The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (43 page)

Nevyn caught his breath in surprise. At the sound Lilli looked his way.

“I thought she was just saying it to hurt me,” she went on. “But all kinds of things he did make sense if he was my father.”

“I see. Well, it’s no crime of yours, child. You weren’t there at your begetting.”

Lilli merely shrugged the comfort away. She was doubtless remembering all the things that people said about children of incest, that they were cursed by the gods and doomed to an early death. In his long experience none of this had ever held true, and he was groping for some reassuring words when she suddenly cried out, one sharp sob.

“It’s almost midday,” Lilli whispered. “They’ll be hanging her soon.”

“They will. Don’t go watch.”

“I don’t want to. Will you stay here till they’re done?”

“I will. I suspect that you’ll know when it’s over.”

She nodded and went back to fussing with the strands of hair. Nevyn leaned back against the window’s edge and turned a little to look out. All he saw were towers and far below, a strip of cobbled ground. Wherever they would be hanging Merodda, it was mercifully out of sight. If only he could have offered her a full pardon! Perhaps she would have told him about the curse-tablet in return for her life if that life had promised freedom and rank. But Maddyn would never back down now.

“You look troubled,” Lilli said.

“I am. Your mother murdered two women who had no power to fight for their lives, and she’s worked unspeakable dweomers against our prince, but still, I would rather she had been spared.”

“So would I.” Lilli’s voice broke suddenly into weeping. “Oh ye gods! So would I!”

“Well, come along!” Maddyn said. “It’s time to go.”

“Go where?” Branoic said.

“To watch Merodda hang.”

“I don’t want to.”

“What? What’s wrong with you?”

Branoic merely shrugged. He didn’t understand himself sometimes, and this was one of them. He should want to see the prince’s executioner take Aethan’s revenge for him, shouldn’t he? Maddyn set his hands on his hips and glared at him.

“You go,” Branoic said. “You can tell me about it.”

With one last shrug Maddyn turned and strode out of the great hall. Almost everyone in the dun seemed to agree with the bard about this morning’s entertainment. Branoic was left alone with one serving girl, who sat weeping on the bottom step of the curving staircase. On an impulse he got up and walked over.

“What’s so wrong?” he said.

“They can say what they like about Lady Merodda,” the girl snivelled. “But she saved my life and my baby’s too, when the battle was on.”

“Did she now? That’s the first good thing I’ve heard about her.”

The girl wiped her face on her sleeve. She was wearing much better clothes than the usual wench, better enough to make him wonder if she too were a lady in disguise, until she pulled up the hem of her overdress and blew her nose upon it.

“Ah well,” Branoic said. “At least the lady will have someone to mourn her. It would be a hard thing to leave the earth knowing everyone was celebrating your going.”

She nodded and let the dress hem fall.

“That’s true,” she said. “Oh ye gods, I’d best hurry! I was supposed to bring some water upstairs, for that old man, the councillor, the one with hair.”

“Nevyn’s upstairs?”

“He said there was a lady with him who’d been taken faint.”

Lilli, I’ll wager! Branoic thought.

“Here, I’ll take it up,” he said aloud. “And a bit of mead, too, should help.”

With a goblet of mead in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, Branoic trotted upstairs to find an impatient Nevyn standing out in the corridor.

“What happened to that lass?” the old man said.

“She was overcome with grief, like, my lord. Merodda had done her a good turn or two.”

Behind Nevyn stood an open door; Branoic ducked around him and carried the water inside before Nevyn could say a word against it. Sure enough, Lilli was sitting on the end of the bed, all pale and puffy-eyed—with grief, he assumed.

“My lady,” Branoic said. “My heart aches for your loss.”

“Oh, does it really?” she snapped. “I don’t want false sympathy! I know you hated my mother.”

“Well, then, it aches because you’re so sad.”

“That’s better.”

“But I didn’t hate her.” Branoic glanced around for a table, found none, and put the pitcher and goblet down on the windowsill instead. “It’s our Maddo who’s gone daft on the subject, not me. All I cared about was the wrong she did Aethan, and by the gods, when she said she wanted to ride off with him, maybe I’m a dolt, but I believed her.”

“So did I,” Nevyn said. “And it’s a pity the gods didn’t allow it. The omens would be a cursed sight better for the new kingdom if they had.”

Branoic was about to ask what he meant when from out in the ward a roar went up, a crowd of voices all raised in mockery and cheers.

“It’s over,” Lilli said.

Branoic was expecting her to weep, but instead she lay down across the end of the bed and curled up like a dog in straw. Nevyn hurried round and sat next to her.

“Get out, Branoic,” the old man snapped. “Now.”

Branoic turned and fled. He avoided angering sorcerers as a matter of principle.

Although the priests had decreed that Maryn could not become High King until the white mare had been found, they saw nothing wrong with the prince celebrating his victory with a feast. In Dun Deverry’s stores lay the best of a spring harvest, laid up for men now dead in a siege now over. All afternoon servants kept bringing food and mead, while bards sang manfully against the noise, and the laughter went round like the drink. Nevyn, however, slipped away from the feast early. While it was still light, he wanted to look in on some of the most badly wounded men. In their improvised hospital—they’d commandeered one of the barracks buildings—he found Caudyr there ahead of him.

“I just sent a page to find you,” Caudyr said.

“Well, I was coming here on my own. Is somewhat wrong?”

“Very. Come look at this.”

Caudyr took him to the bunk of a young lad whose wounds Nevyn had dressed the day before: a slice across the body that had broken several ribs and a gash from a javelin along the side of his thigh. Both wounds had bled but neither had seemed likely to kill him. Now he lay deathly still with barely the life to turn his eyes Nevyn’s way. In the flickering lantern light his skin looked bluish-white. Nevyn laid a hand on the boy’s face and found his skin clammy cold.

“His cuts have gone septic?” Nevyn said.

“They’ve not. I just changed the bandages, and everything’s clean.”

Nevyn squatted down to look into the boy’s eyes. The boy seemed to be about to speak, then died. One moment he was looking at Nevyn; the next he stiffened and simply stopped breathing. Nevyn swore and grabbed him by the shoulders, but his head lolled back with an unseeing stare for the ceiling. Caudyr let fly with a string of curses worthy of a silver dagger.

“It’s like he didn’t have the strength to live,” Caudyr said. “But last night he ate and drank, and he was talking, too. He should have recovered.”

Nevyn rose and looked around. Most of the men in this end of the barracks were so badly wounded that they had no energy to spare for another’s death; those who were awake lay staring at the ceiling or were curled up with pain. Some moaned; some wept. None would have seen—seen what? he asked himself. He glanced at the dead boy again and noticed a swollen mark on his lips, as if a bee had stung him twice, once on the upper, once on the lower.

“Here!” Nevyn said. “That’s odd! Have you seen bees in here?”

“What?” Caudyr was looking at him as if he thought Nevyn had gone daft. “What do you mean, bees?”

“Well, I don’t think a horsefly would have left that mark.”

“A sting, you mean?” Caudyr scratched his head while he thought. “Not any bees in here that I noticed. They had kitchen gardens in the dun, so I suppose there must be a hive or two around somewhere. It seems a blasted strange thing to die of, anyway.”

“I did see it once, a child stung by a bee who went into convulsions and died. But surely someone would have noticed if this fellow had thrown fits right here in his bunk.”

“So you’d think! I’m well and truly baffled, Nevyn. I can’t see any reason on earth for this lad to die like this.”

“No more can I. He wasn’t important enough for anyone to poison, even.”

“Just so. Ah, that reminds me—”

Nevyn held up a hand for silence.

“Get someone to take that poor lad away and bury him,” Nevyn said. “Then meet me in my tent.”

Nevyn had not forgotten the problem of Oggyn’s possible murders. Or one murder, truly, as he remarked to Caudyr later that night.

“The young king was doomed, anyway. No one but me would hold him to account for that.”

“Just so,” Caudyr said. “And the poor nursemaid wasn’t even noble-born.”

“If I gathered enough evidence, Maryn wouldn’t let that stop him. From what the servants here have told me, Rwla—that was her name, Rwla—has no living kin. If she did, it would gladden my heart to make Oggyn pay over a stiff lwdd for her. But since she doesn’t, all the king can do is hang him.”

“Or send him into exile. But curse it, Oggyn’s too useful. The king needs men like him. Winning a war’s one thing. Restoring the kingdom’s quite another.”

“That’s true, and the apportioning of taxes and scrounging the coin to rebuild the city are things Oggyn will understand.”

They looked at each other, and Nevyn realized that Caudyr shared his weariness. In that moment, he knew that he would never gather the evidence against Oggyn. It’s another little wound, isn’t it? he told himself. Merodda’s curse. It’s going to be a matter of small corruptions and little faults, but in time, they’ll touch the king himself—unless I can stop it.

“What’s wrong?” Caudyr said sharply.

“Naught, naught. I’m just very tired.”

“No doubt. Here, I’ll be going. Get some sleep. Your fellow physician commands it.”

“Very well, and I’ll follow the order gladly.”

And yet, although he did lie down and try to sleep, Nevyn lay awake for many a long hour. Nothing would ever take Maryn’s victory away, not the mightiest black dweomer in the world. The dweomer of Light had turned the tide of history and swept back the sea of blood against all hope. In the inner planes the balance was righting itself deep within the Deverry group-mind, and there would be peace for the kingdom. But the curse-tablet and the sheer malice it represented could reach out filthy hands and infect those who had won the victory, turning all their joy into a sickness of the soul.

Finally he called upon the Light that he had served so faithfully. If he could win the battle at all, he would win it in the name of the Light and not by his own strength alone. At last then he could sleep, and for the first time in months, he slept soundly.

With the dun given over to Prince Maryn, Lilli reclaimed her old chamber. She had her maids bring her things up from the tent and add them to her own clothes in her wooden chest, which had stayed untouched. Doubtless no one had had time to worry about a traitor’s pitifully few belongings. Clodda folded everything neatly, then reached in with a small laugh.

“Part of your dowry, my lady?” She held up the front of what would have been Braemys’s wedding shirt.

“So it was.” Lilli took the piece from her. “You may go now. Tell Oggyn to find you and Nalla a nice place to sleep. Tell him I’ll make sure it’s nice, too, so he’d better not skimp you.”

Clodda curtsied and hurried out. Lilli closed the chest, then sat down and laid the piece of shirt in her lap. Bevyan had embroidered those rows of interlace and added the Boar blazon on the yoke above them. Lilli stroked the stitches, so smooth and tiny, with her fingertips, but instead of grief, she felt only weariness.

“They hanged your murderer, Bevva,” she said aloud. “I wish I thought you’d be pleased. You’d probably forgive her, knowing you.”

But I can’t. The thought hung in her mind, too painful to voice, even to the empty air.

That night Lilli dreamt of her mother. In the dream she was a child new to Dun Deverry, and she’d gotten lost in the tangle of towers and wards. She looked down a long corridor and saw Bevyan standing at the end, but when she went running to meet her, the figure turned into Merodda, holding a dagger. Lilli screamed and turned to run, only to find Burcan blocking the way, and he, too, held a knife upraised. She woke with a cry to find herself standing next to the bed, clutching a blanket in one hand.

At first Lilli thought herself dreaming still. The chamber stretched around her utterly silent and shadowed except for one ray of pale light that fell across the wooden chest. When she glanced around, following the beam back to its source, she found that a leather shutter had torn from its hook at the window and sagged to allow the moonlight in. The leather must have rustled as it slid, waking her. She laughed and told herself that she’d been silly, letting herself be so afraid of a dream. When she turned to climb back into bed, her mother was standing at the other side.

Dressed in a grey shift and glowing like the moonlight, Merodda stood motionless and stared at her daughter. Her mouth hung open; one hand clutched at a throat deep-furrowed and bruised. Lilli stared back across the rumpled bed until her mother’s lips moved, as if she were trying to frame words.

“What is it?” Lilli whispered. “Ah ye gods, you’re dead!”

The apparition began to move toward her, but it didn’t walk—rather it seemed to glide around the end of the bed. Lilli stepped back, and back again, and back, but she hit the wall behind her. The rough stone bit into her skin as she pressed against it. Merodda raised her arm and reached out a long white hand. Just as Lilli tried to scream a finger touched her lips. Like fire it was, burning on her flesh, and yet she felt as if she’d stepped outside naked on a winter’s day. The cold sucked her life out; she felt herself stagger on the edge of a faint.

“Oh don’t,” she whispered. “Mother, forgive me!”

The apparition broke away and stepped back. It looked much more solid now, and Lilli could distinguish her mother’s features, her mother’s hair, cropped short to make the hangman’s job easier. The lips moved again, still soundless, but Lilli could make out the word it mouthed over and over: traitor. With a toss of its head the apparition turned and moved off, gliding back to the window.