A Time of Exile (38 page)

“A pretty lass like you should have a mirror of her own.”

“Do you truly think I’m pretty? I don’t.”

He looked so shocked that she was embarrassed.

“Well,” Maer said thoughtfully. “Truly, pretty isn’t the right word, is it? As handsome as a wild horse or a trout leaping from a stream, not pretty like a rose in some lord’s garden.”

“Then my thanks.” Glaenara busied herself with wrapping the mirror up in the cloth again, but she felt herself blush in sheer pleasure. “And what errand are you running?”

“Well, our Badger wanted a word with Ganedd the merchant’s son. Cursed if I know why, but I’m taking the lad a letter. I can’t read, or I would have sneaked a look. It’s not sealed.”

“It would have been dishonorable.”

“Of course, but ye gods, I’ve always been a curious sort of man. Ah, well, it’s beyond me anyway, all this wretched writing. Will you come into town next week?”

“I might, I might not. It depends on the chickens.”

“Then I’ll pray to the Goddess to let them lay more eggs than your family can possibly eat and that my lord will let me come down to town.”

After Maer left, Glaenara counted up her coin. She had just enough to buy a length of cloth to make herself that new dress that Nalyn had been nagging her about. If she
worked hard, sitting outside every evening to get the last of the sunlight, she could have the dress finished by next market day.

Ganedd sat uneasily on the edge of his chair and held his goblet of mead in nervous fingers. The lad was wearing a pair of blue-and-gray-checked brigga and a shirt heavily worked in flowers—his best clothes, Pertyc assumed, for his visit to the noble-born.

“No doubt you’re wondering why I asked you up here. I’ll come straight to the point. My silver dagger told me that you voted against the rebellion in Aberwyn. I’m holding for the king myself. It gladdens my heart that you do the same.”

“My thanks, my lord, but I don’t know what the two of us can do about it.”

“Naught more than what we can, truly, but we’ve got to try. I want to ask you to take my service. There’s going to be a war in the spring, lad, and I’ve no doubt that our rebels will want me dead before they march against the king.”

“I’m no warrior, my lord, but if you want me to join your men, I’ll do my best to fight.”

Pertyc was both surprised and ashamed of himself. He’d been dismissing this young man as nothing but a merchant, little more than a farmer and most likely a coward to boot.

“Well, actually,” Pertyc said, “I was hoping you’d run an errand for me. You deal with the Westfolk all the time, don’t you? You must know where to find them and all that.”

“I do, my lord.” Ganedd looked puzzled; then he grinned. “Longbows.”

“Just that. If I load you up with every bit of iron goods and fancy cloth and jewelry and so on that I can scrape together, do you think you could get me enough bows for the warband? I wouldn’t take a few extra archers amiss, either, if you can recruit some.”

“Well, I’ll try, my lord, but I don’t think the Westfolk are interested in hiring out as mercenaries. The bows I can most likely get, though.”

“Well, that’ll be somewhat to the good.” Pertyc hesitated, struck by a sudden thought and then surprise, that
he’d never had the thought until this moment. “You know, I wonder just how proud a man I am.”

“My lord?”

It took Pertyc a long time to answer, and in the end, the only thing that brought him round was his love for his children. While no rebel lord would ever have knowingly killed his daughter, terrible things happened in sieges, especially if they ended in fire. If Pertyc lost the battle but the rebels lost the war, Adraegyn of course was quite simply doomed. The king’s men would smother the boy, most like.

“Tell me somewhat, Ganno. Do you think you could find my wife?”

Ganedd stared openmouthed.

“Well, she won’t lift a finger for my sake,” Pertyc said, “but for Beclya and Adraegyn, she just might raise a small army.”

“I’ll do my best, my lord, but the elven gods only know where she might be, and the Westlands are an awfully big place. The sooner I leave, the better. Can you give me a guard and some packhorses? The less of Da’s stock that I use, the fewer questions Mam will ask.”

All that afternoon, while Ganedd gathered supplies, Pertyc agonized over the letter to his wife. Finally, when he was running out of time, he decided to make it as simple and as short as he could:

“Our children are in mortal danger from a war. My messenger will explain. For their sakes I’m begging your aid. I’ll humble myself in any way you want if you’ll just come and take them to safety.”

He rolled it up, sealed it into a silver message tube, then without thinking kissed the seal, as if the wax could pass the kiss along.

Just at sunset, Ganedd and his impromptu caravan assembled out in the ward, a straggling line of packhorses and mules along with two of Pertyc’s most reliable riders for guards and the undergroom for a servant. Pertyc handed Ganedd what coin he could spare and the message tube, then walked to the gates to wave his only true hope on its way until the caravan disappeared into a welter of dust and sea haze. As he turned to go inside, the ward flared with yellow light. Up on the tower the lightkeeper had fired the beacon.

•  •  •

In every warband, Maer reflected sadly, there was always an utterly humorless man like Crindd. If you said it looked like fair weather, Crindd saw rain coming; if you said a meal tasted good, Crindd remarked that the cook had filth under her fingernails; if you liked the looks of a horse, Crindd insisted that he had the legs to come up lame. On a bad day Crindd’s little black cloud of gloom could make even Garoic the captain groan under his breath.

“Ye gods,” Maer said to Cadmyn one morning, “I’d drown the man except it would give him too much pleasure to have somewhat go wrong.”

Cadmyn, an easygoing blond who was Maer’s only real friend in the warband, nodded with a faint look of disgust.

“True-spoken. We all used to mock him, but it wasn’t truly satisfying. He never seemed to notice, you see.”

“Really? Well, just you leave this to me.”

That afternoon Maer asked for and received Lord Pertyc’s permission to leave the dun, then rode over to Glaenara’s farm. Much to his annoyance, she was gone, and her brother-in-law refused to tell him where.

“Just what do you want anyway, silver dagger?” Nalyn snarled.

“To buy a pint of dried beans or peas from you and naught more. I’ll give you a copper.”

Nalyn considered, greed fighting with dislike.

“Oh, I’ll sell you a handful of pulse gladly enough,” he said at last. “But I don’t want you hanging round Glae.”

After dinner that night, two of the other lads kept Crindd busy in the great hall while Maer and Cadmyn sneaked out to the barracks. They stripped Crindd’s bunk of blanket and sheet, and while Cadmyn kept watch at the door, Maer sprinkled the dried peas over the mattress before he made up the bed again. When the time came, everyone in the warband went to bed full of anticipation. In the dark they could hear Crindd squirming this way and that. At last he got up, and they heard the sound of him trying to brush the sheet clean with his hands. When he got back into bed, the squirming picked up again. Finally one of the men broke and sniggered; the entire warband joined in. Crindd sat up with a howl of rage.

“And just why are you bastards all laughing?”

Silence fell, except for the sound of Crindd getting up and messing with something at the hearth. At great length, he struck a spark into tinder and lit a candle. Everyone else sat up and arranged innocent smiles while he stalked over to examine his bunk.

“There’s somewhat in my bed!”

“Fleas?” Maer said. “Lice? Bedbugs?”

“Oh, hold your pus-boil tongue, you whoreson bastard!”

“Nasty, isn’t he?” Cadmyn remarked.

Crindd shoved the candle into a wax-crusted holder and began hauling the sheet off.

“Dried peas!”

“And how did they get in there?” Cadmyn said.

“Must be the Wildfolk,” Maer answered.

The moment Maer said the name he regretted it, because they came at the sound, or so he assumed, not knowing that the Wildfolk love a good prank, the meaner the better. Although it was hard to be certain in the flickering candlelight, Maer thought he saw them as little shapes of shadow, thicker than smoke but just as unstable. When Crindd began gathering the pulse and throwing it impartially at every man within range, the Wildfolk helped the warband catch what they could and throw it back. Maer, however, sat stone-still on his bunk and merely stared, wondering if Nevyn could make a potion that would bring him back to normal. At last Garoic rushed in, wearing a nightshirt over his brigga and swearing at the lot of them to restore order.

The prank brought Maer so much glory that of course he wasn’t going to stop there, Wildfolk or no Wildfolk. On the morrow he filled a bucket with water, threw in a handful of mucky straw from the stable, and balanced it on top of the half-open door of the tack room. When young Werryc maneuvered Crindd into going to fetch something from this room, Crindd flung the door open and dumped the foul and by then chilly water all over himself. For the rest of the day, he strode around in a humor as foul as his bath, and his mood wasn’t sweetened any when Maer barred the privy door from the outside and trapped him in it. He must have banged and yelled for a good hour before Adraegyn heard him and let him out. Crindd grabbed a rake from the
nearby dungheap and came charging for the barracks; he might well have killed someone if Garoic hadn’t calmed him down.

Although Crindd had no idea who was persecuting him, Garoic wasn’t so dense. That very evening, he caught Maer as he was leaving the great hall and haded him off for a private word.

“Listen, silver dagger, a jest’s a jest, and I have to admit that I’ve had some good laughs out of all this, but enough’s enough.”

“But, Captain, sir, what makes you think I’ve got anything to do with it?”

“My eyes and ears. A warning, silver dagger: the long road might be calling you soon.”

Since being kicked out of the warband would mean disaster, what with winter coming on, Maer swore that the pranks would end. Unfortunately, Cadmyn came up with an idea that was too good to resist, and he also offered to take the blame for it if worse came to worst. Crindd had a pair of new riding boots, worked in two colors of leather, which had cost him all his winnings from a particularly lucky dice game. Maer and Cadmyn went down to a pond not far from the dun and found the two last frogs who hadn’t dug themselves under the mud for the winter. One fit neatly into each boot. Although Maer and Cadmyn were outside when Crindd went to put on his new boots, they could hear his shriek quite clearly. They were laughing themselves sick when Crindd found them.

“You foul bastards! I can see the mud on your brigga.”

From inside his shirt the frogs croaked.

“You’ve got a pair of pets, have you?” Maer said. “Well, flowers to the fair, and frogs to the warty.”

Crindd hauled back and hit him in the face. With a yell, Maer swung back, but he was so dizzy that he missed. He could hear Cadmyn shouting, and men running; just as Crindd hit him again, hands grabbed them both and hauled them apart. Although Maer’s right eye was already swelling and dripping, he could see Lord Pertyc and Garoic strolling over, both of them scowling.

“It was all my fault!” Cadmyn squeaked. “Crindd hit the wrong man!”

“He would,” Garoic said.

“What is all this?” Pertyc snapped.

“Frogs, my lord! They put frogs in my boots. This very morning.” Crindd reached inside his shirt and hauled out the terrified creatures. “Here’s the evidence. And they put dried peas under my sheet and doused me with rotten water and …”

“Enough!” Pertyc took the frogs, contemplated them briefly, then handed them to a grinning Adraegyn. “Go put these back in the pond, will you? Right now, please. Now. Maer, Cadmyn. Why did you two commit this list of heinous crimes?”

Cadmyn groped for words and gave it up as a bad job.

“Well, my lord,” Maer said. “Just for the jest of the thing. You see, Crindd makes a splendid victim.”

Crindd squealed in outrage, but his lordship laughed.

“1 do see, indeed. Crindd, it looks to me like you’ve already gotten your revenge on Maer’s right eye. Let this be a lesson to you: never be a splendid victim again. It gives people ideas.”

“But, my lord—”

“Just think about it, will you?” Pertyc turned to the two malefactors. “Maer, you’d better go down to the village and have the herbman look at that eye. I don’t like the way it’s swelling.”

When Maer rode up to the herbman’s cottage, he received a surprise bigger than the one the frogs had given Crindd. Out in the front garden Glaenara was spreading laundry to dry. Pretty in a new dress of woad-blue wool, she was singing to herself, her raven-dark hair gleaming in the sunlight. The sight of her made him feel warm all over.

“And what are you doing here?” he called out as he dismounted.

“Keeping up Nevyn’s house for him.” She strolled over to open the gate. “Oh, Maer! Your eye!”

“I just got into a little scrap with one of the lads.”

He found Nevyn sitting at a table inside and sorting out various herbs and dried barks. The old man got up and caught Maer by the chin, tipping his head back for a look as if the silver dagger were a child, and his fingers were surprisingly strong.

“Well, that’s a nasty mess, isn’t it? I’ll make you up a poultice. Sit down, Maer.”

When Maer sat, a pair of big-bellied gnomes appeared on the table and considered him. He scowled right back. Nevyn went to the hearth, where an iron pot hung from a tripod over a small arrangement of logs. When the old man waved his hand at the wood, it burst into flame. Maer felt so sick that he slumped against the table behind him like a lady feeling a faint coming on. Nevyn picked up a handful of herbs from the table and stirred them into the water simmering in the pot.

“I’m assuming someone’s fist gave you that black eye.”

“It was, sir. Not long ago.”

“Ah.” Nevyn turned from his stirring and fixed Maer with one of his needle-sharp stares. “Glaenara’s a nice, decent lass, Maer. I would absolutely hate to see her dishonored and deserted.”