A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [176]
“What’s happened?” he said—and in Elvish, without really thinking about the choice.
“Oh, well, nothing much, really. Aderyn wants you to come share his tent instead of mine, that’s all.”
“All right. But why do you—oh, by the Dark Sun! Jill’s left, hasn’t she? That’s what this means.”
“I’m afraid so. She’s like all the blasted Round-ears—as impatient as babies, all of them! She announced this morning that if Devaberiel couldn’t be bothered to hurry, then she couldn’t be bothered to sit around and wait for him.” Calonderiel frowned down at the ground. “She could have had the decency to wait and tell you goodbye.”
“She’s leaving because of me, you know, no matter what she told you.”
“Oh.” A long pause. “I see.”
Rhodry turned on his heel and strode off alone to the camp. At Calonderiel’s tent he found all his gear gone—moved already, he supposed, at the Wise One’s command. When he went to the old man’s tent, he found the dweomermaster sitting by a banked fire with Wildfolk all around him. In a curve of the wall not far from Gavantar’s place, his bedroll and other gear were neatly laid out below a new pair of tent bags. Aderyn looked up with a wary cock of his head.
“Jill’s gone, then, is she?” Rhodry said, falling back into Deverrian.
“She is. Did you truly think she’d stay?”
Rhodry shrugged and sat down on his blankets. From outside the normal sounds of the camp drifted into the tent—children laughing and running, a horse whinnying, a woman singing as she strolled by-but all the noise seemed strangely far away.
“I don’t know what I thought,” Rhodry said at last. “I do know it doesn’t matter. Not to her, not to the gods, not to my Wyrd or the wretched dweomer either.”
“Well, that’s probably true enough.”
Rhodry nodded and began pulling off his boots. In a few minutes he looked up to find the old man gone.
That night, some time when his sleep was deepest, Rhodry had a dream. He was walking across a meadow on a night when the full moon shone overhead, guarded with a double ring, and the grass crackled with frost under his feet, but in his dream he was too fevered to feel the cold, his cheeks burning in the icy air. Every step he took drove pain like a knife into his lungs. Yet he kept walking, never considered turning back, forced himself on a step at a time until he reached a copse of birches, white as frost in the moonlight, dancing and trembling with his fever. Among the trees a woman waited. At first he thought it was Jill, but when he went to meet her, he saw that she was neither human nor elven, with her flesh as pale as the birch bark and her waist-length hair as dark blue as a winter sea. She threw her arms around him and whimpered like an animal as she kissed his burning cheeks with cold lips, but when he kissed her mouth, he had to fight for breath between each kiss. Then he started to cough. He shoved her away, turned away and clasped both hands over his mouth while he choked and coughed in spasms that made his entire body rock and tremble. She wept, watching him. When he took his hands away they were covered with blood, dark and fresh, but thick with clots of gore. With a cry the woman flung herself against him and kissed him. When she pulled back, her pale lips were bright with his blood.
He couldn’t breathe. He was choking, drowning in his own blood—Rhodry sat up with a cry and heard the woman’s answering wail echo around him. Yellow dweomer light danced on the walls of the tent. Aderyn was standing over him.
“What were you dreaming?”
“I was choking. She kissed me and killed me. In the white birches.” Then the dream faded and blurred, like a reflection on water as the wind blows across. “I don’t remember any more of it.”
“I wondered what being back on the border would do to you. Come, get up, and we’ll have a bit of a talk.”
At the old man’s bidding Wildfolk made the dead fire leap up with flame. Rhodry was shivering.
“You