Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [73]
When Tudvulc laughed, Rhodry joined him, but mostly for the courtesy of it. As soon as he could, he made a polite escape from the gwerbret and went to find Jill.
She was sitting in the window of their chamber up in Elyc’s broch, turned sideways to look down on the ward. The sight of her there, up so high with naught between her and a fall, made him uncomfortable, even though her position seemed perfectly secure. When he shut the door, she turned her head his way.
“You look so pale,” he said. “What’s so wrong, my love?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Mallona’s death.”
“Oh, here, you’ve seen far worse deaths than that!”
“I know. You’re going to think me daft, but I still feel sorry for her.”
“What? You are daft, then! She would have had you maimed without thinking twice and then killed Babryan, too.”
“Would she? Well, one thing’s sure, if her clumsy charge of thievery had held up, I would have lost a hand.” Jill shuddered, rubbing one wrist with the other palm. “But she wasn’t making that charge in cold blood. I doubt me if she was thinking at all, by then. She was so panicked, seeing her last safety gone. And as for Baba, well, we’ll never know the truth of that.”
“And what about the gatekeeper?”
“You have me there. The poor old fellow!”
“She’s an evil woman, Mallona. Don’t you believe that?”
“Probably so. I can’t really defend her, because, well—” She hesitated for a moment. “When she died, I thought—I saw the oddest sort of vision, as she lay there. The goddess came to claim her, Aranrhodda, I mean.”
“Well, splendid! They can sit round in the Otherlands together and gossip over their pot of herb brew.”
“Don’t! Oh, Rhoddo, hold your tongue! Never mock like that, oh please! It’s so dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” He tossed his head, tried to grin, would rather have spat on the floor. “Oh, come now, what is this? More of your blasted dweomer?”
Jill started to speak, then began to cry in a shudder of tears. Rhodry ran to her, pulled her up, and pulled her into his arms.
“Oh, here, here, I’m sorry, my sweet, please forgive me, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mock you.”
“It’s not me that matters,” she sniveled out. “When it comes to mocking, I mean.”
“Well, then, I don’t mean to mock the Goddess either. My apologies to her as well. It’s just all this talk of all this wretched dweomer! It gets on a man’s nerves, it does.”
“Don’t you think it gets on mine?” She looked up, sniffing back more tears. “Oh, Rhodry, I love you so much. All I ever want is you. Truly.”
He kissed her, savoring her words as much as the feel of her mouth on his.
Yet later, of course, the memory of those words would return, a bitter haunting, when her dweomer finally tore them apart, as indeed the entire memory rose, all those many years later, when he looked into the golden eyes of a shape-changer, and knew against all reason, all possibility, against everything his intellect knew of life and death, that his old enemy Mallona lived again, and that she remembered him as clearly as ever he did her.
That evening, while the dragon slept after feeding upon a doe she’d hunted down, Rhodry sat awake without a fire and stared into the dark, all glowy with moonlight and as bright as a summer twilight to his half-elven sight. Round him on the high plain, the land stretched silent toward the white peaks, glimmering under the stars. He was remembering all the cryptic hints that Jill had, much later in their lives, given him about such matters. She’d suggested more than once that each man or woman lives far more lives than one, that the gate to the Otherlands swings both ways, no matter what the priests may have taught to the faithful.
“No!” And oddly enough, he found himself