Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [91]
“You’re not in love with the man, are you?”
“What? Of course not. Oh! You know how he feels.”
“I do, and it worries me. I’ll warn you somewhat—your husband is a proud man and a jealous one.”
“I do know that.” Carra forced herself to look at Jill again. “And truly, you don’t need to worry. I don’t love Yraen. Truly.”
Jill raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Well, besides,” Carra went on, “I feel so rotten all the time with the baby and suchlike. And here we are, right in the middle of everyone all day, and I sleep in the women’s hall at night. I mean, even if I did love him, and even if I was the sort of woman who’d betray her husband, where would we go?”
Jill laughed.
“You have a very fine core of common sense,” the dweomermaster said. “I need to remember that, and so do you. Now, you rest here till the other women come back upstairs, then go to the women’s hall. In the meantime, I’ll have Yraen come in. If he says he feels danger in the air or suchlike, listen to him. The reason that I want him to be your guard is that he’s had some experience with the peculiar kinds of magicks we’re facing here.”
“I will.”
“Good. But somewhat’s still wrong. I can tell by the look on your face. Out with it.”
“I just feel so cruel, knowing Yraen loves me. He knows I’ll never love him. And he has to sit on the floor when we eat, and walk behind me everywhere, and sleep on the floor, too, in front of the door to the women’s hall. It’s dreadful.”
“Cruel? Well, you know, I hadn’t thought of that, but I suppose it is painful for him. Huh. Very well. I’ll think about this.”
When Jill left Carra, she gave her sack of supplies to a page to return to her chamber, then went up to the roof. Although she’d just renewed the dweomer seals that noon, she wanted to check them on the off chance that they’d been breached to allow an enemy to attack Carra’s mind. She stood in the middle of the roof, faced east, and raised her inner sight to etheric level.
Over and around her, the golden dome shimmered unbroken with all its seals of the Elemental Kings still safely in place. Jill turned in a slow circle, studying each seal and segment, but she found not the slightest sign of tampering. Yet danger pricked at her like a touch of ice, a deep stab of dweomer-warning. She sat down cross-legged, because she would have to be in a stable position if she should need to go into a trance, then considered the sky beyond the dome. To her etheric sight, it hung silvery and alive, swirling with energy and the darting forms of innumerable Wildfolk. The long beams of light from the setting sun shot through, seemingly as solid as silver rods.
In the midst of all this confusion, it was hard to see, yet Jill felt the warning intensify when she peered out to the east. She waited, on guard, until all at once, she saw a white mist forming high in the sky. She dropped her sight down, found no trace of the mist on the physical, and brought it back up to the etheric in time to see the opalescent mass billowing outward from some other plane, as if an invisible blacksmith were using a bellows to blow smoke through a crack in the wall of sky. Jill went tense and rose to a kneel. Light-shot and pearly, it sank toward the golden dome in a single cloud.
All at once, the cloud cracked open like a tapped egg in a cook’s strong fingers. Out stepped the figure of an enormous woman as calmly as if she were stepping onto solid ground instead of midair. She was dressed like an elven huntress, in tight doeskin trousers and a belted tunic, with a quiver of arrows slung at her hip and a bow held loosely in her hands. Her honey-blond hair hung to her waist in swept-back Horsekin fashion, laced with little charms and thongs, but it had to be Alshandra. Like Evandar and indeed most of their race, she preferred to appear in elven form, mostly because those incorporeal beings had no true form of their own. Here on the etheric, she shimmered in an aureole of silver light.
Jill forced herself to breathe calmly, slowly, to gather power from the Light and to focus