The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [165]
“And where would they go? Korla did serve my mother well, and she’ll have a place here as long as she lives.”
Raena seemed about to argue, then merely shrugged and turned away.
“Let’s go dine,” Verrarc said.
She hesitated, staring into the fire.
“Please, my love?” Verrarc went on. “Let’s not have the food chill with waiting.”
“Oh very well! Whatever pleases you.”
When he touched her arm, she shook him off and marched out of the room without another word. He followed, planning out apologies.
Evandar returned to his country to find winter creeping back. Although the sunlight remained warm, the trees had lost their leaves again. Great drifts of red and gold lay on the ground or scattered across the grass with each breath of cold wind. Swearing like a silver dagger, he called down the astral Light yet once again and poured its energy into the Lands. He clothed the trees with green and filled the river with fresh water; he brought birds to life and scattered flowers over the green meadows. Everywhere he walked, spring returned—but for how long? he asked himself. Would he have to stay here now to fight against the winter, like a sieged lord trapped in his dun?
He could, he supposed, go consult with Dallandra about this change in the Lands, but the thought of iron and its torments stopped him. All at once he remembered a man who must have been another dweomer-master, someone he’d met by chance during the summer’s wars, when he’d been hunting Alshandra. Off at the far edge of his domain, it was, in a place that he had never created.
Under an aged oak tree that grew beside the silver river, Evandar stripped off his semblance of Deverry clothes and left them in a heap on the grass. He ran naked along the riverside, stretched out his arms, and sprang into the air. As his leap carried him up, he changed into a enormous red hawk. With a screech the hawk flew high and circled to get his bearings. The Lands spread out far below in a long sweep of green meadow, divided in one direction by the boundary forest and in the other, crosswise, direction by the silver river. The landscape stretched into mist and a horizon, where, or so he suspected, other lands had sprung up following the pattern of his own, wild lands with no lord to rule them. In one of them he’d found a mysterious old man, but at the time he’d been too intent upon Alshandra to wonder who he might be.
Evandar set off, flying fast, for the edge of the mist that ran into the green meadow like feather-edged waves upon a shore. Although it hid the land below, he tucked his wings and dove, swooping down to level just under its cover. He was flying over a grey landscape stretching sullen in a grey light. Big boulders pushed up through thin soil, and a constant scour of wind blew dust in little eddies over the flat. At a distance, among patches of green lichen and thin grass, he saw a dead tree, stripped of branches, and swooped down to land nearby.
The old man with the brown skin and ready smile still sat on the rocks where Evandar had left him. He was still cutting the apple with a blunt knife, and each time he sliced off a piece, another grew back to replace it. Yet something had changed. All around him, for a distance of some fifty feet, the barren land had turned green with the beginnings of grass. Near the dead trunk a sapling had sprouted. With a shiver of feathers Evandar changed back into elven form, then created himself a green tunic to wear as well. He sat down on the rock opposite the old man.
“An apple tree?” Evandar said. “That’s new.”
“It is.” The old man looked up and greeted him with a smile. “You’ve returned.”
“I have, at that. I’ve come to ask you a question or two.”
“Ah, have you? Well, I may not answer unless you answer me some of my own.”
“A fair bargain, good sir. I’ve told you why I’m here. Why are you here?”
“To act as a canal.”
Evandar gaped.
“Haven’t you ever been to Bardek?” the old man said, grinning. “The irrigation canals bring water from where it is to where it’s not.”
“And are you bringing water, then?