"Kerr, Katharine - Westlands 01 - A Time Of Exile v1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

"I do, and you're right enough. But that's your Wyrd, lad. I'd never presume to guess why, but it's your Wyrd, and you've taken it up well. I honor you for it."
Since in his grief the noisy camp seemed too much to bear, Aderyn led Nevyn on a long, silent walk halfway round the lake. Having his old teacher there was a comfort more healing than any herbs. When the sun was getting low they started back, and Aderyn made an effort to wrench his mind away from his loss.
"And what do you think of my Dallandra?"
Nevyn grinned, looking suddenly much younger.
"I'm tempted to make some smart remark about your having luck beyond your deserving, to find a beautiful woman like this, but truly her looks are the least of it, aren't they? She's a woman of great power, Ado, very great power indeed."
"Of course."
"Don't take it lightly." Nevyn stopped walking and fixed him with one of his icy stares. "Do you understand me, Aderyn? At the moment she's in love with you and in love with playing at being your wife, but she's a woman of very great power."
"Truly, I'm aware of that every single day we're together. And there's another thing, too. Don't you think I realize that she's bound to live hundreds of years longer than I will? No matter how much I love her, I'm only an incident in her life."
"What? What are you saying?"
"Forgive me, I forgot that you wouldn't know. The People live for a long, long time indeed. About five hundred years, they tell me, out on the plains, though when they lived in cities, six or seven hundred was the rule."
"Well, that'll keep a man honest out here." Nevyn hesitated in sheer surprise. "But, Ado, the envy-"
"I know. It's somewhat that I'll have to fight, isn't it? My own heart-aching envy."
That night the three of them sat together in Aderyn and Dallandra's tent. Since it was too warm for a fire, Dallandra made a dweomer globe of yellow light and hung it at the tent peak. Wildfolk swarmed, the gnomes hunkering down on cushions, the sprites and sylphs clustering in the air; a few bold gray fellows even climbed into Nevyn's lap like cats.
"Aderyn's been telling me about the Guardians," Nevyn said to Dallandra. "This is a truly strange thing."
"It is," Dallandra said. "Do you know who or what they are?"
"Spirits who've never been born, obviously."
Both Aderyn and Dallandra stared.
"Never been incarnated, I mean," the old man went on. "But I get the distinct feeling that they're souls who were destined to incarnate. I think, Dalla, that this was what Evandar meant by 'staying behind'. That they should have taken flesh here in the material world but refused to do it. The inner planes are free and beautiful, and full of power-a very tempting snare. They're also completely unstable and fragile. Nothing endures there, not even a soul that would have been immortal, if it had undergone the disciplines of form."
"Do you mean that the Guardians really will fade and simply vanish?" She was thinking hard, her eyes narrow.
"I do. Eventually. Maybe after millions of years as we measure time, maybe soon-I don't know." Nevyn allowed himself a grin. "It's not like I'm an expert in this subject, you know."
"Well, of course." Dallandra thought for a moment before she went on. "Evandar said that they were meant to be 'like us'. Are they elven souls, then?"
"Mayhap. Or it might well be that they belong to some other line of evolution, some other current in the vast river of consciousness that fiows through the universe, but one that's got itself somehow diverted into the wrong channel. It doesn't much matter, truly. They're here now, and they desperately need a pattern to follow."
"But Evandar said his people could help us, do things for us."
"No doubt. They have all sorts of dweomer power at their disposal, dwelling on the inner planes as they do. I couldn't even begin to guess what all they may be able to do. But I'd be willing to wager a very large sum on this proposition: they have no wisdom, none. No compassion, either, I'd say. That's the general rule among those who've never known the material world, who've never suffered in fiesh." Nevyn leaned forward and caught Dallandra's gaze. "Be careful, lass. Be on your guard every moment you're around them."
"I am, sir. Believe me. And truly, I don't want anything to do them from now on. If it's my Wyrd to learn about them or suchlike, it can just wait till I've got the strength to deal with it properly."
"Well, I think me that in this case at least, your Wyrd should be to do just that."
And Nevyn smiled in relief, as if he'd just seen a horse jump a dangerous hurdle and come down safe and running.

It was some three years before Dallandra spoke with the Guardians again. In the first year of her marriage to Aderyn, she deliberately kept herself so busy learning what he had to teach and teaching him what lore she could pass on that she had few moments to think of that strange race of spirits. She also refused to go anywhere alone, and sure enough, they avoided her companions, if indeed they weren't avoiding her. By a mutual and unspoken agreement, she and Aderyn never mentioned them again, and they grew clever at changing the subject when one of the other dweomerworkers did bring the Guardians up. Her love for Aderyn became exactly the anchor, as she'd called it, that she wanted. He was so kind, so considerate of her, that he was an easy man to love: warm, gentle, and rock-solid reliable. Dallandra was not the sort of woman to demand excitement from her man; in her work she dealt with enough excitement to drive the average woman, whether human or elven, daft and gibbering. Since Aderyn was exactly what she needed, she did her best to give him everything he might need from her in return.
Yet, by the end of the second year, Dallandra began to see the Guardians again, though only at a distance, because they sought her out. When the alar was changing campgrounds, and she was riding at the head of the line with Aderyn or Halaberiel, occasionally she would hear at some great distance the melancholy of a silver horn and look up to see tiny figures in procession at the horizon. If she tried to point them out to her companions, the figures would be gone by the time they looked. When she and Aderyn went flying together-and by then he'd learned to take the form of the great silver owl-she would sometimes see the three swans, too, keeping pace with them but far off in the sky. Whenever she and Aderyn tried to catch up with them, they merely disappeared in a swift flicker of light.
Then, in the third spring after her marriage, the dreams started. They came to her in brief images, using the elven forms she'd seen before, Evandar, Alshandra, and Elessario, to reproach her for deserting them. At times, they offered great favors; at others, they threatened her; but neither favors nor threats held any force. The reproaches, however, hurt. She could remember Evandar vividly, saying that his people needed hers to keep from vanishing, and she remembered Nevyn's theories, too, as well as Nevyn's warnings. She told herself that the Guardians had made their choice when they'd refused to take up the burdens of the physical world; as the elven proverb put it, they'd cut their horse out of the herd-now they could blasted well saddle it on their own. Provided, of course, Nevyn's theories were right. Provided they'd known what they were doing.
Finally, after a particularly vivid dream, Dallandra haltered her mare and rode out bareback and alone into the grasslands. She did take with her, however, a steel-bladed knife. After about an hour of riding, she found a place that seemed to speak of the Guardians: a little stream ran at one point between two hazel trees, the last two left of a stand that must have been cut by an alar in some desperate need. Dallandra dismounted several hundred yards away, tethered out her mare, then stuck the knife, blade down, into the earth next to the tether peg so that about half the handle protruded but the blade was buried. Only after she'd made sure that she could find it again did she walk on to the paired hazels.
Sure enough, a figure stood on her side of this otherworldly gate: Elessario. If it had been Evandar, Dallandra would have turned back immediately, but she trusted another woman, especially one who appeared young and vulnerable, barely out of her adolescence. She had her father's impossibly yellow hair, but it hung long and unbound down to her waist; her eyes were yellow, too, and slit catlike with emerald green.
"You've come, then?" Elessario said. "You heard me ask you?"
"Yes, in my dreams."
"What are dreams?"
"Don't you know? That's when you talk to me."
"What?" Her perfect, full mouth parted in confusion. "We talk to you when you come into the Gatelands, that's all."
"Your father told me your name, Elessario."
She jerked up her head like a startled doe.
"Oh, the beast! That's not fair! I don't know yours."
"Didn't he tell you? He knows it."
"He does? He's never very fair, you know." She turned suddenly and stared upstream, between the hazels. "Mother's worse."
"You call them Mother and Father, but they never could have birthed you. Not in the usual way, anyway."
"But when I became, they were there."
"Became?"
Elessario turned both palms upward and shrugged.
"I became, and they were there."
"All right, then. Do you know what I mean by being birthed?"
When she shook her head no, Dallandra told her, described the entire process as vividly as she could and described the sexual act, too, just to judge her reaction. The child listened in dead silence, staring at her unblinking with her yellow eyes; every now and then, her mouth worked in disgust or revulsion-but still she listened.