Sword of Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  “They’ll pay,” Merryc said. “We know who’s behind this, good sir, and they’ll pay.”

  * * *

  Dovina, Mavva, and Lady Amara stayed in the suite to wait for news. Polla and Minna started to leave for the servants’ quarters, but Dovina called them back.

  “It might not be safe,” she said, “if someone realizes you were the one who gave the alarm.”

  “Truly,” Amara said. “Minna, that was very brave of you to come tell us.”

  “Well, my lady, I’ve not been treated this well before in my whole life, and the hells may take me if I should let great ladies like these come to harm!”

  “You have my thanks,” Dovina said. “My humble thanks, even. I just hope to every god that Merro reaches Lyss and her husband before those scumbag bastards do.”

  They waited. After what seemed like half the night, but what was probably a bare half of one watch, Dovina sent Darro off to find out what he could, with Amara’s second footman along for a guard.

  “Be careful!” she said. “Stay on the lighted streets!”

  “We will, my lady,” the footman said. “Have no doubt about that.”

  After another interminable wait, they returned with the news that Alyssa was safe but Cavan gravely wounded. Two attackers dead, one merely wounded, and, worst of all, the other Daiver footman dead as well.

  “He died defending the guests and the carriage, my lady.”

  “Ah, ye gods! I’m so sorry!” Amara rose from her chair and laid a kind hand on his arm. “I know he was a good friend to you.”

  The footman nodded, his lips pressed tight together.

  “Go wait in the servants’ hall,” Amara said and released him to his grief.

  More waiting. Mavva finally could stay awake no longer, but she curled up on top of her bed fully dressed. The two maids huddled together on the floor in a corner and slept. Amara dozed in a cushioned chair. Dovina managed to do the same, only to wake to Merryc’s familiar pattern of knocks on the door. She got up and rushed to open it to find the corridor full of armed men, her father among them.

  “Come in, come in,” Dovina said. “How does Cavan fare?”

  “Badly,” Merryc said. “But I’ve not given up hope yet.”

  The men, all from Aberwyn’s warband, stayed out in the corridor when Ladoic and Merryc entered. Amara woke, Mavva hurried in from her chamber, and the two maids scrambled to their feet to curtsy.

  “Your carriage is outside, Mother,” Merryc said. “My two men and two more of Aberwyn’s will escort you home.”

  “After I hear your news, Merro.” Amara turned to Ladoic. “Well, this is a fine turn of events!”

  “A grave one, my lady,” Ladoic said. “There’s one of your men dead, first off. And then there’s been an attack on persons the laws declared sacrosanct, and that wretched priest backed me up, even.”

  Dovina shuddered in a brief chill. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  “I haven’t! The Lord of Hell’s going to demand a bit of tribute for this, say I.”

  “As soon as it’s light,” Merryc said, “we’ll be sending messages to the mayor and to the prince.”

  “I’ll take the messages to the prince myself,” Ladoic said. “Attacking a woman, and her but a lass, truly!”

  “Who did this?” Mavva said. “Do you have any idea, my lords?”

  “Plenty of ideas,” Ladoic snapped. “Little evidence as of yet.”

  “As far as I can tell,” Merryc said, “the fellow that Alyssa killed belonged to Gwerbret Caddalan’s warband.” He glanced at Minna. “Would you recognize him, do you think?”

  “He was standing in the light from the kitchen window, my lord, so I will. The other fellow, he was in the shadows, like, but I did hear him say Caddalan’s name. Caddalan’s going to be pleased with us, he said, for this night’s work. He sounded like a lord to me, my lord, not one of the riders or suchlike. And he was holding one arm all strange, like, crooked and wrapped in a scarf or suchlike. That’s all I heard, because I threw the scraps to the dogs and ran up here.”

  “More than enough,” Ladoic said. “Hah!”

  “It is.” Merryc smiled, a slow, grim smile without a shred of humor in it. “Well and good, then. I’ll go to the mayor, Your Grace, if you go to the prince.”

  “Done. I—”

  “Wait just a moment here!” Dovina held up one hand flat. “Did you say Alyssa killed a man?”

  “I did. Just luck, she says, and a Westfolk knife with dwimmer on it, but she cursed well did.” Merryc laughed in one short bark. “The dolt thought she was an easy target. Huh. Well, he can think about his mistake in the Otherlands.”

  * * *

  At the Bardekian compound, they’d taken Cavan and the other wounded man into the main building. The physician’s apprentice bound up the wounded attacker, but Edry himself tended Cavan. In a room usually reserved for dining they put him on a long table with candelabra massed on the sideboard so Edry could see to work. To wait, Alyssa sat in a little side room with Hwlio’s wife, Markella. She, Hwlio, and the physician had all been dining at the embassy when a guard had rushed in to say Gurra was yelling for help nearby.

  Maids and other servants kept offering to escort her to the cottage so she could change her blood-stained clothes, but she refused to go. She did let Gurra have the knife to clean it and the sheath before the blood dried and stuck them together. Now and then she would think, I killed a man, but the thought seemed utterly meaningless. Again, it seemed to refer to some incident in a story she’d heard.

  Alyssa was drowsing on the edge of numb sleep when she heard a door open. Two servants carried buckets of red water out of the improvised surgery. In a short while they returned with buckets of clean water and carried those inside. A third servant followed with a blanket.

  “He’s going to die,” Alyssa whispered. “I know it in my heart.”

  “Nah nah nah!” Markella said. “He’s a strong man and a warrior, and he has you to live for.”

  Markella was proven right shortly after. Edry, his fine clothing all streaked and stained with blood, came out to say that Cavan was out of danger. In sheer relief Alyssa wept even as she laughed in a choked little mutter. Edry turned to Markella. “I want him to rest before we try to move him.”

  Alyssa managed to speak at last. “Can I see him?”

  “You may, but only for a little while. I’ll come in with you.”

  As she walked into the room, she nearly stumbled over a heap of his blood-stained clothes, sliced and shredded where the physician had cut them off in his hurry. Wrapped in the blanket Cavan still lay on the table. His face had gone dead-pale, his lips bloodless, his eyes half-open on the edge of consciousness. Yet he managed to smile at her, briefly but a smile, when she walked up to him. She stroked his sweat-soaked hair back from his face, so cold under her fingers.

  “My love, my heart!” she said. “Please don’t die.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “Sewn up like a rag doll.”

  He smiled again and fell asleep.

  * * *

  Not long after dawn, Merryc arrived at the civic broch tower to find the mayor of Cerrmor there ahead of him. In the Justice Hall Eddel and five men of the night watch were sitting around the table on the dais and sharing a couple of loaves of bread and butter. Eddel stood up and called to Merryc.

  “Come up, my lord! I was just thinking of sending you a message.”

  “My thanks! I take it you’ve heard about the trouble in the streets last night?”

  “I have, and we’ll be holding a hearing this afternoon. I’ve sent a message to the Prince Regent. He may want to attend. I’ve also sent some of the lads round to the embassy to collect the wounded man, one of the ones who did the attacking, that is, not the fellow who was trying to defend the lass.”

  “Then my than
ks again.”

  Merryc sat down and accepted a chunk of bread. He’d just finished it when a servant came running to say that the wounded fellow had arrived.

  “We’ve put him in the little room,” the servant said. “The one with the bars in the door.”

  Everyone got up and trooped down into the cellar of the broch, where prisoners were kept before a trial or hearing.

  “You can talk to him first, my lord,” Eddel said. “He might listen to you better’n me, like.”

  Barlo, his name was, a big burly man with thinning red hair and a slack mouth, at the moment, from the pain of his slashed ribcage. He was foolishly still wearing the blood-soaked shirt embroidered with Lughcarn’s device, though he had turned it inside out, that marked him as a member of Caddalan’s warband. Apparently he had decided he wasn’t going to hang alone. As soon as Merryc came up to the barred window in the door to confront him, he blurted out the truth.

  “It was Careg, my lord, the gwerbret’s cursed son, who came up with the cursed plan, and may the Lord of Hell take him for it, too.”

  “And what did he hope to gain from it?”

  Barlo hesitated.

  “Out with it!” Merryc said.

  “He wanted us to take your betrothed, for revenge, like, but Seddo—he’s dead now, and he won’t mind me telling you—he was our captain, so we had to take his cursed orders—so Seddo says to him, she’s a gwerbret’s daughter and are you out of your mind, my lord? Then we’ll get her cursed slut of a friend, Lord Careg said, that’s almost as good, them and their—well, he went on a bit about it.”

  Merryc felt himself turn very cold and very still. You had to humiliate him, didn’t you? he was thinking. It wasn’t enough to just win the cursed duel! You had to go and humiliate him, and now there’s men dead over this. And if they’d taken the lass? His face must have revealed his flare of rage, because Barlo took a step back and stared at him with the hopeless terror of a rat cornered by a ferret.

  “I see,” Merryc said. “You have my thanks, for what that’s worth.”

  With a grunt Barlo left the window. He staggered to a cot and lowered himself carefully onto it. Merryc turned away. Eddel and the guards were waiting by the stairs.

  “I heard all that, my lord,” the mayor said.

  “Indeed? You’d best start mustering your archers and spearmen.”

  Eddel’s pale eyebrows shot up.

  “Well?” Merryc said. “Do you think Gwerbret Caddalan’s going to turn his favorite son over to you, all nice and peaceful, like?”

  “Good point, my lord. Huh. If I ask for the prince’s aid, think he’ll give it?”

  “More than likely, but he’ll be the one to decide.”

  * * *

  As a victim and witness, Alyssa was required to attend the legal proceedings. After a flurry of messages, she left the embassy with Gurra and a second embassy guard to escort her. Just outside Dovina and Mavva waited along with ten men of the Aberwyn warband and Ladoic himself.

  “No chance of trouble this time,” Ladoic said.

  “My thanks, Your Grace.” Alyssa curtsied to him.

  “We can’t expect you to kill them all for us, eh? But that was a nice bit of work, lass. My congratulations.”

  Alyssa curtsied again and forced out a smile. She’d spent the night having painful dreams that always ended with the sight of the dead man crumpling over like a half-filled sack of flour. Dovina caught her hand and squeezed it.

  “Don’t mind Father. He’s an old warrior. He can’t help being bloodthirsty.”

  Alyssa nodded, but a second smile was beyond her. Mavva took her other hand. She clung to both of them the entire way up to the city broch. And yet, as they made their slow way through the crowded, busy streets, she realized that rather than feeling shamed and sick over what had happened, she was very glad to be alive, just as much as she was glad that Cavan still lived. The fog was peeling back from a blue summer sky. Gulls wheeled and called overhead. Now and then she caught a glimpse of someone’s little garden, or a woman passed carrying a baby, all of them beautiful each in their own way.

  Better him than me, she thought. Far better him than me!

  * * *

  Prince Gwardon attended the hearing, but he stood in the back of the crowded Justice Hall with three of his men. As the sole concession to royalty, the four of them were allowed to keep their weapons. Merryc, who had surrendered his finesword, stood with them and watched Eddel run the hearing. On the dais with the mayor sat a Lawspeaker priest and two men from the Advocates Guild.

  Once the Sword of Justice lay on the table, Merryc studied the small crowd of witnesses, guards, and the merely curious. Alyssa, with her enormous Bardekian guard beside her, sat near the front. The two Aberwyn maids sat just behind with Dovina, Mavva, and Gwerbret Ladoic. A surprise arrived when Hwlio of House Elaeno, the Bardekian ambassador in Cerrmor, strode in and took the last vacant chair near the front. There was no sign of Caddalan or Careg, but just as the guards were shutting the door, Caddalan’s noble-born councillor, Lord Vupyl, rushed in. A local man surrendered his seat to allow the lord to sit as far from the Aberwyn contingent as possible. With him came a scribe who scribbled notes all through the proceedings, as Mavva did as well.

  “We have before us,” Eddel said, “a lot of things to sort out. First, attacking people in the night streets. Worse yet, killing one of ’em and cursed near killing a couple of others. Second, two of these people were under strict protection of our ancient traditions.”

  He paused and glanced at the priest, who nodded. Hwlio rose from his chair.

  “What is it?” Eddel said.

  “They were also, honored sir, under the protection of the Bardekian embassy.”

  The priest winced.

  “My thanks,” Eddel said. “We’ll add that right in.”

  Hwlio sat down again.

  “There are smaller matters,” Eddel continued, “like the damage to the carriage, but we’ll let those go for now. There are a couple of persons charged with these offenses, but two of ’em are dead. We’ve got a third one in custody. There must be at least two others, judging from the reports I’ve heard of the incident. Witnesses tell me that all of these men rode in Gwerbret Caddalan of Lughcarn’s warband.”

  Lord Vupyl hesitated on the edge of his chair. Eddel waited, but the lord shook his head no and settled back again.

  “What counts is who came up with this idea in the first place,” Eddel said. “We have witnesses accusing Lord Careg of Lughcarn.”

  Vupyl jumped to his feet.

  “Honored mayor! I demand—”

  “You’ll hear ’em, my lord, and right now.”

  One after the other, the witnesses spoke: Minna, Alyssa herself, and Barlo, carried up from the cellar by two burly guards. He had repeated what he’d told Merryc in front of so many listeners that it was far too late for him to lie in court. Once he’d been carried down again, the mayor called Merryc. Merryc went up to the dais, kissed the Sword of Justice, and knelt before the table. The priest leaned forward to listen.

  “I was having dinner with my betrothed and my mother when the maid told us what she’d heard. I gathered my two men. As we were leaving the guesthouse, we saw two men of Aberwyn’s warband. I commandeered them, too. So we ran down toward the embassy. I knew the carriage was on its way there, you see. We could hear the noise of the fighting easily enough, anyway, when we got closer.

  “By then a couple of your men from the night watch had joined us. As we ran up, we heard someone yelling ‘Lughcarn! Lughcarn!’ So I yelled ‘Daiver’ right back, and we joined the scrap.”

  Merryc glanced over his shoulder and saw Lord Vupyl sitting slumped in obvious defeat. Servant witnesses could be bullied. The nephew of Gwerbret Daiver could not.

  “Well and good, then,” Eddel said. “I think we’ve got enough
to get on with. Lord Merryc, you may rise and go.”

  Merryc decided against returning to the prince’s side. He took a vacant spot on a bench at the back instead. A shabby woman who smelled of fish moved over to give him room.

  “I’m going to call for a formal malover for this afternoon,” Eddel said. “If of course our Lawspeaker agrees. Your Holiness?”

  The priest got up and addressed his remarks to Lord Vupyl.

  “These are grave charges laid against the son of your lord,” he said. “I would suggest that you advise him to appear before this court as soon as it reconvenes in malover. The honored mayor of Cerrmor has rightly called for a continuing investigation into this matter. I shall be in attendance. It would behoove both the gwerbret and his son to be so as well. I hereby declare the charge. Lord Careg of Lughcarn appears to be red-tongued as per the third instance as listed under King Bran’s laws of abetting murder. He has urged others to kill innocent victims.”

  The chamber fell so silent that Merryc could hear Vupyl’s small gasp for breath. The lord rose, and the scrape of his chair on the wood floor as he did so sounded as loud as a trumpet call.

  “I shall inform him, Your Holiness. I cannot answer for what he will do.”

  “Of course. If he refuses, will you return with news of his decision?”

  “If he allows. I’ll urge him to attend in any case.”

  “Good.” The priest turned to Eddel. “Honored mayor?”

  Eddel rose and picked up the Sword of Justice. “Come back when the sun’s moved on about two hours. Until then, the hearing’s over.” He rapped the pommel of the sword on the table three times.

  Although Merryc considered meeting up with Dovina and her women friends, he decided that as a principal witness he’d best avoid any appearance of collusion. He got himself a chunk of pork and bread from a street vendor and drifted to a quiet spot to eat it. After more aimless walking, he at last heard the town criers calling to reconvene the hearing. He hurried back to the Justice Hall in time to get a seat on a bench. After the usual noise and confusion of a swarm of people looking for seats, the court quieted, and Eddel reopened the matter at hand.