A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [21]
“Ado, Ado, thank the gods!”
It was his mother, Lyssa, laughing and weeping at the same time as she threw herself into his arms. Close to tears himself, Aderyn hugged her tight, then set his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her. She’d grown stout but was still beautiful, her raven-dark hair barely touched with gray, her wide blue eyes bright, her cheeks barely marked with wrinkles.
“It’s so good to see you,” Lyssa said. “Truly, I was wondering if we would ever see you again. Can you stay with us a while?”
“I will, if Lord Maroic allows. But, Mam, this is the last visit I’ll ever make. I want you to know that now.”
Lyssa caught her breath sharply, but he knew there would be no tears or recriminations. In a sweep of laughter, the rest of his family came running from the broch and clustered around him—his younger brother, Acern, training to take his father’s place as bard, his sister, Araena, married to the captain of Maroic’s guard and with a baby of her own, and finally his father, Gweran, as tall and imposing as always with his blond hair heavily laced with silver. In a chattering crowd they escorted him inside, where the aging Lord Maroic rose from his carved chair and announced that Aderyn was going to take his meat and mead for as long as he wanted to stay. The dailiness, the cheer, the mundanity of the visit broke over Aderyn like a wave, as if the dweomer were only some dream he’d once had. Being surrounded by his family made him realize why he had a lonely road ahead: the strange lore that mattered to him could never be shared. It set him apart like walls even as he talked and gossiped and shared heavy meal after heavy meal with them all in the long drowsy days of his visit.
Gweran went out of his way to spend time with Aderyn, much more than usual. Aderyn supposed that Lyssa had told him that his firstborn son would never ride home again. She’d always been the link between them, keeping them at peace, telling them things that they could never voice themselves. There was good reason for their distance. Looking at his father’s silvery hair, his straight, almost regal bearing, his rich clothing that he wore like the honor it was, Aderyn found it hard to remember that Gweran was a murderer who had used the very law itself as a weapon. At times he wondered if Gweran even remembered the young rider, Tanyc, whom he’d so cleverly trapped twenty years before. Perhaps he did, because even though their talks rambled through Aderyn’s childhood, every time they came close to Aderyn’s seventh year, when the murder had happened, Gweran would shy away and find a distant topic to discuss. Aderyn was more than willing to let the subject stay closed. Even though he’d only been a child and spoken in all innocence, still he felt he shared his father’s blood guilt. Seven years old or not, he’d blurted out the information that had sent Gweran hunting revenge. “Tanyc’s always looking at Mam, Da.” Even at this lapse of years, he could hear his small boy’s voice pronouncing an unwitting death sentence.
Since he’d done much meditation work to heal that old wound, Aderyn was surprised the way the murder rose to haunt him. Doubtless it came from being in the dun, whose walls had once displayed his private horror. He remembered it vividly: climbing out of bed on a sunny morning, throwing open the shutters at the window, and seeing, just down below his tower room, Tanyc’s body hanging by the neck from the ramparts. He was bound hand and foot, his head flopping like a rag doll’s, and already the ravens were wheeling in the sky. Aderyn could only think there’d been some ghastly accident. He started screaming for his mother, who ran to him, looked out the window, and in a moment of horrified honesty, blurted out, “Your