The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [122]
“I take it that not everyone’s perfectly contented with life in the islands.”
“I only wish.” Meranaldar smiled briefly. “It’s the young people, of course, who are discontented, and we do have some young people, though not enough. The volunteers who settled Mandra, for instance, and laid out its farms. You’ve noticed, I’m sure, how cheerful they are about all the hard work they do, keeping their town alive.”
“Yes, I have. I was surprised, I’ll admit it.”
“So was I, but I understand them. In the islands we’ve devoted ourselves to honoring the past. You probably can’t imagine how completely we live for the past.”
“Young people would rather have a future.”
“Precisely, which is why our banadar can’t keep your future from arriving, one fine day. And you know, if we ever return to the ruins of the cities, everything will change again—no, that’s too weak a word. Our lives will be utterly recast, Dalla, whether we’re Westfolk or Islanders. Both kinds of life will be transformed utterly, and none of us can tell how that will be, I’ll wager, not even Valandario with her gem-dweomer.”
“You’re right, aren’t you?” She felt suddenly cold, utterly exhausted. “I hate to say it, but you’re right.”
All that evening, Prince Daralanteriel held a council in front of his tent. Men from the alar came to ask questions or to listen to Calonderiel’s plans for the coming war; after a short while, they pledged their support and left again. Princess Carra sat on the ground next to her husband and occasionally made a comment or explained a fine point of the various treaty ties between Cengarn and the Westfolk. Dallandra merely listened. As the most competent healer in camp, she would no doubt have to ride with the war party when the time came, and she was dreading the job—not the danger to herself, but the sights and stench of the wounds, the deaths, and the pain of those she considered her kin.
That night, when Calonderiel escorted her to her tent as usual, she succumbed to her dread enough to avoid being alone for as long as possible. She invited him to sit down in the soft grass and talk.
“You scared poor Meranaldar today,” Dalla said. “He actually thought you were going to hit him.”
“I had thoughts that way.” Cal tossed his head in a defiant gesture. “He gripes my soul, with all his fancy talk about kings and the like. I—” He paused for a smile. “I suppose I’m just turning into a crabby old man.”
“Oh, come now, you’re not old.”
“Of course I am, or getting that way. We were born under the same moon, Dalla, but while you were off with Evandar, I was still here in this world. I must be well over five hundred years old by now, even if you’re practically still a girl.”
“Hardly a girl! But you’re right about the flow of Time.”
He nodded, looking a little away, out to the grasslands where everything they’d known was changing, their old ways slipping away as fast as Time itself. Dalla felt such an odd tangle of emotion that at first she couldn’t put a name to any of it. Sympathy for him, perhaps, and sorrow, a melancholy to match his—but among them, half-hidden by her love of solitude, lay something finer.
“Ah, well,” Cal said at last. “I’d best be getting back.”
“Must you?” Dalla said.
He turned his head sharply to look at her. Unsmiling, for she felt as solemn as a priestess, Dalla held out her hand. When he clasped it, the comfort of his warmth, the touch of another hand on hers, gave her such an intense pleasure that she couldn’t speak. How lonely had she grown, she wondered, that a simple touch could move her so? When he leaned forward to kiss her, she slipped her arms around his neck with a sigh of profound relief.
Yet much later, when she woke in her tent to find him still asleep beside her, she wondered what she’d done. There’s going to be a war, she thought. You fool! Why do you always fall in love with men who are likely to get themselves killed? She could wonder all she wanted, but it was too late to turn aside her feelings for him now.
The Westfolk camps usually woke right