Read Online The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage by Katharine Kerr - Free Book Online

once he smiled, stooped, and pulled something out of a crack between two planks.
    “A silver piece,” he said, grinning. “Well, I’ll take that as tribute. Here’s one bit of coin that won’t buy a horse for the Usurper’s army.”
    Their second night on the road brought an even nastier surprise. Lord Ganedd’s dun was shut against them, the gates barred from inside. Daeryc and Peddyc sat on their horses and yelled out Ganedd’s name, but no voice ever answered. No one appeared on the walls, not even to insult the two lords. Yet the place felt alive and inhabited. In the long silences Bevyan heard the occasional dog bark or horse whinny. Once she thought she saw a face at a window, high up in the broch. When Peddyc and Daeryc rode back to their waiting entourage, they were red-faced and swearing.
    “Are they neutral, then?” Anasyn asked. “Or gone over to the Usurper?”
    “How would I know, you young dolt?” Peddyc snarled. “Oh, here, forgive me, Sanno. No use in taking this out on you.”
    When the entourage camped, out in a grassy field stripped of its cows, Bevyan had the servants build a separate fire for the womenfolk. All evening, as they sat whispering gossip and fears, they would keep looking to the men’s fire, some twenty feet away, where Peddyc and Daeryc paced back and forth, talking together with their heads bent.
    The third evening, then, they rode up to Lord Camlyn’s dun with dread as a member of their entourage, but the gates stood open, and Camlyn himself, a tall young man with a shock of red hair, came running out to the ward to greet them with four grey boarhounds barking after him. He yelled the dogs into silence, then grabbed the gwerbret’s stirrup in a show of fealty and blurted:
    “Your Grace, what greeting did you get at Ganedd’s door?”
    “A cursed poor one,” Daeryc said. “I’m glad to see you held loyal to the true king. This autumn, when we ride against Ganedd, his lands are yours.”
    At dinner that night the talk centered itself upon broken fealties—who had gone over to the Usurper, who was threatening neutrality, who was weaselling any way he could to get out of his obligations for fighting men and the provisions to feed them. Since only one honor table stood in the poverty of Camlyn’s hall, Bevyan heard it all. She shared a trencher with Camlyn’s wife, Varylla, at the foot of the table. In unspoken agreement the two women spoke little, merely listened. By the time the page poured the men mead, Gwerbret Daeryc had forgotten tact.
    “It’s the cursed Boar clan that’s the trouble,” he snarled. “Men would rally to the king, but why should they rally to the Boar?”
    “Just so,” Camlyn said. “The wars have made them rich while the rest of us—huh, we’ll be out on the roads like beggars one fine day.”
    The two men were looking at Peddyc and waiting.
    “I’ve no love for Burcan or Tibryn,” he said. “But if the king had chosen them, I’d serve in their cause.”
    “I like that if.” Daeryc paused for a careful bite of food; he could chew only on one side of his mouth, since most of his teeth were gone. “I’d do the same. If.”
    Peddyc glanced down the table and caught Bevyan’s glance. She answered the unspoken question with a small shrug. It seemed safe enough to voice their long doubts here.
    “Well,” Peddyc went on. “They say that King Daen made Burcan regent when he was dying. I wasn’t there to hear him.”
    “No more was I,” Camlyn snapped.
    “Nor I either. And with Daen’s widow such close kin to the Boar …” Daeryc let his words trail off into a swallow of mead.
    “Hogs root,” Camlyn said, seemingly absently. “If you let hogs into a field, they’ll tear it up with tusk and trotter till the grass all dies.”
    “There’s only one thing to do in that case,” Peddyc said. “And that’s turn them out of it.”
    “Only the one, truly.” Daeryc hesitated for a long time. “But you’d best have a