A Time of Exile

by Katharine Kerr

  “Well, uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Shall I tell you how much I love you?”

  He heard her laugh, then a little rustling sound, and looked up to find her untying and unbraiding her hair. Her slender face seemed almost lost in that pale thick spill of silver waving down to her waist. When he risked running a gentle hand through it she smiled at him.

  “We’ve laced the tent flap,” she said. “No one will dare bother us now.”

  Smiling, Aderyn bent his head down and kissed her. This time she turned into his arms with a shy desire that sparked his own.

  From that day on, everyone treated him as though he’d always lived among the People and always been Dallandra’s man, just as she became his woman, so naturally, so easily, that he felt as if his heart would break from the joy of it, the first truly human joy he’d ever known in life, that of being part of a pair and no longer lonely. Even Calonderiel accepted the situation, although, just after the shortest day of the year, Cal did leave the banadar’s warband and ride away to join another alar. Aderyn felt guilty over that and said as much to Halaberiel.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the banadar said. “He’ll reconsider when his broken heart heals. At his age, it’ll probably heal quickly, too.”

  Halaberiel was right enough. When the winter camps were breaking up in the first of the warm weather, Cal came riding back, greeted everyone, including Aderyn, as a long-lost brother, and stowed his gear in its former place in the banadar’s tent without a word needing to be said by anyone. As the alarli moved north, heading for the Lake of the Leaping Trout, other warriors came to join them, swordsmen and archers, men and women both, until an army rode into the death-ground to camp and wait for news from Eldidd. Since the dweomer sent Aderyn no warnings of danger, he doubted if there was going to be war, but Halaberiel spent long restless nights, pacing back and forth by the lakeshore, until at last a merchant caravan rode in with Namydd at its head to announce that there would be nothing but peace.

  Even though Melaudd’s elder son, Tieryn Waldyn now, had cried revenge and spent the winter riding all over the princedom trying to raise men to seek it, he’d failed ignominiously. Prince Addryc refused his aid, of course, on the grounds that the Bear’s had violated his decree of sanctity for the elven burial ground. None of the other lords wanted either to displease the prince or to face the longbows of the Westfolk, and Waldyn’s potential allies found an absolute army of reasons to avoid doing so, especially once the news from Cannobaen spread north, that a band of Westfolk had fallen upon the west-lying settlements without warning and wiped them out.

  “So Waldyn can mutter over his ale all he wants,” Namydd finished up. “But he’s not getting any vengeance this summer, leastaways. Besides, Banadar, there’s trouble along the Deverry border now. The king of Eldidd’s collected the rights and dues from the mountain passes for as long as anyone can remember, but the Deverry gwerbret in Morlyn’s started claiming them. There’ll be blood over this, there will.”

  “Splendid,” Halaberiel said. “They won’t be encroaching upon our lands if they’re fighting among themselves. May their gods of war lead them in a long, long dance.”

  The People spent just over a month at the Lake of the Leaping Trout, digging stones from the hills and using them to make a rough boundary line, rather than a wall, around the sacred territories. No one, it seemed, remembered how to make the mortar that had once held together the fabled cities of the far west, but as Halaberiel remarked, they’d be riding back often enough to keep the boundary in repair even without a proper wall. All during the construction Aderyn continued his teaching, since several of the dweomerworkers had followed them, and it was there, too, that Nevyn found him for his promised visit. Not only had the old man brought books of lore—three whole volumes of precious writings, including The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid—but he also had a mule pack filled with rolls of parchment, big blocks of dried ink, and special slate trays for grinding the ink into water. Pens, of course, they could cut from any bank of water reeds.

  “How did you get the coin for all of this?” Aderyn said, marveling at the ink. Each block was stamped with the pelicans of the god Wmm. “Or did the temple just give it to you?”

  “The ink was a gift, truly, but I bought the rest. Lord Maroic’s son paid me handsomely for saving his new lady’s life.” Nevyn’s face turned suddenly blank. “Ado, I’ve got news of a sort for you. Come walk with me.”

  When they left the tent, Dallandra hardly seemed to notice, so lost in the books was she. In the long sun of a hot spring afternoon they walked along the lake, where tiny ripples of water eased up onto clear white sand.

  “Somewhat’s wrong, isn’t it?” Aderyn said.

  “It is. There was fever, bad fever, in Blaeddbyr last winter. Your father and mother are both dead. So is Lord Maroic and most of the elderly and all of the babies in the village, for that matter.”

  Aderyn felt his head jerk up of its own will. He wanted to weep and keen, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Nevyn laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  “It aches my heart, too, Ado. I felt it would be better to tell you myself rather than merely pass the news on through the fire.”

  Aderyn nodded his agreement, wondering at himself and at the grief that seemed to have torn out his tongue. They’re not truly dead, he told himself. They’ve just gone on. They’ll be born again. You know that.

  “It was a terrible thing, that fever.” Nevyn’s voice was soft and distant, as if he were talking to himself alone. “But at least it was quick. I think Lyssa might have pulled through if it weren’t that Gweran had already died. I don’t think she truly wanted to live without him.”

  He nodded again, still unable to speak.

  “There’s no fault or shame in tears, lad. They’ve gone on to new life, but who knows if ever you’ll see them again?”

  At that, finally, he could weep, tossing his head back and sobbing aloud like one of the People. Nevyn patted him on the shoulder repeatedly until at last he fell quiet again, spent.

  “I’ll miss them,” Aderyn said. “Especially Mam. Ye gods, Nevyn, I feel so lost! Except for you, I really don’t have any people but the People now, if you take my meaning.”

  “I do, and you’re right enough. But that’s your Wyrd, lad. I’d never presume to guess why, but it’s your Wyrd, and you’ve taken it up well. I honor you for it.”

  Since in his grief the noisy camp seemed too much to bear, Aderyn led Nevyn on a long, silent walk halfway round the lake. Having his old teacher there was a comfort more healing than any herbs. When the sun was getting low they started back, and Aderyn made an effort to wrench his mind away from his loss.

  “And what do you think of my Dallandra?”

  Nevyn grinned, looking suddenly much younger.

  “I’m tempted to make some smart remark about your having luck beyond your deserving, to find a beautiful woman like this, but truly, her looks are the least of it, aren’t they? She’s a woman of great power, Ado, very great power indeed.”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t take it lightly.” Nevyn stopped walking and fixed him with one of his icy stares. “Do you understand me, Aderyn? At the moment she’s in love with you and in love with playing at being your wife, but she’s a woman of very great power.”

  “Truly, I’m aware of that every single day we’re together. And there’s another thing, too. Don’t you think I realize that she’s bound to live hundreds of years longer than I will? No matter how much I love her, I’m only an incident in her life.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “Forgive me, I forgot that you wouldn’t know. The People live for a long, long time indeed. About five hundred years, they tell me, out on the plains, though when they lived in cities, six or seven hundred was the rule.”

  “Well, that’ll keep a man honest out here.” Nevyn hesitated in sheer surprise. “But, Ado, the envy—”

  “I know. It’s somewha
t that I’ll have to fight, isn’t it? My own heart-aching envy.”

  That night the three of them sat together in Aderyn and Dallandra’s tent. Since it was too warm for a fire, Dallandra made a dweomer globe of yellow light and hung it at the tent peak. Wildfolk swarmed, the gnomes hunkering down on cushions, the sprites and sylphs clustering in the air; a few bold gray fellows even climbed into Nevyn’s lap like cats.

  “Aderyn’s been telling me about the Guardians,” Nevyn said to Dallandra. “This is a truly strange thing.”

  “It is,” Dallandra said. “Do you know who or what they are?”

  “Spirits who’ve never been born, obviously.”

  Both Aderyn and Dallandra stared.

  “Never been incarnated, I mean,” the old man went on. “But I get the distinct feeling that they’re souls who were destined to incarnate. I think, Dalla, that this was what Evandar meant by ‘staying behind.’ That they should have taken flesh here in the material world but refused to do it. The inner planes are free and beautiful and full of power—a very tempting snare. They’re also completely unstable and fragile. Nothing endures there, not even a soul that would have been immortal if it had undergone the disciplines of form.”

  “Do you mean that the Guardians really will fade and simply vanish?” She was thinking hard, her eyes narrow.

  “I do. Eventually. Maybe after millions of years as we measure time, maybe soon—I don’t know.” Nevyn allowed himself a grin. “It’s not like I’m an expert in this subject, you know.”

  “Well, of course.” Dallandra thought for a moment before she went on. “Evandar said that they were meant to be ‘like us.’ Are they elven souls, then?”

  “Mayhap. Or it might well be that they belong to some other line of evolution, some other current in the vast river of consciousness that flows through the universe, but one that’s got itself somehow diverted into the wrong channel. It doesn’t much matter, truly. They’re here now, and they desperately need a pattern to follow.”

  “But Evandar said his people could help us, do things for us.”

  “No doubt. They have all sorts of dweomer power at their disposal, dwelling on the inner planes as they do. I couldn’t even begin to guess what all they may be able to do. But I’d be willing to wager a very large sum on this proposition: they have no wisdom, none. No compassion, either, I’d say. That’s the general rule among those who’ve never known the material world, who’ve never suffered in flesh.” Nevyn leaned forward and caught Dallandra’s gaze. “Be careful, lass. Be on your guard every moment you’re around them.”

  “I am, sir. Believe me. And truly, I don’t want anything to do with them from now on. If it’s my Wyrd to learn about them or suchlike, it can just wait till I’ve got the strength to deal with it properly.”

  “Well, I think me that in this case at least, your Wyrd should be willing to do just that.”

  And Nevyn smiled in relief, as if he’d just seen a horse jump some dangerous hurdle and come down safe and running.

  It was some three years before Dallandra spoke with the Guardians again. In the first year of her marriage to Aderyn, she deliberately kept herself so busy learning what he had to teach and teaching him what lore she could pass on that she had few moments to think of that strange race of spirits. She also refused to go anywhere alone, and sure enough, they avoided her companions, if indeed they weren’t avoiding her. By a mutual and unspoken agreement, she and Aderyn never mentioned them again, and they grew clever at changing the subject when one of the other dweomerworkers did bring the Guardians up. Her love for Aderyn became exactly the anchor, as she’d called it, that she wanted. He was so kind, so considerate of her, that he was an easy man to love: warm, gentle, and rock-solid reliable. Dallandra was not the sort of woman to demand excitement from her man; in her work she dealt with enough excitement to drive the average woman, whether human or elven, daft and gibbering. Since Aderyn was exactly what she needed, she did her best to give him everything he might need from her in return.

  Yet, by the end of the second year, Dallandra began to see the Guardians again, though only at a distance, because they sought her out. When the alar was changing campgrounds, and she was riding at the head of the line with Aderyn or Halaberiel, occasionally she would hear at some great distance the melancholy of a silver horn and look up to see tiny figures in procession at the horizon. If she tried to point them out to her companions, the figures would be gone by the time they looked. When she and Aderyn went flying together—and by then he’d learned to take the form of the great silver owl—she would sometimes see the three swans, too, keeping pace with them but far off in the sky. Whenever she and Aderyn tried to catch up with them, they merely disappeared in a swift flicker of light.

  Then, in the third spring after her marriage, the dreams started. They came to her in brief images, using the elven forms she’d seen before, Evandar, Alshandra, and Elessario, to reproach her for deserting them. At times, they offered great favors; at others, they threatened her; but neither favors nor threats held any force. The reproaches, however, hurt. She could remember Evandar vividly, saying that his people needed hers to keep from vanishing, and she remembered Nevyn’s theories, too, as well as Nevyn’s warnings. She told herself that the Guardians had made their choice when they’d refused to take up the burdens of the physical world; as the elven proverb put it, they’d cut their horse out of the herd—now they could blasted well saddle it on their own. Provided, of course, Nevyn’s theories were right. Provided they’d known what they were doing.

  Finally, after a particularly vivid dream, Dallandra haltered her mare and rode out bareback and alone into the grasslands. She did take with her, however, a steel-bladed knife. After about an hour of riding, she found a place that seemed to speak of the Guardians: a little stream ran at one point between two hazel trees, the last two left of a stand that must have been cut by an alar in some desperate need. Dallandra dismounted several hundred yards away, tethered out her mare, then stuck the knife, blade down, into the earth next to the tether peg so that about half the handle protruded but the blade was buried. Only after she’d made sure that she could find it again did she walk on to the paired hazels.

  Sure enough, a figure stood on her side of this otherworldly gate: Elessario. If it had been Evandar, Dallandra would have turned back immediately, but she trusted another woman, especially one who appeared young and vulnerable, barely out of her adolescence. She had her father’s impossibly yellow hair, but it hung long and unbound down to her waist; her eyes were yellow, too, and slit catlike with emerald green.

  “You’ve come, then?” Elessario said. “You heard me ask you?”

  “Yes, in my dreams.”

  “What are dreams?”

  “Don’t you know? That’s when you talk to me.”

  “What?” Her perfect, full mouth parted in confusion. “We talk to you when you come into the Gatelands, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Your father told me your name, Elessario.”

  She jerked up her head like a startled doe.

  “Oh, the beast! That’s not fair! I don’t know yours.”

  “Didn’t he tell you? He knows it.”

  “He does? He’s never very fair, you know.” She turned suddenly and stared upstream, between the hazels. “Mother’s worse.”

  “You call them Mother and Father, but they never could have birthed you. Not in the usual way, anyway.”

  “But when I became, they were there.”

  “Became?”

  Elessario turned both palms upward and shrugged.

  “I became, and they were there.”

  “All right, then. Do you know what I mean by being birthed?”

  When she shook her head no, Dallandra told her, described the entire process as vividly as she could and described the sexual act, too, just to judge her reaction. The child listened in dead silence, staring at her unblinking with her yellow eyes; every now and then, her mouth worked in disgust or revulsion—
but still she listened.

  “What do you think of that?” Dallandra said at last.

  “It never happened to me, all that blood and slime!”

  “I didn’t think it had, no.”

  “But why? What a horrible thing! Why?”

  “To learn this world.” Dallandra swept her arm to point out sky and earth, grass and water. “To learn all about it and never ever vanish.”

  For a moment Elessario considered, her mouth working in thought this time, not disgust. Then she turned, stepped into the stream between the hazels, and was gone. That will have to do for now, Dallandra thought to herself. We’ll see if she can even remember it. As she was walking back to her horse, she was thinking that Nevyn’s theory of never-incarnate spirits seemed more and more true. She had just reached the tethered mare when she felt a presence behind her like a cool wind. She spun around to see Alshandra, towering and furious, carrying a bow in her hands with a silver-tipped arrow nocked and ready. Suddenly Dallandra remembered the arrow she’d been given and remembered even more vividly that it was no etheric substance but real, sharp wood and metal.

  “Why are you angry?”

  “You will not come to us in our own country.”

  “If I did, would I ever come back to my own country?”

  “What?” Alshandra’s rage vanished; she seemed to shrink down to normal size, but still she clasped the bow. “Why would you want to?”

  “This is where I belong. What I love dwells here.”

  Alshandra tossed the bow into the air, where it disappeared as if it had tumbled through an invisible window into some hidden room. Dallandra’s blood ran cold: these were no ordinary spirits if they could manipulate physical matter in such a way.