Bristling Wood (7 page)

That night the snow was so bad that Maddyn risked staying till morn. It was pleasant, sleeping with his arms around her, 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 neighbors 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, 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; hoof beats 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 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 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 backward, 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 backward, 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 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 favor, 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 came 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 a 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 humor 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, but 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 favor, 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 just 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 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 beard 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 the 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 somewhat 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?”