The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (37 page)

“No doubt. All of you lads need to do some hard thinking before you go asking for those boons. The king will honor them above any others he’s granted. I know him well enough to know that. Is the point taken?”

“Very well indeed. And I’ll do some hard talking to make sure we all do the hard thinking.”

“Good. I always recommend it. Thinking, that is.”

All afternoon Burcan strode through Dun Deverry with wads of bandages tied under his shirt as tight as Merodda could get them. Whenever she begged him to lie down and rest, he snarled at her. All she could do was trail along behind, ready to tend his wounds whenever he let her. He’d been struck one blow to his side that had broken several ribs and split the skin, then suffered a stab low down on his back, perhaps at the joining of his mail. Both bled, on and off, and she was afraid that the stab had gone deeper than he’d admit. At moments when no one but she could see him, he would lean against a wall or doorjamb for a long moment, biting his lips against the pain.

Wherever he went, his men flocked to him. He would sometimes laugh and cheer them, at others turn solemn and tell them how much depended upon them. Although she kept back out of the way, Merodda could see the change he wrought. White-faced and dispirited men slumped wearily on the ground or against walls to listen to him; men with life in their eyes jumped up to cheer him when he was done.

“I beg you for the king’s sake, and in the king’s name!” To each of them Burcan said the same. “For the king and Deverry!”

But Merodda could guess that the men were thinking the same as she, that in these moments Burcan was the king, and it would be for him that they’d fight on the morrow.

Dinner in the great hall was an agony. Since he couldn’t sit without enormous pain, Burcan walked through the tables with a goblet of mead in his hand, laughing with his allies and cheering his lords on. Merodda could see him turning pale, then white, then a drained horrible death-white. Finally, with one last jest, he turned and strode out of the hall. She rushed after to find him just outside, hanging on to the wall with one hand and swaying. The sunset sent a last flare of gold over the sky, but in the ward the shadows lay cold.

Burcan turned to her, started to speak, and collapsed. Merodda flung herself to the ground beside him. Through the bandages and his shirt both red blood oozed. She cradled his head in the crook of her left arm and stroked his hair and face with her other hand, while he squinted at her as if he could barely see.

“Rhodi?” he whispered. “Do you truly love me?”

“I do. I always have.”

He smiled, seemed to be about to speak, seemed to be staring up at her face. Then she realized that he was dead. She kissed him once, then sat up and closed his eyes. His blood soaked the front of her dress; she sat there staring at it and wondering if she’d told him the truth, if she’d ever loved him at all. No matter—he’d done so much for her that she’d owed him the lie, if it was one.

“My lady!” It was Lord Belryc, standing over her. “Oh, my lady!”

“He’s dead, truly.” Merodda stood up and looked around her.

Everything seemed oddly small and oddly far away, even the lord, who was holding out one hand as if offering to steady her. Men shouted, men came running from the broch to gather around.

“We should bury him somewhere in the dun,” Merodda said. “He loved it so.”

The world spun once sharply to the left. When she woke again, she was lying on her bed with the queen and the serving women clustered around her. Abrwnna was holding her hand and weeping. So should we all, Merodda thought. Tomorrow is the end of everything.

“Oooh, it’s going to be terrible on the morrow, my lady,” Clodda said. “I’ve heard all the men talking. A terrible hard battle, they say.”

“No doubt,” Lilli said. “I don’t want to think about it. I wish we were back in Cerrmor.”

“Well, I’ve had a longing or two that way myself.”

They were sitting just outside of Lilli’s tent with a candle lantern on the ground between them. The dapples of light from the cut tin flickered on their faces and stamped strange patterns onto the canvas of Nevyn’s tent nearby. Nevyn himself was gone, off at the council of war with the prince and the great lords, those who had lived through the day’s fighting, that is.

“I feel like a murderess,” Lilli said abruptly. “If I’d not come forward, the prince would have had to siege the dun, and none of this ghastly slaughter would have happened.”

“What, my lady?” Clodda looked up in sincere confusion. “But the gods want Prince Maryn to be king, and so you had to tell him.”

“But still, if I hadn’t told him—”

“It was the prince’s decision to strike, my lady, not yours.”

The voice came from Branoic, standing just outside the lantern light, and he’d come up so quietly that Lilli had never heard him. With a yelp she scrambled to her feet. Although he’d washed and put on a clean shirt, he wore his mud-crusted brigga still.

“Oh ye gods!” she stammered. “You gave me such a start!”

“Then my apologies.” He walked the last few steps to stand in front of her. “But I’ll not have you berating yourself for the fortunes of war.”

“Don’t you blame me for what happened to Caradoc?”

“Not in the least, though I’m sick at heart over losing him. How can you know someone else’s Wyrd? Maryn’s the one who decided to attack, not siege, and Caradoc’s the one who talked him into letting the silver daggers open the gates. None of that was your doing. Who knows what would have happened if we’d had to sit here all winter long? Fevers have slain many a besieging army when the snow falls and they’re half-starved.”

“Well, true spoken, I suppose, but—”

“Nah nah nah, none of that supposing! Your lass is right. It’s all on the knees of the gods, anyway, what a man’s Wyrd may bring.”

“That eases my heart. You can’t know how much. I was so afeared, thinking everyone would hate me.”

“What?” Branoic laughed at that. “My lady, I doubt me if you could ever do anything vicious enough to make me hate you.”

He was staring at her so intensely, so sincerely, that Lilli turned tongue-tied. With a little cough, Clodda got up and curtsied.

“I’d best go inside, my lady,” Clodda said, “and not sit here eavesdropping.”

“You can stay,” Branoic said. “I’m not going to say anything dishonorable.” He turned back to Lilli. “The prince has offered all of us silver daggers a boon once the wars are over. If the gods let me live, I’m going to ask him for enough land to support a wife. And so I want to ask you to be so kind as to just keep me in mind, like. Neither of us have much of a place in the world now, but it would gladden my heart to earn one for us.”

“But I hardly know you!”

“Well, and I don’t have the land yet, either.” Branoic gave her a grin. “Just think about it.”

He bowed, then turned on his heel and hurried away before Lilli could say one thing more.

“Oooh, how exciting!” Clodda said. “He’s awfully handsome, isn’t he?”

“Do you think so? He’s too beefy for me.”

“Oh my lady! You’re just saying that to be haughty, aren’t you? I mean, ladies are supposed to be haughty to their suitors and all.”

“I’m not! I mean it.”

When Clodda giggled, so did she, covering her mouth with one hand. I certainly don’t want to marry Branoic, she thought, lands or not! But she had to admit that she found it comforting that someone wanted to marry her, an exile without so much as a horse for her dowry.

Later that night, when she was falling asleep, she realized that she would worry about his safety on the morrow during the battle, that once again she would wait helplessly with nothing to do but pray that a man she cared something for would live through the fighting. She fell asleep at last to dream of Peddyc and Bevyan. She woke in tears.

Not long after dawn the attack on the last wall began. With the last of the silver daggers around him, Prince Maryn took his place on the fourth wall. The rams and the assault ladders stood in position at the fourth-wall gates, and assault men stood ready to winch them open at the prince’s signal. On the fifth and last wall between the Red Wyvern and Dun Deverry, the false king’s men waited in utter silence. A revulsion so physical that he felt like vomiting made Nevyn turn away long before the fighting began. He left the prince, climbed down the catwalk, and trotted downhill until he reached the outermost wall and the refuge of the camp.

All that day Nevyn worked with the chirurgeons. The wounded men who could walk or crawl to safety kept them busy enough that he avoided thinking about the men worse off, left lying when they fell. By the time anyone could spare the effort to get them off the battlefield, most would have died. Not, of course, that there was much the chirurgeons could have done for them, anyway—Nevyn was always aware of the deadly limits of his knowledge. He had studied physic and chirurgy for nearly two hundred years, and yet he knew with a sour certainty that he lacked the keys to unlock the mysteries of wounds. Some went septic; some did not; why? The theory of humors in the books of that learned Greggyn, Gaelyn, never had answered this question nor the hundred others that haunted him as he worked, arms red to his elbows, washing wounds, stitching wounds, desperately trying to staunch wounds. Another mystery—why did some wounds ooze bluish blood but others pump out bright red? Those with slow bleeding he could save; few who bled fast lived to reach him.

Up the hill from the chirurgeons the battle raved in a thousand deliriums. Blended by the wind and distance the screams and shouts, the clashing of weapons on armor, drifted down to them in a meaningless babble. With the wounded came more cogent reports. The regent’s men were fighting the battle of their lives to protect the final wall into the last ward, that secret inner heart of Dun Deverry.

“We’ve got the ladders up,” one young lad said. “They were trying to push them off, but we keep pulling their cursed poles away from them, and they must have run out, because they’ve stopped that.”

“Good,” Nevyn said. “Now hold still. This is going to sting.”

When Nevyn poured watered mead over the gash in his face, the lad screamed and fainted. It was easier to stitch up the wound that way, but Nevyn had to wait till the next wounded man who could talk for more details of the fighting for the walls. The Boar’s men on the catwalks, Maryn’s men on scaling ladders: the battle hung on who would fight the longest, on whether Maryn had the men to pour over the wall like a wave and wash the Boarsmen off. Toward the middle of the afternoon the first squad gained the catwalks, only to be mobbed and killed, but in the flurry of fighting a second lot got over, and these held.

“Once we’ve got the place to stand, like,” a man with a broken arm said, “then we’ll have them. Ah ye gods, that hurts! It’s when I try to move it, like.”

“Then don’t!” Nevyn snapped. “Hold still while I wrap this. You’ll have to wait before I can try to set it.”

“There’s many worse off than me, truly.” Sweat broke out on his whitening face. “When I left, a lot of our lads were atop the wall.”

Whether they stayed there or not, the man didn’t know. A few at a time, more reports filtered down to the waiting chirurgeons and through them to the camp itself. Maryn’s men held a stretch of wall; Maryn’s men held the wall directly over the gates. They were calling for the ram; the ram had arrived. And finally, late in the afternoon, the gates went down. That event they could hear as a massive shout on the wind, a horrendous scream from the defenders and one of triumph from the attackers at the walls. The stream of wounded turned into a flood, and Nevyn had no more time to worry about the battle until the sun hung low in the western sky and a messenger arrived, announcing that the prince wanted to talk with him.

“The walls are ours, my lord, but the royal broch—well, that’s another matter.”

Nevyn cleaned up by the simple expedient of dumping a couple buckets of water over himself, clothes and all, and hurried off, still wet but cool for the first time all day. In sweaty and blood-streaked mail and helm Prince Maryn, with a tidy Oggyn in attendance, stood on the walls near the shattered gates. Nevyn climbed up a rickety siege ladder and joined them. The prince acknowledged him with a nod.

“They hold the main broch complex and some of the side ones.” Maryn drew his sword, streaked with old blood, and pointed. “The ward is ours, but it’s nearly night. I’m not risking what we’ve gained by trying to finish this now.”

“Sounds wise, my liege,” Nevyn said. “So this is the last battleground, is it?”

In the middle of the final ring of walls stood the central broch complex. Eight hundred years earlier it had started with a single squat tower, broader at the base than at the top. Other kings had built other brochs, some freestanding, others half-rounds joined to the first. Covered arcades and flat sheds had grown like mushrooms between and among the towers; here and there a slender tower in the new style rose from the roof of a stone building. The whole edifice covered some hundreds of yards. Off to either side, some thirty yards away, stood two smaller clusters of brochs. All three complexes flew the banner of the Green Wyvern, a last defiance in the gathering night.

“In the morning I’ll try to parley,” Maryn said. “I’m hoping they’ll just surrender. There can’t be a lot of them left.”

“True spoken, Your Highness. Well, we can hope for a surrender, though I’ve got my doubts that they’ll take it.”

“If not, we’ll have to turn into terriers and dig them out.”

Nevyn merely nodded. He was studying the complex, searching for the brochs he’d known as a child and young man, but they were too overgrown with new building for him to make them out.

“Tomorrow, my liege!” Oggyn said. “Tomorrow you’ll at last claim your birthright. Tomorrow the kingdom is yours!”

“Most likely,” Maryn said. “I just hope it’ll be worth the deaths it’s cost.”

“Oh come now, Your Highness!” Oggyn barked a laugh. “No other man in Deverry would think such a thing!”

“Just so,” Nevyn said. “But no other man but Prince Maryn is fit to be High King.”

Trapped in the royal broch with King Olaen and his last defenders were women and children—nine women, Merodda counted, and twelve children, mostly pages, but one of the servant girls, Pavva, had a nursling, whom she clutched so tightly to her chest that Merodda feared the baby would suffocate.