A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [99]
With the curious Wildfolk trailing after, they went to the tent that Maddyn was sharing with Nevyn. The bard rummaged through his saddlebags and took out something hard wrapped in a bit of embroidered linen. He opened the cloth to reveal the ring, a simple silver band about a third of an inch wide, graved with roses, and a pin shaped like a single rose, so cunningly worked that it seemed its petals should be soft to touch. He gave Aderyn the ring, but he wrapped the pin back up and returned it to his saddlebags. Idly Aderyn glanced inside the ring, half expecting to see the lady in question’s name, but it was smooth and featureless.
“The smith who made it, and that pin, too, is a brilliant craftsman,” Maddyn remarked. “Otho, his name is.”
When, out of idle curiosity, Aderyn slipped the ring on his own finger, his hand shook in a dweomer-induced cold.
“Somewhat wrong?” Maddyn said.
“There’s not. It’s just the knowing, coming upon me. You shall have this back, Maddo, one fine day. You’ll have it back in a way you never expected, and long after you’ve forgotten it.”
Maddyn stared in frank puzzlement. There was nothing Aderyn could tell him, because he didn’t know what he meant himself. His heart was bitter, too, remembering the similar promise that Evandar had made him. Apparently the Guardian had meant that he would see Dallandra again, all right, but only in that agonizingly brief glimpse on the etheric plane.
On the morrow morning, Aderyn did what she’d asked and placed the ring high up in the crotch of the oak tree while the alar was breaking camp. Although he never knew who had taken it, the next time the alar rode that way, it was gone. In its place was a small smooth bit of wood scratched with a couple of Elvish words, a simple “thank you,” but in her handwriting. He borrowed an awl and bored a hole in the scrap, so he could wear it on a bit of thong round his neck, just because her hands had touched it. Seeing her again had brought his grief alive even as it had killed the last of his hope.
Early the next year, from an Eldidd port Maddyn sailed off with Nevyn to Bardek, and Aderyn never saw or heard of him again, not even to hear how he died, far off in the islands after the rose-shaped pin had been stolen from him. But oddly enough, Dallandra did hear of the bard’s death, or, to be more precise, she realized what had happened when his blue sprite turned up at the court of the Guardians on what seemed to her to be the day after she’d gotten the silver ring. It was the jewelry that drew the little creature, in fact, because they found her clasping it between her tiny hands. Her face was screwed up in an agony of despair, and when Elessario tried to stroke her, the sprite whipped her head around and sank her pointed teeth deep into the Guardian’s hand. Illusory blood welled, then vanished. Elessario stared for some moments at the closing wound.
“What made her do that?”
“I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that Maddyn’s dead.”
The sprite threw back her head, opened her mouth in a soundless howl, and disappeared.
“He seems to be, yes,” Dallandra went on. “And she’s mourning him.”
Elessario cocked her head to one side and considered the words for some time. They walked across the glowy emerald grass in a pinkish twilight, where blue-green trees on the horizon shifted like smoke. With a howl that they could actually hear, the sprite reappeared, much larger, about the size of a three-year-old child.
“She mourns because he’s gone to the place called death,” Elessario said, “and she can’t follow him there.”
“That’s right, yes.”
They were sitting on the billowing grass with the sprite between them, leaning her head into Elessario’s silken lap.
“Every now and then I wonder what it would be like to die,” Elessario said. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I can only make guesses. I suppose it’s a lot like falling asleep—but you’ve never been asleep—sorry.”
“I’m growing very tired of finding out that there are all these things I’ve never done.” But she sounded sad rather than cross. By then,