A Time of Omens (27 page)

“The border lies secure!” Evandar cried out. “Go then to your music and the feast, but come again when I call.”

Behind him the host of soldiers blew away, like dead leaves swirling in an autumn wind. He swung down from his horse, helped Dallandra dismount, then turned the reins of their horses over to the same boy, who appeared as silently as before. Dallandra watched him lead them away round the pavilion and wondered aloud if there they would disappear.

“No, they’ll return to their pastures, from whence we stole them.” He was grinning. “Are you weary, my love? Shall we join the feast?”

“I’d rather you explained a few things to me.”

“If a riddle has an answer, it’s a riddle no more.”

Simply because she was indeed very tired, she dropped the subject and let him lead her into the pavilion. Their seats, couches on which they could semirecline, stood at the head of the hall. She sank gratefully onto the soft cushions and accepted a golden goblet of mead from a page. As always, the mead and the bread seemed real to her fingers and her taste, solid and so delicious that she realized how hungry she was after the long ride. While they ate, various members of the Host would come to Evandar and talk in low voices, reporting things they’d seen, apparently. Harpers played nearby in long, sad harmonies, while young voices sang, until at last, she slept.

The Westlands,
Autumn, 1112

Out on the high plains the elven leader with the most authority—and the largest warband for that matter—was Calonderiel, Banadar of the Eastern Border, and yet, as Deverry men reckoned such things, his claim to power rested on an oddly weak foundation. He was descended from nobody in particular and related to no one much—just the son of a horse herder who was the son of a weaver who was the son of a prosperous farmer back in the old days when the elves lived settled lives in their own kingdom in the far west. No one had ever accused his family of having any connection whatsoever to the noble-born or the renowned. He was, of course, the best archer, the shrewdest tactician, and one of the most respected leaders of men that the high plains had ever seen, and those things, among the People, outweighed any questions of kinship. Despite that, Rhodry ap Devaberiel was continually amazed that
Calonderiel would hold such easy authority without a grumble from anyone. He himself was second in command of the banadar’s warband, and since he’d sworn to serve him, he personally would never have argued with a single order or decision his leader made. It was just that, at odd moments, he puzzled about it, or even, Calonderiel being the kind of man he was, felt he could wonder about it aloud.

“And now this Aledeldar shows up for the autumn meeting,” Rhodry remarked. “What if he and his son decide to ride with us? Doesn’t it trouble you?”

“Why should it?” Calonderiel looked up in surprise. “Something wrong with him?”

“Not as far as I can see. It’s just that he’s the king, isn’t he? Well, the only one you people—we, I mean—have. There’s bound to be trouble over it. One wagon but two teamsters makes for a rough journey.”

Calonderiel merely laughed. It was late in the evening, and wrapped in woolen cloaks, they were sitting together in front of the banadar’s enormous tent. Among the other tents (and there were over two hundred of them), everything was dark and silent, broken only by the occasional bark of a dog or cry of a hungry baby, hushed as fast as the echo died.

“Well, it won’t be so funny when he starts countermanding your orders.”

“Rhodry, you don’t understand us still, do you? How long have you lived with us now? Thirteen, fourteen years? Well, think back over it. You’ve heard plenty of people mention Del and his son, haven’t you? And how? Exactly like they’d mention anyone else they know. You have more real power than he does, as a matter of fact. You’re my second, and the men all respect you, and so the People would take your orders long before they’d take his. Nothing can take his position away from Del, mind. He’s Halaberiel’s son, and Halaberiel was Berenaladar’s, and Berenaladar was the son of Ranadar, King of the High Mountain, and that’s that. But since the wolves and the owls and the weeds are running his kingdom these days, well, by the Dark Sun herself! He’s got no call to be giving himself airs over it.”

Baffled, Rhodry shook his head. Calonderiel was right,
he supposed. He didn’t understand the People, and at times like these, he doubted if he ever would.

On the morrow, with the autumn meeting or alardan as it was called in full swing, his loneliness seemed to double itself. Since it was the last festival before the long trip south to the winter camps, it was a big one. Whenever a new traveling group arrived, some ten families and their horses and sheep, everyone rushed to greet old friends, not seen since the height of summer, and to help them unpack and settle in. Time to visit was short; the herds would crop the available grazing down fast, and the meeting would disperse, Rhodry wandered through the brightly painted tents by himself, saying the occasional hello or exchanging smiles and nods with someone whom he recognized. Wildfolk swarmed everywhere, grinning and gaping, dashing back and forth, pulling dogs’ tails and children’s hair, then suddenly vanishing only to stream back into manifestation a few feet away. Among the People themselves, everyone was rushing around, getting ready for the enormous feast that evening. Here and there he found groups of musicians, tuning their instruments together and squabbling over what to play; here and there cooks were drawing and dressing slaughtered iambs or pooling precious hoards of Bardek spices. Children ran to and fro, bringing twigs and scraps of bark or baskets of dried dung to the cooking fires that were, as always on the grasslands, short of fuel.

At one of the fires Rhodry found Enabrilia, sitting on a wooden chest, her two grandsons fighting at her feet over a pair of pottery horses. She looked tired, that morning, and scattered through her golden hair shone an obvious sprinkling of gray. When Rhodry hunkered down next to her, she smiled at him, then went back to peeling roots with a small knife.

“The warband’s always in the way when there’s work to be done,” she remarked, but pleasantly. “Hanging round asking when the food’s going to be cooked and distracting the girls who are supposed to be working. You’re all the same, you know.”

“Well, that’s true enough. I thought I’d come distract you.”

“Oh, get along with you! I’m old enough to be your
grandmother—well, three times over, no doubt, and I feel every one of my years this morning, I tell you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Oldana’s having one of her bad turns again.” She paused with a significant look at the boys, all ears at the mention of their mother, who had been ill for months.

“Ah. I see.”

Back in Eldidd, where he’d been a great lord and one of the High King’s personal friends, Rhodry would never have given the two children, one barely out of diapers, a thought. Since he was out on the grasslands now, he held out his arms to the younger one, Faren, who toddled over and laid both of his tiny hands into one of Rhodry’s callused and weather-beaten palms.

“Let’s go for a walk and let your gramma cook in peace. Val, are you going to come with us?”

Val shook his head no and grabbed both horses with a grin of triumph. Carrying Faren, Rhodry went back to his aimless wandering. In the center of camp, near the ritual fire that burned at the heart of every alardan, he found Calonderiel talking with the king and his young son, who at twenty-six was still a child by elven standards. They looked too much alike to be anything but father and son, with raven-dark hair yet pale gray eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s to reveal a darker lavender, and they were slender even for men of the People. Rhodry was honestly shocked to see how deferentially the two of them treated the banadar, nodding thoughtfully at his remarks, laughing at his little jokes in exactly the same way as the other men did. When Rhodry joined them, both of them greeted him by holding up their hands, shoulder high and palm outward, in a gesture of profound respect; yet all his instincts were making him want to kneel to their royal blood instead.

“I’ve wanted to meet you,” Aledeldar said. “I have great respect for your father’s poems.”

“So do I,” Rhodry said. “Not that I understand them very well.”

Everyone laughed but Faren, who squirmed round in Rhodry’s arms and pointed over his shoulder.

“Who’s that? She’s strange.”

“Beautiful, maybe,” Calonderiel remarked. “Wouldn’t say strange.”

When Rhodry turned to look, he saw what seemed to be an ordinary elven woman, with waist-length hair the color of strained honey, bound back in two severe braids, standing among the tents some twenty feet away. She was wearing an ordinary pair of leather trousers and an ordinary linen tunic, and carrying a basket of greens in one hand while she watched the men, but she stood so still, and her stare was so intense, that she did indeed seem strange in some hard-to-place way. Cut off from the bustle around her, perhaps? Rhodry had the peculiar feeling that she wasn’t really there, that she stood behind some invisible window and looked into the frantic camp. When Calonderiel gave her a friendly wave, she turned and walked fast away, disappearing into the constant scurry of people among the tents.

“What’s her name?” Rhodry asked.

“I don’t know,” Calonderiel said. “Del, does she ride with your alar?”

“No. Never seen her before. Well, there’s a lot of people here. Bound to be a few that we don’t know.”

Out of curiosity and not much more, Rhodry kept an eye out for the woman all during the rest of that day. Although he described her to a number of friends, no one remembered her or would admit to knowing her, and she should have stood out. Among the People, dark blond hair like hers, with a honey-colored or yellowish tinge, was very rare, enough so that she might have had some human blood in her veins. Once, when he was hauling water for the cooks, he dodged between two tents and saw her, walking away in the opposite direction, but though he called out, she merely glanced over her shoulder and hurried on.

He didn’t see her again until late that night, long after the feast was over. On the opposite side of the camp from the herds some of the People had cleared a space for dancing by cutting the long grass down to a reasonably even stubble. By torchlight the musicians gathered off to one side, a rank of harpers backed by drummers and a couple of those elven bundled-reed flutes that produce drones. The People danced in long lines, heads up, backs straight, arms up and rigid while their feet leapt and scissored in intricate steps. Sometimes the lines held their position; at others they snaked fast and furiously around the meadow
until everyone collapsed laughing on the cool grass. On and on the dancing went, till the older and less energetic began to drop out, Rhodry among them.

Out of breath and sweating, he flung himself down near a tall standing torch, far enough away from the music to hear himself think, and watched the dance spiral past. A pack of gray gnomes flopped into manifestation around him and lay on their backs, panting in imitation of their elder brothers. When Rhodry laughed, they all sat up and grinned, then began pushing and shoving each other to see who would sit on his lap. All at once one of them drew his lips back from his teeth and pointed at something behind Rhodry; the rest leapt up and snarled; they all disappeared. Rhodry slewed round where he sat to see the honey-haired woman standing behind him. In the torchlight her eyes seemed made of beaten gold.

“And a good eve to you, my lady.” He rose to his knees. “Won’t you join me?”

She smiled, then knelt down facing him rather than sitting companionably. For a long moment she studied him in a silence as deep and unreadable as the night sky. He was struck all over again by the sense she gave of distance, as if she were a painted image on a temple wall, looking down upon him from a height. In her presence the camp seemed far, far behind him.

“Uh, my name is Rhodry, son of Devaberiel. May I have the honor of knowing yours?”

“You may not, truly.” Much to his shock, she spoke in Deverrian. “My name’s not for the giving, though I’ll trade it for that little ring you have.”

Reflexively he looked down at his right hand, where he wore on the third finger a silver band, about a third of an inch wide and graved with roses.

“Well, now, you have my apologies, but I’ll not surrender that, not even to please a lady as beautiful as you.”

“It’s made of dwarven silver, did you know?”

“I do. It’s the same metal as this silver dagger I carry.”

“So it is, and both were made by a dwarf, too, many a long year ago.”

“I know the man who made the dagger, and dwarven he is, but this ring is elven.”

“It’s not, for all that it has elven writing inside it. It’s the
work of the Mountain Folk, and not a fit thing for an important man of the People like you, Rhodry Maelwaedd.”

“Here! No one’s called me by that name for years and years.”

She laughed, revealing teeth that seemed oddly sharp and shiny in the flickering light.

“I know many a name, I know all your names, truly, Rhodry, Rhodry, Rhodry.” She held out her hand. “Give me that ring.”

“I will not! And who are you, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you everything if you give me that ring.” She smiled, her mouth suddenly soft with a thousand promises. “I’ll do more than tell a tale, truly, for that ring you wear. Give me a kiss, Rhodry Maelwaedd, won’t you now?”

Rhodry stood up.

“I won’t, my thanks. Many a year ago now a dangerous thing happened to me for being too free with my kisses, and I’ll not make the same mistake twice.”

In cold fury she crouched, staring up at him while he wondered if he were daft for treating one so beautiful so coldly.

“Rhodry! Where are you?” It was Calonderiel’s voice, calling out in Elvish with a drunken lilt, coming from a long distance over the music. “Here, harpers! Have you seen Rhodry?”

She flung her head back and howled like a wolf, then as suddenly as one of the Wildfolk she was gone, simply gone, vanished without so much as a puff of dust or a stirring of the torch flame. From right behind him Rhodry heard Calonderiel swear. He spun round.