The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [177]
“We bury sword with lad,” one of the men said, “when we can.”
“He’d want that,” Berwynna said. “My thanks.”
His face smeared with blood and tears, Richt had gotten to his feet and stood talking with Mic beside Aethel’s body. Six of the muleteers had survived mostly unharmed as far as she could see, and two more sat on the ground, badly wounded and sobbing. One of the men Laz had brought with him was helping two of the unharmed men take the weapons from the dead and dying Horsekin in the road while others were leading captured horses toward the mules. The lone Horsekin prisoner had hauled himself up to a sitting position and watched all this with expressionless eyes. Berwynna pointed him out to Laz.
“That be the man who killed Dougie,” Berwynna said. “Bain’t?”
“It is.”
“I do want a word with him.”
“Be careful, now. I know he’s tied up, but these swine are dangerous. ”
“Dougie’s knife be here with me.”
Before he could say more, Berwynna strode away, the long knife clutched in one hand. Dougie’s never going to hold this again, she thought. Or hold me. Her grief turned into a spear of ice, shoved into the place that once had been her heart.
The prisoner sat on the ground. The muleteers had tied the man’s hands together, forced his arms down over his bent knees, then slid a quarterstaff twixt arms and knees to keep him from escaping or causing more trouble. Indeed, the only part of him that he could move was his head. He tipped it back to look Berwynna over with narrow eyes, pale gray eyes that marked him as a human being, she realized, not Horsekin. His hair, crusted with blood from the quarterstaff blow, was a pale brown. A tattoo of a boar, not some Horsekin marking, decorated his left cheek.
“So you be the one who killed him,” she said. “My betrothed, that was.”
He refocused his gaze on the empty air beyond her.
“You did stab him in the back, you coward!”
Still no response.
“Go ahead, ignore me now, but I’ll be having vengeance on your clan for this.”
“Oh, will you?” He deigned to look at her. “A lass like you? I suppose you think you can swing a sword.”
“There be no need for me to. I’ll be begging my father to wipe you and yours off the face of the earth.”
“And I suppose your father’s some great lord.” Contempt dripped from every word. “As if there were any up here.”
“He’s not, but the silver dragon himself.”
He considered her again, his eyes flicking this way and that. “You look human enough to me,” he said at last, and he laughed.
Berwynna stepped forward and entwined her fingers in his hair. She heard someone shout, heard men running toward her, but she wrenched his head back and held the knife blade against his throat. He stopped laughing. His pale eyes stared up at her, wide and suddenly wet.
“You bastard scum,” she whispered.
With one smooth stroke she slit his throat. Blood sprayed and dappled her shirt sleeve. She let the dead thing go and stepped back with a jerk of his hair to make his head slump over his knees. She wiped the knife blade clean on the back of his shirt, then looked up to realize that she was standing in the midst of horrified onlookers.
“Well?” Berwynna said. “It be no different than cutting up venison, except I always do feel pity for the deer.”
Some of the men pressed hands over their mouths as if to choke back curses. Mic, however, merely looked at her, his eyes as calm as if he were contemplating some distant truth.
“He did kill my Dougie,” Berwynna said.
The men all nodded, as if agreeing with her unspoken right of vengeance. Mic sighed with a shake of his head.
“You’re Rhodry’s daughter, sure enough,” Mic said. “He’s going to be very proud of you when we find him.”
“If we do live that long,” Berwynna said.
Mic winced but made no answer.
As animals go, mules are the geniuses of the four-legged world, but terror can blunt the finest intelligence. Berwynna’s mule, with its halter rope flapping and the saddlebags banging