Katharine Kerr - Dawnspell

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!’