A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [186]
“A couple of hundred years, more or less and all told.”
“She must be quite … well, convincing by now.”
“Very, and beautiful, too, or so he says, but in this case beauty’s certainly in the eye of the beholder. I never cared for the pale and pouty type myself, all wide eyes and simpers, when I was young.”
“Neither did Rhodry. Ych, this is revolting, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe it of him, but here we are. How are you guarding against her? The usual seals?”
“Just that, but she keeps calling to him, particularly when he’s asleep, and I can’t watch him every moment of every day. Gav can help set the seals, but that’s all. In fact, with you here and all, I was thinking that I might just go to Cal’s tent right now and get some sleep. Ye gods, I’m tired!”
Leaving Gavantar just outside the door on watch, Jill went back to Aderyn’s tent. Rhodry never even glanced up when she came in, nor did he say a word to her as she helped herself to bread and smoked meat from the basket lying by the hearthstone. She sat down some feet from him and studied him while she ate, since he didn’t seem to care whether she did or not. He looked his age, she realized with a shock. Even though he didn’t have a single gray hair or a pouch or bag in his weather-beaten face, he looked old, slumped down, drained of the immensely high vitality and magnetism that keeps those of elven blood so “young” by human standards. Since in her mind she always held the image of him as her young lover, she felt that she hardly knew this middle-aged man. The estrangement hurt.
“Rhodry? Don’t you have one word to say to me?”
He looked up, his mouth slack, his eyes narrow, as if he were trying to puzzle out who she was.
“My apologies,” he said at last. “I thought you’d prefer it if I just held my tongue.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I must disgust you.”
She considered the matter with the care it deserved.
“You don’t, truly. But I’m afraid for your life.”
“Does it matter if I live or die?”
“Of course it does. Your Wyrd—”
“Ah, curse my wretched Wyrd! I mean, does it matter to you?”
Another question that deserved a careful answer, not some unthinking reply.
“It does matter. I may not be in love with you anymore, but I like you. I always have, really. Liked you as a friend and admired you, too, and over the long years that’s more important than love.”
“Is it? I—” He froze in mid-sentence.
Jill felt at the edge of her mind the touch of crackling energy that means the Wildlands are lying close by. Her gray gnome popped into manifestation and pointed, all big eyes and gaping mouth, at something behind her. Opening up the second sight, she slewed around and looked. The first thing she saw was the smooth curving wall of the golden sphere of force that Aderyn and Gavantar had set over the tent and marked with flaming pentagrams. Just beyond, though, she could dimly make out a female shape, all wavery like a woman seen through bottle glass. When she rose to her knees, the shape vanished.
“She knows I’m here.”
“Actually, she told me you were coming. I mean, she didn’t know who you were, but she told me that the old man was bringing another dweomermaster. I figured it was you.”
“You knew she knew, and you never told Aderyn?”
When Rhodry blushed with shame she realized for the first time just how divided his loyalties were.
Over the next few days Jill and Aderyn worked out a strange sort of watch. While Rhodry was awake and thus fairly safe, they both rested, too, but the minute he fell asleep, one of them would watch his body while the other stood watch out on the etheric plane. The White Lady was forced to stay far out of reach of his dreams, although Jill did catch a glimpse of her one morning. Normally, on the etheric plane an elemental spirit appears as a nexus of lines of force or as a crystalline brilliance, much more a bit of geometry than a person, but the creature that Jill saw hovering on a billow of blue light seemed caught in between. She’d put on a half-human face, but it kept forming out of and dissolving into a burst of green light