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

"They deserved to die, you know," Evandar said. "They'd killed my city and, for that matter, all of your people. I don't know why you keep saying you don't remember Rinbaladelan, Dalla. I'm sure that I saw you there."
"Maybe you did, but I wouldn't remember from life to life. You don't remember much after you've died and been reborn. A soul that remembered everything would be too burdened to live its new life afresh."
It was his turn for the shudder.
"To forget everything. I couldn't bear it, and to live bound down the way you do!"
"Evandar, it's time for some honest talk, if indeed your folk can do such a thing. You keep asking me to help you, yet you keep saying you don't want my help."
"Well, that's because this is such a new thing for me." He picked up the harp and ran a trill, notes of such unearthly sweetness that her eyes filled with tears. "It's not myself. It's Elessario.
"Ah. You do love her, don't you?*'
"Love? No. I don't want to possess her. I don't even want her at my side all the time." He looked up from the strings. "I only want her to be happy, and I'd hate to see her fade away. Is that love?"
"Yes, you dolt! It's a greater love than just simply wanting her."
His surprise was comic.
"Well, if you say so, Dalla. Fancy that." He ran another trill, faintly mocking notes, this time, and very high. "Very well, then. I love Elessario, strange though it sounds to my ears, and she's still young, so young, too young to know what she'd be giving up if she followed you people into birth and flesh and the endless wheel and all of that glittering, strange, and sometimes oddly sticky and slimy and wet world you live in. And then she'd have all we were meant to have, and I could die in peace."
"Why not come with her and live?"
He shook his head in a no and bent over the harp. The song he played was meant for dancing; she could tell by the driving chords and the way her feet demanded to move. She forced herself to sit very still until he was done, modulating suddenly into a minor key and letting the tune hang unfinished.
"You won't understand us until you come into our country," he said.
"Suppose that I came-just suppose, mind-what would happen to my body while I was gone?"
"The lump of meat? Do you care?"
"Of course I care! Without it I can never come home to the man I love."
"But why should I care?"
"Because without my body I'll die and go away to be reborn and you'll have to wait a long time and then start this all over from the beginning."
"Oh, well, that would be tedious beyond belief, wouldn't it? I know. You can change from a woman to a bird and back again already, so if I turn the lump of meat into a jewel on a chain and you put the chain around your neck, it shall travel everywhere with you, and you can change back whenever you want to go home. Dalla, truly, if you'd only stay a few days with us-just a few days-to see us and know us and all that we do, and then you'd see how to help my Elessario, I'm sure of it." All at once he smiled. "My Elessario. Whom I love. What an odd sound to it, but you know, I think you must be right."
He hit the harp in a discord and disappeared.
If Evandar had asked for his own sake, Dallandra might never have gone-she realized it even then-but that he would ask for the sake of another soul made all the difference. She'd seen enough of his people already, particularly Alshandra, to understand just how right Nevyn had been to wager against them having compassion. That Evandar was beginning to be capable of a love beyond wanting for himself was a momentous thing, and a change to be nurtured and cherished. Yet she was always mindful of the dangers, and she particularly hated the thought of letting Aderyn know that she was thinking of running such a risk. He'll only yell and scream, she told herself, and with the thought realized that she'd made up her mind.
Since she couldn't bear to lie to Aderyn, either, she rode out that morning without telling him anything at all. When she was a good five miles from camp, she unsaddled and unbridled her mare, turned her head in the direction of the herd, and gave her a slap on the rump to start her back home. Then she took the silver nut out of her pocket and unwrapped it from its bit of rag. For a long time she merely studied it and wondered if she truly had the courage to go through with this thing. What if Evandar were lying? Yet she had enough dweomer to tell true from false, and she knew that he'd never spoken so honestly before in all his long existence. In the end what spurred her on was her respect for Aderyn. What would he think if she acted like a squealing coward, full of big plans, empty of courage? With one last wrench of her will she touched the nut to her eyes, left first, then right.
When she lowered it, at first it seemed that nothing had happened, and she laughed at herself for being taken in by some prank of Elessario's, but when she put the nut in her pocket, she was suddenly aware of a subtle change in the landscape. The colors were brighter, for one thing, the grass so intense a green that it seemed to be shards of emerald, the sky as deep and glowy as a sunlit sea. When she took a few steps, she saw, ahead of her to the north across the emerald billows of grass, a mist hanging in the air, seemingly at the horizon, but as she walked on, it grew closer, swelled up, turned opalescent in a delicate flood of grays and lavenders shot through with the palest pinks and blues like the mother-of-pearl on Evandar's harp. Thinking of the harp, she suddenly heard it, a soft run of arpeggios in some far distance.
The mist wrapped around her in a delightful coolness like the touch of silk. Ahead she saw three roads, stretching out pale across the grasslands. One road led to the left and a stand of dark hills, so grim and glowering that she knew they had no part in Evandar's country. One road led to the right and a sudden rise of mountains, pale and gleaming in pure air beyond the mist, their tops shrouded in snow so bright that it seemed as if they were lighted from within. Straight ahead on the misty flat stretched the third. As Dallandra stood there hesitating, Elessario came racing down the misty road.
"Dalla, Dalla, oh, it's so wonderful you've come! We'll have such a splendid time."
"Now, now, I can't stay very long, just a few days."
"Father told me, yes. You have to get back to your man, whom you love. Here. Father said to give this to you."
She handed over an amethyst hanging from a golden chain. When Dallandra took the jewel, she cried out, because it was carved into a full-length statue of her, no more than two inches long, but a perfect likeness, down to the shape of her hands. She slipped it over her head and settled it round her neck.
"If you ever see me drop or lose this, Elessario, tell me at once."
"Father said that too. I will. I promise. Now let's go. There'll be a feast tonight because you've come."
When Ellesario took her hand, as trusting as a child, Dallandra realized that this spirit, at least, was still young enough to learn how to love. Hand in hand they walked on down the misty road, and when Dallandra looked back, mist was all that she saw behind her.

Three hours before sunset, Dallandra's mare came ambling into the herd. When Calonderiel, who happened to be on herd guard, saw her come home, he sent a young boy racing to camp to fetch Aderyn. In his tent, Aderyn heard the lad yelling all the way in and came running out to meet him.
"Wise One, Wise One," he gasped between breaths. "The Wise One's horse has come home without her."
Aderyn broke into a run and headed for the herd. His mind kept flashing horrible images: Dalla thrown, her neck broken; Dalla dragged by a stirrup and bruised to death; Dalla falling down a ravine and hitting the bottom dead and broken. Leading the unperturbed mare, Calonderiel came to meet him.
"She just wandered in like this, without saddle or bridle."
"Ye gods! Maybe Dalla was just doing a working, then, and the mare slipped her tether and wandered off."
Yet even as he spoke he felt a cold clammy dread, like an evil hand grabbing his heart. He was so perturbed, in fact, that when he tried to scry her out, all his skill and power deserted him. No matter what focus he used, he saw nothing, not her, not her trail, not even her saddle and bridle, which must have been lying abandoned somewhere. Finally Calonderiel saddled up three geldings and put the mare on a lead rope, then comandeered Albaral, the best tracker in the warband, to help them. On the way out, Albaral trotted ahead of them like a hunting dog, his eyes fixed on the ground as he circled round and round, looking for tracks. Fortunately, no one from the alar had ridden out that day but Dallandra, and soon enough he picked up the trail of crushed grass and the occasional clear hoofprint that led, straight as an arrow, across the grasslands.
The sun was dancing on the cloud-touched horizon when they found her saddle and bridle. When Albaral yelled at Cal to stop and keep the horses from trampling the area. Aderyn dismounted and ran to the other elf, crouching in the tall grass.
"These are hers, all right," Aderyn said.
Albaral nodded, then got up to start circling again to see if he could pick up any footprints or other traces of her leaving the spot. Aderyn knelt down, and when he laid a shaking hand on her saddle, he knew with the dark stab of dweomer-touched certainty that she was gone, not dead, but gone so far away that he would never find her. Involuntarily he cried out, a long wailing note of keening that made Albaral spin around to face him.
"Wise One! An omen?"
Aderyn nodded, unable to speak. Calonderiel left the horses and came running over, started to say something, then thought better of it, his cat eyes as wide as a tiny elven child's. With a convulsive shudder Albaral turned away.
"Found a few tracks. Wise One, do you want to wait here?"
"No. I'll come with you. Lead on."
But the tracks only led them a few yards, to a place where the grass was flattened down in a pattern that suggested, to Albaral's trained eyes at least, that she'd first fallen to her knees, then lain down all in a heap. Beyond that there was nothing, no sign to show she'd risen again, no footprints, nothing, as if she'd turned into a bird and flown away.
"But she didn't leave her clothes behind her," Aderyn said. "She couldn't fly with those."
"Grass is kind of damp here," Albaral said, kneeling. "Like were was fog, maybe. Or something."
"Some kind of dweomer mist?" Unconsciously Calonderiel crossed his fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft.