A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [90]
“Wise One! An omen?”
Aderyn nodded, unable to speak. Calonderiel left the horses and came running over, started to say something, then thought better of it, his cat eyes as wide as a tiny elven child’s. With a convulsive shudder Albaral turned away.
“Found a few tracks. Wise One, do you want to wait here?”
“No. I’ll come with you. Lead on.”
But the tracks only led them a few yards, to a place where the grass was flattened down in a pattern that suggested, to Albaral’s trained eyes at least, that she’d first fallen to her knees, then lain down all in a heap. Beyond that there was nothing, no sign to show she’d risen again, no footprints, nothing, as if she’d turned into a bird and flown away.
“But she didn’t leave her clothes behind her,” Aderyn said. “She couldn’t fly with those.”
“Grass is kind of damp here,” Albaral said, kneeling. “Like there was fog, maybe. Or something.”
“Some kind of dweomer mist?” Unconsciously Calonderiel crossed his fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft.
Aderyn’s fear clutched his throat and turned him mute. Had some great bird swooped down out of that mist and carried her away?
“We could see how far the damp grass stretches,” Albaral said. “Seems to go on a ways.”
Aderyn was about to answer when he heard—when they all heard—the sound of a silver horn, echoing from some long distance away, and looked up to see at the far horizon a line of riders silhouetted against the setting sun, the horses picked out in black against the blood-red clouds for the briefest of moments, then gone.
“The Guardians,” Cal whispered. “Have they taken her?”
Aderyn dropped to his knees and grabbed handfuls of the crumpled grass, the last thing on earth her body had touched. It took the others a long time to make him come away.
All that night, once they were back in camp, Aderyn stayed in their tent and paced endlessly back and forth. At one moment he knew with a heartsick certainty that he’d never see her again; at the next, his hope would well up in a flood of denial to tell him that she’d come back, of course she’d come back, maybe in the morning, maybe in only an hour, that maybe she was walking toward camp this very moment. Then tears would burn in his throat as he told himself that she was as good as dead, gone forever. At dawn he stumbled out and actually walked off in the direction that she’d gone, but of course, he didn’t find her. When he came back to camp, everyone else treated him like an invalid, speaking softly around him, offering him food, telling him to lie down, staring at him so sadly that he nearly screamed aloud and cursed the lot of them.
Aderyn slept all that day, vigiled all that night, and the next, and on and on, until seven days had passed with no sign of Dallandra. Only then, toward the dawn of the eighth night, did he finally think of the obvious and call to Nevyn through the fire. The old man responded so quickly that he must have been already awake and up. When Aderyn told him what had happened, his image above the fire seemed to grow even older with grief.
“She promised me once that she’d never leave me,” Aderyn said at last. “And like a dolt, I believed her. Not for more than a few days, she said, and I believed her.”
“Now here, I can’t imagine Dallandra breaking a solemn promise, no matter how much glamour these Guardians have.”
“Well, maybe she wouldn’t. Nevyn, I just don’t know what to think! If I only knew what’s happened to her, really knew, I mean. I’m only guessing that the rotten Guardians even took her.”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
“Ask them? I can’t even find them!”
“Have you truly tried?”
Aderyn left the tent and walked outside into the rising dawn. He hadn’t really tried, he supposed. In his heart he never wanted