A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [171]
“I take the responsibility onto myself,” Nevyn said through the fire. “Because of Maddyn. I never should have let him make a link with the Wildlands.”
“Oh, come now, you had no way of knowing where it would lead.”
“True. But still, I might have done some meditating. I might have gotten an inkling of what would happen, or at least that it was a wrong thing.”
“It might not have been a wrong thing if it weren’t for the Guardians. Let’s not forget that one of them’s been meddling in this mess. And that, somehow, is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have left them to Dallandra. I should have tried to know them myself, and maybe then—”
“All these maybes ill become us, my friend. What is, is, and we’re not the men to unweave Time and pluck this strand out again.”
“I know. Well, I suspect that when he’s reborn, Maer will come my way again. We’ll see what we can do for him then.”
• • •
It was a long time before Aderyn met that soul again, though, some three twenties of years, and even then it was only by chance. Late one summer, when the days were already growing short and the trees on the tops of hills and in other exposed places were turning yellow, his alar was traveling up in the northern plains, not far from the Deverry province of Pyrdon. One of their horses, a young stallion, got it into his head to break his tether and run off, following his natural instincts to get away from the reigning stud of the herd. A couple of the men went after him, of course, and out of a sentimental desire to see his own people again Aderyn left Loddlaen in charge of their tent and herds and rode off with Calonderiel and Albaral. The stallion’s tracks were easy to follow; in fact, in a few miles the tracks of another horse, one carrying some kind of load, joined them, and the two sets marched east in such a straight line that it was obvious that the stallion had either been stolen outright or picked up by a mounted rider while wandering loose. Since the second horse was shod, it was easy enough to guess that the rider was a human being.
Sure enough, the trail led them straight to the town of Drwloc, where it joined a welter of other tracks and petered out, but by asking around they discovered that one of Lord Gorddyn’s men had found a Westfolk horse and brought it in to the dun. Calonderiel was furious, swearing to slit the fellow’s throat for a stinking horse thief, but Aderyn ordered him to hold his tongue.
“We could at least go ask the lord about the matter first, couldn’t we? If you’d only traded the stallion off to a herd that needed a stud, he never would have broken tether.”
“Well, you’ve got a point, I suppose. But this wretched rider could have come looking for the horse’s owner.”
“Would you have ridden alone into a Round-ear camp?”
Calonderiel started to snarl an answer, then stopped to think.
“A second point, truly. Let’s go talk to Lord Gorddyn.”
The lord’s dun was about three miles out of town, a solitary broch behind earthwork walls set up on a small hill. As they rode up to the gap in the earthen mounds that did duty as a gate, they saw a strange woman—or at least she seemed to be a woman at first—lounging on the grassy wall. She was slender and pale, dressed in a dirty, torn smock, but as they came closer, they saw that her long unbound hair was a deep blue, the color of the winter ocean. At the sight of Aderyn and the elves she leapt to her feet, then suddenly vanished clean away.
“What?” Calonderiel hissed. “What was that? One of the Wildfolk? It looked so cursed human!”
“So she did, indeed.” Aderyn felt a premonition of trouble coming. “Cal, I have the wretched feeling I’ve seen her before. This might not be a pretty thing we’ve stumbled onto.”
Lord Gorddyn turned out to be stout, balding, and good-humored, greeting them with no more fuss and as much friendliness as if they’d all been human beings. He insisted that they sit at his beat-up table of honor by the smoky hearth and drink mead out of dented silver goblets, then listened to their story of the lost horse.
“Well, he’s here, sure enough, lads.