The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [123]
‘Ye gods!’ Salamander recovered himself with a sickly grin. ‘My apologies, one and all! I seem to be oddly clumsy tonight, and now I’ve quite forgotten what I was saying.’ He jumped down from the table that he’d been standing on. ‘If you’ll forgive me?’ He bowed to the tieryn and Lady Galla, then strode off to the staircase without another word.
In a stunned silence everyone watched him hurry upstairs. Finally Cadryc shook his head and shrugged.
‘And what was all that about, I wonder?’ Cadryc said. ‘He looked so startled that I thought mayhap he was seeing a ghost stroll in the door.’
‘This dun’s too new to have ghosts,’ Galla said. ‘I hope he’s not been taken ill.’
Neb swung himself free of the bench and stood up with a half-bow in her direction. ‘I’ll go see, my lady,’ he said, ‘with your permission of course.’
‘You have it,’ Galla said, ‘and my thanks.’
Neb returned some while later with the news that Salamander was suffering from a headache. ‘Councillor Dallandra left me some medicinals,’ Neb told Galla, ‘so I gave him some willow bark to chew upon.’
‘That should help, certainly,’ Galla said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a herbman as well as a scribe.’
‘I’m not, my lady, not yet. Those books she sent? One of them’s a herbal, so I’ve been studying.’
‘A very accomplished young man!’ Galla favoured Neb with a smile.
Gerran, however, had the uneasy feeling that Neb was hiding something about Salamander’s condition. If so, he suspected that dweomer, not headache, lay at the root of the gerthddyn’s strange behaviour. Late that evening, when the great hall was clearing out, he had a chance at a private word with Neb.
‘Did the gerthddyn truly have a headache?’ Gerran said.
‘He didn’t,’ Neb said with a slight smile. ‘You’ve got good eyes, Gerro.’
‘Dweomer?’
‘Just that. I’ll explain more if you like.’
‘No need, no need! Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘Answer me somewhat. Why are you fighting men so troubled by talk of dweomer?’
Since it was a serious question, asked with no hint of mockery, Gerran considered his answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘But I’ll wager it’s because we don’t understand it, and we can’t understand it, no matter how hard we try. It doesn’t seem real, because we can’t see it or touch it, and yet it is real. How can a man fight an enemy he can’t even see? It creeps my flesh, it does.’ All at once he grinned. ‘Besides, if we can’t use it to slash someone to bits or bash his head in, well, then, what good is it?’
‘Ah. That makes it perfectly clear.’
They shared a laugh.
On the morrow, the first lords and their warbands arrived for the muster. Cadryc’s vassals showed up first. Each brought as many men as he could spare from guarding his own holdings, generally five to ten. Although the noble-born slept in the broch, with so many guests expected, their riders ended up camping out in the meadow behind the dun. Next came Cadryc’s allies, among them Branna’s father, Tieryn Gwivyr, who brought twenty-five men and provisions for sixty days. When Gwivyr rode in, Branna dutifully went out to greet him. They spoke briefly, an odd pair, with him so tall and stout, her young and slender, though she’d obviously received her yellow hair from him. He patted her on the head, then strode past her into the great hall. With a shrug Branna followed him in, but as far as Gerran could tell, she seemed neither pleased nor distressed.
Later that day, Gerran came across Gwivyr down