‘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 to sit down beside him.
‘I don’t know. Off meditating or whatever it is you sorcerers do, I suppose.’
‘Do I hear a sour note marring your dulcet tones? A touch of pique, a nettle-ment, if indeed such a word exists, a certain jealousy or resentment of our demanding craft, or mayhap a …’
‘Will you hold your tongue, you chattering bastard?’
‘Ah, I was right. I did.’
At that moment Jill appeared on the other side of the fire. They were camped near a little copse, and in the uncertain light it seemed she materialized right out of the trees like one of the Wildfolk.
‘You two look as startled as a pair of caught burglars. Talking about me?’
‘Your ears were burning, were they?’ Salamander said with a grin. ‘Actually we were just wondering where you were, and lo, our question is answered, our difficulty solved. Come sit down.’
Smiling, but only a little, Jill did so.
‘We should be at the ruined dun on the morrow,’ she remarked. ‘That’s where the others are meeting us. Do you remember it, Rhodry? The place where Lord Corbyn’s men tried to trap you during that rebellion.’
‘Ye gods, that was years and years ago, but remember it I do, and that dun will always be dear to my heart, because it was there that I first saw you.’
‘You chatter like your wretched brother, don’t you?’ She got up and walked away, disappearing noiselessly back into the copse and was gone.
Rhodry winced and stared into the fire.
‘I think, O brother of mine, that there’s somewhat you don’t quite understand.’ Salamander paused for dramatic effect. ‘Jill’s beyond you now. Beyond us both, truly, for I’ll admit that there was a time or brief season in my life when I was madly in love with her myself – without the slightest result, let me hasten to add, but a cold and most cruel rejection, a sundering of my heart and the smashing to little bits of my hopes.’
‘Oh. Who is he, then?’
‘Not who, O jealousy personified. What. The dweomer. It takes some people that way. Why, by every god in the sky, do you think she left you in the first place? Because a love of dweomer is a burning twice stronger than lust or even sentiment, which it oft times overpowers.’
Rhodry and Jill had parted so long ago that Rhodry quite simply couldn’t remember its details, but he could remember all too well his bitterness.
‘I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now, and cursed if I even want to.’
‘Then there’s naught I can say about it, is there? But I warn you, don’t let yourself fall in love with her again.’
Rhodry merely shrugged, wondering if the warning were coming too late.
On the morrow morn they splashed across Y Brog and left the settled lands behind. All that day they rode through fallow grasslands, dotted here and there with copses or crossed with tiny streamlets; that night, they camped in green emptiness. Yet early on the next day, Rhodry saw rising on the horizon a broken tower, as lonely in the endless grass as a cairn marking a warrior’s grave – which, he supposed, it might well have been.
‘Did this dun fall to the sword?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Jill said. ‘Calonderiel might know.’
The elf in question, an old friend and a warleader among his people, was waiting for them near the empty gap in the outer walls that once had held wooden gates. They saw his horse first, a splendid golden gelding with a silvery mane and tail, tethered at his leisure out in the grass. Calonderiel himself was pacing idly back and forth in the ward, where grass grew round the last few cobbles and a profusion of ivy was sieging the broch itself. A tall man but slender, as most of his people were, the war-leader had dark purple eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, moonbeam pale hair, and, of course, ears as long and delicately pointed as a sea-shell.
‘So there you are!’ he sang out in Deverrian. ‘I thought Salamander had gone and got you all lost.’
‘Spare me the implied insults, if you please.’ Salamander made him a sketch of a bow. ‘You must have been talking with my father, if you’d think so ill of me. Which reminds me. Where is the esteemed parent? I thought he’d be eager for a first look at this other son of his.’
‘No