The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [73]
For a moment Caradoc was tempted. Nevyn could see it in the distant way he looked up at the dais, where the prince sat, pretending to ignore the captain and Nevyn both. But all at once Caradoc shook his head.
“I couldn’t live with myself,” he said. “Sending my men into battle while I stayed safely behind.”
“Ah. Do you hold me a shamed man, then, for not fighting?”
“What? Of course I don’t!”
“Why not?”
“Well, my lord, you’re a scholar. You’ve got your medicines, you’ve got your dweomer-lore and suchlike—how could the prince risk losing you? Me—all I’ve ever known is battle.”
“And that knowledge is just as valuable in its own way. Here, how long have you been riding to war?”
“Most of my life. I was born with the turning of the hundred, my lord. My mother told me that, she did, and I’ve remembered it. I was born in the year the priests call 800, and so what does that make me now? Nearly half a hundred years.”
“Well, then, at your age there’s no shame in retiring from the field.”
A blunder—Nevyn saw it instantly, but he couldn’t call it back. Caradoc bristled.
“I’m not as old as all that!” the captain snapped. “I can still swing a sword.”
“I never meant to imply otherwise. It’s just that—”
“Just what? Are you trying to tell me I’m too blasted old to ride to war?”
“Naught of the sort! I was just trying to point out that your experience is long enough to be valuable, that’s all.”
Caradoc set his hands on his hips and scowled.
“Ah well,” Nevyn said. “Keep it in mind, will you, Captain? No doubt the prince would like to speak with you about this later.”
“You can tell him my answer. I’m not decrepit yet, and cursed if I’ll lead my men from behind.”
Nevyn left the matter there. Much later, when he had a chance to think about the conversation, the significance of Caradoc’s birth date struck him. In those days, long before the priests began displaying the calendars in the temples for everyone to see, the dating of years meant nothing to most people. Only the oddity of his birth year’s date had made Caradoc remember it at all, but to Nevyn it revealed an interesting secret. Glyn had died in 797 only to be reborn as Caradoc a scant three years later, far faster than usual. If Glyn had been so eager to return to his unfinished war, no wonder that he was refusing to play an onlooker’s part now.
At dinner that evening, Lilli sat with Anasyn and Peddyc. In her current stage of pregnancy the princess preferred to eat in her own hall, and generally her women stayed with her. Lilli came down because Anasyn wanted to hear in detail how she was being treated. When she told him that she had her own little chamber and two pair of nearly new dresses from Bellyra herself, he seemed satisfied.
“But if you feel spurned, you come to me,” Peddyc put in. “I’ll not have my foster-daughter treated like a servant or suchlike. It would be an insult to our clan if naught else.”
“My thanks,” Lilli said. “But so far the princess has been wonderful to me.”
“Well, I’ve never known anyone as generous as our prince,” Peddyc said. “It gladdens my heart that his wife’s his match.”
At the end of the meal, a page came from the prince to invite Anasyn and Peddyc to drink with him. Lilli decided to return to the women’s hall rather than stay on display, as it were, among the men, some of whom were eyeing her with undisguised interest. She was particularly aware of a tall, beefy blond lad, wearing the shirt and dagger of the prince’s guard. He’d watched her all through the meal, and now, when she rose to go, he got up with an exaggerated air of indifference and walked her way. When they met by this carefully arranged accident, he bowed to her with a small smile.
Lilli pretended not to notice and hurried past. Near the door she saw Elyssa talking with a short man—exceptionally short, actually—with a grey beard and a mop of grey hair to match it. When Lilli joined them, the man gave her a sour glance, then ignored