Katharine Kerr: Daggerspell

“Well and good, then.” The priestess held out her hand to Jill. “How old are you?”

“Seven, Your Holiness.”

“Well, now, that’s very young, but you’ll have to be brave, just like a warrior. Your father’s a warrior, isn’t he?”

“He is. A great warrior.”

“Then you’ll have to be as brave as he’d want you to be. Come say farewell to your mama; then let Macyn take you out.”

When Jill came to the bedside, Mama was awake, but her eyes were red, swollen, and cloudy, as if she didn’t really see her daughter standing there.

“Jill?” Mama was gasping for breath. “Mind what Macco tells you.”

“I will. Promise.”

Mama turned her head away and stared at the wall.

“Cullyn,” she whispered.

Cullyn was Da’s name. Jill wished he was there; she had never wished for anything so much in her life. Macyn picked Jill up, doll and all, and carried her from the chamber. As the door closed, Jill twisted round and caught a glimpse of the priestess, kneeling to pray.

Since no one wanted to come to a tavern with fever in the back room, the big half-round of the alehouse stood empty, the wooden tables forlorn in the dim firelight. Macyn sat Jill down near the fire, then went to get her something to eat. Just behind her stood a stack of ale barrels, laced with particularly dark shadows. Jill was suddenly sure that Death was hiding behind them. She made herself turn around and look, because Da always said a warrior should look Death in the face. She found nothing. Macyn brought her a plate of bread and honey and a wooden cup of milk. When Jill tried to eat, the food turned dry and sour in her mouth. With a sigh, Macyn rubbed his bald spot.

“Well now,” he said. “Maybe your da will ride our way soon.”

“I hope so.”

Macyn had a long swallow of ale from his pewter tankard.

“Does your doll want a sip of milk?” he said.

“She doesn’t. She’s just rags.”

Then they heard the priestess, chanting a long sobbing note, keening for the soul of the dead. Jill tried to make herself feel brave, then laid her head on the table and sobbed aloud.

They buried Mama out in the sacred oak grove behind the village. For a week, Jill went every morning to cry beside the grave till Macyn finally told her that visiting the grave was like pouring oil on a fire—she would never put her grief out by doing it. Since Mama had told her to mind what he said, Jill stopped going. When custom picked up again in the tavern, she was busy enough to keep from thinking about Mama, except of course at night. Local people came in to gossip, farmers stopped by on market day, and every now and then merchants and peddlers paid to sleep on the floor for want of a proper inn in the village. Jill washed tankards, ran errands, and helped serve ale when the tavern was crowded. Whenever a man from out of town came through, Jill would ask him if he’d ever heard of her father, Cullyn of Cerrmor, the silver dagger. No one ever had any news at all.

The village was in the northernmost province of the kingdom of Deverry, the greatest kingdom in the whole world of Annwn—or so Jill had always been told. She knew that down to the south was the splendid city of Dun Deverry, where the High King lived in an enormous place. Bobyr, however, where Jill had spent her whole life, had about fifty round houses, made of rough slabs of flint packed with earth to keep the wind out of the walls. On the side of a steep Cerrgonney hill, they clung to narrow twisted streets so that the village looked like a handful of boulders thrown among a stand of straggly pine trees. In narrow valleys farmers wrestled fields out of rocky land and walled their plots with the stone.

About a mile away stood the dun, or fort, of Lord Melyn, to whom the village owed fealty. Jill had always been told that it was everyone’s Wyrd to do what the noble-born said, because the gods had made them noble. The dun was certainly impressive enough to Jill’s way of thinking to have had some divine aid behind it. It rose on the top of the highest hill, surrounded by both a ring of earthworks and a ramparted stone wall. A broch, a round tower of slabbed stone, stood in the middle and loomed over the other buildings inside the walls. From the top of the village, Jill could see the dun and Lord Melyn’s blue banner flapping on the broch.

Much more rarely Jill saw Lord Melyn himself, who only occasionally rode into the village, usually to administer a judgment on someone who’d broken the law. When, on a particularly hot and airless day, Lord Melyn actually came into the tavern for some ale, it was an important event. Although the lord had thin gray hair, a florid face, and a paunch, he was an impressive man, standing ramrod straight and striding in like the warrior he was. With him were two young men from his warband, because a noble lord never went anywhere alone. Jill ran her hands through her messy hair and made the lord a curtsy. Macyn came hurrying with his hands full of tankards; he set them down and made the lord a bow.

“Cursed hot day,” Lord Melyn said.

“It is, my lord,” Macyn stammered.

“Pretty child,” Lord Melyn glanced at Jill. “Your granddaughter?”

“She’s not, my lord, but the child of the lass who used to work here for me.”

“She died of a fever,” one of the riders interrupted. “Wretched sad thing.”

“Who’s her father?” Lord Melyn said. “Or does anyone even know?”

“Oh, not a doubt in the world, my lord,” the rider answered with an unpleasant grin. “Cullyn of Cerrmor, and no man would have dared to trifle with his wench.”

“True enough.” Lord Melyn paused for a laugh. “So, lass, you’ve got a famous father, do you?”

“I do?”

Lord Melyn laughed again.

“Well, no doubt a warrior’s glory doesn’t mean much to a little lass, but your da’s the greatest swordsman in all Deverry, silver dagger or no.” The lord reached into the leather pouch at his belt and brought out some coppers to pay Macyn, then handed Jill a silver. “Here, child, without a mother you’ll need a bit of coin to get a new dress.”

“My humble thanks, my lord.” As she made him a curtsy, Jill realized that her dress was indeed awfully shabby. “May the gods bless you.”

After the lord and his men left the tavern, Jill put her silver piece into a little wooden box in her chamber. At first, looking at it gleaming in the box made her feel like a rich lady herself; then all at once she realized that his lordship had just given her charity. Without that coin, she wouldn’t be able to get a new dress, just as without Macyn’s kindness, she would have nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep. The thought seemed to burn in her mind. Blindly she ran outside to the stand of trees behind the tavern and threw herself onto the shady grass. When she called out to them, the Wildfolk came—her favorite gray gnome, a pair of warty blue fellows with long, pointed teeth, and a sprite, who would have seemed a beautiful woman in miniature if it weren’t for her eyes, wide, slit like a cat’s and utterly mindless. Jill sat up to let the gray gnome climb into her lap.

“I wish you could talk. If some evil thing should happen to Macyn, could I come live in the woods with your folk?”

The gnome idly scratched his armpit while he considered.

“I mean, you could show me how to find things to eat, and how to keep warm when it snows.”

The gnome nodded in a way that seemed to mean yes, but it was always hard to tell what the Wildfolk meant. Jill didn’t even know who or what they were. Although they suddenly appeared and vanished at will, they felt real enough when you touched them, and they could pick up things and drink the milk that Jill set out for them at night. Thinking of living with them in the woods was as much frightening as it was comforting.