The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [150]
Yet someone or something shared the chamber with him. All at once he felt a presence, a trembling of life within the stone space. The presence gathered strength, glittered like crystal in a corner, swelled and grew, turned into a vaguely female form, huge and menacing. When she raised cloaked arms like huge wings, he saw her long hair, streaming down black as stone over her shoulders and down her back. Her face, shadowed by a hood, he could not see at all.
“Where is she?” The thought came to him in a silky whisper.
“She’s gone to the Light, where she belongs.”
The presence considered him briefly, then vanished. Nevyn shuddered in what he could later admit was fear. He slid down the silver cord until he hovered just above his body, then let himself fall back. Another clicking sound, a long wheeze of breath, and he was back.
“It is over!” Nevyn slapped one hand hard on the mattress beside him. “May she find the Light!”
Not so much as a crack of the Light’s earthly counterpart gleamed around the hide over the window. It was late, then. He sat up, stretching his cramped muscles, wondering over the presence. A god form, perhaps? It inspired the same kind of cold awe as one of those created embodiments of raw power. And yet it seemed too personal, too individually concerned with Merodda to be a goddess. With a shrug he got up, but as he was hurrying across the ward to Lilli’s refuge, he was thinking about the presence in black. The only lore he could connect with her was what Aderyn had told him about the Guardians, those strange beings attached to the elven group-soul. But what would one of them be doing in Dun Deverry? He cast that explanation aside, which in the long wheel of events proved to be most unfortunate.
By the light of a candle lantern Branoic was standing guard, leaning against Lilli’s door. At the sight of Nevyn he straightened up, all tense expectation.
“Does Lilli fare well?” Nevyn said.
“As far as I know, my lord.” Branoic spun around and pulled open the door.
Lilli nearly fell into the corridor. She managed a laugh.
“I was leaning against it,” she said. “I wanted to stay right by it, you see, so Branoic would hear me if I screamed.”
“Very wise,” Nevyn said. “But it’s over. She’s well and truly dead this time.”
Lilli let out her breath in a long raspy sigh.
“Thank the Goddess,” she whispered. “And a thousand thanks to you, Nevyn.”
“Oddly enough, I did it for her sake as well as yours. But be that as it may, she’ll never trouble you or any other soul again.”
Yet he knew that even as he spoke the truth, he was lying, that while Merodda would never trouble anyone in this life, she would have other lives in which to work her enemies harm. No doubt she would remember them all, even in her new bodies and new lives. Now that she’d learned to welcome evil, evil would seek her out. He hoped and prayed that she would renounce it when it presented itself to her, but he had no way of knowing if she would or not. One thing only he could be sure of: sooner or later in the long skein of lives, her thread would tangle round Lilli’s once again.
PART THREE
The
North Country
WINTER 1117
Sleep and Trance are Lord Death’s twin sisters. A master of the dweomer befriends all three.
—The Secret Book of
Cadwallon the Druid
Much to Niffa’s surprise, Verrarc and Raena came to her wedding. By whining and begging and generally clamping on to the subject like a stubborn ferret, she’d talked her mother into allowing the wedding early, on the first day of the new year, which Deverry folk call “Samaen.” During their long years of slavery, the people of the Rhiddaer had adopted the holiday and brought it with them to their new home. Although they considered the eve as ill-omened as we do in Deverry, they judged the first day of the new year itself a splendid time for starting something new.
When the sun hung nearly to the horizon, Niffa and her family trudged up the hill to the assembly ground near the peak of Citadel. In front of the stone council hall, which sported a colonnade