A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [80]
“Well, uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Shall I tell you how much I love you?”
He heard her laugh, then a little rustling sound, and looked up to find her untying and unbraiding her hair. Her slender face seemed almost lost in that pale thick spill of silver waving down to her waist. When he risked running a gentle hand through it she smiled at him.
“We’ve laced the tent flap,” she said. “No one will dare bother us now.”
Smiling, Aderyn bent his head down and kissed her. This time she turned into his arms with a shy desire that sparked his own.
From that day on, everyone treated him as though he’d always lived among the People and always been Dallandra’s man, just as she became his woman, so naturally, so easily, that he felt as if his heart would break from the joy of it, the first truly human joy he’d ever known in life, that of being part of a pair and no longer lonely. Even Calonderiel accepted the situation, although, just after the shortest day of the year, Cal did leave the banadar’s warband and ride away to join another alar. Aderyn felt guilty over that and said as much to Halaberiel.
“Don’t worry about it,” the banadar said. “He’ll reconsider when his broken heart heals. At his age, it’ll probably heal quickly, too.”
Halaberiel was right enough. When the winter camps were breaking up in the first of the warm weather, Cal came riding back, greeted everyone, including Aderyn, as a long-lost brother, and stowed his gear in its former place in the banadar’s tent without a word needing to be said by anyone. As the alarli moved north, heading for the Lake of the Leaping Trout, other warriors came to join them, swordsmen and archers, men and women both, until an army rode into the death-ground to camp and wait for news from Eldidd. Since the dweomer sent Aderyn no warnings of danger, he doubted if there was going to be war, but Halaberiel spent long restless nights, pacing back and forth by the lakeshore, until at last a merchant caravan rode in with Namydd at its head to announce that there would be nothing but peace.
Even though Melaudd’s elder son, Tieryn Waldyn now, had cried revenge and spent the winter riding all over the princedom trying to raise men to seek it, he’d failed ignominiously. Prince Addryc refused his aid, of course, on the grounds that the Bear’s had violated his decree of sanctity for the elven burial ground. None of the other lords wanted either to displease the prince or to face the longbows of the Westfolk, and Waldyn’s potential allies found an absolute army of reasons to avoid doing so, especially once the news from Cannobaen spread north, that a band of Westfolk had fallen upon the west-lying settlements without warning and wiped them out.
“So Waldyn can mutter over his ale all he wants,” Namydd finished up. “But he’s not getting any vengeance this summer, leastaways. Besides, Banadar, there’s trouble along the Deverry border now. The king of Eldidd’s collected the rights and dues from the mountain passes for as long as anyone can remember, but the Deverry gwerbret in Morlyn’s started claiming them. There’ll be blood over this, there will.”
“Splendid,” Halaberiel said. “They won’t be encroaching upon our lands if they’re fighting among themselves. May their gods of war lead them in a long, long dance.”
The People spent just over a month at the Lake of the Leaping Trout, digging stones from the hills and using them to make a rough boundary line, rather than a wall, around the sacred territories. No one, it seemed, remembered how to make the mortar that had once held together the fabled cities of the far west, but as Halaberiel remarked, they’d be riding back often enough to keep the boundary in repair even without a proper wall. All during the construction Aderyn continued his teaching, since several of the dweomerworkers had followed them, and it was there, too, that Nevyn found