Katharine Kerr - Darkspell

The boundless imagination of

KATHARINE KERR

Her novels of Deverry and the Westlands:

DAGGERSPELL

DARKSPELL

THE BRISTLING WOOD

THE DRAGON REVENANT

A TIME OF EXILE

A TIME OF OMENS

DAYS OF BLOOD AND FIRE

DAYS OF AIR AND DARKNESS

THE RED WYVERN

Available from Bantam Spectra Books

BATTLE TO THE DEATH

“Do I have any hope of convincing you to get back and stay out of this?” Rhodry said, pulling a javelin.

“None.” Jill glanced back and saw that he’d positioned all the guards directly behind them.

He gave her a tight smile, as if he’d been expecting no less from her. For another mile the road snaked on. The dust they were raising hung in the windless air like a banner to announce that they were coming. Jill felt a little coldness in the pit of her stomach. She knew what riding to battle meant. In her hand, her sword winked bright, the blade that her father had given her. Oh Da, she thought, it’s a cursed good thing you taught me how to use it.

The road made a sharp turn, and Jill saw them, a pack of some twenty armed men, blocking the road about thirty feet ahead. With an automatic shout of his old war cry, “For Aberwyn!” Rhodry threw the javelin in his hand and drew his sword. Screaming, the bandits charged, but their leader’s horse staggered to its knees and fell with Rhodry’s javelin in its chest, rolling its rider under the hooves of his own men. Jill kicked Sunrise forward as Rhodry led his ragged handful of men out to meet the charge….

BY KATHARINE KERR

Her novels of Deverry and the Westlands

DAGGERSPELL

DARKSPELL

THE BRISTLING WOOD

THE DRAGON REVENANT

A TIME OF EXILE

A TIME OF OMENS

DAYS OF BLOOD AND FIRE

DAYS OF AIR AND DARKNESS

THE RED WYVERN

Her works of science fiction

RESURRECTION

PALACE

(with Mark Kreighbaum)

For my father, Sergeant John Carl Brahtin, 1918-44,

who died fighting to free Europe from a worse evil than

anything a novelist can invent.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe many thanks to Bill and Katie Daniel, who made the revision of both this book and Daggerspell much easier by keyboarding the previous versions onto disks. I also owe more than a few thanks to all those friends and relations, particularly my husband, Howard, who put up with my moods when I’m writing.

PRONUNCIATION NOTES

The language spoken in Deverry, which we might well call Neo-Gaulish, is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such, just as the Deverrians themselves are quite different from any historical Celts.

VOWELS are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

E as in pen.

I as in pin.

U as in pun.

Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

DIPHTHONGS generally have one consistent pronunciation.

AE as the a in mane.

AI as in aisle.

AU as the ow in how.

EO as a combination of eh and oh.

EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

IE as in pier.

OE as the oy in boy.

UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic (KAR-noh-ik).

CONSONANTS are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

C is always hard as in cat.

G is always hard as in get.

DD is the voiced th as in breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in thin or breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

R is heavily rolled.

RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

Y is never a consonant.

I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

DOUBLED CONSONANTS are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

ACCENT is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

On the whole, I have transcribed both Elvish and Bardekian names and words according to the preceding system of orthography, which is quite adequate to the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be both confusing and overly pedantic to use the full apparatus by which scholars try to represent this most subtle and nuanced of tongues. To the average human ear, for instance, distinctions such as those between A, *A, and A are lost in the hearing. Why, then, should we try to distinguish them in print?

If the reader feels that I belabor this point, the reader should be apprised that a certain Elvish scholar of Elvish has already sniped at this simplified usage, both in private circles and the more public medium of the Aberwyn papers. One hopes that having relieved himself of his bile, he will now find more suitable activities for his leisure hours.

PROLOGUE

AUTUMN, 1062

Every light casts a shadow. So does the dweomer. Some men choose to stand in the light; others, in the darkness. Be ye always aware that where you stand is a matter of choice, and let not the shadow creep over you unawares….

— The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

Back in the eleventh century, when the far-flung kingdom of Deverry lay sparse and tentative across the lands men claimed in the king’s name, Eldidd province was one of the most sparsely settled areas of all. Particularly in its western reaches, towns were rare, and in the west Dun Gwerbyn was something of a governmental seat, even though its high stone walls circled barely five hundred thatched houses and three temples, two of those little better than wayside shrines. On a hill in the center of town, however, stood the dun, or fort, of the tieryn, large and solid enough to be impressive in any province at that time. Inside a double set of earthworks and ditches, stone walls sheltered stables and barracks for the tieryn’s warband of a hundred men, a collection of huts and storage sheds, and the broch complex itself, a four-story round stone tower with two shorter towers built on to the sides.