A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [100]
“The ring, Rhodry Maelwaedd. Give me the rose ring, and you shall have your dagger back.”
“Suppose I just take it from you?”
She laughed and disappeared, suddenly and completely gone. When he swore, he heard her laugh behind him again, and spun around. There she was, and she was still holding the dagger.
“You shan’t be able to catch me, of course,” she said. “But I always keep my promises. I promise that if you give me the ring, I shall give you your dagger.”
“Well, if you want it that cursed badly…”
When he started to slip the ring free, she moved forward, gliding over the grass, and it seemed that she was suddenly taller, her eyes flashing gold in the not-real moonlight that clung to her. All at once he was afraid, hesitated, stepped back with the ring still on his finger.
“Just why do you want this bit of silver so badly?”
“That’s none of your affair! Give it to me!”
She strode forward, he moved back. She stood huge now, her hair spreading out in some private wind like flames stirring, and she held the dagger up to strike.
“Stop!” It was a man’s voice. “You have no right to that ring!”
Rhodry could see no one, but she suddenly shrank down to the form of a normal elven woman, and the dagger hung in a flaccid hand.
“It was his long before I carved the runes upon it. You know it was. Admit it.”
All at once a figure appeared to match the voice, a man with impossibly yellow hair and lips as red as cherries. Smiling, but it was more a wolf’s smile than a man’s, he strolled in between them. The long tunic he wore matched his unnaturally blue eyes. With a sense of utter shock Rhodry realized that he could see him so clearly because dawn was already turning the eastern sky silver, that the entire night had somehow passed during his brief conversation with the woman. She was staring at the grass now, and kicking a tuft of it like a sulky child.
“Hand it over,” the man said.
With a shriek of rage she hurled the dagger straight at Rhodry’s head. He ducked, twisting out of the way barely in time, then looked up to find them both gone. The dagger, however, lay gleaming in the rising sun. When he picked it up, he found it perfectly solid—and realized with surprise that he’d expected it to be somehow changed. Although he sheathed it, he kept his hand on the hilt as he started back to camp.
“Rhodry?”
The voice made him yelp aloud. The man with the yellow hair gave him an apologetic smile.
“If I were you,” the fellow said. “I’d leave the Westlands. She won’t follow you into the lands of men.”
He disappeared again. Rhodry ran the rest of the way back to the camp.
The wake was long over. Most of the People, in fact, were asleep after the long night of mourning. Only a pack of dogs, a few of the older boys, and Calonderiel were sitting round the newly rekindled fire in front of the banadar’s tent.
“Where were you?” Calonderiel said.
“I hardly know.” Rhodry sat down next to him on the ground.
Calonderiel considered for a moment, then waved at the boys and dogs impartially.
“Go. I don’t care where—to bed, probably. But go.”
Once they’d gone, the banadar laid a few chips and twigs onto the fire.
“I hate to let it go out,” he remarked. “What do you mean, you hardly know?”
“Just that. I thought I was but a mile from here, down by the lake, but the whole night passed like a bare moment, and I saw a woman who came and went like one of the Wildfolk.”
While Rhodry told the story, and he finally admitted the earlier incidents as well, Calonderiel listened without a word, but the banadar grew more and more troubled.
“Guardians,” he said at last. “What you saw were two of the Guardians. I don’t exactly know what they may be, but they’re somehow linked to the People. They’re not gods, certainly, nor are they elves like you and me, nor men like your other tribe, either. No more are they Wildfolk, though