A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [88]
His surprise was comic.
“Well, if you say so, Dalla. Fancy that.” He ran another trill, faintly mocking notes, this time, and very high. “Very well, then. I love Elessario, strange though it sounds to my ears, and she’s still young, so young, too young to know what she’d be giving up if she followed you people into birth and flesh and the endless wheel and all of that glittering, strange, and sometimes oddly sticky and slimy and wet world you live in. And then she’d have all we were meant to have, and I could die in peace.”
“Why not come with her and live?”
He shook his head in a no and bent over the harp. The song he played was meant for dancing; she could tell by the driving chords and the way her feet demanded to move. She forced herself to sit very still until he was done, modulating suddenly into a minor key and letting the tune hang unfinished.
“You won’t understand us until you come into our country,” he said.
“Suppose that I came—just suppose, mind—what would happen to my body while I was gone?”
“The lump of meat? Do you care?”
“Of course I care! Without it I can never come home to the man I love.”
“But why should I care?”
“Because without my body I’ll die and go away to be reborn and you’ll have to wait a long time and then start this all over from the beginning.”
“Oh, well, that would be tedious beyond belief, wouldn’t it? Let me think. I know. You can change from a woman to a bird and back again already, so if I turn the lump of meat into a jewel on a chain, and you put the chain around your neck, it shall travel everywhere with you, and you can change back whenever you want to go home. Dalla, truly, if you’d only stay a few days with us—just a few days—to see us and know us and all that we do, and then you’d see how to help my Elessario, I’m sure of it.” All at once he smiled. “My Elessario. Whom I love. What an odd sound to it, but you know, I think you must be right.”
He hit the harp in a discord and disappeared.
If Evandar had asked for his own sake, Dallandra might never have gone—she realized it even then—but that he would ask for the sake of another soul made all the difference. She’d seen enough of his people already, particularly Alshandra, to understand just how right Nevyn had been to wager against them having compassion. That Evandar was beginning to be capable of a love beyond wanting for himself was a momentous thing, and a change to be nurtured and cherished. Yet she was always mindful of the dangers, and she particularly hated the thought of letting Aderyn know that she was thinking of running such a risk. He’ll only yell and scream, she told herself, and with the thought realized that she’d made up her mind.
Since she couldn’t bear to lie to Aderyn, either, she rode out that morning without telling him anything at all. When she was a good five miles from camp, she unsaddled and unbridled her mare, turned her head in the direction of the herd, and gave her a slap on the rump to start her back home. Then she took the silver nut out of her pocket and unwrapped it from its bit of rag. For a long time she merely studied it and wondered if she truly had the courage to go through with this thing. What if Evandar were lying? Yet she had enough dweomer to tell true from false, and she knew that he’d never spoken so honestly before in all his long existence. In the end what spurred her on was her respect for Aderyn. What would he think if she acted like a squealing coward, full of big plans, empty of courage? With one last wrench of her will she touched the nut to her eyes, left first, then right.
When she lowered it, at first it seemed that nothing had happened, and she laughed at herself for being taken in by some prank of Elessario’s, but when she put the nut in her pocket, she was suddenly aware of a subtle change in the landscape. The colors were brighter, for one thing, the grass so intense a green that it seemed to be shards of emerald, the sky as deep and glowy as a sunlit sea. When she took a few steps, she saw, ahead of