A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [106]
In his dream it seemed to him that they stood on a high cliff and looked off over the misty plains. They must have been on the western border of the grasslands, he realized, because he was looking east to a sun rising behind storm clouds in a wash of light the color of blood, which he knew for an evil omen. She was wearing, not her elven tunic and trousers, but a long dress, belted at the waist with jewels, of purple silk. As one does in dreams, he knew without needing to be told that her dress was of the style worn in the long-lost cities of the far west.
“I came to apologize for leaving you again,” she said. “But then, you didn’t really want me to stay, did you.”
It wasn’t a question, but his heart ached at the unfairness of it, that she would think he wanted her gone when all he wanted was to be able to love her again.
“I don’t blame you for leaving,” he said instead. “There was naught left for you in our world, was there? Not even the baby could delight you anymore.”
“Just so. But still, I want you to know that—”
“Hush! You don’t need to explain anything to me, or apologize anymore, either. Go in peace. I know I can’t keep you bound to me any longer.”
She hesitated, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth working in honest sadness, but at the same time her image was fading, turning faint and pale, turning into mist and blowing away into the gray and ugly light of a stormy morning. He was in his own tent, sitting up and wide awake, hearing Loddlaen cry in his big hanging cradle of leather stiffened with bone. Aderyn rose and got the baby, changed him, and took him to Banamario’s tent, which stood right next to his. As she nursed him, Aderyn squatted down nearby and thought of the two ebony arrows with silver tips, lying somewhere in his tent wrapped in an old blanket, those pledges from the Guardians that had turned out sharp and deadly indeed.
“There’s the good boy,” Banamario was crooning. “Not hungry anymore, is he? What a good boy! Here’s your papa now, Laen, go to Papa.”
Aderyn took the baby and shifted him to one shoulder to burp him while Banamario took her own child, a boy named Javanateriel, and set him at her other breast.
“When do you think Dallandra will be back, Wise One?” she asked, but absently.
“Never.”
She looked up, deeply troubled.
“The dweomer has strange roads, Banna. She’s chosen one to walk that leads where none of us can follow her.”
“I see, but, Wise One, I’m so sorry!”
“For me? Don’t be. I’ve accepted it.”
But from that day on, Aderyn could deny Loddlaen nothing, not even when he grew old enough to beg for things that he should never have had.
PART THREE
ELDIDD
918
AFTER SIXTY-ODD years in Bardek, Nevyn returned to Eldidd late in the summer of 918, landing in Aberwyn with some unusual cargo tucked inside his shirt for safety’s sake. While he’d been abroad, studying the scholarly dweomer lore of the Bardekian priests, he’d gotten the idea of making a talisman for the High King, a magically charged jewel that would radiate the noble virtues endlessly to its owner’s mind. To that end, he’d bought an extremely unusual stone and studied the various writings about such creations in the libraries of various temples, but to make the talisman, he brought the stone home. As big as a walnut, but perfectly round and smoothly polished, a tribute to the art of Bardek jewelers, the opal was shot through with pale gold veins and bluish-pink shadows, as mottled as the coat of some exotic animal. At the moment, for all its beauty, it was an ordinary jewel,