A Time of Omens. Katharine Kerr
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point, your highness, is to keep you safe so you can marry the one True King when he reaches Cerrmor.’
‘And when, my lord, will that be? When the moon turns into a boat and sails down from the sky with him on it?’
Elyc let out his breath in a little puff and ran both hands through his hair. With something of a sense of shock, Bellyra realized that he was close to tears.
‘My apologies, my lord. Oh here, don’t cry. I truly am sorry.’
Elyc looked up, his eyes murderous – then he laughed.
‘I feel as weepy as a wench, true enough, your highness. You have sharp eyes for one so young.’
‘It comes from living here, actually. You’d have them too if you had to grow up in the palace.’
‘No doubt. But listen, lass, for lass you are though a royal one: it doesn’t do to tread on men’s hopes when hope is all they have. Remember that.’
‘Indeed? Well, how do you think I feel, knowing I’ll probably get smothered before I’m fifteen and even betrothed, much less married to anyone?’
Elyc winced, and for a moment she was afraid that he truly would cry this time.
‘Your highness,’ he said at last. ‘Cerrmor can still field an army of over three thousand loyal men …’
‘And Cantrae’s got close to seven thousand. I heard you telling Lord Tammael that.’
‘You little sneak! What were you doing, creeping around the great hall when we thought you were in bed?’
‘Just that. It’s my hall, isn’t it? Since I’m the heir and all, and so I’ll sneak around in it if I want to.’
All at once he laughed in genuine good cheer.
‘You know, your highness, at times you truly do have the royal spirit. But listen to me. Once the True King comes, a good thousand of those Cantrae men are ours again. Their lords have gone over to Dun Deverry out of fear and naught else, and they have a hundred years’ worth of reasons to hate the Boars and their false king. Give them hope, and they’ll flock to our banner.’
‘Well and good, my lord.’ She suddenly remembered that she was supposed to act regally at moments like these, not slang her cadvridoc like a fishwife. ‘Truly, we have great faith in your understanding of matters military.’
Although it seemed to her that Elyc was suppressing a smile, he did make her a passable bow.
‘Now, good regent, did you want me for some reason?’
‘Not truly. I was just worried, wondering where you’d got to.’ He paused to glance round at the towering rise of stone. ‘You’re probably safe enough out here.’
‘Unless an assassin comes creeping under the walls.’
‘Oh indeed? Has the bard been amusing you with lurid tales?’
‘He hasn’t. Look, see where the stream comes out from under the wall over there? Well, that water comes from the dairyroom, where they store the cheeses and suchlike. The running water keeps them cool in summer. But it gets into the dairyroom through this underground tunnel that leads all the way outside the dun walls to that big stream that goes through the market district down to the river. The tunnel was built in 769 by Glyn the First when the sorcerer was here, the one who posed as a gardener to gain the king’s confidence and …’
‘Sorcerer? Don’t prattle about some wretched sorcerer!’ He was close to shouting. ‘I never knew about any cursed tunnel. Ye gods, your highness, this is a serious matter!’
‘Well, so I thought. That’s what I meant about assassins.’
‘We’ll have to brick the tunnel up, or, wait, if things come to a siege, we’ll need the water.’
Muttering about portcullises and blacksmiths, Tieryn Elyc rushed off with barely a bow in her direction. Although Bellyra considered climbing back into her tree, her day-dreaming mood was broken. It was also getting late; in a few moments the sun would drop below the circling walls, and the garden turn cold. She crossed the bridge and went inside a tower, climbed up a spiral staircase to a landing, crossed it to another set of stairs, which led down to still another door, which finally got her out to the ward. As she was going to the kitchen hut, she saw two of the scullery boys cleaning a butchered pig. Its liver lay steaming and bleeding on the cobbles.
‘Modd, please, slice me off a bit of that liver, will you?’
‘For that scraggly cat of yours, your highness?’
‘She won’t be scraggly when she’s not half-starved. How’s she going to have her kits if she can’t make milk?’
When she gave him one of her most brilliant smiles, he relented, smiling in return, pushing back his forelock with a blood-crusted wrist and glancing round at the littered ward.
‘Fetch me those cabbage leaves over there for a wrap,’ he said to the younger boy. ‘And we’ll slice the royal puss up a bit of supper.’
‘She is the royal puss now. So there!’
The cat in question lived with her up in her chambers, the old nursery, which took up the floor above the women’s hall. Half the round floor plan was filled by a single big room with a hearth, where she and her brother and younger sister had once had their baths and eaten their meals. Lying by the hearth were a pair of little wooden horses, left there by Caturyc on the night when he’d fallen ill. Somehow no one wanted to pick them up and put them away, even though he’d been dead for years. The other half was divided into small wedge-shaped chambers, one each for the children and one for their old nurse who had accompanied Gwerna, Bellyra’s eight-year-old sister, when she’d been sent off to an aunt’s in a country dun – for her delicate health, everyone said, but Bellyra knew that they were keeping her safe, as the younger heir, in case Cerrmor was besieged at the end of the summer. As Princess of the Blood it was Bellyra’s Wyrd to stay through the siege. She would have to be very brave, she supposed, and keep out of everyone’s way.
Her own chamber held a single bed, a dower chest, one horribly faded tapestry on the wall, and the bottom of a cracked ale-barrel which the carpenter had sawn down for her, ostensibly to make a bed for her dolls, but in reality for Melynna, a very pregnant ginger cat whom Bellyra had found starving in the stables with a paw hurt badly enough to keep her from hunting. By now the paw was healing and she was sleek again from being fed as many times a day as the princess could beg or steal food for her, but Bellyra hated to give her up and Melynna certainly saw no reason to leave. As soon as Bellyra put the liver scraps down on the floor she lumbered out of her bed, lined with a torn-up linen shift that the princess had outgrown, and settled in for a good bloody munch.
‘How’s your basket of sand? Not too dirty? Good. When your kits are born, we’re going to have trouble hiding them, aren’t we? Well, I’ll think of some clever plan then. I don’t want anybody drowning any of them.’
Melynna looked up, licked a whisker, and purred a throaty thanks.
Just outside the bedchamber, right by a window, was Bellyra’s writing table, with her pot of ink, her stylus, and her pens laid out in a neat row. She laid the book down next to them, then sat on her stool and looked out the window at the main ward and the great iron-bound gates (built in 724 by Glyn the First’s father, Gwerbret Ladoic) which were standing open to reveal the city street beyond. The iron hinges and reinforcements were rusty and pitted – iron did pit in Cerrmor’s salt air.
‘It’s all very well for Elyc to talk of putting in a portcullis,’ she said to the cat. ‘But where, pray tell, are the blacksmiths going to get the metal for it?’
At that precise moment, just like an omen sent by the gods, servants began running toward the gates and shouting in welcome. With an enormous rumble and clatter, ox-cart after ox-cart pulled into the ward, and from her high perch Bellyra could see that they were loaded to