‘I never saw them,’ Cullyn gasped.
‘No more did I, Your Grace.’
The sound of that honorific knocked the last bit of breath out of him. When he looked up, he saw the gamekeeper’s face streaming tears, and the sight made him burst out sobbing, half-keening, half-choking as he gasped for breath. All his suspicions, all his envy and his fears were at last at an end, but he would have spent a year in the hells just to have his father back again.
‘By every god and his wife,’ Salamander whispered, and his face was white with fear. ‘I never dreamt your lad would try to fetch you out again like that.’
‘No more did I, or I’d never have agreed to this daft scheme!’ Rhodry felt like hitting him. ‘Aberwyn could have lost two gwerbrets in one misbegotten day! Ye gods, did you have to make that cursed boar so terrifying? I never knew you could make an illusion smell like that.’
‘You don’t understand, O brother of mine.’ Salamander passed the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead. ‘That boar was none of my work. It was real, a solid, corporeal, existent, and utterly unplanned accident.’
Rhodry felt the colour drain from his own face. He was about to say something particularly foul when Jill came crawling back into their hiding place, a bracken-filled ditch on the other side of the river.
‘He’s safe,’ she whispered. ‘The gamekeeper and the kennelmaster are with him, and all the dogs, too. They’ve got the horses under control, and no doubt they’ll be riding home soon. We’d best get out of here before every man in your warband comes out to search for your corpse.’
‘They’re not my men any more.’
‘Well, true enough, and we’ve got only the grace of the gods to thank that they ride for your eldest son and not the second.’ She turned on Salamander. ‘You and your wretched, blasted, rotten, and foul elaborate schemes!’
‘You were the one who insisted there be witnesses, and you agreed to this scheme at the time. Berate me not, O princess of powers perilous, for I put not that stinking boar in their path.’
Although Jill growled under her breath, she let the matter drop. For some minutes they lay there, waiting until the remnant of the hunting party should leave. While Salamander’s dweomer could turn one man invisible as he crawled out of a river, he couldn’t hide a party of three horsemen, a mule, and two packhorses. Now that he knew Cullyn was safely on land, Rhodry felt heart-wrung and numb, hating the irony of it, that he would find out how much his son loved him when he’d never see the lad again.
Eventually the hunting party gave up their last futile search and rode back to Aberwyn, leaving them in sole possession of the woods. Rhodry was more than glad to change out of his damp clothes into the things he’d smuggled out in readiness: a pair of plain grey brigga, an old linen shirt with no blazons, a cheap belt with his silver dagger on it.
‘So here I am, a silver dagger again, am I?’
‘Not for long,’ Salamander said. ‘We’ll be in the elven lands soon enough.’
‘Provided no one catches us.’
‘Don’t fret about that,’ Jill broke in. ‘Salamander can make sure no one recognizes you, even if they’re staring right at you.’
‘Well and good, then. We’d best be off.’
‘Just that. Our father should be waiting near the border.’
‘And that’s going to be a strange thing, meeting my true father after all these years, and him a bard at that.’
‘Mam, I tried to save him, truly I did.’ Cullyn sounded like a little boy again.
Aedda caught his hands in hers and squeezed them gently.
‘Of course you did. I know you did.’
For his sake, out of pain for his pain, she managed to do the proper thing and weep, but there was no mourning in it. For years she had tried very hard not to blame Rhodry; after all, she wasn’t the first lass in Deverry who’d been given away to cement a treaty, and she wouldn’t be the last. Yet still, he had taken her maidenhead, her youth, her life, truly, while keeping her always to one side of his affairs, and then, the final bitter thing, he had taken her sons from her, too. They always loved you more than they loved me, she thought. By every fiend in hell, I’m glad you’re dead.
Although they never found the gwerbret’s body, they did put up a stone to mark his passing, out in the sacred grove where his ancestors lay. On it they carved this englyn:
This grave marks Aberwyn’s grief.
A wild wolf in the battle-strife,
Rhodry laughed when he took your life.
And that was the first death of Rhodry Maelwaedd and the vindication of the old hermit who, years and years before, had told him he would die twice over.
Keeping to country lanes and open lands, buying food from farmers and shunning the duns of the noble-born, Rhodry, Salamander, and Jill travelled west and south for ten days until they reached the large stream or small river known as Y Brog, marking what most human beings considered the Eldidd border, since only elves lived beyond it. During Rhodry’s rule, the Westfolk, as Eldidd people called the elves, had started becoming a little friendlier than they’d been in times past. Every now and then a trading party would show up in the border towns of Cannobaen or Cernmeton to offer their beautiful horses in return for ironwork and glassware; even more rarely, an embassy would appear in Aberwyn itself with tokens of friendship and alliance for the gwerbret. Yet they were still strange and alien, still frightening to most people. It was one of Rhodry’s regrets that he’d never been able to make his subjects welcome the Westfolk in the rhan. Since he’d always raised his sons to like and admire them, he could at least hope that they would continue to be welcome in the dun.
‘I suppose I’ll get word now and then of how things fare in Aberwyn,’ he remarked one evening. ‘Especially if Calonderiel goes to pay his respects to the new gwerbret.’
‘Of course he’s going.’ Salamander was kneeling by their campfire and feeding in sticks. ‘That was part of the scheme. He’ll be waiting to have a chat with us, and then he’ll head east. What’s wrong? Worried about your holdings? Well, your former or late lamented holdings, I should say.’
‘It’s strange, truly. I can’t stop thinking about Aberwyn. I keep drafting mental orders, you see, about the way things should be run, and every now and then I actually find myself turning round to call a page or suchlike, to carry a command for me.’
‘You’ll get over it in time. Think of rulership as a fever. It’ll pass off as your health returns.’
‘Well and good, then. Maybe I need some strengthening herbwater or suchlike.’
They shared a grin. Although they were only halfbrothers, they looked a good bit alike in everything but colouring. Salamander’s hair was as ash-blond pale as Rhodry’s was dark, but they had the strong jut of their jaw and the deep set of their eyes in common, as well as a certain sharpness about the ears that marked them as half-breeds.
‘Where’s Jill, anyway?’ Salamander stopped fussing with the fire and came
