Weavers of War by David B. Coe Page B

father had brought most of the Curgh army and also commanded five hundred men of the King’s Guard, the duke had been alarmed by his army’s showing during their brief encounter with the enemy. A number of his men had been wounded. Qirsi healers had little trouble mending most of their injuries, but Curgh’s soldiers should have fared better.
    Still, even under these extraordinary circumstances, Javan had clearly been pleased to see his son; Tavis, in turn, had been surprised by how happy he was to be with his father again. Theirs had never been an easy relationship, even before the brutal murder of Tavis’s promised bride, Lady Brienne of Kentigern, and the young lord’s imprisonment in Kentigern. Tavis hadn’t been certain how the duke would receive him. But Javan had openly welcomed both Grinsa and the boy, and Kearney had done much the same.
    The soldiers of the King’s Guard, however, had made it clear from the moment Tavis and Grinsa joined them that they still considered the young lord a murderer who had lost all claim to nobility. Since his arrival, they had offered naught but glares and vile comments uttered just loud enough for Tavis to hear. The boy had thought, or at least hoped, that once he proved his innocence their hostility toward him would abate. But though Cresenne ja Terba had confessed to hiring an assassin to kill Brienne, and Tavis had managed to kill that assassin on the shores of Wethyrn’s Crown, little had changed.
    “It’s going to take them some time,” Grinsa had whispered that first day, as they rode past the soldiers, Tavis’s face burning as if it had been branded. “Not all of them will have heard yet that you killed the assassin, and even after they do, some of them will never accept your innocence.”
    Tavis had simply nodded, unable to bring himself to speak.
    Curgh’s men had been far more welcoming. As word of his encounter with the assassin, Cadel, spread through his father’s army, men began to treat him like a hero, a conquering lord returning to his homeland. This made Tavis nearly as uncomfortable as the rage he saw on the faces of Kearney’s men. He had been fortunate to survive his battle with Cadel, and the man had been defenseless when Tavis killed him. I’m no hero, he wanted to yell at them. And I’m not a butcher, either. I’m just a man. Let me be. But that, he was beginning to understand, would never be his fate.
    Still, despite all of this, he was glad to be with his father again, and also with Hagan and Xaver MarCullet, and Fotir jal Salene, his father’s first minister. For a year he had been an exile, denied the comfort of his friends and family, denied the right to claim his place as a noble in the House of Curgh. Now his life as a fugitive was over. He had told Javan all that he could remember of his final encounter with the assassin, and though he knew that many in the realm might be slow to believe him when finally his story was told to all, he had no doubt that his father did. He longed to see his mother, to set foot once more in the castle of his forebears, but already he felt that this was a homecoming of sorts.
    Just as Tavis’s father had expected, the Braedon attack, brief as it was, had taken a heavy toll on Heneagh’s army. At least two dozen men lay dead in the long grass; most of them bore ugly, bloody wounds. Nearly three times that number had been injured. Already healers were tending to them, but Tavis could see immediately that they had need for more.
    “Go to the Curgh camp,” Javan told the nearest of Heneagh’s uninjured men. “Tell them to send all our healers.”
    “What of the king’s healers?” the man asked.
    “Curgh’s should be enough. Go. Quickly.” As the man ran back toward the Curgh lines, Javan surveyed the Heneagh army, shielding his eyes with an open hand. “Where is Welfyl?” he muttered.
    “You don’t suppose he fell in the battle.”
    The duke glanced at his son. “He shouldn’t have been