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

Dallandra found herself clutching the amethyst figurine at her throat, as if to keep it safe. Alshandra howled with laughter.
"You don't know the way home, do you, girl? You don't know which road leads home."
They stood on the misty green plain, looking into the setting sun. On their right hand rose the dark hills, twisted and low; on their left towered the high mountains, their white peaks shining in the last of the light. Before them stretched not one road but a tangle, all leading off into mist as dark as night.
"You could wander a long time here," Alshandra said. "Maybe luck would take you home straightaway. I doubt it."
Evandar grabbed her elbow. When she swung round to face him he grinned in smug triumph.
You say it's fair that you have a prize, and so our laws run. But would it be fair, my sweet, my darling, to trap and keep a soul that never took a thing from you, that never saw Elessario before, that never, indeed, saw you or me before?"
"What? Of course it wouldn't be fair, and never would I do such a thing. What does that have to do with anything?"
"Everything, my sweet, my darling. Dallandra carries a child under her heart, an innocent child that never took a thing from us, that's yet to see any of us."
With a shriek, a scream, a howl of sheer agony Alshandra swelled up huge, towering over them like storm clouds. When she cried out again her voice was a wail of mourning.
"Unfair!"
"No." Evandar's voice was cool and calm. "Very fair."
She stretched out, as thin as clouds dissolving under a hot sun, then all at once snapped back, standing before them as an old, withered woman, dressed all in black, with tears running down her wrinkled cheeks.
"Clever," Evandar remarked. "But somehow my heart doesn't ache for you the way it should."
With a snarl she stood before them, herself again, in her hunting tunic and boots, her bow slack in one hand.
"Oh, very well, show her the road home, but you're a stupid wretched beast and I hate you."
She was gone. Dallandra caught her breath in a convulsive sob.
"And what do you want from me, Evandar, in return for all of this?"
"Only one thing. After your babe is born, and if you're not happy anymore, come back." He caught her by the shoulders, but gently. "But only if you're not happy. Do you understand? Come back only if your heart aches to come back."
"I do understand, but I fear me you'll never see me again."
"No doubt. Well, I can hope-no, I'm fairly sure-that Elessario will find her way to you and to your world, sooner or later. As for the rest of us, our fate is no concern of yours. I'll take it up in my hands, the fate of us all, and see what I can do about it. Farewell." He bent his head and kissed her, a soft, brotherly brush of his mouth on hers.
The kiss seemed to wipe away the landscape around her. She blinked, staggered, then found herself standing on the edge of a shallow cliff. When she automatically clutched at her throat, she found the amethyst figurine gone. Down below in a brushy canyon stood the painted tents of her people. Off to one side she could see the big tent, painted with looping vines of roses, that belonged to her and Aderyn, but all the designs were oddly faded and weathered. Hasn't he kept it up? she thought. Well, that hardly matters now-I'm home. Half laughing, half weeping, she ran along the clifftop until she found the path, then scrambled down, sliding a ways in her eagerness. As she got to her feet on the level ground, she heard shouts, and some of the People began running toward her, Enabrilia in the lead.
"Dalla, Dalla!" As Enabrilia threw her arms around her, she was weeping hysterically. "Oh, thank every god, thank every god! Farendar, don't stand there gaping! Go get Aderyn!"
A tall young man, fully grown and a strong-muscled warrior, ran off at her bidding. Dallandra grabbed her friend by the shoulders while the other elves stood around in dead silence and merely stared. Half of them she didn't even recognize.
"That can't be Faro!" But even as she spoke, she felt unwelcome knowledge creeping into her mind like dread. "What's wrong with you?"
"You've been gone so long." Enabrilia began repeating the same thing over and over. "You've been gone so long."
Dallandra hugged her, shook her, yelled at her, until at last she fell quiet. When the other elves moved back to let someone through, Dallandra looked up to see Aderyn. For a moment she felt as if she would faint. He was so old, so thin, his hair dead white, his hands thin, too, like sticks or claws, and his face was so wrinkled, like ancient leather left out too long in the sun, that she sobbed aloud on a note that was close to a keen.
"Oh, ye gods! I've come back just in time to help you die."
"I doubt that." His voice was soft, but strong, younger somehow than his face. "My kind ages a long, long time before they die, Dalla."
All at once her knees would no longer hold her weight, and she staggered forward, caught herself before she fell, then staggered again, letting him grab her arms and steady her.
"How long?" she whispered. "How long have I been gone?"
"Close to two hundred years."
She threw back her head and keened, howling and raging all at once, just as Alshandra had done. The other elves closed in and caught her, supported her, led or shoved her along back to the camp and her tent. Only Enabrilia came inside with her and Aderyn.
"Sit down, Dalla," Enabrilia said. "Sit down and rest. Things will be better when you've had a moment to think. At least you're free and back with us."
"Things will never be better again, never!"
Between them. Enabrilia and Aderyn got her to sit on a pile of blankets. When, blind with tears, she held out her hands, he took them, and squeezed them, his fingers stiff and dry and thin on hers. She realized that she would never again feel the touch of the hands she'd been remembering and burst out weeping afresh. Dimly she was aware of Enabrilia leaving and had the hysterical thought that at least Bril had learned tact in the last two hundred years. She nearly laughed, then choked, then wept again, until at last, spent and exhausted, she fell quiet and slumped down against the blankets in a sprawl. She heard him get up; then he laid a leather cushion down in front of her. She took it, sat up enough to shove it under her head, then lay on her back and watched him numbly. His face showed no feeling but a deep confusion, like a man who's coming round from a hard blow to the head.
"Ado, I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault." He sat down, next to her. "I'm surprised they let you go at all."
"I'm going to have a chid, and they let me go for its sake. It's your child, Ado. We made it before I left. All those years were like seven days to me, no more."
It was his turn to weep, but his tears were the rusty creak of a man who thought he would never care enough about anything in life again to weep for it. The sound made her want to scream for the injustice of it all, but there was no good in howling "It isn't fair!" like one of the Guardians. Slowly she sat up and put her hands on his shoulders.
"Don't cry, Ado, please. At least I'm back. At least we're together. I've missed you so much."
"Missed me or the young man you left behind?" The tears gone, he turned to face her, this old man who reminded her so much of her lover. "I wouldn't even be alive, you know, if it weren't for Evandar. He worked some kind of dweomer on me, to give me an elven life span, but he forgot about elven youth."
He was furious, and she knew that no matter how much he might protest, it was her that he was angry with, not the Guardians. She wanted to weep again, but she was too exhausted.
"What about our baby?" she whispered. "Are you going to hate it?"
"Hate it? What? As if I ever could! Ah, Dalla, forgive me. At first I dreamt every night about seeing you again, and I had things all planned to say to you, wonderful loving things. And then the years dragged on, and I forgot them because I lost all hope of ever seeing you again. And now I don't have any words left that make sense." He got up, stood hesitating at the tent flap. "Forgive me."
When he left, she was relieved. Within minutes, she was asleep.

As the days passed, Aderyn came to believe that he was more furious with himself than with either Dallandra or Evandar. He began to see himself as a warrior who spends all winter drinking, and lying around in his lord's hall until, when spring comes, his mail no longer fits over his swollen belly and hefting a weapon makes him pant for breath just when the war is about to start and he's needed the most. In all the long years that she'd been gone, it had never even occurred to him to look at another woman, never crossed his mind to grow fond of someone else.
No one could ever have taken Dallandra's place in his heart, of course; never would he have thought of remarrying, even though elven law would have allowed him to do so as soon as she'd been gone for twenty years and a day. But he might have found friendship and affection, if not love, might have kept his heart alive instead of suffocating it in his work as he had in fact done. All the energy of his heart, all his capacity to love that he might have given to another woman-he'd transmuted them into something sterile and poured them into his pupils and his studies. He marveled at himself, that he had Dallandra back yet couldn't really love her again, even though she treated him with all her old affection. She would have shared his bed if he'd wanted, but he used her pregnancy as an excuse and slept away from her.
He didn't want her pity-that's how he put it to himself. He was sure that she was treating him, an old man, withered and ugly, with pity, and he wanted no part of it. Even though he'd forgotten how to love, he knew that he wanted no one else to have her heart. As the days slipped into months, and her pregnancy began to show, he turned more and more into a hideous human stereotype that he hated even as he felt powerless to stop his transformation: he saw himself becoming a jealous old man with a young wife. All his dweomercraft, all his strange lore and his great powers, his deep understanding of the secret places of the universe and his conversations with hidden spirits-none of it helped him now, when he would see Calonderiel stop to speak to her and hate him in his heart, when he would see her smile innocently at some young man and wish him dead. And what was he going to do, he asked himself, once the baby was born and she was lithe and beautiful again?
If he could have spoken with Nevyn, his old master might have cured him, but Nevyn was off in Bardek on some mysterious working of his own. If they'd lived in Deverry, among human beings in all their vast variety of ages and looks, he might have come to his senses, too, but as it was, every person they saw was young and beautiful except Aderyn himself. His jealousy ate into every day and poisoned every night, but thanks to his long training in self-discipline and self-awareness, he did at least manage one thing: he kept the jealousy from showing. Around Dallandra he was always perfectly calm and kind; not once did he berate her or subject her to some long agony of questioning about where she'd been or what she might have said to some other man. (Years later, when it was far too late, he realized that being so rational was perhaps the worst thing he could have done, because she read his careful control as sheer indifference.) As her pregnancy progressed, of course, it became impossible for her to go off on her own, anyway. The alar made a semi-permanent camp along a stream where there was good grazing and settled in to wait for the birth. More and more, Dallandra spent her time with the other women, and particularly with Enabrilia, who would be her midwife.