A Time of Exile (22 page)

T
he horror of first the battle, then the aftermath of the slaughter and the long withdrawal with the wounded had so filled Dallandra’s mind and heart that she’d never had a proper moment alone with her mourning, or so it seemed to her. Once Halaberiel and the men returned, the life of the winter camps slipped gradually into its normal rhythms, and she felt Nananna’s loss like a fresh stab to the heart. She took to going off alone for long hours, either riding far along the wild seacoast or assuming her bird-form and soaring high above the emerald-green grasslands during the intervals between storms, when the sky was cold and pure and the wind a highroad for her wings.

Although she knew that Aderyn was eager to learn how to fly, she put off teaching him on various excuses. In the winter camps were a number of other dweomerworkers, all of whom were impatient to meet him and to hear about the lore preserved in Deverry though lost in the west. Learning to fly in the bird-form was a long, hard job, requiring perfect concentration, solitude, and, quite simply, good
weather. The fledgling dweomerman could no more learn to fly in a storm than a fledgling bird could. Yet at heart, she knew that she was putting off teaching him simply because she didn’t want to. Sooner or later, she would honor her promise to Nananna and give him the lore, but until she absolutely had to, she wanted to keep it private, hers alone, the last vestige of the spiritual adventures she and Nananna had shared.

Dallandra’s bird-form was an odd one. Normally, when masters of the craft finally achieved their goal and shape-changed, they found themselves in a bird-form modeled on some real species, though they couldn’t truly choose which one. The process of finding one’s form was basically an elaboration on constructing a body of light, in which the magician makes a thought-form as a vehicle for his or her consciousness out on the etheric plane. Although at first he has to imagine this form minutely every time he wishes to use it, eventually a fully realized body, identical to the last one, will appear whenever the magician summons it, out of no greater dweomer than “practice makes perfect,” in exactly the way a normal memory image, such as the memory house a merchant uses to store information about his customers, becomes standardized after a long working with it. The elven shape-changer would start by imagining a simple bird shape, all one color and with generalized features. Once that image was clear and steady in her mind, she would transfer her consciousness over to it in exactly the same way she’d transfer to the body of light, then practice scrying on the etheric in this birdlike form.

Eventually, of course, came the true test, using this etheric form as a mold in which to pour the actual substance of her physical body until no trace of an elf remained on the physical plane, and an actual enormous bird flew free in the solid air. Some died while working this stage for the first time; a few even died thereafter, out of carelessness more than any other cause. Most students, however, neither died nor succeeded. Those few who did achieve the transfer over to the physical received a further surprise. When they opened their eyes and looked down at feather, not smooth flesh, they found themselves a very specific bird indeed rather than the generalized image of their mental efforts, a species that was somehow chosen for them by the
deepest set of their unconscious mind and thus appropriate to their nature.

All except Dallandra. Learning the procedure had taken her a long, frustrating year; if it hadn’t been for Nananna’s faith in her abilities, she would have given up after six months. Finally, however, after a long, hard night’s work, just when she was about to quit with a howl of frustration, she’d slipped over and felt her arms lengthen and lighten, her body turn full and strangely smooth, then opened new eyes to find herself perching on clawed feet. She’d become a—just what had she become? A bird, certainly, but an amorphous sort of species, a solid dove gray, even to her feet and eyes, with the powerful wings and smooth head of a raptor but a straight beak more like a linnet’s. Nananna had never seen any bird quite like it; later, when they consulted with other dweomerwomen, none of whom had ever seen such a bird either, they realized that Dallandra had manifested her idealized form, a thing that had never happened before. Since she could fly with the best of them, however, no one but Dallandra had worried about it or even given it much weight. What counted was that she could make the transformation. Dallandra herself felt that she’d been given a troubling and deeply unusual omen, and not even Nananna could talk her out of her dread.

Dread or not, she loved flying, and in those long weeks when her grief for Nananna turned the whole world bleak, she took refuge in the wind as often as she could. It was on one of these solitary flights that she met the Guardians again. For weeks now, all during the hideous aftermath of the battle, they had haunted her dreams, coming to her in a swirl of bright colors and lights and music to utter strange warnings or make even stranger jests, none of which she could ever remember when she woke of a morning. On an afternoon when a pale and lowering sun struggled to burn off the morning’s mist, she was swooping over a canyon when she saw three pure-white swans flapping along, legs dangling awkwardly, long necks bobbing in and out. Swans were so out of place in the grasslands that she darted after them, only to realize that they were as large as she was and thus no true birds at all. Since she knew of no dweomermasters who flew as swans, she followed when they circled down to land, splashing and bobbing, in a shallow
backwater of the river below. She herself landed on the ground and hopped, suddenly clumsy, to the water’s edge. When they spoke, the words came directly to her mind without effort or sound, and wrapped in their dweomer, she found she could answer the same way.

“So,” the largest swan, who seemed to be male, remarked. “Our little sister can fly, can she?”

“Who ever would have thought it?” said the larger female. “Do you still have that arrow I gave you, girl?”

“Yes, of course. But how did you recognize me?”

On a ripple of amusement the swans flew up with a trail of real water splashes, then settled in a flurry of light on the ground nearby. All at once they were elven figures, and dressed in green clothing, rough tunics, leggings, and the younger woman had a short green cloak. To her horror Dallandra found herself in her own true form, but quite naked.

“Things seem much more difficult for you than for us.” The younger woman took off the cloak and tossed it to her. “Here. You look cold.”

Dallandra snapped the cloak out and wrapped it around her in one smooth gesture. She was sure that her face was scarlet.

“Thank you,” she said with what dignity she could muster. “Do you have a name?”

“Of course, but I’m not going to tell you. We’ve just met.”

“In my country it’s the custom to exchange names when you meet someone.”

“Foolish, very foolish,” the elder woman said. “I’d never do such a thing, and I suggest that you don’t, either, girl. Now, I want to ask you a question, and it’s a very important one, so listen carefully. Why do your people insist on using iron when you know we hate it?”

“Well, first off, why should we care whether or not you hate it?”

“Very good, answering a question with another one. I think you’re getting the hang of this. But I’ll give you an answer. Because we’re the Guardians. That’s why.”

“And if we stopped using iron, would you do something for us or help us in some way?”

“We did before, didn’t we?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t remember. I mean, that was years and years ago, and I wasn’t even alive then.”

This answer shocked them. In a confused outburst of sound, they looked back and forth at each other—and disappeared, taking the cloak with them. Dallandra threw a few choice curses into the void after them, then concentrated on the laborious task of changing back into bird-form. Once she was safely settled, she flew straight home. She had a lot of questions to ask of the older dweomermasters in the camp.

And yet no one seemed to know much about the Guardians, because no one had ever considered before that they might be real rather than part of some old folktale. That they were spirits rather than incarnate beings seemed obvious enough, but no one knew where their true home in the universe might be, not even Aderyn.

“You know, we have tales about beings much like these Guardians,” he remarked one afternoon. “My people must have met them somehow in their travels. But our lore about them is all bits and pieces, a tale here and there, much like yours is.”

“They insist that they belong to the People, and they seem to be bound to the same lands. And they’re more complex than planetary spirits or suchlike. They have faces and hearts—oh, that doesn’t make sense.”

“It does, truly. You mean they feel like real individuals.”

“Just that. But unformed or unfinished or suchlike. Oh, I don’t know! We’ll have to wait till you see them, too, and then we can puzzle out more. They’re fascinating, though.”

“They are that. I hope I get to meet them.”

Yet it seemed that they were avoiding him; indeed, they came to Dallandra only when she was alone. When she was out riding, she would see them only from a distance. Usually she’d hear strange music, turn to look, and see one of their processions jogging along at a great distance across the grasslands. Whenever she tried to gallop and catch them, they simply disappeared. When she was flying in the bird-form, though, they would often come as swans or ospreys to fly along with her, usually without sharing a word or thought. Finally it occurred to her that they shunned her in her real form because she generally carried iron with her
—a knife at her belt, the bit in her horse’s bridle, or the bars in her stirrups.

One cold but sunny day she decided to ride out bareback with only a rope halter to guide her horse, and she left her knives at home. Sure enough, as soon as she was well out of sight of the camp, the two women and their male companion appeared, riding milk-white horses with rusty-red ears.

“So,” the elder woman remarked. “You’ve left your demon metal behind.”

“Well, yes, but I honestly don’t understand why you hate it so much.”

The man frowned in thought. Although his face was both exceptionally handsome and elven, his hair was as yellow as a daffodil, his lips were a sour-cherry red, and his eyes were sky blue—colors as artificial as the tent paints that the artisans ground out of earths and barks.

“We don’t understand, either,” he said at last. “Or we’d tell you outright. Listen, girl, see if you can solve the puzzle for us. When there’s iron around we can’t come through to your world properly. We swell and shift and suffer. It hurts, I tell you.”

“Through to our world? And where’s your world, then?”

“Far away and over the sky and under the hill,” the young woman said, and eagerly, leaning forward in her saddle. “Would you like to see?”

Dallandra felt a danger warning like a slap across the face.

“Someday maybe, but I’ve got to get home now and tend my herds.”

She swung her horse’s head around, kicked him mercilessly, and galloped away while their laughter howled round her head and seemed to linger in her mind for a long, long time.

Thanks to the male Guardian’s frankness, Aderyn could unravel a bit of the puzzle, or rather, his old master, whom Aderyn contacted through the fire, did the unraveling when Aderyn discussed the information with him.

“He says they must be halfway between spirits and us,” Aderyn reported. “The bodies we see are really just etheric substance, come through to the physical, and not flesh at
all. They must be able to cast a powerful glamour over themselves as well to change their appearance and all, but Nevyn says that there has to be some sort of real substance for them to work with. Do you know what a lodestone is?”

“I don’t.”

“It’s a thing Bardek merchants invented. They take an iron needle and do somewhat to it so that it soaks up an excess of aethyr. I don’t know what they do—the sailing guilds keep it secret, you see. When they’re done with it, it attracts tiny iron filings—oh, it’s a strange thing to watch, because the filings cling to the needle like hairs on a cat! But the important thing is, after they’ve done this, one end of the needle always points south. They use it to navigate.”

“By the Dark Sun herself! A wonder indeed! But what does this have to do with the Guardians?”

“Well, Nevyn says that iron would soak up aethyr from their presence and become much like a lodestone. Then it would either attract or repel the etheric substance they’re made of.”

“Making them shrink or swell, just like that fellow said.”

“Just so. As to their true home, it might lie on the etheric, but they’re not part of the Wildfolk. Then again, Nevyn says it might lie in some part of the universe that we don’t even know about.”

“And a great lot of help that is! But it doesn’t matter where they belong. What counts is what they want with us. They claim they’ve served the People in the past. Do you think they’re like your Lords of Light, the Great Ones? I mean, souls like us who’ve gone on before us to the Light?”