prey.
By then the noise had attracted a smallish crowd of its own.
‘Naught to worry about, lads,’ Rhodry called out. ‘This stinking swine was trying to rape this poor innocent lass. We’ll just take him along to the tieryn.’
Dwaen and half the dun were waiting by the honour hearth in the great hall. Although Vyna identified their prisoner as the man who met her regularly, nobody in the warband recognized him for a member of Lord Beryn’s troop. The tieryn questioned him, Rhodry mocked him, and Lallyc got in a few barbs of his own, but the prisoner never said a word, not even his name, merely smiled with faint contempt during the entire session. Finally, Lallyc glared at the man and rolled up a sleeve with exaggerated care.
‘There’s more than one way to get a man to talk, Your Grace.’
‘Not in my dun!’ Dwaen snapped. ‘I know what you’re planning, and you can just put it out of your mind.’
‘His grace is an honourable man,’ Rhodry broke in. ‘But his life is at stake. Lallyc and me can just work him over some place where you don’t have to watch.’
‘You won’t! I won’t have a helpless man tortured. It’s against the will of the gods, and that’s an end to it.’
The prisoner looked at the lord with eyes poisoned by contempt.
‘We’ll take you along to the gwerbret.’ Dwaen seemed unaware of the look. ‘If you refuse to give evidence in the malover, then the laws state he can put you to death, and so we’ll see how long you keep your lips laced. Lallyc, get one of the men to shut him in a shed. Keep him under guard, and make sure he’s got food and water, decent food and water, mind.’
Later that afternoon Lord Cadlew returned with ten men from his warband. As the two lords, with Rhodry in attendance, sat drinking in the great hall, Dwaen noticed Ylaena halfway up the spiral staircase and hanging over the rail like a child trying to see what the grown-ups are doing down below. Apparently Cadlew noticed her, too, because he blushed for no discernible reason.
‘There’s somewhat we’d best settle before we ride,’ Dwaen said. ‘Do you want to marry my sister? She wants to marry you.’
Cadlew’s grip tightened on his tankard.
‘I realize she’s far above me in rank, and never would I let such a thing come between us, Your Grace.’
‘Don’t be a stuffy bastard. I have every intention of seeing you two betrothed if it pleases you both.’
‘Oh.’ Cadlew considered the ale in his tankard for a long moment, then got up, slowly and deliberately. ‘Perhaps I’d best speak formally to your mother.’
‘It seems advisable, truly.’
Cadlew looked his way, started to speak, then merely grinned. He dashed for the staircase, though Ylaena was gone, doubtless back to the women’s hall to wait for her suitor there as formality demanded. Dwaen watched him running up after her till he ducked out of sight onto the landing above, then turned to Rhodry.
‘Well, there. If Beryn does manage to dispose of me, Cadlew will inherit through Ylaena, and Beryn will regret the day he ever made an enemy out of my friend.’
‘I believe it, Your Grace. From what I’ve seen of Lord Cadlew, he’d get you a splendid revenge, but I’d just as soon he didn’t have to. I’ve been thinking about the precautions we should take once we reach the gwerbret’s dun. I haven’t forgotten that fellow in Caenmetyn who tried to hire me to kill you.’
‘For all we know, Beryn’s planning on attacking us on the road. If he’s got one of his men watching the dun from a distance, he’ll know when we’re riding out and lay another ambush in the forest. That reminds me – where’s Jill?’
‘Up in the women’s hall, Your Grace. She told me earlier that the local gossip was truly interesting, whatever she means by that.’
Like Dwaen, Jill had been wondering if Beryn was going to try another ambush, but the combined warbands, followed by a six pack of horses laden with gifts of food for the gwerbret’s hall, reached Caenmetyn without incident. Although Gwerbret Coryc’s provincial demesne was a poor one by gwerbretal standards, his dun walls rose imposingly enough round a huge central broch surrounded by four squat half-brochs and a cobbled ward. While Dwaen, with Cadlew and Rhodry along for witnesses, went to the great hall to lay his formal complaint, Jill helped the servants haul all their gear up to the tieryn’s chambers in the main tower. While they worked, she made friends with one of the menservants and got him to introduce her to the various servitors, particularly to the head groom, a stocky fellow, mostly bald, named Riderrc.
It was easy for her to use her horse, a beautiful golden gelding of the breed known as Western Hunter, to get a friendly conversation going. While they discussed Sunrise in particular and horses in general, she asked casual questions about the various important officials in the dun, particularly the chamberlain, the most important of all.
‘He’s a decent enough lord, I suppose.’ Riderrc sucked his teeth in a meditative way. ‘Fussy about every blasted detail, but no one bribes him for a favour, I tell you.’
‘Amazing! Many a chamberlain’s got rich selling access to his gwerbret.’
‘Our Tallyc would choke rather than take lying silver.’
‘Interesting. Well, I’d best be getting back upstairs.’
But Jill went to the kitchen hut, which was as big as a small house. In the thick smoke two cooks were frantically yelling at a squad of kitchen maids while the chamberlain himself supervised the carving of a whole hog, and serving lasses and pages dashed around filling baskets with bread and bowls with stewed cabbage. In that madhouse a would-be poisoner could slip all manner of things into the food and drink, but on the other hand, it would be near-impossible to ensure that only Dwaen and his retinue ate the tainted servings. Jill hoped, at least, that the murderer would draw the line at poisoning the gwerbret, his entire household, and several hundred riders just to finish off one man. For a few minutes she hesitated, wondering if she should tell Rhodry where she was going, then realized that she wouldn’t be able to get him alone to tell him privately. With a glance at the lowering sun, she trotted off to the main gates, pausing only to identify herself to the guards so they’d let her back in, and headed out into the town.
It took her some time to find the thieves’ tavern again, curiously uncrowded for the dinner hour. She got herself a tankard of dark ale and stood chatting with the tavernman while she jingled a couple of coppers in one closed hand.
‘Do you remember the night that me and my man were in here? We were sitting right over there, and this fellow in a long grey cloak came in.’
‘Remember it I do. I thought he was a strange one to be coming into a place like this.’
‘Just so. You don’t happen to know who he is, do you?’
‘I don’t, but he must have been a master craftsman, all right. There was fine wool in that cloak of his.’
‘Or maybe a scribe or suchlike? He had soft hands, and he smelled like temple incense.’
‘So he did.’ The tavernman spat into the straw to help his concentration. ‘Never seen him before or since, so he can’t live
