A Time of Omens Read Free Page B

polished strip, graved with three tiny ships.
    “You could still see the paint on one shield, too,” Maryn went on. “It was the ship blazon. I wish we had the messages that were in that tube.”
    “So do I, Your Highness, but I think me I know what they said. We’d best go down and collect the entire troop.No doubt we’re months too late, but I won’t rest easy until we have a look round for the murderers.”
    As they hurried back to the broch, it occurred to Nevyn that he no longer had to worry about communicating with his allies by dweomer. It was obvious that their enemies already knew everything they needed to know.
    Even though Maddyn considered hunting the murderers a waste of time, and he knew that every other man in the troop was dreading camping out in the chilly damp, no one so much as suggested arguing with Nevyn’s scheme. If anyone had, Maddyn himself would have been the one to do it, because he was a bard of sorts, with a bard’s freedom to speak on any matter at all, as well as being second in command of this troop of mercenaries newly become the prince’s guard. The true commander, Caradoc, was too afraid of Nevyn to say one wrong word to the old man, while Maddyn was, in some ways, the only real friend Nevyn had. Carrying what provisions the dun could spare them at the end of winter’s lean times, the silver daggers, with the prince and old Nevyn riding at the head of the line, clattered out the gates just at noon. With them was a wagon and a couple of servants with shovels to give the bodies a decent burial.
    “At least the blasted clouds have all blown away,” Caradoc said with a sigh. “I had a chance for a word with the king’s chief huntsman, by the by. He says that there’s an old hunting lodge about ten, twelve miles to the northeast, right on the river. If we can find it, it might still have a roof of sorts.”
    “If we’re riding that way to begin with.”
    They found the murdered men and their horses where they’d left them, and it ached Maddyn’s heart to think how close they’d been to safety when their Wyrd fell upon them. While the servants looked for a place where the thawing ground was good and soft, Nevyn coursed back and forth like a hunting dog and examined everything—the dead men, the horses, the soggy ground around them.
    “You and the men certainly trampled all over everything, Maddo,” he grumbled.
    “Well, we looked for footprints and tracks and suchlike. If they’d left a trail we would have found it, but you’ve gotto remember that the ground was frozen hard when this happened.”
    “True enough. Where’s the third lad, the one who almost got away?”
    Maddyn took him across the field to the sprawled and puffing corpse. In the warming day the smell was loathsome enough to make the bard keep his distance, but Nevyn knelt right down next to the thing and began to examine the ground as carefully as if he were looking for a precious jewel. Finally he stood up and walked away with one last disgusted shake of his head.
    “Find anything?”
    “Naught. I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get, to tell you the truth. It just seems that…” Nevyn let his words trail away and stood there slack-mouthed for a moment. “I want to wash my hands off, and I see a stream over there.”
    Maddyn went with him while he knelt down and, swearing at the coldness of the water, scrubbed his hands in the rivulet. All at once the old man went tense, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack again, his head tilted a little as if he listened to a distant voice. Only then did Maddyn notice that the streamlet brimmed with glassy-blue undines, rising up in crests and wavelets. In their midst, and yet somehow beyond them, like a man coming through a doorway from some other place, was a presence. Maddyn could barely see it, a vast silvery shimmer that seemed to partake of both water and air like some preternatural fog, forming itself into a shape that might not even have existed beyond