The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [160]
Raena sat down on the bed, slid half under the covers, and turned when he turned so that she could see his back. He could feel her fingers, soft and warm, tracing out old scars.
“I did wonder what gave you those,” she said. “And where does Dera come into this tale?”
“Everyone in this cursed town knew what my da did to me, and not one person would shelter me when he was in his rages nor would they speak out. Except Dera. She may be but a ratcatcher, but she does have a noble soul and the courage of one of her weasels, too. When I ran to her she took me into her house, and she would not let my father in her door, no matter how he raged and swore. And then in the public streets, whenever her path crossed his, she would denounce him, and she would point him out to all the passersby and say what a shameful thing it was, that a man should beat a boy who was not half his size. She shamed them all into shaming him, and the beatings stopped.”
Her hands came to rest on his shoulders.
“Well, then,” she said at last. “I’ll not be harming the lass, not one hair on her head, Verro. I do promise you that. And truly, I do wonder somewhat. Mayhap I could make a friend of her, like, and then see if these gifts of hers do fit her to serve the gods.”
“My thanks.” He turned to face her, twisting around under the blankets. “I’ll not have Dera brought grief.”
“None from me, I do swear it.”
She sealed her oath with a kiss, and then another. He caught her by the shoulders and pressed her down into the bed, then took her the way she liked—roughly—while she pumped and squealed under him.
In the upper astral, what Evandar imagined became real, though it lasted but a brief span of time. Here in the physical world, what he imagined took on no existence at all.
“A riddle,” he told himself. “One of the greatest riddles yet.”
He was standing on the top of a stone wall, crusted with moss and ivy, that was all that remained of the Palace of the Zodiac in Rinbaladelan, the City of the Moon. Over the thousand years or so since the city had fallen, the surrounding forests had moved to take it back. From his perch Evandar looked out on green: trees stood in the middle of fragments of cracked pavement, vines and mosses covered the walls, shrubs and grasses burgeoned in the courtyards. Just below him a pair of black ravens chased each other and shrieked as if they were mocking him. He could remember this part of the city clearly enough to picture it in his mind, but in his mind the picture remained, a memory only and impotent. When he tried to invoke the astral light, none came.
Dallandra had tried to explain to him the difference between the world of men and elves and his own bright country. Although her words made sense when he was listening to her, when he left her they melted away as fast as his memory-pictures. He simply did not understand what she meant by fine words such as matter or the inertia of forms. Although he’d travelled much in this world of time and stone, never had he lived here, never had he worn real flesh and felt himself bound by the passing of years.
“And I never will! Better to fade away than that!”
But for the first time in the four hundred years that he’d been mulling these questions, his proud boast sounded empty to him. What would it be like to fade away, to cease to exist, to die? Not to die and be reborn, endlessly dragging himself through the muck and pain of the world of Time, but to simply die, once and for all, to fade away like one of his memory-pictures but with no one to recall him to mind? He understood even less about this final death than he did about Dallandra’s talk of things astral and material. He did know that thinking about fading away frightened him.
Evandar dropped down from the top of the wall and landed in the weed-choked courtyard below. If he remembered