Katharine Kerr - Darkspell

“The man I love’s a silver dagger, and I left my kin to follow him.”

“Now, that was stupid of you, but then, who knows what women will do?” He dismissed the problem with a shrug. “Very well then, Gilyan. We can’t have you sheltering out in the barracks, so I’ll give you a chamber in the broch for the night.”

Earlier that same day, the patrol of Cwm Pecl riders escorted the remnant of Seryl’s caravan back to the border station before they rode out again to go bandit hunting. Rhodry helped carry Seryl to a bed in the barracks, saw to it that his guards and the muleteers were properly fed, then went out to the stables to make sure Sunrise was safe. The groom told him that Jill had indeed ridden out at dawn as a speeded courier.

“So she’d be reaching Dun Hiraedd about now.” Rhodry glanced out the door at the sunset.

“Just that. Been in our city before, silver dagger?”

“Once or twice. Well, I’m going to get my dinner.”

After he ate, Rhodry checked on the wounded bandit, who had been locked in a storage shed. The precautions turned out to be unnecessary, because the lad was dying. Not only was he too feverish to talk, but Rhodry could smell the stench of his septic wound even through the bandages. He gave the lad a drink of water, then sat back on his heels and considered him. Never in his life had he seen a bad wound spread so fast—and he’d ridden in many battles. Since bandits weren’t known for eating like lords, no doubt the lad had been badly fed for some time and thus abnormally weak. Yet still, the foul humors should have spread more slowly, especially since Jill had put a proper bandage on the wound right after he’d got it. If someone had wanted to shut the lad’s mouth, they couldn’t have been luckier.

“And was it just luck?” Rhodry said aloud.

The dying lad moaned and gasped for breath in his fevered sleep. Although Rhodry had been ready to slit his throat the day before, he suddenly pitied him.

Jill woke late in the morning and looked round confused. What was she doing in this luxurious bed with embroidered hangings? At last she remembered Blaen’s hospitality of the night before. When she pushed the hangings aside, she found sunlight streaming through the windows and a page hovering uncertainly in the doorway.

“My—uh—lady?” the boy said. “The gwerbret requests your presence at the noon meal. Shall we fetch you a bath? There’s just time.”

“A bath would be splendid. Noon? Ye gods! Here, will his grace’s lady be at the table? I don’t even know her name.”

“It’s Canyffa, but she’s visiting her brother.”

Jill thanked the gods for that. She hadn’t been looking forward to having a noblewoman scrutinizing her table manners. After her bath she got her other shirt, which was reasonably clean, out of her saddlebags, then decided she’d best change her socks, too. All at once she remembered the armband, which should have been wrapped up in her spare clothes. It was gone.

“By all the ice in all the hells! One of those blasted muleteers must have stolen it.”

Irritably she hunted through both saddlebags, but the armband simply wasn’t there. Down at the bottom of one, however, caught under the stitched flap, lay something small and hard. She pulled it out to find a sapphire finger ring, a fine, large stone set in a band of gold, with two tiny dragons curled round the setting. Jill stared at it for a long time.

“How did you get into my gear? Must have been the Wildfolk, stealing the armband—” She paused, considering the weight of the ring in her hand. “The armband weighed about this much, didn’t it?”

The sapphire gleamed in the sunlight. Jill felt an utter fool, talking to a ring as if it could understand her. She found a scrap of rag and wrapped it up, tucking it down at the bottom of the saddlebag again. With a gwerbret waiting for her, there was no time to worry about it now.

It turned out that Blaen was extending her the honor of having her eat at his table because he was curious about her life on the long road. Since she knew that having people talk about his exile made Rhodry feel shamed, she did her best to say little about him during the meal, a job that turned easy when she mentioned that her father was Cullyn of Cerrmor.

“Well, then, no wonder you can bear up on the long road so well,” Blaen said with a grin. “Here, Jill, I met your father once. I was just a little lad, six or seven, I think, and my father gave him a hire. I remember looking up at him and thinking that I’d never met a more frightening man.”

“Da takes people that way, truly.”

“But a splendid warrior he was. I don’t quite remember how the thing worked out, but my father ended up giving him a beautiful scabbard, all trimmed with gold, as an extra reward beyond his hire. Now, here, is he still among the living?”

From that point Jill could fill the time with tales of her father’s various deeds over the years. When the meal was over, Blaen gave her a careless handful of coins as her pay for riding the message.

“And when will this caravan of yours ride in, do you think?” the gwerbret said.

“Not for at least three more days, Your Grace. Some of the men were wounded.”

“Ah. Well, when they do, have the caravan master come see me.”

Jill collected her gear and carried it out of the dun into the busy streets of the city, the only settlement worthy of that name in the entire province. Under arches in the walls, the river flowed through town and divided it into a west side for the well-off and the gwerbret himself, and an east for the ordinary townsfolk. All along the riverbanks themselves selves stretched a green commons, where cows grazed in the hot afternoon sun.

Over by the east gate Jill finally found an inn called the Running Fox that was desperate enough to take her custom. As soon as she was alone in her filthy, small chamber, she opened her saddlebags and found the ring. This time a single dragon coiled about the setting.

“I can’t be going daft. You must be dweomer.”

The stone glowed brightly for a moment, then dimmed to just the shine of an ordinary gem. Jill shuddered, then wrapped it up and put it in the pouch she wore round her neck, where all but a few coppers of her coins were stored. When she went down to the tavern room, she got herself a tankard of the darkest ale available to calm her nerves. Ye gods, here she was, in a strange town with a dweomer gem in her possession and Rhodry miles away! Nevyn, oh, Nevyn, she thought, I wish to every god in the sky that you were here!

“ He’s coming, ” a thought sounded in her mind. “ He’ll come save us both.”

Jill choked so hard on her ale that she coughed and sputtered into her tankard. The innkeep hurried over.

“There wasn’t no fly in that, was there?” He pounded her on the back.

“There wasn’t. My thanks.”

With a sympathetic nod he hurried away. That’s the last feather off this hen! Jill thought. I’ve got to find out more about this gem. Although there were bound to be several jewelers in a town this size, she had no intention of talking openly about a gem that could shapechange and send thoughts to people’s minds. There were, however, always other sources of information for a person who knew how to look for them.

The tavern room was crowded. At one table sat a gaggle of blowsy young women who were eating breakfast porridge rather late in the day; at another, a handful of aspiring caravan guards; at a third, some young men who might have been apprentices to shopkeepers. When the innkeep came to refill Jill’s tankard, she did a bit of deliberate bragging, praising Blaen’s generosity and saying she’d never been so well paid for riding a message. Of course she paid the man from the pouch she wore openly at her belt, not the well-stuffed one round her neck. Then she went out to walk round the streets.