The Dragon Revenant (4 page)

“Still coughing up blood?” Nevyn said.

“None, my lord. Er, ah, well, is that all right?”

“It’s a very good sign, actually. Will you stop cowering and sniveling like a wretched field mouse? I’m not going to hurt you.”

“But when are they going to come to … er, you know … hang me?”

“Not until I tell them to, and if you do exactly as I say, they may not hang you at all.”

Perryn arranged a totally unconvinced smile.

“I see you ate a good dinner. Do you feel like getting up and getting dressed?”

“Whatever you say, my lord.”

“I want to know how you feel.”

“Well enough, then.” Perryn threw back the covers and swung himself up to sit on the edge of the bed. In his long white nightshirt he looked like some impossibly awkward stork. “Er, ah, I’m a bit light-headed.”

“That’s to be expected. Elaeno, hand him his clothes, will you?”

Once Perryn was dressed Nevyn sat him down in a chair right by the charcoal brazier, which was heaped with glowing coals. He’d brought with him a small cloth sack filled with chips of cedar, juniper, and a strange Bardek wood with a sweet but clean scent called sandalwood. Casually he strewed the chips over the coals, where they began to smoke in a concatenation of scent.

“Just somewhat to cleanse the stale humors from the air,” Nevyn said, lying cheerfully. “Ah, we’ve got some good coals. I always like to look into a fire. It always seems that you can see pictures in the coals, doesn’t it?”

“So it does.” Automatically Perryn looked at the lambent flames and the gold-and-ruby palaces among the heaped-up sticks and knobs. “When I was a lad I used to see dragons crawling in the fire. My Mam had lots of tales about dragons and elves and suchlike. I used to wish they were real.”

“It would be pretty, truly.”

Nodding a little, Perryn stared into the brazier while the sweet smoke drifted lazily into the room. When Nevyn opened up the second sight, he noted with a certain professional pleasure that the lad’s aura had expanded to normal from the shrunken size it had been during his illness. The Seven Stars were glowing brightly, but they were all oddly colored and slightly displaced from their proper positions. Nevyn sent a line of light from his own aura to the Star that drifted over Perryn’s forehead and made it swirl, slapping it like a child lashes a top with a whip.

“You see pictures in the coals now, don’t you, lad?” Nevyn whispered. “Tell me what you see. Tell me everything you see.”

“Just a fire. A leaping fire.” Perryn sounded as if he were drunk. “Big logs. It must be winter.”

“Who’s nearby? Who’s sitting at the hearth?”

“Mam and Da. Mam looks so pale. She’s not going to die, is she?”

“How old are you?”

“Four. She
is
going to die. I heard Uncle Benoic yelling at the herbman last night. I don’t want to go live with him.”

“Then go back, go back to the fall of the year. Do you see your Mam? Is she better?”

“She is.”

“Then go back, go back further, to the spring.”

“I see the meadow, and the deer. The hunters are coming. I’ve got to help them, warn them.”

“The hunters?”

“The stag. He’s my friend.”

In his trance Perryn twitched, his mouth working, as he went running into that meadow of memory and chased the deer away before the hunters came. Nevyn supposed that his childish mercy had cost the little lad a good beating, too. He took him back farther, to the winter before, and back again until Perryn saw the face of his wet nurse as she held him to her breast for the first time. And back further, to the pain of his birth, and back yet more, as his soul was swept into the unborn body that grew into the one he now wore, and back and back, until all at once he cried out, twisting in pain, speaking, half-choked, in some language that Nevyn had never heard before.

“By every god!” Elaeno hissed. “What is that tongue?”

Nevyn held up his hand for silence. Perryn talked on, his voice gasping as he relived his last death. Even though his facial features had changed not a jot, he no longer looked like the weasely lad he had moments before—stronger, somehow, his eyes blazing in an ancient hatred as he spat out angry words. At the end his body jerked, half-rising from the chair, then falling back as his voice broke off. Nevyn caught him by the shoulders and shook him, but gently, calling out his name until he awakened.

“My apologies,” Perryn stammered. “I must have fallen asleep or suchlike, looking at the fire. Ye gods, that was a miserable dream.”

“Indeed? Tell me about it.”

“I was skewered. A spear, you see, right through me, pinning me to the ground, and there were enemies, mocking me. Horrible horrible enemies, like goblins or suchlike.” He let his voice fade to a whisper. “They had these big noses and bushy eyebrows, all black and bristly.” Suddenly he shook himself. “I must have been remembering one of those tales my Mam used to tell me.”

“Most like, most like. Here, lad, I must have pushed you too hard. You go back to bed now and rest. We’ll try sitting up again tomorrow.”

Once they had Perryn settled and the guard back at the door, Nevyn and Elaeno returned to the old man’s chamber in the main broch. They sat down with a tankard of mulled ale each to discuss what they’d witnessed.

“I suppose his killers looked ugly to him now because he’s grown used to human beings,” Elaeno said.

“Oho! You’re assuming that those beings were his own kind of people.”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m tempted, truly, but I also think that it’s very unwise to make any assumptions about Perryn at all.”

“Now there I’d most certainly agree with you. Huh. Big noses and bristling black eyebrows. I suppose they could be the goblins or ogres of many an old tale, either from the islands or your kingdom. Odd, how our folk stories do seem to be pretty much alike, with sorcerers, dragons, and some sort of evil ugly being.”

“Except this isn’t a tale, but a memory.”

“True.” Elaeno had a thoughtful sip of his ale from the tankard cradled in his enormous hands. “Well, if they weren’t his people, then he’s from some race or other that lives near our big-nosed friends.”

“What is clear is that he died violently and in anger and hatred. It might be enough to make his spirit flee at the death moment and stray far enough away to get caught up in the wrong sort of birth vortex.”

“So it seems. And it was his ill luck that the womb that caught him was kin to Tieryn Benoic.”

“Who by all accounts was the last man in the kingdom to understand what a strange fish his wife’s sister had netted.” Nevyn shook his head in bafflement. “Well, when he’s stronger we’ll try the fire-vision again, but I think me we’d better wait some days.”

“He couldn’t take the strain right now, truly. How goes the other hunt?”

“For our murdering troublemaker? Very badly indeed. For a while there I thought I was on his trail, but he’s disappeared. The stinking gall of him, trying to attack the child! If I get my claws into him, I’ll tear him limb from limb, I swear it.”

“He doubtless knows it, too. Once he realized that you were looking for him, he probably ran off somewhere to hide.” Elaeno considered the problem for a moment. “Well, maybe if he’s properly scared, he’ll leave us alone.”

“Always full of hope and raw optimism, aren’t you? No doubt he’ll lie quiet for a while, but he’ll come back. His kind always does, like a witch’s curse.”

After being in attendance on the King for two long months, both pleading his cousin Rhodry’s cause and tending to business of his own, Blaen, Gwerbret Cwm Pecl, was profoundly relieved to ride home to his own city of Dun Hiraedd. With the fall harvest his taxes were coming in, and he spent a pleasurable pair of days playing the role of the rough country lord, standing round his ward with the chamberlain and bailiffs and counting up the pigs and chickens, cheeses and barrels of apples, sacks of flour (both white and barley), tuns of mead and ale, as well as the occasional hard coin that was his due. He had a private word or a jest for every man who came to deliver his taxes, whether he was a lord’s chamberlain riding ahead of a pair of laden ox carts or a local farmer carrying a wicker cage of rabbits on his back and a sack of flour in his arms.

Yet soon enough he left the taxes to his highly efficient staff and decided instead to make a small progress among his vassals. There were many lords that he hadn’t seen since the spring at the great feast of Beltane, and he liked to keep a personal eye on potential squabblers and grumblers. He had another reason, as well: to look for some likely parcel of land, at least ten farmsteads worth, to bestow on Rhodry’s woman, Gilyan, Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, along with letters patent of nobility. Although, with a good half of his demesne wilderness, finding the land would be easy, enticing the free farmers to work it was another matter indeed. What counted now, though, was that Jill have land and a tide of her own; the income would be superfluous once she was married to Rhodry and he’d been installed in Aberwyn.

Since his wife, Canyffa, was pregnant, Blaen left her behind to rule dun and rhan in his stead and took only some twenty-five men of his warband along as an honor guard. They rode north first, stopping at Cae Labradd and the dun of the tieryn, Riderrc. To celebrate the gwerbret’s visit there was a great feast one night and a hunting party the next day, but on the third day Blaen told the tieryn that he wanted merely to ride around the rhan on his own. With only five men for an escort he set out in mid-morning, but rather than viewing the tieryn’s fields and woods, he rode straight for town.

Just at the outskirts of Cae Labradd, on the banks of a tributary that flowed into the Canaver a few miles on, stood a brewery that was known as the best in all Cwm Pecl. Set behind a low, grassy earthenwork wall was a cluster of round buildings, freshly white-washed and neatly thatched, the brewer’s living quarters, the malt house, the drying house, the brewing house proper, the storage sheds and, off to one side, the pigsty and the cowbarn. When Blaen turned off the road and led his men toward the brewery, they all cheered him, quite spontaneously and sincerely.

Over the door of the main house hung a rough broom of birch twigs, scented with strong ale, a sign that customers could buy a tankard or a tun as it suited them. When Blaen and his men dismounted, a stout gray-haired woman with a long white apron over her blue dresses hurried out and curtsied.

“Oh my, oh my, it’s the gwerbret himself. Veddyn, get out here! It’s the gwerbret and his men! Oh my, oh my! Your Grace, such a great honor, oh you must try some of our new dark and there’s a cask of bitter, too, oh my, oh my!”

“Don’t dither, woman! Gods! You’ll drive his grace daft.” Tall and lean, hawk-nosed, and perfectly bald, Veddyn strolled out and made Blaen a perfunctory bow. “Honored, Your Grace. What brings you to us?”

“Thirst, mostly, good Veddyn. Do you have tankards enough for me and mine?”

“It’d be a poor brewery that couldn’t serve six travelers, Your Grace. Just you all tie up those horses and come inside.”

Blaen handed his captain a handful of silver to pay for the ale, ushered his men inside, then lingered briefly in the yard with Twdilla while Veddyn followed them in. Once they were alone, she dropped her dithery ways.

“I take it that Your Grace is here for news?”

“That, and to look in on Camdel, poor lad. Is he any better?”

“Quite a bit, actually, but he’ll never be right in the head again after what they did to him.” She crossed her fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft. “He’s mucking out the cowbarn at the moment, so I’ll wager Your Grace doesn’t want …”

“By the gods, it doesn’t matter to me what he smells like. Let’s stroll over, shall we?”

As it turned out, they found Camdel sitting behind the cowbarn on an old stump and eating his lunch, a chunk of bread and slices of yellow cheese laid out neatly on an old linen napkin. When he saw Blaen, he got up and bowed with a sweeping courtly gesture that went ill with his dirty shirt and brown brigga, but although his eyes betrayed a flicker of recognition, he didn’t truly remember Blaen and had to be told his name. He was, however, physically healthy again and even somewhat happy, smiling as he spoke of his quiet life at the brewery. Blaen was well-pleased. The last time he’d seen the man, Camdel had been a quivering shrieking wreck, stick-thin and utterly mad from the tortures of those who followed the dark dweomer.

And now, or so Blaen had been told, his beloved cousin, Rhodry was in the hands of those same evil men. Although he generally could keep the thought at bay, at times, when he least expected it, when he was talking with some vassal or merely walking down a corridor or looking idly from a window, the memory would rise up like an assassin and stab him: Rhodry could be suffering like Camdel did. With the thought came a breathless rage, a gasp for air that seared his chest and made him swear yet one more time a vengeance vow: if these evil magicians had made his cousin suffer for so much as the length of a cockcrow, then nothing on earth, not king nor dweomer, would stop him from raising an army and sweeping down on Bardek like a flock of eagles, even if he had to bankrupt his rhan and call in every honor debt and alliance anyone had ever owed him. Since he made the vow to his gods as well as to the honor of his clan, it was no idle boast.

He would have been surprised to know that the Dark Brotherhoods knew of his rage but pleased to learn that they feared it.

The central plateau and especially the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending from the knife edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parceled out land grants to their supporters at whim, since the hawks and field mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land owners in turn rented out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a further benefit, the archons and the laws were far, far away, so that a grant holder could live as he pleased, rather like a Deverry lord.