Daggerspell Read online

  “I’ve never had any trouble with bandits out here,” Dregydd was saying, “and now you tell me there’s a whole pack of them waiting in ambush. It doesn’t make any sense. How the hells can you know?”

  “I can know and I do know,” Aderyn said. “We’ve got to do something, or we’ll be slaughtered on the road.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “At least thirty, and they seemed to be as well armed as a lord’s warband.”

  “We might be able to hold them off long enough for Jill to get back from Cannobaen with some of the tieryn’s men,” Cullyn suggested.

  “What?” Jill snapped. “You can’t send me away!”

  Cullyn slapped her across the face so hard she staggered.

  “You’ll follow orders. You’re riding to the tieryn and begging for aid. Do you hear me?”

  “I do.” Jill rubbed her aching cheek. “But you’d best be alive when I ride back.”

  The way Cullyn smiled, a cold twitch of his mouth, told Jill that he doubted he would be. For a moment she thought that her body had turned to water, that she was going to flow away and dissolve like one of the Wildfolk. Cullyn grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.

  “You’re riding for the life of every man in this caravan. Do you understand me?”

  “I do,” Jill said. “Truly, I do.”

  DAGGERSPELL

  BY KATHARINE KERR

  Her novels of Deverry and the Westlands

  DAGGERSPELL

  DARKSPELL

  THE BRISTLING WOOD

  THE DRAGON REVENANT

  A TIME OF EXILE

  A TIME OF OMENS

  DAYS OF BLOOD AND FIRE

  DAYS OF AIR AND DARKNESS

  THE RED WYVERN

  THE BLACK RAVEN

  Available wherever

  Bantam Spectra Books

  are sold

  For my husband, Howard,

  who helped me more than even he can know.

  Without his support and loving encouragement,

  I never would have finished this book.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of friends:

  Barbara Jenkins, who gave me a whole career in a box when she gave me my first fantasy role-playing game many Christmases past,

  Elizabeth Pomada, who took on an admittedly eccentric project and then actually sold it,

  Conrad Bulos, the fastest typewriter repairman in the West.

  And especially, Jon Jacobsen, the best gaming buddy a girl ever had.

  PRONUNCIATION NOTES

  The Deverrian language, which we might well call neo-Gaulish, looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in a great many respects, as it does from Cornish and Breton. All these languages are members of that subfamily of Indo-European known as P-Celtic.

  VOWELS are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

  A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

  O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

  W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

  Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

  E as in pen.

  I as in pin.

  U as in pun.

  Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

  DIPHTHONGS generally have one consistent pronunciation.

  AE as the a in mane.

  AI as in aisle.

  AU as the ow in how.

  EO as a combination of eh and oh.

  EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

  IE as in pier.

  OE as the oy in boy.

  UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in Carnoic, (KAR-noh-ik).

  CONSONANTS are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

  C is always hard as in cat.

  G is always hard as in get.

  DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound in breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

  R is heavily rolled.

  RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

  DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

  Y is never a consonant.

  I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

  DOUBLED CONSONANTS are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

  ACCENT is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

  I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole, it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues.

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE YEAR 1045

  Men see life going from a dark to

  a darkness. The gods see life as a

  death. …

  —The Secret Book of

  Cadwallon the Druid

  In the hall of light, they reminded her of her destiny. There, all was light, a pulsing gold like the heart of a candle flame, filling eternity. The speakers were pillars of fire within the fiery light, and their words were sparks. They, the great Lords of Wyrd, had neither faces nor voices, because anything so human had long since been burned away by dwelling in the hall of light. She had no face or voice either, because she was weak, a little flicker of pale flame. But she heard them speak to her of destiny, her grave task to be done, her long road to ride, her burden that she must lift and willingly.

  “Many deaths have led you to this turning,” they said to her. “It is time to take your Wyrd in your hands. You belong to the dweomer in your very soul. Will you remember?”

  In the hall of light, there are no lies.

  “I’ll try to remember,” she said. “I’ll do my best to remember the light.”

  She felt them grow amused.

  “You will be helped to remember. Go now. It is time for you to die and enter the darkness.”

  When she began to kneel before them, to throw herself down before them, they rushed forward and forbade her. They knew that they were only servants of the one true light, paltry servants compared to the glory they served, the Light that shines beyond all gods.

  When she entered the gray misty land, she wept, longing for the light. There, all was shifting fog, a thousand spirits and visions, and the speakers were like winds, tossing her with words. They wept with her at the fall that she must make into darkness. These spirits of wind had faces, and she realized that she, too, now had a face, because they were all human and far from the light. When they spoke to her of fleshly things, she remembered lust, the ecstasy of flesh pressed against flesh.

  “But remember the light,” they whispered to her. “Cling to the light and follow the dweomer.”

  The wind blew her down through the gray mist. All round her she felt lust, snapping like lightning in a summer storm. All at once, she remembered summer storms, rain on a fleshly face, cool dampness in
the air, warm fires, and the taste of food in her mouth. The memories netted her like a little bird and pulled her down and down. She felt him, then, and his lust, a maleness that once she had loved, felt him close to her, very close, like a fire. His lust swept her down and down, round and round, like a dead leaf caught in a tiny whirlpool at a river’s edge. Then she remembered rivers, water sparkling under the sun. The light, she told herself, remember the light you swore to serve. Suddenly she was terrified: the task was very grave, she was very weak and human. She wanted to break free and return to the Light, but it was too late. The eddy of lust swept her round and round till she felt herself grow heavy, thick, and palpable.

  There was darkness, warm and gentle, a dreaming water-darkness: the soft, safe prison of the womb.

  In those days, down on the Eldidd coast stretched wild meadows, crisscrossed by tiny streams, where what farmers there were pastured their cattle without bothering to lay claim to the land. Since the meadows were a good place for an herbman to find new stock, old Nevyn went there regularly. He was a shabby man, with a shock of white hair that always needed combing, and dirty brown clothes that always needed mending, but there was something about the look in his ice-blue eyes that commanded respect, even from the noble-born lords. Everyone who met him remarked on his vigor, too, that even though his face was as wrinkled as old leather and his hands dark with frog spots, he strode around like a young prince. He never seemed to tire, either, as he traveled long miles on horseback with a mule behind him to tend the ills of the various poor folk in Eldidd province. A marvel he is, the farmers all said, a marvel and a half considering he must be near eighty. None knew the true marvel, that he was well over four hundred years old, and the greatest master of the dweomer that the kingdom had ever known.

  That particular summer morning, Nevyn was out in the meadows to gather comfrey root, and the glove-finger white flowers danced on the skinny stems as he dug up the plants with a silver spade. The sun was so hot that he sat back on his heels and wiped his face on the old rag that passed for a handkerchief. It was then that he saw the omen. Out in the meadow, two larks broke cover with a heartbreaking beauty of song that was a battle cry. Two males swept up, circling and chasing each other. Yet even as they fought, the female who was their prize rose from the grass and flew indifferently away. With a cold clutch of dweomer knowledge, Nevyn knew that soon he would be watching two men fight over a woman that neither could rightfully have.

  She had been reborn.

  Somewhere in the kingdom, she was a new babe, lying in her exhausted mother’s arms. On a mirror made of sky he saw it with his dweomer sight.

  In a sunny room a midwife stood washing her hands in a basin. On a bed of straw and rags lay a pretty young lass, the mother, her face bathed in sweat from the birth but smiling at a child at her breast. As Nevyn’s sight showed him the baby, the tiny creature, all damp and red, opened cloudy blue eyes and seemed to stare right at him.

  Nevyn jumped to his feet in sheer excitement. The Lords of Wyrd had been kind. This time they were sending him a warning that somewhere she was waiting for him to bring her to the dweomer, somewhere in the vast expanse of the kingdom of Deverry. He could search and find her while she was still a child, before harsh circumstances made it impossible for him to untangle the snarl of their intertwined destinies. This time, perhaps, she would remember and listen to him. Perhaps. If he found her.

  CERRGONNEY, 1052

  The young fool tells his master that he will suffer to gain the dweomer. Why is he a fool? Because the dweomer has already made him pay and pay and pay again before he even stood on its doorstep. …

  —The Secret Book of

  Cadwallon the Druid

  A cold drizzle of rain fell. The last of the twilight was closing in like gray steel. Looking at the sky made Jill frightened to be outside. She hurried to the woodpile and began to grab firewood. A gray gnome, all spindly legs and long nose, perched on a big log and picked at its teeth while it watched her. When she dropped a stick, it snatched it and refused to give it back.

  “Beast!” Jill snapped. “Then keep it!”

  At her anger, the gnome vanished with a puff of cold air. Half in tears, Jill hurried across the muddy yard to the circular stone building, a tavern, where cracks of light gleamed around wooden shutters. Clutching her firewood, she ran down the corridor to the chamber and slipped in, hesitating a moment at the door. The priestess in her long black robe was kneeling by Mama’s bed. When she looked up, Jill saw the blue tattoo of the crescent moon that covered half her face.

  “Put some wood on the fire now, child. I need more light.”

  Jill picked out the thinnest, pitchiest sticks and fed them into the fire burning in the hearth. The flames sprang up, sending flares and shadows dancing round the room. Jill sat down on the straw-covered floor in a corner to watch the priestess. On her pallet Mama lay very still, her face deadly pale, oozing drops of sweat from the fever. The priestess picked up a silver jar and helped Mama drink the herb water in it. Mama was coughing so hard that she couldn’t keep the water down.

  Jill grabbed her rag doll and held her tight. She wished that Heledd was real, and that she’d cry so Jill could be very brave and comfort her. The priestess set the silver jar down, wiped Mama’s face, then began to pray, whispering the words in the ancient holy tongue that only priests and priestesses knew. Jill prayed, too, in her mind, begging the Holy Goddess of the Moon to let her mama live.

  Macyn came to the doorway and stood watching, his thick pudding face set in concern, his blunt hands twisting the hem of his heavy linen overshirt. Macyn owned this tavern, where Mama worked as a serving lass, and let her and Jill live in this chamber out of simple kindness to a woman with a bastard child to support. He reached up and rubbed the bald spot in the middle of his gray hair while he waited for the priestess to finish praying.

  “How is she?” Macyn said.

  The priestess looked at him, then pointedly at Jill.

  “You can say it,” Jill burst out. “I know she’s going to die.”

  “Do you, lass?” The priestess turned to Macyn. “Here, does she have a father?”

  “Of a sort. He’s a silver dagger, you see, and he rides this way every now and then to give them what coin he can. It’s been a good long while since the last time.”

  The priestess sighed in a hiss of irritation.

  “I’ll keep feeding the lass,” Macyn went on. “Jill’s always done a bit of work around the place, and ye gods, I wouldn’t throw her out into the street to starve, anyway.”

  “Well and good, then.” The priestess held out her hand to Jill. “How old are you?”

  “Seven, Your Holiness.”

  “Well, now, that’s very young, but you’ll have to be brave, just like a warrior. Your father’s a warrior, isn’t he?”

  “He is. A great warrior.”

  “Then you’ll have to be as brave as he’d want you to be. Come say farewell to your mama; then let Macyn take you out.”

  When Jill came to the bedside, Mama was awake, but her eyes were red, swollen, and cloudy, as if she didn’t really see her daughter standing there.

  “Jill?” Mama was gasping for breath. “Mind what Macco tells you.”

  “I will. Promise.”

  Mama turned her head away and stared at the wall.

  “Cullyn,” she whispered.

  Cullyn was Da’s name. Jill wished he was there; she had never wished for anything so much in her life. Macyn picked Jill up, doll and all, and carried her from the chamber. As the door closed, Jill twisted round and caught a glimpse of the priestess, kneeling to pray.

  Since no one wanted to come to a tavern with fever in the back room, the big half-round of the alehouse stood empty, the wooden tables forlorn in the dim firelight. Macyn sat Jill down near the fire, then went to get her something to eat. Just behind her stood a stack of ale barrels, laced with particularly dark shadows. Jill was suddenly sure that Death was hiding behind them. She m
ade herself turn around and look, because Da always said a warrior should look Death in the face. She found nothing. Macyn brought her a plate of bread and honey and a wooden cup of milk. When Jill tried to eat, the food turned dry and sour in her mouth. With a sigh, Macyn rubbed his bald spot.

  “Well now,” he said. “Maybe your da will ride our way soon.”

  “I hope so.”

  Macyn had a long swallow of ale from his pewter tankard.

  “Does your doll want a sip of milk?” he said.

  “She doesn’t. She’s just rags.”

  Then they heard the priestess, chanting a long sobbing note, keening for the soul of the dead. Jill tried to make herself feel brave, then laid her head on the table and sobbed aloud.

  They buried Mama out in the sacred oak grove behind the village. For a week, Jill went every morning to cry beside the grave till Macyn finally told her that visiting the grave was like pouring oil on a fire—she would never put her grief out by doing it. Since Mama had told her to mind what he said, Jill stopped going. When custom picked up again in the tavern, she was busy enough to keep from thinking about Mama, except of course at night. Local people came in to gossip, farmers stopped by on market day, and every now and then merchants and peddlers paid to sleep on the floor for want of a proper inn in the village. Jill washed tankards, ran errands, and helped serve ale when the tavern was crowded. Whenever a man from out of town came through, Jill would ask him if he’d ever heard of her father, Cullyn of Cerrmor, the silver dagger. No one ever had any news at all.

  The village was in the northernmost province of the kingdom of Deverry, the greatest kingdom in the whole world of Annwn—or so Jill had always been told. She knew that down to the south was the splendid city of Dun Deverry, where the High King lived in an enormous place. Bobyr, however, where Jill had spent her whole life, had about fifty round houses, made of rough slabs of flint packed with earth to keep the wind out of the walls. On the side of a steep Cerrgonney hill, they clung to narrow twisted streets so that the village looked like a handful of boulders thrown among a stand of straggly pine trees. In narrow valleys farmers wrestled fields out of rocky land and walled their plots with the stone.