A Time of Exile

As Aderyn watched, the sun set over the river. The forest went dark, disappearing under vast shadows. Yet he could hear the water flowing. With a start he realized he was kneeling in the dew-soaked grass and hearing the hundred water-voices of Loc Tamig. In the west, the moon was setting. He rose and walked back between the pillars, then knelt again before the altar to raise his hands and prayed aloud in thanks to the Lords of Light. As he finished, the pillars disappeared, winking out like blown candles. He withdrew the five-pointed stars into himself and erased the magic circles.

‘And any spirits bound by this ceremony go free! It is over. It is finished.’

From the lake came three hollow claps of thunder in answer. Aderyn stood and stamped three times upon the ground, then fell to his knees, sweating with exhaustion, trembling so hard from the spent forces that he could do nothing but kneel and shake until the first pale grey of dawn cracked in the east and brought him some of his strength back with the sunlight. He gathered up his magical weapons, put them in the sack, then rose to see Nevyn, striding across the grass towards him.

‘Oh, here! Have you been close by all this time?’

‘Did you truly think I’d leave you to face this alone? You’ve done well, lad.’

‘I heard the voices of the Great Ones. I’ll never forget this.’

‘Don’t. It would go hard with you if you did. You’ve had your great vision, but there will be plenty of other little ones. Never forget that, either: you’ve just begun.’

Aderyn slept all that day and through most of the night. When he woke, a few hours before dawn, he knew that the hour had come for him to leave. As he lay in darkness and considered routes west, he was calm, knowing without knowing how he knew that he would see Nevyn again, no doubt many times, over the years ahead. His grief at leaving his beloved master was only another test; he’d had to believe that he would lose Nevyn in order to see if he would ride out even in grief. You’re not an apprentice any more, he thought, not a master, either, mind – but the journeyman is ready to go look for his work.

In the centre of the hut, a fire flared, revealing Nevyn beside it.

‘I figured you were awake,’ the old man said. ‘Shall we have one last meal together before you go?’

‘We will. I know I don’t need to, but I wish I could pour my heart out in thanks for all you’ve done for me.’

‘You were always a nicely-spoken lad. Well, then, in thanks, do one last thing that I charge you: go say farewell to your family before you head west. I took you from them, after all, and I feel I should send you back one last time.’

All of Aderyn’s new confidence dissolved in a sudden stab of anxiety. Nevyn grinned at him as if he knew exactly what was happening.

‘Oh, I’ll do it!’ Aderyn snapped. ‘But I’d hoped to spare them that.’

‘Spare yourself, you mean. And how can you handle the mighty forces of the universe if you can’t even face your own father?’

After they ate, Aderyn saddled his riding horse and loaded up his mule. He had only a few things of his own – a bedroll, a spare shirt, a cloak, his magical weapons, the cooking pots and implements he needed for camping by the edge of the road – but he did have a great store of herbs, roots, salves, and other such medicines, all of which needed to be carefully stowed in the canvas panniers. Nevyn also insisted on dividing their small store of coins and giving him half.

‘You’ve earned it as much as I have. Ride out in the light. We’ll meet again one of these days, and if the need is great, we can scry each other out through the fire.’

‘Well, so we can.’ Aderyn felt a definite lump in his throat. ‘But I’ll miss you anyway.’

As he rode out, leading his mule, Aderyn turned in the saddle and looked back. Nevyn was standing by the door of the hut and watching. He waved once, then turned back inside.

On a day warm with the promise of coming summer, Aderyn reached the village of Blaeddbyr and Lord Maroic’s dun, where his father, Gweran the bard, served the White Wolf clan and where Aderyn had been born and raised. To his surprise, the ward and the familiar buildings seemed much smaller than he’d remembered them. Near the broch tower he dismounted and looked round the dusty ward. A few curious servants stopped to look him over; a couple of the riders came strolling over as if to ask him his business there. All at once he heard a woman’s voice.

‘Ado, Ado, thank the gods!’

It was his mother, Lyssa, laughing and weeping at the same time as she threw herself into his arms. Close to tears himself, Aderyn hugged her tight, then set his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her. She’d grown stout but was still beautiful, her raven-dark hair barely touched with grey, her wide blue eyes bright, her cheeks barely marked with wrinkles.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ Lyssa said. ‘Truly, I was wondering if we would ever see you again. Can you stay with us a while?’

‘I will, if Lord Maroic allows. But, Mam, this is the last visit I’ll ever make. I want you to know that now.’

Lyssa caught her breath sharply, but he knew there would be no tears or recriminations. In a sweep of laughter, the rest of his family came running from the broch and clustered around him – his younger brother Acern, training to take his father’s place as bard, his sister Araena, married to the captain of Marioc’s guard and with a baby of her own, and finally his father, Gweran, as tall and imposing as always with his blond hair heavily laced with silver. In a chattering crowd they escorted him inside, where the ageing Lord Maroic rose from his carved chair and announced that Aderyn was going to take his meat and mead for as long as he wanted to stay. The dailiness, the cheer, the mundaneness of the visit broke over Aderyn like a wave, as if the dweomer were only some dream he’d once had. Being surrounded by his family made him realize why he had a lonely road ahead: the strange lore that mattered to him could never be shared. It set him apart even as he talked and gossiped and shared heavy meal after heavy meal with them all in the long drowsy days of his visit.

Gweran went out of his way to spend time with Aderyn, much more than usual. Aderyn supposed that Lyssa had told him that his first-born son would never ride home again. She’d always been the link between them, keeping them at peace, telling them things that they could never voice themselves. There was good reason for their distance. Looking at his father’s silvery hair, his straight, almost regal, bearing, his rich clothing that he wore like the honour it was, Aderyn found it hard to remember that Gweran was a murderer who had used the very law itself as a weapon. At times he wondered if Gweran even remembered the young rider, Tanyc, whom he’d so cleverly trapped twenty years before. Perhaps he did, because even though their talks rambled through Aderyn’s childhood, every time they came close to Aderyn’s seventh year, when the murder had happened, Gweran would shy away and find a distant topic to discuss. Aderyn was more than willing to let the subject stay closed. Even though he’d only been a child and spoken in all innocence, still he felt he shared his father’s blood guilt. Seven years old or not, he’d blurted out the information that had sent Gweran hunting revenge. ‘Tanyc’s always looking at Mam, Da.’ Even after this lapse of years, he could hear his small boy’s voice pronouncing an unwitting death sentence.

Since he’d done much meditation work to heal that old wound, Aderyn was surprised the way the murder rose to haunt him. Doubtless it came from being in the dun, whose walls had once displayed his private horror. He remembered it vividly: climbing out of bed on a sunny morning, throwing open the shutters at the window, and seeing, just down below his tower room, Tanyc’s body hanging by the neck from the ramparts. He was bound hand and foot, his head flopping like a rag doll’s, and already the ravens were wheeling in the sky. Aderyn could only think there’d been some ghastly accident. He started screaming for his mother, who ran to him, looked out of the window, and in a moment of horrified honesty, blurted out, ‘Your Da’s killed him!’ Later, she tried to recant, but by then, Aderyn knew that his father had goaded the young warrior into drawing a sword against him, a bard, a capital crime under Deverry laws. In his child’s way, he knew his mother had told him the truth that first time.

Aderyn wondered if Lyssa felt she shared their guilt. After all, Gweran and Tanyc had been fighting over her. During the visit, Lyssa said little, merely listening to him and his father talk while she watched Gweran with a patient devotion. Her man was a good husband who still loved her; he was famous, with young disciples clamouring to study with him; his skill kept her in comfort. Perhaps she’d carefully forgotten that he’d murdered a man for her sake. Perhaps.

On the last day of the visit, Aderyn and Lyssa walked down to the Nerraver as they’d so often done when he was a child. The river ran full between lush green banks and sparkled in the sun with little fish-scale ripples of silver. When they sat down for a rest, Lyssa hunted through the grass and picked a few daisies like a young girl.

‘Ado? Do you remember the year of the Great Drought?’

‘I do.’ That was the year of the murder, too. ‘Did you know it was Nevyn’s dweomer that set it right?’

‘Of course. It was one reason I let you go as his apprentice.’

‘And do you regret that decision now?’

‘Well.’ Lyssa looked at her daisies. ‘If a mother is any kind of mother at all, she knows her sons will leave her. I have your sister and her babies nearby.’

‘Well and good, but Mam, truly I’ll miss you.’

Lyssa shrugged, turning the flowers this way and that between her fingers, fighting to keep back tears.

‘Do you think you’ll ever marry on this strange road of yours?’ she said at last.

‘I doubt it. It wouldn’t be much of a life for a woman, living out of a mule’s pack and sleeping by the road.’

‘True enough, but here – don’t tell me the dweomer lets a man carry on with tavern lasses and suchlike.’

‘It doesn’t, but then I’ve got no intentions of doing anything of the sort.’

Lyssa considered him, her head a bit to one side.

‘You don’t care much for women, do you, Ado?’

‘Care? Of course I do. Truly, Mam, I prefer their company and talk to that of men most of the time.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

When he understood, Aderyn felt distinctly squeamish – after all, she was his mother.

‘Well, I don’t, not in that way. But Mam, don’t trouble your heart over it. I don’t care for other lads or suchlike.’

‘That wouldn’t have bothered me. It’s just that I’ve always felt you didn’t have much of a taste for that sort of thing with anyone. Do you feel you can’t trust us women?’

‘And why would you think that?’

‘Oh, you saw a bit too much, maybe, when you were a lad.’

Aderyn hesitated, then decided it was time for the truth.