A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [177]
“When you had the dream before—as a child, I mean—did your lungs hurt when you woke?”
“Don’t remember, but I doubt it, because I do remember screaming my head off, and my old nurse running over with her nightdress flapping around her. What does it mean?”
“Most dreams have as many meanings as an onion has peels. I wouldn’t venture to say what the right one might be.”
Rhodry hesitated on the edge of asking more. Although he knew that Aderyn had sworn a sacred oath never to tell an outright lie, he could sense that the old man was leaving a great many things unsaid. And do I want to force them out into the open? Rhodry asked himself. There in the middle of the night, miles and miles away from his old home and his old life, the answer was a decided no. Yet all the next day, he kept thinking about the dream, and every now and then, it seemed he could remember a little piece of it, just a visual image of the woman or the feel of a kiss, until he realized just how familiar to him she was, this White Lady, as he found himself calling her for no particular reason at all.
At dinner that night Aderyn announced that he’d scried Devaberiel out and found him traveling by himself and quickly, heading south through the grasslands but a good many miles away. He’d seen Salamander, too, hurrying to meet him. Since the dweomermaster could assume that one of Calonderiel’s messengers had finally tracked the bard down, he decided that the alar should ride in his direction. When they headed north, though, they kept to the borderlands, because Devaberiel was expecting to find them somewhere near Eldidd. For the same reason they didn’t ride far, finally making a semi-permanent camp not far from the Peddroloc.
Once he was well away from his old rhan, Rhodry turned melancholy. It was one thing to think of having an entire new life ahead of him; another to leave the old completely behind. Much to his surprise, he realized that he missed his kin far more than he missed the power of rulership. At odd moments of the day he would find himself wondering how his sons fared, and their children, too; he even had the occasional fond thought of Aedda. He took to riding alone to ease his hiraedd, and the elves were willing to leave him alone with his solitude.
One day he borrowed a particularly fine gelding from Calonderiel and rode farther than usual in the simple pleasure of getting to know a new horse. After some hours he came to a little stream that led back to a marshy, spring-fed pond, surrounded with scrubby hazel thickets and some willows. Rhodry dismounted, and as he led his horse to the pond for a drink, he saw a white heron, standing on one leg in the shallows and regarding him with one suspicious round eye. All at once the bird shrieked its harsh cry and flapped off. Rhodry spun around, thinking that someone else had crept up behind him, but he saw no one, not even one of the Wildfolk. Since his horse was elven-trained, he left it to drink without him and walked back into the trees. The golden sunlight of late afternoon came down in shafts, solid with dust; the silence felt just as palpable. Then he saw her standing between two willows and watching him sadly.
Although he knew at once that she wasn’t truly substantial, she wasn’t an illusion, either: a real enough woman but lighter, somehow, than the solid trees around her. Tall and lithe, she was wearing a loose blue dress that left her arms bare and hung in torn dags around her ankles. Her dark blue hair flowed like water over her pale shoulders and curled close to her pale, pale face. When she spoke, he heard her language as Elvish, but it seemed that she wasn’t truly speaking at all.
“You heard me this time.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been calling and calling, but you didn’t come. You always used to come to me.”
“Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you, that’s all.”
“Ah. That must be because