Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [8]
Alastyr felt an icy-cold hand clench his stomach. He was being warned, no matter how circumspectly, that the Old One could no longer trust his own predictions.
Devaberiel Silverhand knelt in his red leather tent and methodically rummaged through a wall bag embroidered with vines and roses. Since it was quite large, it took him a while to find what he was looking for. Irritably he scrabbled through old trophies from singing contests, the clumsy first piece of embroidery his daughter had ever done, two mismatched silver buckles, a bottle of Bardek scent, and a wooden horse given to him by a lover whose name he’d forgotten. At the very bottom he found the small leather pouch, so old that it was cracking.
He opened it and shook a ring out into his hand. Although it was made of dwarven silver, and thus still as shiny as the day he’d put it away, it had no dweomer upon it, or at least none that any sage or dweomerperson had ever been able to unravel. A silver band, about a third of an inch wide, it was engraved with roses on the outside and a few words in Elvish characters, but some unknown language, on the inside. In the two hundred years he’d had this ring, he’d never found a sage who could read it.
The way he’d come by it was equally mysterious. He was a young man then, just finished with his bardic training and riding with the alar of a woman he particularly fancied. One afternoon a traveler rode up on a fine golden stallion. When Devaberiel and a couple of the other men strolled out to greet him, they received quite a surprise. Although from a distance he looked like an ordinary man of the People, with the dark hair and jet-black eyes of someone from the far west, up close it was hard to tell just what he did look like. It seemed that his features changed constantly though subtly, that at times his mouth was wider, then thinner, that he became shorter, then taller. He dismounted and looked over the welcoming party.
“I wish to speak with Devaberiel the bard.”
“Here I am.” Devaberiel stepped forward. “How did you know my name?”
The stranger merely smiled.
“May I ask your name, then?” Devaberiel said.
“No.” The stranger smiled again. “But I have something for you, a present for one of your sons, young bard, for sons you’ll have. When each is born, consult with someone who knows the dweomer. They’ll be able to tell you which one receives the gift.”
When he handed over the pouch and the ring, his eyes seemed more blue than black.
“My thanks, good sir, but who are you?”
The stranger laughed, then mounted his horse and rode off without another word.
Over the intervening years Devaberiel had learned nothing more about the ring. All the sages and dweomermasters he consulted told him, though, that the man who gave him the gift must have been one of the Guardians, the semidivine beings whose mysterious ways sometimes crossed those of the elves. No mortal man, or so they told him, could understand the Guardians, who came and went as they pleased and changed their appearance, too, as easily as a man changes his shirt.
Devaberiel did indeed have sons, two of them to be exact, and when each was born, he’d dutifully taken the ring and the baby both and consulted with a dweomermaster. The omens had fallen wrong both times. Now, however, he had a third son. Holding the ring, he walked to the door of the tent and looked out. A cold, gray drizzle fell over the camp, and the wind was brisk. He was going to have an uncomfortable journey, but he was determined to find the dweomerwoman who seemed to have the most affinity for the ring. His curiosity was not going to let him rest until he found out if it belonged to young Rhodry ap Devaberiel, who still thought himself a Maelwaedd.
Driven by a bitter-cold wind, the rains slashed down hard in the gray streets of