Read Online Bristling Wood by Katharine Kerr - Free Book Online Page B

incredibly interesting.”
    ‘Then my thanks, truly. Now, Slwmar of Dun Deverry’s a great and generous man, but he’s not a dweomer leader. I always had trouble believing he was the true king, frankly, even though I always pledged him that way because my lord did. He used to walk among us men every now and again, talking to us and calling us by name, and it was splendid, of him, but he was just an ordinary sort of lord, not a true king.”
    “Indeed? And what should the true king look like, then?”
    “Well, there should just be somewhat of the dweomer about him. You should just be able to tell he’s the true king. I mean, he doesn’t have to be as tall as one of the gods, or as handsome, either, but you could look at him and know in your very soul he was meant to rule. He’d have splendid good luck, and the gods would send omens of the things he was going to do. By the hells, I’d follow a man like that to the death, and most of the kingdom would, too, I’ll wager.”
    With a wild, half-mad grin, Nevyn got up and. began pacing furiously back and forth in front of the hearth . . . 
    “Have I said somewhat stupid?” Maddyn said.
    “What? You’ve just said the best thing I’ve beard in many a long year, actually. Lad, you can’t know how glad I am, that I dragged you back from the gates of the Otherlands. My thanks for making me see what’s been under my nose all along. I’ll tell you one great fault of the dweomer. You get so used to using it and looking in strange places for stranger lore that you forget to use the wits the gods gave you in the first place!”
    Utterly confused, Maddyn could only stare at him as he cackled and paced back and forth like a madman. Finally Maddyn went to bed, but when he woke restlessly in the middle of the night, he saw Nevyn standing by the hearth and smiling into the fire.
    Over the next couple of snowbound weeks, Nevyn spent much time brooding over the idea that Maddyn had so inadvertently handed him, a splendid repayment for his healing. Although complex in the details, the plan was peculiarly simple at its core and thus possible. At the moment, things looked as if the wars might rage until the end of time, ravaging the kingdom until there wasn’t a man left fit to fight. After so many years of civil war, after so many leaders slain and buried, so many loyal followers wiped out, it seemed to men’s minds that each of the claimants had as good a right as the next one to the throne. When it came to figuring bloodlines and genealogies, even the priests had a hard time telling who was most fit to be king of all Deverry. The lords, therefore, pledged to the man who seemed to offer an immediate advantage, and their sons changed the alliance if the advantage changed.
    But what if a man appeared who impressed his followers as the true king, a dweomer leader, as Maddyn said, whom half the kingdom would follow to the throne or the grave? Then at last, after one final gruesome bloodbath, the kingdom would come to peace. Dweomer leader, is it? Nevyn would think; give me a decent man, and I’ll make him look dweomer soon enough. It would be easy—disgustingly easy as he thought about it—to surround a good-looking man with glamour, to manipulate the omens around him, to pull a few cheap tricks just like the one that the Wildfolk had pulled on Selyn and his friends. They would have the troops on their knees and their lords along with them, all cheering the one true king. He realized, too, in those nights of brooding, that he shouldn’t have been surprised that Maddyn would bring him the idea. In his last life, as young Ricyn down in Cerrmor, he’d been the captain of a warband pledged to just such a dweomer leader, Gweniver of the Wolf, whose madness and undoubted piety to the Dark Goddess had combined to blaze her round with false glamour like a fire.
    Thinking about her and her grim fate made Nevyn wary. Did he have the right to subject another man to the forces that had