The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [227]
“Wonderful!” Val said. She was thinking that she’d arrived just in time. “New temple?”
“The town built it this summer. It’s not very splendid yet, but it does have a few statues of gods inside.”
Just at sunset, the town crier went running through the streets. Four ships were pulling into the harbor under oars. As Valandario walked down with Lara and Jin, she felt oddly calm. She’d convinced herself, she realized, that she’d merely dreamt about Aderyn and his messages. Surely they couldn’t be real, surely they could have nothing to do with Jav.
But he arrived in the first boat, a sailor with jet-black hair and golden eyes. Valandario was watching from the beach when she spotted him, leaping onto the wooden pier. A shipmate threw him a rope, which he hitched around the nearest bollard. With the knot secure he walked a few steps down the pier, hooked his thumbs into his leather belt, and stood looking wide-eyed at his new homeland. Or his old homeland, to which he’d returned—when he glanced her way, Valandario recognized him. Jav! she thought. Oh, Jav, do you remember me?
Not, of course, that he would know that he did. Still, he took a few more steps, staring at her, smiling. She climbed the steps up to the pier, and as she walked toward the ship, he came to meet her with the rolling walk of a man who still expected his footing to rise and fall under him.
“Good morrow,” he said in a soft, dark voice. “I seem to have come to the most beautiful spot in the world.”
“I—” Val could feel her face burning, and he laughed.
“Forgive me,” he said. “My name is Braelindar. What’s yours?”
“Valandario Gemscryer.”
“The Wise One!” It was his turn to blush. “Meranaldar told us about—” He dropped to one knee and looked down. “Forgive me, Wise One! I didn’t mean to be so forward. I—”
“It’s perfectly all right. I’m not in the least insulted.”
“You’re sure?” Brae raised his head to look into her eyes.
“Very sure.” She smiled at him. “Oh, do get up! It’s not like I’m royalty or some such thing.”
He did as she asked, then grinned at her. “Things are truly different here,” he said. “They warned us, but I don’t think I realized just how different they’d be. Back in the islands I’d never have dared speak to you, much less—uh, well.”
“Uh, well what?”
He laughed, she joined him, and they stood smiling at each other while the rest of the shipload of immigrants hurried past down the pier to their new homes on the land.
In the Halls of Light, they spoke to him of the work ahead.
They stood in pillars of crystal, pale lavender or mottled silver. They themselves appeared as shafts of light, glinting inside their crystal towers. He himself was but a glimmer of light, a beam of sun, perhaps, glinting on a stream, flickering, uncertain. Yet he heard them.
“They have all been born,” they said in a thousand voices that were yet one voice, “those twisted souls you once failed, they who are called changelings. They have left behind the world of images, and they must learn now to live in the world of flesh, as children of the Westfolk, Children of Air. It is your task to help them learn. Will you remember?”
In the Halls of Light there are no lies.
“I will try to remember,” he said. “I will strive to remember.”
“You will be helped to remember. Aderyn, your name was once. You will learn to fly again.”
In the midst of the light a lack of light appeared, a shapeless thing, not a true darkness, for there can be no darkness in the Halls of Light, but still, it opened. He stepped to its edge. Among the crystal pillars a tiny flame of gold burned, quivering. He could hear its cry of pain.
“You’ll follow me, Evandar,” he said. “In due time you will follow me, and I shall father you a body. Dallandra’s child will be your mother, and she will cherish you. They have promised.”
“So we have,” they said. “Farewell and remember!”
He took one more step and fell, soaring, spiraling down and down through indigo light until he floated above a pair of golden auras that marked elven bodies. He recognized Valandario