he comes and throws a direct order into my face, I shall have to obey him. Unless of course I can work him round.’ Dovina considered briefly. ‘It would be best that I never hear that he’s at the gates. If he does come, tell everyone that I’ve got such a terrible pain in my head that I simply can’t be disturbed.’ She laid a pale hand on her forehead and grinned. ‘My weak eyes, you know. Such a trial!’
‘I’ll spread the word,’ Mavva said. ‘Lyss, you’re not really going to go speak in the marketplace, are you? I know we planned it, but things have gotten so dangerous.’
‘Curse the danger!’ Alyssa said. ‘I said I’d speak, and I will, because now it’ll be a praise piece for Cradoc.’ She forced her voice steady. ‘And for Lord Grif and Procyr, too. Do you know the name of the dead townsman?’
‘I don’t.’ Mavva thought for a moment. ‘But I’ll find it out for you.’
Alyssa spent most of that night in the hive’s bookchamber. With her good eyesight, she could read by candlelight. She had a reading candle as thick as her wrist and a good two feet high. The priests of Wmm had gifted the hive with a wooden crate of these candles when the scholars had visited the Holy Island to view the bookhoard owned by the temples. Alyssa read gwerchanau, the famous death-songs of the past, and stored up fragments of poetry in her mind to add to her speech. All of the scholars depended on memory far more than writing. While Bardekian pabrus had become far more common than parchment, and most certainly much cheaper, wasting even scraps of it upon notes and rough drafts lay beyond the women’s collegium’s finances.
Finally, when the hourglass on her lectern ran dry from the fifth turnover, she closed her books and stumbled off to bed in the sleeping room she shared with six other women. As senior students, each of them had a narrow cot of her own, rather than sharing a mattress as the first-year lasses did. Moving carefully in the dark, Alyssa took off her skirt and tunic, folded them on top of the carved chest that sat at the foot of her cot, then lay down in her underdress and fell straight asleep.
She dreamt of Cradoc, not the skeletal person she’d seen at the end, but as he’d looked in the prime of life, tall and slender, with a mane of silvery hair that he wore combed straight back from his high forehead. They stood together in a landscape of mist and old stone walls, the collegium, perhaps, when the winter fogs rolled thick over Aberwyn.
‘Mourn me,’ Cradoc said, ‘but don’t wallow in grief. You have work to be done. You were my best student, and the work will be yours to do.’
‘Am I truly worthy?’ Alyssa said. ‘I wish you were still here with us.’
‘So do I.’ He smiled with a wry twist of his mouth. ‘I deem you worthy. Take risks, Alyssa, but judge them carefully. Don’t throw yourself away by starving like I did. You have a wyrd to fulfill.’
‘What is that wyrd?’
‘Now that I can’t tell you. No one can know another man’s wyrd, nor a woman’s either. Farewell.’ He took a step away into the mist, then turned back. ‘Oh, and do remember to breathe deeply and evenly while you speak.’
Overhead a raven cried out. She saw three of the carrion birds circling in the misty sky. When she looked for Cradoc, he’d disappeared, but another glance skyward showed her four ravens where three had been before.
Alyssa sat up in bed, awake and shivering in the morning light streaming through the windows near her bed. Had he come from the Otherlands one last time to speak with her? That bit of advice about breathing – it was so like him! She sometimes did run out of breath when she reached the peroration of a speech. She shivered again, but not from cold.
Silver daggers occupied an odd position in Deverry. They were all proven fighters who’d made one bad mistake, either broken a law or incurred some sort of dishonor that had gotten them kicked out of a warband or exiled by their kinfolk. Although they were outright mercenary soldiers, they had more honor than most men of that sort and a name to protect as well. To become a silver dagger, a man had to find a member of the band, ride with him a while, and prove himself. Only then could they visit one of the rare silversmiths that knew the secrets to forging the alloy in the silver dagger itself. Thus merchants and lords alike trusted them more than your ordinary hired guard. Even so, they had a cold welcome everywhere they went in the kingdom.
Cavan of Lughcarn had found shelter of a sort down near the main harbor. He and his horse shared a smelly shed at the back of the sagging building that housed the tavern, the innkeep, his thin shrew of a wife, and their one servant, a potman of advanced age who moved more slowly than anyone Cavan had ever seen. Just crossing the round room to fetch a tankard of ale took him enough time for a man to die of thirst, as customers often remarked. It was, however, one of the few places in Aberwyn that would take a silver dagger’s coin. Blood money, most people called a mercenary’s hire.
The tavernman himself, Iolan by name, was as fat as his wife was bony. Unlike wife and potman, he enjoyed talking with his customers while he swilled down his own ale. That morning, while Cavan ate a bowl of cold porridge, Iolan sat himself down on the bench opposite.
‘So you had some excitement last night, did you now? I heard the noise of it, and that was enough for me.’
‘Too much for me, almost,’ Cavan said. ‘When the gwerbret’s riders charged into the crowd, I thought we were all done for.’
Iolan sucked his few remaining teeth and nodded.
‘Tell me summat,’ Cavan continued, ‘are the courts here as bad as all that? A cause worth dying for, I mean.’
‘Not to me, but there’s some like Cradoc, a good man he was, too, the voice of the people, just like they say a bard should be. The courts? Well, some are rotten, but not so much in Aberwyn. Abernaudd, now – the things you hear! But Aberwyn’s got its troubles, sure enough. A potter here in town, a man I know, some bastard-born servant of a lord cheated him out of a week’s work. Took the bowls away, never came back to pay. The lord refused to pay. The gwerbret told the lordling, you have the potter’s merchandise, so pay the man. But he never did come across with the coin. Nothing more Ladoic could do about it, either, without starting a war with his vassal. Potter had his day at the hearing. No way to make the noble-born pay after.’ Iolan paused to spit into the straw on the floor beside him. ‘Noble as my fat arse.’
‘Sounds like it, truly.’
‘Other towns, from what I’ve heard, they wouldn’t even have let a poor man into the chamber of justice.’ He spat again. ‘If you have the coin, you can buy off priest and lord both.’
‘And the bards have been speaking out about it?’
‘They have, for all the good it did that poor bastard last night.’
Cavan scraped the last spoonful of oats out of his bowl, laid the spoon down, and got up. He swung himself clear of the bench.
‘Which way is the old harbor?’
‘Just follow the street outside downhill.’
Cavan found his way to the marketplace just as the sun was reaching zenith. A
