A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [145]
“Wise of you. Very well; I know enough to get on with. I’ll stop putting hot irons to your honor. For a while, anyway.”
That evening, Nevyn enlisted Aderyn’s help to guard his body while he went scrying in the body of light—a dangerous business, but he had no choice; since he’d never seen any of these men in the flesh before, he couldn’t simply scry them out through a fire or other such focus. They went into his bedchamber, which was pleasantly warm from the small charcoal stove in the corner. Nevyn lay flat on his back on the hard straw mattress while Aderyn sat cross-legged on the floor nearby. The little room was silent, dark except for the faint reddish glow from the coals. At this time of day, there was little chance that one of the villagers would come knocking, but Aderyn was there to fend them off if they did.
“Where will you go?” Aderyn said.
“Aberwyn for starters.”
Nevyn folded his arms across his chest, shut his eyes, and concentrated on his breathing. Quickly his body of light came, a simple man shape, built of the blue light, bound to him by a silver cord. He transferred over, hearing a rushy click as his consciousness took root, and opened his astral eyes. When he looked at Aderyn, he saw his friend’s body only dimly, like a wick in a candle flame, obscured by the blaze of his gold-colored aura.
Slowly Nevyn let himself drift up to the ceiling, then brought his will to bear on a thought of the coast road. Abruptly he was outside, hovering in the blue etheric light above the cliffs. Across the beach, the ocean was a silver and blue turmoil of elemental force, surging and boiling in vast currents, swarming with Wildfolk and spirits of all types. Although the sand itself, and the stone and dirt cliff faces, appeared black and dead, they were dotted here and there with the reddish auras of the clumps of weed and grass caught in cracks and crannies. The meadows at the clifftop glowed a dull orange, streaked by the dead road. As Nevyn rose higher, the Wildfolk clustered round him, some in the form of winks and flashes of refracted light; others, as pulses of glow, bright-colored as jewels. When he glanced over his etheric equivalent of a shoulder, he saw the silver cord stretching behind him and vanishing into mist.
With the Wildfolk swarming after, Nevyn rushed in long leaps of thought over the sleeping countryside until he came to Aberwyn. Far below him lay the town, a haphazard scattering of round dead shapes—the houses—lit by the occasional patch of reddish vegetable aura. Here and there some human or animal aura wandered through the dark streets like a mobile candle flame. Wreathed and misted in a veil of elemental force, the dangerous river ran like a streak of cold fire down the middle. Nevyn drifted over the city wall, but he was careful to avoid the river’s surge as he flew to the gwerbret’s dun.
Since he’d only been inside this dun once, and that nearly seventy years ago, he was lost at first until a small garden caught his attention. In the midst of the bright auras of well-tended plants stood a fountain in the shape of a dragon and a hippogriff, illuminated by the etheric glow of the water playing over them. He focused down until it seemed that he hovered only a few inches off the grass. Nearby was the jutting round wall of the main tower. Candlelight and firelight, forming pale reflections in the overall etheric glow, flickered out of the windows in such profusion that Nevyn could assume the great hall lay inside. He could also pick up a welter of ancient emotions: blood-lust, rage, the exhilaration of war and the stink of treachery, all lingering as faint, nearly unreadable traces in the blue light.
He walked right through the wall and found himself standing, or rather floating, on the dais at the honor end of the great hall. Gwerbret Gatryc was dining with his lady and an honored guest, a lord whom Nevyn didn’t recognize, a brown-haired fellow with prominent front teeth. The currents of feeling emanating from them were as tangled and sharp as a hedge