A Time of Exile

by Kerr, Katharine

  Cullyn also was fairly certain that his father suspected him of wishing him gone. After the first few days of his visit, Rhodry became more and more withdrawn, spending long hours alone either riding through the demesne or shut up brooding in his private chamber. Cullyn considered simply going home, but since he’d said that he’d stay for ten days, he was afraid that leaving ahead of schedule would seem suspicious. On the fifth morning he came down for breakfast only to find that Rhodry had already left the dun. He went out to the stable to question the groom, but the gwerbret hadn’t said a word about where he was going. As he made his way through the clutter of sheds behind the broch, he noticed two serving lasses gossiping furiously about something, an activity that would have meant nothing if they hadn’t suddenly fallen silent at the very sight of him. He walked on past, tormenting himself by wondering if even the wretched common-born servants knew his secret.

  Later, as he was going up to his chamber in the broch, a similar thing happened, two pages, this time, who stopped talking the moment they saw him. Cullyn grabbed one of them by the shirt collar.

  “And just what are you saying that’s unfit for my ears?”

  The two boys went dead white and looked as it they wanted to run, but whether or not he would ever be gwerbret, Cullyn was a powerful lord and no man to argue with.

  “Begging your pardon, my lord, please, it was naught.”

  “Indeed? Then why have you gone as white as milk?”

  The second page was older and obviously a bit wiser. He stepped forward with a passable bow.

  “My lord, we mean no offense. We were talking over this strange rumor. Maybe you should know about it, my lord. Then you can stop people from repeating it.”

  “Indeed? And just what have the townsfolk been saying?”

  “Well, you know, my lord, how the gwerbret looks so young? We heard an old woman in the marketplace saying it was all because of dweomer. She said some old wizard cast this spell on him years and years ago, that he’d never get old, but then he’d have to die all of a sudden, like, to pay back the spell. The old woman said there’s a gerthddyn in town spreading the tale. He heard it up north or somewhere.” He paused, sincerely troubled. “My lord, that’s not true, is it? His grace is splendid, and I don’t want to see him die.”

  “Here, that can’t be true, indeed. Don’t you bother your heart with it.”

  Yet he hesitated, troubled himself, remembering all the tales whispered among his clan that Rhodry’s life had been touched more than once by dweomer. And what if this strange story were true? Although by that time most people in Deverry knew that magic existed, few knew much about its true powers and capabilities, so Cullyn was ready enough to believe that it could keep his father unnaturally young. He summoned four men from his warband as an escort, then went into the town. By asking round in the market square he found out that the gerthddyn had been staying at the Green Goose, the best inn in Aberwyn, but when he went there, the tavernman told him that the gerthddyn had ridden out that very morning.

  “I’ll wager, my lord, that he knew he couldn’t stay here long, what with him spreading them nasty tales about your father. There’s not a vain bone in the gwerbret’s body, my lord. Why would he be making pacts with sorcerers just to keep his looks?”

  “Well spoken, truly. What was this fellow like?”

  “His name was Salamander, my lord, and he was a skinny sort of fellow with yellow hair. Oh, he was a splendid talker, my lord, when he was telling his tales, so it’s no wonder this wretched rumor’s spreading itself around. Now, wait, my lord.” He paused to suck his brown stumps of teeth in thought. “Salamander didn’t rightly say the rumor was true, like. He said he heard it up in Belglaedd and asked if we thought there was any truth in it.”

  “I see. Well, he’s gone and no more trouble to us, then.”

  When Cullyn returned to the great hall, Rhodry was sitting at the head of the table of honor and drinking alone. He waved his son over with a smile that made him look more his normal self than he had in days.

  “There you are, lad. I’ve been thinking. Shall we go hunting on the morrow? I rode out to the forest preserve today, and the gamekeeper tells me we’ve got a pair of young stags. We could cull one easily and help the old stag keep his dominion for another spring.”

  “Gladly, Father.”

  Cullyn motioned a page over to pour him ale. As they talked about the hunt to come, he forgot all about strange rumors in the normality of the moment.

  Just at dawn on the morrow, Cullyn joined his father and the kennelmaster in the courtyard, where the well-trained dogs lay still but excited, ears pricked, tails thumping the cobbles. When the men mounted for the ride to the forest, the dogs leapt up and swarmed round the kennelmaster, who trotted along with them on foot as the party set out. In the brightening day the hunt left Aberwyn behind and went north along the bank of the river Gwyn, which churned white and swollen with the spring runoff. About eight miles on they reached the preserve, a smallish stand of timber compared with the vast gwerbretal hunting park at Belglaedd farther north. While they ate a cold breakfast and let the dogs rest, Alban the gamekeeper appeared out of the forest and sat down with them, a gnarled and wind-chapped man as tough as an oak root. Since he was nearly as shy as the deer themselves, it took him a long time to bring out the various scraps of news he had for the gwerbret; he would say one thing, then withdraw into himself before he brought out the next. Rhodry listened with an amazing patience.

  Since Cullyn loved the hunt, he was almost as excited as the dogs by the time they finally got underway. So early in the year the trees were only just leafing out, and the bracken and ferns still low. Ducking and dodging the occasional branch, they rode through the widely spaced oaks behind the kennelmaster and his pack. The deerhounds coursed this way and that, sniffed the wind more than the ground, then suddenly broke, baying off to the left. With a laugh Rhodry spurred his horse after them, and Cullyn followed, catching up with the hounds, who turned abruptly and headed off in the general direction of the river.

  All at once, Cullyn’s horse stumbled slightly, forcing him to let it slow to regain its balance and calm down. When he headed after the hunt, it was a good ways ahead of him. He could just see them through the trees. Then he heard the barks turn to yelps of terror, and the kennelmaster scream. Spear at the ready, he kicked his horse hard, dodged through at a dangerous gallop, and burst into a clearing to see a wild boar, flushed by accident but furious nonetheless, making a straight charge at the pack. Dogs scattered and the kennelmaster yanked himself into a tree barely in time. Cullyn found himself swearing with every foul oath he knew.

  They had no boarhounds—worse yet, no boar spears with the essential guards on the haft. Already his horse was tossing its head in fear as the massive, reeking boar charged one of the hounds. As Cullyn kicked his horse forward, Rhodry appeared, raced between the boar and the dog, and stabbed down at it as he passed. Enraged, the boar swung after him and let the dogs be. With a battle cry Cullyn charged after as Rhodry led the boar along. He could see what his father had in mind—keep sticking the slower-moving boar, keep it running and bleeding until they wore the thing out and could make a safe kill. Since by its snarls he could tell that the boar was deep in rut, he knew they had a long, hard fight ahead.

  But they had forgotten about the river. Just as Cullyn caught up, their strange hunt burst out of the forest to the cleared roadway along the riverbank. Yelling for Cullyn to stay back, Rhodry tried to turn his horse, but the mount got a good look at the boar following and reared—then slipped and went down. Rhodry rolled clear easily, unhurt, but the boar was turning and charging.

  “Da!” Cullyn’s voice was the shriek of a child. “Da!”

  Half to his feet, Rhodry threw himself to one side and rolled straight into the river. Blind with fury, the boar hurled itself in after him. Cullyn could never remember dismounting, nor could he remember stripping off his hunting leathers; all he knew was that suddenly he wa
s in the river and swimming, desperately coursing from bank to bank, letting the current carry him downstream until at last, utterly exhausted, he heard Alban screaming at him from the bank.

  “To shore, my lord! I beg you, come ashore!”

  With the last of his strength Cullyn fought the current to the bank and grabbed the butt of the spear that Alban was holding out. It took both their strengths to haul him up onto land.

  “I never saw them,” Cullyn gasped.

  “No more did I, Your Grace.”

  The sound of that honorific knocked the last bit of breath out of him. When he looked up, he saw the gamekeeper’s face streaming tears, and the sight made him burst out sobbing, half keening, half choking as he gasped for breath. All his suspicions, all his envy and his fears were at last at an end, but he would have spent a year in the hells just to have his father back again.

  • • •

  “By every god and his wife,” Salamander whispered, and his face was white with fear. “I never dreamt your lad would try to fetch you out again like that.”

  “No more did I, or I’d never have agreed to this daft scheme!” Rhodry felt like hitting him. “Aberwyn could have lost two gwerbrets in one misbegotten day! Ye gods, did you have to make that cursed boar so terrifying? I never knew you could make an illusion smell like that.”

  “You don’t understand, O brother of mine.” Salamander passed the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead. “That boar was none of my work. It was real, a solid, corporeal, existent, and utterly unplanned accident.”

  Rhodry felt the color drain from his own face. He was about to say something particularly foul when Jill came crawling back into their hiding place, a bracken-filled ditch on the other side of the river.

  “He’s safe,” she whispered. “The gamekeeper and the kennelmaster are with him, and all the dogs, too. They’ve gotten the horses under control, and no doubt they’ll be riding home soon. We’d best get out of here before every man in your warband comes out to search for your corpse.”

  “They’re not my men anymore.”

  “Well, true enough, and we’ve got only the grace of the gods to thank that they ride for your eldest son and not the second.” She turned on Salamander. “You and your wretched, blasted, rotten, and foul elaborate schemes!”

  “You were the one who insisted there be witnesses, and you agreed to this scheme at the time. Berate me not, O princess of powers perilous, for I put not that stinking boar in their path.”

  Although Jill growled under her breath, she let the matter drop. For some minutes they lay there, waiting until the remnant of the hunting party should leave. While Salamander’s dweomer could turn one man invisible as he crawled out of a river, he couldn’t hide a party of three horsemen, a mule, and two packhorses. Now that he knew Cullyn was safely on land, Rhodry felt heart-wrung and numb, hating the irony of it, that he would find out how much his son loved him when he’d never see the lad again.

  Eventually the hunting party gave up their last futile search and rode back to Aberwyn, leaving them in sole possession of the woods. Rhodry was more than glad to change out of his damp clothes into the things he’d smuggled out in readiness: a pair of plain gray brigga, an old linen shirt with no blazons, a cheap belt with his silver dagger on it.

  “So here I am, a silver dagger again, am I?”

  “Not for long,” Salamander said. “We’ll be in the elven lands soon enough.”

  “Provided no one catches us.”

  “Don’t fret about that,” Jill broke in. “Salamander can make sure no one recognizes you, even if they’re staring right at you.”

  “Well and good, then. We’d best be off.”

  “Just that. Our father should be waiting near the border.”

  “And that’s going to be a strange thing, meeting my true father after all these years, and him a bard at that.”

  “Mam, I tried to save him, truly I did.” Cullyn sounded like a little boy again.

  Aedda caught his hands in hers and squeezed them gently.

  “Of course you did. I know you did.”

  For his sake, out of pain for his pain, she managed to do the proper thing and weep, but there was no mourning in it. For years she had tried very hard not to blame Rhodry; after all, she wasn’t the first lass in Deverry who’d been given away to cement a treaty, and she wouldn’t be the last. Yet still, he had taken her maidenhead, her youth, her life, truly, while keeping her always to one side of his affairs, and then, the final bitter thing, he had taken her sons from her, too. They always loved you more than they loved me, she thought. By every fiend in hell, I’m glad you’re dead.

  Although they never found the gwerbret’s body, they did put up a stone to mark his passing, out in the sacred grove where his ancestors lay. On it they carved this englyn:

  This grave marks Aberwyn’s grief.

  A wild wolf in the battle-strife,

  Rhodry laughed when he took your life.

  And that was the first death of Rhodry Maelwaedd and the vindication of the old hermit who, years and years before, had told him he would die twice over.

  Keeping to country lanes and open lands, buying food from farmers and shunning the duns of the noble-born, Rhodry, Salamander, and Jill traveled west and south for ten days until they reached the large stream or small river known as Y Brog, marking what most human beings considered the Eldidd border, since only elves lived beyond it. During Rhodry’s rule, the Westfolk, as Eldidd people called the elves, had started becoming a little friendlier than they’d been in times past. Every now and then a trading party would show up in the border towns of Cannobaen or Cernmeton to offer their beautiful horses in return for ironwork and glasswares; even more rarely, an embassy would appear in Aberwyn itself with tokens of friendship and alliance for the gwerbret. Yet they were still strange and alien, still frightening to most people. It was one of Rhodry’s regrets that he’d never been able to make his subjects welcome the Westfolk in the rhan. Since he’d always raised his sons to like and admire them, he could at least hope that they would continue to be welcome in the dun.

  “I suppose I’ll get word now and then of how things fare in Aberwyn,” he remarked one evening. “Especially if Calonderiel goes to pay his respects to the new gwerbret.”

  “Of course he’s going.” Salamander was kneeling by their campfire and feeding in sticks. “That was part of the scheme. He’ll be waiting to have a chat with us, and then he’ll head east. What’s wrong? Worried about your holdings? Well, your former or late lamented holdings, I should say.”

  “It’s strange, truly. I can’t stop thinking about Aberwyn. I keep drafting mental orders, you see, about the way things should be run, and every now and then I actually find myself turning round to call a page or suchlike to carry a command for me.”

  “You’ll get over it in time. Think of rulership as a fever. It’ll pass off as your health returns.”

  “Well and good, then. Maybe I need some strengthening herb water or suchlike.”

  They shared a grin. Although they were only half brothers, they looked a good bit alike in everything but coloring. Salamander’s hair was as ash-blond pale as Rhodry’s was dark, but they had the strong jut of their jaw and the deep set of their eyes in common, as well as a certain sharpness about the ears that marked them as half-breeds.

  “Where’s Jill, anyway?” Salamander stopped fussing with the fire and came to sit down beside him.

  “I don’t know. Off meditating or whatever it is you sorcerers do, I suppose.”

  “Do I hear a sour note marring your dulcet tones? A touch of pique, a nettlement, if indeed such a word exists, a certain jealousy or resentment of our demanding craft, or mayhap a …”

  “Will you hold your tongue, you chattering bastard?”

  “Ah, I was right. I did.”

  At that moment Jill appeared on the other side of the fire. They were camped near a little copse, and in the uncertain light it seemed she materialized right out
of the trees like one of the Wildfolk.

  “You two look as startled as a pair of caught burglars. Talking about me?”

  “Your ears were burning, were they?” Salamander said with a grin. “Actually, we were just wondering where you were, and lo, our question is answered, our difficulty solved. Come sit down.”

  Smiling, but only a little, Jill did so.

  “We should be at the ruined dun on the morrow,” she remarked. “That’s where the others are meeting us. Do you remember it, Rhodry? The place where Lord Corbyn’s men tried to trap you during that rebellion.”

  “Ye gods, that was years and years ago, but remember it I do, and that dun will always be dear to my heart, because it was there that I first saw you.”

  “You chatter like your wretched brother, don’t you?” She got up and walked away, disappearing noiselessly back into the copse and gone.

  Rhodry winced and stared into the fire.

  “I think, O brother of mine, that there’s somewhat you don’t quite understand.” Salamander paused for dramatic effect. “Jill’s beyond you now. Beyond us both, truly, for I’ll admit that there was a time or brief season in my life when I was madly in love with her myself—without the slightest result, let me hasten to add, but a cold and most cruel rejection, a sundering of my heart and the smashing to little bits of my hopes.”

  “Oh. Who is he, then?”

  “Not who, O jealousy personified. What. The dweomer. It takes some people that way. Why, by every god in the sky, do you think she left you in the first place? Because a love of dweomer is a burning twice stronger than lust or even sentiment, which it ofttimes overpowers.”

  Rhodry and Jill had parted so long ago that Rhodry quite simply couldn’t remember its details, but he could remember all too well his bitterness.