“You the silver dagger who was asking for Lord Perryn?”
“I am, and what’s it to you?” Rhodry asked.
“Naught, but I might have a bit of information for you for the right price.”
Rhodry took two silver pieces from his pouch and held them between his fingers. The peddler grinned.
“I stayed one night in a little village inn, oh, some thirty miles from here. I was trying to get my sleep when I heard someone yelling out in the stable yard. So I sticks my head out the window, and I see our Perryn arguing with this blond lass. Seems like she was leaving him, and he was yelling at her not to go.”
Rhodry handed over the first silver.
“‘I’m going to find no one,’ she says,” the peddler went on. “Seemed like a cursed strange thing to say, so it’s stuck in my mind, like.”
“So it would. Did she say where ‘nev yn’ was?”
“Not truly. But she did say to his lordship that if he tried to follow her to Cerrmor, she’d take his balls off with her silver dagger.”
With a laugh, Rhodry handed him the second coin, then dug out a third for good measure.
“My thanks, peddler.”
When Rhodry left the stable, Merryc laughed quietly under his breath. It was a good jest, to make the silver dagger pay for the false rumors that were going to mean his doom.
