A Time of Exile

by Kerr, Katharine

  The last thing he heard before his etheric double broke up completely was the sprite, shrieking in agony.

  Maer fell into trance just after noon, not long before the storm broke with all the fury of the first full tempest of winter. Lightning stroked down; thunder rumbled; his horse panicked and fled out across the grasslands. Unfortunately, since it was the horse he’d brought from Aberwyn, it couldn’t find its way home to the herds round the winter camp. (In time, it did wander into the herd of another alar, far to the west, but that was months later and an event of no importance at all.) All afternoon it rained as the storm proceeded slowly and majestically north, but Maer, entranced in the true and technical sense of the word, lay sprawled among the hazels. By sunset, the river was brimming in its banks, and still the rain poured down. Maer’s body, in a convulsion of cramped muscles that had nothing to do with mind, flopped over onto its back, then lay still. All evening clouds rolled in from the sea, rained, and moved on north. The river rose steadily, then round midnight spilled over and flooded, sending a first a thin sheet of water trickling through the grass and swirling round the knobby roots of the trees, then a pour, a spill of water traveling out and out and swelling as it ran. It covered Maer’s face some three hours before dawn and kept rising, but the rain stopped before the flood was deep enough to float his corpse more than a few feet away, where it fetched up against a tree and stuck.

  Under normal circumstances, Calonderiel would have recruited the entire warband and gone to search for his guest when Maer didn’t return for the evening meal, but the floods were rising along the river that flowed by the camp, too. As soon as the swirling brown water started churning downstream, Aderyn and Halaberiel ordered the alar to begin packing. In an organized frenzy the People rushed round, stuffing tent bags, loading the travois, collaring dogs and children. By the time the water came within a few inches of the riverbanks, just at sunset, everyone’s portable goods had been hauled up to the canyon rim. Halaberiel and Aderyn walked along by the surging water and studied it in the last light fading from the clouds. Twisting and bobbing like some many-armed animal, an entire gnarled tree raced past.

  “It’s going to keep rising,” Aderyn remarked. “I don’t need dweomer to tell me that.”

  “Just so, Wise One. Very well. Let’s give the order to strike the tents.”

  As they turned to head back to camp, they heard a woman shriek, a howl of terror and agony. A chorus of voices cut through the pound of rain: “He’s gone in!” Cursing under his breath, Halaberiel dashed to the river’s edge. Aderyn could just barely see a small blond head bobbing toward them some five feet from shore. Howling and keening, the child’s mother tried to throw herself into the river after the boy. Her man grabbed her and held her back just as the banadar dove, as smoothly as a seabird, into the torrents. Aderyn heard himself yell aloud, invoking the Lords of Water, as he ran downstream. At first he could see nothing but the surging brown and silver race; then two heads popped up, a small blond and a larger gray one.

  “Hal! I’m keeping pace with you! Oh Lords of Water, help me now if ever I’ve aided you!”

  With one arm crooked round the boy’s neck Halaberiel was struggling to swim with the other even as the raging current swept them both inexorably out to the estuary and the pounding, foaming sea. Although Aderyn never actually saw the Lords of the Elements, they must have appeared in answer to his cry, because Hal never would have been able to reach shore without some supernormal aid. As it was, he managed to struggle to within a bare foot of the muddy bank and thrust the boy into Aderyn’s grasping hands. Then the current grabbed him in turn and swept him on, swept him under in the churn and mill of white water pouring down to the waiting sea waves. Aderyn clasped the shrieking child in his arms and wept until the others caught up to him. Sobbing hysterically, the mother snatched the child from him as if he’d been the one who nearly drowned it.

  “The banadar!” Calonderiel came running. “Hal! Hal!”

  “He’s gone.” Aderyn caught his arm. “You’re the warleader for this alar now.”

  Calonderiel threw his head back and screamed his grief into the howling wind. Aderyn grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

  “The tents! You’ve got to order the alar to strike the tents!”

  With one last convulsive sob Calonderiel pulled himself together. As he ran off, he was shouting orders in a voice of command.

  It was close to dawn, and the rain was slacking to a drizzle, before anyone said, “By the way, where’s Maer?” With a lot of snapping and cursing the warband rushed around through the sopping, improvised camp. Just as the gray and sullen dawn was breaking they returned with the news that Maer and his horse both were missing. Aderyn felt an icy finger of dread run down his back.

  “He must have been caught in the storm,” Calonderiel said. “And these wretched Round-ears don’t know how to take care of themselves in open country. We’ll have to start searching for him right now.”

  “If you’ll wait for five ticks of a heart together,” Aderyn said with some asperity, “I’ll scry for him and make your task a good bit easier.”

  Since fires were out of the question, he used water for a scrying focus, appropriately enough, and saw Maer’s heaped and tumbled body against a hazel. With a high-pitched keen he broke the vision.

  “Dead?” Calonderiel said.

  “Drowned. But I don’t understand why. I found him in the midst of trees. Why didn’t he climb one? Ye gods, the water’s only a foot or so high around him.”

  At the head of a grim procession Aderyn led them to Maer’s body. Calonderiel was as overwhelmed as he’d been by losing the banadar, but in this case, it was guilt as much as grief that was ripping at his heart. Maer was his guest-friend, and he’d failed him—that’s how Cal saw it, no matter who tried to argue otherwise. While Calonderiel wept and stormed, and Albaral wrapped Maer in a blanket with the ritual prayers, Aderyn left the hazel thicket and walked a few feet downstream to the place where three streams joined for the river. Three streams. The hazels. Aderyn swore under his breath.

  “Evandar!” he yelled. “Evandar, can you hear me!”

  No one answered, no one came. Only the wind blew over the rain-soaked grass in its endless sigh.

  It was some days before Aderyn discovered what had really killed Maer. He scried by every method he knew, consulted Nevyn and learned two new ones, invoked the Kings of the Elements and the Lords of the Wildlands both, assumed his body of light and journeyed long and hard through not only the etheric but various portions of the astral plane as well until, a few scraps of information at a time, he pieced together the story of the transformed sprite’s unwitting murder of the only thing she loved. Eventually, many weeks later, he found and confronted her among the hazel thicket by the joining of three streams.

  He went there on an impulse so strong that he knew someone was sending him a message, whether the Lords of the Wildlands or the King of Water he wasn’t sure, but either way, he wasn’t disposed to ignore it. As he rode up, he saw her pacing back and forth by the stream, head down as if hunting for something. To avoid frightening her, he dismounted and walked the rest of the way. When she saw him, she snarled and swiped at him with one hand, curled into claws like a cat’s.

  “I didn’t take Maer away.”

  “You did! I saw you take him. You came with some of the elder brothers, and they wrapped him a blanket, and you all took him away.”

  “His soul was already gone by then. He was dead. Do you know what dead means?”

  She merely stared, then wept in a numb scatter of tears.

  “Give him back.”

  “There’s nothing to give back.”

  “Yes, there is! You took him away. Where did you put him?”

  Aderyn debated, then decided that he was desperate enough to bargain.

  “I’ll show you his grave if you answer me three questions.”

  “His what?”

  “The place where we put his bo
dy. I warn you, though, that he can’t speak or move anymore.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Then answer me the questions. First, who taught you how to speak?”

  “She did. The goddess who helped me.”

  “What did this goddess look like?”

  “All sorts of things. She comes and goes and changes like I do.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “A what?”

  “A name. Like Maer. A word that belongs only to her.”

  “Oh.” For a long moment she wrinkled her nose in thought. “Elessario. That’s her special word. Now show Maer to me. You promised, and I’ve answered all three.”

  “So you have. Follow me, but I warn you, he’s all different now.”

  With a rustle like grass in the wind she vanished, but her voice lingered briefly.

  “Ride, and I’ll follow.”

  As he rode back to the pretty spot in the canyon where they’d buried Maer (since Calonderiel had decided that his guest would have preferred the burial of his own people rather than a burning), Aderyn was considering strategies. Although he was afraid to openly contact the Lords of the Wildlands, apparently they’d been keeping an eye on him, because when he reached the grave, they were there, tall slender pillars of silver light, barely visible as a shimmering in the air. He felt rather than heard their thanks, knew wordlessly that they’d come to claim the sprite as one of their own so that they could heal her.

  But she never came. All that day Aderyn and the lords waited, and all evening, too, until the last quarter moon rose to announce that it was midnight.

  “She’s been too clever for us,” Aderyn remarked in thought. “I think she knows you’ll take her away.”

  He could feel them agree in an exhalation of worry. One by one they winked out, like stars disappearing in the light of dawn, leaving Aderyn with the feeling that he wasn’t to trouble himself with the sprite any longer, that they would, one way or another, find a way to deal with her.

  Maer, however, or, rather, the soul of the man who’d once been Maer, was another matter altogether. Nevyn agreed that his Wyrd might well have become tangled with things that were, at root, no affair of his. After all, the sprite had found him once before when he’d died and been reborn; now she had even more reason to search for him, her lost beloved.

  “I take the responsibility onto myself,” Nevyn said through the fire. “Because of Maddyn. I never should have let him make a link with the Wildlands.”

  “Oh, come now, you had no way of knowing where it would lead.”

  “True. But still, I might have done some meditating. I might have gotten an inkling of what would happen, or at least that it was a wrong thing.”

  “It might not have been a wrong thing if it weren’t for the Guardians. Let’s not forget that one of them’s been meddling in this mess. And that, somehow, is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have left them to Dallandra. I should have tried to know them myself, and maybe then—”

  “All these maybes ill become us, my friend. What is, is, and we’re not the men to unweave Time and pluck this strand out again.”

  “I know. Well, I suspect that when he’s reborn, Maer will come my way again. We’ll see what we can do for him then.”

  • • •

  It was a long time before Aderyn met that soul again, though, some three twenties of years, and even then it was only by chance. Late one summer, when the days were already growing short and the trees on the tops of hills and in other exposed places were turning yellow, his alar was traveling up in the northern plains, not far from the Deverry province of Pyrdon. One of their horses, a young stallion, got it into his head to break his tether and run off, following his natural instincts to get away from the reigning stud of the herd. A couple of the men went after him, of course, and out of a sentimental desire to see his own people again Aderyn left Loddlaen in charge of their tent and herds and rode off with Calonderiel and Albaral. The stallion’s tracks were easy to follow; in fact, in a few miles the tracks of another horse, one carrying some kind of load, joined them, and the two sets marched east in such a straight line that it was obvious that the stallion had either been stolen outright or picked up by a mounted rider while wandering loose. Since the second horse was shod, it was easy enough to guess that the rider was a human being.

  Sure enough, the trail led them straight to the town of Drwloc, where it joined a welter of other tracks and petered out, but by asking around they discovered that one of Lord Gorddyn’s men had found a Westfolk horse and brought it in to the dun. Calonderiel was furious, swearing to slit the fellow’s throat for a stinking horse thief, but Aderyn ordered him to hold his tongue.

  “We could at least go ask the lord about the matter first, couldn’t we? If you’d only traded the stallion off to a herd that needed a stud, he never would have broken tether.”

  “Well, you’ve got a point, I suppose. But this wretched rider could have come looking for the horse’s owner.”

  “Would you have ridden alone into a Round-ear camp?”

  Calonderiel started to snarl an answer, then stopped to think.

  “A second point, truly. Let’s go talk to Lord Gorddyn.”

  The lord’s dun was about three miles out of town, a solitary broch behind earthwork walls set up on a small hill. As they rode up to the gap in the earthen mounds that did duty as a gate, they saw a strange woman—or at least she seemed to be a woman at first—lounging on the grassy wall. She was slender and pale, dressed in a dirty, torn smock, but as they came closer, they saw that her long unbound hair was a deep blue, the color of the winter ocean. At the sight of Aderyn and the elves she leapt to her feet, then suddenly vanished clean away.

  “What?” Calonderiel hissed. “What was that? One of the Wildfolk? It looked so cursed human!”

  “So she did, indeed.” Aderyn felt a premonition of trouble coming. “Cal, I have the wretched feeling I’ve seen her before. This might not be a pretty thing we’ve stumbled onto.”

  Lord Gorddyn turned out to be stout, balding, and good-humored, greeting them with no more fuss and as much friendliness as if they’d all been human beings. He insisted that they sit at his beat-up table of honor by the smoky hearth and drink mead out of dented silver goblets, then listened to their story of the lost horse.

  “Well, he’s here, sure enough, lads. A beautiful animal, beautiful. What do you say I trade for him? Under Deverry laws he’s mine, because my man found him wandering loose, but under Westfolk laws he’s yours, so let’s not have a fight over it, eh? I’ve got two fine dun mares out in my stable, and you shall have both if you want.”

  Faced with this utterly unexpected fairness, Calonderiel could do nothing but agree to look them over, and everyone trooped out to the stables. The mares were indeed fine breeding stock, young, healthy, and handsome.

  “Done, then, my lord,” Calonderiel said. “I’ll take them gladly in trade for the stud for the sake of peace between our two peoples.”

  “Splendid, splendid! That gladdens my heart, good sir. Here, lad!” This to a stable boy, who was hanging round to stare goggle-eyed at the elves. “Get those mares on lead ropes and bring them out to the courtyard.”

  As they were leaving the stables, Aderyn noticed a young man lying on the straw in an empty stall. Even though the day was warm, he was wrapped in a blanket, and his face was a deathly sort of pale.

  “My lord?” Aderyn said. “What’s wrong with that fellow?”

  “He’s dreadfully ill, I’m afraid, and it aches my heart, because he’s one of my sworn riders and a good man, too. Our local herbwoman has him lie out here during the day, you see. She says he’ll soak up the vitality from the horses, and it’ll help him.”

  Superstitious nonsense, that, but Aderyn refrained from saying so outright.

  “I happen to be a herbman, my lord. Would you like me to have a look at him? Maybe I’ll see somewhat she missed, like.”

  “Gladly, good sir, gladly. His
name’s Meddry. I’ll just take our other guests on into the great hall.”

  For all that Lord Gorddyn called him a man, Meddry was really little more than a boy, about fifteen and most likely brand-new to the warband. He was far too thin and hollow-eyed, with his pale blond hair sticking with sweat in wisps to his pinched face. When Aderyn knelt down beside him, Meddry propped himself up on one elbow, tried to speak, then began to cough, the most horrible hacking deep cough Aderyn had ever heard a man give. He threw one arm around Meddry’s shoulders and supported him until at last he spat up—not rheum, but blood, bright red and clotted. Aderyn grabbed a twist of clean hay and wiped his mouth for him.

  “Dying, aren’t I?” Meddry whispered.

  “Not just yet, and maybe not at all.” Aderyn came as close to an outright lie as he could get. “We’ll see what we can do for you, lad.”

  “I can spot false cheer by now, herbman.” With a sigh he flopped back down into the warm straw.

  Mostly to check how much vitality his newfound patient had left, Aderyn stared into his eyes, then nearly swore aloud as he recognized the soul who in his last life had carried the name of Maer. At that point he remembered the strange womanlike sprite he’d seen hanging round Lord Gorddyn’s gates, and his blood ran as cold as the sick boy’s.

  “You’ve got a strange sort of lover, don’t you, Meddry?”

  His face turned first so white, then so fiery with shame that Aderyn knew that his loose arrow had hit the mark.

  “You’ve got to leave her alone. She’s what’s killing you. Hush! Don’t try to argue with me. Just listen. She’s so desperate to please you that she wants to look like a real woman. She’s doing it by feeding off your life. I can’t explain any better than that, but it’s making you ill.”

  In a stubborn burst of energy he shook his head no.

  “We’ll talk more later. You rest here for now, and I’ll send one of your friends to you.”