The Last Light of the Sun (6 page)

Bern shrugged. “That will be as Ingavin and Thünir decide. Make some magic, if you have any. Pray for me, if you haven’t. Perhaps we’ll meet again. I thank you for coming out. You saved me from … one bad kind of death, at least.”

It was past the bottom of the night, and he had a distance to go to the beach nearest the mainland. He said nothing more, and neither did she, though he could see that she was still staring at him in the dark. He mounted up on the horse he wouldn’t leave for Halldr Thinshank’s funeral rites, and rode away.

Some time before reaching the strand south-east of the forest, he realized he didn’t know her name, or have any clear idea what she looked like. Unlikely to matter; if
they met again it would probably be in the afterworld of souls.

He came around the looming dark of the pine woods to a stony place by the water: rocky and wild, exposed, no boats here, no fishermen in the night. The pounding of the sea, heavy sound of it, salt in his face, no shelter from the wind. The blue moon west, behind him now, the white one not rising tonight until dawn. It would be dark on the ocean water. Ingavin alone knew what creatures might be waiting to pull him down. He wouldn’t leave the horse. He wouldn’t go back. You did whatever was left, and acted as if it could be done. Bern cursed his father aloud, then, for murdering another man, doing that to all of them, his sisters and his mother and himself, and then he urged the grey horse into the surf, which was white where it hit the stones, and black beyond, under the stars.

“O
ur trouble,” muttered Dai, looking down through green-gold leaves at the farmyard, “is that we make good poems and bad siege weapons.”

A siege, in fact, wasn’t even remotely at issue. The comment was so inconsequential, and so typical of Dai, that Alun laughed aloud. Not the wisest thing to do, given where they were. Dai slapped a hand to his brother’s mouth. After a moment, Alun signalled he was under control and Dai moved his hand away, grunting.

“Anyone in particular you’d like to besiege?” Alun asked, quietly enough. He shifted his elbows carefully. The bushes didn’t move.

“One poet I can think of,” Dai said, unwisely. He was prone to jests, his younger brother prone to laughing at them; they were both prone under leaves, gazing at penned cattle below. They’d come north to steal cattle. The Cyngael did that to each other, frequently.

Dai moved a hand quickly, but Alun kept still this time. They couldn’t afford to be seen. There were just twelve of them—eleven, with Gryffeth now captured—and they were a long way north into Arberth. No more than two or three days from the sea, Dai reckoned, though he wasn’t sure exactly where they were, or what this very large farmhouse below them was.

Twelve had been a marginal number for a raiding party, but the brothers were confident in their abilities, not without some cause. Besides, in Cadyr it was said that
any one of their own was worth two of the Arberthi, and at least three from Llywerth. They might do the arithmetic differently in the other two provinces, but that was just vanity and bluster.

Or it should have been. It was alarming that Gryffeth had been taken so easily, scouting ahead. The good news was that he’d prudently carried Alun’s harp with him, to be taken for a bard on the road. The bad news was that Gryffeth—notoriously—couldn’t sing or play to save his life. If they tested him down below, he was unmasked. And saving his life became an issue.

So the brothers had left nine men out of sight off the road and climbed this overlook to devise a rescue plan. If they went home without cattle it was bad but not humiliating. Not every raid succeeded; you could still do a few things to make a story worth telling. But if their royal father or uncle had to pay a ransom for a cousin taken on an unauthorized cattle raid into Arberth during a herald’s truce, well, that was … going to be quite bad.

And if Owyn of Cadyr’s nephew died in Arberth it could mean war.

“How many, do you think?” Dai murmured.

“Twenty, give or take a few? It’s a big farmhouse. Who lives here? Where are we?” Alun was still watching the cows, Dai saw.

“Forget the cattle,” Dai snapped. “Everything’s changed.”

“Maybe not. We let them out of the pen tonight, four of us scatter them north up the valley, the rest go in after Gryffeth while they’re rounding them up?”

Dai looked thoughtfully at his younger brother. “That’s unexpectedly clever,” he said, finally.

Alun punched him on the shoulder, fairly hard. “Hump a goat,” he added mildly. “This was
your
idea, I’m getting us out of it. Don’t be superior. Which room’s he in?”

Dai had been trying to sort that out. The farmhouse—whoever owned it was wealthy—was long and sprawling, running east to west. He saw the outline of a large hall beyond the double doors below them, wings bending back north at each end of that main building. A house that had expanded in stages, some parts stone, others wood. They hadn’t seen Gryffeth taken in, had only come upon the signs of struggle on the path.

Two cowherds were watching the cattle from the far side of the fenced enclosure east of the house. Boys, their hands moving ceaselessly to wave at flies. None of the armed men had emerged since a cluster of them had gone in through the main doors, talking angrily, just as the brothers had arrived here in the thicket above the farm. Once or twice they’d heard raised, distant voices within, and a girl had come out for well water. Otherwise it was quiet and hot, a sleepy afternoon, late spring, butterflies, the drone of bees, a hawk circling. Dai watched it for a moment.

What neither brother said, though both of them knew it, was that it was extremely unlikely they could get a man out of a guarded room, even at night and with a diversion, without men dying on both sides. During a truce. This raid had gone wrong before it had even begun.

“Are we even certain he’s in there?” Dai said.

“I am,” said Alun. “Nowhere else likely. Could he be a guest? Um, could they have … ?”

Dai looked at him. Gryffeth couldn’t play the harp he carried, was wearing a sword and leather armour, had a helmet in his saddle gear, looked exactly the sort of young man—with a Cadyri accent, too—who’d be up to mischief, which he was.

The younger brother nodded, without Dai saying anything. It was too miserably obvious. Alun swore briefly, then murmured, “All right, he’s a prisoner. We’ll
need to move fast, know exactly where we’re going. Come on, Dai, figure it out. In Jad’s name, where have they got him?”

“In Jad’s holy name, Brynn ap Hywll tends to use the room at the eastern end of the main building for prisoners, when he has them here. If I remember rightly.”

They whipped around. Dai’s knife was already out, Alun saw.

The world was a complex place sometimes, saturated with the unexpected. Especially when you left home and the trappings of the known. Even so, there were reasonable explanations for why someone might be up here now, right behind them. One of their own men might have followed with news; one of the guards from below could have intuited the presence of other Cadyri besides the captured one and come looking; they might even have been observed on their way up.

What was implausible in the extreme was what they actually saw. The man who’d answered Alun’s question was smallish, grey-haired, cheeks and chin smooth-shaven, smiling at the two of them. He was alone, hands out and open, weaponless … and he was wearing a faded, telltale yellow robe with a golden disk of Jad about his neck.

“I might not actually be remembering rightly,” he went on affably. “It has been some time since I’ve been here, and memory slips as you get older, you know.”

Dai blinked, and shook his head as if to clear it after a blow. They’d been completely surprised by an aging cleric.

Alun cleared his throat. One particular thing had registered, powerfully. “Did you, er, say … Brynn ap Hywll?”

Dai was still speechless.

The cleric nodded benignly. “Ah. You know of him, do you?”

Alun swore again. He was fighting a rising panic.

The cleric made a reproving face, then chuckled. “You
do
know him.”

Of course they did. “We don’t know you,” Dai said, finally recovering the capacity for speech. He’d lowered the knife. “How did you get up here?”

“Same way you did, I imagine.”

“We didn’t hear you.”

“Evidently. I do apologize. I was quiet. I’ve learned how to be. Not quite sure what I’d find, you know.”

The long yellow robes of a cleric were ill suited to silent climbing, and this man was not young. Whoever he was, he was no ordinary religious.

“Brynn!” Alun muttered grimly to his brother. The name—and what it meant—reverberated inside him. His heart was pounding.

“I heard.”

“What evil, Jad-cursed luck!”

“Yes, well,” said Dai. He was concentrating on the stranger for the moment. “I did ask who you were. I’d count it a great courtesy if you favoured us with your name.”

The cleric smiled, pleased. “Good manners,” he said, “were always a mark of your father’s family, whatever their other sins might have been. How
is
Owyn? And your lady mother? Both well, I dare hope? It has been many years.”

Dai blinked again.
You are a prince of Cadyr,
he reminded himself.
Your royal father’s heir. Born to lead men, to control situations.
It became a necessary reminder, suddenly.

“You have entirely the advantage of us,” said his brother, “in all ways I can imagine.” Alun’s mouth quirked. He found too many things amusing, Dai thought. A younger brother’s trait. Less responsibility.

“All ways? Well, one of you does have a knife,” said the cleric, but he was smiling as he said it. He lowered his hands. “I’m Ceinion of Llywerth, servant of Jad.”

Alun dropped to his knees.

Dai’s jaw seemed to be hanging open. He snapped it shut, felt himself going red as a boy caught idling by his tutor. He sheathed the knife hurriedly and sank down beside his brother, head lowered, hands together in submission. He felt overwhelmed. A saturation of the unexpected. The unprepossessing yellow-robed man on this wooded slope was the high cleric of the three fractious provinces of the Cyngael.

He calmly made the sign of Jad’s disk in blessing over both of them.

“Come down with me,” he said, “the way we came. Unless you have an objection, you are now my personal escorts. We’re stopping here at Brynnfell on our way north to Amren’s court at Beda.” He paused. “Or did you really want to try attacking Brynn’s own house? I shouldn’t advise it, you know.”

I shouldn’t advise it.
Alun didn’t know whether to laugh or curse again. Brynn ap Hywll was only the subject of twenty-five years’ worth of songs and stories. Erling’s Bane they’d named him, here in the west. He’d spent his youth battling the raiders from overseas with his cousin Amren, now ruling in Arberth, of whom there were stories too. With them in those days had been Dai and Alun’s own father and uncle—and this man, Ceinion of Llywerth. The generation that had beaten back Siggur Volganson—the Volgan—and his longships. And Brynn was the one who’d killed him.

Alun drew a steadying breath. Their father, who liked to hold forth with a flask at his elbow, had told tales of all of these men. Had fought with—and then sometimes against—them. He and Dai and their friends were, Alun
thought, as they walked down and out of the wood behind the anointed high cleric of the Cyngael, in waters far over their heads. Brynnfell. This was
Brynnfell
below them.

They had been about to attack it. With eleven men.

“This is his stronghold?” he heard Dai asking. “I thought—”

“Edrys was? His castle? It is, of course, north-east by Rheden and the Wall. And there are other farms. This is the largest one. He’s here now, as it happens.”

“What? Here? Himself? Brynn?”

Alun worked to breathe normally. Dai sounded stunned. His brother, who was always so composed. This, too, could almost be funny, Alun thought. Almost.

Ceinion of Llywerth was nodding his head, still leading the way downwards. “He’s here to receive me, actually. Good of him, I must say. I sent word that I would be passing through.” He glanced back. “How many men do you have? I saw you two climbing, but not the others.”

The cleric’s tone was precise, suddenly. Dai answered him.

“And how many were taken?”

“Just the one,” Dai said. Alun kept quiet. Younger brother.

“His name is Gryffeth? That’s Ludh’s son?”

Dai nodded.

He’d simply overheard them, Alun told himself. This wasn’t Jad’s gift of sight, or anything frightening.

“Very well,” said the cleric crisply, turning to them as they came out of the trees and onto the path. “I’d account it a waste to have good men killed today. I will do penance for a deception in the name of Jad’s peace. Hear me. You and your fellows joined me by arrangement at a ford of the Llyfarch River three days ago. You are escorting me north as a courtesy, and so that you might visit Amren’s court at
Beda and offer prayers with him in his new-built sanctuary during this time of truce. Do you understand all that?”

They nodded, two heads bobbing up and down.

“Tell me, is your cousin Gryffeth ap Ludh a clever man?”

“No,” said Dai, truthfully.

The cleric made a face. “What will he have told them?”

“I have no idea,” Dai said.

“Nothing,” Alun said. “He isn’t quick, but he can keep silent.”

The cleric shook his head. “But why would he keep silent when all he had to say was that he was riding in advance to tell them I had arrived?”

Dai thought a moment, then he grinned. “If the Arberthi took him harshly, he’ll have been quiet just to embarrass them when you do show up, my lord.”

The cleric thought it through, then smiled back. “Owyn’s sons
would
be clever,” he murmured. He seemed pleased. “One of you will explain this to Ludh’s boy when we are inside. Where are your other men?”

“South of here, hidden off the road,” Dai said. “And yours, my lord?”

“Have none,” said the high cleric of the Cyngael. “Or I didn’t until now. You are my men, remember.”