The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [142]
“I just sent a page to find you,” Caudyr said.
“Well, I was coming here on my own. Is somewhat wrong?”
“Very. Come look at this.”
Caudyr took him to the bunk of a young lad whose wounds Nevyn had dressed the day before: a slice across the body that had broken several ribs and a gash from a javelin along the side of his thigh. Both wounds had bled but neither had seemed likely to kill him. Now he lay deathly still with barely the life to turn his eyes Nevyn’s way. In the flickering lantern light his skin looked bluish-white. Nevyn laid a hand on the boy’s face and found his skin clammy cold.
“His cuts have gone septic?” Nevyn said.
“They’ve not. I just changed the bandages, and everything’s clean.”
Nevyn squatted down to look into the boy’s eyes. The boy seemed to be about to speak, then died. One moment he was looking at Nevyn; the next he stiffened and simply stopped breathing. Nevyn swore and grabbed him by the shoulders, but his head lolled back with an unseeing stare for the ceiling. Caudyr let fly with a string of curses worthy of a silver dagger.
“It’s like he didn’t have the strength to live,” Caudyr said. “But last night he ate and drank, and he was talking, too. He should have recovered.”
Nevyn rose and looked around. Most of the men in this end of the barracks were so badly wounded that they had no energy to spare for another’s death; those who were awake lay staring at the ceiling or were curled up with pain. Some moaned; some wept. None would have seen—seen what? he asked himself. He glanced at the dead boy again and noticed a swollen mark on his lips, as if a bee had stung him twice, once on the upper, once on the lower.
“Here!” Nevyn said. “That’s odd! Have you seen bees in here?”
“What?” Caudyr was looking at him as if he thought Nevyn had gone daft. “What do you mean, bees?”
“Well, I don’t think a horsefly would have left that mark.”
“A sting, you mean?” Caudyr scratched his head while he thought. “Not any bees in here that I noticed. They had kitchen gardens in the dun, so I suppose there must be a hive or two around somewhere. It seems a blasted strange thing to die of, anyway.”
“I did see it once, a child stung by a bee who went into convulsions and died. But surely someone would have noticed if this fellow had thrown fits right here in his bunk.”
“So you’d think! I’m well and truly baffled, Nevyn. I can’t see any reason on earth for this lad to die like this.”
“No more can I. He wasn’t important enough for anyone to poison, even.”
“Just so. Ah, that reminds me—”
Nevyn held up a hand for silence.
“Get someone to take that poor lad away and bury him,” Nevyn said. “Then meet me in my tent.”
Nevyn had not forgotten the problem of Oggyn’s possible murders. Or one murder, truly, as he remarked to Caudyr later that night.
“The young king was doomed, anyway. No one but me would hold him to account for that.”
“Just so,” Caudyr said. “And the poor nursemaid wasn’t even noble-born.”
“If I gathered enough evidence, Maryn wouldn’t let that stop him. From what the servants here have told me, Rwla—that was her name, Rwla—has no living kin. If she did, it would gladden my heart to make Oggyn pay over a stiff lwdd for her. But since she doesn’t, all the king can do is hang him.”
“Or send him into exile. But curse it, Oggyn’s too useful. The king needs men like him. Winning a war’s one thing. Restoring the kingdom’s quite another.”
“That’s true, and the apportioning of taxes and scrounging the coin to rebuild the city are things Oggyn will understand.”
They looked at each other, and Nevyn realized that Caudyr shared his weariness. In that moment, he knew that he would never gather the evidence against Oggyn. It’s another little wound, isn’t it? he told himself. Merodda’s curse. It’s going to be a matter of small corruptions