Bristling Wood by Katharine Kerr Page B

rebuild. In the center of the city, around and between two main hills, lived what was left of the population, scarcely more than in King Bran’s time. Warriors walked the streets and shoved the townsfolk aside whenever they met. It seemed to Nevyn that every man he saw was a rider for one lord or another, and every woman either lived in fear of them or had surrendered to the inevitable and turned whore to please them.
    The first inn he found was tiny, dirty, and ramshackle, little more than a big house divided into a tavern room and a few chambers, but he lodged there because he liked the innkeep, Draudd, a slender old man with hair as white as Nevyn’s and a smile that showed an almost superhuman ability to keep a sense of humor in the midst of ruin. When he found out that Nevyn was an herbman, Draudd insisted on taking out his lodging in trade.
    “Well, after all, I’m as old as you are, so I’ll easily equal the cost of your herbs. Why give me coins only to have me give them right back?”
    “True-spoken. Ah, old age! Here I’ve studied the human body all my life, but I swear old age has put pains in joints I never knew existed.”
    Nevyn spent that first afternoon in the tavern, dispensing herbs for Draudd’s collection of ailments and hearing in return all the local gossip, which meant royal gossip. In Dun Deverry even the poorest person knew what there was to know about the goings-on at court. Gossip was their bard, and the royalty their only source of pride. Draudd was a particularly rich source, because his youngest daughter, now a woman in her forties, worked up in the palace kitchens, where she had plenty of opportunities to overhear the noble-born servitors like the chamberlain and steward at their gossip. From what Draudd repeated that day, the Boars were so firmly in control of the king that it was something of a scandal. Everyone said that Tibryn, the Boar of Cantrae, was close to being the real king himself.
    “And now with the king so ill, our poor liege, and his wife so young, and Tibryn a widower and all . . . ” Draudd paused for dramatic effect. “Well! Can’t you imagine what we folk are wondering?”
    “Indeed I can. But would the priests allow the king’s widow to marry?”
    Draudd rubbed his thumb and forefinger together like a merchant gloating over a coin.
    “Ah, by the hells!” Nevyn snarled. “Has it gotten as bad as all that?”
    “There’s naught left but coin to bribe the priests with. They’ve already gotten every land grant and legal concession they want.”
    At that point Nevyn decided that meeting with Gwergovyn—if indeed he could even get in to see him—was a waste of time.
    “But what ails the king? He’s still a young man.”
    “He took a bad wound in the fighting last summer. I happened to be out on the royal road when they brought him home. I’d been buying eggs at the market when I heard the bustle and the horns. And I saw the king, lying in a litter, and he was as pale as snow, he was. But he lived, when here we all thought they’d be putting his little lad on the throne come winter. But he never did heal up right. My daughter tells me that he has to have special food, like. All soft things, and none of them Bardek spices, neither. So they boil the meat soft, and pulp apples and suchlike.”
    Nevyn was completely puzzled: the special diet made no sense at all for a man who by all accounts had been wounded in the chest He began to wonder if someone were deliberately keeping the king weak, perhaps to gain the good favor of Tibryn of the Boar The best way to find out, of course, was to talk to the king’s physicians. On the morrow he took his laden mule up to the palace, which lay on the northern hill. Ring after ring of defensive walls, some stone, some earthworks, marched up the slope and cut the hill into defensible slices. At every gate in every wall, guards stopped Nevyn and asked him his business, but they always let a man with healing herbs to sell