A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [83]
Yet, by the end of the second year, Dallandra began to see the Guardians again, though only at a distance, because they sought her out. When the alar was changing campgrounds, and she was riding at the head of the line with Aderyn or Halaberiel, occasionally she would hear at some great distance the melancholy of a silver horn and look up to see tiny figures in procession at the horizon. If she tried to point them out to her companions, the figures would be gone by the time they looked. When she and Aderyn went flying together—and by then he’d learned to take the form of the great silver owl—she would sometimes see the three swans, too, keeping pace with them but far off in the sky. Whenever she and Aderyn tried to catch up with them, they merely disappeared in a swift flicker of light.
Then, in the third spring after her marriage, the dreams started. They came to her in brief images, using the elven forms she’d seen before, Evandar, Alshandra, and Elessario, to reproach her for deserting them. At times, they offered great favors; at others, they threatened her; but neither favors nor threats held any force. The reproaches, however, hurt. She could remember Evandar vividly, saying that his people needed hers to keep from vanishing, and she remembered Nevyn’s theories, too, as well as Nevyn’s warnings. She told herself that the Guardians had made their choice when they’d refused to take up the burdens of the physical world; as the elven proverb put it, they’d cut their horse out of the herd—now they could blasted well saddle it on their own. Provided, of course, Nevyn’s theories were right. Provided they’d known what they were doing.
Finally, after a particularly vivid dream, Dallandra haltered her mare and rode out bareback and alone into the grasslands. She did take with her, however, a steel-bladed knife. After about an hour of riding, she found a place that seemed to speak of the Guardians: a little stream ran at one point between two hazel trees, the last two left of a stand that must have been cut by an alar in some desperate need. Dallandra dismounted several hundred yards away, tethered out her mare, then stuck the knife, blade down, into the earth next to the tether peg so that about half the handle protruded but the blade was buried. Only after she’d made sure that she could find it again did she walk on to the paired hazels.
Sure enough, a figure stood on her side of this otherworldly gate: Elessario. If it had been Evandar, Dallandra would have turned back immediately, but she trusted another woman, especially one who appeared young and vulnerable, barely out of her adolescence. She had her father’s impossibly yellow hair, but it hung long and unbound down to her waist; her eyes were yellow, too, and slit catlike with emerald green.
“You’ve come, then?” Elessario said. “You heard me ask you?”
“Yes, in my dreams.”
“What are dreams?”
“Don’t you know? That’s when you talk to me.”
“What?” Her perfect, full mouth parted in confusion. “We talk to you when you come into the Gatelands, that’s all.”
“Oh. Your father told me your name, Elessario.”
She jerked up her head like a startled doe.
“Oh, the beast! That’s not fair! I don’t know yours.”
“Didn’t he tell you? He knows it.”
“He does? He’s never very fair, you know.” She turned suddenly and stared upstream, between the hazels. “Mother’s worse.”
“You call them Mother and Father, but they never could have birthed you. Not in the usual way, anyway.”
“But when I became, they were there.”
“Became?”
Elessario turned both palms upward and shrugged.
“I became, and they were there.”
“All right, then. Do you know what I mean by being birthed?”
When she shook her head no, Dallandra told her, described the entire process as vividly as she could and described the sexual act, too, just to judge her reaction. The child listened in dead silence, staring at her unblinking with her yellow eyes; every now and then, her mouth worked in disgust or revulsion—but still she