Daggerspell

by Katharine Kerr

  “Hail, Wise One of the East,” Jennantar said. “I’d hoped to meet you again in better circumstances than these.”

  “I’d been hoping the same thing, truly. It aches my heart that your friend died for the sake of an Eldidd feud.”

  “We’ll have vengeance for him,” Calondereil broke in. “Just like we will for all the others.”

  In his cat-slit eyes burned a wild rage. Even though the war to which he referred had been over for three hundred and fifty years, doubtless he still remembered the name of every elf slain in it. Foe or insult, the Elcyion Lacar never forgot and only rarely forgave. Although Aderyn liked to talk of what he called the essential goodness of the folk, they made Nevyn profoundly nervous.

  “I know you must be eager to meet Jill,” Aderyn said. “I saw her not a moment ago, but now she’s off some-where. Shall we go look for her?”

  Yet Nevyn had to postpone the meeting for a little while, because Sligyn came striding up to them. He looked like a baffled bear when the hunting dogs first surround it.

  “Now, here, Nevyn,” Sligyn bellowed. “I’m gravely worried. Young Rhodry’s gone daft. Stark out of his mind.”

  “Indeed, my lord? Let me guess the kind of delusions the lad’s suffering from. He swears that Aderyn and I are both dweomer, and that Aderyn can turn himself into an owl.”

  “Just that. I—” Sligyn’s mouth slackened as he finally realized that Nevyn was being sarcastic. “Oh, now, here! You’re not telling me it’s the truth, are you?”

  “I am.”

  Sligyn swung his head back and forth, looking at both of them in turn, just as the bear swings his when the dogs close in.

  “By the black hairy ass of the Lord of Hell, what have I done? Ridden all this blasted way to rescue a pack of madmen? Even that silver dagger swears it’s true.”

  “That’s because it is true,” Nevyn said. “I suppose I have to do some stupid trick to convince you.” He glanced around and saw a stick of firewood in the grass. “Here, watch.”

  When Nevyn invoked the Wildfolk of Fire, they rushed to do his bidding and set the stick on fire. Sligyn swore, and he swore again when Nevyn had them douse it.

  “You can touch it, my lord. It’s hot.”

  Sligyn turned and ran back to the broch without so much as a backward glance. When the two elves burst out laughing, Aderyn snapped at them in their own language. Reluctantly they held their tongues.

  “Go get ready to ride,” Aderyn said. “Get my horse for me, too, will you?”

  Still grinning, Calonderiel and Jennantar hurried off. It was then that Nevyn saw Jill, standing at a little distance and watching him as warily as a stag in a forest. Without waiting for Aderyn to call to her, she walked over, studying him all the while. In spite of her dirty men’s clothing, in spite of her face that was different than Brangwen’s for all its beauty, Nevyn recognized her immediately. His first muddled thought was a surprise that she would be so tall.

  “Good morrow, Jill. Our Aderyn’s told me somewhat about you.”

  “Has he, now? Good things, I hope.”

  “They were.”

  Nevyn wished that he could simply tell her the truth, use his dweomer to make her remember and pour out his heart to say how glad he was he’d found her again—all forbidden by his dweomer-vows. Jill was studying him coolly and curiously.

  “But you know,” she said, “haven’t we met before? On the road or suchlike when I was a child?”

  “We haven’t.”

  “Then I must be thinking of someone else. Passing strange—I could have sworn I’d met you.”

  For a moment Nevyn nearly wept. Even after all these years, she still remembered him.

  After a good bit of argument, the noble lords worked out their next moves in the war. Since they had dweomermen on their side to keep track of Corbyn’s movements, they could safely fall back to pick up their supply train, then head east, circling round in a feint designed to make Corbyn think that they were trying to bypass him in order to take his dun. Corbyn would be forced to follow, allowing them to pick the position for the inevitable battle. In the meantime, they could send messengers to any reinforcements coming from Dun Cannobaen. Cullyn idly wondered how many reinforcements they would get; the number depended on how many of Lovyan’s vassals held steady for her.

  After the council of war broke up, Cullyn found Jill by the gates of the dun. She had gotten both their horses saddled and ready and was holding their reins while she waited for him.

  “I asked Lord Rhodry for a boon, and he granted it,” Cullyn said. “You’re going to be taking messages to Dun Cannobaen as soon as we join up with the supply train.”

  “Da! By the hells, I wanted to—”

  “Do what? Ride to war with us? Sometimes I swear that you’ve got naught between your two ears!”

  “I’ll wager I could hold my own.”

  “Oh, don’t dribble on like a spewing drunkard! So what if you could? I’m not going to let you risk your life in battle when you’re the only thing I’ve got in the world. You know what’s wrong with you, my sweet? You’re like all young riders—you think that death’s only for other men, not for you. Well, I’ve given more than a few of those cocksure young lads their last drink of water and sat with them while they died. May the gods blast me if I’ll risk having to do the same for you!”

  His bluntness hit home. Jill looked down and began fiddling with the reins in her hand.

  “I know what’s aching your heart,” he went on. “You think that I don’t value your swordcraft. That’s not true. You’re good enough with the blade, but riding into a battle’s a cursed different thing than playing out a mock combat to amuse a lord in his hall.”

  “Well, true enough.” Jill looked up with a faint smile. “Da, do you truly think I’m good with a blade?”

  “I do.”

  The way she smiled in childlike delight wrung his heart. It was at moments like these that Cullyn felt an ugly knowledge pressing at the edge of his mind, that maybe he loved his daughter far too well. He grabbed his horse’s reins from her.

  “Don’t go getting all puffed up because I said that,” he snapped. “You’ve got a stinking lot more to learn.”

  Leading the horse, he strode away to join Rhodry’s warband. Although he knew how badly he’d hurt her, he refused to look back.

  When the army headed south to meet the baggage train, Dregydd the merchant left them. Jill went over to say farewell to him, and he shook her hand vigorously for quite a long time.

  “My thanks, to you, lass, and to your Da, too. And here’s a bit more than thanks. I know blasted well you two saved my life.”

  Dregydd slipped her a small pouch, heavy with coin, then trotted off to get his caravan in order. Rather than giving it to her father, Jill kept the pouch. When this hire was over, they’d need the coin, and Da would only drink half of it away if she let him know that she had it.

  When Jill fell back into line at the rear of the army, she found herself next to Nevyn, who greeted her too courteously for her to be able to just move away from him, as she rather wanted to do at first. All the dweomer around her was frightening in itself; that she seemed to understand some of instinctively was terrifying. Yet much to her surprise, she found Nevyn congenial, with his candid blue eyes and ready smile, dressed like a farmer in a plain shirt and brown brigga instead of the long robes embroidered with peculiar signs and sigils of her fancies.

  Since he’d seen even more of the kingdom than she had, they talked of their various travels. As the afternoon wore on, she found herself thinking of him as a long-lost grand-father whom sheer bad luck had kept her from meeting before.

  “Tell me somewhat, child,” Nevyn said at one point. “Your father seems an unusually decent man—the way he cared for you and all. Do you know what drove him to take the silver dagger?”

  “I don’t, and if I were you, I’d never ask him. But he took me with him because he loved my Mam so much. She died when I was just a
little lass, you see, and at the time, I didn’t understand at all. Da just rode in one day and off we went. But I’ve often thought about it since. Da had an awful lot of coin from a noble lord’s ransom. I’ll wager he was planning on settling down with us—getting a farm, maybe, somewhat like that. And there he rides in to find her dead. He was more than half mad that day.”

  “So he must have been, the poor lad. Ye gods, that was a cruel jest his Wyrd had on him, and on you and your Mam, too.”

  He spoke with a warm, sincere sympathy that took Jill by surprise. Somehow she’d always thought that people like a silver dagger and his bastard would be beneath the notice of a man who’d studied strange magicks. And yet Nevyn was an herbman, too, who tended the poor folk. He made the dweomer seem a human thing, but there was no doubting that it was dweomer nonetheless, and for some reason that she couldn’t put into words, she was terrified by the very thought.

  Late in the afternoon the army met the baggage train, a straggling line of wooden carts, servants, and spearmen, just about three miles from the seacoast. Since the carts carried ale, the men had a more pleasant camp that night. On the morrow, Cullyn woke Jill early.

  “You’d best get ready to ride, my sweet,” he said. “Lord Rhodry’s going to want that message on its way.”

  “Well and good, Da, but I still wish you—”

  When Cullyn raised his hand for a slap, Jill held her tongue.

  “Have a good ride,” he went on. “And I’ll see you when I do.”

  Cullyn walked away so fast that she knew that she wouldn’t see him again before she rode. It was better that way; she hated saying farewell to him before a war because speaking the words made them both aware that it might be the last farewell they ever said.

  All that morning, as the army made its slow way east, Nevyn and Aderyn rode together at the rear behind the carts and the servants. Although Rhodry had offered them a place of honor at the head of the line, they had a dangerous sort of rear guard to keep. At any moment, they might have to turn their horses out of line and dismount, because not even mighty masters of dweomer like they could assume a full trance on horseback without falling headlong into the road. No matter what the bards claim, the dweomer has its limits.

  “I’m truly grateful you’ve come along,” Aderyn said. “By rights, this little job should be mine alone.”

  “Well, you’ll have to fight the last battle without me, sure enough, but I haven’t spent years brooding over Rhodry like a hen with one egg just to have him killed by a pack of rebels. Here, do you think Loddlaen will try to attack you directly?”

  “I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m so glad you’re here.”

  When Nevyn turned in the saddle to look at him, he realized that Aderyn was frightened.

  “We’ve never faced each other in combat,” Aderyn went on. “For all I know he’s stronger than me, and I’ve never tried to kill a man in my life, while he’s already murdered one. Ah, by the hells, it’s not my life I fear for, but my work. It isn’t finished yet. I can’t afford to waste all that wretched time being reborn and growing up again. You know as well as I do that without human dweomer on the border, there’ll be open war between man and elf.”

  “So I do. Well, I’m going to do my best to convince your successor that she should take up the dweomer.”

  “And is that our Jill’s Wyrd?”

  “I’m not certain, of course, but I’m beginning to think so. First she’ll have to be firmly rooted in the ways of her own kind. That’s my task. And then? Well, the Lords of Light will give her omens when the time is ripe.”

  “Just so. But that’s a long way away, and the Elcyion Lacar need me there now.”

  “Well, if worst comes to worst, I’ll ride west. There are others in the kingdom who can do my work in Eldidd.”

  “My thanks. You can’t know how much that eases my heart.”

  “Good. But you’re not dead yet, my friend. If we stay on guard, we’ll keep you alive, sure enough.”

  Near noon, one of the carts shattered a wheel—a common occurrence. Irritably Rhodry announced that the army might as well have its midday rest while the carter made repairs. The men spread out along one of those tiny streams so common in the Eldidd meadowlands and unsaddled their horses to let them roll, then clustered around the carts to get their rations. Since neither Nevyn nor Aderyn ever ate more than two spare meals a day, they had time for more important things. They turned their horses over to a servant and walked downstream until the noise and bustle of the army were far behind them.

  “I want a look at things,” Nevyn said.

  “I’ll admit that it’ll gladden my heart if you can scry him out. I haven’t done so much flying in years, and my arms ache all day long.”

  Nevyn shuddered. Even though he’d seen Aderyn fly many a time over the past year, there was just something about a shapechanger that creeped a man’s flesh, even if that man had other dweomer himself.

  “Then you haven’t been scrying him out on the etheric?”

  “I’m quite simply afraid to meet him there until I test his strength some other way.”

  “That’s doubtless wise. Well, I’ll see what I can find out for you. I have the feeling the young cub will run like the hells were opening under him if he comes face to face with me.”

  Nevyn lay down on his back in the grass and crossed his arms over his chest. Aderyn stood nearby, ready to keep anyone from disturbing him. Nevyn slowed his breathing, then closed his eyes. In his mind, he pictured his body of light, a simple manlike form made out of a bluish glow and joined to his solar plexus with a silver cord. He refined the form until it seemed solid, then imagined that he was looking out of its eyes and transferred his consciousness over. He heard a sharp click, like a sword striking a shield, and felt his body drop away. He was indeed looking out of the simulacrum’s eyes at his sleeping body lying about ten feet below him. Nearby, Aderyn’s aura was a pulsing egg of soft golden light, his body just visible within it.

  Rust red with a vegetable aura, the meadowlands spread out under the shimmering blue light of the etheric plane. The stream was a tall veil of elemental force, extending about fifty feet into the air, like a silver waterfall with no river above. Nevyn floated up higher, the silver cord paying out behind him, until he was about a hundred yards away from his body. Upstream the army was a fiery glow of intermingled auras, pulsing and swarming as the men walked around, a mix of many colors, but the predominant one was the blood red of true killers. To Nevyn it was an ugly sight, but he’d be looking for another just like it. He went up higher, then flew, gliding over the landscape below in the cold blue light.

  As he headed north, the Wildfolk came to join him. Here on their true plane of existence, they had no bodies at all but were beautiful shimmering nexuses of lines of colored light. At times they refracted out into a pattern like the glimmer of a bright star; at others, they shrank to a core of consciousness. As Nevyn’s body of light carried his mind along, the Wildfolk wheeled around him like seagulls round a ship. As much as Nevyn loved them, they were also a nuisance. If Loddlaen happened to be up on the etheric, he would see this army of lights coming from miles away. When Nevyn ordered them away, the Wildfolk fled.

  After some time—as much as one can measure time on the etheric, anyway—Nevyn saw a glowing dome of light in a meadow off to one side of his path. He checked his flight and drifted over. The pale silver dome covered fully an acre, and it was marked at the four cardinal points and the zenith by flaming pentagrams traced in different colors and set around with the sigils of the elements, altogether a showy and pretentious job of setting an astral seal. Under it, doubtless, lay Corbyn’s army. The dome told Nevyn just how afraid of Aderyn Loddlaen must be, to exert so much energy to build himself a shelter. Nevyn drifted up until he hovered over the pentagram that shone with the pale purple of the element of Aethyr.

  “In the name of the Kings, allow me to pass by.”

  Like a hatch cover on a
ship, the pentagram lifted. So much for Loddlaen’s mighty magicks, Nevyn thought. He might well be daft, at that.

  Slowly and cautiously Nevyn sank down through the opening. Loddlaen might well have felt his entry and come to challenge him, yet he saw nothing but the pulsing, swarming red mass of the army below. He dropped down close enough to begin to sort out the shapes of the overlapped auras of men and horses, but it was impossible to count them. Rhodry would have to be content with the information that Corbyn’s army was much the same size as his own.

  As he drifted this way and that, Nevyn saw a pair of men off by themselves and floated over for a better look. One aura was blood red shot with darkness, and it spun unevenly around the body within. A thin rope of gauzy light fastened it to the other, a shifting, pulsating mass of color that changed as Nevyn watched from gold to sickly olive green. Nevyn could easily guess that the red aura belonged to Corbyn, ensorceled and bound to Loddlaen. Loddlaen’s aura changed again to mottled brown and gold, then swelled only to contract suddenly. Ah, ye gods, Nevyn thought, he’s so far gone that it’s a miracle he can work dweomer at all! He watched for a few minutes more, but never did he see the black lines of stress in the aura which would have indicated that Loddlaen was working the dark dweomer.

  Nevyn shot up through the door in the seal and closed it behind him, then flew back as fast as he could, following the silver cord that inexorably led to his body. He was about halfway along when the Wildfolk appeared, a frightened crowd, swelling, shining, and beating about him. He stopped his flight and tried to understand what they were trying to tell him. Since they had no words, only waves of feeling, all he could sort out was that something had frightened them while he was in the dome. He thanked them for the warning—for warning it seemed to be—then went on his way. At last he saw Aderyn’s clear golden aura and his own body, a lump of dead-looking matter. He slid down the silver cord till he hovered just above, then relaxed and let his mind follow the pull of the flesh. He heard another sharp click, and then he was looking out of his physical eyes at Aderyn, standing above him. Nevyn absorbed the body of light back into himself, slapped his hand thrice on the ground as a sign that the operation was over, and sat up.