A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [93]
“Did this room once belong to a queen of the lost cities?” Dallandra asked.
“No, not at all.” Evandar gave her a sly grin. “To a merchant’s wife, that’s all.”
Dallandra gasped, properly impressed.
“You have no idea how beautiful the cities were, Dalla,” he went on, and his voice cracked in honest sadness. “Your people were rich, and they lived even longer than they do now, with time to learn every craft to perfection, and they were generous, too, pooling their wealth to build places so fine and wonderful that they took the breath out of everyone that saw them, even a strange soul like me. I loved those cities. Truly, I think they were the things that taught me how to love. If they still stood, I might go to your world and live there the way you want me to do. But they’re gone, and my heart half died with them.”
“Well, true enough,” Dallandra said. “Broken stone doesn’t heal itself, and fallen walls won’t rise.”
“Just so.” He looked away, staring out the window to a long view of grass and flowers. “And your people never went back, they never even went back to mourn them. That was a hard thing to forgive, that and of course the wretched iron.”
“Evandar, I am so sick of hearing you people whine about iron. Do you think we could have built those beastly cities without it? Do you think we’d live long out on the grasslands without knives and arrow points and axes?”
“I hadn’t thought about it at all. Forgive me.”
“If they used iron in the cities, Father,” Elessario broke in, “how did you spend time there?”
“With great difficulty. It was worth it to me, the pain.”
“Well, then.” Dallandra pounced like a striking hawk. “If that pain was worth the beauty, then …”
His laugh cut her off, but it was a pleasant one.
“You’re as sly as I am, sorceress.” He rose, motioning to his daughter. “Come along, let our guest rest.”
“Well, I am tired, truly.” Dallandra suddenly yawned. “I left home—well, it must have been a full day ago now.”
For the first twenty years that Dallandra was gone, Aderyn kept hoping that soon, any day, any moment, she would return. The People marveled at him, in fact, that he would be so strong, so faithful to her memory, when all those old tales said that no one ever returned from the lands of the Guardians. During that twenty years, he spent some time talking to the Forest Folk, who worshipped the Guardians as gods, and learned what little they knew about these strange beings. When their shamans—priests is a bit too dignified a word—insisted that he should be happy that his wife had been honored and taken as a concubine for these gods, Aderyn managed to be polite, barely, but he never went back to talk with them again. It was his work that saved him. At first he supervised the copying of the books Nevyn had brought and taught his new lore to those elves who were already masters of the old; then he took young apprentices and trained them from the beginning in his craft. As Deverry men reckon time, it was in the year 752 that he sent his first three pupils out to teach others, and that year, as well, when he was still looking around for his next apprentice, Nevyn rode out to the Eldidd border to visit him.
They met about thirty miles north of Cannobaen, at the place where the Aver Gavan, as men call it, joins up with the Delonderiel. That spring the elves were holding a horse fair, because the Eldidd merchants were willing to pay higher than ever for good stock, in the wide meadows along the riverbanks. What Nevyn brought with him, however, wasn’t iron goods, but news. The Eldidd king wanted those horses because he’d just declared war on Deverry.
“Again?” Aderyn said peevishly. “Ye gods, I’m glad I don’t live in the kingdoms anymore, with all their stupid bickering and squabbling.”
“I’m afraid it’s a good bit more this time than just petty quarrels.” Nevyn looked and sounded exhausted. “The High King died without an heir, and there