A Time of Exile

by Katharine Kerr

  “You will take my daughter from me, girl. I fear you for it.”

  “What? I don’t want to steal your daughter.”

  Alshandra shook her head in a baffled frustration, as if Dallandra had misunderstood her.

  “Don’t lie—I can see it. You will take my daughter. But I shall have a prize in return. Remember that, girl.”

  Swelling and huge, she rose up, her hands like claws as she reached out. Dallandra dropped to her knees, grabbed the hilt of the buried knife, and pulled it free, rising again in one smooth motion. Alshandra shrieked in terror and fell back. For one panicked moment they stood there, staring at each other; then Alshandra’s form wavered—and bulged out, as if some invisible force from the knife blade was pushing against her midriff and shoving it back. She looked exactly like a reflection on the surface of a still pool when a puff of breeze moves the water: all wavering and distorted. Then she was gone, with one last shriek left to echo round the grasslands and make Dallandra’s mare kick and snort in fear.

  That night Evandar appeared in Dallandra’s dreams and said one simple thing: you should never have done that. She didn’t need him to tell her what action he meant. What he couldn’t understand was that she felt not fear but guilt, that she’d caused Alshandra such pain.

  In the morning, as they sat in their tent eating wild berries and soft ewe’s-milk cheese, Dallandra broke their unspoken rule about mentioning the Guardians and told Aderyn what had happened. She was utterly stunned when he became furious.

  “You said you’d never go see them again!” His voice cracked with quiet rage. “What, by all the hells, did you think you were doing, going off alone like that?”

  She could only stare openmouthed. He caught his breath with a gasp, swallowed heavily, and ran both hands over his face.

  “Forgive me, my love. I … they terrify me. The Guardians, I mean.”

  “I don’t exactly find them comforting myself, you know.”

  “Then why—” He checked himself with some difficulty.

  The question was a valid one, and she gave it some hard, silent thought, while he waited, patient except for his hands, which clasped themselves into fists as they rested on his thighs.

  “It’s because they’re suffering,” she said at last. “Evandar is, anyway, and his daughter suspects that something’s very wrong with their people. They do need help, Ado.”

  “Indeed? Well, I don’t see why you should be the one to give it to them.”

  “I’m the only one they’ve got, so far at least.”

  “Well, I need you, too, and so do the rest of the People.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why do you keep hunting these demons down?”

  “Oh, come on, they’re not demons!”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t like them. And besides, it isn’t all pity on your part, is it? You seem to find them fascinating on their own.”

  “I’ve got to admit that. It’s because they’re a puzzle. We’ve searched out all the lore we can, from your old master and his books, from all the other dweomerworkers among the People, and we still don’t know what they are. I’m the only one who has a chance of finding out.”

  “It’s all curiosity, then?”

  “Curiosity?” She felt a surge, not of anger, but of annoyance. “I wouldn’t dismiss it that way.”

  “I never meant to dismiss it.”

  “Oh, indeed?”

  And they had the first fight they’d ever had, hissing the words at each other, because back and forth outside the tent the rest of the alar kept going past on their morning’s chores. Finally Dallandra got up and stormed out of the tent, ran through the camp, and kept running out into the grasslands. When she slowed to a walk and looked back, she was furious to see that he hadn’t followed her. She caught her breath, then walked on, heading nowhere in particular and circling round to keep the camp in sight as a distant jagged line of tents on the horizon.

  “Dallandra! Dallandra!” The voice seemed far away and thin. “Wait! Father told me your name.”

  She spun around to see Elessario running to meet her. As she came close, the grass parted around her as if she did indeed have physical substance and weight, but her form was slightly translucent and thin. Smiling, she offered one hand, bunched in a fist to hide something.

  “A present for you.”

  When Dallandra automatically held out her hand, Elessario dropped a silver nut onto her palm. It looked much like a walnut in a husk, and it had a bit of stem and one leaf still attached, but all of silver, solid enough to ring when Dallandra flicked the husk with her thumbnail.

  “Well, thank you, but why are you giving this to me?”

  “Because I like you. And as a token. If you ever want to come to our country, it’ll take you there.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Touch it to your eyes, and you’ll see the roads.”

  Again, automatically, Dallandra started to do just that, then caught herself in the nick of time. With a shaking hand she stuffed the nut into her trousers pocket.

  “Thank you, Elessario. I’ll remember that.”

  The child smiled, and she looked so happy, so innocent in her happiness, that it was impossible to suspect her of guile. Evandar, of course, was another matter.

  “Did your father give you this to give to me?”

  “Oh yes. He knows where they grow.”

  “Ah. I rather thought so.”

  Elessario started to speak, then suddenly yelped like a kicked dog.

  “Someone’s coming! Him! Your man!”

  Elessario disappeared. Dallandra spun around and saw Aderyn hurrying toward her. When she went to meet him, he smiled in such relief that she remembered their quarrel.

  “I’m sorry I ran out like that,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sorry I said all those things. I love you so much.”

  She flung herself into his arms and kissed him. With his arms tight around her, she felt safe again, warm and secure and even happy. But somehow, she forgot to tell him about the silver nut; when she found it in her pocket, she wrapped it up in a bit of rag and hid it at the bottom of one of her personal saddlebags, where he’d never have any reason to look for anything.

  It was some months later, when the days were growing shorter and the alar was beginning to talk about heading for the winter camps, that Aderyn realized Dallandra was seeing the Guardians regularly. Although she would ride off alone at least three afternoons a week, both of them needed so much time alone, for meditation as well as certain ritual practices, that at first he thought nothing of it. His own teaching work took up so much of his attention that he was in a way grateful that she was occupied elsewhere. Later he was to realize that he’d also been refusing to believe that his woman would coldly and deliberately do something against his wishes; certainly no Deverry woman would have, and in spite of his conscious efforts to the contrary, in his heart he thought of Dallandra as a wife much like the one his mother had been. Besides, she always took her usual knife with her, and her horse had its usual bridle with an iron bit and cheekpieces, and iron stirrup bars and buckles on its saddle, a surety of sorts against the appearance of the Guardians. Eventually, of course, he realized that she could easily leave the horse and the knife behind somewhere and walk out to meet her friends.

  What finally made him face the truth was her growing distraction. At the autumn alardan, when the People brought their problems to her in her role as Wise One, she spent as little time on them as possible; if she could do it without offending anyone, in fact, she turned these mundane matters over to Aderyn. When they were alone, she was lost in thought most of the time; holding any sort of a real conversation with her became next to impossible. Yet in his mind he went on making excuses for her—she’s thinking about her meditations, she’s working on some bit of obscure lore—until he happened to have a conversation with Enabrilia when they met by chance out by the horse herd.

  “Is Dallandra
sick?” she asked him.

  “No. Why?”

  “She’s so distracted all the time. This morning I ran into her down by the stream and I had to hail her three times before she realized that I was there. When I finally got her attention she just kind of stared at me. I swear it took her a while to remember who I was.”

  Aderyn felt fear like the tip of a cold needle just pricking at his mind.

  “Of course,” Enabrilia went on, “she might be pregnant. I mean, you two have only been together for four years, hardly any time at all, but you are—well, no offense intended—but you are a Round-ear, after all. They always say things are different with Round-ear men.”

  Aderyn hardly heard her chatter. Her concern was forcing him to see something that he hated. When Dallandra returned to the camp, he was in their tent and waiting for her.

  “You’ve been riding off to see them again, haven’t you?” He blurted it out straightaway.

  “Yes. I never said I wouldn’t.”

  “Why haven’t you told me?”

  “Why should I? It only upsets you. Besides, I never go to their country. I always make them come through into ours.”

  He stood groping for words while she watched, her head tilted a little to one side, her steel-gray eyes utterly calm and more than a little distant.

  “Why are you so afraid?” she said at last.

  “I don’t want you to go off with them and leave me.”

  “Leave you? What? Oh, my beloved! Never!” She rushed to him and flung herself into his hungry arms. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were worried about something like that.” She looked up, studying his face. “For the work’s sake I might have to go off alone for a few nights, maybe, but that’s all it would ever be.”

  “Really?” He wanted to beg her to stay with him every minute of every day, but he knew that such a plea would be ridiculous as well as impossible, given their mutual work. “Promise?”

  “Of course I do! I’d always come home to you. Always.”

  She kissed him so passionately that he knew that she had to be telling the truth, that at the very least she believed implicitly in her own words. His relief was like a warm tide, carrying all his fears far out to some distant sea. For a long time, too, all through the cold and stormwracked winter, she seemed to put her distraction aside and to devote as much of her attention to him as she could whenever they were together. By the time that spring came, he decided that he’d been foolish to worry about her work with the Guardians, even when she told him openly that she’d been talking regularly with Elessario.

  “That child needs me, Ado. You know, I truly do think that she and her race are meant to be as incarnate as you or me. Something’s gone terribly wrong, somewhere. Some of the evidence I’ve gathered makes me think that these beings are scattered through the universe, across several of the inner planes. I think that’s what they mean. They talk about living on several worlds, you see, not one single world.”

  “But I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “No more have I. That’s why they intrigue me so much. You know, I left my parents for the dweomer because I loved hidden things, secret things.”

  “So did I. I can understand. But please, be careful around them. I just don’t trust them.”

  “Neither do I. Don’t worry.”

  “But suppose they did incarnate. What would they become?”

  “I have no idea. Neither do they, truly. I think that they’ve been here so long now that they’d become beings much like us—like the elves, I mean, not you Round-ears.”

  The words rang in his mind like a shout of warning. Not since their marriage had she made that sharp distinction between herself and his kind. Yet it hurt so much that he hesitated, letting her talk on, until the moment was irrevocably lost.

  “They’d have to give up a lot to become like us,” she was saying. “So much, truly, that I wonder if they ever will, but if they don’t, well, they’re the ones who keep telling me they’ll fade away and be lost forever. I’d hate to see that happen to any soul. It would be a tragedy indeed.”

  “Just so. But it’s their choice.”

  “Is it? Unless they get someone to show them the way, they have no choice.”

  “Indeed? What do they want you for, then? Some kind of cosmic midwife?”

  “Well, yes.” She looked surprised that he didn’t already know. “Just exactly that.”

  In the bright grass by the stream Evandar lounged, half sitting, half lying, his harp at his side. Up close Dallandra could see that the harp was real wood, like the arrow she’d been given, and of elven design, though more elaborate than any she’d ever seen, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl in a pattern of seaweed and sea horses. He noticed the way she studied it.

  “This harp is from the lost cities, from Rinbaladelan, to be precise—a thing that doesn’t come easily to my folk.”

  “You must have taken it away before the city fell.”

  “Oh yes.” He frowned suddenly. “I tried to help defend Rinbaladelan, you see. It was hopeless, of course, even with me there. But it was a very beautiful place, and I hated to see all that beauty lying broken in the mud.”

  “Was it only the beauty? What about the elves that lived there?”

  “They live, they die, they come and go, and it’s no concern of mine. But stone and jewel endure, and the play of water on stone, and the play of light on jewels. The harbor at Rinbaladelan wrung my heart with its beauty, and those hairy creatures filled it with rubble and let it silt and threw corpses into it to turn the water mucky and foul. And then the crabs and the lobsters came to eat the corpses, and the furry creatures ate the crabs and got the plague and died, and I laughed to see them crawling on their bloated bellies through the gutters of the city they’d broken.”

  When Dallandra shuddered, he was honestly puzzled by her reaction.

  “They deserved to die, you know,” Evandar said. “They’d killed my city and, for that matter, all of your people. I don’t know why you keep saying you don’t remember Rinbaladelan, Dalla. I’m sure that I saw you there.”

  “Maybe you did, but I wouldn’t remember from life to life. You don’t remember much after you’ve died and been reborn. A soul that remembered everything would be too burdened to live its new life afresh.”

  It was his turn for the shudder.

  “To forget everything. I couldn’t bear it, and to live bound down the way you do!”

  “Evandar, it’s time for some honest talk, if indeed your folk can do such a thing. You keep asking me to help you, yet you keep saying you don’t want my help.”

  “Well, that’s because this is such a new thing for me.” He picked up the harp and ran a trill, notes of such unearthly sweetness that her eyes filled with tears. “It’s not myself. It’s Elessario.”

  “Ah. You do love her, don’t you?”

  “Love? No. I don’t want to possess her. I don’t even want her at my side all the time.” He looked up from the strings. “I only want her to be happy, and I’d hate to see her fade away. Is that love?”

  “Yes, you dolt! It’s a greater love than just simply wanting her.”

  His surprise was comic.

  “Well, if you say so, Dalla. Fancy that.” He ran another trill, faintly mocking notes, this time, and very high. “Very well, then. I love Elessario, strange though it sounds to my ears, and she’s still young, so young, too young to know what she’d be giving up if she followed you people into birth and flesh and the endless wheel and all of that glittering, strange, and sometimes oddly sticky and slimy and wet world you live in. And then she’d have all we were meant to have, and I could die in peace.”

  “Why not come with her and live?”

  He shook his head in a no and bent over the harp. The song he played was meant for dancing; she could tell by the driving chords and the way her feet demanded to move. She forced herself to sit very still until he was done, modulating suddenly into a minor key and letting the tune hang
unfinished.

  “You won’t understand us until you come into our country,” he said.

  “Suppose that I came—just suppose, mind—what would happen to my body while I was gone?”

  “The lump of meat? Do you care?”

  “Of course I care! Without it I can never come home to the man I love.”

  “But why should I care?”

  “Because without my body I’ll die and go away to be reborn and you’ll have to wait a long time and then start this all over from the beginning.”

  “Oh, well, that would be tedious beyond belief, wouldn’t it? Let me think. I know. You can change from a woman to a bird and back again already, so if I turn the lump of meat into a jewel on a chain, and you put the chain around your neck, it shall travel everywhere with you, and you can change back whenever you want to go home. Dalla, truly, if you’d only stay a few days with us—just a few days—to see us and know us and all that we do, and then you’d see how to help my Elessario, I’m sure of it.” All at once he smiled. “My Elessario. Whom I love. What an odd sound to it, but you know, I think you must be right.”

  He hit the harp in a discord and disappeared.

  If Evandar had asked for his own sake, Dallandra might never have gone—she realized it even then—but that he would ask for the sake of another soul made all the difference. She’d seen enough of his people already, particularly Alshandra, to understand just how right Nevyn had been to wager against them having compassion. That Evandar was beginning to be capable of a love beyond wanting for himself was a momentous thing, and a change to be nurtured and cherished. Yet she was always mindful of the dangers, and she particularly hated the thought of letting Aderyn know that she was thinking of running such a risk. He’ll only yell and scream, she told herself, and with the thought realized that she’d made up her mind.

  Since she couldn’t bear to lie to Aderyn, either, she rode out that morning without telling him anything at all. When she was a good five miles from camp, she unsaddled and unbridled her mare, turned her head in the direction of the herd, and gave her a slap on the rump to start her back home. Then she took the silver nut out of her pocket and unwrapped it from its bit of rag. For a long time she merely studied it and wondered if she truly had the courage to go through with this thing. What if Evandar were lying? Yet she had enough dweomer to tell true from false, and she knew that he’d never spoken so honestly before in all his long existence. In the end what spurred her on was her respect for Aderyn. What would he think if she acted like a squealing coward, full of big plans, empty of courage? With one last wrench of her will she touched the nut to her eyes, left first, then right.