KATHARINE KERR
Dawnspell
The Bristling Wood
For the profit of kins, well did he attack the hosts of the
country, the bristling wood of spears, the grievous
flood of the enemy
The Gododdin of Aneirin, Stanza A84
Copyright
Voyager An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.voyager-books.com
Previously published in paperback by Grafton 1990 reprinted six times and by HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy 1993 reprinted two times
First published in Great Britain by GraftonBooks 1989
Copyright © Katharine Kerr 1989
Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN 9780007404384
Version: 2019-07-15
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Note to Readers
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
Change of font size and line height
Change of background and font colours
Change of font
Change justification
Text to speech
Epigraph
In memoriam
Raymond Earle Kerr, Jr, 191787,
an officer and a gentleman
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Epigraph
A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words
Prologue: Spring, 1063
Part One: Deverry and Pyrdon, 833845
1
2
3
4
Part Two: Summer, 1063
1
2
3
Appendix
Keep Reading
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words
The language spoken in Deverry 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.
Vowels 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).
Consonants 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 thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in 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.
Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.
Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place-names are often an exception to this rule.
I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues. Since the human ear cannot even distinguish between such sound-pairings as B> and B<, I see no reason to confuse the human eye with them. I do owe many thanks to the various elven native speakers who have suggested which consonant to choose in confusing cases and who have laboured, alas, often in vain, to refine my ear to the elven vowel system.
A Note on Dating
Year One of the Deverry calendar is the founding of the Holy City, or, to be more accurate, the year that King Bran saw the omen of the white sow that instructed him where to build his capital. It corresponds roughly to 76 CE.
Prologue Spring, 1063
Often those who study the dweomer complain that it speaks in riddles. There is a reason for this riddling. What is it? Well, that happens to be a riddle of its own.
The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
Out in the grasslands to the west of the kingdom of Deverry, the concepts of day and month had no meaning. The years flowed by, slowly, on the ebb and swell of the seasons: the harsh rains of winter, when the grass turned a bluish-green and the grey sky hung close to the earth; the spring floods, when the streams overflowed their banks and pooled around the willows and hazels, pale green with first leaves; the parching summer, when the grass lay pale gold and all fires were treacherous; the first soft rains of autumn, when wildflowers bloomed briefly in purple and gold. Driving their herds of horses and flocks of sheep, the People drifted north in the summers heat and south in the winters cold and, as they rode, they marked only the little things: the first stag to lose its antlers, the last strawberries. Since the gods were always present, travelling with their folk in the long wandering, they needed no high holidays or special feasts in their honour. When two or three alarli, the loosely organized travelling groups, happened to meet, then there was a festival to celebrate the company of friends.
Yet, there was one day of the year marked out from all the others: the spring equinox, which usually signalled the start of the floods. In the high mountains of the far north, the snows were melting, sending a tide down through the grasslands, just as another tide, this one of blood, had once swept over them from the north in the far past. Even though individuals of their race lived some five hundred years on average, by now there were none left whod been present in those dark years, but the People remembered. They made sure that their children would always remember on the day of the equinox, when the alarli gathered in groups of ten or twelve for the Day of Commemoration.
Even though he was eager to ride east to Deverry, Ebañy Salomonderiel would never have left the elven lands until hed celebrated this most holy and terrifying of days. In the company of his father, Devaberiel Silverhand the bard, he rode up from the sea-coast to the joining of the rivers Corapan and Delonderiel, near the stretch of primeval forest that marked the border of the grasslands. There, as theyd expected, they found an alardan, or clan-meet. Scattered in the tall grass were two hundred painted tents, red and purple and blue, while the flocks and herds grazed peacefully a little distance away. A little apart from the rest stood ten unpainted tents, crudely stitched together from poorly tanned hides.
By the Dark Sun herself, Devaberiel remarked. It looks like some of the Forest Folk have come to join us.
Good. Its time they got over their fear of their own kind.
Devaberiel nodded in agreement. He was an exceptionally handsome man, with hair pale as moonlight, deep-set dark blue eyes, slit vertically like a cats, and gracefully long pointed ears. Although Ebañy had inherited the pale hair, in other ways he took after his mothers human folk; his smoky grey eyes had round irises, and his ears, while slightly sharp, passed unnoticed in the lands of men. They rode on, leading their eight horses, two of which dragged travois, loaded with everything they owned. Since Devaberiel was a bard and Ebañy a gerthddyn, that is, a storyteller and minstrel, they didnt need large herds to support themselves. As they rode up to the tents, the People ran out to greet them, hailing the bard and vying for the honour of feeding him and his son.
They chose to pitch the ruby-red tent near that of Tanidario, a woman who was an old friend of the bards. Although shed often given his father advice and help as he raised his half-breed son alone, Ebañy found it hard to think of her as a mother. Unlike his own mother back in Eldidd, whom he vaguely remembered as soft, pale and cuddly, Tanidario was a hunter, a hard-muscled woman who stood six feet tall and arrow-straight, with jet-black hair that hung in one tight braid to her waist. Yet when she greeted him, she kissed his cheek, caught his shoulders, and held him a bit away while she smiled as if to say how much hed grown.
Ill wager youre looking forward to the spring hunt, he said.
I certainly am, little one. Ive been making friends with the Forest Folk, and theyve offered to show me how to hunt with a spear in the deep woods. Im looking forward to the challenge.
Ebañy merely smiled.
I know you, Tanidario said with a laugh. Your idea of hunting is finding a soft bed with a pretty lass in it. Well, maybe when youre fully grown, youll see things more clearly.
I happen to be seventy-four this spring.
A mere child. She tousled his hair with a calloused hand. Well, come along. The gatherings already beginning. Wheres your father got to?