Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [175]
“Ill news, Rori. I never did find Yraen. He’s somewhere in the old siege camp, I suppose, buried under the other dead in a trench. I’m sorry. I wanted to set your mind at rest.”
“You have my thanks.” Rhodry sighed sharply and looked away. “You were right yesterday. It doesn’t much matter. He’s dead. Where he lies won’t change that.”
“It aches my heart to see you so sad.”
“Truly? I didn’t think you cared much for the likes of us.”
“Only for you and Dalla. The rest come and go like birds, here in the spring, gone in the fall of the year. I can never tell one from the other.”
“Ah. Well, I suppose we’d look that way to you.”
Evandar nodded, glancing round the great hall with a peculiar expression on his face, as if he were judging it and finding it somehow lacking.
“What are you doing?” Rhodry said.
“Making plans.” Evandar flashed him a grin, then wandered over to the hearth. He ran one hand over the carving and peered at the designs. “This is a fine bit of carving, wouldn’t you say?”
“It is, I suppose.”
“Imph.” Evandar had his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth while he examined the tiny bands of interlace down the dragon’s body. “These delicate bits here. Did the masons cut them with a chisel?”
“How would I know?”
“I wonder how many masons it took to do this? Do you know?”
“I don’t. Ye gods, who cares? Will you stop worrying at that blasted stone?”
Evandar straightened up and blinked at him.
“Oh well, lots of time later, I suppose.”
“For what?”
“Studying this hearth. By the by, what about Jill’s books?”
“What about them?”
“She borrowed some of them from a man I know down Bardek way.”
“Then you’d best take them back to him. We should fetch them out of her chamber right now. You don’t want the servants tearing out pages to light fires and suchlike.”
If the ward had seemed empty, Jill’s familiar chamber felt so cold and dead that he wondered if her very possessions somehow knew that their mistress would never come home again. When he and Evandar stepped in, silence seemed to slap them in the face, even though her narrow bed stood unmade, just as if she’d use it again, and a book lay open on the table, where it would catch the light from the window, just as if she were coming back to read it. Her packs and sacks of herbs and other medicines sat in the curve of the wall. She’d probably planned on using them to tend the wounded after the siege was lifted. Rhodry ran one hand over her pillow and felt his throat clench.
“There’s a lot of those books,” Evandar said. “Dalla will want most of them. I’ll just take these three back to Meranaldan.”
“Meranaldan? That’s an elven name! You said he lived in Bardek.”
“I said he lived down Bardek way, which is a very different thing.” Evandar began picking up the books, one at a time, and slung them into the air to disappear just as the harp had. “It’s a riddle.”
Then there was, Rhodry supposed, no arguing with him. He went to the window and leaned onto the sill to look down to the distant cobbles.
“What about the things in this chest?” Evandar said. “Do you think any of them have dweomer?”
“I wouldn’t know if they did. You could ask Dalla.”
Far below, a dog was trotting across the ward. Rhodry watched until it disappeared round the corner of the stables. Behind him, he heard Evandar sigh, then walk over to join him.
“I don’t understand sorrow, Rori, but I can see yours. It’s interesting, truly. Dalla taught me to understand joy, and I think you’re going to teach me sorrow. You and Dalla loved each other once, didn’t you?”
Rhodry spun round to find Evandar smiling, someone who possessed more dweomer than any human being ever could muster, someone who could, for all Rhodry knew, make him disappear as completely and utterly as the books had.
“I wouldn’t call it love, and I doubt if she would either. Does it trouble your heart?”
“Not at all, not at all. That’s not the sorrow I meant. I was just thinking that you and she were two sides of a pair, sorrow and joy.”
“I don’t understand.