Authors: Katharine Kerr
“I asked Nevyn that, and he said he doubted it, just because the Guardians seem so odd and arbitrary and, well, so dangerous.”
“Well, then, maybe they’re meant to come after us.”
“But that’s the Wildfolk’s Wyrd, to grow under our care and become truly conscious. What I wonder is why the Guardians always appear as elves and ape elven ways. I don’t trust them, Dalla, and I wish you wouldn’t go off alone to meet them.”
“But if I don’t, how are we going to find out anything about them?”
“Couldn’t we just ask the Forest Folk when we ride east in the spring?”
“The only thing the Forest Folk ever say about the Guardians is that they’re gods.”
Dallandra suddenly realized that Aderyn’s warning was irritating her. How dare he tell me what to do! she thought. But she knew that in truth the Guardians were so fascinating that she simply didn’t want to give them up. That very afternoon she left all iron behind, took her favorite mare, and rode out to the grasslands. Not far from the winter camp was a place where three rivulets came together to form a stream, and according to the “children’s tales” the joining of three streams always marked a spot favored by the Guardians. In the spirit of testing a theory Dallandra rode straight there. She saw the horse first, a white gelding with rusty-red ears, then its rider, dismounted and lounging in the soft grass on the other side of the water-joining from her. When she rode up and dismounted, he got to his feet and held out his hand. In the cold winter sun his impossibly yellow hair seemed to glow with a light of its own.
“Come sit with me, little sister.” His voice was as soft as the sounding of a harp.
“Oh, I think I’ll stay on my side of the water, thank you. After all, sir, I don’t even know your name.”
He tossed his head back and laughed.
“Now that’s one up for you! You can call me Evandar.”
“I don’t want a name I can call you. I want your true name.”
“Another one up for you! What if I told you it was Kerun?”
“I’d say you were lying, because that’s the name of a Round-ear god.”
“And you score the third point. If I tell you my true name, will you tell me yours?”
“That depends. Will you tell the others my name, even though I won’t know theirs?”
“My woman’s name is Alshandra, my daughter’s is Elessario, and I actually and truly am Evandar. It was going to be a jest, you see, to tell you my true name and have you think it false, and in your thinking it false it would have had no power, though power it should have had, and so it all would have been satisfying, somehow. For a jest, that is.”
If he had been elven, he would have been daft, she decided,
but since he was his own kind, who knew if he were daft or sane? A bargain, though, was a bargain.
“My name is Dallandra.”
“A pretty name it is. Now come join me on my side of the stream, because I’ve told you my name.”
“No, because I’ve given you my name in return.”
He laughed with another toss of his head.
“You are truly splendid.” Like a wink of light off silver, he disappeared, then reappeared standing beside her on her side of the water. “So I shall come to you instead. May I have a kiss for crossing the water?”
“No, because I’ve already done you the favor you asked me. I’ve found out about the iron.”
Although he listened gravely, his paintpot blue eyes all solemn thought, she wondered if he truly understood her explanation, simply because it seemed so abstract.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’ve never seen one of these lodestones, but I’ll wager it would only pain me if I did. Thank you, Dallandra. You’re clever as well as beautiful.”
His smile was so warm, his eyes so intense, that she automatically took a long step back. His smile vanished into a genuine melancholy.
“Do I displease you so much?” he said.
“Not at all. It’s just you strike me as a dangerous man, and I wouldn’t care to cross Alshandra’s jealousy, either.”
“More than clever—wise!” He grinned, revealing sharp-pointed teeth. “We never mean to hurt you people, you know. In fact, we’ve tried to help you more often than not. Well, most of us try to help. There are some …” He let the words trail away, stared down at the grass for a long moment, then shrugged the subject away. “We need you, you see.”
“Why?”
“To keep from vanishing.”
“What? Why would you vanish?”
“I think … I think …” He looked up, but he stared over her shoulder at the sky. “I think we were meant to be like you, but we stayed behind, somehow. Truly, I think that’s it We stayed behind. Somehow.”
And then he was gone, and his horse with him, though the grass was flattened down where they’d stood. Dallandra felt suddenly cold and close to choking, so badly so that it
took her a moment to realize that she was terrified, not ill. She mounted her horse and rode home fast. About half a mile from camp, she met Aderyn, walking by the river and obviously lost in thought. At the sight of him she almost cried in utter relief: he was so ordinary and homely and
safe
, a Round-ear maybe, but since he had the dweomer, he shared a deeper bond with her than any man of the People ever could. When he saw her, he smiled in such sheer pleasure that she suddenly wondered if he loved her, and she found herself hoping that he did, because for the first time in her life she realized that a man’s love could be a refuge rather than a nuisance. She dismounted and led her horse over to him.
“Out for a ride?” he said.
“I was.” She realized that he was simply not going to ask her about the Guardians, and she almost loved him for it. “I’ve been spending too much time alone, I think.”
“Do you?” He grinned in relief. “I didn’t want to say anything, but …”
“But, indeed. You know, it’s really time we started teaching you to fly.”
“I’d like naught better.”
So close that their shoulders touched, wrapped in their conversation, they walked back to camp together, but it seemed to her that she heard the mocking laughter of the Guardians in the cry of distant seabirds. When she shuddered in a sudden fear, he reached out and caught her hand to steady her.
“What’s so wrong?”
“Oh, naught. I’m just very tired.”
When he released her hand, he let his fingers slip away so slowly, so reluctantly, and his eyes were so rich with a hundred emotions, that she knew he did love her. Her heart fluttered in her throat like a trapped bird.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“I suppose so. Ado, when I was riding today, I met a man of the Guardians, and he told me some strange things. I really need your help.”
“Well, then, you shall have it, every scrap of it I can give you. Dalla, I’d do anything for you, anything at all.”
And she knew that, unlike all those other young men who’d courted her, he meant it.
• • •
As the wet and drowsy winter days rolled past, Aderyn realized that being a man of the dweomer among the Westfolk brought more than honor with it. Dallandra had inherited all of Nananna’s possessions—the tent and its goods, twenty horses, a flock of fifty sheep—but she did none of the work of tending them. Although she cooked her own food, and Aderyn’s too, now, because she enjoyed cooking, the rest of the People did all her other chores; they would have waited upon her like a great lady if she’d let them. Since he, too, had the dweomer, Aderyn found himself treated the same. As soon as the People saw that he had no wealth of his own, presents began coming his way. Any animal that was in some way unusual—all lambs born out of season, any horse with peculiar markings, even a dog that showed a rare intelligence—seemed to the People to belong to those who studied equally strange lore and were turned automatically into the herds belonging to the Wise Ones. As Aderyn remarked to Nevyn one night, when they were talking through the fire, his new life had advantages over traveling as a herbman.
“Well, advantages of a sort,” Nevyn thought to him, and sourly. “Always remember that you’re there to serve, not to be waited upon. If you get a big enough swelled head, the Lords of Wyrd will find some way to shrink it for you.”
“Well, true enough, and I do have a fair bit of real work to do, so you can put your mind at ease about that. There’s so much teaching been lost out here, Nevyn. It’s heartbreaking, truly. I only wish I was a real scholar, not just the clumsy journeyman I am. I’m terrified of failing these people.”
“The thing about the dweomer teaching is, once you’ve got the rootstock, the plant will grow again on its own. Teach them what you know, and they’ll recover the rest. Besides, someday soon I might ride your way, and I can bring books if I do.”
“Would you? Oh, that’d be splendid! And you could meet my Dallandra.”
Nevyn’s image smiled.
“That would gladden my heart, truly,” the old man said. “But I can’t make any promises about when I’ll come.”
Every afternoon Aderyn and Dallandra would retire to her tent, where she began teaching him the mechanics of the shape-change and the Elvish language as well. His mind and his heart were so full that he was hardly sure if he loved her so much because she was dweomer or if her dweomer was only one more splendid treasure to be found in his beloved. He supposed that Dallandra knew he loved her, but neither of them said one explicit word. Aderyn himself was sure that she would be uninterested in a homely man like him but too kind to say so and break his heart. Since he had never been in love and never expected to be, he was caught by his own utter naïveté about human women, much less elven ones. He had never even kissed a lass, not once, not even in jest.
On a still night that was a little warmer than usual, Aderyn and Dallandra left the camp and walked alone to the seashore to practice a simple ritual. They had no plans of working any great dweomer or invoking any true power; they merely wanted to practice moving together in a ritual space and making the proper gestures in unison. When the moon broke free of the earth and flooded the water with silver, they took their places facing each other and began to build the invisible temple by the simple method of first imagining it according to formula, then describing to each other what they saw. With two trained minds behind them, the forces built up fast. The cubical altar, the two pillars, the flaming pentangles appeared at the barest mention of their names and glowed with power. Aderyn and Dallandra took positions on either side of the altar—he to the east, she to the west—and laid their hands on a glowing cube of astral stone that only eyes such as theirs could see. For the first time Aderyn actually felt it, as solid and cold as real stone, under his trembling fingers.
Dallandra raised her head and looked him full in the face. Although they had yet to start any invocations, suddenly he saw a female figure standing behind her, a gauzy sort of moonlight shape. At first he thought it might be one of the Guardians; then she stepped forward, burst into light and power, stood solid and real, grew huge until she seemed to swallow up the actual elven woman standing beside her. Her pale hair spread out like sunlight, flowers bloomed in garlands, her smile pierced his heart but so
sweetly that he cried out and trembled as the scent of roses filled the air.
“What do you see?” It was Dallandra’s voice, but as vast as a wave booming on the shore.
“The Goddess. I see her, and she stands upon you.”
Barely aware of what he was doing, Aderyn sank to his knees and raised both hands in worship as the Goddess seemed to merge again with the moonlight and blow away in the wind. When she was gone, he felt like weeping with all the grief of a deserted lover. Dallandra called out and stamped upon the ground. With a snap of withdrawn power, the temple vanished, and Aderyn jerked forward and nearly fell, because he’d been leaning against the astral altar for support. Half spraddled on the wet sand, he was too exhausted to do more than watch while Dallandra formally closed the working and banished the invisible forces. Only when she’d finished did he hear again the sound of the ocean, crashing heavy waves nearby. She knelt down beside him and caught his hands in hers.
“I’ve never felt such power before. I don’t know what went wrong—well, if you could call it wrong.”
“Of course it was wrong!” Aderyn snapped. “I owe you a hundred apologies. I got completely out of control. By the hells, you must think me a rank beginner.”
Dallandra laughed, a soft musical note.
“Hardly that!”
In the darkness, a faint glow still hung around her face. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he felt lust—not some sentimental warm desire, but a sheerly physical hunger for her body. He could think of nothing else; he wanted to grab her and take her like the worst barbarian in the world. Sharply he drew in his aura and pulled himself under control, but she had already seen the violence of the feeling playing across his face.
“We broke the ritual too soon.” Dallandra’s voice shook. “I owe you the apology. We should have let the force finish itself out.”
“That would only have led to somewhat worse.”
Aderyn dropped her hands and stood up, turning his back on her in a sick kind of shame. When she laid a timid hand on his shoulder, he turned and knocked it away.
“You’d best get back to your tent.”
Biting back tears, she ran for the camp. He walked down to the water’s edge, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the surface like a young lad. As it sank, he imagined his lust and made the feeling sink with it.
In the morning, when they met to continue their studies, Dallandra acted as if nothing unusual had happened the night before, but Aderyn could see that she was troubled. They spent an uncomfortable, distant hour discussing the proper visualization of the bird-form while from outside the noise from the alar filtered in—children yelling, dogs barking, Enabrilia’s voice giggling as she discussed something with another woman, a brief yelling match and fistfight between two young men, the shouting as the rest of the alar ran to break it up. After they’d been interrupted for the tenth time, Aderyn’s frustration boiled over.
“By the Lord of Hell himself, why can’t they be quiet for two stupid minutes?”