The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [157]
Snow lay white on the long meadows. Below him at the foot of the hill, it heaped in drifts against the broken walls and dead hedges of the formal garden he’d once created for Dallandra. Trees stood leafless; dead flowers hung on blackened rosebushes. In the ruin one of his warriors was wandering around, poking at the snow with a long stick.
“Menw!” Evandar called out.
At the sound the warrior tossed the stick away and started up the hill. A tall fellow, with ash-blond hair and bright blue eyes, as he climbed he kept one broad hand on the hilt of his silver sword, as if the snow were an enemy, waiting to pounce.
“My lord!” Menw said. “It gladdens my heart to see you. I’ve been waiting here, hoping you’d come back. We’ve all been frantic, wondering what’s gone wrong.”
“A great deal,” Evandar said. “We’ve swung close enough for Time to invade us.”
“Indeed, my lord? Well, so far it seems to be winning the battle.”
Evandar considered the silver river, where dead water reeds and rushes stood brown along the banks. The water still flowed, but even more sluggishly than usual.
“Where are my people?” Evandar said.
“In the pavilion, waiting for you.”
Over dead grass and snow they walked downhill to the riverbank. Some ways along it stood an enormous pavilion of cloth-of-gold, listing to one side from the weight of snow upon its roof and the drifts piled against its windward side. With cloaks over their silver armor, the men of his warband were standing outside, talking among themselves. They were a beautiful people, Evandar’s folk; their illusions of bodies had been modelled on the elven race, with hair pale as moonlight or bright as the sun to set off their eyes, violet, grey, or gold, and the long delicate curled ears. For the most part they had pale skin, but some had seen the human beings of the far southern isles, and had copied their skin, as dark as fresh-plowed earth under a rain.
“He’s here!” Menw called out.
The warband cheered. As Evandar and Menw hurried over, the women came out of the pavilion, led by the Night Princess, a dark-skinned woman whose hair was a tangle of long black curls. All the women wore dresses of silk in colors as bright as spring itself.
“What are these strange events, my lord?” she said. “What’s turned the world so cold?”
“It’s called snow,” Evandar said. “It falls during the season that men and elves call winter.”
“It’s nasty stuff! Make it go away.”
Whimpering, holding out their hands, the men and women alike clustered round him. The cold was making them suffer, Evandar realized. They’d come to believe in his illusions so completely that they actually felt pain from their effects. He realized something even more important as well, that he’d learned what suffering meant, and so their unhappiness caused him pain. A strange lesson indeed! he thought. And how many more would I learn if I were born into the world of Time?
“Please, my lord, please!” They were begging him. “Bring back the spring.”
Evandar’s power stemmed from the upper astral, but aeons upon aeons ago he’d learned to knot and twine the stuff of the lower astral like a weaver, laying it on the loom of his will to make forms and images. To keep those forms stable he’d also learned how to call down power and ensoul them.
With a cry Evandar threw his arms over his head and saw the light swirling just beyond the grey sky. It seemed to him that he flung the images of nets out from his fingers and trapped the light, pulling it down within his reach. He grabbed huge handfuls of energy and flung them, some into the river, some into the ground, some onto his people, who laughed and caught them like children catching coins flung by a great lord. At once the air grew warmer; the snow melted; the river began to churn and flow with new power. All along the banks the reeds turned glossy green in the light of a pale sun that shone once more from the sky. Evandar