PART ONE

       Eldidd and the Westlands, 1428

      Never loose an arrow with your eyes shut.

       Westfolk proverb

      

       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. Tendrils 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