A Time of Justice

I PROLOGUE

The Northlands, 1116

ALBUS
The opposite of Rubeus in all things, thus generally an omen for good. Yet when it falls into the House of Lead, pertaining to matters of war, it does signify days of air and darkness, and an evil upon the land.
The Omenbook of Gwarn, Loremaster
Under a starry night two men and a dragon camped by a river. Though the wind blew warm, the men had built a fire for light, and the great wyrm lay her head as close to it as she dared. The rest of her glittering body and folded wings stretched away into shadow. Well over twenty feet long, not counting the tail curled round her haunches, the greeny-black dragon kept raising her head to look about her and sniff the summer wind. On the opposite side of the fire sat a young man of the Mountain People, though he was tall for one of them at five and a half feet. He had high dwarven cheekbones and a flat nose, narrow eyes, shadowed under heavy dwarven brows, and his hair was a brown close to black, as was his close-cropped beard. Every time the dragon went on guard he would start up, then mutter a curse under his breath and sit again.
‘Rori?’ he said finally. ‘What be troubling the beast?’
Rhodry Maelwaedd stopped his restless pacing and walked back into the pool of firelight. He was well over six feet tall but built straight from shoulder to hip, and his raven-dark hair and cornflower blue eyes marked him for an Eldidd man, even though that province lay hundreds of miles to the south, all the way across the far-flung kingdom of Deverry. Weather-beaten, grizzled, Rhodry was still a handsome man, and

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 th 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.
Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, how