A Time of Omens by Katharine Kerr Read Free Book Online Page A

councillor.”
    “No doubt, but please, do your best to treat him the way you’d treat any other man. He won’t take offense—he knows that his life depends on it.”
    Branoic nodded his agreement, but mentally he was half-giddy with pride—not because the true king of all Deverry would be dining with him that night, but because Nevyn had somehow assumed that Maddyn and he formed a unit, a pair you could take for granted. Me and Maddyn, he thought, it sounds right. Then he blushed, wondering why his heart was pounding so hard, the same way it did when he saw some pretty lass he fancied.
    Although he of course never explained them to Branoic or indeed any of the silver daggers, Nevyn had several tricks at his disposal to hide the prince. For one thing, he simply withdrew all the glamours that the elemental spirits had been casting over the boy, so that when he changed into the scruffy brigga and much-mended shirt that Caradoc had ready for him, all his supernatural air of power and magnetism vanished along with the fine clothes. For another, with Maryn’s complete cooperation he ensorcelled the prince and suggested to his subconscious mind that he had difficulty in speaking—though in nothing else. He also suggested that on a simple cue, the difficulty would vanish. Once he removed the ensorcellment, the suggestion took effect, and the prince who’d always held forth like the hero of an ancient epic now stammered as he struggled to find the right words to express a simple, routine thought. All of the silver daggers swore in amazement and said that they wouldn’t recognize him themselves if they didn’t know better, but they, of course, thought that the prince was merely acting a part.
    Which in a way he always was, or, what was perhaps worse, the prince always lived his part in the strange epic that they were composing not with their words, but with their lives. At times, when he remembered the happy, charming little lad that Maryn once had been, Nevyn felt like a murderer. Over the years he had trained the prince so well that he’d stripped away all trace of the lad’s individuality, pruned and sheared him as ruthlessly as a gardener in the king’s palace shapes an ornamental hedge or splays a climbing rose over its trellis in order to torture it into anunnatural form. It was hard to tell at times whether Maryn was larger than life or smaller, a grand hero out of the Dawntime or a picture of a hero such as a Bardek illuminator would draw, all ink lines and thin colors. Either way, the kingdom needed him, not some all-too-human and complex man who would use the kingship rather than the kingship using him. Nevyn could only hope that in some future life either he himself or the Lords of Wyrd would make it up to Prince Maryn for slicing his personality away like the peel of an apple.
    First, of course, they had to get the lad and his councillor safely to Cerrmor before he could be any kind of king. Nevyn figured out a way to hide himself, too. Since there had to be some reason for an old man to be traveling with a mercenary troop, he decided to pass himself off as a jewel merchant who’d paid the troop a fee for allowing him to ride in the safety of their numbers. He knew enough about precious stones to bring this ruse off, and since Casyl had given him what few royal jewels there were to take to the Cerrmor princess, he could use them as his stock-in-trade. The real danger now lay in their desperate need to keep up these ruses. Since working dweomer leaves obvious tracks on the etheric and astral planes for those who know how to look for them, Nevyn could use no dweomer at all until the prince was safely in Cerrmor territory—not one single spell, not even lighting a fire or scrying someone out. He’d also asked the kings of the elements to keep their people away from him and the prince, which meant that he was deprived of any danger warning that the Wildfolk might give him, too. After two hundred years of living