Katharine Kerr - Daggerspell

“I’ve never had any trouble with bandits out here,” Dregydd was saying, “and now you tell me there’s a whole pack of them waiting in ambush. It doesn’t make any sense. How the hells can you know?”

“I can know and I do know,” Aderyn said. “We’ve got to do something, or we’ll be slaughtered on the road.”

“How many of them are there?”

“At least thirty, and they seemed to be as well armed as a lord’s warband.”

“We might be able to hold them off long enough for Jill to get back from Cannobaen with some of the tieryn’s men,” Cullyn suggested.

“What?” Jill snapped. “You can’t send me away!”

Cullyn slapped her across the face so hard she staggered.

“You’ll follow orders. You’re riding to the tieryn and begging for aid. Do you hear me?”

“I do.” Jill rubbed her aching cheek. “But you’d best be alive when I ride back.”

The way Cullyn smiled, a cold twitch of his mouth, told Jill that he doubted he would be. For a moment she thought that her body had turned to water, that she was going to flow away and dissolve like one of the Wildfolk. Cullyn grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

“You’re riding for the life of every man in this caravan. Do you understand me?”

“I do,” Jill said. “Truly, I do.”

DAGGERSPELL

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

THE BLACK RAVEN

Available wherever

Bantam Spectra Books

are sold

For my husband, Howard,

who helped me more than even he can know.

Without his support and loving encouragement,

I never would have finished this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of friends:

Barbara Jenkins, who gave me a whole career in a box when she gave me my first fantasy role-playing game many Christmases past,

Elizabeth Pomada, who took on an admittedly eccentric project and then actually sold it,

Conrad Bulos, the fastest typewriter repairman in the West.

And especially, Jon Jacobsen, the best gaming buddy a girl ever had.

PRONUNCIATION NOTES

The Deverrian language, which we might well call neo-Gaulish, looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in a great many respects, as it does from Cornish and Breton. All these languages are members of that subfamily of Indo-European known as P-Celtic.

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 thin or breathe , but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH , the unvoiced sound in 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.

I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole, it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues.

PROLOGUE

IN THE YEAR 1045

Men see life going from a dark to

a darkness. The gods see life as a

death. …

— The Secret Book of

Cadwallon the Druid

In the hall of light, they reminded her of her destiny. There, all was light, a pulsing gold like the heart of a candle flame, filling eternity. The speakers were pillars of fire within the fiery light, and their words were sparks. They, the great Lords of Wyrd, had neither faces nor voices, because anything so human had long since been burned away by dwelling in the hall of light. She had no face or voice either, because she was weak, a little flicker of pale flame. But she heard them speak to her of destiny, her grave task to be done, her long road to ride, her burden that she must lift and willingly.

“Many deaths have led you to this turning,” they said to her. “It is time to take your Wyrd in your hands. You belong to the dweomer in your very soul. Will you remember?”

In the hall of light, there are no lies.

“I’ll try to remember,” she said. “I’ll do my best to remember the light.”

She felt them grow amused.

“You will be helped to remember. Go now. It is time for you to die and enter the darkness.”

When she began to kneel before them, to throw herself down before them, they rushed forward and forbade her. They knew that they were only servants of the one true light, paltry servants compared to the glory they served, the Light that shines beyond all gods.