CHAPTER 1
UP IN A HIGH tower chamber, Alyssa vairc Sirra stood at a lectern and studied a massive book of ancient chronicles. A shaft of sunlight, pale from the encroaching fog, fell through the window onto the page. Now and then she looked away from the passage she was memorizing and glanced out at the view. She could see down to Aberwyn’s fine new harbor and the Southern Sea beyond, dark blue water, just flecked with white caps in the last light of the day. Soon, she realized, it would be too dark to read.
“Lyss! Lyss!” Gasping for breath, Mavva flung herself into the chamber. “You’ve got to come. Now!”
Alyssa looked up from the book. Mavva’s long dark hair had slipped from its clasp. It hung in tendrils around her face, normally so pale, now flushed and red.
“Why?” Alyssa said. “What’s so wrong? And you shouldn’t run up the stairs like that. No wonder you’re all out of breath.”
“You don’t understand. He’s dying. Cradoc the bard.”
Alyssa slammed the chronicle-book shut.
“Let me just get my surcoat. I’ll come with you!”
With their red students’ surcoats flapping over their skirts and tunics, the two women hurried down the long spiral staircase. They ran out into the main courtyard of the United Scholars’ Collegia in Aberwyn, where they were studying in residence. The news had spread as Mavva had passed by, it seemed, because some thirty other students, men and women both, were milling about on the grassy lawn near the front gates of the scholars’ preserve. A pair of chaperones, older women dressed in black, fluttered at the mob’s edge and called out cautions. A dark-haired lad with the pale orange surcoat of Wmm’s Scribal Collegium over his breeches and shirt hurried to join them.
“Here’s Alys!” Rhys, Mavva’s betrothed, called out. “What shall we do, go up to the dun?”
“That’s where I’m bound,” Alyssa called back. “If we want to see him fairly treated, we’d best all go.”
The pack followed her out of the gates into the streets of Aberwyn, dim with the early twilight of a damp spring day. Already the lamplighters were out working, one to steady a ladder while the other climbed up to light the wicks of the oil lanterns from his coil of smoking fuse. Shopkeepers stood yawning at their doors; townsfolk hurried home with baskets of food from the marketplace or trotted out on one last errand. Every now and then a fine coach and four clattered down the narrow streets and made the students jump back against the shopfronts.
As they panted up the last steep hill, other students and the merely curious joined them from taverns or public squares, calling out the news to those still behind them. No one could believe it, that Gwerbret Ladoic would go so far as this, to let a true bard starve himself to death before his gates.
“Every bard in Eldidd will be singing his shame in a fortnight,” Mavva said.
“If it takes that long,” Alyssa said. “The news will go out with the mail coaches, I’ll wager.”
The grand dun of the gwerbrets of Aberwyn stood on the highest hill in town, as befitted the dwelling of one of the most important noblemen in the land. A wall of worked tan stone set it off from the city, but its cluster of towers and brochs stood so tall that you could see them, pointing up like hands, over the wall. Some of the towers bore a conical roof, covered in slate tiles, in the new courtly style, and glass caught the setting sun in every window. A fortune, that dun had cost the Western Fox clan, and townsfolk grumbled that bribes from the gwerbret’s law courts had paid for it all.
Just outside the main gates huddled a crowd of some hundred persons, but they kept a respectful distance from Cradoc, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground and slumped against the wall. Under his dirty gray breeches and a shirt as loose as a shroud, he was so ghastly thin, all bone and skull’s grimace, his skeletal fingers clutched round his harp, that Alyssa wondered how he managed to hold his head upright. Kneeling beside him were his two young apprentices, both in tears, and the grim-faced journeyman who’d sworn to take his place when the end came.
“Not one sign of the gwerbret and his wretched heir,” Rhys muttered. “May the gods curse them!”
“Hush!” Alyssa snapped. “You’ll get yourself transported to the Desolation for saying things like that.”
Behind them the crowd swelled steadily. It filled the street, spilled out into the long carriage drive round the dun walls, but everyone kept silent, barely breathing, it seemed. Alyssa felt them as a huge hand pressing at her back, driving her forward. She moved close enough to see Cradoc clearly—the pale gray hair, plastered to the all-too-prominent skull; the eyes, pools of unseeing shadow. One of the apprentices dipped a linen napkin into a jug of water, then held it to his master’s lips. For some days now Cradoc had been too weak to drink from a cup. The bard’s mouth stayed shut. With a wail, the ’prentice burst out keening and flung the napkin to the cobbles.
“He’s gone!” the journeyman shouted. “Look you at Aberwyn’s justice!”
The crowd roared. The keening began, high and musical, sobbing and wailing as everyone began to sway, back and forth, back and forth. Alyssa keened with them; she linked her arms with Mavva on one side and Rhys on the other as they rocked, bound by grief. Their leader was dead, their leader had fallen in a battle as real as any fought with swords and crossbows. In a time of change all over the far-flung kingdom of Deverry, the gwerbret of Aberwyn had held firm for the past and its outmoded ways, even while the most famous bard in the province of Eldidd starved himself at his door in protest.
Cutting over the keening and the sobs came the call of a silver horn. With the grinding of a winch and the grumble of timbers on stone the great gates swung slowly open. Through the widening view Alyssa caught sight of men in red and brown tartan trousers and vests over their loose shirts mounting horses. Cavalry sabers flashed as the horn sounded again. The men were sheathing the sabers and taking some other weapon out of their belts. Alyssa stood on tiptoe to see: horsewhips!
“Run!” Alyssa screamed. She let go of Mavva and Rhys’s arms. “When the crowd breaks we’ll be trampled!”
But although the crowd swirled as the prudent slipped away, it refused to break. When the cavalrymen edged their horses out, they carried not sabers but horsewhips—after all, it was their own fellow citizens they were facing, there in the darkening streets. For a moment utter silence and utter stalemate held. The troop leader, the gwerbret’s younger son, Lord Gwarl, urged his bay horse forward.
“Disperse!” he called out. “In the name of Aberwyn I command you! Clear this street immediately!”
The keening continued. The crowd swayed but never moved to leave.
“Rabble, all of you!” Gwarl stood high in his stirrups and yelled. “Scum! Disperse!”
A rock sailed through the air and smacked Lord Gwarl’s horse in the chest. With a whinny it reared, nearly unseating its rider. The crowd laughed and howled. Gwarl settled his horse down and began screaming at the top of his lungs, but his words died in the screech from the mob, laughter and rage all mingled into one hideous noise. Another rock, another—the troop swung horsewhips up and charged full toward the crowd.