A Time of Exile

by Kerr, Katharine

  “Sit down, Dalla,” Enabrilia said. “Sit down and rest. Things will be better when you’ve had a moment to think. At least you’re free and back with us.”

  “Things will never be better again, never!”

  Between them Enabrilia and Aderyn got her to sit on a pile of blankets. When, blind with tears, she held out her hands, he took them and squeezed them, his fingers stiff and dry and thin on hers. She realized that she would never again feel the touch of the hands she’d been remembering and burst out weeping afresh. Dimly she was aware of Enabrilia leaving and had the hysterical thought that at least Bril had learned tact in the last two hundred years. She nearly laughed, then choked, then wept again, until at last, spent and exhausted, she fell quiet and slumped down against the blankets in a sprawl. She heard him get up; then he laid a leather cushion down in front of her. She took it, sat up enough to shove it under her head, then lay on her back and watched him numbly. His face showed no feeling but a deep confusion, like a man who’s coming round from a hard blow to the head.

  “Ado, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” He sat down next to her. “I’m surprised they let you go at all.”

  “I’m going to have a child, and they let me go for its sake. It’s your child, Ado. We made it before I left. All those years were like seven days to me, no more.”

  It was his turn to weep, but his tears were the rusty creak of a man who thought he would never care enough about anything in life again to weep for it. The sound made her want to scream for the injustice of it all, but there was no good in howling “It isn’t fair!” like one of the Guardians. Slowly she sat up and put her hands on his shoulders.

  “Don’t cry, Ado, please. At least I’m back. At least we’re together. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Missed me or the young man you left behind?” The tears gone, he turned to face her, this old man who reminded her so much of her lover. “I wouldn’t even be alive, you know, if it weren’t for Evandar. He worked some kind of dweomer on me, to give me an elven life span, but he forgot about elven youth.”

  He was furious, and she knew that no matter how much he might protest, it was her that he was angry with, not the Guardians. She wanted to weep again, but she was too exhausted.

  “What about our baby?” she whispered. “Are you going to hate it?”

  “Hate it? What? As if I ever could! Ah, Dalla, forgive me. At first I dreamt every night about seeing you again, and I had things all planned to say to you, wonderful loving things. And then the years dragged on, and I forgot them because I lost all hope of ever seeing you again. And now, I don’t have any words left that make sense.” He got up, stood hesitating at the tent flap. “Forgive me.”

  When he left, she was relieved. Within minutes, she was asleep.

  As the days passed, Aderyn came to believe that he was more furious with himself than with either Dallandra or Evandar. He began to see himself as a warrior who spends all winter drinking, feasting, and lying around in his lord’s hall until, when spring comes, his mail no longer fits over his swollen belly and hefting a weapon makes him pant for breath just when the war is about to start and he’s needed the most. In all the long years that she’d been gone, it had never even occurred to him to look at another woman, never crossed his mind to grow fond of someone else.

  No one could ever have taken Dallandra’s place in his heart, of course; never would he have thought of remarrying, even though elven law would have allowed him to do so as soon as she’d been gone for twenty years and a day. But he might have found friendship and affection, if not love, might have kept his heart alive instead of suffocating it in his work as he had in fact done. All the energy of his heart, all his capacity to love that he might have given to another woman—he’d transmuted them into something sterile and poured them into his pupils and his studies. He marveled at himself, that he had Dallandra back yet couldn’t really love her again, even though she treated him with all her old affection. She would have shared his bed if he’d wanted, but he used her pregnancy as an excuse and slept away from her.

  He didn’t want her pity—that’s how he put it to himself. He was sure that she was treating him, an old man, withered and ugly, with pity, and he wanted no part of it. Even though he’d forgotten how to love, he knew that he wanted no one else to have her heart. As the days slipped into months, and her pregnancy began to show, he turned more and more into a hideous human stereotype that he hated even as he felt powerless to stop his transformation: he saw himself becoming a jealous old man with a young wife. All his dweomercraft, all his strange lore and his great powers, his deep understanding of the secret places of the universe and his conversations with hidden spirits—none of it helped him now, when he would see Calonderiel stop to speak to her and hate him in his heart, when he would see her smile innocently at some young man and wish him dead And what was he going to do, he asked himself, once the baby was born and she was lithe and beautiful again?

  If he could have spoken with Nevyn, his old master might have cured him, but Nevyn was off in Bardek on some mysterious working of his own. If they’d lived in Deverry, among human beings in all their vast variety of ages and looks, he might have come to his senses, too, but as it was, every person they saw was young and beautiful except Aderyn himself. His jealousy ate into every day and poisoned every night, but thanks to his long training in self-discipline and self-awareness, he did at least manage one thing: he kept the jealousy from showing. Around Dallandra he was always perfectly calm and kind; not once did he berate her or subject her to some long agony of questioning about where she’d been or what she might have said to some other man. (Years later, when it was far too late, he realized that being so rational was perhaps the worst thing he could have done, because she read his careful control as sheer indifference.) As her pregnancy progressed, of course, it became impossible for her to go off on her own, anyway. The alar made a semi-permanent camp along a stream where there was good grazing and settled in to wait for the birth. More and more, Dallandra spent her time with the other women, and particularly with Enabrilia, who would be her midwife.

  When she went into labor, in fact, Aderyn was miles away, showing some of his disciples the proper way to dig up medicinal roots. By the time they got back to camp, Dallandra was shut away in Enabrilia’s tent with the attending women around her, and by elven custom, he would have been kept out even if he’d wanted to stay with her. All evening he sat by the fire in a circle of other men, who said little, looked grim, and passed a skin of mead around until at last an exhausted Enabrilia came to fetch Aderyn to the tent.

  “A son,” she said. “And he and his mother are doing well, though … well, no, they’re both doing splendidly.”

  “Tell me the truth,” Aderyn snapped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, really. Dallandra did very well, and while she’s tired, she’s alert and strong and all. It’s just that the baby was so quiet. He never cried, not even when he started breathing.”

  As he hurried into the tent, Aderyn was remembering all those old stories about changelings and wondering what sort of child his wife had birthed. Yet the baby certainly looked normal enough, though much more human than elven. Although his ears were sharp and close to being slightly pointed, his eyes had human irises and pupils, and his face and hands were round and chubby rather than being long and slender. Unlike the women of Deverry, elven women never wrapped their babies in swaddling bands; propped up in a big pile of cushions, Dallandra was holding him, loosely wrapped in a light blanket, while he nuzzled her breast. Aderyn knelt down next to her, kissed her on the forehead, then merely stared for a long time at the wrinkled, reddish creature with the soft crown of pale, pale hair. His son. He had a son, and at that moment he felt young again, felt, indeed, that he’d never loved the mother of that son as much as did right then. Yet if he told her, would she only pity him the more? An old man, gloating over a child as proof that he was still a man?

  “Wh
at shall we call him, Ado?” Her voice was soft, trembling in exhaustion. “I was thinking of my father’s name, but truly, I haven’t seen him in so long now that it wouldn’t matter if you wanted to call him something else.”

  “I truly don’t have anything else in mind. Stupid of me, but you know, I never even thought about names to this moment.”

  She winced.

  “Are you all right? Does something hurt?”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” She looked up with a forced smile. “The name I’m thinking of is Alodalaenteriel. We called him Laen for short.”

  “Well, that sounds splendid. If you like it, why not?”

  Although the baby became Alodalaenteriel in Elvish, Aderyn tended to call him by a Deverry-sounding nickname, Loddlaen, because it was a great deal easier to say and a pun as well, meaning “the comfort of learning,” which amused him. As the years passed, though, it became an omen, for learning and Loddlaen both were the only comforts left to him.

  Dallandra was never quite sure exactly when she decided to return to the Guardians. She realized first that she didn’t particularly love this baby she was saddled with. After the birth, she was oppressed a good bit of the time with a heartsick sadness that she could neither understand nor explain away. The slightest wrong word or look would make her burst into tears, and Loddlaen’s crying was a torment. Aderyn took to keeping the baby with him unless Loddlaen needed feeding. Dallandra disliked nursing him. At first, when his sucking made her womb contract in the usual manner, she felt none of the pleasure some women feel, only cramping pains; when those stopped, her milk was scant, leaving him hungry and making him cry the more. Although Enabrilia tried getting him to suck sheep or mare’s milk from a wad of rag, this animal food only made him vomit convulsively. The one joy Dallandra had during those days was seeing how much Aderyn loved his son, although even this was spoiled by the bitter thought that her man no longer cared about her anywhere near as much as he did their child.

  Half starved as he was, Loddlaen might have died very young from some fever or another, but when he was two months old, they traveled to an alardan, where Dallandra found a woman named Banamario who had just given birth herself. Banamario was one of those women who produce milk in great quantities, enough for her own child and two more, most likely, as she remarked, and her breasts caused her great pain unless she expressed the milk one way or another. Dallandra handed over Loddlaen without a qualm. When she saw how fondly Banamario smiled at the nursing baby, how gently she stroked his pale, fine hair and how softly she touched his little roundish ears, Dallandra felt stabbed to the soul by guilt pure and simple—she didn’t care half as much for her own son as this stranger did. Since she was elven, born to a people who saw every infant as both a treasure and a weapon laid up against their extinction, the guilt burned in the wound for days. Yet even so, she took to leaving Loddlaen for long periods of time with Banamario, who was nothing but pleased to do a favor for the Wise One.

  At times, as she rode alone out in the grasslands, away from the noise and bustle of the alardan, she would think of the Guardians, particularly of Elessario, whom she badly missed. She would wonder, too, if she’d love Loddlaen more if only he were a daughter instead of a son, but she knew that the real trouble lay between her and Aderyn. They should have both been young when their son was born, should have treasured him and squabbled over his upbringing and loved each other the more for it. No doubt they would have had another child, maybe two, even, over the course of years. Now, all that was denied them, and she was dragging herself through a world turned flat and sour by her memories of the splendor of life in another, easier world. She felt, too, like a person who’s been forced to leave the campfire halfway through one of the bard’s best tales and never gets to hear the ending: what did Evandar have in mind for his people? More and more, in fact, she found herself remembering Evandar, particularly the way he’d told her to come back if she should be unhappy. He knew, she would think, he knew that this would happen to me.

  On the day before the alardan was to break up, Aderyn arranged for Banamario and her man to leave their alar and join his and Dallandra’s. Knowing that Loddlaen would be fed and loved more than she could feed and love him seemed to settle the question in Dallandra’s mind. That evening, when she stopped into the wet nurse’s tent to kiss Loddlaen goodbye, she felt a stab of guilt at how easy it was to leave him behind, her round little baby with the solemn eyes and the perennial smell of sour milk hanging about him, but as soon as she walked free of the camp, the guilt disappeared—indeed, she never truly thought of Loddlaen again after that day. She went about five miles west until she found a stand of hazel trees, growing thick and tangled at a place where three streams came together to form a proper river. She’d known them once as rivulets, two hundred years ago and long before the hazels had grown there, but year after year of rain and runoff had deepened them down.

  Among the hazels Evandar was waiting, leaning against a tree and whistling a heart-piercing melody. She found that she wasn’t even surprised that he would know and come to meet her. It was so good to see him again that she also realized, with a twist of her heart, that she was beginning to fall in love with him.

  “You’re certain you want to come back?” he said.

  “I am. It’s so odd. I hate being a mother, but it’s made me ready to be a midwife. I’m assuming, anyway, that some of you will have the courage to take up your birthright.”

  “Elessario at least, and maybe some of the other young ones.” All at once he laughed. “That’s a fine jest, take up your birthright. It took me a moment to understand. You know, I’m feeling solemn, and that’s something I’ve never really done before.”

  Side by side they walked into the opalescent mist, where the flat road stretched out, waiting for them, between the dark hills and the fair mountains. When she raised her hand to her throat, she found the amethyst figurine hanging from its golden chain.

  “And what of you, Evandar? Won’t you pass into my world once and for all, when the time comes?”

  “How could I, knowing what I know, having what I have?”

  “If you don’t, you’ll lose your daughter.”

  He stopped walking and glared at her like a sulky child.

  “I can be as underhanded as you if I have to be,” she said, grinning. “But think of this. If you went first, Elessario would follow you. She loves you even more than you love her. Just think: you could save her by saving yourself.”

  “You wretched trickster!” But he laughed with a toss of his head. “Let me tell you something, Dalla. I know now what missing someone means, and how bitter a thing it is. Do you know why?”

  “I think I do, actually. But what of Alshandra?”

  “She’s left me. She’s gone farther in.”

  “Farther in?”

  “It’s not a good thing. But I’ll explain later.”

  When he kissed her, the mist closed around them, and the road changed itself to sunny meadow, bright with flowers.

  At that moment Aderyn knew in a stab of dweomer cold that she’d gone again. This time, he neither wept nor cursed, merely told the wet nurse that Dallandra had such important work to do that she wouldn’t be back for a while. Wrapped in the joy of having two babies to love and a new alar to help with all the hard work of caring for them, Banamario merely remarked that it was all the same to her. That night, though, when Aderyn fell into a restless sleep in a tent grown suddenly huge and lonely again, Dallandra came to him in the Gatelands.

  In his dream it seemed to him that they stood on a high cliff and looked off over the misty plains. They must have been on the western border of the grasslands, he realized, because he was looking east to a sun rising behind storm clouds in a wash of light the color of blood, which he knew for an evil omen. She was wearing, not her elven tunic and trousers, but a long dress, belted at the waist with jewels, of purple silk. As one does in dreams, he knew without needing to be told that her dress was of the style worn in
the long-lost cities of the far west.

  “I came to apologize for leaving you again,” she said. “But then, you didn’t really want me to stay, did you.”

  It wasn’t a question, but his heart ached at the unfairness of it, that she would think he wanted her gone when all he wanted was to be able to love her again.

  “I don’t blame you for leaving,” he said instead. “There was naught left for you in our world, was there? Not even the baby could delight you anymore.”

  “Just so. But still, I want you to know that—”

  “Hush! You don’t need to explain anything to me, or apologize anymore, either. Go in peace. I know I can’t keep you bound to me any longer.”

  She hesitated, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth working in honest sadness, but at the same time her image was fading, turning faint and pale, turning into mist and blowing away into the gray and ugly light of a stormy morning. He was in his own tent, sitting up and wide awake, hearing Loddlaen cry in his big hanging cradle of leather stiffened with bone. Aderyn rose and got the baby, changed him, and took him to Banamario’s tent, which stood right next to his. As she nursed him, Aderyn squatted down nearby and thought of the two ebony arrows with silver tips, lying somewhere in his tent wrapped in an old blanket, those pledges from the Guardians that had turned out sharp and deadly indeed.

  “There’s the good boy,” Banamario was crooning. “Not hungry anymore, is he? What a good boy! Here’s your papa now, Laen, go to Papa.”

  Aderyn took the baby and shifted him to one shoulder to burp him while Banamario took her own child, a boy named Javanateriel, and set him at her other breast.

  “When do you think Dallandra will be back, Wise One?” she asked, but absently.

  “Never.”

  She looked up, deeply troubled.