A Time of Exile

by Katharine Kerr

  Aderyn said nothing, staring into the fire as if he could read the flames like writing. Rhodry was only aware of his shame, burning in his face worse than any fever. Yet even in his dishonor he knew that the marvels had snared him more than the sex. He could remember them so vividly, those bejeweled caves deep under waves that never broke on any earthly shore, or the rose meadows, breathing perfume in a golden sunlight. He could hear the harsh shrieks of the peacocks, strutting through the emerald grass, and see just beyond them a ruby mound of roses, big as a dun. He got up and began walking over to those roses, drawn by the scent until a stinging pain flooded his face. He tried to ignore it and keep walking, but the pain came again. The vision vanished with a rushy hiss like water dropped into a pot of hot oil. Rhodry found himself staring up at Aderyn, who was leaning over him, one hand still raised.

  “This is very bad,” the old man said. “She’s come right after you.”

  Aderyn stepped back, stretched out his hand, and began turning slowly in a circle while he chanted under his breath in some language that Rhodry didn’t recognize. It seemed that he was using his pointing finger to draw a big invisible circle around the tent and to scribble some sort of figure at each quadrant, too. As soon as he’d gone round three times, Rhodry felt as if he’d been suddenly shaken awake after a night of vivid dreams. While he could remember that he’d seen marvels, he couldn’t remember a single detail, and the tent seemed far more real and solid than it had in weeks. Yet the world around him was also strangely bleak—tawdry, somehow, and dirty round the edges, as if it were some rich and beautiful shirt, all embroidered in Bardek silk, that he’d worn and worn until it was frayed bald and stained, fit only for giving to a beggar to keep off the cold.

  “You’ve got to give her up.” Aderyn’s voice was cold and harsh. “Do you understand me? She’ll kill you if you don’t.”

  The anger he felt caught Rhodry by surprise. He wanted her, wanted the marvels, wanted them so badly he had a brief thought of killing anyone, even Aderyn, who stood in his way. The old man stepped back so sharply that Rhodry knew his rage must have shown on his face.

  “Please, Rhodry, listen to me. You’ve touched on the edge of forbidden things, and it’s hard for me to explain, but—wait, I know. Think of it this way. That dream you had? It’s an omen. She’ll kill you without even meaning to do it if you keep going to her. She’s sucking the life-force out of you, and soon enough your body will weaken and die, because there won’t be enough force to sustain it. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but—”

  “Cursed right it doesn’t! Ye gods, don’t you understand? Dying seems a small price to pay for what she gives me.”

  Aderyn stared, simply stared at him for a long time.

  “Things are worse even than I feared,” the old man said at last. “But there’s one last thing you don’t understand. Maybe you’re willing to die, but what about her? Are you going to drag her down with you? She thinks I hate her, but she’s as much my charge as you are. She has no mind to understand what happens between you. She loves you, and that’s everything and all that she knows about this world.”

  Almost against his will Rhodry was remembering her confusion over simple things like names and time passing.

  “She’s become the way she is because she knows you want her that way,” Aderyn went on. “You’re doing this to her, Rhodry Maelwaedd. If she goes on trying to please you, she’ll be utterly ruined, caught between the lands of men and elves on the one side and the Wildlands on the other. The Wildlands are her true home, but soon she’ll lose them, get herself shut out of them, and all because of you. Do you want that? She’ll be doomed, a bit of cosmic refuse, suffering for half of Eternity, and all because of—”

  “Stop it! Oh, ye gods, hold your tongue! I could never do that! I’ll give her up, then! I swear it on the gods of both my peoples!”

  “And I’ll hold you to that vow. Good. Well, then, let me just call Gavantar back in. Looks to me like you could use some dinner.”

  Rhodry forced down food that was strangely tasteless, then went to his blankets and fell asleep without even bothering to undress. Almost at once he was dreaming so vividly that he knew it was no ordinary dream, that she’d come to him when he could set no guard against her, because in the land of dream she was the lord and he the vassal. When she reproached him for betraying her, he fell to his knees and begged her to forgive him, groveled at her feet like a bondsman until she graciously reached out a hand and bade him take it. She swept him back to the rose meadows, where even in dream the perfume hung thick in the golden air, and led him to a stream, where fish as bright as jewels slipped through golden rushes and emerald water weeds. As they sat down together in the warm and sweet-scented grass, Rhodry knew that if he made love to her there, he would never wake, that his body would sleep entranced while his mind roamed free in dream. Until, of course, he died, but her smile was sweet, so sweet that the price seemed very low. He would seem to live for a long time, perhaps, here with her, and they would share a glorious day before the gray night inevitably fell. When she leaned toward him for a kiss, he smiled, welcoming her—then caught her wrists and held her back.

  His death would doom her. Aderyn said so, and he knew in his very heart that the old man would never lie. Pouting, she slid closer, sensing his coldness, smiling again, slipping her hands free of his weakening grasp and moving closer yet to run her hands through his hair and waken a desire that made him gasp for breath, just from the sweetness of it. He was about to kiss her when she screamed. Rhodry spun around and saw Aderyn striding across the meadow, his face as grim and set as a warrior’s, and right behind him came a presence. At moments it seemed to be a slender young man, but with flesh and clothes of palest silver; at others, a misty, swirling tower of moonlight. With a howl and shriek of rage the White Lady vanished, sweeping all color from the world along with her. Over a corpse-gray meadow Aderyn came stalking, the ground shaking, rumbling, the trees trembling, rocking

  and Rhodry woke to find Aderyn shaking him by the shoulders. Although Aderyn’s face was every bit as grim now as it was in the dream, there was no sign of the Silver Lord of the Wildlands.

  “By the Dark Sun herself,” Aderyn said. “This is going to be a battle and a half. You’re not leaving the camp alone until we’ve won it. I’m going to find Cal and ask him for some guards.”

  Rhodry’s first and immediate thought was to slip out while the old man was gone, but Gavantar was standing by the door with his arms folded over his chest and a grim look of his own carved onto his young face. When he snapped his fingers a horde of Wildfolk materialized to sit on Rhodry’s lap, grab his arms, weigh down his shoulders, and generally do whatever they could to keep him in place. Rhodry studied the floorcloth and tried to ignore her voice, whispering, begging, calling to him like the murmur of a distant sea. Now that he was awake, he could argue with her, warn her, tell her of the evil fate that waited for her if she persisted in loving him, but she only said that she was as willing to die for him as he was for her.

  “You don’t even know what death means.”

  He realized that he’d been speaking aloud and looked up to find Gavantar listening in a horrified fascination. He felt tears brim in his eyes and spill beyond his power to stop them, but he couldn’t say one word more until Aderyn returned. As soon as the dweomermaster slipped through the tent flap, she fled with one last whisper of desire.

  “I don’t sleep as much as most men do,” Aderyn said. “But I do need some rest every now and then, and Gav is only a beginner at this sort of thing. Thanks to the warleader and his men, your body’s going to stay right here, but your soul’s somewhat of a problem. I think me I’d best send for some help.”

  After she left the encampment, Jill rode southwest, heading for the seacoast and the islands of Wmmglaedd, which at that time was a small temple complex dedicated to the gods of knowledge and learning. Already, though, a long stone building, where peat fires always smoldered to kee
p off the damp, held the core of what was to become its famous library. With the help of a young priest Jill settled in, hunting through its collection of some five hundred books and scrolls for any scrap of information that would help decipher the mysteries of Rhodry’s Wyrd in general and the rose ring in particular. Her problem was simple. At that time the entire Elvish heritage of literature and history appeared lost. Although some of the People out on the grasslands could read, and a few more were trained as sages to memorize vast amounts of oral tradition, only two Elvish books were known to have survived the Great Burning. Apparently lost with this heritage was the meaning of the word engraved inside Rhodry’s ring.

  Scattered here and there through books in other languages, however, were the occasional reference to Elvish lore and learning, written down by the rare scribe who considered the People worth listening to. Jill was determined to see what she could glean from these less than fertile fields. Since she’d learned to read so late in life, understanding Deverrian text was still a slow process for her, and she had to pause often and ask one of the scribes the meaning of an obscure word. Puzzling out Bardekian was even slower.

  After about two weeks of frustrating and unprofitable research, Jill was ready to pack it up as a bad job and depend entirely on meditation for her information, but just as she was about to give up she came upon a passage that made her struggles seem worthwhile. “When our people first came to the islands,” wrote a certain Bardekian historian, “they found other refugees there ahead of them, a strange people who had no name for themselves but who said they came from across the northern sea. There were never very many of them, so the old tales run, and they either all died or sailed south.” That was all, just a tantalizing scrap of legend passed down by word of mouth and quite possibly unreliable—but one that would fit the elvish refugees from the Great Burning of the Cities. What if it were true? And what, furthermore, if descendants of those refugees still lived, off in the little-known islands far to the south? The very thought drew to the surface of her mind long-forgotten memories, little scraps of knowledge about Bardek that had never seemed very important before, such as a certain style of wall painting that reminded her of the decorations on elven tents.

  Late one evening she was sitting in the tiny guesthouse, going over a list of names of the more obscure islands and hoping to find some similarities to Elvish words, when she felt Aderyn’s mind tugging on hers. She sat down on the floor by the fire and stared into the glowing coals until at last his face appeared, floating just above the flame.

  “Thank god I finally reached you. I’ve been trying to attract your attention for hours.”

  “My apologies, but I’ve been on the track of some very peculiar information, and it’s a fascinating puzzle.”

  “Could you see your way clear to laying it aside for a while? Somewhat’s dreadfully wrong.”

  “What? Of course! I mean, what is it?”

  “I need your help. I hate to ask, truly, because I know how you feel about Rhodry, but you’re the only one I can turn to. I beg you, if ever you’ve honored me, ride back to us.”

  “I’ll leave on the morrow. Where are you?”

  The vision changed to show her the camp, nestled in a valley up at the northern end of the Peddroloc; then Aderyn’s mind left hers in a gust of anxiety, as if every moment was so precious that he simply couldn’t stop to explain.

  When she rode out, Jill left her mule and packs of medicines behind, and she borrowed an extra riding horse from the priests, too, so that she could switch her weight back and forth between her two mounts. For the first three days she traveled fast and smoothly; then a summer storm boiled up out of the west. On the fourth morning she woke to a sky as dark as slate and a pair of horses turned jumpy and foul-tempered by the thick and oppressive air. Late in the day it broke, a few fat drops at first, then a hard stinging slash of storm and the crack of lightning. Jill was forced to dismount and calm her trembling pair until at last the lightning moved off and the rain settled to a steady drizzle. Although she made a few more miles, shoving a way through the soaking-wet grass was so hard on the horses that she stopped early, making a wet camp in a little clump of willows by a stream.

  Just before dawn she woke, cramped and shivering, to the distinct feeling that someone was watching her. Although the rain had stopped, the clouds still hung gray and lowering over the plains, bringing a dark and misty dawn, but as she looked around, she could just make out a woman, standing among the trees.

  “Well, a good morrow to you,” Jill said in Elvish. “Is your alar nearby, or are you riding alone?”

  The woman tossed back her head and wailed, one high keen of a spine-chilling note, then vanished. Slowly Jill got to her feet, and she was shivering from more than the damp.

  “A banshee, was it? Oh, ye gods! Rhodry!”

  Immediately she tried to scry him out, but she could find no trace either of him or the elven camp. Just before she panicked she realized that Aderyn might well have set seals over them all for some reason of his own—if so, a portent of horrible trouble indeed.

  All that day, while the storm cleared and the sun and wind dried the tall grass, she pushed herself and the horses mercilessly, but even so, it was on the morrow noon—the fifth day after she’d left the islands of Wmm—that she finally saw the elven camp, a huddle of round tents on the horizon, and the horse herds, spread out and grazing peacefully. The young elf on watch greeted her with a shout that brought Calonderiel and half a dozen men riding hard to gallop her into camp.

  “Take her horses,” the warleader called. “I’ll escort her to the Wise One’s tent. Jill, by every god, I’m glad to see you!”

  “Is Rhodry dead?”

  “No. Aderyn didn’t tell you? Rhodry’s gone mad. Straight off his head, raving, seeing things—I don’t understand it one bit, but it’s terrifying, truly. Just trying to get him to eat is a battle and a half.”

  Aderyn’s tent was standing in the middle of the camp instead of at its usual distance. With Calonderiel right behind her and a crowd of Wildfolk shoving and pushing round them, Jill rushed inside. Aderyn was standing by the dead fire and waiting for her. The dweomermaster looked exhausted, pale and stooped, with dark circles round his eyes that were worthy of a drunken warrior. Behind him, crouched in the curve of the leather wall like an animal at bay, sat Rhodry. At first she barely recognized him, just because he sat so quietly, his eyes stripped of all feeling and fire.

  “What’s so wrong?” Jill snapped.

  “I haven’t slept much in a week, for starters,” Aderyn said. “But I’ll wager you mean our Rhodry.”

  Rhodry never moved or looked up at the mention of his name.

  “I was afraid he was dead. I met a banshee on the road.”

  “It wasn’t a banshee. It—she—was the trouble.” Aderyn turned to the warleader. “Cal, stay here with him, will you? Yell at the first sign of the usual madness. We’ll just be outside, where we can talk privately.”

  They went round to the side of the tent, and Jill noticed that no one dared come near, not even the normally curious children, not even one of the dogs.

  “It’s a woman from the Wildlands.” Aderyn wasted no time on fine phrasing. “The little bitch has gone and ensorceled him, but it’s hurting her worse than it is him, truly. She’s linked to him from other lives, and there was no way for me to warn him adequately without spilling truths he shouldn’t hear.”

  “We’ve got to trap her and turn her over to her lords.”

  “Easier said than done. I’ve been trying, but she’s a wily little thing.”

  “Look, Rhodry’s a man of honor. Can’t you explain that he’s hurting this poor innocent spirit, and—”

  “I did, and that’s the only reason he’s still with us at all. He did his best to resist her, but in the end, she pulled him back.”

  “I still don’t see how—”

  “She’s his lover. And I mean exactly that. As much his lover as ever you were.”<
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  Her sudden anger caught Jill by surprise—nothing so strong as rage, no, but a definite resentment, a flickering of old jealousies. Aderyn misunderstood her silence.

  “You do know about such things, don’t you?” the old man said. “She’s one of the Wildfolk, but many years ago she ran afoul of one of the Guardians, who gave her a false body of sorts. Ever since, she’s been working on becoming a physical being, sucking magnetism from him and other lovers to—”

  “Of course I know what she’s doing! Oh, my apologies, Aderyn, I didn’t mean to snap at you. How long has this been going on?”

  “A couple of hundred years, more or less and all told.”

  “She must be quite … well, convincing by now.”

  “Very, and beautiful, too, or so he says, but in this case beauty’s certainly in the eye of the beholder. I never cared for the pale and pouty type myself, all wide eyes and simpers, when I was young.”

  “Neither did Rhodry. Ych, this is revolting, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe it of him, but here we are. How are you guarding against her? The usual seals?”

  “Just that, but she keeps calling to him, particularly when he’s asleep, and I can’t watch him every moment of every day. Gav can help set the seals, but that’s all. In fact, with you here and all, I was thinking that I might just go to Cal’s tent right now and get some sleep. Ye gods, I’m tired!”

  Leaving Gavantar just outside the door on watch, Jill went back to Aderyn’s tent. Rhodry never even glanced up when she came in, nor did he say a word to her as she helped herself to bread and smoked meat from the basket lying by the hearthstone. She sat down some feet from him and studied him while she ate, since he didn’t seem to care whether she did or not. He looked his age, she realized with a shock. Even though he didn’t have a single gray hair or a pouch or bag in his weather-beaten face, he looked old, slumped down, drained of the immensely high vitality and magnetism that keeps those of elven blood so “young” by human standards. Since in her mind she always held the image of him as her young lover, she felt that she hardly knew this middle-aged man. The estrangement hurt.