"Kerr, Katharine - Deverry 01 - Daggerspell v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

Jill was crying too hard to say anything. Cullyn carried her into the tavern and sat down with her in his lap at a table near the door. The men at the far table set down their tankards and looked at him with cold, hard eyes.
“You know what, Da?” Jill sniveled out. “The last thing Mama said was your name.”
Cullyn tossed his head back and keened, a long, low howl of mourning. Hovering nearby, Macyn risked patting his shoulder.
“Here, lad,” Macyn said. “Here, now.”
Cullyn kept keening, one long moan after another, even though Macyn kept patting his shoulder and saying “here now” in a helpless voice. The other men walked over, and Jill hated their tight little smiles, as if they were taunting her da for his grief. All at once, Cullyn realized that they were there. He slipped Jill off his lap, and as he stood up, his sword leapt into his hand as if by dweomer.
“And why shouldn’t I mourn her?” Cullyn yelled. “She was as decent a woman as the Queen herself, no matter what you pack of dogs thought of her. Is there anyone in this stinking village who wants to say otherwise to my face?”
The clot of men faded back, one cautious step at a time.
“None of you are even fit to be killed to pour blood on her grave,” Cullyn said. “Admit it.”
All the men muttered, “We aren’t, truly.” Cullyn took one step forward, the sword glittering in the sunlight from the door.
“Well and good,” he said. “Go on, scum—get back to your drinking.”
Instead, shoving each other to be the first out the door, the men fled the tavern. Cullyn sheathed the sword with a slap of the metal into leather. Macyn wiped sweat off his face.
“Well, Macco,” Cullyn said. “You and the village can think as low of me as you want, but my Seryan deserved better than a dishonored piss-poor excuse for a man like me.”
“Er ah well,” Macyn said.
“And now you’re all I’ve got left of her.” Cullyn turned to Jill. “We’ve got a cursed strange road ahead of us, my sweet, but we’ll manage.”
“What?” Jill said. “Da, are you going to take me with you?”
“Cursed right. And today.”
“Now here,” Macyn broke in. “Hadn’t you best wait and think this over? You’re not yourself right now, and—”
“By all the ice in all the hells!” Cullyn spun around, his hand on his sword hilt. “I’m as much myself as 1 need to be!”
“Ah well.” Macyn stepped back. “So you are.”
“Get your clothes, Jill. We’ll go see your mother’s grave, and then we’ll be on our way. I never want to see this stinking village again.”
Pleased and terrified all at the same time, Jill ran to the chamber and began bundling the few things she owned up into a blanket. She could hear Macyn trying to talk to Cullyn and Cullyn snarling right back at him. She risked calling out softly to the Wildfolk. The gray gnome materialized in midair and floated to the straw-strewn floor.
“Da’s taking me away,” Jill whispered. “Do you want to come? If you do, you’d better follow us or get on his horse.”
When the gnome vanished, Jill wondered if she’d ever see him again.
“Jill!” Cullyn yelled. “Stop talking to yourself and get out here!”
Jill grabbed her bundle and ran out of the tavern. Cullyn shoved her things into the bedroll tied behind his saddle, then lifted her up on top of it. When he mounted, Jill slipped her arms around his waist and rested her face against his broad back. His shirt was stained all over in a pattern of blurry rings, rust marks made by his sweating inside his chain mail. His shirts always looked like that.
“Well,” Macyn said. “Farewell, Jill.”
“Farewell.” All at once she wanted to cry. “And my thanks for being so good to me.”
Macyn waved, somewhat teary-eyed. Jill turned on her uneasy perch to wave back as they started downhill.
On the downhill side of the village stood the holy oaks, sacred to Bel, god of the sun and the king of all the gods. Scattered among them were the village burials. Although Seryan had no stone to mark her grave as the richer people did, Jill knew that she would never forget where it lay. As soon as she led her father there, Cullyn began to keen, throwing himself down full-length on it, as if he were trying to hold his beloved through the earth. Jill was terrified until at last, he fell silent and sat up, “I brought your mama a present this trip,” Cullyn said. “And by the gods, she’s going to have it.”
Cullyn pulled his silver dagger and cut out a piece of sod, then dug down like a badger to make a shallow hole. He took a gold bracelet out of his shirt and held it up for Jill to see: a thin rod of pure gold, twisted round and round to look like rope. He put it into the hole, smoothed the dirt down, then put the chunk of sod back.
“Farewell, my love,” he whispered. “For all my wandering, I never loved a woman but you, and I pray to every god you believed me when I told you that.” He stood up and wiped the dagger blade clean on the side of his brigga. “That’s all the mourning you’ll ever see me do, Jill, but remember how I loved your mother.”
“I will, Da. Promise.”
All afternoon, they rode down the east-running road, a narrow dirt track through the sharp-peaked hills and pine forests. Every now and then they passed fields where the grain stood green and young, and the farmers would turn to stare at the strange sight of a warrior with a child behind his saddle. Jill was soon stiff and sore on her uncomfortable perch, but Cullyn was so wrapped in a dark brooding that she was afraid to speak to him.
Just at twilight, they crossed a shallow river and reached the walled town of Averby. Cullyn dismounted and led the horse along narrow twisting streets while Jill clung to the saddle and looked around wide-eyed. She had never seen so many houses in her life—easily two hundred of them. At last they reached a shabby inn with a big stables out in back, where the innkeep greeted Cullyn by name and gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. Jill was too tired to eat dinner. Cullyn carried her upstairs to a dusty wedge-shaped chamber and made her a bed out of his cloak on a straw mattress. She fell asleep before he’d blown the candle out.
When she woke, the room was full of sunlight, and Cullyn was gone. Jill sat up in panic, trying to remember why she was in this strange chamber with nothing but a pile of gear. It took her several minutes to remember that Da had come and taken her with him. It wasn’t long before Cullyn came back, with a brass bowl of steaming water in one hand and a large chunk of bread in the other.
“Eat this, my sweet,” he said.
Eagerly Jill started in on the bread, which was studded with nuts and currants. Cullyn set the bowl down, rummaged in his saddlebags for soap and a fragment of mirror, then knelt on the floor to shave. He always shaved with his silver dagger. As he took it out, Jill could see the device engraved on the blade, a striking falcon, which was Cullyn’s mark, graved or stamped on everything he owned.
“That dagger’s awfully sharp, Da,” Jill said.
“It is.” Cullyn began lathering his face. “It’s not pure silver, you see, but some sort of alloy. It doesn’t tarnish as easily as real silver, and it holds an edge better than any steel. Only a few silversmiths in the kingdom know the secret, and they won’t tell anyone else.”
“Why not?”
“And how should I know? A suspicious lot, the smiths who serve the silver dagger. I tell you, not just any exile or dishonored man can buy one of these blades. You have to find yourself another silver dagger and ride with him awhile—prove yourself, like—and then he’ll pledge you to the band.”
“Do you have to show him you can fight good?”
“Fight well.” Cullyn began to shave in neat, precise strokes. “That’s somewhat of it, truly, but only a part. Here, silver daggers have an honor of our own. We’re scum, all of us, but we don’t steal or murder. The noble lords know we don’t, and so they trust us enough to give us our hires. If a couple of the wrong kind of lads got into the band, gave us a bad name, like, well, then, we’d all starve.”
Jill had a few more bites of bread.
“Da, why did you want to be a silver dagger?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. I didn’t want to. It was only choice I had, that’s all. I’ve never heard of a man being so big a fool as to join up just because he wanted to.”
“I don’t understand.”
Cullyn considered, wiping the last bit of lather off his upper lip with the back of his hand.
“Well,” he said at last. “No man joins the daggers if he has a chance at a decent life in a lord’s dun. Sometimes men are fools, and we do things that mean no lord would let us ride in his warband ever again. When that happens, well, carrying the dagger is a cursed sight better than sweeping out a stable or suchlike. At least you get to fight for your hire, like a man.”
“You never could have been a fool!”