The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (6 page)

“You will. I did see that as well, you laughing with us all.”

“Good. I—here, what be making that noise?”

From outside the two women heard shouting, swearing, and a peculiar sort of hollow bumping sound. Niffa got up and hurried to the door, opened it to a blast of cold air and peered out the crack. She could just see up the narrow steep alley that led from their door to the public street on the slope above. Panting and puffing, two men were struggling to get a four-foot-high barrel of ale down the rocky track without it escaping to crush the fellow at the bottom. The one at the top she recognized as Councilman Verrarc’s servant, Harl.

“What are you doing?” she called out.

“Bringing you a gift,” Harl panted. “From my master. For your wedding.”

“Less talk!” the other man snapped. “Don’t let it get away from you!”

With a grunt Harl steadied his grip on the barrel. Once they had it level with the entrance, getting the barrel over the doorstep and inside required a last round of curses and a lot of banging, but finally it stood on the straw-strewn floor. Harl and his helper—Niffa recognized him as one of the blacksmith’s sons now that he was visible—wiped their sweaty faces on the sleeves of their baggy winter shirts, then stood panting for a moment.

“Ye gods,” Harl said. “The stink of ferrets in this place be like to knock a man flat!”

The blacksmith’s lad nodded his agreement. Dera wrapped the cloak tightly around her and walked over to survey the gift, almost as tall as she.

“It be a kind thing for the councilman to remember us,” Dera said. “And so generously!”

“It be the best ale, too,” Harl said. “My master was particular about that, he was, the best dark ale. He did send it this early so it could settle. He said to tell you to leave it be till the wedding day itself.”

“We will, then.” Dera shot Niffa a glance. “And there be a need on you to go thank him.”

Niffa and her family, the town ratters, lived with their ferrets in two big rooms attached to the public granary, lodgings provided them in return for keeping the rats down. The big square building stood low on the Citadel hill, while Councilman Verrarc’s fine house stood high, just below the mysterious ruins at the island’s crest. To get there Niffa panted up the steep alley to the broader, cobbled path above, then followed it as it spiralled up the hill, past the whitewashed fronts of family compounds and the occasional stone bench, provided for the weary. She dodged between the militia’s armory and a huge boulder to come out on the next street up. Here and there, twisted little pine trees grew in patches of dirt or shoved their way to the sunlight from between rocks.

In the high white wall Councilman Verrarc’s outer gate stood open. Niffa walked into a square court, paved with flat reddish stones, where huge pottery tubs stood clumped together to catch rainwater. A pair of big black hounds, lying in a patch of sun, lifted their heads, sniffed at her, then thumped lazy tails. The house itself stood beyond them, a low white structure roofed in thatch. The front door sported a big brass ring. Niffa banged it on the wood, then waited, shifting from foot to foot, until it opened a bare crack. She could just see Magpie, a girl of about her own age, staring back out. Magpie had a pudgy round face, dark eyes, and a thin mouth that always hung a little open.

“Let me in, Maggi,” Niffa said. “There’s a need on me to see the councilman.”

Maggi considered, tilting her head a little.

“Come on now, you’ve had the knowing of me since we were children! Do let me in, and then fetch the councilman.”

When Magpie’s eyes narrowed, Niffa realized she’d made a mistake by linking two different tasks together. It would take the poor girl a while to sort that out, she supposed. Fortunately, a voice sounded from inside the house, and old Korla, a bent and withered woman who shuffled along in big sheepskin shoes, took over the door from her granddaughter.

“Ah,” Korla said to Niffa. “So, you’ve come about that ale?”

“I have. I do wish to thank your master properly for so fine a gift.”

Giggling to herself, Magpie ran off. Korla led Niffa into the councilman’s hall, a square room with a low-beamed ceiling and a floor covered with braided rushes. Below each shuttered window stood a carved chest; in the middle of the room, a table with benches; at the massive hearth, two carved wooden chairs with cushioned seats, and against the wall, three other chairs—a fortune of furniture for a Cerr Cawnen house. Here and there on mantel and table some small silver oddment caught the firelight and glittered. Sitting in one of the chairs, her feet up on a footstool, was Raena, dressed in fine blue cloth and with her hair bound up like a great lady. She acknowledged the servant with a small nod but said nothing to either her or Niffa.

“I’ll be fetching the master,” Korla said and shuffled through a side door.

Niffa walked close to the fire and held out her hands to the warmth. She could feel the older woman studying her, but when she looked up and arranged a smile, Raena looked away with a sneer. Perhaps she felt her shamed position—Niffa tried to think kindly about her. After all, Raena had been cast off by her husband for being unfaithful to him with Verrarc. She must have known that every woman in town gossiped about her.

On the hearth a log within the fire slipped, flashing with sparks and a long leap of flame. In the suddenly brighter light Niffa could see Raena’s face clearly: pale, beaded with sweat, and under her eyes lay dark circles as livid as bruises.

“Be you well?” Niffa said. “Should I be calling your maid to you?”

“My thanks but no. Tired I be, not ill.” Her words slipped out one at a time.

“Very well, then, but I—”

Niffa stopped in mid-sentence, caught by the way Raena was looking at her. The older woman’s dark eyes glittered in the firelight, but her stare was cold, thorough, searching over Niffa as if she were hunting lice upon her cloak. All at once Niffa felt like screaming at her, like slapping her as well and yelling that she should take her filthy self out of Cerr Cawnen forever. She turned and hid her face in the shadows thrown by the fire, but she fancied that she could feel Raena’s cold stare prying at her back.

“Well, a good day to you, Niffa!”

Verrarc strode in through the side door. He was tall, the councilman, blond and good-looking by most people’s standards, but his blue eyes peered with a winter’s cold, and to Niffa his smiles looked as painted as a wooden doll’s.

“I trust your mam be well?” he went on.

“She does have a rheum, Councillor, though she fares better today than last. I did come in her place to thank you for that splendid gift.”

Briefly his smile turned warm.

“Most welcome you are to it, and your kin as well. Now, if your mother should need of somewhat, whether medicaments or food, please do ask me for it. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

He did, too—Niffa could tell even as she wondered why his very generosity irked her so. She managed a few more polite exchanges, then curtsied and made her glad escape.

As she picked her way down the icy steps that led to the granary and home, she was wondering why she hated Raena so much, and on sight, too. She’d never actually met the woman before that day. Unless she was very badly wrong, Raena hated her as well.

But little could either of them know that their hatred went back hundreds of years to another life, when both of their souls had been closely linked indeed, as mother and daughter in a life so far removed from what they shared at the moment that it would seem to lie in another world—could they ever know of it. And less could they know that the man Raena hated as Rhodry Maelwaedd had been bound up with them in a knot of Wyrd, though he, too, had lived in another body and another life, back in those distant years.

  PART TWO  

D
everry

849

The year
849.
The spring brought terrible omens in the sky above the Holy City. A cloud shaped like a dragon flew overhead, and there was lightning. The sky turned the color of copper, and a huge cloud like a spindle of black wool drew water from Lake Gwerconydd only to spit it out upon the land. So many refugees fled to Lughcarn that the city could not take them all in. High Priest Retyc gave them what food he could gather and sent them farther east, where the farmlands had need of them
.

—The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn

  CHAPTER ONE  

In the midst of a clamor, Lillorigga, daughter of the Boar clan, sat on a bench in the curve of the wall and wished that she were invisible. The king’s great hall roiled with armed men, standing, talking, sitting, eating, calling out to one another and calling for ale. Spring had come and brought with it the annual muster of the king’s loyal lords and their warbands, but in the two enormous hearths at either side of the hall, fires blazed and sent wafts of smoke into the hazy room. The stone walls of the enormous round hall oozed cold, for the attacking sun never made more than a brief sally into the tangled complex of brochs and outbuildings that made up the royal palace of Dun Deverry.