A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [76]
“Why?”
“To keep from vanishing.”
“What? Why would you vanish?”
“I think … I think …” He looked up, but he stared over her shoulder at the sky. “I think we were meant to be like you, but we stayed behind, somehow. Truly, I think that’s it We stayed behind. Somehow.”
And then he was gone, and his horse with him, though the grass was flattened down where they’d stood. Dallandra felt suddenly cold and close to choking, so badly so that it took her a moment to realize that she was terrified, not ill. She mounted her horse and rode home fast. About half a mile from camp, she met Aderyn, walking by the river and obviously lost in thought. At the sight of him she almost cried in utter relief: he was so ordinary and homely and safe, a Round-ear maybe, but since he had the dweomer, he shared a deeper bond with her than any man of the People ever could. When he saw her, he smiled in such sheer pleasure that she suddenly wondered if he loved her, and she found herself hoping that he did, because for the first time in her life she realized that a man’s love could be a refuge rather than a nuisance. She dismounted and led her horse over to him.
“Out for a ride?” he said.
“I was.” She realized that he was simply not going to ask her about the Guardians, and she almost loved him for it. “I’ve been spending too much time alone, I think.”
“Do you?” He grinned in relief. “I didn’t want to say anything, but …”
“But, indeed. You know, it’s really time we started teaching you to fly.”
“I’d like naught better.”
So close that their shoulders touched, wrapped in their conversation, they walked back to camp together, but it seemed to her that she heard the mocking laughter of the Guardians in the cry of distant seabirds. When she shuddered in a sudden fear, he reached out and caught her hand to steady her.
“What’s so wrong?”
“Oh, naught. I’m just very tired.”
When he released her hand, he let his fingers slip away so slowly, so reluctantly, and his eyes were so rich with a hundred emotions, that she knew he did love her. Her heart fluttered in her throat like a trapped bird.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“I suppose so. Ado, when I was riding today, I met a man of the Guardians, and he told me some strange things. I really need your help.”
“Well, then, you shall have it, every scrap of it I can give you. Dalla, I’d do anything for you, anything at all.”
And she knew that, unlike all those other young men who’d courted her, he meant it.
• • •
As the wet and drowsy winter days rolled past, Aderyn realized that being a man of the dweomer among the Westfolk brought more than honor with it. Dallandra had inherited all of Nananna’s possessions—the tent and its goods, twenty horses, a flock of fifty sheep—but she did none of the work of tending them. Although she cooked her own food, and Aderyn’s too, now, because she enjoyed cooking, the rest of the People did all her other chores; they would have waited upon her like a great lady if she’d let them. Since he, too, had the dweomer, Aderyn found himself treated the same. As soon as the People saw that he had no wealth of his own, presents began coming his way. Any animal that was in some way unusual—all lambs born out of season, any horse with peculiar markings, even a dog that showed a rare intelligence—seemed to the People to belong to those who studied equally strange lore and were turned automatically into the herds belonging to the Wise Ones. As Aderyn remarked to Nevyn one night, when they were talking through the fire, his new life had advantages over traveling as a herbman.
“Well, advantages of a sort,” Nevyn thought to him, and sourly. “Always remember that you’re there to serve, not to be waited upon. If you get a big enough swelled head, the Lords of Wyrd will find some way to shrink it for you.”
“Well, true enough, and I do have a fair bit of real work to do, so you can put your mind at ease about that. There