The Black Raven

by Katharine Kerr

“I was watching the fog. Did you see it turn from gold to grey?”

  “It always does that, Your Highness, this time of year.”

  “I know, but I was just thinking that my life’s rather been like that, all gold when I married, and now …”

  Elyssa stared, her dark blue eyes narrowed in puzzlement. Although the serving woman was the older by a few years, they had been friends since childhood, but now, Bellyra supposed, Elyssa hardly knew what to make of her. She hardly knew what to make of herself at times.

  “It’s just the baby,” Elyssa said at last. “It should come soon.”

  “Very soon.” Bellyra laid both hands on her swollen belly. “He feels ready to move down.”

  “You’re so sure it’s a lad.” Elyssa smiled at her. “I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  “I won’t be. No lass would kick her mother’s guts as hard as this little beast has.”

  “Let’s hope, anyway.” Elyssa considered her, the smile gone. “Are you frightened?”

  “Very, but not of the labor or suchlike. It’s what came after.”

  Elyssa reached out and caught the princess’s hand twixt both of hers.

  “You’ll do splendidly this time. I swear it. I’ve made ever so many prayers to the Goddess.”

  “But did the Goddess give you an answer back? Oh, I’m sorry, Lyss, please, don’t look so distressed. We’ll deal with what comes if it comes.”

  In the middle of the night Bellyra woke sopping wet and in pain. Her water had broken. She got out of bed, stood for a moment considering her contractions—not too bad, but strong—then flung open her bedroom door and yelled to her serving women.

  “It’s begun. Send for the midwife!”

  She sat down on a wooden chest and let herself sprawl, legs akimbo. In a few moments Elyssa and Degwa came hurrying in, carrying candle lanterns. Degwa’s dark hair hung in two tidy braids, while Elyssa’s fair hair tumbled down her back, all tousled.

  “Let me just put a dress over this nightgown,” Degwa said, “and then I’ll go down and wake the pages.”

  “Send young Donno,” Elyssa said. “He knows the town well. And get a couple of serving lasses up here to light a fire and suchlike.”

  Panting from the pain, Bellyra leaned back against the wall and let their concern cover her like a warm quilt. Servant girls came soon, and after them the midwife. By the time the dawn broke, her labor filled her world. She clung to the birthing rope and thought of naught else but the child fighting within her to get out. The pain, oddly enough, helped keep the fear at bay. When the sun was well over the horizon, the baby came with one huge squall of rage at being shoved into the light.

  “A lad!” the midwife crowed. “Ah, the Goddess has favored you again, Your Highness.”

  “I told you,” Bellyra whispered. “Give me some water.”

  The afterbirth came clean and whole. Only then did she truly feel safe. Once again, she’d had an easy birth, or so the midwife told her. Laughing and chattering, her women washed her and brought her dry nightclothes, then tucked her up in her freshly made bed. By the time they’d drawn the hangings around her, she was asleep.

  In a little while they woke her. When Degwa brought the new prince to her bed, he mewled like a kitten. Bellyra took him with unsteady hands and settled him at her breast. He grabbed the nipple in his mouth and began to suck the false milk so hard that her breast ached.

  “Oh, he’s so beautiful,” Degwa crooned. “What a little love, isn’t he?”

  “Just so,” Elyssa said. “What lovely little hands he has!”

  In truth, Bellyra thought, Marro was red, wrinkled, and squashed-looking about the face still. His sprinkling of pale hair lay coarsely on his skull. She lay back on the mounded pillows and stared up at the bed hangings, embroidered with a repeating design of three ships bound round with interlacements. The ships were brown, the waves blue, and the interlacements red. She could remember embroidering them, back when she was first married and still happy.

  “You must be so proud,” Degwa said. “Two sons for your lord!”

  “I’d hoped for a daughter, in truth,” Bellyra said. “But you remind me. How is Casyl? Jealous?”

  “Of course.” Elyssa was smiling. “But I explained to him that he’ll always be the oldest and the Marked Prince, while his brother will have to make do with a lordship. I don’t think he truly understood, but he was the happier for it.”

  Bellyra smiled, and at that moment her new son opened his cloudy-blue eyes and looked up at her with such an intense animal devotion that she laughed.

  “You are precious!”

  He shut his eyes tight and slept. When Bellyra handed him back to Degwa, she could read the profound relief in her dark eyes. Elyssa too was smiling.

  “We need to send the prince the news,” Bellyra said.

  “I thought we’d best wait a few days,” Elyssa said, hesitating. “Just to make sure that little Marro lives.”

  “True spoken. Unfortunately. Still, Casyl was healthy enough, so I have hope.”

  Bellyra spent the next few days in a pleasant sort of exhaustion. Although all the important men in the kingdom had followed the prince off to war, the noblewomen who lived within a day’s ride came to see the new princeling and to offer her their congratulations. All morning she would sit with the guests and gossip. In the middle of the day the sun poured into the women’s hall; she sat in a chair at a window with her women while they embroidered the pieces of the dress she would wear when her husband was finally invested as high king. Yet every night the fog slid over the town and turned her heart cold.

  All too soon the morning came that she’d been fearing. She woke, sat up, pulled back a bed curtain, and burst into tears at the sight of the chamber beyond. She flung the hanging closed. For a long while she wept, until Elyssa heard and came hurrying in. She pulled back the hanging and peered round the edge.

  “I’m just so tired,” Bellyra stammered. “It’s all the visitors and such. Just let me sleep a bit more.”

  And yet she stayed abed all that day. Finally, in the evening, when Degwa carried in the new prince for a feeding, Elyssa insisted on pulling back the bed curtains.

  “To let some air in, Your Highness,” Elyssa said. “There. Isn’t that better?”

  The cold grey fog light hung in the chamber and seemed to pick out every detail in an unnatural glare. The streaks and chips on the stone wall, the grain on the wood windowsill all seemed marks in some mysterious writing. If she could read them, she knew, they would tell her tales horrible beyond her imagining. She forced herself to look away. In the breeze from the open window the hangings swayed. The ships seemed to bob up and down on their embroidered waves.

  “Your Highness?” Elyssa’s voice had turned tentative. “You seem so sad. Would you like us to sing to you?”

  “I wouldn’t.” Bellyra looked at her suckling and wished she didn’t hate him. “Get him away from me! Get him a wet nurse! It’s all starting again.”

  She felt the tears run, but sitting up to wipe them away lay beyond her. Clucking and murmuring, her serving women swept the squalling baby away and at last left her alone. She managed to flop onto her side and weep into the pillow. Some long while later, Elyssa came back.

  “One of the kitchen lasses has a year-old son and lots of milk. Degwa’s making her have a bath, and then she’ll come up and take little Marro over.”

  “It’s very odd, these tears,” Bellyra said. “They fall of their own accord.”

  “Ah, my lady! It aches my heart to see you like this again! What—I wish I could—if we only understood—”

  “I want to go to sleep. Please leave me alone.”

  “It’s not good for you to—”

  “Get out of here!” Bellyra propped herself up on her elbows. “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

  Elyssa fled. Bellyra could hear her whispering with the other women just beyond the door, but she could understand nothing of what they said. She flo
pped back down onto the pillows and stared at the hangings until at last she fell asleep.

  • • •

  Dun Deverry lay so far to the north of seacoast Cerrmor that the son was nearly a fortnight old before his father learned he’d been born. The messenger rode in with the news late on a sticky-hot afternoon when low clouds threatened rain. Servants rushed every which way until they at last found Prince Maryn on an outer wall of the royal dun.

  With the man everyone called “lord” Nevyn, his most trusted councillor, the prince was leaning over the wall, looking down at the ruins of what had once been a flourishing city, now reduced to rubble by the long years of sieges and the fires they always seemed to bring. What was left of the houses and shops stretched across a valley to another low hill, crowned with the walls and the tree-tops of the sacred grove surrounding the temple of Bel.

  “I hope to all the gods that the folk come back to rebuild,” Maryn was saying.

  “So do I,” Nevyn said with a wry grin. “But remember, there are inducements you can offer.”

  They heard voices calling and turned to see a pair of pages racing down the hill, their tabards flapping around them.

  “Your Highness, Your Highness! Messages from Cerrmor! Your lady’s given you another son!”

  “Splendid!” Maryn called to them. “Where’s the messenger?”

  “Up in the great hall, Your Highness.”

  Nevyn followed Maryn down the rickety ladder. Ahead of them the grassy hill, ringed by three more walls, climbed to the fortress at the crest. With the pages leading the way they trudged up the spiralling road toward the inner fortress. Black against grey, three ravens flew overhead, cawing. With their passing the day fell hushed in homage to the coming storm. Nevyn wiped enough sweat from his face onto his sleeve to leave a wet spot.

  “You look grim,” Maryn said abruptly.

  “Do I, my liege? I do hope the princess is truly well.”

  “And not as she was the last time? Ye gods, I’ve never seen a woman so sad, and all for no reason. I thought she’d gone daft.”

  “She hadn’t. There were medical reasons.” Nevyn put steel in his voice. “Childbirth takes some women that way.”

  “Well, so you said at the time. My apologies.”

  “Watery humors collect in a woman’s womb to feed the child. These are expelled at birth. In a few cases, there are dregs left behind, and these corrupt to vapors, producing the illness.”

  “These women’s matters!” Maryn shuddered. “I thank the gods for making me a man, frankly, when I think on such things. But here, Nevyn, if this illness falls upon her again, she’ll be more comfortable in Cerrmor, and safer as well. The journey upriver might be hard on her.”

  “Don’t you want her here?”

  “What? That’s not it. Of course I do! It’s just that—well, I fear for her, that’s all. My lady has given me another son. She’s done great service to the kingdom and to my line, and I’d not risk her health in any way.”

  It was all true enough, yet Maryn couldn’t look him in the eye. Oho! Nevyn thought. What’s all this?

  “I see,” Nevyn said aloud. “Well, we can wait to send for her. I’ll send a message to her women and see how she fares.”

  “That’s a splendid idea. And it will be good to have her here. She’s got more common sense than ten men, when she’s herself at least. I truly respect her opinions, you know. It’s a pity that she’s not able to rule in her own right. I’d give her the blasted Cerrmor rhan and put an end to all the cursed conniving over it.”

  “By rights it would belong to her, truly.” Nevyn considered for a moment. “Alas, I doubt me if we could convince either your vassals or the priests.”

  Maryn laughed, nodding his agreement.

  “Don’t let me forget,” the prince went on, “to send messengers to my father with this news.”

  “I’m always mindful of Pyrdon, never fear. Once you’ve settled things with the Boar clan, it’ll be time to look west, and I fear me we won’t care for the view.”

  “Oh, I agree. As soon as I claim Pyrdon, we have a war with the Eldidd on our hands.”

  “Of course. The Eldidd king is likely to back your brother, you know, as a claimant for the Pyrdon throne.”

  “Riddmar has no claim. I’m the eldest by a great many years and I have sons.”

  “Just so. But I truly wish your father’s new wife had given him a daughter.”

  As they walked on, Nevyn was feeling grim. Despite the prince’s spectacular victories of this summer, they had yet to achieve the final peace. Fighting over spoils had kept many a war alive before this. And hovering on the western horizon like a sunset storm lay the kingdom of Eldidd, whose tentative claim to the Deverry throne had helped prolong the civil wars for a hundred years.

  Toward noon the rain finally hit, driving everyone indoors to the great hall of the royal broch. While servants set about bringing the men ale, Councillor Oggyn bustled in. He was a stout man, Oggyn, barrel-chested and egg-bald, though his brindled black-and-grey beard bristled with enough hair for two men. He climbed onto a bench so he could be seen and shouted at the top of his lungs for silence. When he got it, he called out the news of the birth of the prince’s second son. The noble lords in attendance, and there were a good many of them, all cheered and clapped at the prince’s good fortune.

  “It’s their good fortune, too,” Maddyn said. “It’s a hard thing to fight for a new king only to see his line shrivel and die.”

  “Just so.” Owaen raised his tankard in semisalute, then drank the ale off in one long swallow. “Two sons make a fourfold blessing for a lord.” He burped profoundly. “Pardon.”

  The two silver daggers were sitting near the hearth they shared with the riders in the various lords’ warbands, across the circular great hall from the noble-born themselves. Most of Prince Maryn’s enormous army still camped at the bottom of the hill behind the outer ring of dun fortifications. Custom, however, demanded that each lord have an escort of picked men near them at all times, and the prince had his guards as well, all quartered within the dun proper.

  Or what was left of the Prince’s Guard, all twenty-three of them, when once a hundred men had worn the silver dagger as their badge. They had lost the rest and their leader, Caradoc, in the summer’s fighting. Now Maddyn, who was something of a bard, and Owaen, one of the best swordsmen in the entire kingdom, were supposedly leading the unit together, as Caradoc had wished. Supposedly—Maddyn doubted that the arrangement would last much longer. He cared little for command, while to Owaen it was everything.

  “We need to recruit,” Maddyn said. “The prince needs more guards than our handful.”

  “Just so.” Owaen wiped his blond moustache dry on the back of his left hand, which sported a clot of scar tissue where the little finger should have been. “I’ve been approached by some of the regular Cerrmor riders.”

  “Any of them any good?”

  “They weren’t. But I’ve got my eye on a couple of other lads who can swing a sword well enough. Don’t know if they’ll fit in. What about you talk with them? You’re better at that kind of thing.”

  “Very well. Point them out to me.”

  Owaen swung a leg over the bench and stood straddling it while he looked round the great hall.

  “They’re not here,” he said finally. “Let’s see if we can find them outside somewhere.”

  “Ye gods, it’s storming out there!”

  Owaen gave him a look of such disgust that Maddyn rose to join him.

  “Oh very well. Truly, it won’t shorten my days to get wet.”

  They left the hall but stood for a moment under the shelter of the doorway. Rain pounded down on the cobbled ward, one of many at the heart of the fortress. Dun Deverry stood on the crest of a high hill and spilled over it, too, trailing down the sides in a jumble of towers and barracks, storage sheds and brochs. Here and there low walls surrounded a particular cluster of buildings, marked off a random—seeming
ward, or cut across open space for no particular reason. Most of the buildings were squat in the broch style, wider at the base than the top. A few slender towers rose up over the confusion, though they seemed to have been built off true, because they leaned over the wards below.

  Thunder cracked overhead and rolled around the towers. Owaen looked up at the dark sky and scratched his stomach in a thoughtful sort of way.

  “They won’t be out and about,” Maddyn said, “these lads of yours.”

  “Maybe not. Here! What’s that?”

  At the gates someone was yelling, demanding entry, and men came running to swing them wide. Escorted by pages, a rider on a black horse jogged through. He was carrying a staff wound with many-colored ribands, plastered down at the moment with rain. His boots and brigga and his mount’s legs and belly dripped dark mud.

  “It’s a herald,” Owaen said.

  “True spoken,” Maddyn said. “And isn’t that the Boar crest on his saddlebags?”

  The herald handed his staff down to a page, then dismounted and reclaimed the soggy emblem of his office. As a stableboy led the black away, the silver daggers could see the Boar rampant quite clearly, stamped on the saddle skirts as well as the saddlebags.

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Maddyn said. “I wonder what Lord Braemys has to say to our prince?”

  “The gall of the man!” Prince Maryn snarled. “The stinking spiteful gall!”

  “Well, truly, Your Highness,” Oggyn said. “It bodes ill.”

  Nevyn propped his elbows on the table and considered the piece of parchment lying in front of him. The three men were sitting in the prince’s private council chamber, where the prince had pressed Nevyn into service as a scribe to read the letter from Braemys of the Boar. A cold wind flapped the cowhides hanging over the windows and swirled round the stone room. The candles guttered dangerously low. Nevyn grabbed the parchment and held it flat.

  “I must admit,” the prince said, “that I’m not looking forward to spending a winter here. The summer storms are bad enough. Listen to that rain come down!”

  “True spoken, my liege,” Nevyn said. “But if this is how Braemys thinks a man sues for peace, then you’d best not leave Dun Deverry. He might move right in and call himself king.”