A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [61]
“Jill! What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find out the meaning of the word inside the rose ring. Do you remember it? The one Rhodry Mael-waedd has.”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’ve been looking for you.” She frowned, staring down at something near her feet that Jill couldn’t see. “But I meant, why are you in Bardek?”
“You know where I am? How?”
“I can see your surroundings, and they match what I’ve been told about the islands. But please, I don’t have much time.”
“Well, it seems that some of the People may have fled south after the Great Burning, and there might be some still living far to the south of here. I’ve found a map, you see, that shows islands out beyond Anmurdio, and some histories that indicate there were once elves in Bardek. I’ve come to look for them.”
Dallandra gasped, and the surprise broke her concentration. Her form began to fade as the pillar of light changed to a thick pillar of smoke, swirling silver in the moonlight.
“Dallandra!” Without thinking Jill was on her feet and shouting. “Dalla! Wait! How did you get here?”
With one last swirl the pillar seemed to blow away, smoke on the wind, a thickening of moonlight, then gone.
For a long time Jill sat on the bench and did some hard thinking. Dallandra was a dweomermaster of great power who, some hundreds of years earlier, had linked her Wyrd to that of the strange race of beings known as the Guardians. Jill had last seen her back in the Westlands a thousand miles away and, more significantly, far across the ocean. Working dweomer across any large body of water is impossible, because the exhalations of elemental force and the astral vibrations break up an image as fast as even the greatest dweomermaster can build it. Other dweomermasters had told Jill many a time that Dallandra had long left ordinary physical existence behind, even though none of them knew exactly in what state she did exist. At best she was semicorporeal, a thing of etheric substance only, which would make her even more vulnerable to the water forces than an ordinary magically produced shape or image. Yet here she was, or at the least some clear projection of her, coming through onto the physical plane. It was more of a puzzle than Jill could solve.
When she went back inside, she paused for a moment at the door of the common room and watched Salamander lounging at a table with a half-empty wine cup in his slender hands and smiling as he listened to the talk and jests flying like juggling clubs among the troupe of acrobats. He’s probably been lonely, Jill thought. The gods all know that I’m poor enough company when I’ve got some working at hand. Yet her annoyance lingered, that he’d distract himself from his studies this way. She had, after all, promised Nevyn that she would oversee his dweomer training and do her best to get him to work up to his potential. In her mind, any promise she’d made to Nevyn was a sacred charge.
Dallandra had come to Bardek searching for Jill, or to be precise, she’d been searching for Jill on the inner planes and traced her to a place that had turned out to be Bardek. Judging from the way that Time ran in that world in which she was experiencing Time, it had only been a few weeks since she’d left her dweomermaster of a husband, Aderyn of the Silver Wings, back in the Westlands, although she knew, of course, that it was well over two hundred years as men and elves reckoned the span. Even though she was well aware of the split between the two time flows, it was hard to keep track of small variations. It seemed to her that she’d last seen Jill the day before, when in truth it had been nearly three years. During that last meeting, Jill had asked her about the rose ring’s secret, and she’d tried to find the answer for the human dweomerwoman.
“I’d forgotten about the lapse of time,” she remarked to Evandar. “She was so surprised that I’d remember.”
“Eventually you’ll grow used to the ebb and flow, and you’ll see why we don’t concern ourselves with the affairs of that world of yours.