“Indeed? Well, you’ve had a hard life.”
Olaen never woke again but died just as the first dawn silvered the sky. Nevyn had the guards summon servants to clean up the murderous filth and lay the dead out properly, then went down to the cookhouse behind the dun. Although he’d hoped to find the cooks and question them, what he found was chaos. Half the high-ranking servants had fled the dun and taken their tools with them. Cleavers, iron kettles, and the like fetched a high price in the war-torn kingdom. Maryn’s own servants were trying to restore order and scratch together some kind of breakfast for the prince, his noble allies, guards, councillors, and themselves while keeping a cautious eye on those who’d once served the false king. Merely from watching, Nevyn realized that no one in the confusion of preparing last night’s meal would have noticed Oggyn or a plate of honeycakes coming in or going out.
Nevyn also realized that he didn’t even know the poison’s name. How could he go to Maryn babbling of poisoners if he couldn’t even name the thing out? He paused in the ward and looked up at the tower where Lady Merodda was imprisoned. That wretched fool of a bard! he thought. There’s so much I could ask her if only the prince had been able to pardon her! There’s so much I need to ask her—in his mind he could see all too vividly the image of the lead tablet, scribed with evil dweomer in the ancient tongue. What did it mean? How could he turn it harmless? Merodda would never tell him now, and he couldn’t even find it in his heart to blame her.
It occurred to him, however, that Lilli might know about her mother’s poisons. He was heading out of the dun gates toward the encampment when he heard someone call his name and saw one of Lilli’s maidservants hurrying toward him.
“My lord Nevyn!” Clodda said. “Have you seen our lady?”
“I’ve not. Did she leave her tent?”
“She never came back to it last night. We’ve been ever so worried. I couldn’t find Tieryn Anasyn or you when I went to look.”
“Well, I’m here now. Go back to the tent and wait there. I’ll look for her.”
As soon as the lass was gone, Nevyn leaned against the wall and glanced at the sky—apparently just an idle look at the clouds, but he was scrying Lilli out. He saw her immediately, sitting fully dressed at the end of a bed in a chamber, up in the main dun from the look of it. But where? He went back and in the great hall he found one of the servants left over from the old regime. The girl did indeed know what suites had formerly belonged to the Boars, and for a copper was glad enough to tell him.
“And Lady Lillorigga had the smallish one, right down at the end.”
When Nevyn found the chamber, he knocked, then kept knocking until Lilli let him in. He first thought she’d taken ill. Her hair hung in dull wisps around her dead-pale face, and dark circles pouched under her eyes.
“What’s so wrong?” Nevyn said.
“I—I had terrible nightmares.”
Lilli sank down on a wooden chest at the room’s one narrow window. When the morning sun glared on her face, she winced and got up, stood looking around her, then finally sat on the end of her bed. Nevyn took the seat in the window.
“Terrible they must have been,” he said. “About what awaits your mother?”
“Some of that, truly. Although it gladdens my heart she’s going to die.”
“Because of Lady Bevyan?”
Lilli nodded, then reached up with a trembling hand and began trying to brush her still-short hair back from her face. She would tuck a strand into place only to have another fall forward, over and over, until he felt like screaming at her to stop.
“What are you doing up here?” Nevyn said. “Your lasses are worried about you.”
“Oh ye gods! Last night, I was just so upset. I bolted for my old chamber without thinking.”
“Lilli.” Nevyn softened his voice. “Somewhat’s gravely wrong, isn’t it?”
“I went to talk with my mother last night. I’m sorry now.”
“Did she curse you?”
“She did, and she told me,” a long pause, “things.”
“Things?”
Finally she stopped fussing with her hair and clasped her hands in her lap.
“Did you want to see me about somewhat?” Lilli said.
“I did.” Nevyn considered, then decided to leave his prying till later. “The poison your mother had, do you know its name?”
“Dwarven Salts. Brour called it that.”
“Not much of a name, but it will do. And how did it work?”
“You put it in someone’s food or drink, and then it ate at their vitals. It was terrible, just like someone dying from eating tainted meat or spoiled milk. There was one woman, Caetha, and everyone said my mother poisoned her because—” She broke off, staring out at nothing.
“Well, your mother did confess to one poisoning.”
“Then it’s true.” Lilli was whispering and mostly to herself. “Everything points to it being true.”
“The poisoning?”
Lilli stared at him, her mouth a little slack.
“What’s so wrong?” Nevyn said again. “I can see it’s somewhat truly grave, or I wouldn’t be badgering you like this.”
Lilli turned her head and stared at the wall.
“Mother told me,” she said, “she told me that I’m really a bastard, that her husband wasn’t my father.”
“Ah. Well, no wonder you’re so troubled! My heart goes out to you, lass, but no one need ever know. Here, Aethan wasn’t your father, was he?”
“I only wish.” Lilli paused as if gathering her strength. “She told me that my father—that my father was—well, her own brother. My uncle.”
Nevyn caught his breath in surprise. At the sound Lilli looked his way.
“I thought she was just saying it to hurt me,” she went on. “But all kinds of things he did make sense if he was my father.”
“I see. Well, it’s no crime of yours, child. You weren’t there at your begetting.”
Lilli merely shrugged the comfort away. She was doubtless remembering all the things that people said about children of incest, that they were cursed by the gods and doomed to an early death. In his long experience none of this had ever held true, and he was groping for some reassuring words when she suddenly cried out, one sharp sob.
“It’s almost midday,” Lilli whispered. “They’ll be hanging her soon.”
“They will. Don’t go watch.”
“I don’t want to. Will you stay here till they’re done?”
“I will. I suspect that you’ll know when it’s over.”
She nodded and went back to fussing with the strands of hair. Nevyn leaned back against the window’s edge and turned a little to look out. All he saw were towers and far below, a strip of cobbled ground. Wherever they would be hanging Merodda, it was mercifully out of sight. If only he could have offered her a full pardon! Perhaps she would have told him about the curse-tablet in return for her life if that life had promised freedom and rank. But Maddyn would never back down now.
“You look troubled,” Lilli said.
“I am. Your mother murdered two women who had no power to fight for their lives, and she’s worked unspeakable dweomers against our prince, but still, I would rather she had been spared.”
“So would I.” Lilli’s voice broke suddenly into weeping. “Oh ye gods! So would I!”
“Well, come along!” Maddyn said. “It’s time to go.”
“Go where?” Branoic said.
“To watch Merodda hang.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What? What’s wrong with you?”
Branoic merely shrugged. He didn’t understand himself sometimes, and this was one of them. He should want to see the prince’s executioner take Aethan’s revenge for him, shouldn’t he? Maddyn set his hands on his hips and glared at him.
“You go,” Branoic said. “You can tell me about it.”
With one last shrug Maddyn turned and strode out of the great hall. Almost everyon
e in the dun seemed to agree with the bard about this morning’s entertainment. Branoic was left alone with one serving girl, who sat weeping on the bottom step of the curving staircase. On an impulse he got up and walked over.
“What’s so wrong?” he said.
“They can say what they like about Lady Merodda,” the girl snivelled. “But she saved my life and my baby’s too, when the battle was on.”
“Did she now? That’s the first good thing I’ve heard about her.”
The girl wiped her face on her sleeve. She was wearing much better clothes than the usual wench, better enough to make him wonder if she too were a lady in disguise, until she pulled up the hem of her overdress and blew her nose upon it.
“Ah well,” Branoic said. “At least the lady will have someone to mourn her. It would be a hard thing to leave the earth knowing everyone was celebrating your going.”
She nodded and let the dress hem fall.
“That’s true,” she said. “Oh ye gods, I’d best hurry! I was supposed to bring some water upstairs, for that old man, the councillor, the one with hair.”
“Nevyn’s upstairs?”
“He said there was a lady with him who’d been taken faint.”
Lilli, I’ll wager! Branoic thought.
“Here, I’ll take it up,” he said aloud. “And a bit of mead, too, should help.”
With a goblet of mead in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, Branoic trotted upstairs to find an impatient Nevyn standing out in the corridor.
“What happened to that lass?” the old man said.
“She was overcome with grief, like, my lord. Merodda had done her a good turn or two.”
Behind Nevyn stood an open door; Branoic ducked around him and carried the water inside before Nevyn could say a word against it. Sure enough, Lilli was sitting on the end of the bed, all pale and puffy-eyed—with grief, he assumed.
“My lady,” Branoic said. “My heart aches for your loss.”
“Oh, does it really?” she snapped. “I don’t want false sympathy! I know you hated my mother.”
“Well, then, it aches because you’re so sad.”
“That’s better.”
“But I didn’t hate her.” Branoic glanced around for a table, found none, and put the pitcher and goblet down on the windowsill instead. “It’s our Maddo who’s gone daft on the subject, not me. All I cared about was the wrong she did Aethan, and by the gods, when she said she wanted to ride off with him, maybe I’m a dolt, but I believed her.”
“So did I,” Nevyn said. “And it’s a pity the gods didn’t allow it. The omens would be a cursed sight better for the new kingdom if they had.”
Branoic was about to ask what he meant when from out in the ward a roar went up, a crowd of voices all raised in mockery and cheers.
“It’s over,” Lilli said.
Branoic was expecting her to weep, but instead she lay down across the end of the bed and curled up like a dog in straw. Nevyn hurried round and sat next to her.
“Get out, Branoic,” the old man snapped. “Now.”
Branoic turned and fled. He avoided angering sorcerers as a matter of principle.
Although the priests had decreed that Maryn could not become High King until the white mare had been found, they saw nothing wrong with the prince celebrating his victory with a feast. In Dun Deverry’s stores lay the best of a spring harvest, laid up for men now dead in a siege now over. All afternoon servants kept bringing food and mead, while bards sang manfully against the noise, and the laughter went round like the drink. Nevyn, however, slipped away from the feast early. While it was still light, he wanted to look in on some of the most badly wounded men. In their improvised hospital—they’d commandeered one of the barracks buildings—he found Caudyr there ahead of him.
“I just sent a page to find you,” Caudyr said.
“Well, I was coming here on my own. Is somewhat wrong?”
“Very. Come look at this.”
Caudyr took him to the bunk of a young lad whose wounds Nevyn had dressed the day before: a slice across the body that had broken several ribs and a gash from a javelin along the side of his thigh. Both wounds had bled but neither had seemed likely to kill him. Now he lay deathly still with barely the life to turn his eyes Nevyn’s way. In the flickering lantern light his skin looked bluish-white. Nevyn laid a hand on the boy’s face and found his skin clammy cold.
“His cuts have gone septic?” Nevyn said.
“They’ve not. I just changed the bandages, and everything’s clean.”
Nevyn squatted down to look into the boy’s eyes. The boy seemed to be about to speak, then died. One moment he was looking at Nevyn; the next he stiffened and simply stopped breathing. Nevyn swore and grabbed him by the shoulders, but his head lolled back with an unseeing stare for the ceiling. Caudyr let fly with a string of curses worthy of a silver dagger.
“It’s like he didn’t have the strength to live,” Caudyr said. “But last night he ate and drank, and he was talking, too. He should have recovered.”
Nevyn rose and looked around. Most of the men in this end of the barracks were so badly wounded that they had no energy to spare for another’s death; those who were awake lay staring at the ceiling or were curled up with pain. Some moaned; some wept. None would have seen—seen what? he asked himself. He glanced at the dead boy again and noticed a swollen mark on his lips, as if a bee had stung him twice, once on the upper, once on the lower.
“Here!” Nevyn said. “That’s odd! Have you seen bees in here?”
“What?” Caudyr was looking at him as if he thought Nevyn had gone daft. “What do you mean, bees?”
“Well, I don’t think a horsefly would have left that mark.”
“A sting, you mean?” Caudyr scratched his head while he thought. “Not any bees in here that I noticed. They had kitchen gardens in the dun, so I suppose there must be a hive or two around somewhere. It seems a blasted strange thing to die of, anyway.”
“I did see it once, a child stung by a bee who went into convulsions and died. But surely someone would have noticed if this fellow had thrown fits right here in his bunk.”
“So you’d think! I’m well and truly baffled, Nevyn. I can’t see any reason on earth for this lad to die like this.”
“No more can I. He wasn’t important enough for anyone to poison, even.”
“Just so. Ah, that reminds me—”
Nevyn held up a hand for silence.
“Get someone to take that poor lad away and bury him,” Nevyn said. “Then meet me in my tent.”
Nevyn had not forgotten the problem of Oggyn’s possible murders. Or one murder, truly, as he remarked to Caudyr later that night.
“The young king was doomed, anyway. No one but me would hold him to account for that.”
“Just so,” Caudyr said. “And the poor nursemaid wasn’t even noble-born.”
“If I gathered enough evidence, Maryn wouldn’t let that stop him. From what the servants here have told me, Rwla—that was her name, Rwla—has no living kin. If she did, it would gladden my heart to make Oggyn pay over a stiff lwdd for her. But since she doesn’t, all the king can do is hang him.”
“Or send him into exile. But curse it, Oggyn’s too useful. The king needs men like him. Winning a war’s one thing. Restoring the kingdom’s quite another.”
“That’s true, and the apportioning of taxes and scrounging the coin to rebuild the city are things Oggyn will understand.”
They looked at each other, and Nevyn realized that Caudyr shared his weariness. In that moment, he knew that he would never gather the evidence against Oggyn. It’s another little wound, isn’t it? he told himself. Merodda’s curse. It’s going to be a matter of small corruptions and little faults, but in time, they’ll touch the king himself—unless I can stop it.
“What’s wrong?” Caudyr said sharply.
“Naught, naught. I’m just very tired.”
“No doubt. Here, I’ll be going. Get s
ome sleep. Your fellow physician commands it.”
“Very well, and I’ll follow the order gladly.”
And yet, although he did lie down and try to sleep, Nevyn lay awake for many a long hour. Nothing would ever take Maryn’s victory away, not the mightiest black dweomer in the world. The dweomer of Light had turned the tide of history and swept back the sea of blood against all hope. In the inner planes the balance was righting itself deep within the Deverry group-mind, and there would be peace for the kingdom. But the curse-tablet and the sheer malice it represented could reach out filthy hands and infect those who had won the victory, turning all their joy into a sickness of the soul.
Finally he called upon the Light that he had served so faithfully. If he could win the battle at all, he would win it in the name of the Light and not by his own strength alone. At last then he could sleep, and for the first time in months, he slept soundly.
With the dun given over to Prince Maryn, Lilli reclaimed her old chamber. She had her maids bring her things up from the tent and add them to her own clothes in her wooden chest, which had stayed untouched. Doubtless no one had had time to worry about a traitor’s pitifully few belongings. Clodda folded everything neatly, then reached in with a small laugh.
“Part of your dowry, my lady?” She held up the front of what would have been Braemys’s wedding shirt.
“So it was.” Lilli took the piece from her. “You may go now. Tell Oggyn to find you and Nalla a nice place to sleep. Tell him I’ll make sure it’s nice, too, so he’d better not skimp you.”
Clodda curtsied and hurried out. Lilli closed the chest, then sat down and laid the piece of shirt in her lap. Bevyan had embroidered those rows of interlace and added the Boar blazon on the yoke above them. Lilli stroked the stitches, so smooth and tiny, with her fingertips, but instead of grief, she felt only weariness.
“They hanged your murderer, Bevva,” she said aloud. “I wish I thought you’d be pleased. You’d probably forgive her, knowing you.”
But I can’t. The thought hung in her mind, too painful to voice, even to the empty air.
That night Lilli dreamt of her mother. In the dream she was a child new to Dun Deverry, and she’d gotten lost in the tangle of towers and wards. She looked down a long corridor and saw Bevyan standing at the end, but when she went running to meet her, the figure turned into Merodda, holding a dagger. Lilli screamed and turned to run, only to find Burcan blocking the way, and he, too, held a knife upraised. She woke with a cry to find herself standing next to the bed, clutching a blanket in one hand.