A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [165]
“Have you thought of riding west and finding the Westfolk? Calonderiel gave you an invitation, you know, when they were leaving.”
“So he did. Do you think he meant it, my lord?”
“The Westfolk never say anything unless they mean it.”
A flicker of life woke in Maer’s eyes.
“Ganedd’s going to be making one last trading trip west soon,” Nevyn went on. “Why don’t you go with him?”
“He’s got his father’s business now? I thought Ganno would go to sea for sure once he had the chance.”
“Well, his father’s a broken man, you see. He sits and stares all day at the ocean and naught more. So Moligga and the younger lad need Ganedd, and then there’s Braedda.” Abruptly Nevyn caught himself and shied away from the subject of happy marriages. “But you could stay in the Westlands for the rest of the summer, say. Then see how you feel in the autumn. My heart aches for you, but you know, Glae wouldn’t have wanted you to throw your life away.”
Maer started to speak, then wept like a child. Nevyn flung an arm around his shoulders and let him sob, so long and so hard that Nevyn realized he’d kept himself from weeping during all the long weeks since Glae’s death.
In the normal course of things Nevyn’s cure would have worked. Maer would have visited the elven lands, a world different enough to completely distract him, then most likely returned to Aberwyn with his mourning behind him. But Nevyn hadn’t reckoned with the blue sprite, or, rather, with Elessario.
In the endlessly shifting land of the Guardians, the seeming of only a few hours had passed since Dallandra left them to return to Aderyn. When she saw her friend walk down the road toward home, Elessario rushed blindly away. Her feeling of pain was too ill defined to be called grief, but it was bitter enough to make her throw herself down in the grass and weep. At about the time Dallandra was giving birth to Loddlaen, she stopped weeping, the pain forgotten as fast as it had come, and went in search of company. When Dallandra was returning, Elessario was far away, sitting by the soul of a river and watching her friends dance. It was there that the blue sprite found her, at roughly the same time as Maer and Ganedd were joining the fall alardan out in the Westlands.
Although Elessario had forgotten her grief already, she did remember Dallandra and all the things they’d discussed. One of those discussions involved compassion and the helping of others for no reason beyond their hurting. Somewhere in her growing core of mind, Elessario wanted to please Dallandra so badly that she was willing to follow her teachings, even though, unfortunately, she remembered them by rote rather than understanding their basic principles. When she saw the sprite’s honest pain, and once she understood what caused it, she decided to help the poor little thing to the best of her abilities in the hopes that Dallandra would be proud of her. Child though she was, Elessario’s abilities were considerable.
When the fall alardan was preparing to disperse, and Ganedd was talking of riding back home with his newly acquired horses, Maer was faced with the choice of going with him or of riding with Aderyn and his alar down to the winter camps. He was still so grief-struck and lonely that the choice was a hard one simply because making any decision was hard. Every day he woke to the irony, still fresh and ghastly after all this time, that he’d never realized how much he loved Glae until he lost her. If you could go back, he would think, just for one day, just one rotten day, and live it over, knowing what you know now … ! Then he would shake his head hard, as if he could physically throw off his Wyrd, and get up to face another morning. A further irony vexed him, too. Now, when he would have been grateful for a little company, the blue sprite seemed to have deserted him. In all his long weeks in the elven lands, he never saw her once.
Finally, though, the morning came when the Westfolk were striking their tents, and Ganedd’s men were linking the