A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [22]
Aderyn wondered if Lyssa felt she shared their guilt. After all, Gweran and Tanyc had been fighting over her. During the visit, Lyssa said little, merely listened to him and his father talk while she watched Gweran with a patient devotion. Her man was a good husband who still loved her; he was famous, with young disciples clamoring to study with him; his skill kept her in comfort. Perhaps she’d carefully forgotten that he’d murdered a man for her sake. Perhaps.
On the last day of the visit, Aderyn and Lyssa walked down to the Nerraver as they’d so often done when he was a child. The river ran full between lush green banks and sparkled in the sun with little fish-scale ripples of silver. When they sat down for a rest, Lyssa hunted through the grass and picked a few daisies like a young girl.
“Ado? Do you remember the year of the Great Drought?”
“I do.” That was the year of the murder, too. “Did you know it was Nevyn’s dweomer that set it right?”
“Of course. It was one reason I let you go as his apprentice.”
“And do you regret that decision now?”
“Well.” Lyssa looked at her daisies. “If a mother is any kind of mother at all, she knows her sons will leave her. I have your sister and her babies nearby.”
“Well and good, but, Mam, truly I’ll miss you.”
Lyssa shrugged, turning the flowers this way and that between her fingers, fighting to keep back tears.
“Do you think you’ll ever marry on this strange road of yours?” she said at last.
“I doubt it. It wouldn’t be much of a life for a woman, living out of a mule’s pack and sleeping by the road.”
“True enough, but here—don’t tell me the dweomer lets a man carry on with tavern lasses and suchlike.”
“It doesn’t, but then I’ve got no intentions of doing anything of the sort.”
Lyssa considered him, her head a bit to one side.
“You don’t care much for women, do you, Ado?”
“Care? Of course I do. Truly, Mam, I prefer their company and talk to that of men most of the time.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
When he understood, Aderyn felt distinctly squeamish—after all, she was his mother.
“Well, I don’t, not in that way. But, Mam, don’t trouble your heart over it. I don’t care for other lads or suchlike.”
“That wouldn’t have bothered me. It’s just that I’ve always felt you didn’t have much of a taste for that sort of thing with anyone. Do you feel you can’t trust us women?”
“And why would you think that?”
“Oh, you saw a bit too much, maybe, when you were a lad.”
Aderyn hesitated, then decided it was time for the truth.
“You mean Tanyc.”
“Just that.” Lyssa was studying the daisies. “He died because of me, no matter whose fault it was.” She looked up sharply. “I’ll swear it to you, Ado. I never gave him a word of hope or encouragement.”
“I never thought you did. But it’s not that, Mam. It’s the dweomer. It’s taken my whole life. Everything I would have given to a woman I’ve spent on the dweomer, heart and soul both.”
Lyssa sighed in honest relief, as if she’d been blaming herself for her son’s celibacy. Later, when he was alone, Aderyn wondered if in one way her fear was justified. He’d never blamed her, the woman in the case, for one wrong thing, but the murder had left him with doubts about being a man. To become obsessed with a woman the way Tanyc was seemed to lead to death; to love a woman the way his father did seemed to tempt crime. He decided that he’d better meditate on the subject and untangle this knot in his mind. It might interfere with his work.
All that summer, Aderyn made his way west, going from village to village, supporting himself nicely by selling his herbs—or nicely by his standards, since he was content with two spare meals a day and the occasional tankard of ale in a clean tavern. At times he settled for a week or two to gather fresh herbs or to tend to some long illness, but always