A Time of Exile

by Katharine Kerr

  Aderyn hurried into the great hall, where Calonderiel and the other elves were just finishing up their mead and preparing to leave. He took Lord Gorddyn to one side for a hurried talk.

  “My lord, your rider’s close to death.”

  Gorddyn swore and stared down at the floor.

  “I might—just barely might, mind—be able to help him. Tell me, how long has he been ill?”

  “Well, he didn’t come down with the actual fever until the spring, and he’s only been spitting up the blood for the last few weeks, but truly, he started acting strange months ago. Last winter, it was, just after Samaen.”

  “Acting strange? How?”

  “Oh, keeping to himself a fair bit, when he was always the soul of good company before. He used to go for long rides out in the snow, and I think me that’s when his humors started to wither, out in the cold and wind and all. That’s what the herbwoman in town calls it, withering humors. And every now and then one of the other lads would find him talking to himself. Just talking to the empty air as if there was someone there.”

  Aderyn felt the savage sort of annoyance that comes from seeing your worst fear confirmed.

  “Well, my lord, I ride with the Westfolk these days, but our camp is only a couple of days from here. I need to ride back and fetch my medicinals and suchlike, but I’ll be back as soon as ever I can. Now, listen carefully. I know what I’m going to say will sound strange, but please, my lord, if you value your man’s life, do as I say. While I’m gone, set a guard over Meddry. Never let him be alone for a minute. He’s more than ill; he’s being troubled by an evil spirit, but one of the lesser sorts that walk abroad on Samaen. She must have fastened herself onto him then. It’s the spirit that’s drying up his humors. If there’s people around him—or so I hope, anyway—the spirit will be puzzled at first and leave him alone for a few days.”

  Lord Gorddyn’s eyes went as a wide as a child’s, but he nodded a stunned agreement. Out in these isolated settlements, people took talk of spirits seriously.

  When they left, they rode out fast, and Aderyn pushed everyone along as they traveled back to the camp. There he loaded up his medicinals, took a couple of fresh riding horses, and rushed back again. Although Aderyn wanted Loddlaen to come with him to study this interesting medical case, the boy—well, a young man by then, really—insisted on staying home, and as usual, Aderyn refused to cross his will. Aderyn was, of course, as worried about the spirit as he was about Meddry, no matter what he’d said to Lord Gorddyn. As he rode, he was planning how to approach her, and how he’d invoke the Lords of the Wildlands to help him catch her, but in the end, and for all his speed, he was too late. He rode up to Lord Gorddyn’s gates just in time for Meddry’s burying, out in the sacred grove of oaks behind the dun.

  “Ah, ye gods, what happened?” Aderyn burst out. “I truly thought he had a couple of weeks left, my lord.”

  “Good herbman, I’ve failed him badly, I’m afraid. Here, after this sad thing, we’ll talk. Go on into the dun and have the stable lads take your horses and suchlike.”

  Later that afternoon, over mead Lord Gorddyn told Aderyn the tale. After the dweomermaster left them, they’d followed his orders exactly. The men in the warband took turns sitting with the lad and making sure that he was never alone for a minute during the day. At night they carried him to his bed in the barracks, where he slept surrounded by other men. Since he was so deathly ill no one even considered the possibility that he might get up and slip out on his own.

  “But that’s just what he did, good sir.” Lord Gorddyn looked sick to his stomach. “Two nights ago, it was. All that day he’d been begging the men to go away, and he was raving, too, saying ‘I’ve got to see her’ over and over. They thought maybe he meant his mother, but she’s been dead these two years.” Suddenly he shuddered. “Maybe he did mean his mam, because truly, he’s seeing her in the Other-lands tonight, isn’t he? But anyway, they wouldn’t leave him. So when night came, they put him to bed in his bunk and brought him some broth and suchlike, but still they didn’t leave him alone. They took turns, like, eating dinner in the great hall so he always had company. Sometime in the dead of night, when everyone was sound out, he must have escaped. It’s cold these fall nights, Aderyn. Winter’s coming early this year, I swear it, to judge from the frosts we’ve been having. But be that as it may, Meddry got the strength from some god or other to get out of the barracks and walk all the way out of the dun. He didn’t get much farther, though. We found him not more than a quarter mile from here, up in the birch groves.”

  “He was dead, I take it.”

  “Just that. He had one of his coughing fits and bled to death.” Lord Gorddyn’s pudgy face turned a sudden pale. “But here’s the cursed strange thing. He was lying on his back with his hands crossed over his chest. Someone had laid him out, like, for burying. And me and my men asked around in town and in all the farms, and we never found anyone who’d even seen him that night, much less anyone who’d admit to doing such a thing, and frankly, I know my folk, and none of them would have done it without fetching me first.”

  Although Lord Gorddyn wanted Aderyn to take his hospitality for the night, he made a raft of polite excuses and left well before the dinner hour. A farmer he met on the road told him exactly where young Meddry’s body had been found. On the far side of a meadow from the dun stood a copse of pale birches, standing silently now in the chill of an autumn afternoon as if they mourned the boy who’d died there. Since there was a nearby stream to water his horses, Aderyn made camp in the copse. He had a light meal, then drew a magic circle round the camp, sealed it with the pentagrams, and waited.

  She came with the moonrise, an hour or so after sunset that night, came walking up to the trees just like a human woman, but her long blue hair waved and drifted around her face as if it blew in some private wind, and she was barefoot, too, in the rimy frost. Unlike a human woman, she could see the magic sphere glowing golden over the camp. She greeted it with a howl of rage that sounded more like a wolf than a human. Slowly and carefully, so as not to frighten her, Aderyn walked to the edge of the circle and erased a portion to welcome her in. She refused to come any closer, merely balled her fists and made a show of threatening him.

  “Where is he?” she snarled.

  “The boy you love? He’s dead, child.”

  She stared with mindless blue eyes.

  “You killed him, child. I know you didn’t mean to hurt him, and indeed, you need my help, too. Come now, let’s talk.”

  Again she stared, her mouth slack.

  “He’s gone away.” Aderyn tried to make her see. “Gone far, far away under the ground. He did that once before, remember? When you tried to take him to see Elessario.”

  Her howl took him by surprise, because it was such a human sound, that time, as if all the grief and pain and mourning of the world were tearing her heart.

  “I’m sorry. Please, child, come in and sit by my fire. Let me help you.”

  She howled again, then vanished, leaving him to curse himself for a clumsy fool that he should let her escape so easily. Never had he expected her to love her victim so deeply and so well that she would react with true grief. He camped there in the copse for a fortnight, and every night he went searching the etheric plane for her, and during the day he meditated upon the matter and discussed it with the Lords of the Wildlands, but never did he or they find her again. (He did find out, though, that it was the lords who’d laid the poor lad out properly, as a small token of their desire to make amends.) Finally he was forced to admit defeat and leave to rejoin the People out in the grasslands, because winter was coming on, driving them down to the south coast. He reproached himself with his failure for years.

  And for years the folk around Drwloc heard a banshee, or so they called it, wailing in the lonely places whenever the moon was at her full. At length she came less often, and finally, after a long, long time, she vanished, never to be heard again.

  EPILOGUE
r />   THE ELVEN BORDER

  SUMMER 1096

  For six nights the alar camped near the ruined dun and waited for news of Rhodry’s father. Because of the stock, they did have to move on the seventh day, heading north a day’s ride to fresh pasture. After two days there, though, the alar split up for Rhodry’s sake. Calonderiel and his warband, with their women and children, along with Aderyn’s magical company and of course Rhodry himself, drove off a herd of extra horses to leave the best grazing for the sheep. They made camp back on the Eldidd border and set a guard every night to keep watch for any hated Round-ears. Every day the dweomermasters would scry for Devaberiel; they always found him easily enough, but he always seemed to be traveling idly north, unaware that his long-lost son was waiting for him on the border.

  During all this time Rhodry found himself drawn to Jill in spite of all his best efforts to leave her alone. He had never wanted to lose her, had always planned, from the moment he first met her, to spend his entire life in her company, and now that he’d found her again—or so he thought of it—all that old devotion came back in the same way as a fire, banked with sod for the night, flares up when a servant knocks the lumps of earth aside and lets the fresh air in. He found himself courting her as if she were a young lass, turning up at her side whenever she went walking, bringing her flowers, angling to sit next to her at every communal meal. Although she was mostly cold to him, every now and then she warmed, when they were talking about something they’d done or someone they’d known, all those years ago in his other life on a silver dagger’s long road.

  One morning, when Rhodry went looking for Jill in his usual way, he found her sitting on the streambank near Aderyn’s tent. Apparently she’d just bathed, because she was combing her wet hair while Salamander sat with her and talked. When Rhodry joined them, his brother turned to him.

  “I’m going to leave today and go look for our father. Obviously Cal’s messengers haven’t caught up with him yet, and I can just see us all wandering back and forth across the grasslands for years and years, passing close by but never meeting, endlessly wondering where the other one is—that sort of thing.”

  “I was beginning to worry myself, and you have my thanks, but maybe I should just go with you. I’m the one who wants to see him, after all.”

  “Aderyn says your place is here,” Jill broke in. “He doesn’t want you wandering all over the grasslands just yet.”

  “Very well, but why not?”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well, I’d like to know—”

  “Hold up, brother of mine.” Salamander intervened. “Among the People we have a custom. What a Wise One—a dweomermaster, that is—says, we do. That’s one reason why I’ve never aspired to that exalted title myself. Some small dweomer I have, but the wisdom to lead my people—well, I’d just as soon not put myself to the test.”

  “Which shows,” Jill said. “That you have a little bit of wisdom at least.” She rose, still holding the bone comb. “I’m going back to camp.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Rhodry started to get up, but she scowled and waved him back down.

  “Would you stop following me everywhere?”

  “Oh, here, my love—”

  “Never call me that again.”

  There was the crack of command in her voice, so cold, so harsh that he sat down and said nothing, merely watched her walk away while Salamander pretended to look elsewhere.

  “Ah well,” Salamander said at last. “I’m going to take a packhorse with me. Going to come help me load up?”

  “Of course. Let’s go get the parting over with, shall we?”

  “Ah, you’re beginning to think like an elf, sure enough.”

  On the morrow, Rhodry went riding by himself out to the edge of the wild plains, very much like a green sea indeed, with the grass bowing and sighing like waves under the touch of the wind. For a long time he sat on his horse in the hot spring sun, watched the grass ripple, and thought of very little. All at once he realized that he could no longer remember his name. He swore, slapped his thigh hard with the reins, shook his head and swore again, but the name stayed stubbornly hidden until in frustration he started back toward camp.

  “Rhodry Maelwaedd,” he said aloud, then laughed. “Or it isn’t truly Maelwaedd—never truly was—and I suppose that’s one reason I couldn’t remember. But Rhodry ap Devaberiel still sounds passing strange to me. What do you think? Which one should I use?”

  The horse snorted and tossed its head as if to say it didn’t care either way.

  When he rode back to camp he found Calonderiel waiting for him out by the hobbled herd. The warleader helped him unsaddle his horse and turn it out with the others, in a silence so profound that Rhodry knew something was wrong.

  “What’s happened?” he said—and in Elvish, without really thinking about the choice.

  “Oh, well, nothing much, really. Aderyn wants you to come share his tent instead of mine, that’s all.”

  “All right. But why do you—oh, by the Dark Sun! Jill’s left, hasn’t she? That’s what this means.”

  “I’m afraid so. She’s like all the blasted Round-ears—as impatient as babies, all of them! She announced this morning that if Devaberiel couldn’t be bothered to hurry, then she couldn’t be bothered to sit around and wait for him.” Calonderiel frowned down at the ground. “She could have had the decency to wait and tell you goodbye.”

  “She’s leaving because of me, you know, no matter what she told you.”

  “Oh.” A long pause. “I see.”

  Rhodry turned on his heel and strode off alone to the camp. At Calonderiel’s tent he found all his gear gone—moved already, he supposed, at the Wise One’s command. When he went to the old man’s tent, he found the dweomermaster sitting by a banked fire with Wildfolk all around him. In a curve of the wall not far from Gavantar’s place, his bedroll and other gear were neatly laid out below a new pair of tent bags. Aderyn looked up with a wary cock of his head.

  “Jill’s gone, then, is she?” Rhodry said, falling back into Deverrian.

  “She is. Did you truly think she’d stay?”

  Rhodry shrugged and sat down on his blankets. From outside the normal sounds of the camp drifted into the tent—children laughing and running, a horse whinnying, a woman singing as she strolled by-but all the noise seemed strangely far away.

  “I don’t know what I thought,” Rhodry said at last. “I do know it doesn’t matter. Not to her, not to the gods, not to my Wyrd or the wretched dweomer either.”

  “Well, that’s probably true enough.”

  Rhodry nodded and began pulling off his boots. In a few minutes he looked up to find the old man gone.

  That night, some time when his sleep was deepest, Rhodry had a dream. He was walking across a meadow on a night when the full moon shone overhead, guarded with a double ring, and the grass crackled with frost under his feet, but in his dream he was too fevered to feel the cold, his cheeks burning in the icy air. Every step he took drove pain like a knife into his lungs. Yet he kept walking, never considered turning back, forced himself on a step at a time until he reached a copse of birches, white as frost in the moonlight, dancing and trembling with his fever. Among the trees a woman waited. At first he thought it was Jill, but when he went to meet her, he saw that she was neither human nor elven, with her flesh as pale as the birch bark and her waist-length hair as dark blue as a winter sea. She threw her arms around him and whimpered like an animal as she kissed his burning cheeks with cold lips, but when he kissed her mouth, he had to fight for breath between each kiss. Then he started to cough. He shoved her away, turned away and clasped both hands over his mouth while he choked and coughed in spasms that made his entire body rock and tremble. She wept, watching him. When he took his hands away they were covered with blood, dark and fresh, but thick with clots of gore. With a cry the woman flung herself against him and kissed him. When she pulled back, her pale lips were bright
with his blood.

  He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, drowning in his own blood—Rhodry sat up with a cry and heard the woman’s answering wail echo around him. Yellow dweomer light danced on the walls of the tent. Aderyn was standing over him.

  “What were you dreaming?”

  “I was choking. She kissed me and killed me. In the white birches.” Then the dream faded and blurred, like a reflection on water as the wind blows across. “I don’t remember any more of it.”

  “I wondered what being back on the border would do to you. Come, get up, and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”

  At the old man’s bidding Wildfolk made the dead fire leap up with flame. Rhodry was shivering.

  “You know, I used to have a nightmare somewhat like that when I was a child, but I don’t remember it very well. This one was blasted real, though. Ye gods, it still hurts to breathe.”

  “When you had the dream before—as a child, I mean—did your lungs hurt when you woke?”

  “Don’t remember, but I doubt it, because I do remember screaming my head off, and my old nurse running over with her nightdress flapping around her. What does it mean?”

  “Most dreams have as many meanings as an onion has peels. I wouldn’t venture to say what the right one might be.”

  Rhodry hesitated on the edge of asking more. Although he knew that Aderyn had sworn a sacred oath never to tell an outright lie, he could sense that the old man was leaving a great many things unsaid. And do I want to force them out into the open? Rhodry asked himself. There in the middle of the night, miles and miles away from his old home and his old life, the answer was a decided no. Yet all the next day, he kept thinking about the dream, and every now and then, it seemed he could remember a little piece of it, just a visual image of the woman or the feel of a kiss, until he realized just how familiar to him she was, this White Lady, as he found himself calling her for no particular reason at all.

  At dinner that night Aderyn announced that he’d scried Devaberiel out and found him traveling by himself and quickly, heading south through the grasslands but a good many miles away. He’d seen Salamander, too, hurrying to meet him. Since the dweomermaster could assume that one of Calonderiel’s messengers had finally tracked the bard down, he decided that the alar should ride in his direction. When they headed north, though, they kept to the borderlands, because Devaberiel was expecting to find them somewhere near Eldidd. For the same reason they didn’t ride far, finally making a semi-permanent camp not far from the Peddroloc.