Daggerspell. Katharine Kerr
from among their fellow nobles, and families held the throne only as long as their heirs held the respect of the lords. Under the pressures of colonizing the new kingdom, that custom had died away hundreds of years before, but it was far from unknown for the nobility to organize a rebellion against an unpopular king in order to replace him with a better one.
“Lady Rodda assures me that Blaen will hold loyal,” Galrion said.
“Indeed? Well, I respect her opinion. You truly don’t want to give Brangwen up, do you?”
“I don’t know.” Galrion tossed the remains of the bread into the grass. “I truly don’t know.”
“Here’s somewhat else you might think about. Your eldest brother has always been far too fond of the lasses as it is.”
All at once Galrion found himself standing, his hand on his sword hilt.
“I’d kill him if he laid one hand on my Gwennie. My apologies, Mother, but I’d kill him.”
Her face pale, Ylaena rose and caught his arm. Galrion let go of the hilt and calmed himself.
“Think about this marriage carefully,” Ylaena said, her voice shaking. “I beg you—think carefully.”
“I will. And my apologies.”
Her talk with the prince seemed to have spoiled the Queen’s pleasure in her hawking, because she called her servants to her and announced that they were returning to the city.
At that time, Dun Deverry was confined to a low rise about a mile from the marshy shores of Loc Gwerconydd. Ringed with stone walls, it lay on both sides of a rushing river, which was spanned by two stone bridges as well as two defensible arches in the city walls. Clustered inside were round stone houses, scattered along randomly curving streets, that sheltered about twenty thousand people. At either end of the city rose two small hills. The southern one bore the great temple of Bel, the palace of the high priest of the kingdom, and an oak grove. The northern hill held the royal compound, which had stood there in one form or another for six hundred years.
Galrion’s clan, the Wyvern, had been living on the royal hill for only forty-eight years. Galrion’s grandfather, Adoryc the First, had ended a long period of anarchy by finally winning a war among the great clans over the kingship. Although the Wyvern was descended from a member of King Bran’s original warband and thus was entitled to be called a great clan, Adoryc the First had forged an alliance among the lesser clans, the merchants, and anyone else who’d support his claim to the throne. Although he’d been scorned for stooping so low, he’d also taken the victory.
As the Queen’s party rode through the streets, the townsfolk bowed and cheered her. No matter what they might have thought of her husband in private, they honestly loved Ylaena, who’d endowed many a temple to give aid to the poor and who spoke up often for a poor man to make the King show him mercy. For all his thickheadedness, the King did know what a treasure he had in his wife. She was the only person whose advice he would take and trust—at least, when it suited him to do so. Galrion’s main hope lay in getting her to advise the King to let his third son leave court for the dweomer. Soon, he knew, he would have to tell his mother the truth.
A stone wall with iron-bound gates ringed the bottom of the royal hill. Beyond was a grassy parkland, where white, red-eared cattle grazed along with the royal horses. Near the crest stood a second ring of walls, sheltering a village within the city—the royal compound, the huts for servants, sheds, stables, barracks, and the like. In the middle of this clutter and bustle rose the great broch of the Wyvern clan.
The main building was a six-story tower; around it clustered three two-story half towers like chicks nestling around a hen. In case of fighting, the broch would become a slaughterhouse for the baffled enemy, because the only way into the half towers lay through the main one. Besides the King and his family, the broch complex housed all the noble-born retainers of the court in a virtual rabbit warren of corridors and small wedge-shaped chambers, where constant intrigues and scheming over power and the King’s favor were a way of life not only for the retainers, but for the various princes and their wives. Getting out of that broch had always been the consummate goal of Galrion’s life.
As befitted a prince, Galrion had a suite of rooms on the second floor of the main tower. His reception chamber took up a generous wedge of the round floor plan, with a high, beamed ceiling, a stone hearth, and a polished wooden floor. On the wood-paneled walls hung fine tapestries from the far-off land of Bardek, gifts from various traders who hoped that the prince would speak of them to the King. Since he was honorable in his bribe taking, Galrion always dutifully spoke. The chamber was richly furnished with carved chests, a cushioned chair, and a table, where stood, between bronze wyverns, his greatest treasure: seven books. When Galrion had first learned to read, the King was furious, raging that letters were no fit thing for a man, but in his usual stubborn way, Galrion had persevered until now, after some four years of study, he could read almost as well as a scribe.
To avoid the bustle and clamor of the formal dinner in the great hall, Galrion dined privately in his chamber that night. He did, however, receive a guest after the meal to share a silver goblet of mead: Gwerbret Madoc of Glasloc, in whose jurisdiction lay the lands of the Falcon and the Boar. Although below members of the royal family, of course, the rank of gwerbret was the highest in the kingdom, and the title went back to ancient times. In the Gaulish homeland, the Dawntime tribes elected magistrates called vergobreti to administer their laws and to speak for the wartime assemblies. Generally the vergobreti were chosen from the noble-born, and at about the time that word became gwerbret in their new land of Deverry, the position began to pass from father to son. Since a man who made judgments and distributed booty was in a good position to build up his power, in time the gwerbrets became great, wealthy, and in possession of small armies to enforce their legal rulings on the tieryns and lords beneath them. One last remnant of the Dawntime survived, however, in the council of electors who, if a gwerbret’s line died out, would choose the noble clan to succeed it.
Thus, every gwerbret in the kingdom was a force to be reckoned with, and Galrion fussed over Madoc as if he were a prince himself, offering him the cushioned chair, pouring him mead with his own hands, and sending the page away so that they could speak privately. The object of these attentions merely smiled benignly. A solid man with a thick streak of gray in his raven-dark hair, Madoc cared more for fine horses than honors and for a good battle more than rank. That night he was in a jesting mood, pledging the prince with his goblet of mead in mock solemnity.
“To your wedding, my prince!” Madoc said. “For a man who doesn’t say much, you’re a sly one. Fancy you nipping in and getting the most beautiful lass in the kingdom.”
“I was rather surprised she accepted me. No one could ever call me the most beautiful lad.”
“Oh, don’t give yourself short value. Brangwen sees beyond a lad’s face, which is more than many a lass does.” Madoc had a swallow of mead, long enough to burn an ordinary drinkers throat. “I don’t mind saying that every man in the kingdom is going to envy you your wedding night. Or have you already claimed your rights as her betrothed?”
“I haven’t. I had no desire to set her brother against me just for one night in her bed.”
Although Galrion was merely speaking casually, Madoc turned troubled, watching him over the rim of his goblet.
“Well?” Galrion went on. “How do you think Gerraent would have taken it, if I’d bedded his sister under his roof?”
“He’s a strange lad.” Madoc looked idly away. “He’s been out there alone on the edge of that cursed forest too much, but he’s a good lad withal. I rode with him in that last rebellion against your father. By the hell ice itself, our Gerro can fight. I’ve never seen a man swing a sword as well as he does, and that’s not idle praise, my prince, but my considered judgment.”
“Then coming from you, that’s high praise indeed.”
Madoc nodded absently and had another sip of mead. When he spoke again, it was to change the subject to the legal doings of his gwerbretrhyn—and he kept it there.