KATHARINE KERR
Dawnspell

The Bristling Wood

For the profit of kins, well did he attack the hosts of the

country, the bristling wood of spears, the grievous

flood of the enemy…

The Gododdin of Aneirin, Stanza A84

Copyright

Voyager An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.voyager-books.com

Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1990 reprinted six times and by HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy 1993 reprinted two times

First published in Great Britain by GraftonBooks 1989

Copyright © Katharine Kerr 1989

Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Epigraph

In memoriam

Raymond Earle Kerr, Jr, 1917–87,

an officer and a gentleman

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Epigraph

A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words

Prologue: Spring, 1063

Part One: Deverry and Pyrdon, 833–845

1

2

3

4

Part Two: Summer, 1063

1

2

3

Appendix

Keep Reading

Glossary

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words

The language spoken in Deverry is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such.

Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short. Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

E as in pen.

I as in pin.

U as in pun.

Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long, whether that syllable is stressed or not.

Diphthongs generally have one consistent pronunciation:

AE as the a in mane.

AI as in aisle.

AU as the ow in how.

EO as a combination of eh and oh.

EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

IE as in pier.

OE as the oy in boy.

UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic (KAR-noh-ik).

Consonants are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

C is always hard as in cat.

G is always hard as in get.

DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

R is heavily rolled.

RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

Y is never a consonant.

I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place-names are often an exception to this rule.

I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues. Since the human ear cannot even distinguish between such sound-pairings as B> and B<, I see no reason to confuse the human eye with them. I do owe many thanks to the various elven native speakers who have suggested which consonant to choose in confusing cases and who have laboured, alas, often in vain, to refine my ear to the elven vowel system.

A Note on Dating

Year One of the Deverry calendar is the founding of the Holy City, or, to be more accurate, the year that King Bran saw the omen of the white sow that instructed him where to build his capital. It corresponds roughly to 76 CE.

Prologue Spring, 1063

Often those who study the dweomer complain that it speaks in riddles. There is a reason for this riddling. What is it? Well, that happens to be a riddle of its own.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

Out in the grasslands to the west of the kingdom of Deverry, the concepts of ‘day’ and ‘month’ had no meaning. The years flowed by, slowly, on the ebb and swell of the seasons: the harsh rains of winter, when the grass turned a bluish-green and the grey sky hung close to the earth; the spring floods, when the streams overflowed their banks and pooled around the willows and hazels, pale green with first leaves; the parching summer, when the grass lay pale gold and all fires were treacherous; the first soft rains of autumn, when wildflowers bloomed briefly in purple and gold. Driving their herds of horses and flocks of sheep, the People drifted north in the summer’s heat and south in the winter’s cold and, as they rode, they marked only the little things: the first stag to lose its antlers, the last strawberries. Since the gods were always present, travelling with their folk in the long wandering, they needed no high holidays or special feasts in their honour. When two or three alarli, the loosely organized travelling groups, happened to meet, then there was a festival to celebrate the company of friends.

Yet, there was one day of the year marked out from all the others: the spring equinox, which usually signalled the start of the floods. In the high mountains of the far north, the snows were melting, sending a tide down through the grasslands, just as another tide, this one of blood, had once swept over them from the north in the far past. Even though individuals of their race lived some five hundred years on average, by now there were none left who’d been present in those dark years, but the People remembered. They made sure that their children would always remember on the day of the equinox, when the alarli gathered in groups of ten or twelve for the Day of Commemoration.

Even though he was eager to ride east to Deverry, Ebañy Salomonderiel would never have left the elven lands until he’d celebrated this most holy and terrifying of days. In the company of his father, Devaberiel Silverhand the bard, he rode up from the sea-coast to the joining of the rivers Corapan and Delonderiel, near the stretch of primeval forest that marked the border of the grasslands. There, as they’d expected, they found an alardan, or clan-meet. Scattered in the tall grass were two hundred painted tents, red and purple and blue, while the flocks and herds grazed peacefully a little distance away. A little apart from the rest stood ten unpainted tents, crudely stitched together from poorly tanned hides.

‘By the Dark Sun herself,’ Devaberiel remarked. ‘It looks like some of the Forest Folk have come to join us.’

‘Good. It’s time they got over their fear of their own kind.’

Devaberiel nodded in agreement. He was an exceptionally handsome man, with hair pale as moonlight, deep-set dark blue eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, and gracefully long pointed ears. Although Ebañy had inherited the pale hair, in other ways he took after his mother’s human folk; his smoky grey eyes had round irises, and his ears, while slightly sharp, passed unnoticed in the lands of men. They rode on, leading their eight horses, two of which dragged travois, loaded with everything they owned. Since Devaberiel was a bard and Ebañy a gerthddyn, that is, a storyteller and minstrel, they didn’t need large herds to support themselves. As they rode up to the tents, the People ran out to greet them, hailing the bard and vying for the honour of feeding him and his son.

They chose to pitch the ruby-red tent near that of Tanidario, a woman who was an old friend of the bard’s. Although she’d often given his father advice and help as he raised his half-breed son alone, Ebañy found it hard to think of her as a mother. Unlike his own mother back in Eldidd, whom he vaguely remembered as soft, pale and cuddly, Tanidario was a hunter, a hard-muscled woman who stood six feet tall and arrow-straight, with jet-black hair that hung in one tight braid to her waist. Yet when she greeted him, she kissed his cheek, caught his shoulders, and held him a bit away while she smiled as if to say how much he’d grown.

‘I’ll wager you’re looking forward to the spring hunt,’ he said.

‘I certainly am, little one. I’ve been making friends with the Forest Folk, and they’ve offered to show me how to hunt with a spear in the deep woods. I’m looking forward to the challenge.’

Ebañy merely smiled.

‘I know you,’ Tanidario said with a laugh. ‘Your idea of hunting is finding a soft bed with a pretty lass in it. Well, maybe when you’re fully grown, you’ll see things more clearly.’

‘I happen to be seventy-four this spring.’

‘A mere child.’ She tousled his hair with a calloused hand. ‘Well, come along. The gathering’s already beginning. Where’s your father got to?’

‘He went with the other bards. He’ll be singing right after the Retelling.’

Down by the river, some of the People had lashed together a rough platform out of travois poles, where Devaberiel stood conferring with four other bards. All around it the crowd spread out, the adults sitting cross-legged in the grass while restless children wandered around. Ebañy and Tanidario sat on the edge near a little group of Forest Folk. Although they looked like the other elves, they were dressed in rough leather clothes, and each man carried a small notched stick, bound with feathers and coloured thread, which were considered magical among their kind. Although they normally lived in the dense forests to the north, at times they drifted south to trade with the rest of the People. Since they had never been truly civilized, the events that they were gathered to remember had spared them.

Gradually the crowd quieted, and the children sat down by their parents. On the platform four bards, Devaberiel among them, took their places at the back, arms crossed over their chests, legs braced a little apart, a solemn guard of honour for the storyteller. Manaver Contariel’s son, the eldest of them all, came forward and raised his arms high in the air. With a shock, Ebañy realized that this would be the last year that this bard would retell the story. He was starting to show his age, his hair white and thin, his face pouched and wrinkled. When one of the People aged, it meant death was near.

‘His father was there at the Burning,’ Tanidario whispered.

Ebañy merely nodded his acknowledgement, because Manaver was lowering his arms.

‘We are here to remember.’ His highly trained voice seemed to boom out in the warm stillness.

‘To remember,’ the crowd sighed back. ‘To remember the west.’

‘We are here to remember the cities, Rinbaladelan of the Fair Towers, Tanbalapalim of the Wide River, Bravelmelim of the Rainbow Bridges, yea, to remember the cities, and the towns, and all the marvels of the far, far west. They have been taken from us, they lie in ruins, where the owls and the foxes prowl, and weeds and thistles crack the courtyards of the palaces of the Seven Kings.’

The crowd sighed wordlessly, then settled in to listen to the tale that some had heard five hundred times or more. Even though he was half a Deverry man, Ebañy felt tears rise in his throat for the lost splendour and the years of peace, when in the hills and well-watered plains of the far west, the People lived in cities full of marvels and practised every art and craft until their works were so perfect that some claimed them dweomer.

Over a thousand years ago, so long that some doubted when the Burning had begun, whether it was a thousand and two hundred years or only a thousand and one, several millions of the People lived under the rule of the Seven Kings in a long age of peace. Then the omens began. For five winters the snows fell high; for five springs, floods swept down the river. In the sixth winter, farmers in the northern province reported that the wolves seemed to have gone mad, hunting in big packs and attacking travellers along the road. The sages agreed that the wolves must have been desperate and starving, and this, coupled with the weather, meant famine in the mountains, perhaps even some sort of blight or plague that might move south. In council the Seven Kings made plans: a fair method of stockpiling food and distributing it to those in need, a small military levy to deal with the wolfpacks. They also gathered dweomerfolk and sages around them to combat the threats and to lend their lore to farmers in need. In the sixth spring, squadrons of royal archers went forth to guard the north, but they thought they were only hunting wolves.

When the attack came, it broke like an avalanche and buried the archers in corpses. No one truly knew who the enemies were; they were neither human nor Elvish, but a squat breed like enormous dwarves, dressed in skins, and armed only with crude spears and axes. For all their poor weapons, their warriors fought with such enraged ferocity that they seemed not to care whether they lived or died. There were also thousands of them, and they travelled mounted. When the sages rushed north with the first reinforcements, they reported that the language of the Hordes was utterly unknown to them. Half-starved, desperately fleeing some catastrophe in their homeland, they burned and ravaged and looted as they came. Since the People had never seen horses before, the attackers had a real advantage, first of surprise, then of mobility once the elves grew used to the horrifying beasts. By the time they realized that horses were even more vulnerable to arrows than men, the north was lost, and Tanbalapalim a heap of smoking timbers and cracked stone.

The kings rallied the People and led them to war. After every man and woman who could loose a bow marched north, for a time the battles held even. Although the corpse-fires burned day and night along the roads, still the invaders marched in under the smoke. Since he pitied their desperation, King Elamanderiel Sun-Sworn tried to parley with the leaders and offered them the eastern grasslands for their own. In answer, they slew his guard of honour and ran his head on to a long spear, which they paraded in front of their men for days. After that, no mercy was offered. Children marched north with bows to take the places of their fallen parents, yet still the Hordes came.

By autumn the middle provinces were swept away in a tide of blood. Although many of the People fell back in a last desperate attempt to hold Rinbaladelan on the coast, most fled, taking their livestock, rounding up the horses that had given the invaders such an edge, loading wagons and trekking east to the grasslands that the Hordes despised. Rinbaladelan fought out the winter, then fell in the spring. More refugees came east, carrying tales the more horrible because so common. Every clan had had its women raped, its children killed and eaten, its houses burned down around those too weak to flee. Everyone had seen a temple defiled, an aqueduct mindlessly toppled, a farm looted then burned instead of appropriated for some good use. All summer, refugees trickled in – and starved. They were settled folk, unused to hunting except for sport. When they tried to plant their hoarded seed-grains, the harsh grasslands gave them only stunted crops. Yet in a way few cared whether they lived another winter or not, because they were expecting that the enemy would soon follow them east. Some fled into the forests to seek refuge among the primitive tribes; a few reached what later became Eldidd; most stayed, waiting for the end.

But the Hordes never came. Slowly the People learned to survive by living off their flocks and herds while they explored what the grasslands had to offer them. They ate things – and still did – that would have made the princes of the Vale of Roses vomit: lizards and snakes, the entrails of deer and antelope as well as the fine meat, roots and tubers grubbed out wherever they grew. They learned to dry horsedung to supplement the meagre firewood; they abandoned the wagons that left deep ruts in the grassland that now fed them in its own way. They boiled fish-heads for glues and used tendons for bowstrings as they moved constantly from one foraging-ground to another. Not only did they survive, but children were born, replacing those killed in flash floods and hunting accidents.

Finally, thirty-two years after the Burning, the last of the Seven Kings, Ranadar of the High Mountain, found his people again. With the last six archers of the Royal Guard he rode into an alardan one spring and told how he and his men had lived among the hills like bandits, taking what vengeance they could for their fallen country and begging the gods to send more. Now the gods had listened to their grief. While the Hordes could conquer cities, they had no idea how to rebuild them. They lived in rough huts among the ruins and tried to plant land they’d poisoned. Although every ugly member of them wore looted jewels, they let the sewers fill with muck while they fought over the dwindling spoils. Plague had broken out among them, diseases of several different kinds, all deadly and swift. When he spoke of the dying of the Hordes, Ranadar howled aloud with laughter like a madman, and the People laughed with him.

For a long time there was talk of a return, of letting the plagues do their work, then slaughtering the last of the Hordes and taking back the shattered kingdom. For two hundred years, until Ranadar’s death, men gathered nightly around the campfires to scheme. Every now and then, a few foolhardy young men would ride back to spy. Even fewer returned, but those who did spoke of general ruin and disease still raging. If life in the grasslands hadn’t been so harsh at first, perhaps an army might have marched west, but every year, there were almost as many deaths as births. Finally, some four hundred and fifty years after the Burning, some of the younger men organized a major scouting party to ride to Rinbaladelan.

‘And I was among them, a young man,’ Manaver said, his voice near breaking at the memory. ‘With twenty friends I rode west, for many a time had I heard my father speak of Rinbaladelan of the Fair Towers, and I longed to see it, even though the sight might bring my death. We took many quivers of arrows, for we expected many a bloody skirmish with the last of the Hordes.’ He paused for a twisted, self-mocking smile. ‘But they were gone, long dead, and so was Rinbaladelan. My father had told me of the high temples, covered with silver and jet; I saw grassy mounds. He told of towers five hundred feet high made of many-coloured stones; I found a broken piece here and there. He told of vast processions down wide streets; I traced out the grassy tracks. Here and there, I found a stone hut, cobbled out of the ruins. In some, I found skeletons lying unburied on the floor, the last of the Hordes.’

The crowd sighed, a grief-torn wind over the grassland. Near the front a little girl squirmed free of her mother’s lap and stood up.

‘Then why didn’t we go back, if they were all dead?’ she called out in a clear, high voice.

Although her mother grabbed her, the rest of the gathering laughed, a melancholy chuckle at a child’s boldness, a relief after so much tragedy. Manaver smiled at the little girl.

‘Back to what, sweet one?’ he said. ‘The kingdom was dead, a tangle of overgrowth and ruins. We’d brought our gods to the grasslands, and the grasslands became our mother. Besides, the men who knew how to lay out fine cities and smelt iron and work in stone were all dead. Those of us who survived were mostly farmers, herdsmen, or foresters. What did we know about building roads and working rare metals?’

Her mouth working in thought, the girl twisted one ankle around the other. Finally she looked up at the dying bard.

‘And will we never go back, then?’

‘Well, “never” is a harsh word, and one that you should keep closed in your mouth, but I doubt it, sweet one. Yet we remember the fair cities, our birthright, our home.’

Even though the People sighed out the word ‘remember’ with proper respect, no one wept, because none of them had ever seen the Vale of Roses or walked the Sun Road to the temples. With a nod, Manaver stepped back to allow Devaberiel forward to sing a dirge for the fallen land. The songs would go on for hours, each bard taking a turn and singing of happier and happier things, until at last the alardan would feast and celebrate, dancing far into the night. Ebañy got up and slipped away. Since he’d heard his father practise the dirge for some months, he was heartily sick of it. Besides, his Deverry blood pricked him with guilt, as it did every year on the Day of Commemoration.

By talking with Deverry scholars, Ebañy had pieced together something about the Burning that no one else knew. Since it would only lead to hatred between his two races of kinsfolk, he kept the secret even from his father. The Hordes had been driven south by the great influx of the people of Bel, as the Deverry men called themselves, when they’d come from their mysterious homeland over a thousand years ago. Although to the People’s way of thinking the Deverry men were a bloodthirsty lot, in the old days they’d been even more ruthless conquerors, hunting their enemies’ heads to decorate the temples of their gods. In their wanderings before they founded their Holy City, they’d swept through the far north, slaughtering, looting, enslaving some of the strange race, even, before they passed down the valley of the Aver Troe Matrw to their new lands. And the Hordes had fled before them, fled south.

‘You never lifted a sword against us, oh men of Deverry,’ Ebañy whispered aloud. ‘But you slaughtered my father’s people sure enough.’

With a little shudder, he ducked into the tent, where the sun came through the dyed leather and turned the air to ruby. Since they’d arrived late for the alardan, piles of tent-bags and gear lay scattered on the leather ground-cloth. Idly he picked up a few bags and hung them from the hooks on the tent-poles, then sat down in the clutter to poke through a canvas bag of the Deverry sort. Down at the bottom he found a tiny leather pouch, opened it, and took out a simple silver ring. A flat band about a third of an inch wide, it was engraved with roses on the outside and words in Elvish characters but some unknown language on the inside. The roses caught the reddish light and seemed to bloom, double hybrids of the cultivated sort now found only in Deverry.

‘And are you spoil from Rinbaladelan or Tanbalapalim?’ he asked it. ‘The only roses my people know now are the wild ones with their five meagre little petals.’

The ring lay mute on his palm, a gleaming paradox. Although it possessed no dweomer of its own, it was tied to the dweomer. Many years ago, a mysterious, nameless wanderer had given it to Devaberiel as a present for one of his as-yet-unborn sons. Now the omen-reading of the dweomerwoman showed that it belonged to Rhodry, the youngest of the three, and like Ebañy, a half-breed. But unlike Ebañy’s, Rhodry’s mother was no pretty village lass, but one of the most powerful noblewomen in the kingdom. Rhodry could never learn the truth about his real father, who had given Ebañy the task of taking the ring to him.

‘And what am I supposed to tell him when I find him?’ he grumbled aloud, because talking came much easier to him than thinking. ‘Oh, well, this peculiar personage said it was yours, but I can’t tell you why. Of course, I don’t know why it’s yours – no one does – so, dear brother, I won’t be lying to you when I make my most feeble excuses. One dweomer says it encircles your Wyrd, and another working says that your Wyrd is Eldidd’s Wyrd, and so here we are, in the land of vagaries, nuances, and secrets. Ah by the gods, doesn’t my Elvish curiosity ache to know the truth!’

With a laugh, he slipped the ring back into its wrapping, then put that pouch into the one he carried around his neck. Soon he would be riding into the lands of men, where thieves prowl, and he would need a better hiding-place for the ring than an open canvas sack. Thinking of the journey ahead of him, he went outside and wandered down to the riverbank, where the Delonderiel rolled by, flecked with gold in the lowering sun. Distantly he heard his father’s voice, firm and clear in its sorrow as the stanzas marched on. He stared at the river and used it to focus his mind, until at last his dweomer scryed Rhodry out, a pale image of him at first, then a clear picture.

Rhodry was standing on the ramparts of a rough stone dun and looking out over countryside where patches of snow still lay under dark pine trees. He was wrapped in a cloak, and his breath came in a frosty puff. Now that Ebañy knew they shared a father, he could see what had eluded him the summer before, when he’d met Rhodry by chance and wondered why this young warrior looked so familiar. Although Rhodry had raven-dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes, they looked enough alike to be what they were, brothers. As he studied the resemblance, Ebañy found himself grumbling again.

‘So I’m not supposed to tell you the truth, brother, am I? What am I supposed to do, smash every mirror within your reach? Rhodry has to think himself human and a Maelwaedd, says my master in dweomer. Oh splendid! Then I’d best hand over this ring and disappear before you look too closely at my face!’

In the vision, Rhodry’s image suddenly turned and seemed to be staring right at him, as if he were listening to his faraway kin. Ebañy smiled at him, then widened the vision, switching his point of view this way and that around the countryside to the limits of the scrying, about two miles away from its focus. He saw sharp rocky hills, covered with pine, and here and there among them small farms. Most likely Rhodry was in the province of Cerrgonney, then, a good five hundred miles away at the very least.

‘It’s going to be a long summer’s riding, then, Ebañy, lad,’ he told himself. ‘On the other hand, it would be a wretched shame to leave before the feasting’s over.’

Although it was cold up on the ramparts of Lord Gwogyr’s dun, Rhodry lingered there a few moments longer and looked out over the Cerrgonney hills without truly seeing them. For a moment he wondered if he were going daft, because it seemed he’d heard someone talking to him though he was the only man on the walls. The words had been indistinct, but someone had called him brother and talked of giving him a gift. In irritation he tossed his head and decided that it had only been some trick of the wind. Since the only brother he knew of hated him with his very soul, it was unlikely that he’d be giving him any gift but a dagger in the back, and those words – if words they were – had sounded warm and friendly.

Leaning back against the damp stone, he pulled his silver dagger from his belt and looked at it while he idly thought of his elder brother, Rhys, Gwerbret Aberwyn, who had sent him into exile some years before. Although the dagger was a beautiful thing, as sharp as steel but gleaming like silver, it was a mark of shame, branding him a dishonoured mercenary soldier who fought only for coin, never for honour. It was time for him to wander down the long road, as the silver daggers called their lives. Although he’d fought well for Lord Gwogyr last autumn, even taking a wound in his service, a silver dagger’s welcome was a short one, and already the chamberlain was grumbling about having to feed him and his woman. Sheathing the dagger, he glanced up at the sky, cold but clear. It was likely that the snows were long past.

‘Tomorrow we’ll ride,’ he said aloud. ‘And if you were thinking of me, brother, may the thought turn your guts to fire.’

Far to the south, in a little town in Eldidd, an event was happening that would indeed bring Gwerbret Rhys the sort of pain his younger brother had wished upon him, even though Rhodry had no way of knowing it. Dun Bruddlyn, a fort only recently disposed upon its lord, Garedd, was filled with a tense sort of bustle. While the lord himself paced restlessly in his great hall with a goblet of mead in his hand, his second wife, Donilla, was giving birth up in the women’s hall. Since this was her first child, the labour was a long one, and Tieryn Lovyan as well as the other women in attendance was beginning to worry. Her face dead-white, her long chestnut hair soaked with sweat, Donilla crouched on the birthing stool and clung to the thick rope tied from one of the beams far above. Her serving-woman, Galla, knelt beside her and wiped her face every now and then with a cloth soaked in cold water.

‘Let her suck a bit of moisture from a clean rag,’ said the herbman who was attending the birth. ‘But just a bit.’

Another serving-lass hurried to get clean cloth and fresh water without a moment’s hesitation. Not only was old Nevyn known as the best herbman in the kingdom, but it was widely rumoured that he had the dweomer. Lovyan smiled at the lass’s awe, but only slightly, because she knew full well that the rumours were true. When she glanced at Nevyn in a questioning sort of way, he gave her a reassuring smile, then spoke to Donilla. His ice-blue eyes seemed to bore into her soft brown ones and capture her very soul. With a sigh she relaxed as if some of the pain had left her.

‘It’ll be soon now, my lady.’ His voice was very soft and kind. ‘Breathe deeply now, but don’t bear down on the babe. It’ll be coming soon.’

Donilla nodded, gasped at a contraction, and let out her breath in a long, smooth sigh. Although Lovyan had given birth to four sons herself, she couldn’t remember her own labours being this difficult. Perhaps I’ve just forgotten, she thought. One does forget the pain, and so oddly soon. Restlessly she paced to an open window and looked out on the bright spring day while she considered the irony. Poor Donilla had been so eager to have a child; now she was probably wishing that she truly had been barren. When the younger woman moaned again, Lovyan winced in sympathy.

‘It’s crowning, my lady!’ Nevyn crowed in victory. ‘Soon, very soon. Now – bear down.’

Lovyan stayed at the window until she heard the high-pitched wail, a good, healthy cry at that. She turned round to see Nevyn and the serving-woman laying Donilla down on the pallet prepared by the stool and laying the babe, still attached by the cord, at her breast. With trembling fingers the lady stroked the soft fuzz on her child’s head and smiled in wide-eyed triumph.

‘A son, Your Grace!’ she croaked. ‘I’ve given my lord another son.’

‘And a fine healthy one, at that,’ Lovyan said. ‘Shall I go and tell His Lordship the good news?’

Donilla nodded, her eyes on the tiny face already nuzzling at her breast.

As she went downstairs, Lovyan’s heart was heavy, and she felt badly about it. Of course Donilla deserved this moment of triumph, of vindication. After ten years of a childless marriage, her first husband had cast her off as barren, a bitter humiliation for any woman to bear, worse than the heart-breaking thought that she would never have children. Now she had her son, and everyone in Eldidd knew that she wasn’t the barren one. Unfortunately, her small triumph had important political consequences, of which her second husband seemed to be painfully aware. Garedd was a man of middle years, with two sons and a daughter by his first marriage; a solid sort with grey in his blond hair and moustaches, he was genuinely pleased at Lovyan’s news, breaking out into a laugh and yelling that he had a son to his warband across the hall. Then, almost instantly, he wiped the look of triumph off his face.

‘My apologies for gloating, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘But it takes a man that way.’

‘You don’t need to apologize to me, cousin,’ Lovyan said wearily. ‘Nor to Rhys, either, though I’d advise you to stay away from Aberwyn for a while.’

‘I was planning to, truly.’

There lay the crux of the matter; Gwerbret Rhys had been Donilla’s first husband, the one who had shamed her as barren because he had no heirs for his vast rhan, one of the most important in the entire kingdom. If he died childless, as now seemed most likely, Eldidd could well break out into open war as the various candidates tried to claim the gwerbretrhyn for their own clan. Although Lovyan was fond of her cousin and his wife, she was here to witness the birth because of its political implications. Since she was the tieryn of Dun Gwerbyn, with many vassals and large holdings, her time was too valuable for her to ride around the countryside playing at midwife for her vassals’ wives. But it had been necessary that she see with her own eyes that, truly, Donilla had given birth to a child.

‘Do you think Rhys will adopt a son?’ Garedd said.

‘I have no idea what Rhys will or won’t do any more, for all that he’s my first-born son. An adopted heir won’t have much of a chance in the Council of Electors, anyway. The sensible thing for him to do would be to recall Rhodry from exile.’

Garedd raised one questioning eyebrow.

‘I haven’t given up hope yet,’ Lovyan snapped. ‘But truly, my lord, I understand your scepticism.’

In another half-hour, Nevyn came down to the great hall. A tall man with a thick shock of white hair and a face as wrinkled as old burlap, still he moved with strength, striding up to the table of honour and making Garedd a smooth bow. When he announced that the lord could visit the lady, Garedd was off like a flushed hare, because he loved his young wife in an almost unseemly way. Nevyn accepted a tankard of ale from a page and sat down beside Lovyan.

‘Well,’ he remarked. ‘She had a remarkably good first birth for a woman her age. Knowing you, you’re pleased in spite of yourself.’

‘Just that. I was always fond of her. If only some other beastly man had cast her off.’

Nevyn gave her a thin smile and had a well-deserved swallow of ale.

‘I’ll be leaving tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Going to Dun Deverry. Now that I have a nephew at court, I can hear some of the gossip from the King’s councils.’

‘Nephew, indeed! But I’m glad he’s there, all the same. I’m beginning to think that our only hope is to get our liege to override Rhys’s sentence of exile. It’s happened before.’

‘Gwerbrets have also risen in rebellion against such meddling. Do you think Rhys will?’

‘I don’t know. Ah, by the Goddess herself, it aches my heart to think of war coming to Eldidd, and all over my two squabbling sons!’

‘The war hasn’t started yet, and I’m going to do my cursed best to make sure it doesn’t.’

Yet he looked so weary that she was suddenly frightened. Even though he was the most powerful dweomerman in the kingdom, he was still only one man. He was also caught up in political intrigue that – or so it seemed to her – his magical calling would ill-equip him to handle.

‘Ah well,’ she said at last. ‘At least the child himself was born with good omens. They always say it’s a lucky lad who’s born the first day of spring.’

‘So they do, and let’s hope this spring is as well-omened for us all.’

The absent way he spoke made her realize that he very much doubted it would be. She was hesitating, half wanting to ask more, half afraid to hear the truth if he should tell her, when a page came over to her. The young lad looked utterly confused.

‘Your Grace? There’s a noble lord at the gates. Should I ask you what to do, or go and find Lord Garedd?’

‘You may ask me, because I’m of higher rank. If I were of the same rank as Garedd, you’d have to go and find him. Now. Which noble lord is it?’

‘Talidd of Belglaedd, Your Grace. He said the strangest thing. He asked if he was welcome in the dun that should have been his.’

Beside her Nevyn swore under his breath.

‘Oh ye gods,’ Lovyan said feebly. ‘He would turn up right now! Well, lad, run and tell him that indeed he’s welcome in the dun called Bruddlyn. Tell him that exactly and not a word more.’

As soon as the page was on his way, Nevyn turned to her with the lift of a quizzical eyebrow.

‘It all goes back to Loddlaen’s war,’ she said, her voice heavy with weariness. ‘Talidd’s sister was Corbyn’s wife. She went back to her brother before the war even started, because having Loddlaen in the dun was driving her daft, and I can’t say I blame her for that, frankly. But then, after Corbyn was killed, I attainted this demesne because she’d left her husband. All my loyal men would have grumbled if I hadn’t. I offered her a settlement of coin and horses, but Talidd refused to let her take a copper or a filly of it.’

She broke off because the subject of this explanation was striding into the great hall, stripping off his cloak and riding gloves as he did so. Talidd of Belglaedd was a heavy-set man of forty, with grey hair still streaked with blond, and shrewd green eyes. Tossing his cloak to the page, he came over and made the tieryn a deep bow. His bland smile revealed nothing at all.

‘I’m surprised to see you here, my lord,’ Lovyan said.

‘I came to congratulate Garedd on the birth of a child. The page tells me it’s a lad.’

‘It is, and a healthy one.’

‘Then Dun Bruddlyn has yet another heir, does it?’ Talidd paused to take a tankard of ale from a serving lass. ‘Well, the gods may witness the justice of that.’

Lovyan debated challenging him then and there. If she’d been a man, and thus able to fight her own duels, she might well have done it, but as it was, she would have to call for a champion. Answering that call would be the captain of her warband, Cullyn of Cerrmor, who was without doubt the best swordsman in all Deverry. It seemed rather unfair to sentence Talidd to certain death for a few nasty remarks.

‘I choose to ignore that, my lord,’ Lovyan said, and she put ice in her voice. ‘If you feel injured, you may put your case before the gwerbret, and I shall come to court at his order.’

‘The gwerbret, Your Grace, happens to be your son.’

‘So he is, and I scrupulously raised him to be a fair-minded man.’

At that Talidd looked down abruptly at the table, and he had the decency to blush. In the duel of words, Lovyan had scored the first touch.

‘I’m surprised you’ve come here just to pour vinegar in an old wound,’ she said.

‘The matter’s of great moment for the gwerbretrhyn, isn’t it? You forget, Your Grace, that I hold a seat on the Council of Electors.’

Lovyan had forgotten, and she cursed herself mentally for the lapse. Talidd had a sip of ale and smiled his bland, secretive smile at her and Nevyn impartially.

‘I was hoping I’d be in time to witness the birth,’ he said at last. ‘I take it there were witnesses not of this household.’

‘Myself and the herbman here.’

‘And none, my lady, would dare dispute your word, not in open court nor in private meeting.’ The smile grew less bland. ‘We may take it as a given that, indeed, the Lady Donilla’s not barren, no matter what seemed to be the case before.’

Lovyan gave him a brilliant smile and hated his very heart.

‘Just so, my lord. I take it as another given that you’ll be summoning the council with this news as soon as ever you can.’

Talidd left well before the evening meal with the remark that he had a better welcome nearby. He sounded so martyred, and so genuinely injured, that Nevyn felt like kicking him all the way out of the great hall. For Lovyan’s sake, he refrained. Instead he went up to look in on Donilla, who was by then resting in her own bed with the swaddled babe beside her. In some minutes Lovyan joined him there, her expression as placid as if she’d never heard Talidd’s name, and made a few pleasantries to the younger woman. Nevyn left when she did, following her to the chamber in the suite that had been allotted to her on this visit. Although plain, it was obviously furnished with Dun Bruddlyn’s best; her cousin and his lady both had reason to be grateful for her gift of this demesne, as she remarked.

‘Although it’s turning out to be a troubled gift, sure enough,’ Nevyn said. ‘I didn’t realize Talidd felt so strongly.’

‘Him and half the lords in the tierynrhyn. I knew there’d be trouble when I gave it to Garedd, but there’d have been trouble no matter what I did. Well, I suppose if I’d apportioned it to you, no one would have grumbled, but you didn’t want it, and so here we are.’

‘Come now, Lovva! You almost make me feel guilty.’

‘I like that “almost”. But truly, whenever an overlord has land to give, there’s bound to be injured feelings. I only wish that Talidd didn’t have a seat on the council. Ah ye gods, what a nasty thing this is becoming! Even if Rhys’s wife did have a babe now, no one would believe it was his.’

‘Just so. I –’

With a bang of the door and a gleeful howl of laughter, a child of about two came charging into the chamber with a nursemaid in pursuit. She was slender for her age, with a mop of curly, raven-dark hair and violet eyes, almost as dark a purple as an elf’s – all in all, a breathtakingly beautiful child. With a gurgle, she threw herself into Lovyan’s exalted lap.

‘Granna, Granna, love you, Granna.’

‘And I love you, too, Rhodd-let, but you’re being naughty and interrupting.’

Rhodda twisted in her lap and looked solemnly at Nevyn. The family resemblance was profound.

‘I’d almost forgotten about Rhodry’s daughter. She certainly hasn’t inherited her looks from her mother’s side, has she?’

‘None, but Maelwaedd blood tends to be strong, and Olwen, poor lass, was one of those blonde and bland sorts. Rhodry’s bastard might have a very important role to play in what lies ahead, so I keep her with me at all times – to supervise her upbringing, of course.’ For all her talk of political purposes, she kissed the top of the child’s head with a genuine fondness, then motioned to the nursemaid. ‘Now let Mistress Tevylla take you away and give you some bread and milk. It’s almost time for bed.’

Although Rhodda whined, begged, and finally howled, Lovyan held firm and scooped her up bodily to give her to her nurse, who was hovering by the chamber door. Nevyn hadn’t truly noticed her before, but he saw now that she was a striking woman of about thirty, with dark hair, dark eyes and almost severely regular features. Once she and her small charge were gone, Nevyn asked about her.

‘Tevva?’ Lovyan said. ‘A charming woman, and with a will of steel, which she needs around Rhodda, I assure you. She’s a widow, actually, with a son of her own, who’s – oh ye gods, I don’t remember his age, but old enough for Cullyn to be training him for the warband. Her man was a blacksmith down in my town, but he died suddenly of a fever two winters ago. Since she had no kin, the priests recommended her to my charity, and I needed a woman for Rhodda. That child is a worse handful than even her father was.’ She sighed, and since they were alone, she could be honest. ‘I suppose it’s the elven blood in their veins.’

‘I’d say so, for all that Rhodda doesn’t have much of it.’

‘A full quarter, let us not forget. Don’t fall for your own lies about a trace of elven blood in the Maelwaedds.’

‘Well, it’s not a lie, because there is one, but of course, it doesn’t apply here. I take it you plan to make the child a good marriage some day?’

‘An influential marriage, certainly, and I plan to teach her now to make any marriage suit her own purposes. If she can learn to channel all that wilfulness, she’ll be a woman to reckon with in Eldidd, illegitimate or not.’

Although Nevyn agreed with vague words rather than burden her further, he privately wondered if the child could ever be tamed and forced into the narrow mould of a noble-born woman. Sooner or later, her wild blood was going to show.

Before he left Dun Bruddlyn, Nevyn made a point of scrying out Rhodry and, when he found him well, telling Lovyan so. As he rode out, leading his pack-mule behind him, he felt a dread that was as much logic as it was dweomer-warning. The summer before, he and those others who studied the dweomer of Light had won a series of victories over those who followed the dweomer of darkness. They had not only disrupted an elaborate plot of the dark masters but had also ruined one of their main sources of income, the importing of opium and various poisons into the kingdom. The dark ones would want revenge; they always did, and he reminded himself to stay on guard in his travels. Of course, it was likely that they’d scheme for years, trying to lay a plan so clever and convoluted that it would be undetectable. It was likely, but at the same time, the dweomer-warnings came to him in a coldness down his back. Since the dark masters were so threatened, they would doubtless strike back as soon as they could. The only question was how.

And yet other, more mundane matters demanded his attention as well. The gwerbretrhyn was too rich, too desirable, to stay peaceful if the line of succession should be broken. As much as he hated involving himself in the schemings and feudings of noble clans, Nevyn knew that his duty to Rhodry’s dweomer-touched Wyrd also imposed on him a duty to Rhodry’s rhan and to his innocent subjects, who preferred peace to war, unlike noble-born men like Talidd. He would fight with every weapon he had to keep Aberwyn safe. For all that Lovyan was sceptical about his political skills (and he knew full well that she was), he was better armed for this fight than any man in the kingdom, right down to the wisest of the High King’s councillors. Oh, I learned a trick or two that time, he thought to himself, and our Rhodry was right in the middle of that little mess, for all that he was a humble rider then, and an outlawed man! Although it had been well over a hundred years ago, he knew what it was to battle for the throne of not merely a gwerbret, but a king.

Part One Deverry and Pyrdon, 833–845

When Dilly Blind went to the river,

To see what he could see,

He found the King of Cerrmor

A-washing his own laundry …

Old Eldidd folk song

1

The year 833. Slwmar II, King in Dun Deverry, received a bad wound in battle. The second son of Glyn II, King in Cerrmor, died stillborn. We took these as bad omens. Only later would we realize that Bel in His Wisdom was preparing peace for His people …

The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn

The flies were the worst thing. It was bad enough to be dying, but to have the flies so thick was an unjust indignity. They clustered, buzzing, round the wound and tried to drink the blood. It hurt too much to try to brush them away. The wound was on his right side, just below the armpit, and deep. If someone could have stitched it for him, Maddyn supposed, he might have lived, but since he was all alone in the wild hills, he was going to die. He saw no reason to lie to himself about it: he was bleeding to death. He clutched the saddle-peak with his left hand and kept his right arm raised, because the wound blazed like fire if he let his arm touch it. The blood kept oozing through his shattered mail, and the big shiny blue-black flies kept coming. Every now and then, a fly bit his horse, which was too exhausted to do more than stamp in protest.

Maddyn was the last rider in his warband left alive. Since, when he died, the enemy victory would be complete, it seemed honourable to try to postpone their victory for a while; it seemed important then, as he rode slowly through the golden autumn haze, to cheat them of their victory for twenty minutes more. Ahead, about a mile away, was a lake, the surface rippled gold and shining in the sunset. Along the edge stood white birches, rippling in the rising wind. He wanted water. Next to the flies, being thirsty was the worst thing, his mouth so dry that he could barely breathe. His horse ambled steadily for the lake. It wouldn’t matter, his dying, if only he could drink first.

The lake was coming closer. He could see the rushes, dark strokes against bright water, and a white heron, standing one-legged at the edge. Then something went wrong with the sun. It wasn’t setting straight down, but swinging from side to side, like a lantern held in someone’s hand as they walked. The sky was dark as night, but the sun kept swinging back and forth, a lantern in the night, back and forth, wider swings now, up up high up all the way to noon above him and blazing. Then there was darkness, the smell of crushed grass, the flies buzzing and the thirst. Then only darkness.

A lantern was burning in the darkness. At first, Maddyn thought it was the sun, but this light was too small, too steady. An old man’s face leaned over him. He had a thick mane of white hair and cold blue eyes.

‘Ricyn.’ His voice was low but urgent. ‘Ricco, look at me.’

Although Maddyn had never heard that particular name before, he knew somehow that it was his, and he tried to answer to it. His lips were too dry to move. The old man held a golden cup of water to his lips and helped him drink. The water was sweet and cold. I won’t die thirsty after all, Maddyn thought. Then the darkness came again.

The next time that he woke, he realized that he wasn’t going to die. For a long time, he lay perfectly still and wondered at it: he wasn’t going to die. Slowly he looked around him, for the first time wondering where he was, and realized that he was lying naked between soft wool blankets on a pile of straw. Firelight danced over the walls of an enormous stone room. Although his wound still hurt, it was nicely bound with linen bandages. When he turned his head, he saw the old man sitting at a rough wooden table by the stone hearth and reading in a leatherbound book. The old man glanced up and smiled at him.

‘Thirsty, lad?’

‘I am, good sir.’

The old man dipped water from a wooden barrel into the golden cup, then knelt down and helped him drink.

‘My horse?’ Maddyn said.

‘He’s safe and at his hay.’ The old man laid a hand on Maddyn’s forehead. ‘Fever’s broken. Good.’

Maddyn just managed to smile before he fell asleep. This time, he dreamt of his last battle so vividly that it seemed he could smell the dust and the horse-sweat. His warband drew up on the crest of the hill, and there were Tieryn Devyr and his men waiting across the road – over a hundred to their thirty-seven, but they were going to make the hopeless downhill charge anyway. Maddyn knew it by the way Lord Brynoic laughed like a madman, lounging back in his saddle. There was naught they could do but die; they were trapped, and they had naught left to live for. Even though he felt like a fool for doing it, Maddyn started thinking about his mother. In his mind, he could see her clearly, standing in the doorway of their house and holding out her arms to him. Then the horn blew for the charge, and he could only think of riding. Down the hill, on and on, with Devyr’s men wheeling to face them – the clash came with a shriek from both sides. In his dream Maddyn relived every parry and cut, choked again on the rising dust and woke with a cry when the sword bit deep into his side.

‘Here, lad.’ The old man was right beside him. ‘All’s well now.’

‘Can I have some water?’

‘All you want.’

After Maddyn gulped down six cupsful, the old man brought him bread and milk in a wooden bowl. Since his hands were shaking too badly to hold a spoon, the old man fed him, too, a spoonful at a time. The best feast in the Gwerbret of Cantrae’s hall had never tasted as good as that meal did.

‘My thanks,’ Maddyn said. ‘Truly, I owe you the humblest thanks I can give for saving my life.’

‘Saving lives is somewhat of a habit of mine. I’m a herbman.’

‘And wasn’t that the luck of my life, then!’

‘Luck?’ The old fellow smiled in a sly sort of way. ‘Well, truly, it may have been, at that. My name is Nevyn, by the by, and that’s not a jest; it truly is my name. I’m somewhat of a hermit, and this is my home.’

‘My name is Maddyn, and I rode for Lord Brynoic. Here, do you realize that I’m an outlawed man? By every black-hearted demon in the hells, you should have let me bleed to death where I fell.’

‘Oh, I heard me of Brynoic’s exile, sure enough, but the pronouncements of tieryns and suchlike mean little to me. Cursed if I’ll let a man die, when I can save him, just because his lord overstepped himself at court.’

With a sigh, Maddyn turned his head away. Nearby was his shield, leaning against the wall, and a tidy stack of his other gear, including his small ballad-harp, wrapped safe in its leather sack. The sight of the fox device stamped on everything he owned made tears burn in Maddyn’s eyes. His whole warband, all his friends, men he’d ridden with for eight years now – all dead, because Lord Brynoic had coveted another man’s land and failed in his gamble to get it.

‘Did the tieryn bury our dead?’ he whispered.

‘He did. I found the battlefield some days after I brought you home. From the sight of the slaughter, I’m surprised that even one man escaped.’

‘I ran like a coward. I made the charge and got my wound. I knew I was dying, then, and I just wanted to die alone, somewhere quiet, like. Ah ye gods, I never dreamt that anyone would save me!’

‘No doubt it was your Wyrd to live.’

‘It was a harsh Wyrd, then. I’m still an outlawed man. I threw away the last bit of honour I had when I didn’t die with my lord and my band.’

Nevyn made a soothing remark, but Maddyn barely heard him. For all that his shame bit at him, deep in his heart he knew he was glad to be alive, and that very gladness was another shame.

It was two days before Maddyn could sit up, and then only by propping himself against the wall and fighting with his swimming head. As soon as he was a bit stronger, he began wondering about the strange room he was in. From the smell of damp in the air and the lack of windows, he seemed to be underground, but the fire in the enormous hearth drew cleanly. The room was the right size for that massive hearth, too, a full fifty feet across, and the ceiling was lost above him in shadows. All along the wall by his bed was a carved bas-relief, about ten feet above the floor, that must at one time have run around the entire room. Now the severely geometric pattern of triangles and circles broke off abruptly, as if it had been defaced. Finally, on the day when he was strong enough to feed himself for the first time, it occurred to him to ask Nevyn where they were.

‘Inside Brin Toraedic. The entire hill is riddled with chambers and tunnels.’

Maddyn almost dropped his spoon into his lap. Since Lord Brynoic’s dun was only about five miles away, he’d seen the hill many a time and heard all the tales about it, too; how it was haunted, plagued by demons and spirits, who sent blue lights dancing through the night and strange howls whistling through the day. It certainly looked peculiar enough to be haunted, rising straight out of an otherwise flat meadow, like some old giant long ago turned to stone and overgrown with grass.

‘Now, now.’ Nevyn gave him a grin. ‘I’m real flesh and blood, not a prince of demons or suchlike.’

Maddyn tried to return the smile and failed.

‘I like to be left alone, lad,’ Nevyn went on. ‘So, what better place could I find to live than a place where everyone else is afraid to go?’

‘Well, true enough, I suppose. But then there aren’t any spirits here after all?’

‘Oh, there’s lots, but they go their way and I go mine. Plenty of room for us all.’

When Maddyn realized that the old man was serious, his hands shook so hard that he had to lay down his bowl and spoon.

‘I couldn’t lie to you,’ Nevyn said in a perfectly mild tone of voice. ‘You’ll have to shelter with us this winter, because you won’t be fit to ride before the snows come, but these spirits are a harmless sort. All that talk about demons is simple exaggeration. The folk around here are starved for a bit of colour in their lives.’

‘Are they now? Uh, here, good sir, just how long have I been here, anyway?’

‘Oh, a fortnight. You lay in a fever for a wretchedly long time. The wound went septic. When I found you, there were flies all over it.’

Maddyn picked up his spoon and grimly went on eating. The sooner he got the strength to leave this spirit-plagued place, the better.

As the wound healed, Maddyn began getting out of bed for longer and longer periods. Although Nevyn had thrown away his blood-soaked clothes, Maddyn had a spare shirt in his saddlebags, and the old man found him a pair of brigga that fitted well enough. One of the first things he did was unwrap his ballad-harp and make sure that it was unharmed. With his right arm so weak, he couldn’t tune it, but he ran his fingers over the sour, lax strings to make sure they still sounded.

‘I’m surprised that Lord Brynoic would risk a bard in battle,’ Nevyn remarked.

‘I’m not much of a bard, truly, more a gerthddyn who can fight. I know a good many songs and suchlike, but I never studied the triads and the rest of the true bard lore.’

‘And why not?’

‘Well, my father was a rider in our lord’s warband. When he was killed, I was but thirteen, and Lord Brynoic offered me a place in the troop. I took it to avenge my father’s death, and then, well, there never was a chance to study after that, since I’d given my lord my pledge and all.’

‘And do you regret it?’

‘I’ve never let myself feel regret. Only grief lies that way, good sir.’

Once he was strong enough, Maddyn began exploring the old man’s strange home, a small complex of caves and tunnels. Besides the main living quarters, there was another stone room that the herbman had turned into a stable for his horse, Maddyn’s too, and a fine brown mule. The side of that room crumbled away, leading back to a natural cave, where a small spring welled up, then drained away down the side of the hill. Just outside the stable door was the gully that had given Brin Toraedic its name of ‘broken hill’, a long, straight cleft slicing across the summit. The first time he went outside, he found the air cold in spite of the bright sun, and the chill worked in his wound and tormented him. He hurried back inside and decided to take Nevyn’s word for it that winter was well on its way.

Since the herbman had plenty of coin as well as these elaborate living quarters, Maddyn began to wonder if he were an eccentric nobleman who’d simply fled from the civil wars raging across the kingdom. He was far too grateful to ask such an embarrassing question, but scattered across the kingdom were plenty of the noble-born who weaselled any way they could to get out of their obligations to the various gwerbrets claiming to be King of all Deverry. Nevyn had a markedly courtly way about him, gracious at times, brusque at others, as if he were used to being obeyed without question. What’s more, he could read and write, an accomplishment rare for the simple herbman he claimed to be. Maddyn began to find the old man fascinating.

Once every few days, Nevyn took his horse and mule and rode down to the nearby village, where he would buy fresh food and pack in a mule-load of winter supplies: hay and grain for the stock, or cheeses, sausage, dried fruit and suchlike for the pair of them. While he was gone, Maddyn would do some share of the work around the caves, then sleep off his exertion. On a grey morning with a sharp wind, Nevyn mentioned that he’d be gone longer than usual, because one of the village women needed his healing herbs. After the old man had left, Maddyn swept the stable refuse into the gully, then went back for a rest before he raked it out on to the hillside. He laid a bit more wood on the hearth, then sat down close by to drive the chill from his wound.

For the first time since the battle, he felt too strong to sleep, and his neglected harp called him reproachfully. When he took her out of her leather bag, the lax strings sighed at him. On a harp that size, there were only thirty-six strings, but in his weakened state, tuning her seemed to take him for ever. He struck out the main note from his steel tuning bar, then worked over the strings, adjusting the tiny ivory pegs while he sang out the intervals, until sweat ran down his face. This sign of weakness only drove him on until at last the harp was in reasonable tune, but he had to rest for a few minutes before he could play it. He ran a few trills, struck a few chords, and the music seemed to give him a small bit of his strength back as it echoed through the huge stone-walled room. The very size of the place added an eerie overtone to every note he played.

Suddenly, at his shoulder, he felt the White Lady, his agwen, she who came to every bard who had true song in him. As she gathered, he felt the familiar chill down his back, the stirring of hair at the nape of his neck. For all that he called himself a gerthddyn, her presence and the inspiration she gave him was the sign that the kingdom had lost a true bard when Maddyn had pledged for a rider. Although his voice was weak and stiff that morning, he sang for his agwen, a long ballad, bits of lyric, whatever came to his mind, and the music soothed his wound as well as a healing poultice.

All at once, he knew that he wasn’t alone. When he looked up, expecting to see Nevyn in the doorway, no one was indeed there. When he glanced around, he saw nothing but fire-thrown shadows. Yet every time he struck a chord, he felt an audience listening to him. The hair on the back of his neck pricked like a cat’s when he remembered Nevyn’s talk of spirits. You’re daft, he told himself sharply; there’s naught here. But he had performed too many times to believe himself. He knew the intangible difference between singing to empty air and playing to an attentive hall. When he sang two verses of a ballad, he felt them, whoever they were, leaning forward to catch every word. When he stopped and set the harp down, he sensed their disappointment.

‘Well, here, now. You can’t be such bad sorts, if you like a good song.’

He thought he heard someone giggle behind him, but when he turned, there was nothing there but the wall. He got up and walked slowly and cautiously around the room, looked into every corner and crack – and saw nothing. Just as he sat down again, someone else giggled – this time he heard it plainly – like a tiny child who’s just played a successful prank. Maddyn grabbed his harp only with the somewhat fuddled thought of keeping it safe, but when he felt his invisible audience crowd round him in anticipation, he was too much of a bard to turn down any listeners, even incorporeal ones. When he struck the strings, he was sure he heard them give a little sigh of pleasure. Just because it was the first thing that came to mind, he sang through the fifty chained stanzas that told of King Bran’s sea-voyage to Deverry, and of the magical mist that swept him and his fleet away at the end. By the time the enchanted ships were safe in the long-lost, mysterious harbour in the far north, Maddyn was exhausted.

‘My apologies, but I’ve got to stop now.’

A sigh sounded in regret. Someone touched his hair with a gentle stroke, like a pat on a dog; someone plucked at his sleeve with skinny-feeling fingers. The fire blazed up in the hearth; a draught of preternaturally cold air swirled around him. Maddyn shuddered and stood up, but little hands grabbed his brigga-leg. The harp-strings sounded in a random run down as someone tried them out. The very shadows came alive, eddying and swirling in every corner. Fingers were touching his face, stroking his arm, pinching his clothes, pulling his hair, while the harp-strings rang and strummed in an ugly belling.

‘Stop that, all of you!’ Nevyn yelled from the door. ‘That’s a wretched discourteous way to treat our guest!’

The little fingers disappeared. The fire fell low, as if in embarrassment. Maddyn felt like weeping in relief as the herbman strode in, carrying a pair of saddlebags.

‘Truly, it was a nasty way to behave,’ Nevyn went on, addressing the seemingly empty air. ‘If you do that again, then Maddyn won’t ever play his harp for you.’

The room went empty of presences. Nevyn tossed the saddlebags down on the table and gave Maddyn a grin. With shaking hands, Maddyn set his harp down and wiped the sweat from his face on his sleeve.

‘I should have warned you about that. They love music. My apologies, lad.’

Maddyn tried to speak, failed, and sat down heavily on the bench. Behind him, a harp-string twanged. Nevyn scowled at the air beside it.

‘I said stop it!’

A little puff of wind swept away.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me a few questions, Maddyn lad?’

‘To tell you the truth, I’m afraid to.’

The old man laughed under his breath.

‘Well, I’ll answer anyway, questions or no. Those were what men call the Wildfolk. They’re like ill-trained children or puppies, all curiosity, no sense or manners. Unfortunately, they can hurt us mortal folk without even meaning to do so.’

‘I gathered that, sure enough.’ As he looked at his benefactor, Maddyn realized a truth he’d been avoiding for days now. ‘Sir, you must have dweomer.’

‘I do. How does that strike you?’

‘Like a blow. I never thought there was any such thing outside my own ballads and tales.’

‘Most men would consider me a bard’s fancy, truly, but my craft is real enough.’

Maddyn stared, wondering how Nevyn could look so cursed ordinary, until the old man turned away with a good-humoured laugh and began rummaging in his saddlebags.

‘I brought you a bit of roast meat for your supper, lad. You need it to make back the blood you lost, and the villager I visited had some to spare to pay for my herbs.’

‘My thanks. Uh, when do you think I’ll be well enough to ride out?’

‘Oho! The spirits have you on the run, do they?’

‘Well, not to be ungrateful or suchlike, good sir’ Maddyn felt himself blush ‘but I … uh … well …’

Nevyn laughed again.

‘No need to be ashamed, lad. Now as to the wound, it’ll be a good while yet before you’re fit. You rode right up to the gates of the Otherlands, and it always takes a man a long time to ride back again.’

From that day on, the Wildfolk grew bolder around Maddyn, the way that hounds will slink out from under the table when they realize that their master’s guest is fond of dogs. Every time Maddyn picked up his harp, he was aware of their presence – a liveliness in the room, a small scuffle of half-heard noise, a light touch on his arm or hair, a breath of wind as something flew by. Whenever they pinched or mobbed him, he would simply threaten to stop singing, a threat that always made them behave themselves. Once, when he was struggling to light a fire with damp tinder, he felt them gather beside him. As he struck a spark from his steel, the Wildfolk blew it into a proper flame. When he thanked them automatically, he realized that he was beginning to take spirits for granted. As for Nevyn himself, although Maddyn studied the old man for traces of strange powers and stranger lore, he never saw any, except, of course, that spirits obeyed him.

Maddyn also spent a lot of time thinking over his future. Since he was a member of an outlawed warband, he would hang if Tieryn Devyr ever got his hands on him. His one chance of an honourable life was slim indeed. If he rode down to Cantrae without the tieryn catching him, and then threw himself upon the gwerbret’s mercy, he might be pardoned simply because he was something of a bard and thus under special protection in the laws. Unfortunately, the pardon was unlikely, because it would depend on his liege’s whim, and Gwerbret Tibryn of the Boar was a harsh man. His clan, the Boars of the North, was related to the southern Boars of Muir, who had wheedled the gwerbretrhyn out of the King in Dun Deverry some fifty years before. Between them, the conjoint Boar clans ruled a vast stretch of the northern kingdom and were said to be the real power behind a puppet king in the Holy City. It was unlikely that Tibryn would bother to show mercy to a half-trained bard when that mercy would make one of his loyal tieryns grumble. Maddyn decided that since he and the spirits had worked out their accommodation, he would leave the gwerbret’s mercy alone and stay in Brin Toraedic until spring.

The next time that Nevyn rode to the village, Maddyn decided to ride a-ways with him to exercise both himself and his horse. The day was clear and cold, with the smell of snow in the air and a rimy frost lying on the brown stubbled fields. When he realized that it was nearly Samaen, Maddyn was shocked at the swift flowing of time outside the hill, which seemed to have a different flow of its own. Finally they came to the village, a handful of round, thatched houses scattered among white birches along the banks of a stream.

‘I’d best wait for you by the road,’ Maddyn said. ‘One of the tieryn’s men might ride into the village for some reason.’

‘I don’t want you sitting out in this cold. I’ll take you over to a farm near here. These people are friends of mine, and they’ll shelter you without awkward questions.’

They followed a lane across brown pastureland until they came to the farmstead, a scatter of round buildings inside a circular, packed-earth wall. At the back of the big house was a cow-barn, storage sheds, and a pen for grey and white goats. In the muddy yard, chickens pecked round the front door of the house. Shooing the hens away, a stout man with greying hair came out to greet them.

‘Morrow, my lord. What can I do for you this morning?’

‘Oh, just keep a friend of mine warm, good Bannyc. He’s been very ill, as I’m sure his white face is telling you, and he needs to rest while I’m in the village.’

‘We can spare him room at the hearth. Ye gods, lad, you’re pale as the hoar frost, truly.’

Bannyc ushered Maddyn into the wedge-shaped main room, which served as kitchen and hall both. In front of a big hearth, where logs blazed in a most welcome way, stood two tables and three high-backed benches, a prosperous amount of furniture for those parts. Clean straw covered the floor, and the walls were freshly whitewashed. From the ceiling hung strings of onions and garlic, nets of drying turnips and apples, and a couple of enormous hams. On the hearthstone a young woman was sitting cross-legged and mending a pair of brigga.

‘Who’s this, Da?’ she said.

‘A friend of Nevyn’s.’

Hastily she scrambled up and dropped Maddyn a curtsey. She was very pretty, with raven-black hair and dark, calm eyes. Maddyn bowed to her in return.

‘You’ll forgive me for imposing on you,’ Maddyn said. ‘I haven’t been well, and I need a bit of a rest.’

‘Any friend of Nevyn’s is always welcome here,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and I’ll get you some ale.’

Maddyn took off his cloak, then sat down on the hearthstone as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his shirt. Announcing that he had to get back to the cows, Bannyc strolled outside. The woman handed Maddyn a tankard of dark ale, then sat down near him and picked up her mending again.

‘My thanks.’ Maddyn saluted her with the ale. ‘My name’s Maddyn of … uh, well, just Maddyn will do.’

‘Mine’s Belyan. Have you known Nevyn long?’

‘Oh, not truly.’

Belyan gave him an oddly awestruck smile and began sewing. Maddyn sipped his ale and watched her slender fingers work deftly on the rough wool of a pair of brigga, Bannyc’s, by the large size of them. He was surprised at how good it felt to be sitting warm and alive in the presence of a pretty woman. Every now and then, Belyan hesitantly looked his way, as if she were trying to think of something to say.

‘Well, my lord,’ she said at last. ‘Will you be staying long with our Nevyn?’

‘I don’t truly know, but here, what makes you call me lord? I’m as common-born as you are.’

‘Well – but a friend of Nevyn’s.’

At that Maddyn realized that she knew perfectly well that the old man was dweomer.

‘Now here, what do you think I am?’ Maddyn had the uneasy feeling that it was very dangerous to pretend to dweomer you didn’t have. ‘I’m only a rider without a warband. Nevyn was good enough to save my life when he found me wounded, that’s all. But here, don’t tell anyone about me, will you? I’m an outlawed man.’

‘I’ll forget your name the minute you ride on.’

‘My humble thanks, and my apologies. I don’t even deserve to be drinking your ale.’

‘Oh hold your tongue! What do I care about these rotten wars?’

When he looked at her, he found her angry, her mouth set hard in a bitter twist.

‘I don’t care the fart of a two-copper piglet,’ she went on. ‘All it’s ever brought to me and mine is trouble. They take our horses and raise our taxes and ride through our grain, and all in the name of glory and the one true King, or so they call him, when everyone with wits in his head knows there’s two kings now, and why should I care, truly, as long as they don’t both come here a-bothering us. If you’re one man who won’t die in this war, then I say good for you.’

‘Ye gods. Well, truly, I never thought of it that way before.’

‘No doubt, since you were a rider once.’

‘Here, I’m not exactly a deserter or suchlike.’

She merely shrugged and went back to her sewing. Maddyn wondered why a woman of her age, twenty-two or so, was living in her father’s house. Had she lost a betrothed in the wars? The question was answered for him in a moment when two small lads, about six and four, came running into the room and calling her Mam. They were fighting over a copper they’d found in the road and came to her to settle it. Belyan gave them each a kiss and told them they’d have to give the copper to their gran, then sent them back outside.

‘So you’re married, are you?’ Maddyn said.

‘I was once. Their father drowned in the river two winters ago. He was setting a fish-trap, but the ice turned out to be too thin.’

‘That aches my heart, truly. So you came back to your father?’

‘I did. Da needed a woman around the house, and he’s good to my lads. That’s what matters to me.’

‘Then it gladdens my heart to hear that you’re happy.’

‘Happy?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, I don’t think much of things like happiness, just as long as the lads are well.’

Maddyn could feel her loneliness, lying just under her faint, mocking smile. His body began to wonder about her, a flicker of sexual warmth, another sign that life was coming back to him. She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes patient, self-contained, almost unreadable.

‘And what will you do now?’ she said. ‘Ride on before the snows come?’

‘Nevyn doesn’t think I’ll be fit by then, but sooner or later I have to go. It’ll mean my life if I stay. They hang outlawed men.’

‘So they do.’

Belyan considered him for a moment more, then got up briskly, as if she’d come to some decision, and strode out of the room through a blanket-hung door in one of the wickerwork walls. He was just finishing his tankard when she returned, carrying a shirt, which she tossed into his lap when she sat back down.

‘That was my husband’s,’ she said. ‘It’s too small for Da, and it’ll rot before the lads grow to fit it. Take it. You need a shirt that doesn’t have foxes embroidered all over it.’

‘Ye gods! I forgot about that. No wonder you thought I was a deserter, then. Well, my humble thanks.’

He smoothed it out, studying with admiration the sleeves, stiff with finely embroidered interlacing and spirals, and at the yokes, floral bands. It had probably been her husband’s wedding shirt because it was unlikely that her man had owned two pieces of such fancy clothing, but still, it was a good bit safer for him to wear than one with his dead lord’s blazon. He took off his old shirt and gave it to her.

‘Do you want this for the cloth? You can mend the lads’ tunics out of it.’

‘So I can. My thanks.’

She was looking at the scar along his side, a thick clot of tissue in his armpit, a thinner gash along his ribs. Hurriedly he pulled the new shirt over his head and smoothed it down.

‘It fits well enough. You’re generous to a dishonoured man.’

‘Better than letting it rot. I put a lot of fancy work into that.’

‘Do you miss your man still?’

‘At times.’ She paused, considering for a few moments. ‘I do, at that. He was a good man. He didn’t beat me, and we always had enough to eat. When he had the leisure, he’d whittle little horses and wagons for the lads, and he made sure I had a new dress every spring.’

It came to that for her, he realized, not the glories of love and the tempests of passion that the bard songs celebrated for noble audiences. He’d met plenty of women like Belyan, farm women, all of them, whose real life ran apart from their men in a self-contained earthiness of work and children. Since their work counted as much as their men’s towards feeding and sheltering themselves and their kin, it gave them a secure place of their own, unlike the wives of the noble lords, who existed at their husbands’ whims. Yet Belyan was lonely; at times she missed her man. Maddyn was aware of his body, and the wondering was growing stronger. When she smiled at him, he smiled in return.

The door banged open and, shouting and laughing, the two lads ushered in Nevyn. Although he joked easily with the boys, the old man turned grim when he reached Maddyn.

‘You were right to stay out here, lad. I like that new shirt you’re wearing.’

Belyan automatically began rolling up the old one, hiding the fox-blazoned yokes inside the roll.

‘Tieryn Devyr is up at Brynoic’s dun,’ Nevyn went on. ‘He’s going to assign the lands to his son, Romyl, and give the lad part of his warband to hold them. That means men who know you will be riding the roads around here. I think we’ll just go home the back way.’

For several days after, Maddyn debated the risk of riding on his own, then finally went down to see Belyan by a roundabout way. When he led the horse into the farmstead, it seemed deserted. The wooden wagon was gone, and not even a dog ran out to bark at him. As he stood there, puzzling, Belyan came walking out of the barn with a wooden bucket in one hand. Maddyn liked her firm but supple stride.

‘Da’s taken the lads down to market,’ she said. ‘We had extra cheeses to sell.’

‘Will they be gone long?’

‘Till sunset, most like. I was hoping you’d ride our way today.’

Maddyn took his horse to the barn and tied him up in a stall next to one of the cows, where he’d be out of the wind and, more importantly, out of sight of the road. When he went into the house, he found Belyan putting more wood in the hearth. She wiped her hands on her skirts, then glanced at him with a small, secretive smile.

‘It’s cold in my bedchamber, Maddo. Come sit down by the fire.’

They sat down together in the soft clean straw by the hearth. When he touched her hair with a shy stroke, she laid impatient hands on his shoulders. When he kissed her, she slipped her hands behind his neck and pulled him down to her as smoothly as if she were gathering in a sheaf of wheat.

The winter was slow in coming that year. There was one flurry of snow, then only the cold under a clear sky, day after day of aching frost and wind. Although the pale sun managed to melt the first snowfall, rime lay cold and glittering on the brown fields and in the ditches along the roads. Maddyn spent the days out of sight in Brin Toraedic, because Lord Romyl’s men were often out prowling, riding back and forth to the village to exercise their horses and to get themselves out of the dun. Maddyn would sleep late, then practise his harp by the hour with the Wildfolk for an audience. Sometimes Nevyn would sit and listen, or even make a judicious comment about his singing or the song itself, but the old man spent much of his day deep within the broken hill. Maddyn never had the nerve to ask him what he did there.

One afternoon when Nevyn was gone, Maddyn remembered a song about Dilly Blind, the trickiest Wildfolk of them all. Since it was a children’s song, he hadn’t heard it in years, but he ran through it several times and made up fresh verses when he couldn’t remember the old. The Wildfolk clustered close and listened, enraptured. When he finally finished it, for the briefest of moments he thought he saw – or perhaps did indeed see – little faces, little eyes, peering up at him. Then, suddenly, they were gone. When Nevyn returned later, Maddyn mentioned his vision – if such it was – to the old man, who looked honestly startled.

‘If you do start seeing them, lad, for the sake of every god, don’t go telling people about it. You’ll be mocked within a bare thread of your life.’

‘Oh, I know that, sure enough. I’m just puzzled. I never had so much as a touch of the second sight before.’

‘Truly? That’s odd, because bards so often do have the sight. But anyway, lad, you’re doubtless picking it up just from being here with us. Suppose you laid your sword down close to the fire in the hearth. In time, the blade would grow hot, even though it wasn’t in the fire itself. Being in a centre of dweomer power can do that to a man with a sensitive mind.’

With a little shudder Maddyn looked around the towering stone chamber. A centre of power? he thought; truly, you can feel it sometimes.

‘Well,’ Maddyn said at last. ‘It was a strange chance that brought me here.’

‘Perhaps. But naught happens to a dweomerman by chance, especially not in these cursed and troubled times.’

‘I take it the wars ache your heart.’

‘Of course they do, dolt! If you had any sense, they’d ache yours too.’

‘Well, good sir, I’ve never known anything but war. Sometimes I wonder if the days of the old kingdom are like the tales in some of my songs – splendid to hear, but never true.’

‘Oh, they were real enough. There was a time when a man could ride the roads in peace, and the farmers gather in their crops in safety, and a man have a son and feel sure that he’d live to see the lad live to be grown and married. Good days, they were, and I pray constantly that they’ll come again.’

Maddyn felt a sudden longing to know that kind of life. Before, he’d wanted battle glory and honour, taken it for granted that there would always be wars to provide them, but all at once he wondered if glory were the great prize he’d always believed it to be. Later, when he went out to walk on the top of the hill, he found that the snow had been falling all morning. For miles around, the world was soft and white under a pearly grey sky, the trees etched against the horizon, the distant village snug under a breath of smoke from its chimneys. He’d seen views like it a hundred times and thought nothing of them, but now it was beautiful, so beautiful that he wondered if he’d ever really looked at anything before he’d ridden up to the gates of the Otherlands.

At night, whenever the weather allowed, Maddyn rode down to see Belyan. At first he was afraid that Bannyc would resent this outlaw who’d ridden in and taken his daughter, but the old man regarded him with a certain pleasant indifference. Her sons were a different matter. The younger one found him a nuisance, and the elder frankly hated him. Maddyn took to arriving late at the farm, when he could be sure they were asleep, because Belyan made it clear that the lads came first in her heart – fair enough, he thought, since they both knew he’d be riding on in the spring. Yet, whenever he held her in his arms, the spring seemed very far away.

Once the snows came in force, it was hard to ride down to her bed as often as Maddyn wanted. One night, after a frustrating week of being snowbound in the hill, he left early and pushed his horse hard through the heavy drifts. He stabled his horse, then climbed in through Belyan’s chamber window, pushing the oiled hides aside and cursing while she laughed at him. Although she had a freestanding clay stove in the chamber, it was still bitter cold. He threw off his cloak, pulled off his boots, then got into bed before undressing the rest of the way.

‘Your chamber’s as cold as the blasted roads!’

‘Then come over to my side of the bed. It’s nice and warm.’

When he took her in his arms, she turned to him greedily with a simple, direct passion that still took him by surprise. She didn’t know how to be coy and flirtatious like the other women he’d had. When would she have had the time to learn, he wondered, and it didn’t bother him one whit. Later, as he lay drowsing between sleep and waking, he found himself considering staying in the spring. Bannyc would be glad to have an extra man to help work the farm; Bell would be glad to have him in her bed every night; the lads could gradually be won over. While Maddyn didn’t love her, he liked her, and it would do well enough all round. Yet he didn’t dare stay. For the first time, he saw clearly that he was indeed running for his life. Any lord in Cantrae who recognized him would turn him over to Devyr for hanging. He was going to have to ride west, ride fast and far enough to find a lord who’d never heard of him or Lord Brynoic and one who was desperate enough for men to take him on with no questions asked. Most likely, he’d end up riding for one of the enemy sides in the long wars, a Cerrmor ally or an Eldidd lord. He kissed Belyan awake and made love to her again, simply to drown his thoughts of the future ahead of him.

That night the snow was so bad that Maddyn risked staying the night. It was pleasant, sleeping with his arms around Bell, so pleasant that he was tempted to risk doing it often, but when he came out of her chamber in the morning, he found some of Bannyc’s neighbours there, eating bread and drinking ale while they chatted by the hearth. Although they were pleasant to him, Maddyn had the grim experience of finding himself the undoubted focus of four pairs of eyes and – no doubt – a good bit of future gossip. If any of that gossip reached the wrong ears, he would be in danger. After that, he rode only at night and left her house well before dawn.

Yet for all his precautions, the night came when Maddyn ran across some of Romyl’s men. Just at midnight, he was picking his way across the fields on his way back to Brin Toraedic. A cold wind drove torn and scudding clouds across the sky, alternately covering and sailing free of a full moon. He could see the hill close by, a jagged blackness rising out of the meadow and looming against the sky, when he heard the jingle of bridles carrying in the clear night air. Horses snorted; hoofbeats were trotting fast down the road. Nearby was a leafless copse, an imperfect shelter, but the best Maddyn could find. As he guided his horse into the trees, the branches dropped snow, scattering it over his hood and cloak. Maddyn sat as still as he could and waited. He refused to make an obvious dash for the hill. If he were going to be caught, he didn’t want Nevyn hanged with him.

Trotting in tight formation, six riders came down the road. When they were directly abreast of the copse, they paused and wheeled their horses into a ring to argue about which direction to take at the crossroads ahead. Maddyn could clearly hear that they were more than a bit drunk. In an almost tangible swirl of concern and bewilderment, the Wildfolk clustered around him to listen as the argument in the road went on and on. Then Maddyn’s horse stamped, shivering uncontrollably in the cold with a jingle of tack. One of the riders turned in the saddle and saw him. Maddyn urged his horse slowly forward; he would rather surrender, he realized, than put Nevyn, and possibly Belyan, at risk.

‘Danger,’ he whispered to the Wildfolk. ‘Tell Nevyn.’

He felt some of them rush away, but the others crowded round, a trembling of small lives like gusts of warmer air.

‘You!’ the rider called. ‘Come forward!’

With a sinking heart, Maddyn recognized Selyn, one of Devyr’s men who knew him well. With Selyn at their head, the riders trotted over, spreading out in a semicircle to surround and trap him. Since it was a hopeless situation, Maddyn rode out to meet them. In the moonlight, he could just see an expression of exaggerated surprise on Selyn’s face.

‘Maddyn! Oh by the gods!’ His voice was a frightened hiss. ‘It’s long past Samaen.’

One of the others yelped sharply, like a kicked hound. The group pulled their horses to an abrupt halt, just as Maddyn felt the Wildfolk rushing about him in panic, lifting and trembling the edges of his cloak and hood.

‘Now, here, Maddo lad, don’t harm us. I used to be a friend of yours. It was only my lord’s orders that ever made us lift a sword against you. May peace be yours in the Otherlands.’

As Selyn began edging his nervous horse backwards, the truth hit Maddyn: Selyn, who thought he was dead with all the rest of Brynoic’s warband, could only assume that he was seeing Maddyn’s spirit. The thought made him laugh aloud. It was the perfect thing to do; the entire squad began edging their horses backwards, but they never took their terrified eyes off Maddyn’s face. Such profound attention was more than any bard could resist. Maddyn tossed his head back and howled, a long eerie note, sending his trained voice as far and high as he could. A rider shrieked, and the sound broke the squad.

‘Spirits!’ Selyn screamed. ‘Save yourselves.’

With a giggle of pure, delighted malice, the Wildfolk threw themselves forward among the horses. In the moonlight Maddyn could see them: a thickening in the air like frost crystals, little faces, little hands, fingers that began pinching every horse and rider they could reach. The horses kicked and plunged; the riders yelled, slapping at their mounts with their reins as they desperately tried to turn them. When Maddyn howled a second time, the horses lurched sideways and charged for the road at a gallop with their riders clinging to their necks. Maddyn sat in his saddle and sobbed with laughter until the Wildfolk returned. In a companionable crowd, he rode back to the hill, whose legend had just grown a good bit larger. As he led his horse into the stable, Nevyn came running to meet him.

‘What’s all this about danger?’

‘All over now, good sir, but it’s a pretty tale. I think I’ll make a song about it.’

First, though, he simply told the tale to Nevyn over a tankard of mulled ale, and the old man laughed his dry chuckle that always sounded rusty from long disuse.

‘The battlefield where your warband fell is only about five miles from here, certainly close enough for a haunt. One thing, though, if they ride back in the morning, they’ll see the hoofprints of your horse.’ Nevyn looked at a spot close to his right knee. ‘Do us a favour, will you? Take some of the lads and go out to the field. Do you remember the tracks Maddyn’s horse made? You do? Splendid! Sweep those away like a good lad, but leave all the other tracks where they are. We’ll have a good jest on those nasty men.’

Maddyn could feel that the crowd was gone, except for a tiny blue sprite. All at once, he saw her clearly, perched on his knee and sucking her finger while she stared up at him with alarmingly vacant green eyes. When she smiled, she revealed a mouth full of needle-sharp, bright blue teeth.

‘Oho!’ Nevyn said. ‘You see her, don’t you?’

‘I do, at that. Will I go on seeing the Wildfolk after I leave here?’

‘I’d imagine so, but I don’t truly know. I haven’t come across a puzzle like you before, lad.’

Maddyn had the ungrateful thought that if he were a puzzle, then Nevyn was the greatest riddle in the world.

The next afternoon, Nevyn rode down to the village to hear the gossip and brought back the tale of Maddyn’s meeting with the squad in its new and doubtless permanent form. Lord Romyl’s men had foolishly ridden by Brin Toraedic in moonlight, when every lackwit knows you should avoid the hill like poison during the full moon. There, sure enough, they’d seen the ghosts of Lord Brynoic’s entire warband, charging across the meadow just as they had during the last battle. Yet in the morning, when the riders went back to look, they found the hoofprints of only their own horses.

‘“And what did they think they’d find?” the tavernman says to me,’ Nevyn said with a dry laugh. ‘Everyone knows that spirits don’t leave tracks.’

‘So they did come back, did they? I’m cursed glad you thought of that.’

‘Oh, it’s one thing to be spirit-plagued by moonlight, quite another to think things over in the cold light of dawn. But they found naught for all their looking, and now none of Lord Romyl’s men will ride near the hill, even in daylight.’

‘Isn’t that a handy thing?’

‘It is, but ye gods, you warriors are a superstitious lot!’

‘Oh, are we now?’ Maddyn had to laugh at the old man’s indignation. ‘You show me a world full of spirits, send those spirits out to run me an errand, and then have the gall to call me superstitious!’

Nevyn laughed for a good long time over that.

‘You’re right, and I apologize, Maddyn my lad, but surely you can’t deny that your average swordsman believes that the strangest things will bring him luck, either good or ill.’

‘True, but you just can’t know what it’s like to ride in a war. Every time you saddle up, you know blasted well that maybe you’ll never ride back. Who knows what makes one man fall and another live in battle? Once I saw a man who was a splendid fighter – oh, he swung a sword like a god, not a man – and he rode into this particular scrap with all the numbers on his side, and you know what happened? His cinch broke, dumped him into the mob, and he was kicked to death. And then you see utter idiots, with no more swordcraft than a farmer’s lad, ride straight for the enemy and come out without a scratch. So after a while, you start believing in luck and omens and anything else you can cursed well turn up, just to ease the pain of not knowing when you’ll die.’

‘I can see that, truly.’

Nevyn’s good humour was gone; he looked saddened to tears as he thought things over. Seeing him that way made Maddyn melancholy himself, and thoughtful.

‘I suppose that’s what makes us all long for dweomer leaders,’ Maddyn went on slowly. ‘You can have the best battle plan in the world, but once the javelins are thrown and the swordplay starts, ah by the hells, not even the gods could think clearly. So call it superstition all you want, but you want a leader who’s got a touch of the dweomer about him, someone who can see more than you can, and who’s got the right luck.’

‘If being lucky and clear-sighted made a man dweomer, lad, then the world would be full of men like me.’

‘Well, that’s not quite what I meant, good sir. A dweomer leader would be different, somehow. Doubtless none exist, but we all want to believe it. You’d love to ride for a man like that, you tell yourself, someone the gods favour, someone you can believe in. Even if you died for him, it’d be worth it.’

Nevyn gave him such a sharp look that Maddyn hesitated, but the old man gestured for him to go on. ‘This is incredibly interesting.’

‘Then my thanks, truly. Now, Slwmar of Dun Deverry’s a great and generous man, but he’s not a dweomer leader. I always had trouble believing he was the true King, frankly, even though I always pledged him that way because my lord did. He used to walk among us men every now and again, talking to us and calling us by name, and it was splendid of him, but he was just an ordinary sort of lord, not a true king.’

‘Indeed! And what should the true King look like, then?’

‘Well, there should be somewhat of the dweomer about him. You should just be able to tell he’s the true King. I mean, he doesn’t have to be as tall as one of the gods, or as handsome, either, but you could look at him and know in your very soul that he was meant to rule. He’d have splendid good luck, and the gods would send omens of the things he was going to do. By the hells, I’d follow a man like that to the death, and most of the kingdom would, too, I’ll wager.’

With a wild, half-mad grin, Nevyn got up and began pacing furiously back and forth in front of the hearth.

‘Have I said somewhat stupid?’ Maddyn said.

‘What? You’ve just said the best thing I’ve heard in many a long year, actually. Lad, you can’t know how glad I am that I dragged you back from the gates of the Otherlands. My thanks for making me see what’s been under my nose all along. I’ll tell you one great fault of the dweomer. You get so used to using it and looking in strange places for stranger lore that you forget to use the wits the gods gave you in the first place!’

Utterly confused, Maddyn could only stare at him as he cackled and paced back and forth like a madman. Finally Maddyn went to bed, but when he woke restlessly in the middle of the night, he saw Nevyn standing by the hearth and smiling into the fire.

Over the next couple of snowbound weeks, Nevyn spent much time brooding over the idea that Maddyn had so inadvertently handed him, a splendid repayment for his healing. Although complex in its details, the plan was peculiarly simple at its core and thus possible. At the moment, things looked as if the wars might rage until the end of time, ravaging the kingdom until there wasn’t a man left fit to fight. After so many years of civil war, after so many leaders slain and buried, so many loyal followers wiped out, it seemed to men’s minds that each of the claimants had as good a right as the next one to the throne. When it came to figuring bloodlines and genealogies, even the priests had a hard time telling who was most fit to be King of all Deverry. The lords, therefore, pledged to the man who seemed to offer an immediate advantage, and their sons changed the alliance if the advantage changed.

But what if a man appeared who impressed his followers as the true King, a dweomer leader, as Maddyn said, whom half the kingdom would follow to the throne or the grave? Then at last, after one final gruesome bloodbath, the kingdom would come to peace. Dweomer leader, is it? Nevyn would think; give me a decent man, and I’ll make him look dweomer soon enough. It would be easy – disgustingly easy as he thought about it – to surround a good-looking man with glamour, to manipulate the omens around him, to pull a few cheap tricks just like the one that the Wildfolk had pulled on Selyn and his friends. They would have the troops on their knees and their lords along with them, all cheering the one true King. He realized, too, in those nights of brooding, that he shouldn’t have been surprised that Maddyn would bring him the idea. In his last life, as young Ricyn down in Cerrmor, he’d been the captain of a warband pledged to just such a dweomer leader, Gweniver of the Wolf, whose madness and undoubted piety to the Dark Goddess had combined to blaze her round with false glamour like a fire.

Thinking about her and her grim fate made Nevyn wary. Did he have the right to subject another man to the forces that had torn her fragile mind apart? He would have to be very careful, to wait and scheme until he found a candidate strong enough for the burden. He wondered, too, if he would even be allowed to use dweomer for such a purpose. He spent long hours in meditation, stripped his soul bare and begged for aid from the Lords of Light. In time, his answer grew slowly in his mind: the kingdom needs peace above all else, and if something goes wrong, then you will be the sacrifice. That he could accept, thinking of himself as the servant of, and the sacrifice for, the King he would create.

The permission given, it was time to plan. While Maddyn was away at Belyan’s, or sleeping his boredom away, Nevyn would talk through the fire to the other dweomerfolk of the kingdom, particularly Aderyn in the west and a woman who bore the honorary name of Rommerdda in the north. Everyone was so weary of war that they were eager to throw their dice on Nevyn’s long gamble.

‘But we can’t do this alone,’ Rommerdda remarked one night. ‘We’ll have to win over the priests. Can we?’

‘I intend to start turning the earth for this particular garden in the spring. At the same time, we can start scouting around for the proper prince.’

Her face dancing in the firelight, Rommerdda looked sceptical. She wore her long white hair in two braids like a lass of the Dawntime, and her face was even more wrinkled than his, so old, so exhausted that Nevyn knew she would never see the end of this work they were planning. Of all the dweomerfolk in the kingdom, only he and Aderyn had unnaturally long lives, each for their separate reasons. There would, however, soon be another Rommerdda to take up the task in hand.

And it was going to be a hard one: find the right man, then lay the proper omens for his coming with the aid of the priests. Once the kingdom lived for the day when the true King appeared, then Nevyn could orchestrate his moves. As he brooded over the details, Nevyn began to long for spring. The sooner he got started, the better.

2

The year 834. This was the year of the first omens of the coming King. A two-headed kid was born in a village near our temple. It died soon after, because a kingdom with two kings cannot live. In the sky we saw a vision of a great horse, running before a storm, and coming from the west. Although the omen was duly recorded, only later did we realize its import …

The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn

Spring came too fast that year for Maddyn’s liking. Every morning, he would walk up on the hill and search the sky for weather omens. Although he would have to stay until the snows were well past, at the same time he had to be well away before the real spring, when the riders would be swarming on the Cantrae roads for the summer muster. First came the rains that melted the last of the snow and turned the world to brown muck; then the nights grew warmer until it seemed a hardy man could sleep beside the road without freezing. Yet he found excuses to stay until the pale grass began to come out in sheltered valleys. That very night, he rode down early to see Belyan.

When he climbed through her window, he found her still up, fussing over the fire in the clay stove. She gave him a distracted sort of kiss.

‘Take off those boots before sitting on the bed, will you, love? I don’t want muck all over the blankets.’

Maddyn leaned into the curve of the wall and began to pull them off.

‘Spring’s here,’ he said. ‘Will it ache your heart when I ride?’

‘It will, but not half as badly as seeing you hanged would ache it.’

‘True enough. But, Bell, I wish I could stay, and all for your sake. I want you to know that.’

‘It would be splendid, having you with us on the farm, but I don’t see how we could keep you hidden. A few of our friends already know I’ve got a man, and in a few months, the whole village will know.’

When he looked up, he found her smiling, her dark eyes as calm as always.

‘Oh by the hells, what have I done? Got you with child?’

‘What did you think would happen after all the rolling around we’ve done? I’m hardly barren, am I? Oh here, don’t look so troubled, love. I’ve wanted another babe for ever so long now. I’m just glad we had the time for you to give me one.’

‘But I have to desert you! I don’t even have the wretched coin for the midwife.’

‘Oh, the midwife’s a friend of mine, so don’t trouble your heart over that. I can tend a babe on my own, but I couldn’t have got one without a bit of help, could I?’ She laid her hands delicately on her stomach. ‘Oh, I do hope it’s a daughter, but if it’s a son, shall I name him after you?’

‘Only if you truly want to. I’d rather you gave him my father’s name. It was Daumyr.’

‘Then Daumyr it is, if it’s a lad. Well, either way, I hope it has your curly hair.’

Maddyn hesitated with a troubling suspicion rising in his mind. He’d always known she didn’t truly love him, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d just been put out to stud.

‘Bell? Will you miss me when I’m gone?’

Somewhat startled, she considered the question. ‘Well, I will,’ she said at last. ‘A bit.’

When Maddyn left that night, the air was warm with the moist rich smell of spring earth. At the hilltop he dismounted and stood looking out over the dark countryside, the glitter of streams in the moonlight, the distant mound of the sleeping village, and far away, the gleam of the lake where the gates of the Otherlands had almost opened to receive him. I’ve been happy this winter, he thought; ah, curse both false kings and their balls, too!

In the morning Maddyn led his horse down the gully one last time. Overhead, white clouds sailed by, sweeping their shadows over the pale grass on the muddy moorland. When they reached the foot of the hill, Nevyn handed him a worn leather pouch, jingling with coin.

‘Take it without arguing, lad. I didn’t save your life only to have you starve on the road.’

‘My thanks. I wish I could repay you for everything you’ve done for me.’

‘I’ll wager you will. Your Wyrd brought you to me once, and I suspect it’ll do so again, but in some strange way that neither of us can understand.’

Although Maddyn wanted to head straight west and put Cantrae behind him as soon as he could, he was forced to turn south, because the hills between Cantrae and Gwaentaer province were still snowy at this time of year. He went cautiously, avoiding the main road that ran beside the Canaver down to Dun Cantrae, sticking to winding farm lanes and what wild country there was. The only people he allowed to see him were farmers, who, like Belyan, cared less for the honour of war than they did for the coppers he spent for food. After four days of this careful riding, he was at the Gwaentaer border at a place roughly parallel with Dun Cantrae. Here the hills were low and rolling, dotted with small farms and the winter steadings of the horse-breeders who roamed with their herds all summer in the pasturelands. This time of year, every house bustled with activity. Mares were foaling; hooves needed shoeing; gear needed repairing; food had to be packed against the first long spring ride. No one had time to notice or to care about a solitary rider with a warrior’s saddle but a farmer’s shirt.

Just at dusk one warm day Maddyn came to the pillar stone that marked the boundary between the two gwerbretrhynau. As he rode past, he let out a long sigh of relief. Although he was still an outlaw, his neck was a good bit safer now. Once, back in that peaceful and now nearmythical past, every gwerbret in the kingdom would have honoured Tibryn’s decree of outlawry, but now in the midst of the long-bleeding wars, fighting men were too valuable for lords to go driving them away with awkward questions. For the first time in weeks he felt relaxed enough to sing. Two Wildfolk came for the song, the blue sprite perching on his saddle-peak and showing him her pointed teeth, a gnarled brown gnome who was new to him dancing in the road beside his horse. Maddyn was so glad to see them that he almost wept. At least one small part of his magical winter would travel with him.

As it turned out, he soon had human company, and in a way that he never would have expected. The morning after he passed the boundary stone, he came to the last of the hills and paused his horse for a moment to look down and over the vast green plain of Gwaentaer, the wind’s own country indeed, where the trees that the farmers laboriously planted soon grew leaning, as if they shrank in continuous fear from the constant whistling of the wind. Since the day was sparkling clear, he could see for miles over the land, softly furred with the first green of grass and winter wheat, dimpled here and there with tiny ponds or the round steadings of the widely separated farms. He could also see a well-marked road running deadwest, and on it, not more than a mile ahead of him, a solitary rider.

Something was wrong with the man. Even from this distance Maddyn could see it, because the fellow was riding doubled over in the saddle, and his horse was picking its own way, ambling slowly, pausing every now and then to snatch a tuft of grass from the side of the road before its rider would come to himself and get it back under control, only to slump again a few moments later. Maddyn’s first impulse was to ride on by a somewhat different route and not burden himself with anyone else’s troubles, but then he thought of Nevyn, risking his own life to heal and shelter an outlawed man. With a chirrup to his horse, he started off at a brisk trot. The rider ahead never heard him coming, or else cared not a whit if he were followed, because he never turned or even looked back the entire time that Maddyn was closing with him. Finally, when Maddyn was close enough to see that the entire back of the man’s shirt was thick with rusty-brown dried blood, the fellow paused his horse and sat slumped and weary, as if inviting Maddyn to have a clear strike at him and be done with it.

‘Here,’ Maddyn said. ‘What’s wrong?’

At that the rider did turn to look at him, and Maddyn swore aloud.

‘Aethan, by all the gods! What are you doing on the Gwaentaer road?’

‘And I could ask the same of you, Maddo.’ His voice, normally deep and full of humour, was rasped with old pain. ‘Or have you come to fetch me to the Otherlands?’

Maddyn stared for a moment, then remembered that everyone in Cantrae thought him dead.

‘Oh, here, I’m as much alive as you are. How were you wounded?’

‘I’m not. I’ve been flogged.’

‘Ah, horsedung and a pile of it! Can you ride any farther?’

Aethan considered this for a long moment. He was normally a handsome man, with even features, dark hair just touched with grey at the temples, and wide blue eyes that always seemed to be laughing at some jest, but now his face was twisted in pain, and his eyes were narrow and grim, as if perhaps he’d never laugh again.

‘I need a rest,’ he said at last. ‘Shall we sit awhile, or are you riding on and leaving me?’

‘What? Are you daft? Would I run out on a man I’ve known since I was a cub of fifteen?’

‘I don’t know any more what men will do and women neither.’

In a nearby meadow they found a pleasant copse of willows planted round a farmer’s duckpond, with the farmer nowhere in sight. Maddyn dismounted, then helped Aethan down and watered the horses while his friend sat numbly in the shade. As he worked, he was wondering over it all. Aethan was the last man in the kingdom that Maddyn would have expected to get himself shamed, flogged, and turned out of his warband. A favourite of his captain, Aethan had been a second-in-command of Gwerbret Tibryn’s own warband. He was one of those genuinely decent men so valuable to any good warband – the conciliator, everyone’s friend, the man who settled all those petty disputes bound to arise when a lot of men are packed into a barracks together. The gwerbret himself had on occasion asked Aethan’s advice on small matters dealing with the warband, but now here he was, with his shame written on his back in blood.

Once the horses were watered, Maddyn filled the waterskin with fresh drink and sat down next to Aethan, who took the skin from him with a twisted smile.

‘Outlawed we may be, but we still follow the rules of the troop, don’t we, Maddo? Horses first, then men.’

‘We need these mounts more than ever, with no lord to give us another.’

Aethan nodded and drank deep, then handed the skin back. ‘Well, it gladdens my heart that you weren’t killed in Lord Devyr’s last charge. I take it you found a farm or suchlike to hide in all winter.’

‘Somewhat like that. I was dying, actually, from a wound I took, when a local herbman found me.’

‘Gods! You’ve always had the luck, haven’t you?’

Maddyn merely shrugged and stoppered up the skin tight. For a moment they merely sat there in an uncomfortable silence and watched the fat grey ducks grubbing at the edge of the pond.

‘You hold your tongue cursed well for a bard,’ Aethan said abruptly. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me about my shame?’

‘Say what you want and not a word more.’

Aethan considered, staring out at the far flat horizon.

‘Ah horseshit,’ he said at last. ‘It’s a tale fit for a bard to know, in a way. Do you remember our gwerbret’s sister, the Lady Merodda?’

‘Oh, and how could any man with blood in his veins forget her?’

‘He’d best try.’ Aethan’s voice turned hard and cold. ‘Her husband was killed in battle last summer, and so she came back to her brother in Dun Cantrae. And the captain made me her escort, to ride behind her whenever she went out.’ He was quiet, his mouth working, for a good couple of minutes. ‘And she took a fancy to me. Ah, by the black ass of the Lord of Hell, I should have said her nay – I blasted well knew it, even then – but ye gods, Maddo, I’m only made of flesh and blood, not steel, and she knows how to get what she wants from a man. I swear to you, I never would have said a word to her if she hadn’t spoken to me first.’

‘I believe you. You’ve never been a fool.’

‘Not before this winter, at least. I felt like I was ensorcelled. I’ve never loved a woman that way before, and cursed if I ever will again. I wanted her to ride off with me. Like a misbegotten horseshit fool, I thought she loved me enough to do it. But oh, it didn’t suit her ladyship, not by half.’ Again the long, pain-filled pause. ‘So she let it slip to her brother what had been happening between us, but oh, she was the innocent one, she was. And when His Grace took all the skin off my back three days ago, she was out in the ward to watch.’

Aethan dropped his face into his hands and wept like a child. For a moment Maddyn sat there frozen; then he reached out a timid hand and laid it on Aethan’s shoulder until at last he fell silent and wiped his face roughly on his sleeve.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on her.’ Aethan’s voice was a flat, dead whisper. ‘She did keep her brother from killing me.’ He stood up, and it was painful to watch him wince as he hauled himself to his feet. ‘I’ve rested enough. Let’s ride, Maddo. The farther I get from Cantrae the happier I’ll be.’

For four days Maddyn and Aethan rode west, asking cautious questions of the various farmers and pedlars that they met about the local lords and their warbands. Even though they sometimes heard of a man who might be desperate enough to take them in without asking questions, each time they decided that they were still too close to Cantrae to risk petitioning him. They realized, however, that they would have to find some place soon, because all around them the noble-born were beginning to muster their men for the summer’s fighting. With troops moving along the roads they were in a dangerous position. Maddyn had no desire to escape being hanged for an outlaw only to end up in a rope as a supposed spy.

Since Aethan’s back was far from healed, they rode slowly, stopping often to rest, either beside the road or in village taverns. They had, at least, no need to worry about coin; not only did Maddyn have Nevyn’s generous pouch, but Aethan’s old captain had managed to slip him money along with his gear when he’d been kicked out of Dun Cantrae. Apparently Maddyn wasn’t alone in thinking the gwerbret’s sentence harsh. During this slow progress west, Maddyn had plenty of time to watch and worry over his old friend. Since always before, Aethan had watched over him – he was, after all, some ten years Maddyn’s elder – Maddyn was deeply troubled to realize that Aethan needed him the way a child needs his father. The gwerbret might have spared his life, but he’d broken him all the same, this man who’d served him faithfully for over twenty years, by half beating him to death like a rat caught in a stable.

Always before Aethan had had an easy way with command, making decisions, giving orders, and all in a way that made his fellows glad to follow them. Now he did whatever Maddyn said without even a mild suggestion that they might do otherwise. Before, too, he’d been a talkative man, always ready with a tale or a jest if he didn’t have serious news to pass along. Now he rode wrapped in a black hiraedd; at times he didn’t even answer when Maddyn asked him a direct question. For all that it ached Maddyn’s heart, he could think of nothing to do to better things. Often he wished that he could talk with Nevyn and get his advice, but Nevyn was far away, and he doubted if he’d ever see the old man again, no matter how much he wanted to.

Eventually they reached the great river, the Camyn Yraen, an ‘iron road’ even then, because all the rich ore from Cerrgonney came down it in barges, and the town of Gaddmyr, at that time only a large village with a wooden palisade around it for want of walls. Just inside the gate they found a tavern of sorts, basically the tavernman’s house, with half the round ground floor set off by a wickerwork partition to hold a couple of tables and some alebarrels in the curve of the wall. For a couple of coppers the man brought them a chunk of cheese and a loaf of bread to go with their ale, then left them strictly alone. Maddyn noticed that none of the villagers were bothering to come to the tavern with them in it, and he remarked as much to Aethan.

‘For all they know, we’re a couple of bandits. Ah, by the hells, Maddo, we can’t go wandering the roads like this, or we might well end up robbing travellers, at that. What are we going to do?’

‘Cursed if I know. But I’ve been thinking a bit. There’s those free troops you hear about. Maybe we’d be better off joining one of them than worrying about an honourable place in a warband.’

‘What?’ For a moment some of the old life came back to Aethan’s eyes. ‘Are you daft? Fight for coin, not honour? Ye gods, I’ve heard of some of those troops switching sides practically in the middle of a battle if someone offered them better pay. Mercenaries! They’re naught but a lot of dishonoured scum!’

Maddyn merely looked at him. With a long sigh Aethan rubbed his face with both hands.

‘And so are we. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Maddo? Well, you’re right enough. All the gods know that the captain of a free troop won’t be in any position to sneer at the scars on my back.’

‘True spoken. And we’ll have to try to find one that’s fighting for Cerrmor or Eldidd, too. Neither of us can risk having some Cantrae man seeing us in camp.’

‘Ah, horseshit and a pile of it! Do you know what that means? What are we going to end up doing? Riding a charge against the gwerbret and all my old band some day?’

Maddyn had never allowed himself to frame that thought before, that some day his life might depend on his killing a man who’d once been his ally and friend. Aethan picked up his dagger and stabbed it viciously into the table.

‘Here!’ The tavernman came running. ‘No need to be breaking up the furniture, lads!’

Aethan looked up so grimly that Maddyn caught his arm before he could take out his rage on this innocent villager. The tavernman stepped back, swallowing hard.

‘I’ll give you an extra copper to pay for the damage,’ Maddyn said. ‘My friend’s in a black mood today.’

‘He can go about having it in some other place than mine.’

‘Well and good, then. We’ve finished your piss-poor excuse for ale, anyway.’

They’d just reached the door when the tavernman hailed them again. Although Aethan ignored him and walked out, Maddyn paused as the taverner came scurrying over.

‘I know about one of them troops you and your friend was talking about.’

Maddyn got out a couple of coppers and jingled them in his hand. The taverner gave him a gap-toothed, garlicscented grin.

‘They wintered not far from here, they did. They rode in every now and then to buy food, and we was fair terrified at first, thinking they were going to steal whatever they wanted, but they paid good coin. I’ll say that for them, for all that they was an arrogant lot, strutting around like lords.’

‘Now that’s luck!’

‘Well, now, they might have moved on by now. Haven’t seen them in days, and here’s the blacksmith’s daughter with her belly swelling up, and even if they did come back, she wouldn’t even know which of the lads it was. The little slut, spreading her legs for any of them that asked her!’

‘Indeed? And where were they quartered?’

‘They wouldn’t be telling the likes of us that, but I’ll wager I can guess well enough. Just to the north of here, oh, about ten miles, I’d say, is a stretch of forest. It used to be the tieryn’s hunting preserve, but then, twenty-odd years ago it was now, the old tieryn and all his male kin got themselves killed off in a blood feud, and with the wars so bad and all, there was no one else to take the demesne. So now the forest’s all overgrown and thick, like, but I wager that the old tieryn’s hunting-lodge still stands in there some place.’

Maddyn handed over the coppers and took out two more.

‘I don’t suppose some of the lads in the village know where this lodge is?’ He held up the coins. ‘It seems likely that some of the young ones might have poked around in there, just out of curiosity, like.’

‘Not on your life, and I’m not saying that to get more coin out of you, neither. It’s a dangerous place, that stretch of trees. Haunted, they say, and full of evil spirits as well, most like, and then there’s the wild men.’

‘The what?’

‘Well, I suppose that by rights I shouldn’t call them wild, poor bastards, because all the gods can bear witness that I’d have done the same as them if I had to.’ He leaned closer, all conspiratorial. ‘You don’t look like the sort of fellow who’ll be running to our lord with the news, but the folk who live in the forest are bondsmen. Or I should say, they was, a while back. Their lord got killed, and so they took themselves off to live free, and I can’t say as I’ll be blaming them for it, neither.’

‘Nor more can I. Your wild men are safe enough from me, but I take it they’re not above robbing a traveller if they can.’

‘I think they feels it’s owing to them, like, after all the hard work they put in.’

Maddyn gave him the extra coppers anyway, then went out to join Aethan, who was standing by the road with the horses’ reins in hand.

‘Done gossiping, are you?’

‘Here, Aethan, the taverner had some news to give us, and it just might be worth following down. There might be a free troop up in the woods to the north of us.’

Aethan stared down at the reins in his hand and rubbed them with weary fingers.

‘Ah, horseshit!’ he said at last. ‘We might as well look them over, then.’

When they left the village, they rode north, following the river. Although Aethan was well on the mend by then, his back still ached him, and they rested often. At their pace it was close to sunset when they reached the forest, looming dark and tangled on the far side of a wild meadowland. At its edge a massive marker stone still stood, doubtless proclaiming the trees the property of the long-dead clan that once had owned them.

‘I don’t want to be mucking around in there when it’s dark,’ Aethan said.

‘You’re right enough. We’ll camp here. There’s plenty of water in the river.’

While Aethan tended the horses, Maddyn went to gather firewood at the forest edge. A crowd of Wildfolk went with him, darting around or skipping beside him, a gaggle of green, warty gnomes, three enormous yellow creatures with swollen stomachs and red fangs, and his faithful blue sprite, perching on his shoulder and running tiny hands through his hair.

‘I’ll have to play us a song tonight. It’s been a while since I felt like music, but maybe our luck is turning.’

Yet when it came time to play, Maddyn’s heart was still so troubled that he found it hard to settle down to one ballad or declamation. He got the harp in tune, then played scraps and bits of various songs or practised runs and chordings. Aethan soon fell asleep, lying on his stomach with his head pillowed on folded arms, but the Wildfolk stayed to the last note, a vast crowd of them stretching out beyond the pool of firelight across the meadow. Maddyn felt awed, as if he were playing in a king’s court, the great hall crowded with retainers. When he stopped, he felt more than heard a ripple of eerie applause; then suddenly, they were gone. Maddyn shuddered profoundly, then put the harp away.

After he had banked the campfire, Maddyn paced a little way into the meadow out of restlessness and nothing more. He could see the forest edge, looming dark not far from them, and even more, he could feel its presence, like an exhalation of wildness. He was sure that more than human fugitives lived there. It occurred to him that while the long wars were a tragedy for human beings, to the Wildfolk they were a blessing, giving them back land that men had once taken and tamed. As he stood there in the silent meadow, it seemed that he heard faint music, an echo of his own. Again he shuddered convulsively, then hurried back to his safe camp.

On the morrow the blue sprite woke him just at dawn by the expedient method of pulling his hair so hard that it hurt like fire. When he swatted at her, she laughed soundlessly, exposing her needle-sharp teeth. Nearby Aethan was still sleeping, but restlessly, turning and stretching like a man who’ll wake any moment.

‘Listen carefully, little sweet one,’ Maddyn said to the sprite. ‘Somewhere in that forest are a whole lot of men like me and Aethan, warriors with swords. They’ll have lots of horses, too, and they live in a stone house. Can you lead me there?’

She thought for a long moment, then nodded her agreement and promptly disappeared. Maddyn decided that either she’d misunderstood or had simply forgotten, but as soon as they were ready to ride, she reappeared, dancing and leaping on the riverbank and pointing to the north.

‘I don’t suppose that misbegotten tavernman gave you any directions to this place,’ Aethan said.

‘Well, he had a confused idea or two. I’ll try to lead us there, but don’t be surprised if it’s a bit roundabout.’

It was a good thing that Maddyn had put in his warning, because the Wildfolk’s idea of leading someone left much to be desired. As soon as the men started riding north, two grey gnomes appeared to join the sprite, but they kept pinching either her or each other and distracting her both ways from her task. Once they were all well into the forest, the Wildfolk disappeared, leaving the men to follow a rough deertrack for several miles. Just when Maddyn had given up on them, they flashed back into being, perching on his horse’s neck and saddle-peak and pointing off to the west down a narrow and rough track indeed. Although Aethan grumbled (and a welcome sign of returning life it was) Maddyn insisted on following it, and every time the path branched, he faithfully went the way the blue sprite pointed. By noon, Maddyn was hopelessly lost, with no choice but to follow where the Wildfolk led. Hopping from tree to tree, they grinned, giggled, and pointed in various directions, but Maddyn always followed the blue sprite, who threatened to bite the grey fellows whenever they contradicted her.

‘Maddo, I hope to every god and his horse that you know what you’re doing.’

‘So do I. I’ve got the ugly feeling I may have got us lost in here.’

Aethan groaned with a drama worthy of a bard. Just as Maddyn was thinking that he’d spoken the bitter truth, the sprite led them to a big clearing, ringed round with stumps of trees. Out in the middle was a hut built of logs, piled up whole to form a square structure – a house different from any that Maddyn had ever seen. The roof was neatly thatched with branches, and a wisp of smoke trailed lazily out of the smoke-hole in the roof.

‘What in the three hells have you found?’ Aethan sputtered. ‘That’s not big enough for a band of mercenaries.’

‘So it’s not. More likely it’s some of those runaway bondsmen the taverner mentioned.’

At the sound of their voices, a man came out. He was one of the shortest men Maddyn had ever seen, not more than five feet tall, but he had broad shoulders and heavy arms like a miniature blacksmith, and his legs were in perfect proportion to the rest of him. His long black beard trailed past the round collar of the wool tunic he wore over brigga. He carried a long woodsman’s axe like a weapon. When he spoke, his voice was rough with a heavy guttural accent. ‘And just who are you, lads?’

‘Naught but a pair of lost travellers,’ Maddyn said.

‘Thieves, more like.’ The fellow hefted the axe. ‘And what brought you into these wretched woods in the first place?’

‘We were looking for a mercenary troop,’ Aethan broke in. ‘A tavernman in Gaddmyr said there might be one quartered in this forest.’

‘All we want to do is see if they’ll take us on,’ Maddyn said. ‘I swear it, we’re not thieves, and I don’t know what a hermit like you would have that’s worth stealing, anyway.’

The man considered, his axe at the ready. When Maddyn noticed the blade, he nearly swore aloud in surprise. Although the metal gleamed exactly like silver, it had an edge as sharp as steel by the look of it, and it carried not one nick or bite.

‘Now here,’ Aethan said. ‘We’ll be more than glad to leave you alone if you’ll only show us the way out of these blasted woods.’

‘Go back the way you came, of course.’

‘Good sir, we’re lost,’ Maddyn said, and quickly, because he didn’t like the black look on Aethan’s face.

‘Indeed? You found me easily enough.’

‘Well, I was following one of the …’ Maddyn broke off just in time.

As if she knew he was thinking of her, the blue sprite popped into existence, settling on his shoulder and kissing his hair. The fellow frankly stared, and lowered his axe to lean on it like a walking-stick. Quickly he darted a conspiratorial glance at Aethan, who of course had seen nothing, and then gave Maddyn a grudging smile.

‘Well, perhaps I could take you to the old lodge after all, but your horses look worn out from all these wretched trees. There’s a spring over there, by that bit of stump. Give them a drink first. My name’s Otho, by the by.’

‘And I’m Maddyn, and this is Aethan. My thanks for your help. Do you know this troop?’

‘Somewhat. I did a bit of work for them this winter, fixing buckles and suchlike. I’m a smith, you see.’

It was Maddyn’s turn to stare. What was a smith doing out in the middle of a wilderness? Then it occurred to him that Otho might have some dishonour of his own behind him.

‘Now, Caradoc – that’s their leader – isn’t a bad man, considering what he is,’ Otho went on. ‘He wants me to ride south with him when they go. I’ve been thinking it over.’

While Aethan watered the horses, Otho went into his cabin, then reappeared wearing a leather vest over his tunic and carrying a different axe, one with a long handle banded with metal and obviously made as a weapon, which he used to good advantage for clearing brush and overhanging branches. The trail was so narrow and twisty that the men had to lead their horses. It was about the middle of the afternoon when they came into a vast clearing of some five acres and saw the high stone walls of what once had been a noble’s hunting-lodge. The wooden gates were long since rotted away, letting them see the broch, still in reasonable repair, and a collection of tumbledown sheds inside.

As they walked up, Caradoc himself came out to meet them. Otho introduced him, a tall, slender man with the long, ropy arms of a born swordsman and the high cheek-bones and pale hair of a southern man. He seemed about Aethan’s age, in his mid-thirties, and for all that he was a dishonoured man, there was something impressive about Caradoc, the proud way he stood, the shrewd way he looked men over with eyes that seemed to have seen a lot of life.

‘Since you’re looking for bodies to sell,’ Otho said, ‘I brought you a couple.’

‘Interesting.’ Caradoc gave them each a pleasant smile. ‘Here’s Aethan with a Cantrae boar on his shirt, and Maddyn dressed like a farmer but carrying a sword. I looked like the pair of you, once. Left a warband down in Cerrmor a bit … well, sudden, like. Never did bid a proper farewell to my lord. I’ll wager, Aethan, that there’s scars on your back, judging from the stains on your shirt.’

‘More than a few. Cursed if I’ll tell you why.’

‘I’d never ask. Now, here’s the terms, lads. I’ll take anyone on for a summer. If you can’t fight, then you’ll die in a scrap, and we’ll be rid of you. If you can fight, then you get an equal share of the coin. And remember: I’m the leader of this pack of dogs. You give me one bit of trouble, and I’ll beat the shit out of you. Scribe that deep into your ugly hearts: you ride at orders, or you don’t ride at all.’

It was obvious that Caradoc meant what he said as soon as they went into the dun. Instead of the bandit-like pile of filth that Maddyn had been dreading, the camp was as clean as a great lord’s barracks. There were thirty-six men in the troop, and their gear was well-tended, their horses good, healthy stock, and their discipline tighter, in fact, than that of Maddyn’s old warband. As Caradoc introduced the new recruits around, the other members of the band paid him such strict and respectful attention that Maddyn began to wonder if he were noble-born. Otho came along with them, listening to Caradoc and stroking his beard in thought, but he said naught a word until they all went outside again so that Maddyn and Aethan could unsaddle their horses and unload their gear.

‘Well, Otho,’ Caradoc said. ‘We’ll be pulling out soon. Coming with us to Eldidd?’

‘I might, at that. I’ve got used to a bit of company, especially company that can pay a smith better than the stinking bondsmen in this forest.’

‘So we can, and you’ll like Eldidd well enough once we get there.’

‘Hah! I’ve got my doubts about that. They always say that there’s elven blood in Eldidd veins.’

‘Not that again!’ Caradoc mugged a doleful expression. ‘As much as I admire your craft, good smith, I have to say that your wits are a bit thin in places. Elves, indeed!’

‘Mock all you want, but elven blood makes a man unreliable.’

‘It’d make any man unreliable to have a myth in his clan’s quarterings.’ Caradoc ran one finger down the silvery blade of Otho’s axe. ‘But talk about elves all you want, just so long as you keep working your witchcraft on metals. When we’re all as rich as lords and the most famous free troop in all of Deverry, you’re going to make us swords out of that warlock’s metal of yours.’

‘Hah! You’d have to be a king to afford that, my friend. You’ll be blasted lucky if you ever get rich enough to have so much as a dagger out of it.’

After Maddyn and Aethan had their horses settled and fed in the stables, one of the men, Stevyc by name, came to help them carry their gear into the broch. When he picked up the big leather bag that held Maddyn’s harp, he broke into a grin.

‘Which one of you is the bard?’

‘I am,’ Maddyn said. ‘But not much of one, a gerthddyn, truly, if that. I can sing, but I don’t have a true bard’s lore.’

‘And who gives a pig’s fart who some lord’s great-great-great-grand-dam was? This is a bit of splendid luck.’ Stevyc turned, calling out to Caradoc, ‘Here, captain, we’ve got a bard of our own.’

‘And next we’ll be eating off silver plates, like the great lords we are.’ Caradoc came strolling over. ‘But a bard would have come in handy this winter, with the pack of you causing trouble because you had naught better to do. Well and good then, Maddyn. If you sing well enough, you’ll be free of kitchen work and stable duty, but I’ll expect you to make up songs about our battles just like you would for a lord.’

‘I’ll do my best, captain, to sing as well as we deserve.’

‘Better than we deserve, Maddyn lad, or you’ll sound like a cat in heat.’

After a rough dinner of venison and turnips, Maddyn was given his chance to sing, sitting on a rickety, half-rotted table in what had once been the lodge’s great hall. He’d only done one ballad when he realized that his place in the troop was assured. The men listened with the deep fascination of the utterly bored, hardly noticing or caring when he got a bit off-key or stumbled over a line. After a winter with naught but dice games and the blacksmith’s daughter for entertainment, they cheered him as if he were the best bard at the King’s court. They made him sing until he was hoarse, that night, and let him stop only reluctantly then. Only Maddyn and Otho knew, of course, that the hall was also filled with Wildfolk, listening as intently as the men.

That night, Maddyn lay awake for a long while and listened to the familiar sound of other men snoring close by in the darkness of a barracks. He was back in a warband, back in his old life so firmly that he wondered if he’d dreamt those enchanted months in Brin Toraedic. The winter behind him seemed like a lost paradise, when he’d had good company and a woman of his own, when he’d seen a glimpse of a wider, freer world of peace and dweomer – a little glimpse only, then the door had been slammed in his face. He was back in the war, a dishonoured rider whose one goal in life was to earn the respect of other dishonoured men. At least Belyan was going to have his baby back in Cantrae, a small life who would outlive him and who would be better off as a farmer than his father would be as a warrior. Thinking about the babe he could fall asleep at last, smiling to himself.

On the day that Maddyn left Brin Toraedic, Nevyn spent a good many hours shutting up the caves for the summer and loading herbs and medicines into the canvas mule-packs. He had a journey of over nine hundred miles ahead of him, with stops along the way that were crucial to the success of his long-range plans. If he were to succeed in making a dweomer king to bring peace to the country, he would need help from powerful friends, particularly among the priesthoods. He would also need to find a man of royal blood worthy of his plans. And that, or so he told himself, might well be the most difficult part of the work.

The first week of his journey was easy. Although the Cantrae roads were full of warbands, mustering to begin the ride to Dun Deverry for the summer’s fighting, no one bothered him, seemingly only a shabby old herbman with his ambling mule, his patched brown cloak, and the white hair that the local riders respected as a sign of his great age. He followed the Canaver down to its joining with the River Nerr near the town of Muir, a place that held memories some two hundred years old. As he always did when he passed through Muir, he went into the last patch of wild forest – now the hunting preserve of the Southern Boar clan. In the midst of a stand of old oaks was an ancient, mossy cairn that marked the grave of Brangwen of the Falcon, the woman he had loved, wronged, and lost so many years ago. He always felt somewhat of a fool for making this pilgrimage – her body was long decayed, and her soul had been reborn several times since that miserable day when he’d dug this grave and helped pile up these rocks. Yet the site meant something to him still, if for no other reason than because it was the place where he’d sworn the rash vow that was the cause of his unnaturally long life.

Out of respect for a grave, even though they could have no idea of whose it was, the Boar’s gamekeepers had left the cairn undisturbed. Nevyn was pleased to see that someone had even tended it by replacing a few fallen stones and pulling the weeds away from its base. It was a small act of decency in a world where decency was in danger of vanishing. For some time he sat on the ground and watched the dappled forest light playing on the cairn while he wondered when he would find Brangwen’s soul again. His meditation brought him a small insight: she was reborn, but still a child. Eventually, he was sure, in some way Maddyn would lead him to her. In life after life, his Wyrd had been linked to hers, and, indeed, in his last life, he had followed her to the death, binding a chain of Wyrd tight around them both.

After he left Muir, Nevyn rode west to Dun Deverry for a first-hand look at the man who claimed to be King in the Holy City. On a hot spring day, when the sun lay as thick as the dust in the road, he came to the shores of the Gwerconydd, the vast lake formed by the confluence of three rivers, and let his horse and mule rest for a moment by the reedy shore. He was joined by a pair of young priests of Bel, shaven-headed and dressed in linen tunics, who were also travelling to the Holy City. After a pleasant chat, they all decided to ride in together.

‘And who’s the high priest these days?’ Nevyn asked. ‘I’ve been living up in Cantrae, so I’m badly out of touch.’

‘His Holiness, Gwergovyn,’ said the elder of the pair.

‘I see.’ Nevyn’s heart sank. He remembered Gwergovyn all too well as a spiritual ferret of a man. ‘And tell me somewhat else. I’ve heard that the Boars of Cantrae are the men to watch in court circles.’

Even though they were all alone on the open road, the young priest lowered his voice when he answered.

‘They are, truly, and there are plenty who grumble about it, too. I know His Holiness thinks rather sourly of the men of the Boar.’

At length they came to the city, which rose high on its four hills behind massive double rings of stone walls, ramparted and towered. The wooden gates, carved with a wyvern rampant, were bound with iron, and guards in thickly embroidered shirts stood to either side. Yet as soon as Nevyn went inside, the impression of splendour vanished. Once a prosperous city had filled these walls; now house after house stood abandoned, with weed-choked yards and empty windows, the thatch blowing rotten in dirty streets. Much of the city lay in outright ruin, heaps of stone among rotting, charred timbers. It had been taken by siege so many times in the last hundred years, then taken back by the sword, that apparently no one had the strength, the coin, or the hope to rebuild. In the centre of the city, around and between two main hills, lived what was left of the population, scarcely more than in King Bran’s time. Warriors walked the streets and shoved the townsfolk aside whenever they met. It seemed to Nevyn that every man he saw was a rider for one lord or another, and every woman either lived in fear of them or had surrendered to the inevitable and turned whore to please them.

The first inn he found was tiny, dirty, and ramshackle, little more than a big house divided into a tavernroom and a few chambers, but he lodged there because he liked the innkeep, Draudd, a slender old man with hair as white as Nevyn’s and a smile that showed an almost superhuman ability to keep a sense of humour in the midst of ruin. When he found out that Nevyn was an herbman, Draudd insisted on taking payment for his lodging in trade.

‘Well, after all, I’m as old as you are, so I’ll easily equal the cost in your herbs. Why give me coins only to have me give them right back?’

‘True spoken. Ah, old age! Here I’ve studied the human body all my life, but I swear old age has put pains in joints I never knew existed.’

Nevyn spent that first afternoon in the tavern, dispensing herbs for Draudd’s collection of ailments and hearing in return all the local gossip, which meant royal gossip. In Dun Deverry even the poorest person knew what there was to know about the goings-on at court. Gossip was their bard, and the royalty their only source of pride. Draudd was a particularly rich source, because his youngest daughter, now a woman in her forties, worked in the palace kitchens, where she had plenty of opportunities to overhear the noble-born servitors like the chamberlain and steward at their gossip. From what Draudd repeated that day, the Boars were so firmly in control of the King that it was something of a scandal. Everyone said that Tibryn, the Boar of Cantrae, was close to being the real king himself.

‘And now with the King so ill, our poor liege, and his wife so young, and Tibryn a widower and all …’ Draudd paused for dramatic effect. ‘Well! Can’t you imagine what we folk are wondering?’

‘Indeed I can. But would the priests allow the King’s widow to marry?’

Draudd rubbed his thumb and forefinger together like a merchant gloating over a coin.

‘Ah, by the hells!’ Nevyn snarled. ‘Has it got as bad as all that?’

‘There’s naught left but coin to bribe the priests with. They’ve already got every land grant and legal concession they want.’

At that point Nevyn decided that meeting with Gwergovyn – if indeed he could even get in to see him – was a waste of time.

‘But what ails the King? He’s still a young man.’

‘He took a bad wound in the fighting last summer. I happened to be out on the royal road when they brought him home. I’d been buying eggs at the market when I heard the bustle and the horns coming. And I saw the King, lying in a litter, and he was as pale as snow, he was. But he lived, when here we all thought they’d be putting his little lad on the throne come winter. But he never did heal up right. My daughter tells me that he has to have special food, like. All soft things, and none of them Bardek spices, neither. So they boil the meat soft, and pulp apples and suchlike.’

Nevyn was completely puzzled: the special diet made no sense at all for a man who by all accounts had been wounded in the chest. He began to wonder if someone were deliberately keeping the King weak, perhaps to gain the good favour of Tibryn of the Boar.

The best way to find out, of course, was to talk to the King’s physicians. On the morrow he took his laden mule up to the palace, which lay on the northern hill. Ring after ring of defensive walls, some stone, some earthworks, marched up the slope and cut the hill into defensible slices. At every gate, in every wall, guards stopped Nevyn and asked him his business, but they always let a man with healing herbs to sell pass on through. Finally, at the top, behind one last ring, stood the palace and all its outbuildings and servant quarters. Like a stork among chickens, a six-storey broch, ringed by four lower half-brochs, rose in the centre. If the outer defences fell, the attackers would have to fight their way through a warren of corridors and rooms to get at the King himself. In all the years of war, the palace had never fallen to force, only to starvation.

The last guard called a servant lad, who ran off to the royal infirmary with the news that a herbman waited outside. After a wait of some five minutes, he ran back and led Nevyn to a big round stone building behind the broch complex. There they were met by a burly man with dark eyes that glared under bushy brows as if their owner were in a state of constant fury, but when he introduced himself as Grodyn, the head chirurgeon, he was soft-spoken enough.

‘A herbman’s always welcome. Come spread out your wares, good sir. That table by the window would be best, I think, right in the light and fresh air.’

While Nevyn laid out packets of dried herbs, tree-barks, and sliced dried roots, Grodyn fetched his apprentice, Caudyr, a sandy-haired young man with narrow blue eyes and a jaw so sharply modelled it looked as if it could cut cheese. He also had a club foot, which gave him the rolling walk of a sailor. Between them the two chirurgeons sorted through his wares and for starters set aside his entire stock of valerian, elecampe, and comfrey root.

‘I don’t suppose you ever get down to the sea-coast,’ Grodyn said in a carefully casual tone of voice.

‘Well, this summer I’m thinking of trying to slip through the battle-lines. Usually the armies don’t much care about one old man. Is there somewhat you need from the sea?’

‘Red kelp, if you can get it, and some sea-moss.’

‘They work wonders to soothe an ulcerated stomach or bad bowels.’ Nevyn hesitated briefly. ‘Here, I’ve heard rumours about this peculiar so-called wound of our liege the King.’

‘So-called?’ Grodyn paid busy attention to the packet of beech-bark in his hand.

‘A wound in the chest that requires him to eat only soft food.’

Grodyn looked up with a twisted little smile.

‘It was poison, of course. The wound healed splendidly. While he was still weak, someone put poison into his mead. We saved him after a long fight of it, but his stomach is ulcerated and bleeding, just as you guessed, and there’s blood in his stool, too. But we’re trying to keep the news from the common people.’

‘Oh, I won’t go bruiting it about, I assure you. Do you have any idea of what this poison was?’

‘None. Now here, you know herbs. What do you think this might be? When he vomited, there was a sweetish smell hanging about the basin, rather like roses mixed with vinegar. It was grotesque to find a poison that smelled of perfume, but the strangest thing was this: the King’s page had tasted the mead and suffered not the slightest ill-effect. Yet I know it was in the mead, because the dregs in the goblet had an odd, rosy colour.’

Nevyn thought for a while, running over the long chains of lore in his memory.

‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t name the herbs out, but I’ll wager they came originally from Bardek. I’ve heard that poisoners there often use two different evil essences, each harmless in themselves. The page at table doubtless got a dose of the first one when he tasted the King’s mead, and the page of the chamber got the other. The King, alas, got both, and they combined into venom in his stomach.’

As he nodded his understanding, Grodyn looked half-sick with such an honest rage that Nevyn mentally acquitted him of any part in the crime. Caudyr too looked deeply troubled.

‘I’ve made special studies of the old herbals we have,’ the young chirurgeon said, ‘and never found this beastly poison. If it came from Bardek, that would explain it.’

‘So it would,’ Nevyn said. ‘Well, good sirs, I’ll do my best to get you the red kelp and what other emollients I can, but it’ll be autumn before I return. Will our liege live that long?’

‘If no one poisons him again.’ Grodyn tossed the packet of beech-bark on to the table. ‘Ah ye gods, can you imagine how helpless I feel? Here I am, fighting to undo the effects of one poison while someone is doubtless scheming out a way to slip him a second!’

‘Wasn’t there any inquiry into this poisoning?’

‘Of course.’ Abruptly Grodyn turned guarded. ‘It found out naught, though. We suspect a Cerrmor spy.’

Oh, I’ll just wager you do! Nevyn thought to himself; that is, if there are Boars in Cerrmor, anyway.

Their business over, Nevyn put on a good show of expressing the gossipy interest that any visitor to the palace would have on seeing the place where the King lived. Caudyr, who seemed to be a good-hearted lad, took him on a tour of the semipublic gardens and outbuildings. It took only the slightest touch of Nevyn’s dweomer to sense that the palace was filled with corruption. The omen came to him as the smell of rotting meat and the sight of maggots, crawling between the stones. He banished the vision as quickly as he could; the point was well-made.

As they were walking to the front gate, they saw a noble hunting party returning: Gwerbret Tibryn of the Boar, with a retinue of servants and huntsmen behind him and his widowed sister at his side. As Nevyn led his mule off to the side out of the way of the noble-born, he noticed Caudyr watching the Lady Merodda wistfully. Just twenty, the lady had long blonde hair, bound up in soft twists under the black headscarf of a widow, wide green eyes, and features that were perfect without being cold. She was truly beautiful, but as he watched her, Nevyn loathed her. Although he couldn’t pinpoint his reasons, he’d never seen a woman he found so repellent. Caudyr was obviously of the opposite opinion. Much to Nevyn’s surprise, when Merodda rode past, she favoured Caudyr with a brilliant smile and a wave of her delicately gloved hand. Caudyr bowed deeply in return.

‘Now here, lad,’ Nevyn said with a chuckle. ‘You’re nocking an arrow for rather high-born game.’

‘And don’t I just know it? I could be as noble as she is, but I’d still be deformed.’

‘Oh, my apologies! I meant naught of that sort.’

‘I know, good sir, I know. I fear me that years of being mocked have made me touchy.’

Caudyr bowed and hurried away with his rolling, dragging limp. Nevyn was heartsick over his lapse; it was a hard thing to be handicapped in a world where women and men both worshipped warriors. Later that day, however, he found out that Caudyr bore him no ill will. Just after sunset Caudyr came to Nevyn’s inn, insisted on buying him a tankard, and sat them both down at a table in a corner, far from the door.

‘I was wondering about your stock of herbs, good Nevyn. You wouldn’t happen to have any northern elm bark, would you?’

‘Now here! I don’t traffic in abortifacients, lad.’

Caudyr winced and began studying the interior of his tankard.

‘Ah well,’ the lad said at last. ‘The bark’s a blasted sight safer than henbane.’

‘No doubt, but the question is why you’re doing abortions at all. I should think that every babe these days would be precious.’

‘Not if it’s not sired by your husband. Here, please don’t despise me. There’s a lot of noblewomen who spend all summer at court, and well, their husbands are off on campaign for months at a time, and well, you know how things happen, and well, they come to me in tears, and –’

‘Shower you with silver, no doubt.’

‘It’s not the coin!’

‘Indeed? What is it, then? The only time in your life that women have come begging you for somewhat?’

When tears welled in Caudyr’s eyes, Nevyn regretted his harsh accuracy. He looked away to give the young chirurgeon a chance to wipe his face. It was the infidelities more than the abortions that bothered Nevyn. The thought of noblewomen, whose restricted life gave them nothing but their honour to take pride in, turning first to illicit affairs, then to covering them over, made him feel that the kingdom was rotting from the centre out. As for the abortions, the dweomer lore teaches that a soul comes to indwell a foetus only in the fourth or fifth month after conception; any abortion before that time is only removing a lump of flesh, not a living child. By the time a noblewoman was in her fifth month, Nevyn supposed, her indiscretion would be known already, and so doubtless Caudyr was solving their little problems long before the foetus was truly alive.

‘Now one moment.’ Nevyn was struck by a sudden thought. ‘You’re not using ergot, are you, you stupid little dolt?’

‘Never!’ Caudyr’s voice rose in a sincere squeak. ‘I know the dangers of that.’

‘Good. All it would take is for one of your noble patients to die or go mad, and then you’d be up to your neck in a tub of horseshit good and proper.’

‘I know. But if I didn’t find the right herbs for these ladies, they’d be cast off by their husbands, and probably end up smothering the babe anyway, or they’d go to some old witch or a farmwife, and then they would die.’

‘You split hairs so well you should have been a priest.’

Caudyr tried to smile and failed utterly, looking like a child who’s just been scolded when he honestly didn’t know he had done a wrong thing. Suddenly Nevyn felt the dweomer power gathering round him, filling his mouth with words that burned straight out of the future.

‘You can’t keep this sort of thing quiet. When the King dies, his murderers will need a scapegoat. It’s going to be you, because of this midnight physic you’ve been dispensing. Live ready to flee at the first sign that the King is sinking. Can Tibryn of the Boar find out about your unsavoury herbs?’

‘He could, the lady Merodda … I mean … ah ye gods! Who are you, old man?’

‘Can’t you tell dweomer when you hear it? The Boar will take his sister’s evidence, turn it against you, and have you broken on the wheel to avert suspicion from himself. If I were you, I’d leave well before the end comes, or they’ll hunt you down as a regicide.’

Caudyr jerked to his feet so fast that he toppled both his tankard and Nevyn’s, then fled, racing out of the tavern door. Although old Draudd gave Nevyn a questioning look, he also shrugged as if to say it was none of his affair. Nevyn retrieved the tankards from the floor, then turned on the bench so that he could look directly into the peat fire smouldering on the tavern hearth. As soon as he bent his mind to Aderyn, his old apprentice’s image appeared with his enormous dark eyes and his grey hair swept up in two peaks at his forehead like the horns of a silver owl.

‘And how’s your scheme progressing?’ Aderyn thought to him.

‘Well enough, I suppose. I’ve learned one very important thing. I’d rather die than put any Cantrae king on the throne.’

‘Is it as bad as all that?’

‘The palace stinks like the biggest dungheap on the hottest day of the longest summer. I can’t see how any young soul could grow up there without being corrupted from birth. I’m not even going to bother talking to the priests here. They’re corrupt, too, and doubtless in new and unusual ways.’

‘I haven’t seen you this angry in about a hundred years.’

‘Naught’s been so vexing in a hundred years. The most honourable man I’ve met here is an abortionist. Does that give you a hint?’

Floating about the fire, Aderyn’s image rolled its eyes heavenwards in disgust.

Caradoc and his band of mercenaries left the deserted hunting-lodge soon after Maddyn and Aethan joined the troop. Although everyone was speculating about where they would go, the captain told no one until the morning of their departure. Once the men were mounted and formed up in neat ranks that would have done the King’s Guard credit, Caradoc inspected them carefully, then pulled his horse up to face them.

‘It’s Eldidd, lads. We’ve got too many men who can’t let themselves be seen around Dun Deverry to take a hire on Slwmar’s side, and I don’t dare be seen in Cerrmor. I’ve hoarded some coin from the winter, seeing as our lodging was free and all, so I think we can ride straight there.’

Although no one cheered this prospect of leaving home for a foreign land, no one muttered in discontent, either. Caradoc paused, as if waiting for grumblers, then shrugged and raised his hand.

‘Otho the smith’s meeting us on the road with a wagon. Forward … march!’

With a jingle of tack the troop executed a perfect turn in ranks and began to file out of the dun gate, two by two. As a mark of honour to a bard, Maddyn rode next to Caradoc at the head of the line. Over the next few days, as they worked their way south-west as quickly as possible, he had plenty of chances to study his new leader. The biggest puzzle that ate at his bardic curiosity was whether or not Caradoc was noble-born. At times, when the captain was discussing some point of the royal law or giving orders with his firm authority, Maddyn was sure that he must have been born the younger son of a lord. Yet when it came to coin, he had all the grasping shrewdness of an old peasant woman, an attitude he never would have learned among the nobility. Occasionally Maddyn dropped hints or half-questions about the past into their conversation, but Caradoc never rose to the bait. When the troop camped for the night, Caradoc ate alone like a lord, and Maddyn shared a fire with Aethan and a small crowd of Wildfolk.

After a week of riding, the troop crossed the Aver Trebyc at a point about a hundred miles west of Dun Deverry. Caradoc gave orders that the men were to ride armed and ready for trouble. He sent out point men and scouts ahead of the main body of riders, because they were approaching the border between Cerrmor-held and Cantrae-held territory. The precautions paid off with a rather strange prize. On the second day of riding armed, when they were finally getting close to the Eldidd border, the troop stopped for the noon rest in a grassy meadow that had never known plough nor herd. When the point men came back to change the guard, they brought with them a traveller, an unarmed man with rich clothing, a beautiful riding horse, and an elegant pack-mule that had obviously been bred from the best stock. Maddyn was surprised that the poor dolt had survived unrobbed for as long as he had. The young, sandy-haired fellow looked so terrified that Maddyn supposed he was thinking similar thoughts.

‘He says he comes from Dun Deverry,’ the point man said. ‘So we brought him along in case he had any interesting news.’

‘Good,’ Caradoc said. ‘Now look, young fellow, we’re not going to slit your throat or even rob you. Come have a meal with me and Maddyn here.’

With a most discourteous groan, the stranger looked around at the well-armed troop, then sighed in resignation.

‘So I will, then. My name’s … uh … Claedd.’

Caradoc and Maddyn each suppressed a grin at the clumsiness of the lie. When the stranger dismounted, Maddyn saw that he had a club foot, which seemed to ache him after so many days in the saddle. As they shared a meal of flatbread and cheese, the supposed Claedd told them what little he knew about the troop movements around the Holy City. The current rumour was that the northern forces were planning to make a strong strike along the eastern borders of the Cerrmor kingdom.

‘If that’s true,’ Caradoc said thoughtfully, ‘we’ll have no trouble getting a hire in Eldidd. Probably the Eldidd King will want to take the chance to raid into Pyrdon.’

‘Oho!’ Claedd said. ‘Then you’re a free troop! Well, that’s a relief.’

‘Oh, is it now? Most men would think the opposite.’ Caradoc shook his head, as if he were utterly amazed at the innocence of this lad. ‘Well and good, then. Who’s chasing you? It’s safe to tell me. I’ve sunk pretty low, lad, but not so low that I’d turn a man in for the bounty on his head.’

Claedd concentrated on shredding a piece of flatbread into inedible crumbs.

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ Caradoc said after a moment. ‘But think about travelling with us. You’ll be a blasted sight safer. Ever had a fancy to see Eldidd?’

‘That’s where I was trying to go, and you’re right enough about it being safer. I’ve never swung a sword in my life. I’m a … uh … a scholar.’

‘Splendid. Maybe I’ll need a letter written some fine day.’

Although Claedd managed a feeble smile at the jest, his face stayed deadly pale. Yet, when the troop rode out, he came with them, riding by himself just behind Otho’s wagon. At the night camp, Maddyn took pity on him and offered to let him share their fire. Although he brought out food from his mule-packs, Claedd ate little of it, merely sat quietly and watched Aethan polishing his sword. When, after the meal, Caradoc strolled over for a chat, Claedd again said little as the captain and the bard talked idly of their plans in Eldidd. Finally, though, at a pause he spoke up.

‘I’ve been thinking about your offer, captain. Could you use a troop chirurgeon? I finished my apprenticeship only a year ago, but I’ve had an awful lot of practice at tending wounds.’

‘By all the ice in all the hells!’ Maddyn said. ‘You’re worth your weight in gold!’

‘Cursed right.’ Caradoc cocked his head to one side and considered the young chirurgeon. ‘Now, I’m not a curious man, usually, and I like to leave my lads their privacy, like, but in your case, I’ve got to ask. What’s a man with your learning doing travelling the long lonely roads like this?’

‘You might as well know the truth. First of all, my name’s Caudyr, and I was at the court in Dun Deverry. I mixed up a few potions and suchlike for some high-born ladies to rid them of … ah well … a spot of … er well … trouble now and again. The word’s leaked out about it in rather a nasty way.’

Caradoc and Aethan exchanged a puzzled glance.

‘He means abortions,’ Maddyn said with a grin. ‘Naught that should vex us, truly.’

‘Might even come in handy, with this pack of dogs I’ve got.’ Caradoc said. ‘Well and good, then, Caudyr. Once you’ve shown me that you can physic a man, you’ll get a full share of our earnings, just like a rider. I’ve discovered that a lord’s chirurgeon tends his lord’s men first and the mercenaries when he has a mind to and not before. I’ve had men bleed to death who would have lived if they’d had the proper attention.’

Idly Maddyn happened to glance Aethan’s way to find him staring at Caudyr in grim suspicion.

‘Up in Dun Deverry, were you?’ Aethan’s voice was a dry, hard whisper. ‘Was one of your high-born ladies Merodda of the Boar?’

In a confession stronger than words, Caudyr winced, then blushed. Aethan got to his feet, hesitated, then took off running into the darkness.

‘What, by the hells?’ Caradoc snapped.

Without bothering to explain, Maddyn got up and followed, chasing Aethan through the startled camp, pounding blindly after him through the moonshot night down to the riverbank. Finally Aethan stopped and let him catch up. They stood together for a long time, panting for breath and watching the silver-touched river flow by.

‘With a bitch like that,’ Maddyn said finally, ‘how would you even know that the babe was yours?’

‘I kept my eye on her like a hawk all winter long. If she’d looked at another man, I’d have killed him, and she knew it.’

With a sigh Maddyn sat down, and after a moment, Aethan joined him.

‘Having a chirurgeon of our own will be a cursed good thing,’ Maddyn said. ‘Can you put up with Caudyr?’

‘Who’s blaming him for one single thing? I wish I could kill her. I dream about it sometimes, getting my hands on her pretty white throat and strangling her.’

Abruptly Aethan turned and threw himself into Maddyn’s arms. Maddyn held him tightly and let him cry, the choking ugly sob of a man who feels shamed by tears.

Two days later the troop crossed the border into Eldidd. At that time, the northern part of the province was nearly a wilderness, forests and wild grasslands broken only by the occasional dun of a minor lord or a village of free farmers. Plenty of the lords would have liked to have hired the troop, because they were in constant danger of raids coming either from the kingdom of Pyrdon to the north or from Deverry to the east. None, however, could pay Caradoc what he considered the troop was worth. With thirty-seven men, their own smith, chirurgeon, and bard, the troop was bigger than the warbands of most of the lords in northern Eldidd. Just when Caradoc was beginning to curse his decision to ride that way, the troop reached the new town of Camynwaen, on the banks of an oddly named river, the El, just at the spot where the even more strangely named Aver Cantariel flows in from the north-west.

Although there had been a farming village on the site for centuries, only twenty years before the gwerbret in Elrydd had decided that the kingdom needed a proper town at the joining of the rivers. Since the war with Pyrdon could flare up at any time, he wanted a staging-ground for troops and a properly defensible set of walls around it. Finding colonists was no problem, because there were plenty of younger sons of noble lords willing to risk a move to gain land of their own, and plenty of bondsmen willing to go with them since they became free men once they left their bound-land. When Caradoc’s troop rode into Camynwaen, they found a decent town of a thousand roundhouses behind high stone walls, turreted with watchtowers.

About a mile away was the stone dun of Tieryn Maenoic, and there Caradoc found the kind of hire he’d been looking for. Although Maenoic received maintenance from the gwerbret to the south, there was a shortage of fighting men in his vast demesne, and he had a private war on his hands. Since the authority of his clan was fairly new, he was always plagued with rebellions. For years now the chief troublemaker had been a certain Lord Pagwyl.

‘And he’s gathered together a lot of bastards like himself,’ Maenoic said. ‘And they claim they’ll ask the gwerbret to give them a tieryn of their own and not submit to me. I can’t stand for it.’

He couldn’t, truly, because standing for it would not only take half his land away but also make him the laughing stock of every man in Eldidd. A stout hard-muscled man, with a thick streak of grey in his raven-dark hair, Maenoic was steaming with fury as he strode back and forth looking over the troop, who were sitting on their horses outside the gates to Maenoic’s dun. Caradoc and Maddyn followed a respectful distance behind while the lord judged the troop’s horses and gear with a shrewd eye.

‘Very well, captain. A silver piece per week per man, your maintenance, and of course I’ll replace any horses that you lose.’

‘Most generous, my lord,’ Caradoc said. ‘For peacetime.’

Maenoic turned to scowl at him.

‘Another silver piece per man for every battle we fight,’ Caradoc went on. ‘And that’s paid for every man who dies, too.’

‘Far too much.’

‘As it pleases Your Lordship. Me and my men can just ride on.’

And over to your enemies, perhaps – the thought hung unspoken between them for a long moment. Finally Maenoic swore under his breath.

‘Done, then. A second silver piece per man for every scrap.’

With an open and innocent smile, Caradoc bowed to him.

Maenoic’s new-built dun was large enough to have two sets of barracks and stables built into the walls – a blessing, because the mercenaries could be well separated from Maenoic’s contemptuous warband. At meals, though, they shared the same set of tables, and the warband made barely tolerable comments about men who fought for money and quite intolerable comments about the parentage and character of such who did so. Between them Caradoc and Maenoic broke up seven different fist-fights in two days before the army was at last ready to ride out.

After he had called in all his loyal allies, Maenoic had over two hundred and fifty men to lead west against his rebels. In the line of march, Caradoc’s troop came at the very end, behind even the supply wagons, and ate dust all day long. At night they made camp by themselves a little way off from the warbands of the noble-born. Caradoc, however, was summoned when the lords held a council of war. He came back to the troop with solid news and gathered them around him to hear it.

‘Tomorrow we’ll see the first scrap. Here’s how things stand, lads. We’re coming to a river, and there’s a bridge there. Maenoic claims the taxes on it, but Pagwyl’s holding out. The scouts say Pagwyl’s going to make a stand to prevent the tieryn from crossing, because once he crosses against Pagwyl’s will, it’s his bridge again in everybody’s eyes. We’ll be leading the charge – of course.’

Everyone nodded, acknowledging that they were, after all, the disposable mercenaries. Maddyn found himself troubled by a strange feeling, a coldness, a heaviness. It took him a long time to admit it, but then he realized that he was quite simply afraid. That night he dreamt of his last charge up in Cantrae and woke soaked with cold sweat. You coward, he told himself; you ugly little coward! The reproach burned in his very soul, but the truth was that he had almost died in that last charge, and now he knew what it felt like to be dying. The fear choked him as palpably as if he’d swallowed a clot of sheep’s wool. What was worst of all was knowing that here was one thing he could never share with Aethan.

All night, all the next morning, the fear festered so badly that by the time the army reached the bridge, Maddyn was hysterically happy that the battle was at hand and soon to be over. He was singing under his breath and whistling in turn when the army crested a low rise and saw, just as they’d expected, Lord Pagwyl and his allies drawn up by the riverbank to meet them. There was a surprise, however, in the men who waited for them: a bare hundred mounted swordsmen eked out by two big squares of common-born spearmen, placed so that they blocked any possible approach to the bridge itself.

‘Oh here,’ said Maddyn, forcing a laugh. ‘Pagwyl was a fool to rebel if that’s all the riders he could scrape together.’

‘Horseshit!’ Caradoc snapped. ‘His lordship knows what he’s doing. I’ve seen fighting like this before, spearmen guarding a fixed position. We’re in for a little gallop through the third hell, lad.’

As Maenoic’s army milled around in confusion, Caradoc led his men calmly up to the front of the line. The enemy had picked a perfect place to stand, a long green meadow in front of the bridge, bordered by the river on one side of their formation and on the other, the broken, crumbling earthwork of some long-gone farmer’s cattle corral. Three rows deep, the spearmen stood shield to shield, the spearheads glittering above the chalk-whitened oval shields. To one side of the shield-wall, the mounted men sat on restless horses, ready to charge in from the side and pin Maenoic’s men between them and the river.

‘Horseshit and a pile of it,’ Caradoc muttered. ‘We can’t wheel round the bastards without falling into the blasted river.’

Maddyn merely nodded, too choked for breath to answer. He was remembering the feel of metal, biting deep into his side. Under him, his horse tossed its head and stamped as if it too were remembering their last charge. When Caradoc trotted off to confer with Maenoic, Aethan pulled up beside Maddyn; he’d already settled his shield over his left arm and drawn a javelin. While he followed the example, Maddyn had to work so hard to keep his horse steady that he suddenly realized that the poor beast did remember that last charge. He had a battle-shy horse under him and no time to change him.

The spearmen began calling out jeers and taunting the enemy for scum on horseback, screaming into the sunlight and the wind that blew the taunts into jagged, incomprehensible pieces of words. Some of Maenoic’s men shouted back, but Caradoc’s troop merely sat on their horses and waited until at last their captain left the lord’s side and jogged back, easy in his saddle, a javelin in his hand.

‘All right, lads. We’re riding.’

There was a gust of laughter in the troop as they jogged forward to join him. Maenoic’s own men pulled in behind, but the rest of the army wheeled off, ready to charge the enemy riders positioned off to the side. With an odd jingling shuffle, like a load of metal wares jouncing in a cart, the army formed up. Caradoc turned in his saddle, saw Maddyn right next to him, and yelled at him over the noise.

‘Get back! I want to hear our bard sing tonight. Get back in the last rank!’

Maddyn had never wanted to follow an order more in his life, but he fought with himself only a moment before he shouted back his answer.

‘I can’t. If I don’t ride this charge, then I’ll never have the guts to ride another.’

Caradoc cocked his head to one side and considered him.

‘Well and good, then, lad. We might all be doing our listening and singing in the Otherlands, anyway.’

Caradoc turned his horse, raised his javelin, then broke into a gallop straight for the enemy lines. With a howl of warcries, the troop burst after him, a ragged race of shrieking men across the meadow. Maddyn saw the waiting infantry shudder in a wave-ripple of fear, but they held.

‘Follow my lead!’ Aethan screamed. ‘Throw that javelin and wheel!’

Closer – a cloud of dust, kicked-up bits and clods of grass – the infantry shoving together behind the line of lime-white shields – then there was a shower of metal as Caradoc and his men hurled javelins into the spearmen. Shields flashed up, caught some of the darts, but there was cursing and screaming as the riders kept coming, throwing, wheeling, peeling off in a long, loose circle. Maddyn heard battle-yells break out behind as the reserve troops charged into Pagwyl’s cavalry. Snorting, sweating, Maddyn’s horse fought for the bit and nearly carried them both into the river. Maddyn drew his sword, slapped the horse with the flat, and jerked its head round to spur it back to the troop.

The first rank of Maenoic’s men were milling blindly, waving swords and shouting, in front of the shield-wall. Caradoc galloped among his troop, yelling out orders to re-form and try a charge from the flank. Maddyn could see that Maenoic’s allies had pushed Pagwyl’s cavalry back to expose the shield-wall’s weakest spot. In a cloud and flurry of rearing horses, the troop pulled round and threw itself forward again. Maddyn lost track of Aethan, who was shoved off to the flank when Maenoic’s men, blindly pulling back to charge again, got themselves mixed up with the charging mercenaries. One or two horses went down, their riders thrown and trampled, before Caradoc sorted out the mess into some rough order. Maddyn found himself in Maenoic’s warband. For one brief moment he could see Caradoc, plunging at the flank of the shield-wall with a mob behind him. Then his own unit rode forward for the charge.

On and on – the shield-wall was trembling, turning towards its beleaguered flank, but it held tight directly ahead of Maddyn. From the men behind him javelins flew. Maddyn’s horse bucked and grabbed for the bit; he smacked it down and kicked it forward. A split-second battle – of nerve, not steel – Maddyn saw the slack-jawed face of a young lad, his hands shaking on his braced spear, his eyes suddenly meeting Maddyn’s as he galloped straight for him. With a shriek the lad dropped his spear and flung himself sideways. As the man next to him fell, cursing and flailing, Maddyn was in. Dimly he saw another horseman to his right. The shield-wall was breaking. Swinging, howling with an unearthly laughter, Maddyn shoved his horse among the panicked spearmen. Ducking and bobbing in the saddle like a water bird, he slashed out and down, hardly seeing or caring whom or what he was hitting. A spearhead flashed his way. He caught it barely in time and heard his shield crack, then shoved it away as he twisted in the saddle to meet another flash of metal from the right. Always he laughed, the cold bubble of a berserker’s hysteria that he could never control in battle.

His horse suddenly reared, screaming in agony. As they came down, the horse staggered, its knees buckling, but it couldn’t fall. All around was a press – panicked infantry, trapped cavalry, horses neighing and men shouting as they shoved blindly at one another. Desperately Maddyn swung out, cutting a spearman across the face as his dying horse staggered a few steps forward. All at once the line broke, a mob-panicked scuffle of men, throwing spears down, screaming, pushing their fellows aside as they tried to get away from the slashing horsemen. Maddyn’s mount went down. He had barely time to free his feet from the stirrups before they hit the ground hard, a tangle of man and horse. Maddyn’s shield fell over his face; he could neither see nor breathe, only scramble desperately to get up before a retreating spearman stuck him like a pig. On his knees at last, he flung up his shield barely in time to parry a random thrust. The force of the blow cracked the shield through and sent him reeling backwards to his heels. He saw the spearman laugh as he raised the spear again, both hands tight on the shaft to drive it home for the kill; then a javelin flew into the press and caught the man full in the back. With a scream, he pitched forward, and the men around him ran.

Staggering, choking on dust and his own eerie laughter, Maddyn got to his feet. Around him the field was clearing as the horsemen charged the fleeing infantry and rode them down, slashing in blind rage at men who could no longer defend themselves. Maddyn heard someone yell his name and turned to see Aethan, riding for him at a jog.

‘Did you throw that dart?’ Maddyn called out.

‘Who else? I’ve heard you laugh before, and I knew that cat’s squalling meant you were in trouble. Get up behind me. We’ve won this scrap.’

All at once, Maddyn’s battle-fever deserted him. He felt pain, bad pain, cracked ribs burning like fire. Gasping for breath, he grabbed at Aethan’s stirrup to steady himself, but the movement made the pain stab him into crying out. With a foul oath, Aethan dismounted and caught him round the shoulders, a well-meant gesture that made Maddyn yelp again.

‘Hard fall,’ Maddyn gasped.

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