Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [168]
“Leave me! Take those squalling strings and go!” With little shrieks of fear they clutched their harps to their chests and fled, rushing out of the pavilion. Evandar began to pace back and forth. What was taking Dallandra so much time? Normally she felt his moods and rushed to his side whenever he wanted her. Why was she dallying in the world of men? She had promised him a quick return, and he wanted a quick return.
Evandar strode outside to the long green lawns. These normally soothed him; he’d modeled them upon the royal taste in gardens from the long-dead elven city of Rinbaladelan, and they reminded him of happier times. Even there, however, he was distracted, in this case by a sudden rush of wings and the shrieking of birds. He looked up to see a brilliantly colored flock wheeling toward the pavilion, cockatoos, macaws, parrots with emerald wings. As they settled in the grass they transformed themselves into women,dressed in flowing silk. Shrieking and calling out, the night princess and her ladies rushed across the grass.
“Here, here, what’s all this?” Evandar snapped. ‘What’s so wrong?”
“We saw her, we saw her,” they all cried at once. “And then the men came, all hairy and cruel, with iron strapped to their bodies, and they led horses, horses, stinking of iron.”
“Saw whom?”
“Alshandra, Alshandra.”
They shrieked, dancing round and gabbling until Evandar yelled them into silence. The night princess composed herself and curtsied.
“My lord,” she said, calm at last. “As we danced among the lilacs we heard a great rumbling, as if the earth would split open. We turned ourselves feathered and flew up into the sky just as an army began to ride out of the mist. At their head flew a huge raven. When it saw us, it screeched and attacked, pecking and striking, till we flew away. But we circled back, because the army was like a river, flowing and flowing, marching and marching, and they marched and led their horses for ever so long a time, and so we saw them after the raven had flown away.”
“These were not my brother’s men?”
“No, my lord, because they carried iron. Nor were they men or elves, but ugly and hairy and huge, with strange designs bitten into the skin on their faces. Never have we seen the like. Their horses too were huge and ponderous, with fringed hooves.”
“Are they still here, violating our borders, raping my lands with their very passing?”
“They are not, my lord, for they marched into another mist and were gone.”
Evandar stood stunned for a long moment. He had absolutely no idea what all this might mean.
“Ye gods,” he snapped. “Just when I need her more than ever, she’s gone! Dallas I mean, off frivoling her time away in the lands of men!”
“She’s not there, my lord. We saw her, just before the army marched.”
“What? Where?”
“Here, my lord.” The night princess waved a slender dark arm in the vague direction of the hill and Dalla’s garden. “She said she was waiting for you.”
For a second time Evandar found himself speechless. A few at a time the women wandered away, flickering and re-forming, melding and separating out again, as they drifted into the pavilion nearby. Only the night princess remained whole and steady, waiting for his answer. Evandar raised his hand and summoned his silver horn.
“One more thing before we ride,” he said to the night princess. “This raven. Are you sure it hid Alshandra? Never has she taken that form before.”
“Then I know not who it was. And another strange thing, my lord. So much iron did these monsters carry that the Lands turned all strange and glassy round them, and the trees did seem to burn and the grass to melt away, but the raven flew with them and above them, and never a cry of pain did it give.”
“Not Alshandra, then. By those hells men speak of! I wonder if my hag of a wife has gone and worked Dallandra harm? I think me I’d best look into this. At the lilacs, you say? Well and good, then.”
He plucked the horn from the air