‘Who’s this, Da?’ she said.
‘A friend of Nevyn’s.’
Hastily she scrambled up and dropped Maddyn a curtsey. She was very pretty, with raven-black hair and dark, calm eyes. Maddyn bowed to her in return.
‘You’ll forgive me for imposing on you,’ Maddyn said. ‘I haven’t been well, and I need a bit of a rest.’
‘Any friend of Nevyn’s is always welcome here,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and I’ll get you some ale.’
Maddyn took off his cloak, then sat down on the hearthstone as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his shirt. Announcing that he had to get back to the cows, Bannyc strolled outside. The woman handed Maddyn a tankard of dark ale, then sat down near him and picked up her mending again.
‘My thanks.’ Maddyn saluted her with the ale. ‘My name’s Maddyn of … uh, well, just Maddyn will do.’
‘Mine’s Belyan. Have you known Nevyn long?’
‘Oh, not truly.’
Belyan gave him an oddly awestruck smile and began sewing. Maddyn sipped his ale and watched her slender fingers work deftly on the rough wool of a pair of brigga, Bannyc’s, by the large size of them. He was surprised at how good it felt to be sitting warm and alive in the presence of a pretty woman. Every now and then, Belyan hesitantly looked his way, as if she were trying to think of something to say.
‘Well, my lord,’ she said at last. ‘Will you be staying long with our Nevyn?’
‘I don’t truly know, but here, what makes you call me lord? I’m as common-born as you are.’
‘Well – but a friend of Nevyn’s.’
At that Maddyn realized that she knew perfectly well that the old man was dweomer.
‘Now here, what do you think I am?’ Maddyn had the uneasy feeling that it was very dangerous to pretend to dweomer you didn’t have. ‘I’m only a rider without a warband. Nevyn was good enough to save my life when he found me wounded, that’s all. But here, don’t tell anyone about me, will you? I’m an outlawed man.’
‘I’ll forget your name the minute you ride on.’
‘My humble thanks, and my apologies. I don’t even deserve to be drinking your ale.’
‘Oh hold your tongue! What do I care about these rotten wars?’
When he looked at her, he found her angry, her mouth set hard in a bitter twist.
‘I don’t care the fart of a two-copper piglet,’ she went on. ‘All it’s ever brought to me and mine is trouble. They take our horses and raise our taxes and ride through our grain, and all in the name of glory and the one true King, or so they call him, when everyone with wits in his head knows there’s two kings now, and why should I care, truly, as long as they don’t both come here a-bothering us. If you’re one man who won’t die in this war, then I say good for you.’
‘Ye gods. Well, truly, I never thought of it that way before.’
‘No doubt, since you were a rider once.’
‘Here, I’m not exactly a deserter or suchlike.’
She merely shrugged and went back to her sewing. Maddyn wondered why a woman of her age, twenty-two or so, was living in her father’s house. Had she lost a betrothed in the wars? The question was answered for him in a moment when two small lads, about six and four, came running into the room and calling her Mam. They were fighting over a copper they’d found in the road and came to her to settle it. Belyan gave them each a kiss and told them they’d have to give the copper to their gran, then sent them back outside.
‘So you’re married, are you?’ Maddyn said.
‘I was once. Their father drowned in the river two winters ago. He was setting a fish-trap, but the ice turned out to be too thin.’
‘That aches my heart, truly. So you came back to your father?’
‘I did. Da needed a woman around the house, and he’s good to my lads. That’s what matters to me.’
‘Then it gladdens my heart to hear that you’re happy.’
‘Happy?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Oh, I don’t think much of things like happiness, just as long as the lads are well.’
Maddyn could feel her loneliness, lying just under her faint, mocking smile. His body began to wonder about her, a flicker of sexual warmth, another sign that life was coming back to him. She looked at him steadily, her dark eyes patient, self-contained, almost unreadable.
‘And what will you do now?’ she said. ‘Ride on before the snows come?’
‘Nevyn doesn’t think I’ll be fit by then, but sooner or later I have to go. It’ll mean my life if I stay. They hang outlawed men.’
‘So they do.’
Belyan considered him for a moment more, then got up briskly, as if she’d come to some decision, and strode out of the room through a blanket-hung door in one of the wickerwork walls. He was just finishing his tankard when she returned, carrying a shirt, which she tossed into his lap when she sat back down.
‘That was my husband’s,’ she said. ‘It’s too small for Da, and it’ll rot before the lads grow to fit it. Take it. You need a shirt that doesn’t have foxes embroidered all over it.’
‘Ye gods! I forgot about that. No wonder you thought I was a deserter, then. Well, my humble thanks.’
He smoothed it out, studying with admiration the sleeves, stiff with finely embroidered interlacing and spirals, and at the yokes, floral bands. It had probably been her husband’s wedding shirt because it was unlikely that her man had owned two pieces of such fancy clothing, but still, it was a good bit safer for him to wear than one with his dead lord’s blazon. He took off his old shirt and gave it to her.
‘Do you want this for the cloth? You can mend the lads’ tunics out of it.’
‘So I can. My thanks.’
She was looking at the scar along his side, a thick clot of tissue in his armpit, a thinner gash along his ribs. Hurriedly he pulled the new shirt over his head and smoothed it down.
‘It fits well enough. You’re generous to a dishonoured man.’
‘Better than letting it rot. I put a lot of fancy work into that.’
‘Do you miss your man still?’
‘At times.’ She paused, considering for a few moments. ‘I do, at that. He was a good man. He didn’t beat me, and we always had enough to eat. When he had the leisure, he’d whittle little horses and wagons for the lads, and he made sure I had a new dress every spring.’
It came to that for her, he realized, not the glories of love and the tempests of passion that the bard songs celebrated for noble audiences. He’d met plenty of women like Belyan, farm women, all of them, whose real life ran apart from their men in a self-contained earthiness of work and children. Since their work counted as much as their men’s towards feeding and sheltering themselves and their kin, it gave them a secure place of their own, unlike the wives of the noble lords, who existed at their husbands’ whims. Yet Belyan was lonely; at times she missed her man. Maddyn was aware of his body, and the wondering was growing stronger. When she smiled at him, he smiled in return.
The door banged open and, shouting and laughing, the two lads ushered in Nevyn. Although he joked easily with the boys, the old man turned grim when he reached Maddyn.
‘You were right to stay out here, lad. I like that new shirt you’re wearing.’
Belyan automatically began rolling up the old one, hiding the fox-blazoned yokes inside the roll.
‘Tieryn Devyr is up at Brynoic’s dun,’ Nevyn went on. ‘He’s going to assign the lands to his son, Romyl, and give the lad part of his warband to hold them. That means men who know you will be riding the roads around here. I think we’ll just go home the back way.’
For several days after, Maddyn debated the risk of riding on his own, then finally went down to see Belyan by a roundabout way. When he led the horse into the farmstead, it seemed deserted. The wooden wagon was gone, and not even a dog ran out to bark at him. As he stood there, puzzling, Belyan came walking out of the barn with a wooden bucket in one hand. Maddyn liked her firm but supple stride.
‘Da’s taken the lads down to market,’ she said. ‘We had extra cheeses to sell.’
‘Will they be gone long?’
‘Till sunset, most like. I was hoping you’d ride our way today.’
Maddyn took his horse to the barn and tied him up in a stall next to one of the cows, where he’d be out of the wind and, more importantly, out of sight of the road. When he went into the house, he found Belyan putting more wood in the hearth. She wiped her hands on her skirts, then glanced at him with a small, secretive smile.
‘It’s cold in my bedchamber, Maddo. Come sit down by the fire.’
They sat down together in the soft clean straw by the hearth. When he touched her hair with a shy stroke, she laid impatient hands on his shoulders. When he kissed her, she slipped her hands behind his neck and pulled him down to her as smoothly as if she were gathering in a sheaf of wheat.
The winter was slow in coming that year. There was one flurry of snow, then only the cold under a clear sky, day after day of aching frost and wind. Although the pale sun managed to melt the first snowfall, rime lay cold and glittering on the brown fields and in the ditches along the roads. Maddyn spent the days out of sight in Brin Toraedic, because Lord Romyl’s men were often out prowling, riding back and forth to the village to exercise their horses and to get themselves out of the dun. Maddyn would sleep late, then practise his harp by the hour with the Wildfolk for an audience. Sometimes Nevyn would sit and listen, or even make a judicious comment about his singing or the song itself, but the old man spent much of his day deep within the broken hill. Maddyn never had the nerve to ask him what he did there.
One afternoon when Nevyn was gone, Maddyn remembered a song about Dilly Blind, the trickiest Wildfolk of them all. Since it was a children’s song, he hadn’t heard it in years, but he ran through it several times and made up fresh verses when he couldn’t remember the old. The Wildfolk clustered close and listened, enraptured. When he finally finished it, for the briefest of moments he thought he saw – or perhaps did indeed see – little faces, little eyes, peering up at him. Then, suddenly, they were gone. When Nevyn returned later, Maddyn mentioned his vision – if such it was – to the old man, who looked honestly startled.
‘If you do start seeing them, lad, for the sake of every god, don’t go telling people about it. You’ll be mocked within a bare thread of your life.’
‘Oh, I know that, sure enough. I’m just puzzled. I never had so much as a touch of the second sight before.’
‘Truly? That’s odd, because bards so often do have the sight. But anyway, lad, you’re doubtless picking it up just from being here with us. Suppose you laid your sword down close to the fire in the hearth. In time, the blade would grow hot, even though it wasn’t in the fire itself. Being in a centre of dweomer power can do that to a man with a sensitive mind.’
With a little shudder Maddyn looked around the towering stone chamber. A centre of power? he thought; truly, you can feel it sometimes.
‘Well,’ Maddyn said at last. ‘It was a strange chance that brought me here.’
‘Perhaps. But naught happens to a dweomerman by chance, especially not in these cursed and troubled times.’
‘I take it the wars ache your heart.’
‘Of course they do, dolt! If you had any sense, they’d ache yours too.’
‘Well, good sir, I’ve never known anything but war. Sometimes I wonder if the days of the old kingdom are like the tales in some of my songs – splendid to hear, but never true.’
‘Oh, they were real enough. There was a time when a man could ride the roads in peace, and the farmers gather in their crops in safety, and a man have a son and feel sure that he’d live to see the lad live to be grown and married. Good days, they were, and I pray constantly that they’ll come again.’
Maddyn felt a sudden longing to know that kind of life. Before, he’d wanted battle glory and honour, taken it for granted that there would always be wars to provide them, but all at once he wondered if glory were the great prize he’d always believed it to be. Later, when he went out to walk on the top of the hill, he found that the snow had been falling all morning. For miles around, the world was soft and white under a pearly grey sky, the trees etched against the horizon, the distant village snug under a breath of smoke from its chimneys. He’d seen views like it a hundred times and thought nothing of them, but now it was beautiful, so beautiful that he wondered if he’d ever really looked at anything before he’d ridden up to the gates of the Otherlands.
At night, whenever the weather allowed, Maddyn rode down to see Belyan. At first he was afraid that Bannyc would resent this outlaw who’d ridden in and taken his daughter, but the old man regarded him with a certain pleasant indifference. Her sons were a different matter. The younger one found him a nuisance, and the elder frankly hated him. Maddyn took to arriving late at the farm, when he could be sure they were asleep, because Belyan made it clear that the lads came first in her heart – fair enough, he thought, since they both knew he’d be riding on in the spring. Yet, whenever he held her in his arms, the spring seemed very far away.
Once the snows came in force, it was hard to ride down to her bed as often as Maddyn wanted. One night, after a frustrating week of being snowbound in the hill, he left early and pushed his horse hard through the heavy drifts. He stabled his horse, then climbed in through Belyan’s chamber window, pushing the oiled hides aside and cursing while she laughed at him. Although she had a freestanding clay stove in the chamber, it was still bitter cold. He threw off his cloak, pulled off his boots, then got into bed before undressing the rest of the way.
‘Your chamber’s as cold as the blasted roads!’
‘Then come over to my side of the bed. It’s nice and warm.’
When he took her in his arms, she turned to him greedily with a simple, direct passion that still took him by surprise. She didn’t know how to be coy and flirtatious like the other women he’d had. When would she have had the time to learn, he wondered, and it didn’t bother him one whit. Later, as he lay drowsing between sleep and waking, he found himself considering staying in the spring. Bannyc would be glad to have an extra man to help work the farm; Bell would be glad to have him in her bed every night; the lads could gradually be won over. While Maddyn didn’t love her, he liked her, and it would do well enough all round. Yet he didn’t dare stay. For the first time, he saw clearly that he was indeed running for his life. Any lord in Cantrae who recognized him would turn him over to Devyr for hanging. He was going to have to ride west, ride fast and far enough to find a lord who’d never heard of him or Lord Brynoic and one who was desperate enough for men to take him on with no questions asked. Most likely, he’d end up riding for one of the enemy sides in the long wars, a Cerrmor ally or an Eldidd lord. He kissed Belyan awake and made love to her again, simply to drown his thoughts of the future ahead of him.
That night the snow was so bad that Maddyn risked staying the night. It was pleasant, sleeping with his arms around Bell, so pleasant that he was tempted to risk doing it often, but when he came out of her chamber in the morning, he found some of Bannyc’s neighbours there, eating bread and drinking ale while they chatted by the hearth. Although they were pleasant to him, Maddyn had the grim experience of finding himself the undoubted focus of four pairs of eyes and – no doubt – a good bit of future gossip. If any of that gossip reached the wrong ears, he would be in danger. After that, he rode only at night and left her house well before dawn.
Yet for all his precautions, the night came when Maddyn ran across some of Romyl’s men. Just at midnight, he was picking his way across the fields on his way back to Brin Toraedic. A cold wind drove torn and scudding clouds across the sky, alternately covering and sailing free of a full moon. He could see the hill close by, a jagged blackness rising out of the meadow and looming against the sky, when he heard the jingle of bridles carrying in the clear night air. Horses snorted; hoofbeats were trotting fast down the road. Nearby was a leafless copse, an imperfect shelter, but the best Maddyn could find. As he guided his horse into the trees, the branches dropped snow, scattering it over his hood and cloak. Maddyn sat as still as he could and waited. He refused to make an obvious dash for the hill. If he were going to be caught, he didn’t want Nevyn hanged with him.
Trotting in tight formation, six riders came down the road. When they were directly abreast of the copse, they paused and wheeled their horses into a ring to argue about which direction to take at the crossroads ahead. Maddyn could clearly hear that they were more than a bit drunk. In an almost tangible swirl of concern and bewilderment, the Wildfolk clustered around him to listen as the argument in the road went on and on. Then Maddyn’s horse stamped, shivering uncontrollably in the cold with a jingle of tack. One of the riders turned in the saddle and saw him. Maddyn urged his horse slowly forward; he would rather surrender, he realized, than put Nevyn, and possibly Belyan, at risk.
‘Danger,’ he whispered to the Wildfolk. ‘Tell Nevyn.’
He felt some of them rush away, but the others crowded round, a trembling of small lives like gusts of warmer air.
‘You!’ the rider called. ‘Come forward!’
With a sinking heart, Maddyn recognized Selyn, one of Devyr’s men who knew him well. With Selyn at their head, the riders trotted over, spreading out in a semicircle to surround and trap him. Since it was a hopeless situation, Maddyn rode out to meet them. In the moonlight, he could just see an expression of exaggerated surprise on Selyn’s face.
‘Maddyn! Oh by the gods!’ His voice was a frightened hiss. ‘It’s long past Samaen.’
One of the others yelped sharply, like a kicked hound. The group pulled their horses to an abrupt halt, just as Maddyn felt the Wildfolk rushing about him in panic, lifting and trembling the edges of his cloak and hood.
‘Now, here, Maddo lad, don’t harm us. I used to be a friend of yours. It was only my lord’s orders that ever made us lift a sword against you. May peace be yours in the Otherlands.’
As Selyn began edging his nervous horse backwards, the truth hit Maddyn: Selyn, who thought he was dead with all the rest of Brynoic’s warband, could only assume that he was seeing Maddyn’s spirit. The thought made him laugh aloud. It was the perfect thing to do; the entire squad began edging their horses backwards, but they never took their terrified eyes off Maddyn’s face. Such profound attention was more than any bard could resist. Maddyn tossed his head back and howled, a long eerie note, sending his trained voice as far and high as he could. A rider shrieked, and the sound broke the squad.
‘Spirits!’ Selyn screamed. ‘Save yourselves.’
With a giggle of pure, delighted malice, the Wildfolk threw themselves forward among the horses. In the moonlight Maddyn could see them: a thickening in the air like frost crystals, little faces, little hands, fingers that began pinching every horse and rider they could reach. The horses kicked and plunged; the riders yelled, slapping at their mounts with their reins as they desperately tried to turn them. When Maddyn howled a second time, the horses lurched sideways and charged for the road at a gallop with their riders clinging to their necks. Maddyn sat in his saddle and sobbed with laughter until the Wildfolk returned. In a companionable crowd, he rode back to the hill, whose legend had just grown a good bit larger. As he led his horse into the stable, Nevyn came running to meet him.
‘What’s all this about danger?’
‘All over now, good sir, but it’s a pretty tale. I think I’ll make a song about it.’
First, though, he simply told the tale to Nevyn over a tankard of mulled ale, and the old man laughed his dry chuckle that always sounded rusty from long disuse.
‘The battlefield where your warband fell is only about five miles from here, certainly close enough for a haunt. One thing, though, if they ride back in the morning, they’ll see the hoofprints of your horse.’ Nevyn looked at a spot close to his right knee. ‘Do us a favour, will you? Take some of the lads and go out to the field. Do you remember the tracks Maddyn’s horse made? You do? Splendid! Sweep those away like a good lad, but leave all the other tracks where they are. We’ll have a good jest on those nasty men.’
Maddyn could feel that the crowd was gone, except for a tiny blue sprite. All at once, he saw her clearly, perched on his knee and sucking her finger while she stared up at him with alarmingly vacant green eyes. When she smiled, she revealed a mouth full of needle-sharp, bright blue teeth.
‘Oho!’ Nevyn said. ‘You see her, don’t you?’
‘I do, at that. Will I go on seeing the Wildfolk after I leave here?’
‘I’d imagine so, but I don’t truly know. I haven’t come across a puzzle like you before, lad.’
Maddyn had the ungrateful thought that if he were a puzzle, then Nevyn was the greatest riddle in the world.
The next afternoon, Nevyn rode down to the village to hear the gossip and brought back the tale of Maddyn’s meeting with the squad in its new and doubtless permanent form. Lord Romyl’s men had foolishly ridden by Brin Toraedic in moonlight, when every lackwit knows you should avoid the hill like poison during the full moon. There, sure enough, they’d seen the ghosts of Lord Brynoic’s entire warband, charging across the meadow just as they had during the last battle. Yet in the morning, when the riders went back to look, they found the hoofprints of only their own horses.
‘“And what did they think they’d find?” the tavernman says to me,’ Nevyn said with a dry laugh. ‘Everyone knows that spirits don’t leave tracks.’
‘So they did come back, did they? I’m cursed glad you thought of that.’
‘Oh, it’s one thing to be spirit-plagued by moonlight, quite another to think things over in the cold light of dawn. But they found naught for all their looking, and now none of Lord Romyl’s men will ride near the hill, even in daylight.’
‘Isn’t that a handy thing?’
‘It is, but ye gods, you warriors are a superstitious lot!’
‘Oh, are we now?’ Maddyn had to laugh at the old man’s indignation. ‘You show me a world full of spirits, send those spirits out to run me an errand, and then have the gall to call me superstitious!’
Nevyn laughed for a good long time over that.
‘You’re right, and I apologize, Maddyn my lad, but surely you can’t deny that your average swordsman believes that the strangest things will bring him luck, either good or ill.’
‘True, but you just can’t know what it’s like to ride in a war. Every time you saddle up, you know blasted well that maybe you’ll never ride back. Who knows what makes one man fall and another live in battle? Once I saw a man who was a splendid fighter – oh, he swung a sword like a god, not a man – and he rode into this particular scrap with all the numbers on his side, and you know what happened? His cinch broke, dumped him into the mob, and he was kicked to death. And then you see utter idiots, with no more swordcraft than a farmer’s lad, ride straight for the enemy and come out without a scratch. So after a while, you start believing in luck and omens and anything else you can cursed well turn up, just to ease the pain of not knowing when you’ll die.’
‘I can see that, truly.’
Nevyn’s good humour was gone; he looked saddened to tears as he thought things over. Seeing him that way made Maddyn melancholy himself, and thoughtful.
‘I suppose that’s what makes us all long for dweomer leaders,’ Maddyn went on slowly. ‘You can have the best battle plan in the world, but once the javelins are thrown and the swordplay starts, ah by the hells, not even the gods could think clearly. So call it superstition all you want, but you want a leader who’s got a touch of the dweomer about him, someone who can see more than you can, and who’s got the right luck.’
