Darkspell

“Do I have any hope of convincing you to get back and stay out of this?” Rhodry said, pulling a javelin.

“None.” Jill glanced back and saw that he’d positioned all the guards directly behind them.

He gave her a tight smile, as if he’d been expecting no less from her. For another mile the road snaked on. The dust they were raising hung in the windless air like a banner to announce that they were coming. Jill felt a little coldness in the pit of her stomach. She knew what riding to battle meant. In her hand, her sword winked bright, the blade that her father had given her. Oh Da, she thought, it’s a cursed good thing you taught me how to use it.

The road made a sharp turn, and Jill saw them, a pack of some twenty armed men, blocking the road about thirty feet ahead. With an automatic shout of his old war cry, “For Aberwyn!” Rhodry threw the javelin in his hand and drew his sword. Screaming, the bandits charged, but their leader’s horse staggered to its knees and fell with Rhodry’s javelin in its chest, rolling its rider under the hooves of his own men. Jill kicked Sunrise forward as Rhodry led his ragged handful of men out to meet the charge….

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe many thanks to Bill and Katie Daniel, who made the revision of both this book and
Daggerspell
much easier by keyboarding the previous versions onto disks. I also owe more than a few thanks to all those friends and relations, particularly my husband, Howard, who put up with my moods when I’m writing.

PRONUNCIATION NOTES

The language spoken in Deverry, which we might well call Neo-Gaulish, is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such, just as the Deverrians themselves are quite different from any historical Celts.

V
OWELS
are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

A
as in
father
when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in
far,
when short.

O
as in
bone
when long; as in
pot
when short.

W
as the
oo
in
spook
when long; as in
roof
when short.

Y
as the
i
in
machine
when long; as the
e
in
butter
when short.

E
as in
pen.

I
as in
pin.

U
as in
pun.

Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed.
Y
is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

DIPHTHONGS
generally have one consistent pronunciation.

AE
as the
a
in
mane.

AI
as in
aisle.

AU
as the
ow
in
how.

EO
as a combination of
eh
and
oh.

EW
as in Welsh, a combination of
eh
and
oo.

IE
as in
pier.

OE
as the
oy
in
boy.

UI
as the North Welsh
wy,
a combination of
oo
and
ee.
Note that
OI
is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in
carnoic
(KAR-noh-ik).

C
ONSONANTS
are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

C
is always hard as in
cat.

G
is always hard as in
get.

DD
is the voiced
th
as in
breathe,
but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to
TH,
the unvoiced sound as in
thin
or
breath.
(This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

R
is heavily rolled.

RH
is a voiceless
R,
approximately pronounced as if it were spelled
hr
in Deverry proper. In Eldidd the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from
R.

DW, GW,
and
TW
are single sounds, as in
Gwendolen
or
twit.

Y
is never a consonant.

I
before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending
-ion,
pronounced
yawn.

D
OUBLED
C
ONSONANTS
are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that
DD
is a
single letter,
not a doubled consonant.

A
CCENT
is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

On the whole, I have transcribed both Elvish and Bardekian names and words according to the preceding system of orthography, which is quite adequate to the
Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be both confusing and overly pedantic to use the full apparatus by which scholars try to represent this most subtle and nuanced of tongues. To the average human ear, for instance, distinctions such as those between
A, *A,
and
A
are lost in the hearing. Why, then, should we try to distinguish them in print?

If the reader feels that I belabor this point, the reader should be apprised that a certain Elvish scholar of Elvish has already sniped at this simplified usage, both in private circles and the more public medium of the Aberwyn papers. One hopes that having relieved himself of his bile, he will now find more suitable activities for his leisure hours.

Back in the eleventh century, when the far-flung kingdom of Deverry lay sparse and tentative across the lands men claimed in the king’s name, Eldidd province was one of the most sparsely settled areas of all. Particularly in its western reaches, towns were rare, and in the west Dun Gwerbyn was something of a governmental seat, even though its high stone walls circled barely five hundred thatched houses and three temples, two of those little better than wayside shrines. On a hill in the center of town, however, stood the dun, or fort, of the tieryn, large and solid enough to be impressive in any province at that time. Inside a double set of earthworks and ditches, stone walls sheltered stables and barracks for the tieryn’s warband of a hundred men, a collection of huts and storage sheds, and the broch complex itself, a four-story round stone tower with two shorter towers built on to the sides.

On one particular morning, the open ward round the broch was abustle with servants, carrying supplies to the kitchen hut or stacks of firewood to the hearths in the great hall, or rolling big barrels of ale from the sheds to the broch. Near the iron-bound gates other servants bowed low as they greeted the arriving wedding guests. Cullyn of Cerrmor, captain of the tieryn’s warband, assembled his
men out in the ward and looked them over. For a change they were all bathed, shaved, and presentable. He himself, a burly man well over six feet tall, had put on the newer of his two shirts for the occasion ahead.

“Well and good, lads,” Cullyn said. “You don’t look bad for a pack of hounds. Now, remember: every lord and lady in the tierynrhyn is going to be here today. I don’t want any of you getting stinking drunk, and I don’t want any fighting, either. This is a wedding, remember, and the lady deserves to have it be a happy one after everything she’s been through.”

They all nodded solemnly. If any of them forgot his orders, he’d make them regret it—and they knew it.

Cullyn led them into the great hall, an enormous round room that took up the full ground floor of the broch. Today freshly braided rushes lay on the floor; the tapestries on the walls had been shaken out and rehung. The hall was crammed with extra tables. Not only were there plenty of noble guests, but each lord had brought five men from his warband as an honor escort. Servants sidled and edged their way through the crowd with tankards of ale and baskets of bread; a bard played almost unheard; over by their hearth the riders diced for coppers and joked; up by the honor hearth the noble-born ladies chattered like birds while their husbands drank. Cullyn got his men settled, repeated his order about no fighting, then worked his way to the table of honor and knelt at the tieryn’s side.