A Time of Exile (28 page)

The feasting and the entertainments went on till dawn, a glamour more ensnaring than any ordinary ensorcelment could have been. After all, Dallandra’s own magicks would have been more than a match for any clumsy manipulation of her mind or her aura, but for that little space of time she was watching—no, she was living in—her people’s lost past, religiously remembered, scrupulously re-created by beings to whom these forms meant life itself, or at the least, the only life they knew. A sheer intellectual lust to see more, to understand that missing history caught her deep and held her tight. When the feast broke up and the folk began to slip away in the pale light of a strangely twilit dawn, Evandar took her for a long walk down to a riverbank bordered with formal gardens exactly like the ones that used to grow in Tanbalapalim. They crossed a bridge carved with looping vines, roses, and the little faces of the Wildfolk to enter a palace, or perhaps it was only part of a palace, floating in mist. Some of the rooms seemed to open onto empty air; some of the halls seemed to dead-end themselves in living trees; some of the floors seemed almost transparent, with shadows moving back and forth underneath.

The chamber that they all settled into for a talk seemed solid enough, though. It had a high ceiling, painted white and crossed with polished oak beams, and a floor of pale
gray slate, scattered with red-and-gold carpets. The two walls that held no doors or windows were painted just like the outside of a tent, but far more delicately; on one was a vast landscape, a river estuary opening to the sea at either dawn or sunset; on the other, a view of the harbor at Rinbaladelan. The polished ebony furniture was all padded with silk cushions of many colors.

“Did this room once belong to a queen of the lost cities?” Dallandra asked.

“No, not at all.” Evandar gave her a sly grin. “To a merchant’s wife, that’s all.”

Dallandra gasped, properly impressed.

“You have no idea how beautiful the cities were, Dalla,” he went on, and his voice cracked in honest sadness. “Your people were rich, and they lived even longer than they do now, with time to learn every craft to perfection, and they were generous, too, pooling their wealth to build places so fine and wonderful that they took the breath out of everyone that saw them, even a strange soul like me. I loved those cities. Truly, I think they were the things that taught me how to love. If they still stood, I might go to your world and live there the way you want me to do. But they’re gone, and my heart half died with them.”

“Well, true enough,” Dallandra said. “Broken stone doesn’t heal itself, and fallen walls won’t rise.”

“Just so.” He looked away, staring out the window to a long view of grass and flowers. “And your people never went back, they never even went back to mourn them. That was a hard thing to forgive, that and of course the wretched iron.”

“Evandar, I am
so
sick of hearing you people whine about iron. Do you think we could have built those beastly cities without it? Do you think we’d live long out on the grasslands without knives and arrow points and axes?”

“I hadn’t thought about it at all. Forgive me.”

“If they used iron in the cities, Father,” Elessario broke in, “how did you spend time there?”

“With great difficulty. It was worth it to me, the pain.”

“Well, then.” Dallandra pounced like a striking hawk. “If that pain was worth the beauty, then …”

His laugh cut her off, but it was a pleasant one.

“You’re as sly as I am, sorceress.” He rose, motioning to his daughter. “Come along, let our guest rest.”

“Well, I am tired, truly.” Dallandra suddenly yawned. “I left home—well, it must have been a full day ago now.”

For the first twenty years that Dallandra was gone, Aderyn kept hoping that soon, any day, any moment, she would return. The People marveled at him, in fact, that he would be so strong, so faithful to her memory, when all those old tales said that no one ever returned from the lands of the Guardians. During that twenty years, he spent some time talking to the Forest Folk, who worshipped the Guardians as gods, and learned what little they knew about these strange beings. When their shamans—priests is a bit too dignified a word—insisted that he should be happy that his wife had been honored and taken as a concubine for these gods, Aderyn managed to be polite, barely, but he never went back to talk with them again. It was his work that saved him. At first he supervised the copying of the books Nevyn had brought and taught his new lore to those elves who were already masters of the old; then he took young apprentices and trained them from the beginning in his craft. As Deverry men reckon time, it was in the year 752 that he sent his first three pupils out to teach others, and that year, as well, when he was still looking around for his next apprentice, Nevyn rode out to the Eldidd border to visit him.

They met about thirty miles north of Cannobaen, at the place where the Aver Gavan, as men call it, joins up with the Delonderiel. That spring the elves were holding a horse fair, because the Eldidd merchants were willing to pay higher than ever for good stock, in the wide meadows along the riverbanks. What Nevyn brought with him, however, wasn’t iron goods, but news. The Eldidd king wanted those horses because he’d just declared war on Deverry.

“Again?” Aderyn said peevishly. “Ye gods, I’m glad I don’t live in the kingdoms anymore, with all their stupid bickering and squabbling.”

“I’m afraid it’s a good bit more this time than just petty quarrels.” Nevyn looked and sounded exhausted. “The
High King died without an heir, and there’s three claimants, Eldidd among them.”

“Oh. Well, my apologies. Truly, that’s a serious matter.”

“It is.” Nevyn paused, considering him. “You know, I’m beginning to feel hideously old these days. Ye gods, there’s all that gray in your hair, and here I still remember the little lad I took as an apprentice.”

“I feel even older than I am, frankly.”

“Ah.” Nevyn was silent for a long, tactful moment. “Um, well, how are you faring these days? Without her, I mean.”

“Well enough. I have my work.”

“And your hope?”

“Is feeble but alive. I suppose it’s alive. Maybe it’s just one of those embalmed corpses you read about, like the Bardekians make of their great men.”

“I can’t blame you for your bitterness.”

“Do I still sound bitter? Then I guess my hope truly is still alive as well.” For the first time in about six years, he nearly wept, but he caught himself with a long sigh. “Well, what about this civil war, then? How long do you think it will last?”

Nevyn considered him for a long, sour moment, as if he were wondering whether or not he should let his old pupil get away with such an obvious change of the subject.

“Too long, I’m afraid,” Nevyn said at last. “All three claimants are weak, which means no one’s going to win straightaway. I’ve gotten the most ghastly set of warnings and omens about it, too. Somewhat’s gravely out of balance on the Inner Planes—I’m not sure what yet. But I intend to do what I can to put an end to this nonsense. I’d wager that the war will burn itself out in about ten years.”

In truth, of course, Nevyn’s hope was ill founded in the extreme: the Time of Troubles was to last five and a hundred years, although of course Nevyn was indeed the one to finally and at great cost put an end to it. If either of them had known how long the wars would rage, they might well have lost heart and done nothing at all, but fortunately, dweomer or no, they were forced to live through them one year at a time like other men. Although Nevyn immediately involved himself in the politics of the thing, a story that has been recorded elsewhere, Aderyn and the People were little
affected for some thirty years. Only then, after the demands of the various armies started ruining the delicate network of trade that held Deverry and Eldidd together, did the merchants stop riding west as often as they had. Iron goods were becoming too rare in Eldidd itself for the merchants to take them freely out of the country. The People grumbled, but the Forest Folk gloated, saying that the Guardians had somehow arranged to stop the trade in demon metal. Aderyn had a brief moment of wondering if they were right.

Nevyn, of course, kept him informed of the various events of the wars, but only one meant much to Aderyn personally. Indeed, he felt himself so emotionally distant from the slaughter and the intrigues that he realized that he’d become more than a friend of the People—he was thinking like a man of the People. The Round-ears seemed far away and unimportant; their lives flashed past too quickly for their doings to endure or to take on much significance unless one of them somehow touched his heart or his own life. But in 774 Nevyn mentioned, in one of their infrequent talks through the fire, that two friends of his had died. Nevyn’s grief was palpable, even through their magical communications.

“It aches my heart to see you so sad,” Aderyn thought to him.

“My thanks. You know, this concerns you, too, I suppose. Ye gods, forgive me! I might have told you when they were still alive. I’m speaking of the souls that were once your parents, you see—Gweran and Lyssa, reborn and then killed again so soon by these wretched demon-spawn wars. Do you still remember them?”

“What? Of course I do! Well, that aches my heart indeed. I suppose. I mean, it’s not as if they were my kin anymore. Huh. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.”

“Who knows? No one can read another’s Wyrd. But I must say that it seems unlikely. Their Wyrd seems bound to the kingdoms, and yours to another folk entirely.”

But as it turned out, Aderyn did indeed have a small role to play in ending the wars when, in about 834, he left the elven lands for a few weeks and traveled to Pyrdon, a former province that had taken its chance to rebel and turn itself into an independent kingdom. By then, or so Nevyn told him, with so many claimants to the throne in both
Deverry and Eldidd, it seemed that the wars would rage forever. Nevyn and the other dweomermasters had decided to choose one heir and put their weight and their magicks behind him in a desperate attempt to bring the kingdoms to peace. Simply because he was the closest dweomermaster to Loc Drw, where this claimant lived, Aderyn went to take a look at a young boy, Prince Maryn, son of Casyl of Pyrdon, whom the omens marked as a possible future ruler of Deverry. Traveling as a simple herbman, he arrived late on a blazing summer’s day at Casyl’s dun, which stood on a fortified island out in the middle of a lake.

At the entrance to the causeway leading out to the dun stood armed guards. As Aderyn walked up, he wondered if he’d be allowed to pass by.

“Good morrow, good sir,” said the elder of the pair. “Looks like you’re a peddler or suchlike.”

“Not truly, but a herbman.”

“Splendid! No doubt the ladies of the dun will want a look at your goods.”

“Now here!” The younger guard stepped forward. “What if he’s a spy?”

“Oh, come now! No one’s going to send an elderly soul like this to spy, lad. Pass on by, good sir.”

The words hit Aderyn like a slap across the face. Elderly? Was he really elderly now? Since the ladies of the dun, including the queen herself, did receive him hospitably, during his stay in the dun he had many a chance to study himself in one mirror or another. Yes, the guards were right: his hair was snow white, his face all lined and sagging, his eyes droop-lidded and weary, impossibly weary from his long grief over his stolen woman. He saw then that Dallandra’s loss had burned his youth away like grass thrown into a fire. During those days in Casyl’s dun the last of his hope died, too, that ever he would see her again. He realized it when Nevyn asked him to stay an extra day and he agreed without a thought; he simply no longer felt the need to rush back to the alar on the off chance that she’d returned in his absence.

When he did return to the elven lands, he told the bards to add a new bit of lore to the tales about the Guardians: not always did they keep their promises.

•  •  •

To Dallandra, that same hundred years passed as four days, bright glorious days of feasting and music, laughter and old tales. At odd moments, she remembered Aderyn and even stored up things to tell him when she returned, because she knew that the information Evandar possessed about the lost cities would fascinate him as much as it fascinated her. Just as she never tired of hearing about the cities, Evandar never tired of talking about them, and with such affection that she began to see a possible strategy. Late on the fourth night, they sat together on a hillside overlooking a grassy meadow, where among glittering torches harpers played and the young folk danced in solemn lines, all bowing and slow steps.

“It’s so different from the dances my people do,” Dallandra remarked. “We like to leap and yell and dance fast as the wind.”

“Oh, I remember your dances, too—country dances, they called them then.”

“I see. You know, I’ve been thinking. I wonder if the cities
could
be rebuilt. It’s too bad the Round-ears are such a treacherous folk; otherwise we could make some kind of alliance with them, or at least learn how to work iron again. I know, I know—you hate iron—but we really would have to have it to cut stone and suchlike, and we’d need to know how to work mortar and weave cloth and build bridges that wouldn’t fall down and streets that wouldn’t buckle. It might only be one city at first, but still, it seems such a pity to think of them lying there, all broken, with only the owls nesting and the wolves prowling through to keep them company.”

“You’re saying that to tempt me.”

“Does it?”

“Well, yes, more perhaps than you can know, because I know better than you how it might be done. If we had a place to go to, a fine, fitting place, we’d be more likely to choose your kind of life over death. Well, some of us would. The young people. It’s their fate that worries me, the young people. There are fewer and fewer born, you know, as time passes by.”

“I still don’t understand how they’re born.”

“No more do I.” He laughed under his breath. “No more do I, but they
become
, and they delight us. I hate to think of them vanishing away.”