A Time of Exile

Rhodry merely shrugged, wondering if the warning were coming too late.

On the morrow morn they splashed across Y Brog and left the settled lands behind. All that day they rode through fallow grasslands, dotted here and there with copses or crossed with tiny streamlets; that night, they camped in green emptiness. Yet early on the next day, Rhodry saw rising on the horizon a broken tower, as lonely in the endless grass as a cairn marking a warrior’s grave – which, he supposed, it might well have been.

‘Did this dun fall to the sword?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ Jill said. ‘Calonderiel might know.’

The elf in question, an old friend and a warleader among his people, was waiting for them near the empty gap in the outer walls that once had held wooden gates. They saw his horse first, a splendid golden gelding with a silvery mane and tail, tethered at his leisure out in the grass. Calonderiel himself was pacing idly back and forth in the ward, where grass grew round the last few cobbles and a profusion of ivy was sieging the broch itself. A tall man but slender, as most of his people were, the war-leader had dark purple eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, moonbeam pale hair, and, of course, ears as long and delicately pointed as a sea-shell.

‘So there you are!’ he sang out in Deverrian. ‘I thought Salamander had gone and got you all lost.’

‘Spare me the implied insults, if you please.’ Salamander made him a sketch of a bow. ‘You must have been talking with my father, if you’d think so ill of me. Which reminds me. Where is the esteemed parent? I thought he’d be eager for a first look at this other son of his.’

‘No doubt he will, when he finds out you’ve ridden west.’ Calonderiel turned to Rhodry. ‘My apologies, but Devaberiel’s gone off north somewhere with one of the alarli. I’ve got my men out riding, passing the word along and looking for him. He’ll turn up.’

‘Blast and curse it all!’ Jill got in before Rhodry could say a word. ‘I wanted to speak with him before I rode on, and now I’ll have to sit around here and wait.’

‘Impatient, isn’t she?’ Calonderiel was grinning. ‘You should be used to elven ways by now, Jill. Things happen when they happen, and not a moment before.’

‘Well,’ Rhodry said. ‘I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed myself.’

‘And you must admit, Cal,’ Salamander broke in, ‘that my father can take his sweet time about things. He calls his progresses stately or measured; I call them dilatory, tardy, lackadaisical, or just plain slow.’

‘Well, you’ve got a point.’ The warleader glanced Jill’s way. ‘Aderyn’s at the encampment.’

‘That’ll make the waiting easier, truly. How far away is everybody?’

Not very far at all, as it turned out. A couple of miles to the west the camp sprawled along a stream: some twenty brightly coloured round tents, a vast herd of horses, a small flock of sheep, a neat stack of travois poles, all scattered through the tall grass in a tidy sort of confusion. As they rode up, a rush of children and dogs came yelling and yapping to meet them; about thirty adults strolled more slowly after.

Over the years Rhodry had picked up a fair amount of Elvish, more than enough to greet everyone and to understand the various speeches of welcome that came his way. He smiled and bowed and repeated names that he forgot a moment later. When Calonderiel insisted that the two brothers share his tent, there were plenty of willing hands to carry their gear and to take their horses. Skins of mead and bowls of food appeared as the camp settled in around the main fire for a celebration. Everyone wanted to meet Devaberiel’s son and tell him about the major feast planned for the evening, too. In all the confusion it was some hours before Rhodry realized that he’d lost track of Jill.

About half a mile away from the main camp, Aderyn’s weathered tent stood alone near a stand of willows at the stream edge. It was mercifully quiet there, except for the trill of birds in the willows. Jill tethered her horse out with Aderyn’s small herd, then carried her gear round to the tent-flap. Just as she was wondering whether to call out a greeting, the flap rustled open, and Aderyn’s new apprentice, a pale-eyed young elf named Gavantar, crawled out. He was even more slender than most of his people, and pale-haired, too, so that Jill found herself thinking of him as more a spirit than a man. But his hands were strong enough as he snatched her burdens from her.

‘Let me carry that gear for you, O Wise One of the East. You might have let me tend your horse.’

‘I’m not some withered old woman, lad, not yet, anyway. Is your master here?’

‘Of course, and waiting for you.’

Although the day was warm, the tent was dim and cool, the air sparkling from the rush and bustle of elemental spirits that always surrounded Aderyn. Wildfolk crouched or lounged all over the tent, sprawling on the floor, clinging to the walls, perching on the many-coloured tentbags hanging from the poles. A small fire smouldered under the smoke-hole in the centre, and the dweomerman himself was sitting cross-legged nearby on a pile of leather cushions. He was a small man, fully human, with enormous dark eyes in his slender, wrinkled face and dead-white hair which swept up from his forehead in two peaks like the horns of an owl. When he saw Jill he grinned in honest delight and rose to catch her hands in his.

‘Ah, it’s good to see you in the actual flesh! Come sit down. Can I offer you some mead?’

‘None for me, thanks. I don’t have your head for the stuff. I wouldn’t mind a cup of that spiced honey-water the Westfolk make, though.’

The apprentice put the saddle-bags down and hurried out again, heading for the main camp to fetch a skin of the drink in question. Aderyn and Jill sat down, facing each other, and she began pulling some cloth-wrapped bundles out of her gear. A gaggle of gnomes clustered round to watch, including the small grey fellow that followed Jill everywhere.

‘Nevyn wanted you to have these books.’ She handed Aderyn a pair of ancient folios with crumbling leather bindings. ‘Though what you’re going to do with a matched set of Prince Mael’s writings, I don’t know.’

‘Lug them around with all due honour and respect, I suppose. Actually, these particular volumes mean somewhat to me. The man who gave them to Nevyn was someone I much admired.’ He ran slender fingers over the stamped decorations, flecked here and there with the remains of gold leaf, a roundel enclosing a pair of grappling badgers, and under it a motto: we hold on. ‘But fancy him remembering that, after all these years! I’m quite surprised that I do, actually.’

‘And here’s a trinket from Brin Toraedic. He said to tell you that since it was older than both of you put together, it was a marvel indeed.’

Aderyn laughed and held up the golden cup, made of beaten metal and decorated with a ridged pattern utterly unlike any made by human or elf. Jill found herself studying the old man; he seemed no older, no weaker than he ever had, but still she worried. He picked up her thought.

‘My time won’t be for a little while yet. I have Gavantar to train, and he’s just begun his studies.’

‘Ah. I just … well, wondered.’

‘Things have been hard for you with Nevyn gone.’ It was not a question.

‘They have. It’s not just the missing of him, though that’s bad enough. I feel so wretchedly inadequate, little more than an apprentice myself, truly, and not fit to be the Master of the Aethyr.’

‘Oh, here, we all go through that! You’ll grow into the job. It’s like becoming captain of a warband, I suppose. All that responsibility at first – why, it must overwhelm a man, thinking of all those lives that depend on his decisions.’

‘True spoken. But I’ve got Nevyn’s work to finish. I keep feeling that I’ve absolutely got to do it right for his sake.’

‘Wait a moment now! It’s not his work, any more than it’s your work. Don’t let that kind of vanity enter in, or you’ll find yourself worrying indeed. It’s all our work, and the work and will of the Great Ones. Think of it as an enormous tapestry. We each weave a little piece, what small amount we’re capable of, then hand the grand design on to the next worker. No one soul could possibly finish the entire thing by himself.’

‘You’re right enough, aren’t you?’ Jill smiled, feeling her dark mood lift. ‘I’ll drink to that! Here comes your Gavantar now.’

Carrying a leather bottle, dripping wet and smelling of Bardek cinnamon and cloves, Gavantar ducked through the flap and joined them. Once the drink was poured round, he sat down by the door on guard, and with a shy duck of his head refused to move closer even when Aderyn invited him. He was new to the dweomer, Jill supposed, and still in awe of what he considered strange and mighty powers. Soon enough, when he came to see how natural in their way Aderyn’s magicks were, he would begin to feel at ease.

‘Is Rhodry still with Calonderiel?’ she asked.

‘He is, O Wise One. The whole camp wants to meet him.’

‘Good. Then he’ll stay out of trouble for a few hours, anyway.’ She turned back to Aderyn. ‘Rhodry is one of the things that’s vexing me.’

‘Ah. He’s still in love with you?’

‘That, too, I suppose, but that’s not the important thing. I wonder what’s going to happen to him now, mostly. No, I worry about him, worry badly. We’ve snatched him away from everything he knows and loves, which is harsh enough, and then beyond that, there’s his Wyrd. For so long his whole life was ruled by that prophecy, and now he’s fulfilled it, and well, what’s going to become of him?’

‘Prophecy?’

‘The one Nevyn received all those years ago. Don’t you remember it? Rhodry’s Wyrd is Eldidd’s Wyrd, it ran.’

‘Oh, that! Of course – he became gwerbret in the nick of time, didn’t he?’

‘You seem to take it all blasted lightly, but so he did. Look, there would have been a long and ghastly war in Eldidd if Rhodry hadn’t been there to inherit the rhan.’

Aderyn merely nodded. Jill supposed that he was so old, and had seen so many wars, that one more conflict would have meant nothing to him.

‘And then there’s the rose ring, too,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been vexing myself about that bit of jewellery for months now. That’s why I want to talk to Devaberiel, you see, to ask him about it and the strange being who gave it to him. I’ll wager he wasn’t an ordinary elf.’

‘You’re right about that.’ Aderyn’s voice had gone tense and strange. ‘I’ve got my own ideas about who that mysterious benefactor was.’

‘I want to hear them. And what about that wretched inscription? If we knew what it meant, we might be able to unravel the entire mystery.’