Katharine Kerr - Dawnspell

‘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.’