The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [33]
“Perhaps that. Perhaps to cut it off from our folk, as well, or to cut us off from Deverry, or Deverry off from us. I know not, but I surmise much, none of it pleasant. I was wondering if any of our people have stumbled across this whatever it is, if indeed it exists, or if they’ve heard rumors, hints, clues, or even suspicions.”
“I’ll find out. We’re on our way to the alardan for the summer festival. I’m riding with the prince’s alar, and of course Calonderiel and his archers are, too.”
“Excellent! Cal’s just the man we need. I’d hoped to come west for the festival, but I think I’d better keep an eye on things here.”
“Yes, do. How have you been faring? Your mind feels steady to me, but after what you’ve been through—”
“No sign of a recurrence, I assure you, oh princess of powers perilous.”
“Good. Let me know at the first sign of any trouble.” With a smile for a farewell, Dallandra broke the link between them.
Salamander stayed in the window and considered the view without truly registering it. I used to call Jill the princess of powers perilous, he thought. Back before I went mad, back before I lost everything I loved, there in Bardek.
No matter how carefully he thought about his return to Deverry from the southern islands, some forty years ago, he could never remember it. There had been a ship, of course—how else could he have crossed the ocean between Bardek and Deverry? How he had gotten on that ship, and why he’d left his wife and children behind, had fallen out of his memory like apples falling through a rotted sack. The madness, he thought. With my mind all to pieces like that, it’s a wonder I can remember anything. He could bring up a few memory-images of landing in Eldidd, where Dallandra had been waiting to take him into her care.
Curing his madness had given Dallandra a hard ten years’ work. Once his mind began healing, Salamander had devoted several years to his youngest son, who suffered from mysterious troubles, before he’d returned to Bardek. Once there, he had searched all over the islands for a good long while before he finally found the troupe of traveling acrobats led by his eldest son, a grown man by then with children of his own. Kwinto had given his truant father a cold enough welcome, too.
“Too late,” Salamander said aloud. “Too late to see Marka again, too late to prove to her that I kept my promise. I did come back, my love, truly I did.”
He could see her in his mind so clearly, and as always, he remembered her as a slender young woman, laughing, smiling, tossing her head of curls as she ran to greet him—so clearly that it seemed he could reach out and take her hand, but only empty air returned his grasp. She’s dead, he reminded himself. She died before you found them. He leaned his head back against the cold stone and wept.
Dallandra smothered her little fire, then left her tent, which stood on the edge of the encampment. When she turned toward the sea, she could see the tidy whitewashed buildings of the new town, Linalaven mandra, a name that meant “sorrow but new hope,” though most often its inhabitants merely called it Mandra, “hope.” From her vantage point, its whitewashed square buildings seemed as pale as ghosts against the nighttime sea. Even though returning refugees from the Southern Isles had built the town over twenty years ago, it still amazed her every time she saw it: a proper town, sheltering not Deverry men but her own folk, with a town square and straight streets, trees and gardens, a town fountain and a holy spring. Beyond them, out of her immediate sight, lay farms. All her long life she’d known only wild sea grass in this spot, sea grass and rock and the winter waves that crashed and boomed