Authors: Katharine Kerr
“Well, that’ll keep a man honest out here.” Nevyn hesitated in sheer surprise. “But, Ado, the envy—”
“I know. It’s somewhat that I’ll have to fight, isn’t it? My own heart-aching envy.”
That night the three of them sat together in Aderyn and Dallandra’s tent. Since it was too warm for a fire, Dallandra made a dweomer globe of yellow light and hung it at the tent peak. Wildfolk swarmed, the gnomes hunkering down on cushions, the sprites and sylphs clustering in the air; a few bold gray fellows even climbed into Nevyn’s lap like cats.
“Aderyn’s been telling me about the Guardians,” Nevyn said to Dallandra. “This is a truly strange thing.”
“It is,” Dallandra said. “Do you know who or what they are?”
“Spirits who’ve never been born, obviously.”
Both Aderyn and Dallandra stared.
“Never been incarnated, I mean,” the old man went on. “But I get the distinct feeling that they’re souls who were destined to incarnate. I think, Dalla, that this was what Evandar meant by ‘staying behind.’ That they should have taken flesh here in the material world but refused to do it. The inner planes are free and beautiful and full of power—a very tempting snare. They’re also completely unstable and fragile. Nothing endures there, not even a soul that would have been immortal if it had undergone the disciplines of form.”
“Do you mean that the Guardians really will fade and simply vanish?” She was thinking hard, her eyes narrow.
“I do. Eventually. Maybe after millions of years as we measure time, maybe soon—I don’t know.” Nevyn allowed himself a grin. “It’s not like I’m an expert in this subject, you know.”
“Well, of course.” Dallandra thought for a moment before she went on. “Evandar said that they were meant to be ‘like us.’ Are they elven souls, then?”
“Mayhap. Or it might well be that they belong to some other line of evolution, some other current in the vast river of consciousness that flows through the universe, but one that’s got itself somehow diverted into the wrong channel. It doesn’t much matter, truly. They’re here now, and they desperately need a pattern to follow.”
“But Evandar said his people could help us, do things for us.”
“No doubt. They have all sorts of dweomer power at their disposal, dwelling on the inner planes as they do. I couldn’t even begin to guess what all they may be able to do. But I’d be willing to wager a very large sum on this proposition: they have no wisdom, none. No compassion, either, I’d say. That’s the general rule among those who’ve never known the material world, who’ve never suffered in flesh.” Nevyn leaned forward and caught Dallandra’s gaze. “Be careful, lass. Be on your guard every moment you’re around them.”
“I am, sir. Believe me. And truly, I don’t want anything to do with them from now on. If it’s my Wyrd to learn about them or suchlike, it can just wait till I’ve got the strength to deal with it properly.”
“Well, I think me that in this case at least, your Wyrd should be willing to do just that.”
And Nevyn smiled in relief, as if he’d just seen a horse jump some dangerous hurdle and come down safe and running.
It was some three years before Dallandra spoke with the Guardians again. In the first year of her marriage to Aderyn, she deliberately kept herself so busy learning what he had to teach and teaching him what lore she could pass
on that she had few moments to think of that strange race of spirits. She also refused to go anywhere alone, and sure enough, they avoided her companions, if indeed they weren’t avoiding her. By a mutual and unspoken agreement, she and Aderyn never mentioned them again, and they grew clever at changing the subject when one of the other dweomerworkers did bring the Guardians up. Her love for Aderyn became exactly the anchor, as she’d called it, that she wanted. He was so kind, so considerate of her, that he was an easy man to love: warm, gentle, and rock-solid reliable. Dallandra was not the sort of woman to demand excitement from her man; in her work she dealt with enough excitement to drive the average woman, whether human or elven, daft and gibbering. Since Aderyn was exactly what she needed, she did her best to give him everything he might need from her in return.
Yet, by the end of the second year, Dallandra began to see the Guardians again, though only at a distance, because they sought her out. When the alar was changing campgrounds, and she was riding at the head of the line with Aderyn or Halaberiel, occasionally she would hear at some great distance the melancholy of a silver horn and look up to see tiny figures in procession at the horizon. If she tried to point them out to her companions, the figures would be gone by the time they looked. When she and Aderyn went flying together—and by then he’d learned to take the form of the great silver owl—she would sometimes see the three swans, too, keeping pace with them but far off in the sky. Whenever she and Aderyn tried to catch up with them, they merely disappeared in a swift flicker of light.
Then, in the third spring after her marriage, the dreams started. They came to her in brief images, using the elven forms she’d seen before, Evandar, Alshandra, and Elessario, to reproach her for deserting them. At times, they offered great favors; at others, they threatened her; but neither favors nor threats held any force. The reproaches, however, hurt. She could remember Evandar vividly, saying that his people needed hers to keep from vanishing, and she remembered Nevyn’s theories, too, as well as Nevyn’s warnings. She told herself that the Guardians had made their choice when they’d refused to take up the burdens of the physical world; as the elven proverb put it, they’d cut
their horse out of the herd—now they could blasted well saddle it on their own. Provided, of course, Nevyn’s theories were right. Provided they’d known what they were doing.
Finally, after a particularly vivid dream, Dallandra haltered her mare and rode out bareback and alone into the grasslands. She did take with her, however, a steel-bladed knife. After about an hour of riding, she found a place that seemed to speak of the Guardians: a little stream ran at one point between two hazel trees, the last two left of a stand that must have been cut by an alar in some desperate need. Dallandra dismounted several hundred yards away, tethered out her mare, then stuck the knife, blade down, into the earth next to the tether peg so that about half the handle protruded but the blade was buried. Only after she’d made sure that she could find it again did she walk on to the paired hazels.
Sure enough, a figure stood on her side of this otherworldly gate: Elessario. If it had been Evandar, Dallandra would have turned back immediately, but she trusted another woman, especially one who appeared young and vulnerable, barely out of her adolescence. She had her father’s impossibly yellow hair, but it hung long and unbound down to her waist; her eyes were yellow, too, and slit catlike with emerald green.
“You’ve come, then?” Elessario said. “You heard me ask you?”
“Yes, in my dreams.”
“What are dreams?”
“Don’t you know? That’s when you talk to me.”
“What?” Her perfect, full mouth parted in confusion. “We talk to you when you come into the Gatelands, that’s all.”
“Oh. Your father told me your name, Elessario.”
She jerked up her head like a startled doe.
“Oh, the beast! That’s not fair! I don’t know yours.”
“Didn’t he tell you? He knows it.”
“He does? He’s never very fair, you know.” She turned suddenly and stared upstream, between the hazels. “Mother’s worse.”
“You call them Mother and Father, but they never could have birthed you. Not in the usual way, anyway.”
“But when I became, they were there.”
“Became?”
Elessario turned both palms upward and shrugged.
“I became, and they were there.”
“All right, then. Do you know what I mean by being birthed?”
When she shook her head no, Dallandra told her, described the entire process as vividly as she could and described the sexual act, too, just to judge her reaction. The child listened in dead silence, staring at her unblinking with her yellow eyes; every now and then, her mouth worked in disgust or revulsion—but still she listened.
“What do you think of that?” Dallandra said at last.
“It never happened to me, all that blood and slime!”
“I didn’t think it had, no.”
“But why? What a horrible thing! Why?”
“To learn this world.” Dallandra swept her arm to point out sky and earth, grass and water. “To learn all about it and never ever vanish.”
For a moment Elessario considered, her mouth working in thought this time, not disgust. Then she turned, stepped into the stream between the hazels, and was gone. That will have to do for now, Dallandra thought to herself. We’ll see if she can even remember it. As she was walking back to her horse, she was thinking that Nevyn’s theory of never-incarnate spirits seemed more and more true. She had just reached the tethered mare when she felt a presence behind her like a cool wind. She spun around to see Alshandra, towering and furious, carrying a bow in her hands with a silver-tipped arrow nocked and ready. Suddenly Dallandra remembered the arrow she’d been given and remembered even more vividly that it was no etheric substance but real, sharp wood and metal.
“Why are you angry?”
“You will not come to us in our own country.”
“If I did, would I ever come back to my own country?”
“What?” Alshandra’s rage vanished; she seemed to shrink down to normal size, but still she clasped the bow. “Why would you want to?”
“This is where I belong. What I love dwells here.”
Alshandra tossed the bow into the air, where it disappeared as if it had tumbled through an invisible window
into some hidden room. Dallandra’s blood ran cold: these were no ordinary spirits if they could manipulate physical matter in such a way.
“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.