A Time of Exile (11 page)

“I do love an alardan,” Nananna said. “You can go watch the dancing if you’d like, child.”

“Are you sure you won’t need me for anything?”

“Not while I sleep, no. Oh—I forgot all about Halaberiel. Here, go find him and tell him I’ll speak to him in the morning.”

Shortly after dawn on the morrow, Halaberiel appeared at their tent with the four young men who were to ride with
him. They all sat on the floor of the tent while Nananna described the young Round-ear she’d seen in her vision—a slender man, much shorter than one of the People, with dark hair and big eyes like an owl. He was traveling with a mule and earning his living as a herbman.

“So he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Nananna finished up. “When I scried him out, he was leaving Elrydd and making his way west. Now, the rest of you leave us while I tell the banadar the secret riddle.”

Carefully avoiding Calonderiel, Dallandra left the tent along with the men and went over to Enabrilia’s tent, which stood nearby. Enabrilia was cooking soda bread of Eldidd flour on a griddle while Wylenteriel changed the baby. Enabrilia broke off a bit of warm bread and handed it to Dallandra.

“I’ve got something to show you later,” Enabrilia said. “We traded a pair of geldings for some marvelous things yesterday. A big iron kettle and yards and yards of linen.”

“Wonderful! I should take some of our extra horses over to the Round-eyes, too.”

The Eldidd merchants left the alardan the next day, taking away fine horses and jewelry and leaving behind a vast motley assortment of iron goods, cloth, and mead. The alardan settled down to its real business—trading goods among itself, and sorting out the riding orders for the long trips ahead to the various winter camps. Just at twilight, Dallandra took an Eldidd-made ax and walked about a mile to a stand of oaks where she’d spotted a dead tree earlier. In the blue shadows under the old trees, all tangled with underbrush, it was cool and quiet—too quiet, without even the song of a bird. Suddenly she was aware of someone watching her. She raised the ax to a weapon posture.

“All right,” Dallandra barked. “Come out.”

As quietly as a spirit materializing, a man of the People stepped forward. Dressed in clothes pieced out of animal skins, he carried a long spear with a chipped stone blade, the shaft striped with colored earths and decorated with feathers and ceramic beads. Round his neck on a thong hung a small leather pouch, also elaborately decorated. One of the Forest Folk, come so close to a gathering—Dallandra lowered the ax and stared in sheer surprise. His smile was more a sneer as he looked her over.

“You have magic,” he said at last.

“Yes, I do. Do you need my help for anything?”

“Your help?” The words dripped sarcasm. “Impious bitch! As if I needed your help for one little thing. That axhead is made of iron.”

Dallandra sighed in sudden understanding. The Forest Folk clung to ancient taboos along with ancient ways—or so the People saw it.

“Yes, it is, but it hasn’t hurt me or my friends. Honest. No harm’s come to us at all.”

“That’s not the issue. The Guardians are angry. You drive the Guardians away with your stinking filthy iron.”

To Dallandra the Guardians were a religious principle, not any sort of real being, but there was no use in arguing philosophy with the Forest Folk.

“Have you come to warn us? I thank you for your concern, and I shall pray for forgiveness.”

“Don’t you mock me! Don’t you think I can tell you despise us? Don’t you dare speak to me as if I were a child, or I’ll—”

When he stepped forward, raising the spear, Dallandra threw up one hand and summoned the Wildfolk of Aethyr. Blazing blue fire plumed from her fingers with a roaring hiss. The man shrieked and fell onto his knees.

“Now,” she said calmly. “What do you want? If you just want to lecture me, I’m too busy at the moment.”

“I want nothing, Wise One.” He was shaking, his fingers tight on the spear shaft for comfort. “I brought someone who does need your help.”

When he called out, a human man crept forward from the underbrush. His dark hair was matted; his tattered brown rags were filthy. He fell to his knees in front of her and looked up with desperate eyes. He was so thin that she could see every bone in the hands he raised to her.

“Please help me,” he stammered out in the Eldidd tongue.

Dallandra stared at his dirty face. On his left cheek was a brand, bitten deep into his flesh, the mark of some Round-ear lord. A bondsman—fleeing for freedom and his life.

“Of course we’ll help you,” Dallandra said. “Come with me. Let’s get you fed first.” She turned to the spearman.
“You have my sincere thanks. Do you want to eat with us, too?”

For an answer he rose and ran, slipping back into the forest like a deer. Weeping a low animal mutter under his breath, the Round-ear staggered to his feet. When they reached the alar, the People clustered round with shouts and oaths. Wylenteriel pressed a chunk of bread into the man’s filthy hands and got him a bowl of ewe’s milk to drink—the roast lamb and spiced food would have only made him vomit.

“One of the Forest Folk brought him in,” Dallandra said. “They must have been waiting for the merchants to leave.”

“I heard your people help such as us,” the bondsman stammered. “Oh, please, I can’t bear it anymore. My lord’s a harsh man. His overseer flogs us half to death whenever it suits him.”

“This lord is probably coming after him, too,” Dallandra said to the crowd in Elvish. “I wish Halaberiel were here, but we’ll have to work something out without him.”

“My alar’s riding west.” Gannobrennon stepped forward. “We’ll take him with us, and we’ll leave tonight.”

“Good, but what if the Round-ears ride in looking for him?” Elbaladar said. “We’d better break up the alardan.”

At this a round of arguments, suggestions, a babble of good advice and drawbacks, broke out. Slowly Nananna came out from the tent and walked over. At the sight of her, everyone fell silent.

“Elbaladar is right,” Nananna said. “We’d better break camp tonight. I can contact Halaberiel through my stones and tell him the news.” She paused, looking around at the assembled people. “I need four or five young men to join my alar. We can’t ride fast, and so the Round-ears might catch up with us.”

Quickly the news spread through the alardan: they were rescuing a Round-ear slave, and the Wise One had given her orders. The People gobbled down the feast, then packed up gear and struck tents by firelight and the rising moon. A few at a time, the alarli cut their stock out of the common herds and disappeared, moving on fast into the silent dark grasslands, until the vast meadow stood empty with only the crushed grass and various leavings to show
where the alardan stood. Just after midnight four young men brought their stock and their possessions over to join the Wise One’s group, the last two tents left of hundreds.

“I can ride for a few hours tonight,” Nananna said. “I want to turn back east. If the Round-ear lord finds anyone, it had best be me.”

They made a hasty, sparse camp two hours later on the banks of the river that flows out of the Lake of the Leaping Trout. In the morning they forded the river and turned dead south through the grasslands. Enabrilia and Dallandra led the travois horses while Wylenteriel, Talbrennon, and one of their new recruits herded the stock in the rear. The other three rode in front, hands on sword hilts, eyes constantly sweeping the horizon, ready to ride between any Round-ear and Nananna. Toward noon, the trouble came. Dallandra saw a puff of dust heading toward them that soon resolved itself into six horsemen, trotting fast over the grasslands.

“Good,” Nananna said. “Let’s pull up and let them catch us. Dalla, you do the talking.”

Dallandra handed her the rope of the travois horse and rode up to the head of the line. The horsemen shouted and turned their horses, galloping the last half mile up to the alar. At their head was a heavyset blond man in the plaid brigga that marked him as an Eldidd lord; behind him were five of his warband, all armed and ready. The lord checked his men some twenty feet away from the alar and rode on alone to face Dallandra. He looked sourly over the small party; she could see him noting well the armed men—six of them, counting young Talbrennon.

“My lord! Shall we charge?”

“Hold your tongue!” the lord yelled. “Can’t you see the women with them? And one of them’s old at that.”

Dallandra relaxed slightly; so he had a bit of his kind of honor. The lord edged his horse up close to hers.

“Now, can any of you speak my language?”

Dallandra gave him a wide-eyed stupid stare.

“Eldidd.” He sighed and pointed to himself. “I’m a lord. I lost a bondsman. Have you seen him?”

“Bondsman?” Dallandra said slowly. “What is bondsman? Oh—farmer.”

“That’s right.” The lord raised his voice, as if she would
understand if only he shouted. “A kind of farmer. He has a brand here.” He pointed to his cheek. “A mark. He’s my property, and he ran away.”

Dallandra nodded slowly, as if considering all of this.

“He’s a young man, wearing brown clothes,” the lord bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Have you seen him?”

“That I not. No see farmers.”

The lord sighed and looked doubtfully at the alar’s gear, as if a bondsman wrapped in blankets might be hidden on a travois.

“Which way have your people ridden? North? South?” He pointed out the various directions. “Do you understand? Where have you come from?”

“North. No see farmers. No farmers in north grass.”

“Well, you would have seen him out in those dismal plains.”

“The dis … what?”

“Oh, never mind.” The lord made a vague bow in her direction, then turned and yelled at his warband. “All right, men, we’re riding east. The bastard must have doubled back.”

As soon as the warband was out of sight, the alar burst into howls and cackles. Dallandra leaned into her saddle peak and laughed till her sides ached.

“Oh, a splendid jest,” Wylenteriel gasped with his perfect Eldidd accent. “No see farmer! By those hells of theirs, Dalla!”

“No speak good. Me simple elf. Hard of hearing, too.”

On a wave of laughter the alar rearranged their riding order and continued their slow trip south.

About four days’ ride west of Elrydd, Aderyn came to a tiny lake fringed with willow trees. In a nearby farming village were a woman ill with shaking fever and a man with a jaw abscessed from bad teeth. Aderyn made a camp on the lakeshore with a proper fire circle of stones, a canvas lean-to for covering his gear, and a neat stack of firewood donated by the grateful villagers, and rode daily into the village to care for his new patients. Once they were out of danger, he lingered to gather and dry wild herbs. On his tenth night there, as he was eating bread and cheese by his
fire, he heard his horse whinny a nicker of greeting to some other horse, but one he couldn’t see or hear. When the mule joined in, Aderyn felt profoundly uneasy. He was a good two miles from the village, far away from help if he should need it.

Off among the willows a twig snapped; then silence. Aderyn spun around and stared into the darkness. He thought he saw something moving—too slender for a deer—no, nothing but tree branches. Now here, he told himself, you’re letting your nerves run away with you. But in the distance he heard another sound—a footfall, a twig. He retreated close to the fire and picked up the only weapon he had, a table dagger.

The five men materialized out of the willow trees and stepped quietly into the pool of firelight. While he gawked, too frightened to speak, they ringed him round, cutting off any escape. All five of them had pale blond hair, like moonlight in the fire-thrown shadows, and they shared a certain delicate kind of good looks, too, so that Aderyn’s first muddled thought was that they were brothers. They were dressed differently than Eldidd men, in tight leather trousers instead of baggy brigga and loose dark blue tunics, heavily embroidered, instead of overshirts, but they all carried long Eldidd swords.

“Good evening,” one of them said politely. “Are you the herbman the villagers told us about? Aderyn, the name was.”

“I am. Do you need my help? Is someone sick?”

The fellow smiled and came closer. With a twitch of surprise Aderyn noticed his ears, long, delicately pointed and curled like a seashell, and his enormous eyes were slit vertically like a cat’s.

“My name is Halaberiel. Answer me a riddle, good herbman: where have you seen the sun rise when you see with your other eyes?”

“At midnight, but that’s a strange riddle for a man to know.”

“It was told me by a woman, actually. Well, good herbman, we truly do require your aid. Will you ride west with us?”

“And do I have any choice about that?”

“None.” Halaberiel gave him a pleasant smile. “But I
assure you, we mean you not the least harm. There’s a woman among my people with great power in what you Round-ears call dweomer. She wants to speak with you. She didn’t tell me why, mind, but I do what Nananna wants.” He turned to one of the others. “Calonderiel, go fetch his horse and mule. Jezry, bring our horses.”

The two melted away into the darkness with hardly a sound.

“I take it we’re leaving tonight,” Aderyn said.

“As long as you’re rested, but we won’t go far. I just want to put a little distance between us and the village. The villagers might go running to their lord with tales of Westfolk prowling around.” Suddenly he laughed. “After all, we are actually thieving tonight, stealing the herbman away.”

“Well, the herbman is curious enough to come with you on his own. I’m more than willing to speak to anyone who has dweomer.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. It would have ached my heart to tie you up, but we couldn’t have you taking wing and flying away the minute our backs were turned.”

“Flying? Not quite, but I have ways of moving in the dark, true enough.”

“Ah, you’re only an apprentice, then. Well, no doubt Nananna can teach you a thing or two.”

Halaberiel spoke so matter-of-factly that the implication was unmistakable. Could this Nananna fly? Did all the dweomermasters of the Westfolk have a power that was only a wistful dream for those of the human sort? Aderyn’s heart started pounding in sheer greed. If Halaberiel had somehow changed his mind and tried to keep Aderyn away, he would have had a nasty fight on his hands. Aderyn’s kidnappers-cum-escort saddled his horse, loaded up his mule, then put out and buried his fire for him. As the horses picked their way across the dark meadow, Halaberiel rode beside Aderyn.