The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [96]
Morwen looked away. The setting sun gilded the stream among the grey rocks. In the thick-growing rushes frogs were croaking their evening song.
‘Please, Morri?’ Loddlaen’s voiced dropped to a whisper. ‘You’re the only real friend I’ve got, you know. Don’t you remember telling me how things got taken away from you? Let’s not let our friendship get snatched away from us.’
He’d said the perfect thing to melt her resolve. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said. ‘But if somewhat like this happens again, you’ll ask first, won’t you? I’ll help you if you need me to.’
‘Then I will. I promise.’
She turned back to find him watching her, his eyes as large and solemn as a child’s.
‘Besides,’ Loddlaen said. ‘Don’t you want to go on with your lessons?’
‘I do, truly. I’ve missed them dreadfully.’
‘Them but not me?’
He reminded her so much of a small boy at that moment that Morwen had to smile. ‘You, as well,’ she said.
He grinned at her. ‘Here, let me carry that jug for you. It’s heavy when it’s full.’
‘So it is. My thanks. When it’s dark, and I’ve got Ebañy to sleep, shall I come to your tent?’
‘Please, and we’ll have one of our talks.’
Aderyn and Nevyn both felt Valandario’s absence, but they continued to work with the dweomer scroll. After they’d studied it for some weeks, Aderyn began to wonder about its place in the overall dweomer system developed in the ancient elven cities.
‘The language of the calls intrigues me,’ Aderyn said. ‘Some of the words have an oddly Bardekian flavour to me, but others are just simply odd.’
‘They are that, for certain!’ Nevyn said. ‘I wonder if it’s an artificial language.’
‘It could well be. Some of the old tales that have come down from the Great Burning mention sages who supposedly could talk in a great many strange tongues. Unfortunately, no one remembers exactly what they were.’
‘Well, if the names were invented, they’d be hard to remember, I suppose.’
‘Good point. And of course, they had that wretched obsession with secrecy.’ With a sigh, Aderyn stood up, stretching. ‘Shall we go back to camp?’
Nevyn got up and joined him. Twilight was just beginning to darken the sunset sky, and a soft wind made the tall grass bow down before it. When Nevyn looked towards the camp, he could see fires glowing between the tents and hear music as the Westfolk sang at their evening’s work.
‘Addo,’ Nevyn said, ‘before we go back, we’ve got to have a talk.’
‘I suppose you mean about my son?’ Aderyn said. ‘I’ve noticed the way you look at him, as if you’re studying him like a disease.’
‘Not like a disease. I worry about the lad.’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Aderyn crossed his arms over his chest and turned to face his old master.
‘Actually, I do like the lad,’ Nevyn began. ‘Besides, it’s not a question of like or dislike. It’s a question of—’
Aderyn went straight on as if he’d not heard Nevyn’s words. ‘We all have our faults, don’t we? But I’m his father, and fathers do forgive their children. Well, the good ones do.’
‘I’m not asking you to condemn him. Quite the opposite. I’m asking you to stop teaching him dweomer. Or trying to.’
‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘That he’s learned what he’s going to learn, that’s all. He doesn’t truly want it, for one thing. He wants to please you—that’s the only reason he keeps trying.’
‘He just tires easily. You said that yourself when we were first working with the scroll. He’s done better at other times.’
‘Mayhap, but he’s got a very slender dweomer gift. The dry lore is one thing—anyone can learn that—but actually working dweomer is very different.’
‘Oh come now! He can form the body of light and travel on the etheric—quite easily in fact. If that’s not working dweomer, I don’t know what is.’
‘Certainly, but what does he have to balance it? Of course he can split the levels of his being. That’s the result of what those wretched Guardians did to his mother when she was pregnant. I’ve been studying the lad. Open your sight! You can see his etheric double hanging around him like an ill-fitting cloak. His various bodies