The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [32]
Verrarc moved to sit down beside her on the bed. She turned into his arms and sobbed, while he stroked her hair and whispered “there, there” over and over again. At last she quieted, but she clung to him.
“Well, now,” Verrarc said, “this charge be best done, then, and mayhap she’ll return to you.”
“So I do hope, though it be not such an easy task. It were about a thing that had been stolen from her, you see, and it does lie now in the midst of her enemies. She did ask me to restore it to her.”
“What might this thing be?”
She looked up, and he could feel her trembling in his arms.
“That I can never tell you, Verro,” she whispered. “I beg you, demand not that from me. My secrets you shall have, when the time be ripe for the telling of them. But it were a blasphemy were I to tell you her secrets.”
For a long moment he studied her face. Was she lying or not? He simply couldn’t tell.
“Well and good then,” Verrarc said at last. “What lies between you and your goddess be not mine to meddle in, anyway.”
Once, long ago, in some immeasurably ancient time, Evandar and his people, Alshandra among them, had dwelt between the stars as beings of pure energy and no form. Somehow, when the Light birthed the vast panoply of worlds, they had been “left behind,” as Evandar put it to himself. How or why, he could no longer remember. Yet, since they had been born to follow the path that all souls must take into the physical plane and the world of matter, they had longed for a solid existence in the beauty of a world. To sate their hunger for life he had built that area of the etheric plane he called the Lands, a perfect illusion of the world of Annwn, with its grassy meadows and rivers, its forests and hills—a shadow world so lovely that they had spurned the real world waiting for them on the physical plane.
He had woven them bodies, too, out of the astral substance, modeling them on the elven race he had come to love. Over the aeons Evandar’s dweomer had grown so immensely powerful that he had for a time thought himself as powerful as a god, until the destruction of the Seven Cities of the Far West had stripped him of his arrogance. No matter how much raw dweomer power he expended, no matter how hard he fought with every sort of weapon, in the end the Hordes had won and destroyed every beauty of the elven world. The lesson lived with him still, that as soon as he left his own lands, he too was a slave of change and death, even though his own being seemed immune to both.
And now Time was pursuing him, it seemed, determined to force the lesson home another time. After untold centuries of a perfect spring, the Lands lay besieged by winter. Evander returned to find his meadows frosted white, his streams frozen, his trees stripped bare, and his people huddled miserably together by the bank of a silver river. When they saw him they cried out.
“Bring back the spring! Give us summer!”
“I did that before, and the winter returned to us anyway. Mayhap we’d best just ride the winter out.”
In a screaming pack they rushed forward and surrounded him, yelling, begging, weeping all at once. Evandar raised his arms and shouted for silence. Slowly the babble died.
“Well and good, then,” Evandar said. “Spring you shall have.”
In his mind he visualized a gigantic silver horn, and in the Lands what Evandar saw appeared for all to see. His folk gasped and moved back to give him room as the horn floated into the air, an apparition the size of a horse and wagon. Through it Evandar called down the astral light. He saw it as a golden surge of raw power that flowed through the horn’s tip and spread out across the meadow-lands and into the river. Suddenly the air turned warm; the grass sprang up green; the trees burst into full leaf. On the riverbank a cloth-of-gold pavilion sprang into existence.
“Let us feast,” Evandar cried out. “Let us have music!”
The crowd laughed, calling out his name and cheering him. Yet once they were settled at their feasting,