Read Online Everran's Bane by Sylvia Kelso - Free Book Online Page B

a wordsmith. Draft this.”
    I asked, “What is it, lord?” And he tossed me the stylus. “Proclamation. All the Confederacy. Champions. Anyone who can stick the dragon, I’ll give them... give them...”
    â€œIt’s usual to offer a daughter,” I said flippantly, and then could have bitten off my tongue.
    He did wince, but then it brought his first real laugh. “Better than that.” He held his ribs. “Offer them—Maerdrigg’s maerian.”
    I dropped the stylus. He said, “Heirloom, priceless, the luck of the house.” Shrugged, and winced again. “Everran comes first.”
    He was still in great pain: the physician talked of extracting splinters when he was strong enough, but after three weeks not even Thassal could feed him yeldtar juice. “Saw it in Hazghend. A drug.” So I would play for him, in the night watches where I had now been promoted as nurse.
    I still see that little stone wedge of room, the pallet bed overhung by a goose-feather mattress Stavan commandeered the Four know where, the rough iron door, the archer’s slit full of frostily starlit black, the tiny lamp flame on his strained, haggard face. I would play the little, simple airs of Everran’s work and play: songs for all seasons from every Resh, the folk catches that outlast lore. When that failed, we would talk. One learns a great deal, talking at night. Sellithar must have been the only subject on which we never spoke.
    After seven days Hawge had flown north-east amid a wave of frantic orders for the border garrisons to shelter the people and let the dragon be, and was now dormant after feeding heavily on a tardy cattle herd in the Coesterne hills. The field at Coed Wrock had been salved. The king had already commissioned a cairn, but that no one had found Inyx’s body was his deepest grief.
    â€œHe was right,” he said wistfully during another night conversation. “I shouldn’t have tried it. I threw them—and him—away.”
    â€œI do not think so,” was the best I could do. When he spoke in that quiet remorse so utterly unakin to self-pity was when I pitied him most. “It had to be attempted. They would say the same.”
    He shifted his head on the pillow. “All the same... I’d like to have begged his pardon. Told him he was right.”
    â€œHe,” I rejoined blandly, “would enjoy that.”
    We both chuckled. Then it was time for another of the bed-ridden’s indignities: the sponging, the bed-pan, the food you cannot cut for yourself. Coming back, I beat up the pillows, which as usual were everywhere, and asked, as usual, “Is that better, lord?”
    He smiled rather wearily as he lay back. Then he looked up. Whatever wreckage lay under the bandages, his eyes remained beautiful: long-lashed, vivid green almonds, full of impish light.
    â€œBeryx,” he said. “I can’t expect to be ‘lord’ when I ask you to do things like that.”
    I murmured some demurral. He said, “That’s an order,” and then began laughing. “Oh, Four! I mean, that’s an order—please.” As he held his side, I thought, No wonder they died for you. If you command, you can also charm.
    * * * * *
    Like Thassal, Stavan had been invaluable: while I played Regent he wrought with Gerrar’s household, materialized food and physic and sick-room furniture from thin air, excluded hysterical visitors, even managed to achieve quiet in the nearest streets. Later he provided for counselors, engineers, physicians, armorers, and all the king’s other whimsies as well as me. When I asked why he stayed, he shrugged. “Nothing better to do.”
    That next night I was supping in Gerrar’s former record room when he came in to announce, “Someone wanting you.” With a mental groan I said, “Send him in,” and looked up at a ghost.
    He was propped on crutches in the