Katharine Kerr - Sword of Fire

She dreamt of Cradoc, not the skeletal person she’d seen at the end, but as he’d looked in the prime of life, tall and slender, with a mane of silvery hair that he wore combed straight back from his high forehead. They stood together in a landscape of mist and old stone walls, the collegium, perhaps, when the winter fogs rolled thick over Aberwyn.

‘Mourn me,’ Cradoc said, ‘but don’t wallow in grief. You have work to be done. You were my best student, and the work will be yours to do.’

‘Am I truly worthy?’ Alyssa said. ‘I wish you were still here with us.’

‘So do I.’ He smiled with a wry twist of his mouth. ‘I deem you worthy. Take risks, Alyssa, but judge them carefully. Don’t throw yourself away by starving like I did. You have a wyrd to fulfill.’

‘What is that wyrd?’

‘Now that I can’t tell you. No one can know another man’s wyrd, nor a woman’s either. Farewell.’ He took a step away into the mist, then turned back. ‘Oh, and do remember to breathe deeply and evenly while you speak.’

Overhead a raven cried out. She saw three of the carrion birds circling in the misty sky. When she looked for Cradoc, he’d disappeared, but another glance skyward showed her four ravens where three had been before.

Alyssa sat up in bed, awake and shivering in the morning light streaming through the windows near her bed. Had he come from the Otherlands one last time to speak with her? That bit of advice about breathing – it was so like him! She sometimes did run out of breath when she reached the peroration of a speech. She shivered again, but not from cold.

Silver daggers occupied an odd position in Deverry. They were all proven fighters who’d made one bad mistake, either broken a law or incurred some sort of dishonor that had gotten them kicked out of a warband or exiled by their kinfolk. Although they were outright mercenary soldiers, they had more honor than most men of that sort and a name to protect as well. To become a silver dagger, a man had to find a member of the band, ride with him a while, and prove himself. Only then could they visit one of the rare silversmiths that knew the secrets to forging the alloy in the silver dagger itself. Thus merchants and lords alike trusted them more than your ordinary hired guard. Even so, they had a cold welcome everywhere they went in the kingdom.

Cavan of Lughcarn had found shelter of a sort down near the main harbor. He and his horse shared a smelly shed at the back of the sagging building that housed the tavern, the innkeep, his thin shrew of a wife, and their one servant, a potman of advanced age who moved more slowly than anyone Cavan had ever seen. Just crossing the round room to fetch a tankard of ale took him enough time for a man to die of thirst, as customers often remarked. It was, however, one of the few places in Aberwyn that would take a silver dagger’s coin. Blood money, most people called a mercenary’s hire.

The tavernman himself, Iolan by name, was as fat as his wife was bony. Unlike wife and potman, he enjoyed talking with his customers while he swilled down his own ale. That morning, while Cavan ate a bowl of cold porridge, Iolan sat himself down on the bench opposite.

‘So you had some excitement last night, did you now? I heard the noise of it, and that was enough for me.’

‘Too much for me, almost,’ Cavan said. ‘When the gwerbret’s riders charged into the crowd, I thought we were all done for.’

Iolan sucked his few remaining teeth and nodded.

‘Tell me summat,’ Cavan continued, ‘are the courts here as bad as all that? A cause worth dying for, I mean.’

‘Not to me, but there’s some like Cradoc, a good man he was, too, the voice of the people, just like they say a bard should be. The courts? Well, some are rotten, but not so much in Aberwyn. Abernaudd, now – the things you hear! But Aberwyn’s got its troubles, sure enough. A potter here in town, a man I know, some bastard-born servant of a lord cheated him out of a week’s work. Took the bowls away, never came back to pay. The lord refused to pay. The gwerbret told the lordling, you have the potter’s merchandise, so pay the man. But he never did come across with the coin. Nothing more Ladoic could do about it, either, without starting a war with his vassal. Potter had his day at the hearing. No way to make the noble-born pay after.’ Iolan paused to spit into the straw on the floor beside him. ‘Noble as my fat arse.’

‘Sounds like it, truly.’

‘Other towns, from what I’ve heard, they wouldn’t even have let a poor man into the chamber of justice.’ He spat again. ‘If you have the coin, you can buy off priest and lord both.’

‘And the bards have been speaking out about it?’

‘They have, for all the good it did that poor bastard last night.’

Cavan scraped the last spoonful of oats out of his bowl, laid the spoon down, and got up. He swung himself clear of the bench.

‘Which way is the old harbor?’

‘Just follow the street outside downhill.’

Cavan found his way to the marketplace just as the sun was reaching zenith. A rough square some hundred yards on a side, too small now to handle all the trade of the growing city, it lay close to Aberwyn’s Old Harbor, where the local fishing boats docked. Once that area had been a tribute to the power of new ideas. In the early 1300s, the fashion for square and rectangular houses and shops had arrived from Bardek. The last gwerbret of the Maelwaedd dynasty had given coin to lay the square out among the rows of the then brand-new buildings, which stood in solid rows like walls around the square. Two narrow alleys, one at the northwest corner, one opposite it at the southeast, gave access to the markets and to the houses themselves.

By Cavan’s time, the dwellings had decayed a fair bit. The stonework had turned black from years of cooking fires. The wooden buildings drooped and leaned against one another thanks to the settling of the ground. In back of each row of buildings, privies and chicken coops had replaced the once-elegant gardens. When Cavan walked along, looking for the entrance, he even passed the occasional milk cow, tethered out at her hay behind a house. The pungent atmosphere thickened further when he came into the square and realized without having to look that at least half the market stalls sold fish.

Still, he decided, a chance to see Alyssa again made the smell bearable. She was lovely, true, but also he’d never known a lass given to such clever ways of speaking. The combination intrigued him. The square was so crowded with marketers, servants, and town wives that he searched for some time before he spotted Alyssa standing on the south side of the square. She wore her flame-red surcoat over a plain linen tunic and a pair of brown skirts cut in an outmoded fashion, narrow around her slender hips, flaring at the knees to fall in folds at her ankles. She’d put her thick brown hair back in a silver clasp, her only real ornament. Her face was ornament enough, he decided, with her wide dark eyes and slender features.

A half-dozen of her fellow women students stood with her. Around them stood young men with orange surcoats and, in the outer ring, men wearing woad blue. Since Lughcarn had a King’s Collegium of its own, Cavan knew that the blue surcoats ranged from the dark color of the first years to the honorably faded light blue of those about to finish their course of studies. Over one shoulder the noble-born among them had pinned scarves in the tartan of their clans. Most of their surcoats bunched at the hip over half-hidden swords. Things could become exciting fast , Cavan thought. He took a quick look around and saw four town marshals, conspicuous in their red and brown vests and striped breeches, standing in the entrance to the southeast alley. They carried quarterstaffs, and one had a horsewhip tucked into his belt as well. Cavan glanced over his shoulder, and sure enough, more marshals arrived to stand in the mouth of the northwest entrance.