A Time of Exile (52 page)

“Which shows,” Jill said. “That you have a little bit of wisdom at least.” She rose, still holding the bone comb. “I’m going back to camp.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Rhodry started to get up, but she scowled and waved him back down.

“Would you stop following me everywhere?”

“Oh, here, my love—”

“Never call me that again.”

There was the crack of command in her voice, so cold, so harsh that he sat down and said nothing, merely watched her walk away while Salamander pretended to look elsewhere.

“Ah well,” Salamander said at last. “I’m going to take a packhorse with me. Going to come help me load up?”

“Of course. Let’s go get the parting over with, shall we?”

“Ah, you’re beginning to think like an elf, sure enough.”

On the morrow, Rhodry went riding by himself out to the edge of the wild plains, very much like a green sea indeed, with the grass bowing and sighing like waves under the touch of the wind. For a long time he sat on his horse in the hot spring sun, watched the grass ripple, and thought of very little. All at once he realized that he could no longer remember his name. He swore, slapped his thigh hard with the reins, shook his head and swore again, but the name stayed stubbornly hidden until in frustration he started back toward camp.

“Rhodry Maelwaedd,” he said aloud, then laughed. “Or it isn’t truly Maelwaedd—never truly was—and I suppose that’s one reason I couldn’t remember. But Rhodry ap Devaberiel still sounds passing strange to me. What do you think? Which one should I use?”

The horse snorted and tossed its head as if to say it didn’t care either way.

When he rode back to camp he found Calonderiel waiting for him out by the hobbled herd. The warleader helped him unsaddle his horse and turn it out with the others, in a silence so profound that Rhodry knew something was wrong.

“What’s happened?” he said—and in Elvish, without really thinking about the choice.

“Oh, well, nothing much, really. Aderyn wants you to come share his tent instead of mine, that’s all.”

“All right. But why do you—oh, by the Dark Sun! Jill’s left, hasn’t she? That’s what this means.”

“I’m afraid so. She’s like all the blasted Round-ears—as impatient as babies, all of them! She announced this morning that if Devaberiel couldn’t be bothered to hurry, then she couldn’t be bothered to sit around and wait for him.” Calonderiel frowned down at the ground. “She could have had the decency to wait and tell you goodbye.”

“She’s leaving because of me, you know, no matter what she told you.”

“Oh.” A long pause. “I see.”

Rhodry turned on his heel and strode off alone to the camp. At Calonderiel’s tent he found all his gear gone—moved already, he supposed, at the Wise One’s command. When he went to the old man’s tent, he found the dweomermaster sitting by a banked fire with Wildfolk all around him. In a curve of the wall not far from Gavantar’s place, his bedroll and other gear were neatly laid out below a new pair of tent bags. Aderyn looked up with a wary cock of his head.

“Jill’s gone, then, is she?” Rhodry said, falling back into Deverrian.

“She is. Did you truly think she’d stay?”

Rhodry shrugged and sat down on his blankets. From outside the normal sounds of the camp drifted into the tent—children laughing and running, a horse whinnying, a woman singing as she strolled by-but all the noise seemed strangely far away.

“I don’t know what I thought,” Rhodry said at last. “I do know it doesn’t matter. Not to her, not to the gods, not to my Wyrd or the wretched dweomer either.”

“Well, that’s probably true enough.”

Rhodry nodded and began pulling off his boots. In a few minutes he looked up to find the old man gone.

That night, some time when his sleep was deepest, Rhodry had a dream. He was walking across a meadow on a night when the full moon shone overhead, guarded with a double ring, and the grass crackled with frost under his feet, but in his dream he was too fevered to feel the cold, his cheeks burning in the icy air. Every step he took drove pain like a knife into his lungs. Yet he kept walking, never considered turning back, forced himself on a step at a time until he reached a copse of birches, white as frost in the moonlight, dancing and trembling with his fever. Among
the trees a woman waited. At first he thought it was Jill, but when he went to meet her, he saw that she was neither human nor elven, with her flesh as pale as the birch bark and her waist-length hair as dark blue as a winter sea. She threw her arms around him and whimpered like an animal as she kissed his burning cheeks with cold lips, but when he kissed her mouth, he had to fight for breath between each kiss. Then he started to cough. He shoved her away, turned away and clasped both hands over his mouth while he choked and coughed in spasms that made his entire body rock and tremble. She wept, watching him. When he took his hands away they were covered with blood, dark and fresh, but thick with clots of gore. With a cry the woman flung herself against him and kissed him. When she pulled back, her pale lips were bright with his blood.

He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, drowning in his own blood—Rhodry sat up with a cry and heard the woman’s answering wail echo around him. Yellow dweomer light danced on the walls of the tent. Aderyn was standing over him.

“What were you dreaming?”

“I was choking. She kissed me and killed me. In the white birches.” Then the dream faded and blurred, like a reflection on water as the wind blows across. “I don’t remember any more of it.”

“I wondered what being back on the border would do to you. Come, get up, and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”

At the old man’s bidding Wildfolk made the dead fire leap up with flame. Rhodry was shivering.

“You know, I used to have a nightmare somewhat like that when I was a child, but I don’t remember it very well. This one was blasted real, though. Ye gods, it still hurts to breathe.”

“When you had the dream before—as a child, I mean—did your lungs hurt when you woke?”

“Don’t remember, but I doubt it, because I do remember screaming my head off, and my old nurse running over with her nightdress flapping around her. What does it mean?”

“Most dreams have as many meanings as an onion has peels. I wouldn’t venture to say what the right one might be.”

Rhodry hesitated on the edge of asking more. Although he knew that Aderyn had sworn a sacred oath never to tell an outright lie, he could sense that the old man was leaving a great many things unsaid. And do I want to force them out into the open? Rhodry asked himself. There in the middle of the night, miles and miles away from his old home and his old life, the answer was a decided no. Yet all the next day, he kept thinking about the dream, and every now and then, it seemed he could remember a little piece of it, just a visual image of the woman or the feel of a kiss, until he realized just how familiar to him she was, this White Lady, as he found himself calling her for no particular reason at all.

At dinner that night Aderyn announced that he’d scried Devaberiel out and found him traveling by himself and quickly, heading south through the grasslands but a good many miles away. He’d seen Salamander, too, hurrying to meet him. Since the dweomermaster could assume that one of Calonderiel’s messengers had finally tracked the bard down, he decided that the alar should ride in his direction. When they headed north, though, they kept to the borderlands, because Devaberiel was expecting to find them somewhere near Eldidd. For the same reason they didn’t ride far, finally making a semi-permanent camp not far from the Peddroloc.

Once he was well away from his old rhan, Rhodry turned melancholy. It was one thing to think of having an entire new life ahead of him; another to leave the old completely behind. Much to his surprise, he realized that he missed his kin far more than he missed the power of rulership. At odd moments of the day he would find himself wondering how his sons fared, and their children, too; he even had the occasional fond thought of Aedda. He took to riding alone to ease his hiraedd, and the elves were willing to leave him alone with his solitude.

One day he borrowed a particularly fine gelding from Calonderiel and rode farther than usual in the simple pleasure of getting to know a new horse. After some hours he came to a little stream that led back to a marshy, spring-fed pond, surrounded with scrubby hazel thickets and some willows. Rhodry dismounted, and as he led his horse to the pond for a drink, he saw a white heron, standing on one leg
in the shallows and regarding him with one suspicious round eye. All at once the bird shrieked its harsh cry and flapped off. Rhodry spun around, thinking that someone else had crept up behind him, but he saw no one, not even one of the Wildfolk. Since his horse was elven-trained, he left it to drink without him and walked back into the trees. The golden sunlight of late afternoon came down in shafts, solid with dust; the silence felt just as palpable. Then he saw her standing between two willows and watching him sadly.

Although he knew at once that she wasn’t truly substantial, she wasn’t an illusion, either: a real enough woman but lighter, somehow, than the solid trees around her. Tall and lithe, she was wearing a loose blue dress that left her arms bare and hung in torn dags around her ankles. Her dark blue hair flowed like water over her pale shoulders and curled close to her pale, pale face. When she spoke, he heard her language as Elvish, but it seemed that she wasn’t truly speaking at all.

“You heard me this time.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been calling and calling, but you didn’t come. You always used to come to me.”

“Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, that’s all.”

“Ah. That must be because of the old man. He’s a mean old man. I hate him. Why are you staying in his tent?”

“I’ve got to stay somewhere. Do you mean Aderyn?”

“An aderyn? Yes, the owl.”

“No, no, no, he’s a man—Aderyn is just his name.”

She looked so puzzled that he gave up trying to explain.

“Why do you hate him?”

“He lied to me. I knew you weren’t truly gone far away and under the earth. That’s what he said, you know. Far away and under the earth.” She paused, tilting her head to one side in thought. “But it’s taken me so long to find you again. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She pouted like a child, then laughed, tossing off the mood as she sauntered all sway-hip over to him. Her eyes were the same dark blue as her hair, and they were utterly mindless, like pools of water, glittering and vacant.

“You look so cold.” She was staring at him, studying his
face. “You don’t love me anymore, do you? You’ve forgotten.”

Big tears rolled down her cheeks, but rather than falling, they merely vanished. Yet her sobs, the big gulping gasps of a heartsick child, were real enough.

“I’m sorry.” Rhodry felt her grief like a stab to his own heart. “Please, don’t look so sad. I just don’t understand.”

The tears stopped. Again she tilted her head to consider him, then suddenly smiled.

“I know what you’ll remember.” She caught his face between her hands and kissed him on the mouth. “Oh, you’re warmer now, truly. Come lie down with me. I want to hold you just like we used to. Do you remember that? I’ll wager you do. Men seem to like it so much.”

As she ran her hands through his hair, Rhodry did remember it, a slow, sensual kind of pleasure, utterly different than being in a human woman’s arms. Yet as he drew her close, as he kissed her, he remembered something else as well: her lips, bright with his blood in the moonlight. That was only a dream, he told himself, it all meant somewhat else. He took another kiss, then another, tipped her head back and softly kissed her throat. She began to laugh and cling to him, so perfectly happy, so suddenly solid and radiant in her happiness, that he laughed himself in the simple joy of finding her again. When they lay down together, he could think of her as nothing but a woman. Yet when he caressed her, his hands knew the difference in their blind way. Her skin felt more like silk; her flesh, oddly soft, without resistance or muscle. At first he was repelled, but with every kiss they shared, the difference faded. She grew warmer, more solid, heavier in his arms. The tattered dress faded away, too; he never took it off, but suddenly she was naked in his arms. He ran his hand over her breast, then cried out and pulled his hand back. She had no nipple, merely a soft curve of not quite real flesh.

It was her need of him as much as lust that kept him in her arms. When he opened his eyes and saw that she had no navel, either, he drew away. She looked up, her beautiful eyes brimming tears, and she seemed so desolate that he kissed her to keep her from weeping. Once he kissed her, he could no longer stop, though for a long time he was content with kisses alone, while he let himself forget what
his hands had discovered. Finally, with a little laugh to mock his shyness, she reached inside his brigga and fondled him. At that he could think of nothing but taking her.

Yet the passion was different, a slow thing, languid, wrapping him round like warm water. It was enough to stay inside her, hardly moving, feeling her arms wrapped tightly around him. She whimpered like an animal, shifting under him, keeping him aroused for what seemed like a blissful eternity until his pleasure built close to pain. When he began to move, he nearly fainted from the agonizing delight, and as he sobbed into her shoulder, she laughed, a crow of triumph. He lay next to her, pulled her into his arms, and panted for breath.

“Shall I show you things like I used to?” she whispered. “Shall we go to the pretty places? Not the dangerous ones, not the ones where
she
is, but the safe ones in my home country.”

“I don’t understand. Who’s this she?”

“You never did get to meet her, did you?” She frowned, thinking hard at the edge of her capacity. “You said she was a demon.”

“I don’t remember saying any such thing.”

“You did, too! And maybe you were right, because when we went to her country, you went under the ground. So we won’t go there again.”

“Indeed? Well, whatever you want.”

She raised her head and kissed his closed eyelids, then his mouth. He felt as if they were gliding together down a slow stream, felt sunlight, too, warm and strong. When he opened his eyes he found that they were lying in a meadow, with banks and hedges of red roses scattered through the grass. Rhodry sat up and stared around him. A flock of peacocks strutted by, led by three males in display, gleaming like blue-and-purple jewels.