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
