A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [102]
“I doubt that.” His voice was soft, but strong, younger somehow than his face. “My kind ages a long, long time before they die, Dalla.”
All at once her knees would no longer hold her weight, and she staggered forward, caught herself before she fell, then staggered again, letting him grab her arms and steady her.
“How long?” she whispered. “How long have I been gone?”
“Close to two hundred years.”
She threw back her head and keened, howling and raging all at once, just as Alshandra had done. The other elves closed in and caught her, supported her, led or shoved her along back to the camp and her tent. Only Enabrilia came inside with her and Aderyn.
“Sit down, Dalla,” Enabrilia said. “Sit down and rest. Things will be better when you’ve had a moment to think. At least you’re free and back with us.”
“Things will never be better again, never!”
Between them Enabrilia and Aderyn got her to sit on a pile of blankets. When, blind with tears, she held out her hands, he took them and squeezed them, his fingers stiff and dry and thin on hers. She realized that she would never again feel the touch of the hands she’d been remembering and burst out weeping afresh. Dimly she was aware of Enabrilia leaving and had the hysterical thought that at least Bril had learned tact in the last two hundred years. She nearly laughed, then choked, then wept again, until at last, spent and exhausted, she fell quiet and slumped down against the blankets in a sprawl. She heard him get up; then he laid a leather cushion down in front of her. She took it, sat up enough to shove it under her head, then lay on her back and watched him numbly. His face showed no feeling but a deep confusion, like a man who’s coming round from a hard blow to the head.
“Ado, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” He sat down next to her. “I’m surprised they let you go at all.”
“I’m going to have a child, and they let me go for its sake. It’s your child, Ado. We made it before I left. All those years were like seven days to me, no more.”
It was his turn to weep, but his tears were the rusty creak of a man who thought he would never care enough about anything in life again to weep for it. The sound made her want to scream for the injustice of it all, but there was no good in howling “It isn’t fair!” like one of the Guardians. Slowly she sat up and put her hands on his shoulders.
“Don’t cry, Ado, please. At least I’m back. At least we’re together. I’ve missed you so much.”
“Missed me or the young man you left behind?” The tears gone, he turned to face her, this old man who reminded her so much of her lover. “I wouldn’t even be alive, you know, if it weren’t for Evandar. He worked some kind of dweomer on me, to give me an elven life span, but he forgot about elven youth.”
He was furious, and she knew that no matter how much he might protest, it was her that he was angry with, not the Guardians. She wanted to weep again, but she was too exhausted.
“What about our baby?” she whispered. “Are you going to hate it?”
“Hate it? What? As if I ever could! Ah, Dalla, forgive me. At first I dreamt every night about seeing you again, and I had things all planned to say to you, wonderful loving things. And then the years dragged on, and I forgot them because I lost all hope of ever seeing you again. And now, I don’t have any words left that make sense.” He got up, stood hesitating at the tent flap. “Forgive me.”
When he left, she was relieved. Within minutes, she was asleep.
As the days passed, Aderyn came to believe that he was more furious with himself than with either Dallandra or Evandar. He began to see himself as a warrior who spends all winter drinking, feasting, and lying around in his lord’s hall until, when spring comes, his mail no longer fits over his swollen belly and hefting a weapon makes him pant for breath just when the war is about to start and he’s needed the most. In all the long years that she’d been gone, it had never even occurred to him to look at another woman, never crossed his mind to grow fond of someone