The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [161]
“How would that help remember things?”
“It would be like a skeleton, all those rituals, for us to hang the meat of our lives upon.”
“Ah. I can see that, truly.”
“And besides, we could read and write. Writing is really frozen memory, after all. Once you’ve written a thing down, you don’t have to remember it perfectly.”
“So it is! I’d not thought of it that way before.”
Branna smiled, then let the smile fade and returned to staring off at the meadow. The sun had sunk low in the sky, and long shadows stretched across the grass and the grazing horses. In the east the twilight was beginning to velvet the sky.
“Branna?” Dallandra could stand the silence no longer. “Why are you so frightened?”
Branna hesitated, and for a moment it seemed that she might weep. She arranged an utterly insincere smile instead, a gesture that forcibly reminded Dallandra of her age, a bare fifteen summers, which by elven reckoning meant she was but a little child still.
“I want to be me,” she said at last. “Jill was so strong, so powerful, that I feel like she’s another woman entirely. She’s living inside me or suchlike—I mean, I don’t know how to say this well—but sometimes I feel her trying to take me over. Branna will be the dead one, then, and I don’t want to die.”
“No wonder you’re frightened! You know, this is another reason why so few people remember anything of their past lives.”
“It’s truly terrifying.” She was whispering. “Will I have to give myself up and turn into Jill again?”
“I intend to make sure you don’t.” Dallandra put all the calm reassurance she could summon into her voice. “You can have Jill’s memories without being Jill. Think of them as tales you heard a bard tell, or for that matter, as dreams, just as they’ve come to you. There’s valuable knowledge in them, but tales and dreams is all they are.”
“But you’ll help me?” Branna turned to her with a genuine smile. “I thought you’d—well, it seems truly silly now that I think of it.”
“I doubt very much if it’s silly, whatever it is.”
Branna hesitated, but only briefly. “I thought you’d want me to turn back into Jill. I thought maybe I’d have to if I wanted to know what she used to know.”
“Nah, nah, nah, never think that! Jill was a woman of great power, truly, but she had her faults and blind spots just as we all do. I suspect—and I hope—that she learned enough about them so you won’t need to repeat them. You need to study dweomer as Branna, not as her.”
“Thank the gods!” Branna began to say more, but tears welled and ran. She wiped them roughly away on the sleeve of her dress—a gesture that reminded Dallandra of Jill, not that she would have mentioned it.
“We’ll work through this together,” Dallandra said. “You and Neb both are going to have to come study with me and with another dweomermaster I know, Niffa of Cerr Cawnen. She’s a human being like you, and a former apprentice of mine.”
“Apprentice.” Branna grinned at her. “I like that word. I’ve found my craft and the guild I belong to.” The grin vanished. “But Aunt Galla will miss me.”
“She’ll have Lady Solla for company and, I hope, Adranna as well. We intend to do everything we can to get Adranna and her daughter safely out of that siege.”
“My thanks. There’s poor little Matto, too, but you may not be able to save him. I doubt me if Honelg will let him go, and I’m terrified that our gwerbret will have him killed even if he does leave the dun with the women.”
“What? Whatever for?”
“So he doesn’t grow up to swear vengeance. That’s just the way things go out here on the border.”
“But he’s only—” Dallandra stopped herself from launching into a diatribe against Deverry ways. “That’s very sad. I’ll see what we can do to rescue him.”
“A thousand thanks! I—” Branna broke off speaking and shuddered. “Dalla, someone’s spying on us.”
Dallandra felt the cold then as well, a thin line of ice drawn down her back. She got up and stood staring into the