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Part Two

The Elven Border
719-915

THE HORROR OF first the battle, then the aftermath of the slaughter and the long withdrawal with the wounded had so filled Dallandra’s mind and heart that she’d never had a proper moment alone with her mourning, or so it seemed to her. Once Halaberiel and the men returned, the life of the winter camps slipped gradually into its normal rhythms, and she felt Nananna’s loss like a fresh stab to the heart. She took to going off alone for long hours, either riding far along the wild seacoast or assuming her bird-form and soaring high above the emerald-green grasslands during the intervals between storms, when the sky was cold and pure and the wind a highroad for her wings.
Although she knew that Aderyn was eager to learn how to fly, she put off teaching him on various excuses. In the winter camps were a number of other dweomerworkers, all of whom were impatient to meet him and to hear about the lore preserved in Deverry, though lost in the west. Learning to fly in the bird-form was a long, hard job, requiring perfect concentration, solitude, and, quite simply good weather. The fledgling dweomerman could no more to fly in a storm than a fledgling bird could. Yet at heart, she knew that she was putting off teaching him simply because she didn't want to. Sooner or later, she would honor her promise to give him the lore, but until she absolutely had to, she wanted to keep it private, hers alone, the last vestige of the spiritual adventures she and Nananna had shared.
Dallandra’s bird-form was an odd one. Normally, when masters of the craft finally achieved their goal and shape-changed, they found themselves in a bird-form modeled on some real species, though they couldn’t truly choose which one. The process of finding one’s form was basically an elaboration on constructing a body of light, in which the magician makes a thought-form as a vehicle for his or her consciousness out on the etheric plane. Although at first he has to imagine this form minutely every time he wishes to use it, eventually a fully realized body, identical to the last one, will appear whenever the magician summons it, out of no greater dweomer than “practice makes perfect,” in exactly the way a normal memory image, such as the memory house a merchant uses to store information about his customers, becomes standardized after a long working with it. The elven shape-changer would start by imagining a simple bird shape, all one color and with generalized features. Once that image was clear and steady in her mind, she would transfer her consciousness over to it in exactly the same way she’d transfer to the body of light, then practice scrying on the etheric in this birdlike form.
Eventually, of course, came the true test, using this etheric form as a mold in which to pour the actual substance of her physical body until no trace of an elf remained on the physical plane, and an actual enormous bird flew free in the solid air. Some died while working this stage for the first time; a few even died thereafter, out of carelessness more than any other cause. Most students, however, neither died nor succeeded. Those few who did achieve the transfer over to the physical received a further surprise. When they opened their eyes and looked down at feather, not smooth flesh, they found themselves a very specific bird indeed rather than the generalized image of their mental efforts, a species that was somehow chosen for them by the deepest set of their unconscious mind and thus appropriate to their nature.
All except Dallandra. Learning the procedure had taken her a long, frustrating year; if it hadn’t been for Nananna’s faith in her abilities, she would have given up after six months. Finally, however, after a long, hard night’s work, just when she was about to quit with a howl of frustration, she’d slipped over and felt her arms lengthen and lighten, her body turn full and strangely smooth, then opened new eyes to find herself perching on clawed feet. She’d become a—just what had she become? A bird, certainly, but an amorphous sort of species, a solid dove gray, even to her feet and eyes, with the powerful wings and smooth head of a raptor but a straight beak more like a linnet’s. Nananna had never seen any bird quite like it; later, when they consulted with other dweomerwomen, none of whom had ever seen such a bird either, they realized that Dallandra had manifested her idealized form, a thing that had never happened before. Since she could fly with the best of them, however, no one but Dallandra had worried about it or even given it much weight. What counted was that she could make the transformation. Dallandra herself felt that she’d been given a troubling and deeply unusual omen, and not even Nananna could talk her out of her dread.
Dread or not, she loved flying, and in those long weeks when her grief for Nananna turned the whole world bleak, she took refuge in the wind as often as she could. It was on one of these solitary flights that she met the Guardians again. For weeks now, all during the hideous aftermath of the battle, they had haunted her dreams, coming to her in a swirl of bright colors and lights and music to utter strange warnings or make even stranger jests, none of which she could ever remember when she woke of a morning. On an afternoon when a pale and lowering sun struggled to burn the morning’s mist, she was swooping over a canyon when she saw three pure-white swans flapping along, legs dangling awkwardly, long necks bobbing in and out. Swans were so out of place in the grasslands that she darted after them, only to realize that they were as large as she was and thus no true birds at all. Since she knew of no dweomermasters who flew as swans, she followed when they circled down to land, splashing and bobbing, in a shallow backwater of the river below. She herself landed on the and hopped, suddenly clumsy, to the water’s edge. When they spoke, the words came directly to her mind without effort or sound, and wrapped in their dweomer, she found she could answer the same way.
“So,” the largest swan, who seemed to be male, remarked. “Our little sister can fly, can she?”
“Who ever would have thought it?” said the larger female. “Do you still have that arrow I gave you, girl?”
“Yes, of course. But how did you recognize me?”
On a ripple of amusement the swans flew up with a trail of real water splashes, then settled in a flurry of light on the ground nearby, All at once they were elven figures, and dressed in green clothing, rough tunics, leggings, and the younger woman had a short green cloak. To her horror Dallandra found herself in her own true form, but quite naked.
“Things seem much more difficult for you than for us.” The younger woman took off the cloak and tossed it to her. “Here. You look cold.”
Dallandra snapped, the cloak out and wrapped it around her in one smooth gesture. She was sure that her face was scarlet.
“Thank you,” she said, with what dignity she could muster. “Do you have a name?”
“Of course, but I’m not going to tell you. We’ve just met.”
“In my country it’s the custom to exchange names when you meet someone.”
“Foolish, very foolish,” the elder woman said. “I’d never do such a thing, and I suggest that you don’t, either, girl. Now, I want to ask you a question, and it’s a very important one, so listen carefully. Why do your people insist on using iron when you know we hate it?”
“Well, first off, why should we care whether or not you hate it?”
“Very good, answering a question with another one. I think you’re getting the hang of this. But I’ll give you an answer. Because we’re the Guardians. That’s why.”
“And if we stopped, using iron, would you do something for us or help us in some way?”
“We did before, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t remember. I mean, that was years years ago, and I wasn’t even alive then.”
This answer shocked them. In a confused outburst of sound, they looked back and forth at each other—and disappeared, taking the cloak with them. Dallandra threw a few choice curses into the void after them, then concentrated on the laborious task of changing back into bird-form. Once she was safely settled, she flew straight home. She had a lot of questions to ask of the older dweomermasters in the camp.
And yet no one seemed to know much about the Guardians, because no one had ever considered before that they might be real rather than part of some old folktale. That they were spirits rather than incarnate beings seemed obvious enough, but no one knew where their true home in the universe might be, not even Aderyn.
“You know, we have tales about beings much like these Guardians,” he remarked one afternoon. “My people must have met them somehow in their travels. But our lore about them is all bits and pieces, a tale here and there, much like yours is.”
“They insist that they belong to the People, and they seem to be bound to the same lands. And they’re more complex than planetary spirits or suchlike. They have faces and hearts—oh, that doesn’t make sense.”
“It does, truly. You mean they feel like real individuals.”
“Just that. But unformed or unfinished or suchlike. Oh, I don’t know! We’ll have to wait till you see them, too, and then we can puzzle out more. They’re fascinating, though.”
“They are that. I hope I get to meet them.”
Yet it seemed that they were avoiding him; indeed, they came to Dallandra only when she was alone. When she was out riding, she would see them only from a distance. Usually she’d hear strange music, turn to look, and see one of their processions jogging at a great distance across the grasslands. Whenever she tried to gallop and catch them, they simply disappeared. When she was flying in the bird-form, though, they would often come as swans or ospreys to fly along with her, usually without sharing a word or thought. Finally it occurred to her that they shunned her in her real form because she generally carried iron with her—a knife at her belt, the bit in her horse’s bridle, or the bars in her stirrups.
One cold but sunny day she decided to ride out bareback with only a rope halter to guide her horse, and she left her knives at home. Sure enough, as soon as she was well out of sight of the camp, the two women and their male companion appeared, riding milk-white horses with rusty-red ears.
“So,” the elder woman remarked. “You’ve left your demon metal behind.”
“Well, yes, but I honestly don’t understand why you hate it so much.”
The man frowned in thought. Although his face was both exceptionally handsome and elven, his hair was as yellow as a daffodil, his lips were a sour-cherry red, and his eyes were sky blue—colors as artificial as the tent paints that the artisans ground out of earths and barks.
“We don’t understand, either,” he said at last. “Or we’d tell you outright. Listen, girl, see if you can solve the puzzle for us. When there’s iron around we can’t come through to your world properly. We swell and shift and suffer. It hurts, I tell you.”
“Through to our world? And where’s your world, then?”
“Far away and over the sky and under the hill,” the young woman said, and eagerly, leaning forward in her saddle. “Would you like to see?”
Dallandra felt a danger warning like a slap across the face.
“Someday maybe, but I’ve got to get home now and tend my herds.”
She swung her horse’s head around, kicked him mercilessly, and galloped away while their laughter howled round her head and seemed to linger in her mind for a long, long time.
Thanks to the male Guardian’s frankness, Aderyn could unravel a bit of the puzzle, or rather, his old master, whom Aderyn contacted through the fire, did the unraveling when Aderyn discussed the information with him.
“He says they must be halfway between spirits and us,” Aderyn reported. “The bodies we see are really just etheric substance, come through to the physical, and not flesh at all. They must be able to cast a powerful glamour over themselves as well to change their appearance and all, but Nevyn says that there has to be some sort of real substance for them to work with. Do you know what a lodestone is?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a thing Bardek merchants invented. They take an iron needle and do somewhat to it so that it soaks up an excess of aethyr. I don’t know what they do—the sailing guilds keep it secret, you see. When they’re done with it, it attracts tiny iron filings—oh, it’s a strange thing to watch, because the filings cling to the needle like hairs on a cat! But the important thing is, after they’ve done this, one end of the needle always points south. They use it to navigate.”
“By the Dark Sun herself! A wonder indeed! But what does this have to do with the Guardians?”
“Well, Nevyn says that iron would soak up aethyr from their presence and become much like a lodestone. Then it would either attract or repel the etheric substance they’re made of.”
“Making them shrink or swell, just like that fellow said.”
“Just so As to their true home, it might lie on the etheric, but they’re not part of the Wildfolk. Then again, Nevyn says it might lie in some part of the universe that we don’t even know about.”
“And a great lot of help that is! But it doesn’t matter where they belong. What counts is what they want with us. They claim they’ve served the People in the past. Do you think they’re like your Lords of Light, the Great Ones? I mean, souls like us who’ve gone on before us to the Light?”
“I asked Nevyn that, and he said he doubted it, just because the guardians seem so odd and arbitrary and, well, so dangerous.”
“Well, then, maybe they’re meant to come after us.”
“But that’s the Wildfolk’s Wyrd, to grow under our care and become truly conscious. What I wonder is why the Guardians always appear as elves and ape elven ways. I don’t trust them, Dalla, and I wish you wouldn’t go off alone to meet them.”
“But if I don’t, how are we going to find out anything about them?”
“Couldn’t we just ask the Forest Folk when we ride east in the spring?”
“The only thing the Forest Folk ever say about the Guardians is that they’re gods.”
Dallandra suddenly realized that Aderyn’s warning was irritating her. How dare he tell me what to do! she thought. But she knew that in truth the Guardians were so fascinating that she simply didn’t want to give them up. That very afternoon she left all iron behind, took her favorite mare, and rode out to the grasslands. Not far from the winter camp was a place where three rivulets came together to form a stream, and according to the “children’s tales” the joining of three streams always marked a spot favored by the Guardians. In the spirit of testing a theory Dallandra rode straight there. She saw the horse first, a white gelding with rusty-red ears, then its rider, dismounted and lounging in the soft grass on the other side of the water-joining from her. When she rode up and dismounted, he got to his feet and held out his hand. In the cold winter sun his impossibly yellow hair seemed to glow with a light of its own.
“Come sit with me, little sister.” His voice was as soft as the sounding of a harp.
“Oh, I think. I’ll stay on my side of the water, thank you. After all, sir, I don’t even know your name.”
He tossed, his head back and laughed.
“Now that’s one up for you! You can call me Evandar.”
“I don’t want a name I can call you. I want your true name.”
“Another one up for you! What if I told you it was Kerun?”
“I’d say you were lying, because that’s the name of a Round-ear god.”
“And you score the third point. If I tell you my true name, will you tell me yours?”
”That depends. Will you tell the others my name, even though I won’t know theirs?”
“My woman’s name is Alshandra, my daughter’s is Elessario, and I actually and truly am Evandar. It was going to be a jest, you see, to tell you my true name and have you think it false, and in your thinking it false it would have had no power, though power it should have had, and so it all would have been satisfying, somehow. For a jest, that is.”
If he had been elven, he would have been daft, she decided, but since he was his own kind, who knew if he were daft or sane? A bargain, though, was a bargain.
“My name is Dallandra.”
“A pretty name it is. Now come join me on my side of the stream, because I’ve told you my name.”
“No, because I’ve given you my name in return.”
He laughed with another toss of his head.
“You are truly splendid.” Like a wink of light off silver, he disappeared, then reappeared standing beside her on her side of the water. “So I shall come to you instead. May I have a kiss for crossing the water?”
“No, because I’ve already done you the favor you asked me. I’ve found out about the iron.”
Although he listened gravely, his paintpot blue eyes all solemn thought, she wondered if he truly understood her explanation, simply because it seemed so abstract.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’ve never seen one of these lodestones, but I’ll wager it would only pain me if I did. Thank you, Dallandra. You’re clever as well as beautiful.”
His smile was so warm, his eyes so intense, that she automatically took a long step back. His smile vanished into a genuine melancholy.
“Do I displease you so much?” he said
“Not at all. You strike me as a dangerous man, and I wouldn't care to cross Alshandra’s jealousy, either.”
“More than clever—wise!” He grinned, revealing sharp-pointed teeth. “We never mean to hurt you people, you know. In fact, we’ve tried to help you more often than not. Well, most of us try to help. There are some . . . ” He let the words trail away, stared down at the grass for a long moment, then shrugged the subject away. “We need you, you see.”
“Why?”
“To keep from vanishing.”
“What? Why would you vanish?”
“I think . . . I think . . . ” He looked up, but he stared over her shoulder at the sky. “I think we were meant to be like you, but we stayed behind, somehow. Truly, I think that’s it. We stayed behind. Somehow.”
And then he was gone, and his horse with him, though the grass was flattened down where they’d stood. Dallandra felt suddenly cold and close to choking, so badly so that it took her a moment to realize that she was terrified, not ill. She mounted her horse and rode home fast. About half a mile from camp, she met Aderyn. walking by the river and obviously lost in thought. At the sight of him she almost cried in utter relief: he was so ordinary and homely and safe, a Round-ear maybe, but since he had the dweomer, he shared a deeper bond with her than any man of the People ever could. When he saw her, he smiled in such sheer pleasure that she suddenly wondered if he loved her, and she found herself hoping that he did, because for the first time in her life she realized that a man’s love could be a refuge rather than a nuisance. She dismounted and led her horse over to him.
”Out for a ride?” he said.
“I was.” She realized that he was simply not going to ask her about the Guardians, and she almost loved him for it. “I’ve been spending too much time alone, I think.”
“Do you?” He grinned in relief. “I didn’t want to say anything, but . . . ”
“But, indeed. You know, it’s really time we started teaching you to fly.”
“I’d like naught better.”
So close that their shoulders touched, wrapped in their conversation, they walked back to camp together, but it seemed to that she heard the mocking laughter of the Guardians in the cry of distant seabirds. When she shuddered in a sudden fear, he reached out and caught her hand to steady her.
“What’s so wrong?”
“Oh, naught. I’m just very tired.”
When he released her hand, he let his fingers slip away so slowly, so reluctantly, and his eyes were so rich with a hundred emotions, that she knew he did love her. Her heart fluttered in her throat like a trapped bird.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“I suppose so. Ado, when I was riding today, I met a man of the Guardians, and he told me some strange things. I really need your help.”
“Well, then, you shall have it, every scrap of it I can give you. Dalla, I’d do anything for you, anything at all.”
And she knew that, unlike all those other young men who’d courted her, he meant it.

As the wet and drowsy winter days rolled past, Aderyn realized that being a man of the dweomer among the Westfolk brought more than honor with it. Dallandra had inherited all of Nananna’s possessions—the tent and its goods, twenty horses, a flock of fifty sheep—but she did none of the work of tending them. Although she cooked her own food, and Aderyn’s too, now, because she enjoyed cooking, the rest of the People did all her other chores; they would have waited upon her like a great lady if she’d let them. Since he, too, had the dweomer, Aderyn found himself treated the same. As soon as the People saw that he had no wealth of his own, presents began coming his way. Any animal that was in some way unusual—all lambs born out of season, any horse with peculiar markings, even a dog that showed a rare intelligence—seemed to the People to belong to those who studied equally strange lore and were turned automatically into the herds belonging to the Wise Ones. As Aderyn remarked to Nevyn one night, when they were talking through the fire, his new life had advantages over traveling as a herbman.
“Well, advantages of a sort,” Nevyn thought to him, and sourly. “Always remember that you’re there to serve, not to be waited upon. If you get a big enough swelled head, the Lords of Wyrd will find some way to shrink it for you.”
“Well, true enough, and I do have a fair bit of real work to do, so you can put your mind at ease about that. There’s so much teaching been lost out here, Nevyn. It’s heartbreaking, truly. I only wish I was a real scholar, not just the clumsy journeyman I am. I’m terrified of failing these people.”
“The thing about the dweomer teaching is, once you’ve got the rootstock, the plant will grow again on its own. Teach them what you know, and they’ll recover the rest. Besides, someday soon I might ride your way, and I can bring books if I do.”
“Would you? Oh, that’d be splendid! And you could meet my Dallandra.”
Nevyn’s image smiled.
“That would gladden my heart, truly,” the old man said. “But I can’t make any promises about when I’ll come.”
Every afternoon Aderyn and Dallandra would retire to her tent, where she began teaching him the mechanics of the shape-change and the Elvish language as well. His mind and his heart were so full that he was hardly sure if he loved her so much because she was dweomer or if her dweomer was only one more splendid treasure to be found in his beloved. He supposed that Dallandra knew he loved her, but neither of them said one explicit word. Aderyn himself was sure that she would be uninterested in a homely man like him but too kind to say so and break his heart. Since he had never been in love and never expected to be, he was caught by his own utter naïveté about human women, much less elven ones. He had never even kissed a lass, not once, not even in jest.
On a still night that was a little warmer than usual, Aderyn and Dallandra left the camp and walked alone to the seashore to practice a simple ritual. They had no plans of working any great dweomer or invoking any true power; they merely wanted to practice moving together in a ritual space and making the proper gestures in unison. When the moon broke free of the earth and flooded the water with silver, they took their places facing each other and began to build the invisible temple by the simple method of first imagining it according to formula, then describing to each other what they saw. With two trained minds behind them, the forces built up fast. The cubical altar, the two pillars, the flaming pentangles appeared at the barest mention of their names and glowed with power. Aderyn and Dallandra took positions on either side of the altar—he to the east, she to the west—and laid their hands on a glowing cube of astral stone that only eyes such as theirs could see. For the first time Aderyn actually felt it, as solid and cold as real stone, under his trembling fingers.
Dallandra raised her head and looked him full in the face. Although they had yet to start any invocations, suddenly he saw a female figure standing behind her, a gauzy sort of moonlight shape. At first he thought it might be one of the Guardians; then she stepped forward, burst into light and power, stood solid and real, grew huge until she seemed to swallow up the actual elven woman standing beside her. Her pale hair spread out like sunlight, towers bloomed in garlands, her smile pierced his heart but so sweetly that he cried out and trembled as the scent of roses filled the air.
“What do you see?” It was Dallandra’s voice, but as vast as a wave booming on the shore.
“The Goddess. I see her, and she stands upon you.”
Barely aware of what he was doing, Aderyn sank to his knees raised both hands in worship as the Goddess seemed to merge again with the moonlight and blow away in the wind. When she was gone he felt like weeping with all the grief of a deserted lover. Dallandra called out and stamped upon the ground. With a snap of power the temple vanished, and Aderyn jerked forward and nearly fell, because he’d been leaning against the astral altar for support. Half spraddled on the wet sand, he was too exhausted to do more than watch while Dallandra formally closed the working and banished the invisible forces. Only when she’d finished did he hear again the sound of the ocean, crashing heavy waves nearby. She knelt down beside him and caught his hands in hers.
“I’ve never felt such power before. I don’t know what went wrong—well, if you could call it wrong.”
“Of course it was wrong!” Aderyn snapped. “I owe you a hundred apologies. I got completely out of control. By the hells, you must think me a rank beginner.”
Dallandra laughed, a soft musical note.
“Hardly that!”
In the darkness, a faint glow still hung around her face. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he felt lust—not some sentimental warm desire, but a sheerly physical hunger for her body. He could think of nothing else; he wanted to grab her and take her like the worst barbarian in the world. Sharply he drew in his aura and pulled himself under control, but she had already seen the violence of the feeling playing across his face.
“We broke the ritual too soon.” Dallandra’s voice shook. “I owe you the apology. We should have let the force finish itself out.”
“That would only have led to somewhat worse.”
Aderyn dropped her hands and stood up, turning his back on her in a sick kind of shame. When she laid a timid hand on his shoulder, he turned and knocked it away.
“You’d best get back to your tent.”
Biting back tears, she ran for the camp. He walked down to the water’s edge, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the surface like a young lad. As it sank, he imagined his lust and made the feeling sink with it.
In the morning, when they met to continue their studies, Dallandra acted as if nothing unusual had happened the night before, but Aderyn could see that she was troubled. They spent an uncomfortable, distant hour discussing the proper visualization of the bird-form while from outside the noise from the alar filtered in—children yelling, dogs barking, Enabrilia’s voice giggling as she discussed something with another woman, a brief yelling match and fistfight between two young men, the shouting as the rest of the alar ran to break it up. After they’d been interrupted for the tenth time, Aderyn’s frustration boiled over.
“By the Lord of Hell himself, why can’t they be quiet for two stupid minutes?”
“I don’t know.” Dallandra considered the question seriously. “It’s an interesting point in a way.”
Aderyn almost swore at her, too, but he restrained himself.
“It’s not the noise that’s bothering you,” she said at last. “You know it and I know it.”
He had the most unmagical feeling that he was blushing. For a brief moment she looked terrified of her own words, then forced herself to go on.
“Look, the more we work together, the more the forces will draw us together. We have to face up to that sooner or later.”
“Of course, but then—well, I mean I’m sorry, I truly am, but—it would hardly be a good idea for us to—I mean . . . ” Aderyn’s words failed him in a celibate’s fluster.
For a long time she stared at the floorcloth of the tent, and she seemed as miserably shy as he felt. Finally she looked up with the air of a woman facing execution.
“Well, I know you love me. I have to be honest—I don’t love you yet, but I know I will soon, just from working with you, and I like you well enough already. We might as well just start sharing our blankets.”
When Aderyn tried to speak, the only sound that came to him was a small strangled mutter. He felt his face burn.
“Ado! What’s so wrong?”
“Naught’s wrong. I mean, it’s naught against you.”
When she tried to lay her hand on his arm, he flinched back.
“I don’t understand.” Dallandra looked deeply hurt. “Was I wrong? I thought you wanted me. Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I do! Oh by the hells—I’m making a stinking botch of everything.”
Like panicked horse, Aderyn could only think of getting on and running. Without another word, he left the tent, dodged through the camp, and raced down to the beach. He ran along the hard sand at the water’s edge until he was out of breath, then flung himself down on the soft, sun-warmed beach closer in. So much for having great power in the dweomer, he told himself. You stupid lackwit dolt! He found an ancient fragment of driftwood and began shredding it, pulling the rotting splinters to fiber. He had only the faintest idea of how a man went about making love to a woman—what was she going to think of him—how could he sully someone as beautiful as she—what if he did it all wrong and hurt her somehow?
The wind-ruffled silence, the warm sun, the beauty of the dancing light on the ocean all combined to help calm his racing mind and let him think. Slowly, logically, he reminded himself that she was doubtless right. If they were going to generate such an intensity of polarized power between them, the only thing to do with it was to let it run its natural course and find its proper outlet—an outlet that was as pure and holy as any other part of his life. The dweomer had never expected him to live like a celibate priest of Bel. He honestly loved her, didn’t he? And she was honestly offering. Then he remembered how he’d left her: sitting there openmouthed, probably thinking he was daft or worse, probably mocking him. He dropped his face in his hands and wept in frustrated panic. When he finally got himself under control, he looked up to find her standing there watching him.
“I had to come after you. Please, tell me what I’ve done to offend you.”
“Naught, naught. It’s all my fault.”
Her lips slightly parted, Dallandra searched his face with her storm-dark gray eyes, then sat down next to him. Without thinking he held out his hand; she took it, her fingers warm and soft on his.
“I truly do love you,” Aderyn said. “But I wanted to tell you in some fine way.”
“I should have let you tell me. I’m sorry, too. I’ve had lots of men fall in love with me, but I’ve never wanted anything to do with any of them. I’m frightened, Ado. I just wanted it over and done with.”
“Well, I’m frightened, too. I’ve never been with a woman before.”
Dallandra smiled, as shy as a young lass, her fingers tightening on his.
“Well, then we’ll just have to learn together. Oh, by those hells of yours, Ado, here we’ve studied all this strange lore and met spirits from every level of the world and scried into the future and all the rest of it. Surely we can figure out how to do what most people learn when they’re still children!”
Aderyn laughed, and laughing, he could kiss her, her mouth warm, delicate, and shy under his. When she slipped her arms around his neck, he felt a deep warmth rising to fight with his fears. He was content with her kisses, the solid warmth of her body in his arms, and the occasional shy caress. Every now and then she would look at him and smile with such affection in her eyes that he felt like weeping: someday she would love him, the woman he’d considered unreachable.
“Shall I move my gear to your tent tonight?” he said.
She had one last moment of doubt; he could see it in her sudden stillness.
“Or we could let things run their course. Dalla, I love you enough to wait.”
“It’s not that.” Her voice was shaky and uncertain. “I’m just afraid I’d be using you.”
“Using me?”
“Because of the Guardians. I feel sometimes that I could drift into their sea. I want an anchor, Ado. I need an anchor, but I—”
“Then let me help you. I said I would, and I meant it.”
With a laugh she flung herself into his arms and clung to him. Years later he would remember this moment and tell himself, bitterly, that he’d been warned.
Yet he could never blame himself—indeed, who could blame him?—for ignoring the warning when he was so happy, when every day of his new life became as warm and golden and sweet as a piece of sun-ripened fruit, no matter how hard winter roared and blustered round the camp. That afternoon he carried his gear over to Dallandra’s tent and found that among the People this simple act meant a wedding. In the evening there was a feast and music; when Aderyn and Dallandra slipped away from the celebration, they found that their tent had been moved a good half mile from camp to give them absolute privacy, with everything they owned heaped up inside.
While she lit a fire for warmth as well as light, Aderyn laced the tent flap. Now that they were alone, he could think of nothing to say and busied himself with arranging the tent bag and saddle packs neatly round the tent. He moved them this way and that, stacked them several different ways, as if it truly mattered, while she sat on the pile of blankets and watched him. Finally, when he could no longer pretend that he had anything worthwhile to do, he came and sat beside her, but he looked only at the floorcloth.
“Well, uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Shall I tell you how much I love you?”
He heard her laugh, then a little rustling sound, and looked up to find her untying and unbraiding her hair. Her slender face seemed almost lost in that pale thick spill of silver waving down to her waist. When he risked running a gentle hand through it she smiled at him.
“We’ve laced the tent lap,” she said “No one will dare bother us now.”
Smiling, Aderyn bent his head down, and kissed her. This time she turned into his arms with a shy desire that sparked his own.

From that day on, everyone treated him as though he’d always lived among the People and always been Dalandra’s man, just as she became his woman so naturally, so easily, that he felt as if his heart would break from the joy of it, the first truly human joy he’d ever known in life, that of being part of a pair and no longer lonely. Even Calonderiel accepted the situation, although, just after the shortest day of the year, Cal did leave the banadar’s warband and ride away to join another alar. Aderyn felt guilty over that and said as much to Halaberiel.
“Don’t worry about it,” the banadar said. “He’ll reconsider when his broken heart heals. At his age, it’ll probably heal quickly, too.”
Halaberiel was right enough. When the winter camps were breaking up in the first of the warm weather, Cal came riding back, greeted everyone, including Aderyn, as a long-lost brother, and stowed his gear in its former place in the banadar’s tent without a word needing to be said by anyone. As the alarli moved north, heading for the Lake of the Leaping Trout, other warriors came to join them, swordsmen and archers, men and women both, until an army rode into the death-ground to camp and wait for news from Eldidd. Since the dweomer sent Aderyn no warnings of danger, he doubted if there was going to be war, but Halaberiel spent long restless nights, pacing back and forth by the lakeshore, until at last a merchant caravan rode in with Namydd at its head to announce that there would be nothing but peace.
Even though Melaudd’s elder son, Tieryn Waldyn now, had cried revenge and spent the winter riding all over the princedom trying to raise men to seek it, he’d failed ignominiously. Prince Addryc refused his aid, of course, on the grounds that the Bears had violated his decree of sanctity for the elven burial ground. None of the other lords wanted either to displease the prince or to face the longbows of the Westfolk, and Waldyn’s potential allies had an absolute army of reasons to avoid doing so, especially as the news from Cannobaen spread north, that a band of Westfolk had fallen upon the west-lying settlements without warning and wiped them out.
“Waldyn can mutter over his ale all he wants,” Namydd finished up. “But he’s not getting any vengeance this summer, Besides, Banadar, there’s trouble along the Deverry border now. The king of Eldidd’s collected the rights and dues the from mountain passes for as long as anyone can remember, but the Deverry gwerbret in Morlyn’s started claiming them. There’ll be blood over this, there will.” “Splendid,” Halaberiel said. “They won’t be encroaching upon our lands if they’re fighting among themselves. May their gods of war lead them in a long, long dance.”
The People spent just over a month at the Lake of the Leaping Trout, digging stones from the hills and using them to make a rough boundary line, rather than a wall, around the sacred territories. No one, it seemed, remembered how to make the mortar that had once held together the fabled cities of the far west, but as Halaberiel remarked, they’d be riding back often enough to keep the boundary in repair even without a proper wall. All during the construction Aderyn continued his teaching, since several of the dweomerworkers had followed them, and it was there, too, that Nevyn found him for his promised visit. Not only had the old man brought books of lore—three whole volumes of precious writings, including The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid—but he also had a mule pack filled with rolls of parchment, big blocks of dried ink, and special slate trays for grinding the ink into water. Pens, of course, they could cut from any bank of water reeds.
“How did you get the coin for all of this?” Aderyn said, marveling at the ink. Each block was stamped with the pelicans of the god Wmm. “Or did the temple just give it to you?”
“The ink was a gift, truly, but I bought the rest. Lord Maroic’s son paid me handsomely for saving his new lady’s life.” Nevyn’s face turned suddenly blank. “Ado, I’ve got news of a sort for you. Come walk with me.”
When they left the tent, Dallandra hardly seemed to notice, so lost in the books was she. In the long sun of a hot spring afternoon they walked along the lake, where tiny ripples of water eased up onto clear white sand.
“Somewhat’s wrong, isn’t it?” Aderyn said.
“It is. There was fever, bad fever, in Blaeddbyr last winter. Your father and mother are both dead. So is Lord Maroic and most of the elderly and all of the babies in the village, for that matter.”
Aderyn felt his head jerk up of its own will. He wanted to weep and keen, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Nevyn a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“It aches my heart, too, Ado. I felt it would be better to tell you myself rather than merely pass the news on through the fire.”
Aderyn nodded his agreement, wondering at himself and at the grief that seemed to have torn out his tongue. They’re not truly dead, he told himself. They’ve just gone on. They’ll be born again. You know that.
“It was a terrible thing, that fever.” Nevyn’s voice was soft and distant, as if he were talking to himself alone. “But at least it was quick. I think Lyssa might have pulled through if it weren’t that Gweran had already died. I don’t think she truly wanted to live without him.”
He nodded again, still unable to speak.
“There’s no fault or shame in tears, lad. They’ve gone on to new life, but who knows if ever you’ll see them again?”
At that, finally, he could weep, tossing his head back and sobbing aloud like one of the People. Nevyn patted him on the shoulder repeatedly until at last he fell quiet again, spent.
“I’ll miss them,” Aderyn said. “Especially Mam. Ye gods, Nevyn, I feel so lost! Except for you, I really don’t have any people but the People now, if you take my meaning.”
“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.
“What do you think of that?” Dallandra said at last
“It never happened to me, all that blood and slime!”
“I didn’t think it had, no.”
“But why? What a horrible thing! Why?”
“To learn this world.” Dallandra swept her arm to point out sky and earth, grass and water. “To learn all about it and never ever vanish.”
For a moment Elessario considered, her mouth working in thought this, time, not disgust Then she turned, stepped, into the stream between the hazels, and was gone. That will have to do for now, Dallandra thought to herself. We’ll see if she can even remember it. As she was walking back to her horse, she was thinking that Nevyn’s theory of never-incarnate spirits seemed more and more true. She had just reached the tethered mare when she felt a presence behind her like a cool wind. She spun around to see Alshandra, towering and furious, carrying a bow in her hands with a silver-tipped arrow nocked and ready. Suddenly Dallandra remembered the arrow she’d been given, and remembered even more vividly that it was no etheric substance but real, sharp wood and metal.
“Why are you angry?”
“You will not come to us in our own country.”
“If I did, would I ever come back to my own country?”
“What?” Alshandra’s rage vanished; she seemed to shrink down to normal size, but still she clasped the bow. “Why would you want to?”
“This is where I belong. What I love dwells here.”
Alshandra tossed the bow into the air, where it disappeared as if it had tumbled through an invisible window into some hidden room. Dallandra’s blood ran cold: these were no ordinary spirits if they could manipulate physical matter in such a way.
“You will take my daughter from me, girl. I fear you for it.”
“What? I don’t want to steal your daughter.”
Alshandra shook her head in a baffled frustration, as if Dallandra had misunderstood her.
“Don’t lie—I can see it. You will take my daughter. But I shall have a prize in return. Remember that, girl.”
Swelling and huge, she rose up, her hands like claws as she reached out. Dallandra dropped to her knees, grabbed the hilt of the buried knife, and pulled it free, rising again in one smooth motion. Alshandra shrieked in terror and fell back. For one panicked moment they stood there, staring at each other; then Alshandra’s form wavered—and bulged out, as if some invisible force from the knife blade was pushing against her midriff and shoving it back. She looked exactly like a reflection on the surface of a still pool when a puff of breeze moves the water: all wavering and distorted. Then she was gone, with one last shriek left to echo and the grasslands and make Dallandra’s mare kick and snort in fear.
That night Evandar appeared in Dallandra’s dreams and said one simple thing: you should never have done that. She didn’t need him to tell her what action he meant. What he couldn’t understand was that she felt not fear but guilt, that she’d Alshandra caused such pain.
In the morning, as they sat in their tent eating wild berries and soft ewe’s-milk cheese, Dallandra broke their unspoken rule about mentioning the Guardians and told Aderyn what had happened. She was utterly stunned when he became furious.
“You said you’d never go see them again!” His voice cracked with quiet rage. “What, by all the hells, did you think you were doing, going off alone like that?”
She could only stare openmouthed. He caught his breath with a gasp, swallowed heavily, and ran both hands over his face.
“Forgive me, my love. I . . . they terrify me. The Guardians, I mean.”
“I don’t exactly find them comforting myself, you know.”
“Then why—” He checked himself with some difficulty.
The question was a valid one, and she gave it some hard, silent thought, while he waited, patient except for his hands, which clasped themselves into fists as they rested on his thighs.
“It’s because they’re suffering,” she said at last. “Evandar is, anyway, and his daughter suspects that something’s very wrong with their people. They do need help, Ado.”
“Indeed? Well, I don’t see why you should be the one to give it to them.”
“I’m the only one they’ve got, so far at least.”
“Well, I need you, too, and so do the rest of the People.”
“I know that.”
“Then why do you keep hunting these demons down?”
“Oh, come on, they’re not demons!”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t like them. And besides, it isn’t all pity on your part, is it? You seem to find them fascinating on their own.”
“I’ve got to admit that. It’s because they’re a puzzle. We’ve searched out all the lore we can, from your old master and his books, from all the other dweomerworkers among the People, and we still don’t know what they are. I’m the only one who has a chance of finding out.”
“It’s all curiosity, then?”
“Curiosity?” She felt a surge, not of anger, but of annoyance. “I wouldn’t dismiss it that way.”
“I never meant to dismiss it.”
“Oh, indeed?”
And they had the first fight they’d ever had, hissing the words at each other, because back and forth outside the tent the rest of the alar kept going past on their morning’s chores. Finally Dallandra got up and stormed out of the tent, ran through the camp, and kept running out into the grasslands. When she slowed to a walk and looked back, she was furious to see that he hadn’t followed her. She caught her breath, then walked on, heading nowhere in particular and circling round to keep the camp in sight as a distant jagged line of tents on the horizon.
“Dallandra! Dallandra!” The voice seemed far away and thin. “Wait! Father told me your name.”
She spun around to see Elessario running to meet her. As she came close, the grass parted around her as if she did indeed have physical substance and weight, but her form was slightly translucent and thin. Smiling, she offered one hand, bunched in a fist to hide something.
“A present for you.”
When Dallandra automatically held out her hand, Elessario dropped a silver nut onto her palm. It looked much like a walnut in a husk, and it had a bit of stem and one leaf still attached, but all of silver, solid enough to ring when Dallandra flicked the husk with her thumbnail.
“Well, thank you, but why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I like you. And as a token. If you ever want to come to our country, it’ll take you there.”
“Really? How?”
“Touch it to your eyes, and you’ll see the roads.”
Again, automatically, Dallandra started to do just that, then caught herself in the nick of time. With a shaking hand she stuffed the nut into her trousers pocket.
“Thank you, Elessario. I’ll remember that.”
The child smiled, and she looked so happy, so innocent in her happiness, that it was impossible to suspect her of guile. Evandar, of course, was another matter.
“Did your father give you this to give to me?”
“Oh yes. He knows where they grow.”
“Ah. I rather thought so.”
Elessario started to speak, then suddenly yelped like a kicked dog.
“Someone’s coming! Him! Your man!”
Elessario disappeared. Dallandra spun around and saw Aderyn hurrying toward her. When she went to meet him, he smiled in such relief that she remembered their quarrel.
“I’m sorry I ran out like that,” she said.
“Well, I’m sorry I said all those things. I love you so much.”
She flung herself into his arms and kissed him. With his arms tight around her, she felt safe again, warm and secure and even happy. But somehow, she forgot to tell him about the silver nut; when she found it in her pocket, she wrapped it up in a bit of rag and hid it at the bottom of one of her personal saddlebags, where he’d never have any reason to look for anything.

It was some months later, when the days were growing shorter and the alar was beginning to talk about heading for the winter camps, that Aderyn realized Dallandra was seeing the Guardians regularly. Although she would ride off alone at least three afternoons a week, both of them needed so much time alone, for meditation as well as certain ritual practices, that at first he thought nothing of it. His own teaching work took up so much of his attention that he was in a way grateful that she was occupied elsewhere. Later he was to realize that he’d also been refusing to believe that his woman would coldly and deliberately do something against his wishes; certainly no Deverry woman would have, and in spite of his conscious efforts to the contrary, in his heart he thought of Dallandra as a wife much like the one his mother been. Besides, she always took her usual knife with her, and horse had its usual bridle with an iron bit and cheekpieces, and iron stirrup bars and buckles on its saddle, a surety of sorts against the appearance of the Guardians. Eventually, of course, he realized that she could easily leave the horse and the knife behind somewhere and walk out to meet her friends.
What finally made him face the truth was her growing distraction. At the autumn alardan, when the People brought their problems to her in her role as Wise One, she spent as little time on them as possible; if she could do it without offending anyone, in fact, she turned these mundane matters over to Aderyn. When they were alone, she was lost in thought most of the time; holding any sort of a real conversation with her became next to impossible. Yet in his mind he went on making excuses for her—she’s thinking about her meditations, she’s working on some bit of obscure lore—until he happened to have a conversation with Enabrilia when they met by chance out by the horse herd.
“Is Dallandra sick?” she asked him.
“No. Why?”
“She’s so distracted all the time. This morning I ran into her down by the stream and I had to hail her three times before she realized that I was there. When I finally got her attention she just kind of stared at me. I swear it took her a while to remember who I was.”
Aderyn felt fear like the tip of a cold needle just pricking at his mind.
“Of course,” Enabrilia went on, “she might be pregnant. I mean, you two have only been together for four years, hardly any time at all, but you are—well, no offense intended—but you are a Round-ear, after all. They always say things are different with Round-ear men.”
Aderyn hardly heard her chatter. Her concern was forcing to see something that he hated. When Dallandra returned to the camp, he was in their tent and waiting for her.
“You’ve been riding off to see them again, haven’t you?” He blurted it out out straightaway.
“Yes. I never said I wouldn’t.”
“Why haven’t you told me?”
“Why should I? It only upsets you. Besides, I never go to their country. I always make them come through into ours.”
He stood groping for words while she watched, her head tilted a little to one side, her steel-gray eyes utterly calm and more than a little distant.
“Why are you so afraid?” she said at last.
“I don’t want you to go off with them and leave me.”
“Leave you? What? Oh, my beloved! Never!” She rushed to him and flung herself into his hungry arms. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were worried about something like that.” She looked up, studying his face. “For the work’s sake I might have to go off alone for a few nights, maybe, but that’s all it would ever be.”
“Really?” He wanted to beg her to stay with him every minute of every day, but he knew that such a plea would be ridiculous as well as impossible, given their mutual work. “Promise?”
“Of course I do! I’d always come home to you. Always.”
She kissed him so passionately that he knew that she had to be telling the truth, that at the very least she believed implicitly in her own words. His relief was like a warm tide, carrying all his fears far out to some distant sea. For a long time, too, all through the cold and storm-wracked winter, she seemed to put her distraction aside and to devote as much of her attention to him as she could whenever they were together. By the time that spring came, he decided that he’d been foolish to worry about her work with the Guardians, even when she told him openly that she’d been talking regularly with Elessario.
“That child needs me, Ado. You know, I truly do think that she and her race are meant to be as incarnate as you or me. Something’s gone terribly wrong, somewhere. Some of the evidence I’ve gathered makes me think that these beings are scattered through the universe, across several of the inner planes. I think that’s what they mean. They talk about living on several worlds, you see, not one single world.”
“But I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“No more have I. That’s why they intrigue me so much. You know, I left my parents for the dweomer because I loved hidden things, secret things.”
“So did I. I can understand. But please, be careful around them. I just don’t trust them.”
“Neither do I. Don’t worry.”
“But suppose they did incarnate. What would they become?”
“I have no idea. Neither do they, truly. I think that they’ve been here so long now that they’d become beings much like us—like the elves, I mean, not you Round-ears.”
The words rang in his mind like a shout of warning. Not since their marriage had she made that sharp distinction between herself and his kind. Yet it hurt so much that he hesitated, letting her talk on, until the moment was irrevocably lost.
“They’d have to give up a lot to become like us,” she was saying. “So much, truly, that I wonder if they ever will, but if they don’t, well, they’re the ones who keep telling me they’ll fade away and be lost forever. I’d hate to see that happen to any soul. It would be a tragedy indeed.”
“Just so. But it’s their choice.”
“Is it? Unless they get someone to show them the way, they have no choice.”
“Indeed? What do they want you for, then? Some kind of cosmic midwife?”
“Well, yes.” She looked surprised that he didn’t already know. “Just exactly that.”

In the bright grass by the stream Evandar lounged, half sitting, half lying, his harp at his side. Up close Dallandra could see that the harp was real wood, like the arrow she’d been given, and of elven design, though more elaborate than any she’d ever seen, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl in a pattern of seaweed and sea horses. He noticed the way she studied it.
“This harp is from the lost cities, from Rinbaladelan to be precise, a thing that doesn’t come easily to my folk.”
“You must have taken it away before the city fell.”
“Oh yes.” He frowned suddenly. “I tried to help defend Rinbaladelan, you see. It was hopeless, of course, even with me there. But it was a very beautiful place, and I hated to see all that beauty lying broken in the mud.”
“Was it only the beauty? What about the elves that lived there?”
“They live, they die, they come and go, and it’s no concern of mine. But stone and jewel endure, and the play of water on stone, and the play of light on jewels. The harbor at Rinbaladelan wrung my heart with its beauty, and those hairy creatures filled it with rubble and let it silt and threw corpses into it to turn the water mucky and foul. And then the crabs and the lobsters came to eat the corpses, and the furry creatures ate the crabs and got the plague and died, and I laughed to see them crawling on their bloated bellies through the gutters of the city they’d broken.”
When Dallandra shuddered, he was honestly puzzled by her reaction.
“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.
Aderyn’s fear clutched his throat and turned him mute. Had a great bird swooped down out of that mist and carried her away?
“We could see how far the damp grass stretches,” Albaral said. “Seems to go on a ways.”
Aderyn was about to answer when he heard—when they all heard—the sound of a silver horn, echoing from some long distance away, and looked up to see at the far horizon a line of riders silhouetted against the setting sun, the horses picked out in black against the blood-red clouds for the briefest of moments, then gone.
“The Guardians,” Cal whispered. “Have they taken her?”
Aderyn dropped to his knees and grabbed handfuls of the crumpled grass, the last thing on earth her body had touched. It took the others a long time to make him come away.
All that night, once they were back in camp, Aderyn stayed in their tent and paced endlessly back and forth. At one moment he knew with a heartsick certainty that he’d never see her again; at the next, his hope would well up in a flood of denial to tell him that she’d come back, of course she’d come back, maybe in the morning, maybe in only an hour, that maybe she was walking toward camp this very moment. Then tears would burn in his throat as he told himself that she was as good as dead, gone forever. At dawn he stumbled out and actually walked off in the direction that she’d gone, but of course, he didn’t find her. When he came back to camp, everyone else treated him like an invalid, speaking softly around him, offering him food, telling him to lie down, staring at him so sadly that he nearly screamed aloud and cursed the lot of them.
Aderyn slept all that day, vigiled all that night, and the next, and on and on, until seven days had passed with no sign of Dallandra. Only then, toward the dawn of the eighth night, did he finally think of the obvious and call to Nevyn through the fire. The old man responded so quickly that he must have been already awake and up. When Aderyn told him what had happened, his image above the fire seemed to grow even older with grief.
“She promised me once that she’d never leave me,” Aderyn said at last. “And like a dolt, I believed her. Not for more than a few days, she said, and I believed her.”
“Now here, I can’t imagine Dallandra breaking a solemn promise, no matter how much glamour these Guardians have.”
“Well, maybe she wouldn’t. Nevyn, I just don’t know what to think! If I only knew what’s happened to her, really knew, I mean. I’m only guessing that the rotten Guardians even took her.”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
“Ask them? I can’t even find them!”
“Have you truly tried?”
Aderyn left the tent and walked outside into the rising dawn. He hadn’t really tried, he supposed. In his heart he never wanted to see them again, wanted only to curse them or rage at them or in some way cause them the same heartsick pain that he was feeling. If he did, though, they would most likely never give her back. He left the waking camp and walked out into the grasslands, stumbled along blindly at first, wandering with no purpose, until he felt calm enough to think. From studying the lore, he knew something about the sort of places where the Guardians might appear: boundary places, the crossing of paths, the joining of streams, anywhere that seemed to be a gate or a ford or a marker between two different things. Following a dim memory, he came at last to a place where three rivulets became a proper stream.
“Evandar!” he called out blindly in grief and rage. “Evandar! Give me back my wife!”
His only answer was the grass sighing as it bent in the wind and the stream gurgling over its rough bed. This time his voice screamed in a berserker’s howl.
“Evandar! At least give me the chance to fight for her. Evandar!”
“She’s not mine to keep or give back.”
The voice came from directly behind him. With a yelp he leapt straight up and turned as he came down, panting for breath, close to tears, and faced the seeming-elf. His yellow hair was bright daffodils in the morning sun, and he was wearing a green tunic over leather trousers, a bow slung over his back and a quiver of arrows at his hip.
“She came to us of her own free will, you see,” Evandar went on. “Truly she did. I asked for her help, but never would I have stolen her away.”
“And I suppose you won’t be able to tell me if she’ll ever come back.”
“Of course she will, when she wants to. We won’t keep her against her will.”
“But what if she doesn’t want to? That’s no concern of yours, I suppose.”
Evandar frowned, studying the grass, and spoke without looking up.
“I have the strangest feeling round my heart, and all for your sake. I’ve never felt such a thing before, but you know, I do think I pity you, Aderyn of the Silver Wings. My heart is so heavy and sore that I don’t know what else to call it.” He looked up at that point and indeed, his luridly blue eyes glistened with tears. “I’ll make you a promise. You’ll see her again. I swear it, no matter how long she stays.”
“Well, I believe you’re sincere, but your promise may not do me one jot of good. I’m not elven, you know. My race only lives a little while, a very little while compared with them and even less compared with the likes of you. If she doesn’t come home soon, I won’t be here. Do you understand?”
“I do.” He thought hard, chewing on his lower lip in a completely human gesture. “Very well. I can do somewhat about that. Here, let me give you a pledge . . . oh, what . . . ah, I know. A long time ago my woman gave yours an arrow. Here, take another to go with it. You have my word and my pledge now, Aderyn of the Silver Wings, that she’ll come back and that you’ll live to have her back.”
Aderyn took the arrow and ran his fingers down the smooth, hard wood, cool and solid and as real as the grasslands under him.
“Then you have my thanks in return, Evandar, because I don’t have another thing to give you.”
“Your thanks will do. Oddly enough.”
When Aderyn looked up he was gone, but the arrow stayed, a tangible thing in his hands. He took it back to the camp and his tent, searched through Dallandra’s possessions, and found the other arrow, wrapped in an embroidered cloth in one of her saddlebags. He wrapped its fellow up with it, put the bag back, then sat down on the floor and stared at the wall, merely stared, barely thinking, for hours and hours.

To Dallandra, much less than an hour passed on the misty road. Just at sunset Elessario brought her to a vast meadow, a long spill of green flecked with tiny white flowers. Scattered all across it were tables made of gilded wood set with jewels, so that they sparkled in the light of the thousands of candles that stood in golden candelabra. It was night, suddenly, and in candlelight the host was feasting. They were dressed in green and gold, and gold and jewels flashed at throat or wrist or sparkled in their hair; all of them looked like elves but more beautiful than elves to the same degree that elves are more beautiful than human beings. Dallandra was never sure just how many people there were, a thousand maybe, but when she tried to count them, they wouldn’t hold still—or so it seemed. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a table with, say, ten individuals; when she turned her head for a better look, the table might be gone, or it would seem that only two or three sat there, or perhaps twenty instead of ten. When she looked at a group from a distance, they seemed to blend together while still remaining distinct, as if they were forms seen in clouds, or flames leaping from a fire. Over the laughter rang music, harp and flute and drum, of such beauty that she felt on the edge of tears for the entire time the music played.
Elessario and Dallandra sat, one to his right, one to his left, at the table Evandar headed. He caught Dallandra’s hand and kissed it.
“Welcome. And was your journey an easy one?”
“Oh yes, thank you.”
“Good, but still, you must be tired. Here, have some mead.”
He handed her a tall, slender goblet of pure silver wrapped a garland of tiny roses made of reddish gold. Although she admired the workmanship, mindful of the old tales Dallandra set it down untouched.
“I’m not thirsty, thank you.”
His handsome face turned sharp with rage.
“Why do you turn down my drink?”
“I have no desire to be trapped here, and I won’t eat your food, either.”
“I’ve already given you my pledge: you leave when you want to leave and not a moment later. You can drink with us in safety.”
“Oh, please, Dalla?” Elessario broke in. “You can’t just go hungry the whole time you’re here.”
She hesitated, then smiled and raised the goblet in his direction. If she kept distrusting them, they would never trust her.
“To your health, Evandar, and to your continuance.” She drank off the toast. “Oh, by the gods, this mead is wonderful!”
“It tastes like the mead they made in Bravelmelim.”
All at once something came clear in her mind as she studied the feast and the feasters, the fine clothes, the jewelry, the gilded tableware and the intricately embroidered linens.
“All of this is modeled on the lost cities, isn’t it?” Dallandra waved her hand randomly round. “Your clothes and everything else.”
“Exactly that.” He grinned in pleasure at her recognition. “And later we’ll have jugglers and acrobats, just like the ones your kings used to watch.”
The feasting and the entertainments went on till dawn, a glamour more ensnaring than any ordinary ensorcelment could have been. After all, Dallandra’s own magicks would have been more than a match for any clumsy manipulation of her mind or her aura, but for that little space of time she was watching—no she was living in—her people’s lost past, religiously remembered, scrupulously re-created by beings to whom these forms meant life itself, or at the least, the only life they knew. A sheer intellectual lust to see more, to understand that missing history caught her deep and held her tight. When the feast broke up and the folk began to slip away in the pale light of a strangely twilit dawn, Evandar took her for a long walk down to a riverbank bordered with formal gardens exactly like the ones that used to grow in Tanbalapalim. They crossed a bridge carved with looping vines, roses, and the little faces of the Wildfolk to enter a palace, or perhaps it was only part of a palace, floating in mist. Some of the rooms seemed to open onto empty air; some of the halls seemed to dead-end themselves in living trees; some of the floors seemed almost transparent, with shadows moving back and forth underneath.
The chamber that they all settled into for a talk seemed solid enough, though. It had a high ceiling, painted white and crossed with polished oak beams, and a floor of pale gray slate, scattered with red-and-gold carpets. The two walls that held no doors or windows were painted just like the outside of a tent, but far more delicately; on one was a vast landscape, a river estuary opening to the sea at either dawn or sunset; on the other, a view of the harbor at Rinbaladelan. The polished ebony furniture was all padded with silk cushions of many colors.
“Did this room once belong to a queen of the lost cities?” Dallandra asked.
“No, not at all.” Evandar gave her a sly grin. “To a merchant’s wife, that’s all.”
Dallandra gasped, properly impressed.
You have no idea how beautiful the cities were, Dalla,” he went on, and his voice cracked in honest sadness. “Your people were rich, and they lived even longer than they do now, with time to learn every craft to perfection, and they were generous, too, pooling their wealth to build places so fine and wonderful that they took the breath out of everyone that saw them, even a strange soul like me. I loved those cities. Truly, I think they were the things that taught me how to love. If they still stood, I might go to your world and live there the way you want me to do. But they’re gone, and my heart half died with them.”
“Well, true enough,” Dallandra said. “Broken stone doesn’t repair itself and fallen walls won’t rise.”
“Just so.” He looked away, staring out the window to a long view of grass and flowers. “And your people never went back, they never even went back to mourn them. That was a hard thing to forgive, that and of course the wretched iron.”
“Evandar, I am so sick of hearing you people whine about iron. Do you think we could have built those beastly cities without it? Do you think we’d live long out on the grasslands without knives and arrow points and axes?”
“I hadn’t thought about it at all. Forgive me.”
“If they used iron in the cities, Father,” Elessario broke in, “how did you spend time there?”
“With great difficulty. It was worth it to me, the pain.”
“Well, then.” Dallandra pounced, like a striking hawk. “If that pain was worth the beauty, then . . . ”
His laugh cut her off but it was a pleasant one.
“You’re as sly as I am, sorceress.” He rose, motioning to his daughter. “Come along, let our guest rest.”
“Well, I am tired, truly.” Dallandra suddenly yawned. “I left home—well, it must have been a full day ago now.”

For the first twenty years that Dallandra was gone, Aderyn kept hoping that soon, any day, any moment, she would return. The People marveled at him, in fact, that he would be so strong, so faithful to her memory, when all those old tales said that no one ever returned from the lands of the Guardians. During that twenty years, he spent some time talking to the Forest Folk, who worshipped the Guardians as gods, and learned what little they knew about these strange beings. When their shamans—priests is a bit too dignified a word—insisted that he should be happy that his wife had been honored and taken as a concubine for these gods, Aderyn managed to be polite, barely, but he never went back to talk with them again. It was his work that saved him. At first he supervised the copying of the books Nevyn had brought and taught his new lore to those elves who were already masters of the old; then he took young apprentices, and trained them from the beginning in his craft. As Deverry men reckon time, it was in the year 752 that he sent his first three pupils out to teach others, and that year, as well, when he was still looking around for his next apprentice, Nevyn rode out to the Eldidd border to visit him.
They met about thirty miles north of Cannobaen, at the place where the Aver Gavan, as men call it, joins up with the Delonderiel. That spring the elves were holding a horse fair, because the Eldidd merchants were willing to pay higher than ever for good stock, in the wide meadows along the riverbanks. What Nevyn brought with him, however, wasn’t iron goods, but news. The Eldidd king wanted those horses because he’d just declared war on Deverry.
“Again?” Aderyn said peevishly. “Ye gods, I’m glad I don’t live in the kingdoms anymore, with all their stupid bickering and squabbling.”
“I’m afraid it’s a good bit more this time than just petty quarrels.” Nevyn looked and sounded exhausted. “The High King died without an heir, and there’s three claimants, Eldidd among them.”
“Oh. Well, my apologies. Truly, that’s a serious matter.”
“It is.” Nevyn paused, considering him. “You know, I’m beginning to feel hideously old these days. Ye gods, there’s all that gray in your hair, and here I still remember the little lad I took as an apprentice.”
“I feel even older than I am, frankly.”
“Ah.” Nevyn was silent for a long, tactful moment. “Um, well, how are you faring these days? Without her, I mean.”
”Well enough. I have my work.”
“And your hope?”
“Is feeble but alive. I suppose it’s alive. Maybe it’s just one of those embalmed corpses you read about, like the Bardekians make of their great men.”
“I can’t blame you for your bitterness.”
“Do I still sound bitter? Then I guess my hope truly is still alive as well.” For the first time in about six years, he nearly wept, but he caught himself with a long sigh. “Well, what about this civil war, then? How long do you think it will last?”
Nevyn considered him for a long, sour moment, as if he were wondering whether or not he should let his old pupil get away with such an obvious change of the subject.
“Too long, I’m afraid,” Nevyn said at last. “All three claimants are weak, which means no one’s going to win straightaway. I’ve gotten the most ghastly set of warnings and omens about it, too. Somewhat’s gravely out of balance on the Inner Planes—I’m not sure what yet. But I intend to do what I can to put an end to this nonsense. I’d wager that the war will burn itself out in about ten years.”
In truth, of course, Nevyn’s hope was ill founded in the extreme: the Time of Troubles was to last five and a hundred years, although of course Nevyn was indeed the one to finally and at great cost put an end to it. If either of them had known how long the wars would rage, they might well have lost heart and done nothing at all, but fortunately, dweomer or no, they were forced to live through them one year at a time like other men. Although Nevyn immediately involved himself in the politics of the thing, a story that has been recorded elsewhere, Aderyn and the People were little affected for some thirty years. Only then, after the demands of the various armies started ruining the delicate network of trade that held Deverry and Eldidd together, did the merchants stop riding west as often as they had. Iron goods were becoming too rare in Eldidd itself for the merchants to take them freely out of the country. The People grumbled, but the Forest Folk gloated, saying that the Guardians had somehow arranged to stop the trade in demon metal. Aderyn had a brief moment of wondering if they were right.
Nevyn, of course, kept him informed of the various events of the wars, but only one meant much to Aderyn personally. Indeed, he felt himself so emotionally distant from the slaughter and the intrigues that he realized that he’d become more than a friend or the People—he was thinking like a man of the People. The Round-ears seemed far away and unimportant; their lives flashed past too quickly for their doings to endure or to take on much significance unless one of them somehow touched his heart or his own life. But Nevyn mentioned, in one of their infrequent talks through the fire that two friends of his had died. Nevyn’s grief was palpable even through their magical communications.
“It aches my heart to see you so sad,” Aderyn thought to him.
“My thanks. You know, this concerns you, too, I suppose. Ye gods, forgive me! I might have told you when they were still alive. I’m speaking of the souls that were once your parents, you see—Gweran and Lyssa, reborn and then killed again so soon by these wretched demon-spawn wars. Do you still remember them?”
“What? Of course I do! Well, that aches my heart indeed. I suppose. I mean, it’s not as if they were my kin anymore. Huh. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.”
“Who knows? No one can read another’s Wyrd. But I must say that it seems unlikely. Their Wyrd seems bound to the kingdoms, and yours to another folk entirely.”
But as it turned out, Aderyn did indeed have a small role to play in ending the wars when, in about 834, he left the elven lands for a few weeks and traveled to Pyrdon, a former province that had taken its chance to rebel and turn itself into an independent kingdom. By then, or so Nevyn told him, with so many claimants to the throne in both Deverry and Eldidd, it seemed that the wars would rage forever. Nevyn and the other dweomermasters had decided to choose one heir and put their weight and their magicks behind him in a desperate attempt to bring the kingdoms to peace. Simply because he was the closest dweomermaster to Loc Drw, where this claimant lived, Aderyn went to take a look at a young boy, Prince Maryn, son of Casyl of Pyrdon, whom the omens marked as a possible future ruler of Deverry. Traveling as a simple herbman, he arrived late on a blazing summer’s day at Casyl’s dun, which stood on a fortified island out in the middle of a lake.
At the entrance to the causeway leading out to the dun stood armed guards. As Aderyn walked up, he wondered if he’d be allowed to pass by.
“Good morrow, good sir,” said the elder of the pair. “Looks like you’re a peddler or suchlike.”
“Not truly, but a herbman.”
“Splendid! No doubt the ladies of the dun will want a look at your goods.”
“Now here!” The younger guard stepped forward. “What if he’s a spy?”
“Oh, come now! No one’s going to send an elderly soul like this to spy, lad. Pass on by, good sir,”
The words hit Aderyn like a slap across the face. Elderly? Was he really elderly now? Since the ladies of the dun, including the queen herself, did receive him hospitably, during his stay in the dun he had many a chance to study himself in one mirror or another. Yes, the guards were right: his hair was snow white, his face all fined and sagging, his eyes droop-lidded and weary, impossibly weary from his long grief over his stolen woman. He saw then that Dallandra’s loss had burned his youth away like grass thrown into a fire. During those days in Casyl’s dun, the last of his hope died, too, that ever he would see her again. He realized it when Nevyn asked him to stay an extra day and he agreed without a thought; he simply no longer felt the need to rush back to the alar on the off chance that she’d returned in his absence.
When he did return to the elven lands, he told the bards to add a new bit of lore to the tales about the Guardians: not always did they keep their promises.

To Dallandra, that same hundred years passed as four days, bright glorious days of feasting and music, laughter and old tales. At odd moments she remembered Aderyn, and even stored up things to tell him when she returned, because she knew that the information Evandar possessed about the lost cities would fascinate him as much as it fascinated her. Just as she never tired of hearing about the cities, Evandar never tired of talking about them, and with such affection that she began to see a possible strategy. Late on the fourth night, they sat together on a hillside overlooking a grassy meadow, where among glittering torches harpers played and the young folk danced in solemn lines, all bowing and slow steps.
“It’s so different from the dances my people do,” Dallandra remarked. “We like to leap and yell and dance fast as the wind.”
“Oh, I remember your dances, too—country dances, they called them then.”
“I see. You know, I’ve been thinking. I wonder if the cities could be rebuilt. It’s too bad the Round-ears are such a treacherous folk; otherwise we could make some kind of alliance with them, or at least learn how to work iron again. I know, I know—you hate iron—but we really would have to have it to cut stone and suchlike, and we’d need to know how to work mortar and weave cloth and build bridges that wouldn’t fall down and streets that wouldn’t buckle. It might only be one city at first, but still, it seems such a pity to think of them lying there, all broken, with only the owls nesting and the wolves prowling through to keep them company.”
“You’re saying that to tempt me.”
“Does it?”
“Well, yes, more perhaps than you can know, because I know better than you how it might be done. If we had a place to go to, a fine, fitting place, we’d be more likely to choose your kind of life over death. Well, some of us would. The young people. It’s their fate that worries me, the young people. There are fewer and fewer born, you know, as time passes by.”
“I still don’t understand how they’re born.”
“No more do I.” He laughed under his breath. “No more do I, but they become, and they delight us. I hate to think of them vanishing away.”
Out in the meadow the music sang in harmony with the sound of laughter. Dallandra glanced up and saw a huge silver moon, just wisped with cloud, at zenith. Black specks, birds, she supposed, moved across its face, then circled round, plunging down, growing bigger and faster with the rush of wings. Howling in rage, Evandar leapt to his feet.
“Run!” he screamed. “Dalla, to the trees!”
Suddenly she saw trees, some yards away at the hillcrest. As she ran she heard shrieks and squawks, the rush of wings and the cawing of angry ravens. Just as she darted under cover she realized that one of the enormous birds was a nighthawk, stooping straight for her. In the nick of time she rolled into the shelter of woody shrubs and low-hanging branches. Screaming its disappointment, the hawk veered off and flew toward the meadow, where the dancers were scattering among the torches with little cries of fear. When Dallandra risked standing up, the hawk circled back, but this time it landed to turn with a shimmer of wings and magic into Alshandra.
“I thought it would be you,” Dallandra said calmly. “You should come with your daughter when she goes, and then you won’t lose her.”
“Fetid bitch! I’ll kill you.”
“You can’t, not here, not in this country.” She laid her hand on the amethyst figure. “What are you going to do? Tear at me with your claws?”
A shriek hung in the morning air. Alshandra was gone, and the sun was rising through a lavender mist.

As Dallandra walked downhill in that pale dawn to join Evandar, the year 854 was ending in Deverry and Eldidd. As the slashing rains of autumn drove down, it threatened to become a black new year for Eldidd at least, because Maryn, a man now, not a lad, and the High King of a newly unified Deverry, was camped in her northern fields and sieging her northern towns with the biggest army Eldidd had ever seen. Aderyn was traveling with his alar to the winter camps when he heard the news from Nevyn, who contacted him through the fire. By then, Nevyn had become the High King’s chief councillor, but rather than sit and worry in the drafty ruins of the palace in war-battered Dun Deverry, he was traveling with his king on campaign.
“Not that there’s a cursed lot for me to do,” he said that night and with evident relief. “We’re holed up in Cernmeton, and its nice and snug, because the town surrendered without a siege as promptly as you please.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Do you think the war will last long?”
“I don’t. Everywhere the king rides, the opposition crumbles away. In the spring, when the towns are all running low on provisions and can’t possibly stand a siege, the army will move south and take Aberwyn and Abernaudd, and that’ll be an end to it. Deverry and Eldidd will be one kingdom from now on. What’s wrong? Your image looks frightened.”
“I am. If the wars are over, are the Eldidd men going to start moving west again and stealing my people’s land?”
“I’ve worked so hard to end the civil wars that I forget how things must look to you. But don’t let it trouble your heart.” Even the purely mental touch of Nevyn’s mind on his resonated with grief. “You don’t understand just how horrible things have been, just how many men have died. I think me that there’ll be plenty of land in the new kingdom to satisfy everyone for years to come.”
Just in time Aderyn stopped himself from gloating.
“Well, let me think,” he said instead. “My alar isn’t very far from Cernmeton, and we’ll be riding past on our way to the winter camps. Do you think we could meet?”
“That would be splendid, but I don’t think you’d best ride into town. In fact, the king’s quartermasters are so busy drafting every man who looks like he could fight that I think me the People should stay far away from us at the moment. In the summer, though, when the war is over—it’ll be better then.” Nevyn’s image suddenly smiled. “And there’s someone with me that you should meet, indeed there is. The soul who once was your father. He’s a bard again, of a sort, but he was a mercenary soldier, too, for years years, and a friend of mine as well. Maddyn, his name is.”
By then the thought of his father was so distant that Aderyn felt neither more nor less pleased than he would at the thought of meeting any friend of Nevyn’s, but once he got to know Maddyn he did indeed find him congenial. Nevyn’s predictions about the course of the war proved absolutely true. When in the spring Maryn and his army moved south, the people of Eldidd scrambled to surrender and end the endless horrors of the war. Abernaudd opened its gates the moment it saw him coming; Aberwyn made a great show of holding out for an afternoon, then surrendered at sunset. While Maryn and his men hunted down the last Eldidd king, Aenycyr (who was, for those of you who care about such historical things, the great-grandson of Prince Mael of Aberwyn, later known as Mael the Seer, through the legitimate line of his first marriage), Nevyn took a leave of absence from his king’s side and traveled west with only Maddyn for company to visit with Aderyn.
They met just northwest of Cannobaen on the banks of a little stream that ran into Y Brog, where the alar had set up camp to rest their horses on their way to the first alardan of summer. By then Maddyn was forty-five, an ancient age for a fighting man; his hair was thoroughly gray and his blue eyes were weary with the deep hiraedd of someone who’s seen far too many friends die in far too short a time. Yet he was still an easy man to talk with and ready with a jest, and the People all liked him immediately because among his other talents he could see the Wildfolk as clearly as they did. There was one small creature, a sprite with long blue hair and needle-sharp pointed teeth, that was as devoted to him as a favorite dog, following him around during the day and sleeping near him at night.
“I’m afraid, it’s my fault,” Nevyn said ruefully when, Aderyn asked about the sprite. “Many years ago Maddyn spent a winter with me, you see, when he’d been badly wounded. He began seeing the Wildfolk then—just because they were all around around him, I suppose. His music had somewhat to do with it, too, because he’s a truly fine harper.”
“The Wildfolk do love a good, tune. Well, there’s no harm to it I suppose, except I feel sorry for the poor little thing. When Maddyn dies, she’s not going to be able to understand it at all.”
“Oh, she’ll probably forget him quick enough. He wasn’t meant to see the Widfalk, much less have one of them fall in love with him.”
Although Aderyn normally only slept a few scant hours a night, that evening he felt so tired that he went to his tent early and fell asleep straightaway. In his dreams the little blue sprite came to him and led him out across the grasslands—that is, he thought at first that he was in the grasslands, until he noticed the vast purple moon hanging swollen at the horizon. In his dream-mind a voice sounded, saying cryptically, “The Gatelands.” When he looked around he saw two young women running toward him, hand in hand and smiling. One of them was Dallandra. He’d dreamt about her so much in the last hundred years that he felt neither pleasure nor grief at first, merely noted somewhat wryly in his dream that yes, he still cared enough about her to summon her image at times.
Until, that is, she came closer and he saw the little amethyst figurine at her throat, such a discordant detail that it made him wonder if this dream were different. He realized then that rather than appearing as a dream-image of himself, he’d somehow assumed his body of light, the pale bluish form, a stylized man shape, in which he traveled on the etheric.
“Ado, it’s good to see you, even in this form,” Dallandra said. “But I don’t have much time. It’s hard for us to come to the Gatelands like this, you see.”
“No, I don’t see. For the love of every god, Dalla, when are you coming home?”
“Soon, soon. Oh, don’t sulk—it’s only been a few days, after all. Listen carefully. You know that guest of yours, Nevyn’s friend, the one the sprite loves?”
“His name’s Maddyn. But it hasn’t been a few days.”
“Well, five days then, but do please listen! I can feel them drawing me back already. Maddyn’s got a piece of jewelry made of dwarven silver. The Guardians need it. Ado, I’ve got so much to tell you. Sometimes the Guardians can see the future. Only in bits flashes, but they do see it, in little tiny true dreams, like. And one of them saw that this Maddyn fellow’s going to be important. So they need the rose ring.” Even as she went on speaking, her form seemed to be growing thinner, paler, harder to see. “In my saddlebags are all sorts of things that you can trade him for it—take as much as you need, heap him up with it, I don’t care. Just get the rose ring. Leave it in a tree near camp.”
“Do what? Why should I help these rotten creatures at all?”
“Oh, please, Ado, do be reasonable! Do for my sake if you won’t do it for theirs.” She was a mere shadow, a colored stain on the view behind her. “The biggest oak tree near camp.”
She was gone, and her companion with her. Aderyn looked down and saw the silver cord connecting his body of light with his physical body, lying in his blankets in his tent just below him. So— he hadn’t been dreaming after all! The meeting was in its way true enough. He slipped down the cord, returned to his body, and sat up, slapping the ground to earth himself out in the physical. The blue sprite was crouching at the foot of his bedroll and watching him.
“Well, little sister, you were a messenger, were you?”
She nodded yes and disappeared. For a long time that night Aderyn debated whether or not he’d do what Dallandra wanted, but in the end, for her sake, he decided that he would. He found her saddlebag—he’d been carrying it around for over a hundred and twenty years by then—and the jewelry she’d spoken of. Although it was all tarnished and dusty, she had some beautiful brooches and bracelets in the elven style, and they’d polish up nicely enough.
Early that morning, he went looking for Maddyn and found him sitting in the grass and tuning a small wooden harp in the middle of a cloud of Wildfolk. Although it was all nicked and battered, Aderyn had never heard a sweeter-sounding instrument. For a few moments they talked idly while the Wildfolk settled round them in the hope of music.
“I’ve got somewhat to ask you,” Aderyn said at last. “It’s probably going to sound cursed strange.”
“Ye gods, after knowing Nevyn for all these years I’m used to strange things. Ask away.”
“Someone told me that you’ve got a silver ring with roses on or suchlike.”
“I do.” Maddyn looked startled that he would know. “It was given to me by a woman that I . . . well, if I say I loved her, don’t misunderstand me. She was someone else’s wife, you see, and while I loved her, there was never one wrong thing between us.”
He spoke so defiantly that Aderyn wondered if he were lying, not that it was any business of his. Mentally he cursed Dalla for asking for something that probably carried enormous sentiment for Maddyn.
“Um, well.” Aderyn decided that the plain truth was the best, as usual. “You see, in the dream I was told by a dweomerwoman of great power that this ring is marked by dweomer for a Wyrd of its own. She needs it very badly for a working she has underway. She’s offered to trade high.”
“Well, then, she shall have it. I’ve lived around the dweomer for years, you know. I’ve got some idea of the importance of dreams and what comes to you in them. I won’t trade, but I’ll give it to you outright.”
“Oh, here, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to wheedle like a child. It must mean a lot to you.”
“It did once, but the woman who gave it to me is beyond caring about it or me.” The bard’s eyes brimmed tears. “If you want it, you shall have it.”
With the curious Wildfolk trailing after, they went to the tent that Maddyn was sharing with Nevyn. The bard rummaged through his saddlebags and took out something hard wrapped in a bit of embroidered linen. He opened the cloth to reveal the ring, a simple silver band about a third of an inch wide, graved with roses, and a pin shaped like a single rose, so cunningly worked that it seemed its petals should be soft to touch. He gave Aderyn the ring, but he wrapped the pin back up and returned it to his saddlebags. Idly Aderyn glanced inside the ring, half expecting to see the lady in question’s name, but it was smooth and featureless.
“The smith who made it, and that pin, too, is a brilliant craftsman,” Maddyn remarked. “Otho, his name is.”
When, out of idle curiosity, Aderyn slipped the ring on his finger, his hand shook in a dweomer-induced cold.
“Somewhat wrong?” Maddyn said.
“There’s not. It’s just the knowing coming upon me. You shall have this back, Maddo, one fine day. You’ll have it back in a way you never expected, and long after you’ve forgotten it.”
Maddyn stared in frank puzzlement. There was nothing Aderyn could tell him, because he didn’t know what he meant himself. His heart was bitter, too, remembering the similar promise that Evandar had made him. Apparently the Guardian had meant that he would see Dallandra again, all right, but only in that agonizingly brief glimpse on the etheric plane.
On the morrow morning, Aderyn did what she’d asked and placed the ring high up in the crotch of the oak tree while the alar was breaking camp. Although he never knew who had taken it, the next time the alar rode that way, it was gone. In its place was a small smooth bit of wood scratched with a couple of Elvish words, a simple “thank you,” but in her handwriting. He borrowed an awl and bored a hole in the scrap, so he could wear it on a bit of thong round his neck, just because her hands had touched it. Seeing her again had brought his grief alive even as it had killed the last of his hope.

Early the next year, from an Eldidd port Maddyn sailed off with Nevyn to Bardek, and Aderyn never saw or heard of him again, not even to hear how he died, far off in the islands after the rose-shaped pin had been stolen from him. But oddly enough, Dallandra did hear of the bard’s death, or, to be more precise, she realized what had happened when his blue sprite turned up at the court of the Guardians on what seemed to her to be the day after she’d gotten the silver ring. It was the jewelry that drew the little creature, in fact, because they found her clasping it between her tiny hands. Her face was screwed up in an agony of despair, and when Elessario tried to stroke her, the sprite whipped her head around and sank her pointed teeth deep into the Guardian’s hand. Illusory blood welled, then vanished. Elessario stared for some moments at the closing wound.
“What made her do that?” “I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that Maddyn’s dead.”
The sprite threw back her head, opened her mouth in a soundless howl, and disappeared.
“He seems to be, yes,” Dallandra went on. “And she’s mourning him.”
Elessario cocked her head to one side and considered the words for some time. They walked across the glowy emerald grass in a pinkish twilight, where blue-green trees on the horizon shifted like smoke. With a howl that they could actually hear, the sprite reappeared, much larger, about the size of a three-year-old child.
“She mourns because he’s gone to the place called death,” Elessario said, “and she can’t follow him there.”
“That’s right, yes.”
They were sitting on the billowing grass with the sprite between them, leaning her head into Elessario’s silken lap.
“Every now and then I wonder what it would be like to die,” Elessario said. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I can only make guesses. I suppose it’s a lot like falling asleep—but you’ve never been asleep—sorry.”
“I’m growing very tired of finding out that there are all these things I’ve never done.” But she sounded sad rather than cross. By then, the sprite was sitting on her lap and was larger again, like a child of nine or ten, cradled in her arms and silent. “If I go to live among the People, if I go to be born and someday die, what then, Dallandra?”
“I don’t know. None of us can know what would happen then.”
“I’m growing very tired of you telling me that there are all these things you don’t know.”
“But I don’t know them. The only one who can find those answers is you.”
They were walking among roses, with the sprite, tiny again, skipping ahead. All at once the little creature threw back her head and sniffed the air like a hunting dog. For the briefest of moments she froze, then darted into the air, swooped round them in joy, and disappeared.
“Something’s made her happy,” Dallandra remarked.
“Maybe her bard’s been reborn.”
“Oh no, it’s much too soon! Although, I don’t know about the Round-ears. It might be different for them.”
The lands of the court shifted and gleamed around them in a burst of moonlight, and now and again music drifted in warm air.
“Oh, lovely—the moon’s rising,” Dallandra said. “It’s so hard, to believe that I’ve been here seven whole days.”
All at once, just from, saying the words aloud, their import pierced her mind. How could it have been seven days, only seven short days, when enough time had passed for Nevyn to travel to the elven lands and leave them again, for Maddyn the bard to appear, then die, and now, maybe—no, it was quite likely, really— be reborn again, Dallandra shrieked aloud and felt the cry tear out of her as if by its own will.
“Elessario! You’ve lied to me! You’ve tricked me!”
“What?” She spun, around to stare, then suddenly burst into tears. “Never! Dalla, what do you mean?”
“How long have I been here?”
Elessario could only stare while tears ran down her cheeks. Dallandra realized that she would have no way of understanding such things as the passing of time.
“Take me to your father. Where’s your father?”
“Here.” In full court garb, draped in a cloak of silvery blue and wearing a golden fillet round his yellow hair, he came strolling up to them. “I’m the trickster, Dalla, not my poor little daughter. Time runs different here in our country.”
“You never told me.”
“You never would have come.”
“If you had gods, I’d curse you by them.”
“No doubt. You know, I’m rather sorry I lied. What an odd sensation.”
“Let me go home.”
“Of course. That was our bargain, wasn’t it? Home you shall go, and right now.”
“No!” Elessario howled. “Please don’t go, Dalla.”
“I’m sorry, child, but I have to. You can come visit me in my own country, like you used to do before.”
“I want to go with you now. Please, let me come with you and live with you.”
Suddenly the air grew cold, and the moon slipped behind dark clouds. In the murky light torches gleamed on armor and sword; shields clashed, men swore, banners snapped and fluttered as an army rushed toward them, Alshandra riding hard at their head. With a frown of mild disgust, Evandar threw up one hand and snapped his fingers. All the charging soldiers turned into mist and blew away. Stamping one foot, Alshandra stood before them.
“Dallandra will never leave. She’s turned my daughter against me, and I shall have her in return. It’s the law and it’s fair and she’s my prize.”
“I made her man a promise,” Evandar said. “And I shall keep it.”
“You made the promise, Evandar Yellow-hair, not me. She shan’t leave. If our daughter is going away because of her, she’s staying to be my prize in return.”
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.
When she went into labor, in fact, Aderyn was miles away, showing some of his disciples the proper way to dig up medicinal roots. By the time they got back to camp, Dallandra was shut away in Enabrilia’s tent with the attending women around her, and by elven custom, he would have been kept out even if he’d wanted to stay with her. All evening he sat by the fire in a circle of other men, who said little, looked grim, and passed a skin of mead around until at last an exhausted Enabrilia came to fetch Aderyn to the tent.
“A son,” she said. “And he and his mother are doing well, though . . . well, no, they’re both doing splendidly.”
“Tell me the truth,” Aderyn snapped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really. Dallandra did very well, and while she’s tired, she’s alert and strong and all. It’s just that the baby was so quiet. He never cried, not even when he started breathing.”
As he hurried into the tent, Aderyn was remembering all those old stories about changelings and wondering what sort of child his wife had birthed. Yet the baby certainly looked normal enough, though much more human than elven. Although his ears were sharp and close to being slightly pointed, his eyes had human irises and pupils, and his face and hands were round and chubby rather than being long and slender. Unlike the women of Deverry, elven women never wrapped their babies in swaddling bands; propped up in a big pile of cushions, Dallandra was holding him, loosely wrapped in a light blanket, while he nuzzled her breast. Aderyn knelt down next to her, kissed her on the forehead, then merely stared for a long time at the wrinkled, reddish creature with the soft crown of pale, pale hair. His son. He had a son, and at that moment he felt young again, felt, indeed, that he’d never loved the mother of that son as much as did right then. Yet if he told her, would she only pity him the more? An old man, gloating over a child as proof that he was still a man?
“What shall we call him, Ado?” Her voice was soft, trembling in exhaustion. “I was thinking of my father’s name, but truly, I haven’t seen him in so long now that it wouldn’t matter if you wanted to call him something else.”
“I truly don’t have anything else in mind. Stupid of me, but you know, I never even thought about names to this moment.”
She winced.
“Are you all right? Does something hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” She looked up with a forced smile. “The name I’m thinking of is Alodalaenteriel. We called him Laen for short.”
“Well, that sounds splendid. If you like it, why not?”
Although the baby became Alodalaenteriel in Elvish, Aderyn tended to call him by a Deverry-sounding nickname, Loddlaen, because it was a great deal easier to say and a pun as well, meaning “the comfort of learning,” which amused him. As the years passed, though, it became an omen, for learning and Loddlaen both were the only comforts left to him.

Dallandra was never quite sure exactly when she decided to return to the Guardians. She realized first that she didn’t particularly love this baby she was saddled with. After the birth, she was oppressed a good bit of the time with a heartsick sadness that she could neither understand nor explain away. The slightest wrong word or look would make her burst into tears, and Loddlaen’s crying was a torment. Aderyn took to keeping the baby with him unless Loddlaen needed feeding. Dallandra disliked nursing him. At first, when his sucking made her womb contract in the usual manner, she felt none of the pleasure some women feel, only cramping pains; when those stopped, her milk was scant, leaving him hungry and making him cry the more. Although Enabrilia tried getting him to suck sheep or mare’s milk from a wad of rag, this animal food only made him vomit convulsively. The one joy Dallandra had during those days was seeing how much Aderyn loved his son, although even this was spoiled by the bitter thought that her man no longer cared about her anywhere near as much as he did their child.
Half starved as he was, Loddlaen might have died very young from some fever or another, but when he was two months old, they traveled to an alardan where Dallandra found a woman named Banamario who had just given birth herself. Banamario was one of those women who produce milk in great quantities, enough for her own child and two more, most likely, as she remarked, and her breasts caused her great pain unless she expressed the milk one way or another. Dallandra handed over Loddlaen without a qualm. When she saw how fondly Banamario smiled at the nursing baby, how gently she stroked his pale, fine hair and how softly she touched his little roundish ears. Dallandra felt stabbed to the soul by guilt pure and simple—she didn’t care half as much for her own son as this stranger did. Since she was elven, born to a people who saw every infant as both a treasure and a weapon laid up against their extinction, the guilt burned in the wound for days. Yet even so, she took to leaving Loddlaen for long periods of time with Banamario, who was nothing but pleased to do a favor for the Wise One.
At times, as she rode alone out in the grasslands, away from the noise and bustle of the alardan, she would think of the Guardians, particularly of Elessario, whom she badly missed. She would wonder, too, if she’d love Loddlaen more if only he were a daughter instead of a son, but she knew that the real trouble lay between her and Aderyn. They should have both been young when their son was born, should have treasured him and squabbled over his upbringing and loved each other the more for it. No doubt they would have had another child, maybe two, even, over the course of years. Now, all that was denied them, and she was dragging herself through a world turned flat and sour by her memories of the splendor of life in another, easier world. She felt, too, like a person who’s been forced to leave the campfire halfway through one of the bard’s best tales and never gets to hear the ending: what did Evandar have in mind for his people? More and more, in fact, she found herself remembering Evandar, particularly the way he’d told her to come back if she should be unhappy. He knew, she would think, he knew that this would happen to me.
On the day before the alardan was to break up, Aderyn arranged for Banamario and her man to leave their alar and join his and Dallandra’s. Knowing that Loddlaen would be fed and loved more than she could feed and love him seemed to settle the question in Dallandra’s mind. That evening, when she stopped into the wet nurse’s tent to kiss Loddlaen goodbye, she felt a stab of guilt at how easy it was to leave him behind, her round little baby with the solemn eyes and the perennial smell of sour milk hanging about him, but as soon as she walked free of the camp, the guilt disappeared—indeed, she never truly thought of Loddlaen again after that day. She went about five miles west until she found a stand of hazel trees, growing thick and tangled at a place where three streams came together to form a proper river. She’d known them once as rivulets, two hundred years ago and long before the hazels had grown there, but year after year of rain and runoff had deepened them down.
Among the hazels Evandar was waiting, leaning against a tree and whistling a heart-piercing melody. She found that she wasn’t even surprised that he would know and come to meet her. It was so good to see him again that she also realized, with a twist of her heart, that she was beginning to fall in love with him.
“You’re certain you want to come back?” he said.
“I am. It’s so odd. I hate being a mother, but it’s made me ready to be a midwife. I’m assuming, anyway, that some of you will have the courage to take up your birthright.”
“Elessario at least, and maybe some of the other young ones.” All at once he laughed. “That’s a fine jest, take up your birthright. It took me a moment to understand. You know, I’m feeling solemn, and that’s something I’ve never really done before.”
Side by side they walked into the opalescent mist, where the flat road stretched out, waiting for them, between the dark hills and the fair mountains. When she raised her hand to her throat, she found the amethyst figurine hanging from its golden chain.
“And what of you, Evandar? Won’t you pass into my world once and for all, when the time comes?”
“How could I, knowing what I know, having what I have?”
“If you don’t, you’ll lose your daughter.”
He stopped walking and glared at her like a sulky child.
“I can be as underhanded as you if I have to be,” she said, grinning. “But think of this. If you went first, Elessario would follow you. She loves you even more than you love her. Just think: you could save her by saving yourself.”
“You wretched trickster!” But he laughed with a toss of his head. “Let me tell you something, Dalla. I know now what missing someone means, and how bitter a thing it is. Do you know why?”
“I think I do, actually. But what of Alshandra?”
“She’s left me. She’s gone farther in.”
“Farther in?”
“It’s not a good thing. But I’ll explain later.”
When he kissed her, the mist closed around them, and the road changed itself to sunny meadow, bright with flowers.
At that moment Aderyn knew in a stab of dweomer cold that she’d gone again. This time, he neither wept nor cursed, merely told the wet nurse that Dallandra had such important work to do that she wouldn’t be back for a while. Wrapped in the joy of having two babies to love and a new alar to help with all the hard work of them, Banamario merely remarked that it was all the same to her. That night, though, when Aderyn fell into a restless sleep in a tent grown suddenly huge and lonely again, Dallandra came to him in the Gatelands.
In his dream it seemed to him that they stood on a high cliff and looked off over the misty plains. They must have been on the western border of the grasslands, he realized, because he was looking east to a sun rising behind storm clouds in a wash of light the color of blood, which he knew for an evil omen. She was wearing, not her elven tunic and trousers, but a long dress, belted at the waist with jewels, of purple silk. As one does in dreams, he knew without needing to be told that her dress was of the style worn in the long-lost cities of the far west.
“I came to apologize for leaving you again,” she said. “But then, you didn’t really want me to stay, did you.”
It wasn’t a question, but his heart ached at the unfairness of it, that she would think he wanted her gone when all he wanted was to be able to love her again.
“I don’t blame you for leaving,” he said instead. “There was naught left for you in our world, was there? Not even the baby could delight you anymore.”
“Just so. But still, I want you to know that—”
“Hush! You don’t need to explain anything to me, or apologize anymore, either. Go in peace. I know I can’t keep you bound to me any longer.”
She hesitated, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth working in honest sadness, but at the same time her image was fading, turning faint and pale, turning in to mist and blowing away into the gray and ugly light of a stormy morning. He was in his own tent, sitting up and wide awake, hearing Loddlaen cry in his big hanging cradle of leather stiffened with bone. Aderyn rose and got the baby, changed him, and took him to Banamario’s tent, which stood right next to his. As she nursed him, Aderyn squatted down nearby and thought of the two ebony arrows with silver tips, lying somewhere in his tent wrapped in an old blanket, those pledges from the Guardians that had turned out sharp and deadly indeed.
“There’s the good boy,” Banamario was crooning. “Not hungry anymore, is he? What a good boy! Here’s your papa now, Laen, go to Papa.”
Aderyn took the baby and shifted him to one shoulder to burp him while Banamario took her own child, a boy named Javanateriel, and set him at her other breast.
“When do you think Dallandra will be back, Wise One?” she asked, but absently.
“Never.”
She looked up, deeply troubled.
“The dweomer has strange roads, Banna. She’s chosen one to walk that leads where none of us can follow her.”
“I see, but Wise One, I’m so sorry!”
“For me? Don’t be. I’ve accepted it.”
But from that day on, Aderyn could deny Loddlaen nothing, not even when he grew old enough to beg for things that he should never have had.

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Part Two

The Elven Border
719-915

THE HORROR OF first the battle, then the aftermath of the slaughter and the long withdrawal with the wounded had so filled Dallandra’s mind and heart that she’d never had a proper moment alone with her mourning, or so it seemed to her. Once Halaberiel and the men returned, the life of the winter camps slipped gradually into its normal rhythms, and she felt Nananna’s loss like a fresh stab to the heart. She took to going off alone for long hours, either riding far along the wild seacoast or assuming her bird-form and soaring high above the emerald-green grasslands during the intervals between storms, when the sky was cold and pure and the wind a highroad for her wings.
Although she knew that Aderyn was eager to learn how to fly, she put off teaching him on various excuses. In the winter camps were a number of other dweomerworkers, all of whom were impatient to meet him and to hear about the lore preserved in Deverry, though lost in the west. Learning to fly in the bird-form was a long, hard job, requiring perfect concentration, solitude, and, quite simply good weather. The fledgling dweomerman could no more to fly in a storm than a fledgling bird could. Yet at heart, she knew that she was putting off teaching him simply because she didn't want to. Sooner or later, she would honor her promise to give him the lore, but until she absolutely had to, she wanted to keep it private, hers alone, the last vestige of the spiritual adventures she and Nananna had shared.
Dallandra’s bird-form was an odd one. Normally, when masters of the craft finally achieved their goal and shape-changed, they found themselves in a bird-form modeled on some real species, though they couldn’t truly choose which one. The process of finding one’s form was basically an elaboration on constructing a body of light, in which the magician makes a thought-form as a vehicle for his or her consciousness out on the etheric plane. Although at first he has to imagine this form minutely every time he wishes to use it, eventually a fully realized body, identical to the last one, will appear whenever the magician summons it, out of no greater dweomer than “practice makes perfect,” in exactly the way a normal memory image, such as the memory house a merchant uses to store information about his customers, becomes standardized after a long working with it. The elven shape-changer would start by imagining a simple bird shape, all one color and with generalized features. Once that image was clear and steady in her mind, she would transfer her consciousness over to it in exactly the same way she’d transfer to the body of light, then practice scrying on the etheric in this birdlike form.
Eventually, of course, came the true test, using this etheric form as a mold in which to pour the actual substance of her physical body until no trace of an elf remained on the physical plane, and an actual enormous bird flew free in the solid air. Some died while working this stage for the first time; a few even died thereafter, out of carelessness more than any other cause. Most students, however, neither died nor succeeded. Those few who did achieve the transfer over to the physical received a further surprise. When they opened their eyes and looked down at feather, not smooth flesh, they found themselves a very specific bird indeed rather than the generalized image of their mental efforts, a species that was somehow chosen for them by the deepest set of their unconscious mind and thus appropriate to their nature.
All except Dallandra. Learning the procedure had taken her a long, frustrating year; if it hadn’t been for Nananna’s faith in her abilities, she would have given up after six months. Finally, however, after a long, hard night’s work, just when she was about to quit with a howl of frustration, she’d slipped over and felt her arms lengthen and lighten, her body turn full and strangely smooth, then opened new eyes to find herself perching on clawed feet. She’d become a—just what had she become? A bird, certainly, but an amorphous sort of species, a solid dove gray, even to her feet and eyes, with the powerful wings and smooth head of a raptor but a straight beak more like a linnet’s. Nananna had never seen any bird quite like it; later, when they consulted with other dweomerwomen, none of whom had ever seen such a bird either, they realized that Dallandra had manifested her idealized form, a thing that had never happened before. Since she could fly with the best of them, however, no one but Dallandra had worried about it or even given it much weight. What counted was that she could make the transformation. Dallandra herself felt that she’d been given a troubling and deeply unusual omen, and not even Nananna could talk her out of her dread.
Dread or not, she loved flying, and in those long weeks when her grief for Nananna turned the whole world bleak, she took refuge in the wind as often as she could. It was on one of these solitary flights that she met the Guardians again. For weeks now, all during the hideous aftermath of the battle, they had haunted her dreams, coming to her in a swirl of bright colors and lights and music to utter strange warnings or make even stranger jests, none of which she could ever remember when she woke of a morning. On an afternoon when a pale and lowering sun struggled to burn the morning’s mist, she was swooping over a canyon when she saw three pure-white swans flapping along, legs dangling awkwardly, long necks bobbing in and out. Swans were so out of place in the grasslands that she darted after them, only to realize that they were as large as she was and thus no true birds at all. Since she knew of no dweomermasters who flew as swans, she followed when they circled down to land, splashing and bobbing, in a shallow backwater of the river below. She herself landed on the and hopped, suddenly clumsy, to the water’s edge. When they spoke, the words came directly to her mind without effort or sound, and wrapped in their dweomer, she found she could answer the same way.
“So,” the largest swan, who seemed to be male, remarked. “Our little sister can fly, can she?”
“Who ever would have thought it?” said the larger female. “Do you still have that arrow I gave you, girl?”
“Yes, of course. But how did you recognize me?”
On a ripple of amusement the swans flew up with a trail of real water splashes, then settled in a flurry of light on the ground nearby, All at once they were elven figures, and dressed in green clothing, rough tunics, leggings, and the younger woman had a short green cloak. To her horror Dallandra found herself in her own true form, but quite naked.
“Things seem much more difficult for you than for us.” The younger woman took off the cloak and tossed it to her. “Here. You look cold.”
Dallandra snapped, the cloak out and wrapped it around her in one smooth gesture. She was sure that her face was scarlet.
“Thank you,” she said, with what dignity she could muster. “Do you have a name?”
“Of course, but I’m not going to tell you. We’ve just met.”
“In my country it’s the custom to exchange names when you meet someone.”
“Foolish, very foolish,” the elder woman said. “I’d never do such a thing, and I suggest that you don’t, either, girl. Now, I want to ask you a question, and it’s a very important one, so listen carefully. Why do your people insist on using iron when you know we hate it?”
“Well, first off, why should we care whether or not you hate it?”
“Very good, answering a question with another one. I think you’re getting the hang of this. But I’ll give you an answer. Because we’re the Guardians. That’s why.”
“And if we stopped, using iron, would you do something for us or help us in some way?”
“We did before, didn’t we?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t remember. I mean, that was years years ago, and I wasn’t even alive then.”
This answer shocked them. In a confused outburst of sound, they looked back and forth at each other—and disappeared, taking the cloak with them. Dallandra threw a few choice curses into the void after them, then concentrated on the laborious task of changing back into bird-form. Once she was safely settled, she flew straight home. She had a lot of questions to ask of the older dweomermasters in the camp.
And yet no one seemed to know much about the Guardians, because no one had ever considered before that they might be real rather than part of some old folktale. That they were spirits rather than incarnate beings seemed obvious enough, but no one knew where their true home in the universe might be, not even Aderyn.
“You know, we have tales about beings much like these Guardians,” he remarked one afternoon. “My people must have met them somehow in their travels. But our lore about them is all bits and pieces, a tale here and there, much like yours is.”
“They insist that they belong to the People, and they seem to be bound to the same lands. And they’re more complex than planetary spirits or suchlike. They have faces and hearts—oh, that doesn’t make sense.”
“It does, truly. You mean they feel like real individuals.”
“Just that. But unformed or unfinished or suchlike. Oh, I don’t know! We’ll have to wait till you see them, too, and then we can puzzle out more. They’re fascinating, though.”
“They are that. I hope I get to meet them.”
Yet it seemed that they were avoiding him; indeed, they came to Dallandra only when she was alone. When she was out riding, she would see them only from a distance. Usually she’d hear strange music, turn to look, and see one of their processions jogging at a great distance across the grasslands. Whenever she tried to gallop and catch them, they simply disappeared. When she was flying in the bird-form, though, they would often come as swans or ospreys to fly along with her, usually without sharing a word or thought. Finally it occurred to her that they shunned her in her real form because she generally carried iron with her—a knife at her belt, the bit in her horse’s bridle, or the bars in her stirrups.
One cold but sunny day she decided to ride out bareback with only a rope halter to guide her horse, and she left her knives at home. Sure enough, as soon as she was well out of sight of the camp, the two women and their male companion appeared, riding milk-white horses with rusty-red ears.
“So,” the elder woman remarked. “You’ve left your demon metal behind.”
“Well, yes, but I honestly don’t understand why you hate it so much.”
The man frowned in thought. Although his face was both exceptionally handsome and elven, his hair was as yellow as a daffodil, his lips were a sour-cherry red, and his eyes were sky blue—colors as artificial as the tent paints that the artisans ground out of earths and barks.
“We don’t understand, either,” he said at last. “Or we’d tell you outright. Listen, girl, see if you can solve the puzzle for us. When there’s iron around we can’t come through to your world properly. We swell and shift and suffer. It hurts, I tell you.”
“Through to our world? And where’s your world, then?”
“Far away and over the sky and under the hill,” the young woman said, and eagerly, leaning forward in her saddle. “Would you like to see?”
Dallandra felt a danger warning like a slap across the face.
“Someday maybe, but I’ve got to get home now and tend my herds.”
She swung her horse’s head around, kicked him mercilessly, and galloped away while their laughter howled round her head and seemed to linger in her mind for a long, long time.
Thanks to the male Guardian’s frankness, Aderyn could unravel a bit of the puzzle, or rather, his old master, whom Aderyn contacted through the fire, did the unraveling when Aderyn discussed the information with him.
“He says they must be halfway between spirits and us,” Aderyn reported. “The bodies we see are really just etheric substance, come through to the physical, and not flesh at all. They must be able to cast a powerful glamour over themselves as well to change their appearance and all, but Nevyn says that there has to be some sort of real substance for them to work with. Do you know what a lodestone is?”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a thing Bardek merchants invented. They take an iron needle and do somewhat to it so that it soaks up an excess of aethyr. I don’t know what they do—the sailing guilds keep it secret, you see. When they’re done with it, it attracts tiny iron filings—oh, it’s a strange thing to watch, because the filings cling to the needle like hairs on a cat! But the important thing is, after they’ve done this, one end of the needle always points south. They use it to navigate.”
“By the Dark Sun herself! A wonder indeed! But what does this have to do with the Guardians?”
“Well, Nevyn says that iron would soak up aethyr from their presence and become much like a lodestone. Then it would either attract or repel the etheric substance they’re made of.”
“Making them shrink or swell, just like that fellow said.”
“Just so As to their true home, it might lie on the etheric, but they’re not part of the Wildfolk. Then again, Nevyn says it might lie in some part of the universe that we don’t even know about.”
“And a great lot of help that is! But it doesn’t matter where they belong. What counts is what they want with us. They claim they’ve served the People in the past. Do you think they’re like your Lords of Light, the Great Ones? I mean, souls like us who’ve gone on before us to the Light?”
“I asked Nevyn that, and he said he doubted it, just because the guardians seem so odd and arbitrary and, well, so dangerous.”
“Well, then, maybe they’re meant to come after us.”
“But that’s the Wildfolk’s Wyrd, to grow under our care and become truly conscious. What I wonder is why the Guardians always appear as elves and ape elven ways. I don’t trust them, Dalla, and I wish you wouldn’t go off alone to meet them.”
“But if I don’t, how are we going to find out anything about them?”
“Couldn’t we just ask the Forest Folk when we ride east in the spring?”
“The only thing the Forest Folk ever say about the Guardians is that they’re gods.”
Dallandra suddenly realized that Aderyn’s warning was irritating her. How dare he tell me what to do! she thought. But she knew that in truth the Guardians were so fascinating that she simply didn’t want to give them up. That very afternoon she left all iron behind, took her favorite mare, and rode out to the grasslands. Not far from the winter camp was a place where three rivulets came together to form a stream, and according to the “children’s tales” the joining of three streams always marked a spot favored by the Guardians. In the spirit of testing a theory Dallandra rode straight there. She saw the horse first, a white gelding with rusty-red ears, then its rider, dismounted and lounging in the soft grass on the other side of the water-joining from her. When she rode up and dismounted, he got to his feet and held out his hand. In the cold winter sun his impossibly yellow hair seemed to glow with a light of its own.
“Come sit with me, little sister.” His voice was as soft as the sounding of a harp.
“Oh, I think. I’ll stay on my side of the water, thank you. After all, sir, I don’t even know your name.”
He tossed, his head back and laughed.
“Now that’s one up for you! You can call me Evandar.”
“I don’t want a name I can call you. I want your true name.”
“Another one up for you! What if I told you it was Kerun?”
“I’d say you were lying, because that’s the name of a Round-ear god.”
“And you score the third point. If I tell you my true name, will you tell me yours?”
”That depends. Will you tell the others my name, even though I won’t know theirs?”
“My woman’s name is Alshandra, my daughter’s is Elessario, and I actually and truly am Evandar. It was going to be a jest, you see, to tell you my true name and have you think it false, and in your thinking it false it would have had no power, though power it should have had, and so it all would have been satisfying, somehow. For a jest, that is.”
If he had been elven, he would have been daft, she decided, but since he was his own kind, who knew if he were daft or sane? A bargain, though, was a bargain.
“My name is Dallandra.”
“A pretty name it is. Now come join me on my side of the stream, because I’ve told you my name.”
“No, because I’ve given you my name in return.”
He laughed with another toss of his head.
“You are truly splendid.” Like a wink of light off silver, he disappeared, then reappeared standing beside her on her side of the water. “So I shall come to you instead. May I have a kiss for crossing the water?”
“No, because I’ve already done you the favor you asked me. I’ve found out about the iron.”
Although he listened gravely, his paintpot blue eyes all solemn thought, she wondered if he truly understood her explanation, simply because it seemed so abstract.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’ve never seen one of these lodestones, but I’ll wager it would only pain me if I did. Thank you, Dallandra. You’re clever as well as beautiful.”
His smile was so warm, his eyes so intense, that she automatically took a long step back. His smile vanished into a genuine melancholy.
“Do I displease you so much?” he said
“Not at all. You strike me as a dangerous man, and I wouldn't care to cross Alshandra’s jealousy, either.”
“More than clever—wise!” He grinned, revealing sharp-pointed teeth. “We never mean to hurt you people, you know. In fact, we’ve tried to help you more often than not. Well, most of us try to help. There are some . . . ” He let the words trail away, stared down at the grass for a long moment, then shrugged the subject away. “We need you, you see.”
“Why?”
“To keep from vanishing.”
“What? Why would you vanish?”
“I think . . . I think . . . ” He looked up, but he stared over her shoulder at the sky. “I think we were meant to be like you, but we stayed behind, somehow. Truly, I think that’s it. We stayed behind. Somehow.”
And then he was gone, and his horse with him, though the grass was flattened down where they’d stood. Dallandra felt suddenly cold and close to choking, so badly so that it took her a moment to realize that she was terrified, not ill. She mounted her horse and rode home fast. About half a mile from camp, she met Aderyn. walking by the river and obviously lost in thought. At the sight of him she almost cried in utter relief: he was so ordinary and homely and safe, a Round-ear maybe, but since he had the dweomer, he shared a deeper bond with her than any man of the People ever could. When he saw her, he smiled in such sheer pleasure that she suddenly wondered if he loved her, and she found herself hoping that he did, because for the first time in her life she realized that a man’s love could be a refuge rather than a nuisance. She dismounted and led her horse over to him.
”Out for a ride?” he said.
“I was.” She realized that he was simply not going to ask her about the Guardians, and she almost loved him for it. “I’ve been spending too much time alone, I think.”
“Do you?” He grinned in relief. “I didn’t want to say anything, but . . . ”
“But, indeed. You know, it’s really time we started teaching you to fly.”
“I’d like naught better.”
So close that their shoulders touched, wrapped in their conversation, they walked back to camp together, but it seemed to that she heard the mocking laughter of the Guardians in the cry of distant seabirds. When she shuddered in a sudden fear, he reached out and caught her hand to steady her.
“What’s so wrong?”
“Oh, naught. I’m just very tired.”
When he released her hand, he let his fingers slip away so slowly, so reluctantly, and his eyes were so rich with a hundred emotions, that she knew he did love her. Her heart fluttered in her throat like a trapped bird.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“I suppose so. Ado, when I was riding today, I met a man of the Guardians, and he told me some strange things. I really need your help.”
“Well, then, you shall have it, every scrap of it I can give you. Dalla, I’d do anything for you, anything at all.”
And she knew that, unlike all those other young men who’d courted her, he meant it.

As the wet and drowsy winter days rolled past, Aderyn realized that being a man of the dweomer among the Westfolk brought more than honor with it. Dallandra had inherited all of Nananna’s possessions—the tent and its goods, twenty horses, a flock of fifty sheep—but she did none of the work of tending them. Although she cooked her own food, and Aderyn’s too, now, because she enjoyed cooking, the rest of the People did all her other chores; they would have waited upon her like a great lady if she’d let them. Since he, too, had the dweomer, Aderyn found himself treated the same. As soon as the People saw that he had no wealth of his own, presents began coming his way. Any animal that was in some way unusual—all lambs born out of season, any horse with peculiar markings, even a dog that showed a rare intelligence—seemed to the People to belong to those who studied equally strange lore and were turned automatically into the herds belonging to the Wise Ones. As Aderyn remarked to Nevyn one night, when they were talking through the fire, his new life had advantages over traveling as a herbman.
“Well, advantages of a sort,” Nevyn thought to him, and sourly. “Always remember that you’re there to serve, not to be waited upon. If you get a big enough swelled head, the Lords of Wyrd will find some way to shrink it for you.”
“Well, true enough, and I do have a fair bit of real work to do, so you can put your mind at ease about that. There’s so much teaching been lost out here, Nevyn. It’s heartbreaking, truly. I only wish I was a real scholar, not just the clumsy journeyman I am. I’m terrified of failing these people.”
“The thing about the dweomer teaching is, once you’ve got the rootstock, the plant will grow again on its own. Teach them what you know, and they’ll recover the rest. Besides, someday soon I might ride your way, and I can bring books if I do.”
“Would you? Oh, that’d be splendid! And you could meet my Dallandra.”
Nevyn’s image smiled.
“That would gladden my heart, truly,” the old man said. “But I can’t make any promises about when I’ll come.”
Every afternoon Aderyn and Dallandra would retire to her tent, where she began teaching him the mechanics of the shape-change and the Elvish language as well. His mind and his heart were so full that he was hardly sure if he loved her so much because she was dweomer or if her dweomer was only one more splendid treasure to be found in his beloved. He supposed that Dallandra knew he loved her, but neither of them said one explicit word. Aderyn himself was sure that she would be uninterested in a homely man like him but too kind to say so and break his heart. Since he had never been in love and never expected to be, he was caught by his own utter naïveté about human women, much less elven ones. He had never even kissed a lass, not once, not even in jest.
On a still night that was a little warmer than usual, Aderyn and Dallandra left the camp and walked alone to the seashore to practice a simple ritual. They had no plans of working any great dweomer or invoking any true power; they merely wanted to practice moving together in a ritual space and making the proper gestures in unison. When the moon broke free of the earth and flooded the water with silver, they took their places facing each other and began to build the invisible temple by the simple method of first imagining it according to formula, then describing to each other what they saw. With two trained minds behind them, the forces built up fast. The cubical altar, the two pillars, the flaming pentangles appeared at the barest mention of their names and glowed with power. Aderyn and Dallandra took positions on either side of the altar—he to the east, she to the west—and laid their hands on a glowing cube of astral stone that only eyes such as theirs could see. For the first time Aderyn actually felt it, as solid and cold as real stone, under his trembling fingers.
Dallandra raised her head and looked him full in the face. Although they had yet to start any invocations, suddenly he saw a female figure standing behind her, a gauzy sort of moonlight shape. At first he thought it might be one of the Guardians; then she stepped forward, burst into light and power, stood solid and real, grew huge until she seemed to swallow up the actual elven woman standing beside her. Her pale hair spread out like sunlight, towers bloomed in garlands, her smile pierced his heart but so sweetly that he cried out and trembled as the scent of roses filled the air.
“What do you see?” It was Dallandra’s voice, but as vast as a wave booming on the shore.
“The Goddess. I see her, and she stands upon you.”
Barely aware of what he was doing, Aderyn sank to his knees raised both hands in worship as the Goddess seemed to merge again with the moonlight and blow away in the wind. When she was gone he felt like weeping with all the grief of a deserted lover. Dallandra called out and stamped upon the ground. With a snap of power the temple vanished, and Aderyn jerked forward and nearly fell, because he’d been leaning against the astral altar for support. Half spraddled on the wet sand, he was too exhausted to do more than watch while Dallandra formally closed the working and banished the invisible forces. Only when she’d finished did he hear again the sound of the ocean, crashing heavy waves nearby. She knelt down beside him and caught his hands in hers.
“I’ve never felt such power before. I don’t know what went wrong—well, if you could call it wrong.”
“Of course it was wrong!” Aderyn snapped. “I owe you a hundred apologies. I got completely out of control. By the hells, you must think me a rank beginner.”
Dallandra laughed, a soft musical note.
“Hardly that!”
In the darkness, a faint glow still hung around her face. Suddenly, and for the first time in his life, he felt lust—not some sentimental warm desire, but a sheerly physical hunger for her body. He could think of nothing else; he wanted to grab her and take her like the worst barbarian in the world. Sharply he drew in his aura and pulled himself under control, but she had already seen the violence of the feeling playing across his face.
“We broke the ritual too soon.” Dallandra’s voice shook. “I owe you the apology. We should have let the force finish itself out.”
“That would only have led to somewhat worse.”
Aderyn dropped her hands and stood up, turning his back on her in a sick kind of shame. When she laid a timid hand on his shoulder, he turned and knocked it away.
“You’d best get back to your tent.”
Biting back tears, she ran for the camp. He walked down to the water’s edge, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the surface like a young lad. As it sank, he imagined his lust and made the feeling sink with it.
In the morning, when they met to continue their studies, Dallandra acted as if nothing unusual had happened the night before, but Aderyn could see that she was troubled. They spent an uncomfortable, distant hour discussing the proper visualization of the bird-form while from outside the noise from the alar filtered in—children yelling, dogs barking, Enabrilia’s voice giggling as she discussed something with another woman, a brief yelling match and fistfight between two young men, the shouting as the rest of the alar ran to break it up. After they’d been interrupted for the tenth time, Aderyn’s frustration boiled over.
“By the Lord of Hell himself, why can’t they be quiet for two stupid minutes?”
“I don’t know.” Dallandra considered the question seriously. “It’s an interesting point in a way.”
Aderyn almost swore at her, too, but he restrained himself.
“It’s not the noise that’s bothering you,” she said at last. “You know it and I know it.”
He had the most unmagical feeling that he was blushing. For a brief moment she looked terrified of her own words, then forced herself to go on.
“Look, the more we work together, the more the forces will draw us together. We have to face up to that sooner or later.”
“Of course, but then—well, I mean I’m sorry, I truly am, but—it would hardly be a good idea for us to—I mean . . . ” Aderyn’s words failed him in a celibate’s fluster.
For a long time she stared at the floorcloth of the tent, and she seemed as miserably shy as he felt. Finally she looked up with the air of a woman facing execution.
“Well, I know you love me. I have to be honest—I don’t love you yet, but I know I will soon, just from working with you, and I like you well enough already. We might as well just start sharing our blankets.”
When Aderyn tried to speak, the only sound that came to him was a small strangled mutter. He felt his face burn.
“Ado! What’s so wrong?”
“Naught’s wrong. I mean, it’s naught against you.”
When she tried to lay her hand on his arm, he flinched back.
“I don’t understand.” Dallandra looked deeply hurt. “Was I wrong? I thought you wanted me. Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I do! Oh by the hells—I’m making a stinking botch of everything.”
Like panicked horse, Aderyn could only think of getting on and running. Without another word, he left the tent, dodged through the camp, and raced down to the beach. He ran along the hard sand at the water’s edge until he was out of breath, then flung himself down on the soft, sun-warmed beach closer in. So much for having great power in the dweomer, he told himself. You stupid lackwit dolt! He found an ancient fragment of driftwood and began shredding it, pulling the rotting splinters to fiber. He had only the faintest idea of how a man went about making love to a woman—what was she going to think of him—how could he sully someone as beautiful as she—what if he did it all wrong and hurt her somehow?
The wind-ruffled silence, the warm sun, the beauty of the dancing light on the ocean all combined to help calm his racing mind and let him think. Slowly, logically, he reminded himself that she was doubtless right. If they were going to generate such an intensity of polarized power between them, the only thing to do with it was to let it run its natural course and find its proper outlet—an outlet that was as pure and holy as any other part of his life. The dweomer had never expected him to live like a celibate priest of Bel. He honestly loved her, didn’t he? And she was honestly offering. Then he remembered how he’d left her: sitting there openmouthed, probably thinking he was daft or worse, probably mocking him. He dropped his face in his hands and wept in frustrated panic. When he finally got himself under control, he looked up to find her standing there watching him.
“I had to come after you. Please, tell me what I’ve done to offend you.”
“Naught, naught. It’s all my fault.”
Her lips slightly parted, Dallandra searched his face with her storm-dark gray eyes, then sat down next to him. Without thinking he held out his hand; she took it, her fingers warm and soft on his.
“I truly do love you,” Aderyn said. “But I wanted to tell you in some fine way.”
“I should have let you tell me. I’m sorry, too. I’ve had lots of men fall in love with me, but I’ve never wanted anything to do with any of them. I’m frightened, Ado. I just wanted it over and done with.”
“Well, I’m frightened, too. I’ve never been with a woman before.”
Dallandra smiled, as shy as a young lass, her fingers tightening on his.
“Well, then we’ll just have to learn together. Oh, by those hells of yours, Ado, here we’ve studied all this strange lore and met spirits from every level of the world and scried into the future and all the rest of it. Surely we can figure out how to do what most people learn when they’re still children!”
Aderyn laughed, and laughing, he could kiss her, her mouth warm, delicate, and shy under his. When she slipped her arms around his neck, he felt a deep warmth rising to fight with his fears. He was content with her kisses, the solid warmth of her body in his arms, and the occasional shy caress. Every now and then she would look at him and smile with such affection in her eyes that he felt like weeping: someday she would love him, the woman he’d considered unreachable.
“Shall I move my gear to your tent tonight?” he said.
She had one last moment of doubt; he could see it in her sudden stillness.
“Or we could let things run their course. Dalla, I love you enough to wait.”
“It’s not that.” Her voice was shaky and uncertain. “I’m just afraid I’d be using you.”
“Using me?”
“Because of the Guardians. I feel sometimes that I could drift into their sea. I want an anchor, Ado. I need an anchor, but I—”
“Then let me help you. I said I would, and I meant it.”
With a laugh she flung herself into his arms and clung to him. Years later he would remember this moment and tell himself, bitterly, that he’d been warned.
Yet he could never blame himself—indeed, who could blame him?—for ignoring the warning when he was so happy, when every day of his new life became as warm and golden and sweet as a piece of sun-ripened fruit, no matter how hard winter roared and blustered round the camp. That afternoon he carried his gear over to Dallandra’s tent and found that among the People this simple act meant a wedding. In the evening there was a feast and music; when Aderyn and Dallandra slipped away from the celebration, they found that their tent had been moved a good half mile from camp to give them absolute privacy, with everything they owned heaped up inside.
While she lit a fire for warmth as well as light, Aderyn laced the tent flap. Now that they were alone, he could think of nothing to say and busied himself with arranging the tent bag and saddle packs neatly round the tent. He moved them this way and that, stacked them several different ways, as if it truly mattered, while she sat on the pile of blankets and watched him. Finally, when he could no longer pretend that he had anything worthwhile to do, he came and sat beside her, but he looked only at the floorcloth.
“Well, uh, I don’t know,” he said. “Shall I tell you how much I love you?”
He heard her laugh, then a little rustling sound, and looked up to find her untying and unbraiding her hair. Her slender face seemed almost lost in that pale thick spill of silver waving down to her waist. When he risked running a gentle hand through it she smiled at him.
“We’ve laced the tent lap,” she said “No one will dare bother us now.”
Smiling, Aderyn bent his head down, and kissed her. This time she turned into his arms with a shy desire that sparked his own.

From that day on, everyone treated him as though he’d always lived among the People and always been Dalandra’s man, just as she became his woman so naturally, so easily, that he felt as if his heart would break from the joy of it, the first truly human joy he’d ever known in life, that of being part of a pair and no longer lonely. Even Calonderiel accepted the situation, although, just after the shortest day of the year, Cal did leave the banadar’s warband and ride away to join another alar. Aderyn felt guilty over that and said as much to Halaberiel.
“Don’t worry about it,” the banadar said. “He’ll reconsider when his broken heart heals. At his age, it’ll probably heal quickly, too.”
Halaberiel was right enough. When the winter camps were breaking up in the first of the warm weather, Cal came riding back, greeted everyone, including Aderyn, as a long-lost brother, and stowed his gear in its former place in the banadar’s tent without a word needing to be said by anyone. As the alarli moved north, heading for the Lake of the Leaping Trout, other warriors came to join them, swordsmen and archers, men and women both, until an army rode into the death-ground to camp and wait for news from Eldidd. Since the dweomer sent Aderyn no warnings of danger, he doubted if there was going to be war, but Halaberiel spent long restless nights, pacing back and forth by the lakeshore, until at last a merchant caravan rode in with Namydd at its head to announce that there would be nothing but peace.
Even though Melaudd’s elder son, Tieryn Waldyn now, had cried revenge and spent the winter riding all over the princedom trying to raise men to seek it, he’d failed ignominiously. Prince Addryc refused his aid, of course, on the grounds that the Bears had violated his decree of sanctity for the elven burial ground. None of the other lords wanted either to displease the prince or to face the longbows of the Westfolk, and Waldyn’s potential allies had an absolute army of reasons to avoid doing so, especially as the news from Cannobaen spread north, that a band of Westfolk had fallen upon the west-lying settlements without warning and wiped them out.
“Waldyn can mutter over his ale all he wants,” Namydd finished up. “But he’s not getting any vengeance this summer, Besides, Banadar, there’s trouble along the Deverry border now. The king of Eldidd’s collected the rights and dues the from mountain passes for as long as anyone can remember, but the Deverry gwerbret in Morlyn’s started claiming them. There’ll be blood over this, there will.” “Splendid,” Halaberiel said. “They won’t be encroaching upon our lands if they’re fighting among themselves. May their gods of war lead them in a long, long dance.”
The People spent just over a month at the Lake of the Leaping Trout, digging stones from the hills and using them to make a rough boundary line, rather than a wall, around the sacred territories. No one, it seemed, remembered how to make the mortar that had once held together the fabled cities of the far west, but as Halaberiel remarked, they’d be riding back often enough to keep the boundary in repair even without a proper wall. All during the construction Aderyn continued his teaching, since several of the dweomerworkers had followed them, and it was there, too, that Nevyn found him for his promised visit. Not only had the old man brought books of lore—three whole volumes of precious writings, including The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid—but he also had a mule pack filled with rolls of parchment, big blocks of dried ink, and special slate trays for grinding the ink into water. Pens, of course, they could cut from any bank of water reeds.
“How did you get the coin for all of this?” Aderyn said, marveling at the ink. Each block was stamped with the pelicans of the god Wmm. “Or did the temple just give it to you?”
“The ink was a gift, truly, but I bought the rest. Lord Maroic’s son paid me handsomely for saving his new lady’s life.” Nevyn’s face turned suddenly blank. “Ado, I’ve got news of a sort for you. Come walk with me.”
When they left the tent, Dallandra hardly seemed to notice, so lost in the books was she. In the long sun of a hot spring afternoon they walked along the lake, where tiny ripples of water eased up onto clear white sand.
“Somewhat’s wrong, isn’t it?” Aderyn said.
“It is. There was fever, bad fever, in Blaeddbyr last winter. Your father and mother are both dead. So is Lord Maroic and most of the elderly and all of the babies in the village, for that matter.”
Aderyn felt his head jerk up of its own will. He wanted to weep and keen, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Nevyn a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“It aches my heart, too, Ado. I felt it would be better to tell you myself rather than merely pass the news on through the fire.”
Aderyn nodded his agreement, wondering at himself and at the grief that seemed to have torn out his tongue. They’re not truly dead, he told himself. They’ve just gone on. They’ll be born again. You know that.
“It was a terrible thing, that fever.” Nevyn’s voice was soft and distant, as if he were talking to himself alone. “But at least it was quick. I think Lyssa might have pulled through if it weren’t that Gweran had already died. I don’t think she truly wanted to live without him.”
He nodded again, still unable to speak.
“There’s no fault or shame in tears, lad. They’ve gone on to new life, but who knows if ever you’ll see them again?”
At that, finally, he could weep, tossing his head back and sobbing aloud like one of the People. Nevyn patted him on the shoulder repeatedly until at last he fell quiet again, spent.
“I’ll miss them,” Aderyn said. “Especially Mam. Ye gods, Nevyn, I feel so lost! Except for you, I really don’t have any people but the People now, if you take my meaning.”
“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.
“What do you think of that?” Dallandra said at last
“It never happened to me, all that blood and slime!”
“I didn’t think it had, no.”
“But why? What a horrible thing! Why?”
“To learn this world.” Dallandra swept her arm to point out sky and earth, grass and water. “To learn all about it and never ever vanish.”
For a moment Elessario considered, her mouth working in thought this, time, not disgust Then she turned, stepped, into the stream between the hazels, and was gone. That will have to do for now, Dallandra thought to herself. We’ll see if she can even remember it. As she was walking back to her horse, she was thinking that Nevyn’s theory of never-incarnate spirits seemed more and more true. She had just reached the tethered mare when she felt a presence behind her like a cool wind. She spun around to see Alshandra, towering and furious, carrying a bow in her hands with a silver-tipped arrow nocked and ready. Suddenly Dallandra remembered the arrow she’d been given, and remembered even more vividly that it was no etheric substance but real, sharp wood and metal.
“Why are you angry?”
“You will not come to us in our own country.”
“If I did, would I ever come back to my own country?”
“What?” Alshandra’s rage vanished; she seemed to shrink down to normal size, but still she clasped the bow. “Why would you want to?”
“This is where I belong. What I love dwells here.”
Alshandra tossed the bow into the air, where it disappeared as if it had tumbled through an invisible window into some hidden room. Dallandra’s blood ran cold: these were no ordinary spirits if they could manipulate physical matter in such a way.
“You will take my daughter from me, girl. I fear you for it.”
“What? I don’t want to steal your daughter.”
Alshandra shook her head in a baffled frustration, as if Dallandra had misunderstood her.
“Don’t lie—I can see it. You will take my daughter. But I shall have a prize in return. Remember that, girl.”
Swelling and huge, she rose up, her hands like claws as she reached out. Dallandra dropped to her knees, grabbed the hilt of the buried knife, and pulled it free, rising again in one smooth motion. Alshandra shrieked in terror and fell back. For one panicked moment they stood there, staring at each other; then Alshandra’s form wavered—and bulged out, as if some invisible force from the knife blade was pushing against her midriff and shoving it back. She looked exactly like a reflection on the surface of a still pool when a puff of breeze moves the water: all wavering and distorted. Then she was gone, with one last shriek left to echo and the grasslands and make Dallandra’s mare kick and snort in fear.
That night Evandar appeared in Dallandra’s dreams and said one simple thing: you should never have done that. She didn’t need him to tell her what action he meant. What he couldn’t understand was that she felt not fear but guilt, that she’d Alshandra caused such pain.
In the morning, as they sat in their tent eating wild berries and soft ewe’s-milk cheese, Dallandra broke their unspoken rule about mentioning the Guardians and told Aderyn what had happened. She was utterly stunned when he became furious.
“You said you’d never go see them again!” His voice cracked with quiet rage. “What, by all the hells, did you think you were doing, going off alone like that?”
She could only stare openmouthed. He caught his breath with a gasp, swallowed heavily, and ran both hands over his face.
“Forgive me, my love. I . . . they terrify me. The Guardians, I mean.”
“I don’t exactly find them comforting myself, you know.”
“Then why—” He checked himself with some difficulty.
The question was a valid one, and she gave it some hard, silent thought, while he waited, patient except for his hands, which clasped themselves into fists as they rested on his thighs.
“It’s because they’re suffering,” she said at last. “Evandar is, anyway, and his daughter suspects that something’s very wrong with their people. They do need help, Ado.”
“Indeed? Well, I don’t see why you should be the one to give it to them.”
“I’m the only one they’ve got, so far at least.”
“Well, I need you, too, and so do the rest of the People.”
“I know that.”
“Then why do you keep hunting these demons down?”
“Oh, come on, they’re not demons!”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I just don’t like them. And besides, it isn’t all pity on your part, is it? You seem to find them fascinating on their own.”
“I’ve got to admit that. It’s because they’re a puzzle. We’ve searched out all the lore we can, from your old master and his books, from all the other dweomerworkers among the People, and we still don’t know what they are. I’m the only one who has a chance of finding out.”
“It’s all curiosity, then?”
“Curiosity?” She felt a surge, not of anger, but of annoyance. “I wouldn’t dismiss it that way.”
“I never meant to dismiss it.”
“Oh, indeed?”
And they had the first fight they’d ever had, hissing the words at each other, because back and forth outside the tent the rest of the alar kept going past on their morning’s chores. Finally Dallandra got up and stormed out of the tent, ran through the camp, and kept running out into the grasslands. When she slowed to a walk and looked back, she was furious to see that he hadn’t followed her. She caught her breath, then walked on, heading nowhere in particular and circling round to keep the camp in sight as a distant jagged line of tents on the horizon.
“Dallandra! Dallandra!” The voice seemed far away and thin. “Wait! Father told me your name.”
She spun around to see Elessario running to meet her. As she came close, the grass parted around her as if she did indeed have physical substance and weight, but her form was slightly translucent and thin. Smiling, she offered one hand, bunched in a fist to hide something.
“A present for you.”
When Dallandra automatically held out her hand, Elessario dropped a silver nut onto her palm. It looked much like a walnut in a husk, and it had a bit of stem and one leaf still attached, but all of silver, solid enough to ring when Dallandra flicked the husk with her thumbnail.
“Well, thank you, but why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I like you. And as a token. If you ever want to come to our country, it’ll take you there.”
“Really? How?”
“Touch it to your eyes, and you’ll see the roads.”
Again, automatically, Dallandra started to do just that, then caught herself in the nick of time. With a shaking hand she stuffed the nut into her trousers pocket.
“Thank you, Elessario. I’ll remember that.”
The child smiled, and she looked so happy, so innocent in her happiness, that it was impossible to suspect her of guile. Evandar, of course, was another matter.
“Did your father give you this to give to me?”
“Oh yes. He knows where they grow.”
“Ah. I rather thought so.”
Elessario started to speak, then suddenly yelped like a kicked dog.
“Someone’s coming! Him! Your man!”
Elessario disappeared. Dallandra spun around and saw Aderyn hurrying toward her. When she went to meet him, he smiled in such relief that she remembered their quarrel.
“I’m sorry I ran out like that,” she said.
“Well, I’m sorry I said all those things. I love you so much.”
She flung herself into his arms and kissed him. With his arms tight around her, she felt safe again, warm and secure and even happy. But somehow, she forgot to tell him about the silver nut; when she found it in her pocket, she wrapped it up in a bit of rag and hid it at the bottom of one of her personal saddlebags, where he’d never have any reason to look for anything.

It was some months later, when the days were growing shorter and the alar was beginning to talk about heading for the winter camps, that Aderyn realized Dallandra was seeing the Guardians regularly. Although she would ride off alone at least three afternoons a week, both of them needed so much time alone, for meditation as well as certain ritual practices, that at first he thought nothing of it. His own teaching work took up so much of his attention that he was in a way grateful that she was occupied elsewhere. Later he was to realize that he’d also been refusing to believe that his woman would coldly and deliberately do something against his wishes; certainly no Deverry woman would have, and in spite of his conscious efforts to the contrary, in his heart he thought of Dallandra as a wife much like the one his mother been. Besides, she always took her usual knife with her, and horse had its usual bridle with an iron bit and cheekpieces, and iron stirrup bars and buckles on its saddle, a surety of sorts against the appearance of the Guardians. Eventually, of course, he realized that she could easily leave the horse and the knife behind somewhere and walk out to meet her friends.
What finally made him face the truth was her growing distraction. At the autumn alardan, when the People brought their problems to her in her role as Wise One, she spent as little time on them as possible; if she could do it without offending anyone, in fact, she turned these mundane matters over to Aderyn. When they were alone, she was lost in thought most of the time; holding any sort of a real conversation with her became next to impossible. Yet in his mind he went on making excuses for her—she’s thinking about her meditations, she’s working on some bit of obscure lore—until he happened to have a conversation with Enabrilia when they met by chance out by the horse herd.
“Is Dallandra sick?” she asked him.
“No. Why?”
“She’s so distracted all the time. This morning I ran into her down by the stream and I had to hail her three times before she realized that I was there. When I finally got her attention she just kind of stared at me. I swear it took her a while to remember who I was.”
Aderyn felt fear like the tip of a cold needle just pricking at his mind.
“Of course,” Enabrilia went on, “she might be pregnant. I mean, you two have only been together for four years, hardly any time at all, but you are—well, no offense intended—but you are a Round-ear, after all. They always say things are different with Round-ear men.”
Aderyn hardly heard her chatter. Her concern was forcing to see something that he hated. When Dallandra returned to the camp, he was in their tent and waiting for her.
“You’ve been riding off to see them again, haven’t you?” He blurted it out out straightaway.
“Yes. I never said I wouldn’t.”
“Why haven’t you told me?”
“Why should I? It only upsets you. Besides, I never go to their country. I always make them come through into ours.”
He stood groping for words while she watched, her head tilted a little to one side, her steel-gray eyes utterly calm and more than a little distant.
“Why are you so afraid?” she said at last.
“I don’t want you to go off with them and leave me.”
“Leave you? What? Oh, my beloved! Never!” She rushed to him and flung herself into his hungry arms. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were worried about something like that.” She looked up, studying his face. “For the work’s sake I might have to go off alone for a few nights, maybe, but that’s all it would ever be.”
“Really?” He wanted to beg her to stay with him every minute of every day, but he knew that such a plea would be ridiculous as well as impossible, given their mutual work. “Promise?”
“Of course I do! I’d always come home to you. Always.”
She kissed him so passionately that he knew that she had to be telling the truth, that at the very least she believed implicitly in her own words. His relief was like a warm tide, carrying all his fears far out to some distant sea. For a long time, too, all through the cold and storm-wracked winter, she seemed to put her distraction aside and to devote as much of her attention to him as she could whenever they were together. By the time that spring came, he decided that he’d been foolish to worry about her work with the Guardians, even when she told him openly that she’d been talking regularly with Elessario.
“That child needs me, Ado. You know, I truly do think that she and her race are meant to be as incarnate as you or me. Something’s gone terribly wrong, somewhere. Some of the evidence I’ve gathered makes me think that these beings are scattered through the universe, across several of the inner planes. I think that’s what they mean. They talk about living on several worlds, you see, not one single world.”
“But I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“No more have I. That’s why they intrigue me so much. You know, I left my parents for the dweomer because I loved hidden things, secret things.”
“So did I. I can understand. But please, be careful around them. I just don’t trust them.”
“Neither do I. Don’t worry.”
“But suppose they did incarnate. What would they become?”
“I have no idea. Neither do they, truly. I think that they’ve been here so long now that they’d become beings much like us—like the elves, I mean, not you Round-ears.”
The words rang in his mind like a shout of warning. Not since their marriage had she made that sharp distinction between herself and his kind. Yet it hurt so much that he hesitated, letting her talk on, until the moment was irrevocably lost.
“They’d have to give up a lot to become like us,” she was saying. “So much, truly, that I wonder if they ever will, but if they don’t, well, they’re the ones who keep telling me they’ll fade away and be lost forever. I’d hate to see that happen to any soul. It would be a tragedy indeed.”
“Just so. But it’s their choice.”
“Is it? Unless they get someone to show them the way, they have no choice.”
“Indeed? What do they want you for, then? Some kind of cosmic midwife?”
“Well, yes.” She looked surprised that he didn’t already know. “Just exactly that.”

In the bright grass by the stream Evandar lounged, half sitting, half lying, his harp at his side. Up close Dallandra could see that the harp was real wood, like the arrow she’d been given, and of elven design, though more elaborate than any she’d ever seen, all inlaid with mother-of-pearl in a pattern of seaweed and sea horses. He noticed the way she studied it.
“This harp is from the lost cities, from Rinbaladelan to be precise, a thing that doesn’t come easily to my folk.”
“You must have taken it away before the city fell.”
“Oh yes.” He frowned suddenly. “I tried to help defend Rinbaladelan, you see. It was hopeless, of course, even with me there. But it was a very beautiful place, and I hated to see all that beauty lying broken in the mud.”
“Was it only the beauty? What about the elves that lived there?”
“They live, they die, they come and go, and it’s no concern of mine. But stone and jewel endure, and the play of water on stone, and the play of light on jewels. The harbor at Rinbaladelan wrung my heart with its beauty, and those hairy creatures filled it with rubble and let it silt and threw corpses into it to turn the water mucky and foul. And then the crabs and the lobsters came to eat the corpses, and the furry creatures ate the crabs and got the plague and died, and I laughed to see them crawling on their bloated bellies through the gutters of the city they’d broken.”
When Dallandra shuddered, he was honestly puzzled by her reaction.
“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.
Aderyn’s fear clutched his throat and turned him mute. Had a great bird swooped down out of that mist and carried her away?
“We could see how far the damp grass stretches,” Albaral said. “Seems to go on a ways.”
Aderyn was about to answer when he heard—when they all heard—the sound of a silver horn, echoing from some long distance away, and looked up to see at the far horizon a line of riders silhouetted against the setting sun, the horses picked out in black against the blood-red clouds for the briefest of moments, then gone.
“The Guardians,” Cal whispered. “Have they taken her?”
Aderyn dropped to his knees and grabbed handfuls of the crumpled grass, the last thing on earth her body had touched. It took the others a long time to make him come away.
All that night, once they were back in camp, Aderyn stayed in their tent and paced endlessly back and forth. At one moment he knew with a heartsick certainty that he’d never see her again; at the next, his hope would well up in a flood of denial to tell him that she’d come back, of course she’d come back, maybe in the morning, maybe in only an hour, that maybe she was walking toward camp this very moment. Then tears would burn in his throat as he told himself that she was as good as dead, gone forever. At dawn he stumbled out and actually walked off in the direction that she’d gone, but of course, he didn’t find her. When he came back to camp, everyone else treated him like an invalid, speaking softly around him, offering him food, telling him to lie down, staring at him so sadly that he nearly screamed aloud and cursed the lot of them.
Aderyn slept all that day, vigiled all that night, and the next, and on and on, until seven days had passed with no sign of Dallandra. Only then, toward the dawn of the eighth night, did he finally think of the obvious and call to Nevyn through the fire. The old man responded so quickly that he must have been already awake and up. When Aderyn told him what had happened, his image above the fire seemed to grow even older with grief.
“She promised me once that she’d never leave me,” Aderyn said at last. “And like a dolt, I believed her. Not for more than a few days, she said, and I believed her.”
“Now here, I can’t imagine Dallandra breaking a solemn promise, no matter how much glamour these Guardians have.”
“Well, maybe she wouldn’t. Nevyn, I just don’t know what to think! If I only knew what’s happened to her, really knew, I mean. I’m only guessing that the rotten Guardians even took her.”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
“Ask them? I can’t even find them!”
“Have you truly tried?”
Aderyn left the tent and walked outside into the rising dawn. He hadn’t really tried, he supposed. In his heart he never wanted to see them again, wanted only to curse them or rage at them or in some way cause them the same heartsick pain that he was feeling. If he did, though, they would most likely never give her back. He left the waking camp and walked out into the grasslands, stumbled along blindly at first, wandering with no purpose, until he felt calm enough to think. From studying the lore, he knew something about the sort of places where the Guardians might appear: boundary places, the crossing of paths, the joining of streams, anywhere that seemed to be a gate or a ford or a marker between two different things. Following a dim memory, he came at last to a place where three rivulets became a proper stream.
“Evandar!” he called out blindly in grief and rage. “Evandar! Give me back my wife!”
His only answer was the grass sighing as it bent in the wind and the stream gurgling over its rough bed. This time his voice screamed in a berserker’s howl.
“Evandar! At least give me the chance to fight for her. Evandar!”
“She’s not mine to keep or give back.”
The voice came from directly behind him. With a yelp he leapt straight up and turned as he came down, panting for breath, close to tears, and faced the seeming-elf. His yellow hair was bright daffodils in the morning sun, and he was wearing a green tunic over leather trousers, a bow slung over his back and a quiver of arrows at his hip.
“She came to us of her own free will, you see,” Evandar went on. “Truly she did. I asked for her help, but never would I have stolen her away.”
“And I suppose you won’t be able to tell me if she’ll ever come back.”
“Of course she will, when she wants to. We won’t keep her against her will.”
“But what if she doesn’t want to? That’s no concern of yours, I suppose.”
Evandar frowned, studying the grass, and spoke without looking up.
“I have the strangest feeling round my heart, and all for your sake. I’ve never felt such a thing before, but you know, I do think I pity you, Aderyn of the Silver Wings. My heart is so heavy and sore that I don’t know what else to call it.” He looked up at that point and indeed, his luridly blue eyes glistened with tears. “I’ll make you a promise. You’ll see her again. I swear it, no matter how long she stays.”
“Well, I believe you’re sincere, but your promise may not do me one jot of good. I’m not elven, you know. My race only lives a little while, a very little while compared with them and even less compared with the likes of you. If she doesn’t come home soon, I won’t be here. Do you understand?”
“I do.” He thought hard, chewing on his lower lip in a completely human gesture. “Very well. I can do somewhat about that. Here, let me give you a pledge . . . oh, what . . . ah, I know. A long time ago my woman gave yours an arrow. Here, take another to go with it. You have my word and my pledge now, Aderyn of the Silver Wings, that she’ll come back and that you’ll live to have her back.”
Aderyn took the arrow and ran his fingers down the smooth, hard wood, cool and solid and as real as the grasslands under him.
“Then you have my thanks in return, Evandar, because I don’t have another thing to give you.”
“Your thanks will do. Oddly enough.”
When Aderyn looked up he was gone, but the arrow stayed, a tangible thing in his hands. He took it back to the camp and his tent, searched through Dallandra’s possessions, and found the other arrow, wrapped in an embroidered cloth in one of her saddlebags. He wrapped its fellow up with it, put the bag back, then sat down on the floor and stared at the wall, merely stared, barely thinking, for hours and hours.

To Dallandra, much less than an hour passed on the misty road. Just at sunset Elessario brought her to a vast meadow, a long spill of green flecked with tiny white flowers. Scattered all across it were tables made of gilded wood set with jewels, so that they sparkled in the light of the thousands of candles that stood in golden candelabra. It was night, suddenly, and in candlelight the host was feasting. They were dressed in green and gold, and gold and jewels flashed at throat or wrist or sparkled in their hair; all of them looked like elves but more beautiful than elves to the same degree that elves are more beautiful than human beings. Dallandra was never sure just how many people there were, a thousand maybe, but when she tried to count them, they wouldn’t hold still—or so it seemed. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a table with, say, ten individuals; when she turned her head for a better look, the table might be gone, or it would seem that only two or three sat there, or perhaps twenty instead of ten. When she looked at a group from a distance, they seemed to blend together while still remaining distinct, as if they were forms seen in clouds, or flames leaping from a fire. Over the laughter rang music, harp and flute and drum, of such beauty that she felt on the edge of tears for the entire time the music played.
Elessario and Dallandra sat, one to his right, one to his left, at the table Evandar headed. He caught Dallandra’s hand and kissed it.
“Welcome. And was your journey an easy one?”
“Oh yes, thank you.”
“Good, but still, you must be tired. Here, have some mead.”
He handed her a tall, slender goblet of pure silver wrapped a garland of tiny roses made of reddish gold. Although she admired the workmanship, mindful of the old tales Dallandra set it down untouched.
“I’m not thirsty, thank you.”
His handsome face turned sharp with rage.
“Why do you turn down my drink?”
“I have no desire to be trapped here, and I won’t eat your food, either.”
“I’ve already given you my pledge: you leave when you want to leave and not a moment later. You can drink with us in safety.”
“Oh, please, Dalla?” Elessario broke in. “You can’t just go hungry the whole time you’re here.”
She hesitated, then smiled and raised the goblet in his direction. If she kept distrusting them, they would never trust her.
“To your health, Evandar, and to your continuance.” She drank off the toast. “Oh, by the gods, this mead is wonderful!”
“It tastes like the mead they made in Bravelmelim.”
All at once something came clear in her mind as she studied the feast and the feasters, the fine clothes, the jewelry, the gilded tableware and the intricately embroidered linens.
“All of this is modeled on the lost cities, isn’t it?” Dallandra waved her hand randomly round. “Your clothes and everything else.”
“Exactly that.” He grinned in pleasure at her recognition. “And later we’ll have jugglers and acrobats, just like the ones your kings used to watch.”
The feasting and the entertainments went on till dawn, a glamour more ensnaring than any ordinary ensorcelment could have been. After all, Dallandra’s own magicks would have been more than a match for any clumsy manipulation of her mind or her aura, but for that little space of time she was watching—no she was living in—her people’s lost past, religiously remembered, scrupulously re-created by beings to whom these forms meant life itself, or at the least, the only life they knew. A sheer intellectual lust to see more, to understand that missing history caught her deep and held her tight. When the feast broke up and the folk began to slip away in the pale light of a strangely twilit dawn, Evandar took her for a long walk down to a riverbank bordered with formal gardens exactly like the ones that used to grow in Tanbalapalim. They crossed a bridge carved with looping vines, roses, and the little faces of the Wildfolk to enter a palace, or perhaps it was only part of a palace, floating in mist. Some of the rooms seemed to open onto empty air; some of the halls seemed to dead-end themselves in living trees; some of the floors seemed almost transparent, with shadows moving back and forth underneath.
The chamber that they all settled into for a talk seemed solid enough, though. It had a high ceiling, painted white and crossed with polished oak beams, and a floor of pale gray slate, scattered with red-and-gold carpets. The two walls that held no doors or windows were painted just like the outside of a tent, but far more delicately; on one was a vast landscape, a river estuary opening to the sea at either dawn or sunset; on the other, a view of the harbor at Rinbaladelan. The polished ebony furniture was all padded with silk cushions of many colors.
“Did this room once belong to a queen of the lost cities?” Dallandra asked.
“No, not at all.” Evandar gave her a sly grin. “To a merchant’s wife, that’s all.”
Dallandra gasped, properly impressed.
You have no idea how beautiful the cities were, Dalla,” he went on, and his voice cracked in honest sadness. “Your people were rich, and they lived even longer than they do now, with time to learn every craft to perfection, and they were generous, too, pooling their wealth to build places so fine and wonderful that they took the breath out of everyone that saw them, even a strange soul like me. I loved those cities. Truly, I think they were the things that taught me how to love. If they still stood, I might go to your world and live there the way you want me to do. But they’re gone, and my heart half died with them.”
“Well, true enough,” Dallandra said. “Broken stone doesn’t repair itself and fallen walls won’t rise.”
“Just so.” He looked away, staring out the window to a long view of grass and flowers. “And your people never went back, they never even went back to mourn them. That was a hard thing to forgive, that and of course the wretched iron.”
“Evandar, I am so sick of hearing you people whine about iron. Do you think we could have built those beastly cities without it? Do you think we’d live long out on the grasslands without knives and arrow points and axes?”
“I hadn’t thought about it at all. Forgive me.”
“If they used iron in the cities, Father,” Elessario broke in, “how did you spend time there?”
“With great difficulty. It was worth it to me, the pain.”
“Well, then.” Dallandra pounced, like a striking hawk. “If that pain was worth the beauty, then . . . ”
His laugh cut her off but it was a pleasant one.
“You’re as sly as I am, sorceress.” He rose, motioning to his daughter. “Come along, let our guest rest.”
“Well, I am tired, truly.” Dallandra suddenly yawned. “I left home—well, it must have been a full day ago now.”

For the first twenty years that Dallandra was gone, Aderyn kept hoping that soon, any day, any moment, she would return. The People marveled at him, in fact, that he would be so strong, so faithful to her memory, when all those old tales said that no one ever returned from the lands of the Guardians. During that twenty years, he spent some time talking to the Forest Folk, who worshipped the Guardians as gods, and learned what little they knew about these strange beings. When their shamans—priests is a bit too dignified a word—insisted that he should be happy that his wife had been honored and taken as a concubine for these gods, Aderyn managed to be polite, barely, but he never went back to talk with them again. It was his work that saved him. At first he supervised the copying of the books Nevyn had brought and taught his new lore to those elves who were already masters of the old; then he took young apprentices, and trained them from the beginning in his craft. As Deverry men reckon time, it was in the year 752 that he sent his first three pupils out to teach others, and that year, as well, when he was still looking around for his next apprentice, Nevyn rode out to the Eldidd border to visit him.
They met about thirty miles north of Cannobaen, at the place where the Aver Gavan, as men call it, joins up with the Delonderiel. That spring the elves were holding a horse fair, because the Eldidd merchants were willing to pay higher than ever for good stock, in the wide meadows along the riverbanks. What Nevyn brought with him, however, wasn’t iron goods, but news. The Eldidd king wanted those horses because he’d just declared war on Deverry.
“Again?” Aderyn said peevishly. “Ye gods, I’m glad I don’t live in the kingdoms anymore, with all their stupid bickering and squabbling.”
“I’m afraid it’s a good bit more this time than just petty quarrels.” Nevyn looked and sounded exhausted. “The High King died without an heir, and there’s three claimants, Eldidd among them.”
“Oh. Well, my apologies. Truly, that’s a serious matter.”
“It is.” Nevyn paused, considering him. “You know, I’m beginning to feel hideously old these days. Ye gods, there’s all that gray in your hair, and here I still remember the little lad I took as an apprentice.”
“I feel even older than I am, frankly.”
“Ah.” Nevyn was silent for a long, tactful moment. “Um, well, how are you faring these days? Without her, I mean.”
”Well enough. I have my work.”
“And your hope?”
“Is feeble but alive. I suppose it’s alive. Maybe it’s just one of those embalmed corpses you read about, like the Bardekians make of their great men.”
“I can’t blame you for your bitterness.”
“Do I still sound bitter? Then I guess my hope truly is still alive as well.” For the first time in about six years, he nearly wept, but he caught himself with a long sigh. “Well, what about this civil war, then? How long do you think it will last?”
Nevyn considered him for a long, sour moment, as if he were wondering whether or not he should let his old pupil get away with such an obvious change of the subject.
“Too long, I’m afraid,” Nevyn said at last. “All three claimants are weak, which means no one’s going to win straightaway. I’ve gotten the most ghastly set of warnings and omens about it, too. Somewhat’s gravely out of balance on the Inner Planes—I’m not sure what yet. But I intend to do what I can to put an end to this nonsense. I’d wager that the war will burn itself out in about ten years.”
In truth, of course, Nevyn’s hope was ill founded in the extreme: the Time of Troubles was to last five and a hundred years, although of course Nevyn was indeed the one to finally and at great cost put an end to it. If either of them had known how long the wars would rage, they might well have lost heart and done nothing at all, but fortunately, dweomer or no, they were forced to live through them one year at a time like other men. Although Nevyn immediately involved himself in the politics of the thing, a story that has been recorded elsewhere, Aderyn and the People were little affected for some thirty years. Only then, after the demands of the various armies started ruining the delicate network of trade that held Deverry and Eldidd together, did the merchants stop riding west as often as they had. Iron goods were becoming too rare in Eldidd itself for the merchants to take them freely out of the country. The People grumbled, but the Forest Folk gloated, saying that the Guardians had somehow arranged to stop the trade in demon metal. Aderyn had a brief moment of wondering if they were right.
Nevyn, of course, kept him informed of the various events of the wars, but only one meant much to Aderyn personally. Indeed, he felt himself so emotionally distant from the slaughter and the intrigues that he realized that he’d become more than a friend or the People—he was thinking like a man of the People. The Round-ears seemed far away and unimportant; their lives flashed past too quickly for their doings to endure or to take on much significance unless one of them somehow touched his heart or his own life. But Nevyn mentioned, in one of their infrequent talks through the fire that two friends of his had died. Nevyn’s grief was palpable even through their magical communications.
“It aches my heart to see you so sad,” Aderyn thought to him.
“My thanks. You know, this concerns you, too, I suppose. Ye gods, forgive me! I might have told you when they were still alive. I’m speaking of the souls that were once your parents, you see—Gweran and Lyssa, reborn and then killed again so soon by these wretched demon-spawn wars. Do you still remember them?”
“What? Of course I do! Well, that aches my heart indeed. I suppose. I mean, it’s not as if they were my kin anymore. Huh. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.”
“Who knows? No one can read another’s Wyrd. But I must say that it seems unlikely. Their Wyrd seems bound to the kingdoms, and yours to another folk entirely.”
But as it turned out, Aderyn did indeed have a small role to play in ending the wars when, in about 834, he left the elven lands for a few weeks and traveled to Pyrdon, a former province that had taken its chance to rebel and turn itself into an independent kingdom. By then, or so Nevyn told him, with so many claimants to the throne in both Deverry and Eldidd, it seemed that the wars would rage forever. Nevyn and the other dweomermasters had decided to choose one heir and put their weight and their magicks behind him in a desperate attempt to bring the kingdoms to peace. Simply because he was the closest dweomermaster to Loc Drw, where this claimant lived, Aderyn went to take a look at a young boy, Prince Maryn, son of Casyl of Pyrdon, whom the omens marked as a possible future ruler of Deverry. Traveling as a simple herbman, he arrived late on a blazing summer’s day at Casyl’s dun, which stood on a fortified island out in the middle of a lake.
At the entrance to the causeway leading out to the dun stood armed guards. As Aderyn walked up, he wondered if he’d be allowed to pass by.
“Good morrow, good sir,” said the elder of the pair. “Looks like you’re a peddler or suchlike.”
“Not truly, but a herbman.”
“Splendid! No doubt the ladies of the dun will want a look at your goods.”
“Now here!” The younger guard stepped forward. “What if he’s a spy?”
“Oh, come now! No one’s going to send an elderly soul like this to spy, lad. Pass on by, good sir,”
The words hit Aderyn like a slap across the face. Elderly? Was he really elderly now? Since the ladies of the dun, including the queen herself, did receive him hospitably, during his stay in the dun he had many a chance to study himself in one mirror or another. Yes, the guards were right: his hair was snow white, his face all fined and sagging, his eyes droop-lidded and weary, impossibly weary from his long grief over his stolen woman. He saw then that Dallandra’s loss had burned his youth away like grass thrown into a fire. During those days in Casyl’s dun, the last of his hope died, too, that ever he would see her again. He realized it when Nevyn asked him to stay an extra day and he agreed without a thought; he simply no longer felt the need to rush back to the alar on the off chance that she’d returned in his absence.
When he did return to the elven lands, he told the bards to add a new bit of lore to the tales about the Guardians: not always did they keep their promises.

To Dallandra, that same hundred years passed as four days, bright glorious days of feasting and music, laughter and old tales. At odd moments she remembered Aderyn, and even stored up things to tell him when she returned, because she knew that the information Evandar possessed about the lost cities would fascinate him as much as it fascinated her. Just as she never tired of hearing about the cities, Evandar never tired of talking about them, and with such affection that she began to see a possible strategy. Late on the fourth night, they sat together on a hillside overlooking a grassy meadow, where among glittering torches harpers played and the young folk danced in solemn lines, all bowing and slow steps.
“It’s so different from the dances my people do,” Dallandra remarked. “We like to leap and yell and dance fast as the wind.”
“Oh, I remember your dances, too—country dances, they called them then.”
“I see. You know, I’ve been thinking. I wonder if the cities could be rebuilt. It’s too bad the Round-ears are such a treacherous folk; otherwise we could make some kind of alliance with them, or at least learn how to work iron again. I know, I know—you hate iron—but we really would have to have it to cut stone and suchlike, and we’d need to know how to work mortar and weave cloth and build bridges that wouldn’t fall down and streets that wouldn’t buckle. It might only be one city at first, but still, it seems such a pity to think of them lying there, all broken, with only the owls nesting and the wolves prowling through to keep them company.”
“You’re saying that to tempt me.”
“Does it?”
“Well, yes, more perhaps than you can know, because I know better than you how it might be done. If we had a place to go to, a fine, fitting place, we’d be more likely to choose your kind of life over death. Well, some of us would. The young people. It’s their fate that worries me, the young people. There are fewer and fewer born, you know, as time passes by.”
“I still don’t understand how they’re born.”
“No more do I.” He laughed under his breath. “No more do I, but they become, and they delight us. I hate to think of them vanishing away.”
Out in the meadow the music sang in harmony with the sound of laughter. Dallandra glanced up and saw a huge silver moon, just wisped with cloud, at zenith. Black specks, birds, she supposed, moved across its face, then circled round, plunging down, growing bigger and faster with the rush of wings. Howling in rage, Evandar leapt to his feet.
“Run!” he screamed. “Dalla, to the trees!”
Suddenly she saw trees, some yards away at the hillcrest. As she ran she heard shrieks and squawks, the rush of wings and the cawing of angry ravens. Just as she darted under cover she realized that one of the enormous birds was a nighthawk, stooping straight for her. In the nick of time she rolled into the shelter of woody shrubs and low-hanging branches. Screaming its disappointment, the hawk veered off and flew toward the meadow, where the dancers were scattering among the torches with little cries of fear. When Dallandra risked standing up, the hawk circled back, but this time it landed to turn with a shimmer of wings and magic into Alshandra.
“I thought it would be you,” Dallandra said calmly. “You should come with your daughter when she goes, and then you won’t lose her.”
“Fetid bitch! I’ll kill you.”
“You can’t, not here, not in this country.” She laid her hand on the amethyst figure. “What are you going to do? Tear at me with your claws?”
A shriek hung in the morning air. Alshandra was gone, and the sun was rising through a lavender mist.

As Dallandra walked downhill in that pale dawn to join Evandar, the year 854 was ending in Deverry and Eldidd. As the slashing rains of autumn drove down, it threatened to become a black new year for Eldidd at least, because Maryn, a man now, not a lad, and the High King of a newly unified Deverry, was camped in her northern fields and sieging her northern towns with the biggest army Eldidd had ever seen. Aderyn was traveling with his alar to the winter camps when he heard the news from Nevyn, who contacted him through the fire. By then, Nevyn had become the High King’s chief councillor, but rather than sit and worry in the drafty ruins of the palace in war-battered Dun Deverry, he was traveling with his king on campaign.
“Not that there’s a cursed lot for me to do,” he said that night and with evident relief. “We’re holed up in Cernmeton, and its nice and snug, because the town surrendered without a siege as promptly as you please.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Do you think the war will last long?”
“I don’t. Everywhere the king rides, the opposition crumbles away. In the spring, when the towns are all running low on provisions and can’t possibly stand a siege, the army will move south and take Aberwyn and Abernaudd, and that’ll be an end to it. Deverry and Eldidd will be one kingdom from now on. What’s wrong? Your image looks frightened.”
“I am. If the wars are over, are the Eldidd men going to start moving west again and stealing my people’s land?”
“I’ve worked so hard to end the civil wars that I forget how things must look to you. But don’t let it trouble your heart.” Even the purely mental touch of Nevyn’s mind on his resonated with grief. “You don’t understand just how horrible things have been, just how many men have died. I think me that there’ll be plenty of land in the new kingdom to satisfy everyone for years to come.”
Just in time Aderyn stopped himself from gloating.
“Well, let me think,” he said instead. “My alar isn’t very far from Cernmeton, and we’ll be riding past on our way to the winter camps. Do you think we could meet?”
“That would be splendid, but I don’t think you’d best ride into town. In fact, the king’s quartermasters are so busy drafting every man who looks like he could fight that I think me the People should stay far away from us at the moment. In the summer, though, when the war is over—it’ll be better then.” Nevyn’s image suddenly smiled. “And there’s someone with me that you should meet, indeed there is. The soul who once was your father. He’s a bard again, of a sort, but he was a mercenary soldier, too, for years years, and a friend of mine as well. Maddyn, his name is.”
By then the thought of his father was so distant that Aderyn felt neither more nor less pleased than he would at the thought of meeting any friend of Nevyn’s, but once he got to know Maddyn he did indeed find him congenial. Nevyn’s predictions about the course of the war proved absolutely true. When in the spring Maryn and his army moved south, the people of Eldidd scrambled to surrender and end the endless horrors of the war. Abernaudd opened its gates the moment it saw him coming; Aberwyn made a great show of holding out for an afternoon, then surrendered at sunset. While Maryn and his men hunted down the last Eldidd king, Aenycyr (who was, for those of you who care about such historical things, the great-grandson of Prince Mael of Aberwyn, later known as Mael the Seer, through the legitimate line of his first marriage), Nevyn took a leave of absence from his king’s side and traveled west with only Maddyn for company to visit with Aderyn.
They met just northwest of Cannobaen on the banks of a little stream that ran into Y Brog, where the alar had set up camp to rest their horses on their way to the first alardan of summer. By then Maddyn was forty-five, an ancient age for a fighting man; his hair was thoroughly gray and his blue eyes were weary with the deep hiraedd of someone who’s seen far too many friends die in far too short a time. Yet he was still an easy man to talk with and ready with a jest, and the People all liked him immediately because among his other talents he could see the Wildfolk as clearly as they did. There was one small creature, a sprite with long blue hair and needle-sharp pointed teeth, that was as devoted to him as a favorite dog, following him around during the day and sleeping near him at night.
“I’m afraid, it’s my fault,” Nevyn said ruefully when, Aderyn asked about the sprite. “Many years ago Maddyn spent a winter with me, you see, when he’d been badly wounded. He began seeing the Wildfolk then—just because they were all around around him, I suppose. His music had somewhat to do with it, too, because he’s a truly fine harper.”
“The Wildfolk do love a good, tune. Well, there’s no harm to it I suppose, except I feel sorry for the poor little thing. When Maddyn dies, she’s not going to be able to understand it at all.”
“Oh, she’ll probably forget him quick enough. He wasn’t meant to see the Widfalk, much less have one of them fall in love with him.”
Although Aderyn normally only slept a few scant hours a night, that evening he felt so tired that he went to his tent early and fell asleep straightaway. In his dreams the little blue sprite came to him and led him out across the grasslands—that is, he thought at first that he was in the grasslands, until he noticed the vast purple moon hanging swollen at the horizon. In his dream-mind a voice sounded, saying cryptically, “The Gatelands.” When he looked around he saw two young women running toward him, hand in hand and smiling. One of them was Dallandra. He’d dreamt about her so much in the last hundred years that he felt neither pleasure nor grief at first, merely noted somewhat wryly in his dream that yes, he still cared enough about her to summon her image at times.
Until, that is, she came closer and he saw the little amethyst figurine at her throat, such a discordant detail that it made him wonder if this dream were different. He realized then that rather than appearing as a dream-image of himself, he’d somehow assumed his body of light, the pale bluish form, a stylized man shape, in which he traveled on the etheric.
“Ado, it’s good to see you, even in this form,” Dallandra said. “But I don’t have much time. It’s hard for us to come to the Gatelands like this, you see.”
“No, I don’t see. For the love of every god, Dalla, when are you coming home?”
“Soon, soon. Oh, don’t sulk—it’s only been a few days, after all. Listen carefully. You know that guest of yours, Nevyn’s friend, the one the sprite loves?”
“His name’s Maddyn. But it hasn’t been a few days.”
“Well, five days then, but do please listen! I can feel them drawing me back already. Maddyn’s got a piece of jewelry made of dwarven silver. The Guardians need it. Ado, I’ve got so much to tell you. Sometimes the Guardians can see the future. Only in bits flashes, but they do see it, in little tiny true dreams, like. And one of them saw that this Maddyn fellow’s going to be important. So they need the rose ring.” Even as she went on speaking, her form seemed to be growing thinner, paler, harder to see. “In my saddlebags are all sorts of things that you can trade him for it—take as much as you need, heap him up with it, I don’t care. Just get the rose ring. Leave it in a tree near camp.”
“Do what? Why should I help these rotten creatures at all?”
“Oh, please, Ado, do be reasonable! Do for my sake if you won’t do it for theirs.” She was a mere shadow, a colored stain on the view behind her. “The biggest oak tree near camp.”
She was gone, and her companion with her. Aderyn looked down and saw the silver cord connecting his body of light with his physical body, lying in his blankets in his tent just below him. So— he hadn’t been dreaming after all! The meeting was in its way true enough. He slipped down the cord, returned to his body, and sat up, slapping the ground to earth himself out in the physical. The blue sprite was crouching at the foot of his bedroll and watching him.
“Well, little sister, you were a messenger, were you?”
She nodded yes and disappeared. For a long time that night Aderyn debated whether or not he’d do what Dallandra wanted, but in the end, for her sake, he decided that he would. He found her saddlebag—he’d been carrying it around for over a hundred and twenty years by then—and the jewelry she’d spoken of. Although it was all tarnished and dusty, she had some beautiful brooches and bracelets in the elven style, and they’d polish up nicely enough.
Early that morning, he went looking for Maddyn and found him sitting in the grass and tuning a small wooden harp in the middle of a cloud of Wildfolk. Although it was all nicked and battered, Aderyn had never heard a sweeter-sounding instrument. For a few moments they talked idly while the Wildfolk settled round them in the hope of music.
“I’ve got somewhat to ask you,” Aderyn said at last. “It’s probably going to sound cursed strange.”
“Ye gods, after knowing Nevyn for all these years I’m used to strange things. Ask away.”
“Someone told me that you’ve got a silver ring with roses on or suchlike.”
“I do.” Maddyn looked startled that he would know. “It was given to me by a woman that I . . . well, if I say I loved her, don’t misunderstand me. She was someone else’s wife, you see, and while I loved her, there was never one wrong thing between us.”
He spoke so defiantly that Aderyn wondered if he were lying, not that it was any business of his. Mentally he cursed Dalla for asking for something that probably carried enormous sentiment for Maddyn.
“Um, well.” Aderyn decided that the plain truth was the best, as usual. “You see, in the dream I was told by a dweomerwoman of great power that this ring is marked by dweomer for a Wyrd of its own. She needs it very badly for a working she has underway. She’s offered to trade high.”
“Well, then, she shall have it. I’ve lived around the dweomer for years, you know. I’ve got some idea of the importance of dreams and what comes to you in them. I won’t trade, but I’ll give it to you outright.”
“Oh, here, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to wheedle like a child. It must mean a lot to you.”
“It did once, but the woman who gave it to me is beyond caring about it or me.” The bard’s eyes brimmed tears. “If you want it, you shall have it.”
With the curious Wildfolk trailing after, they went to the tent that Maddyn was sharing with Nevyn. The bard rummaged through his saddlebags and took out something hard wrapped in a bit of embroidered linen. He opened the cloth to reveal the ring, a simple silver band about a third of an inch wide, graved with roses, and a pin shaped like a single rose, so cunningly worked that it seemed its petals should be soft to touch. He gave Aderyn the ring, but he wrapped the pin back up and returned it to his saddlebags. Idly Aderyn glanced inside the ring, half expecting to see the lady in question’s name, but it was smooth and featureless.
“The smith who made it, and that pin, too, is a brilliant craftsman,” Maddyn remarked. “Otho, his name is.”
When, out of idle curiosity, Aderyn slipped the ring on his finger, his hand shook in a dweomer-induced cold.
“Somewhat wrong?” Maddyn said.
“There’s not. It’s just the knowing coming upon me. You shall have this back, Maddo, one fine day. You’ll have it back in a way you never expected, and long after you’ve forgotten it.”
Maddyn stared in frank puzzlement. There was nothing Aderyn could tell him, because he didn’t know what he meant himself. His heart was bitter, too, remembering the similar promise that Evandar had made him. Apparently the Guardian had meant that he would see Dallandra again, all right, but only in that agonizingly brief glimpse on the etheric plane.
On the morrow morning, Aderyn did what she’d asked and placed the ring high up in the crotch of the oak tree while the alar was breaking camp. Although he never knew who had taken it, the next time the alar rode that way, it was gone. In its place was a small smooth bit of wood scratched with a couple of Elvish words, a simple “thank you,” but in her handwriting. He borrowed an awl and bored a hole in the scrap, so he could wear it on a bit of thong round his neck, just because her hands had touched it. Seeing her again had brought his grief alive even as it had killed the last of his hope.

Early the next year, from an Eldidd port Maddyn sailed off with Nevyn to Bardek, and Aderyn never saw or heard of him again, not even to hear how he died, far off in the islands after the rose-shaped pin had been stolen from him. But oddly enough, Dallandra did hear of the bard’s death, or, to be more precise, she realized what had happened when his blue sprite turned up at the court of the Guardians on what seemed to her to be the day after she’d gotten the silver ring. It was the jewelry that drew the little creature, in fact, because they found her clasping it between her tiny hands. Her face was screwed up in an agony of despair, and when Elessario tried to stroke her, the sprite whipped her head around and sank her pointed teeth deep into the Guardian’s hand. Illusory blood welled, then vanished. Elessario stared for some moments at the closing wound.
“What made her do that?” “I don’t know for certain, but I’d guess that Maddyn’s dead.”
The sprite threw back her head, opened her mouth in a soundless howl, and disappeared.
“He seems to be, yes,” Dallandra went on. “And she’s mourning him.”
Elessario cocked her head to one side and considered the words for some time. They walked across the glowy emerald grass in a pinkish twilight, where blue-green trees on the horizon shifted like smoke. With a howl that they could actually hear, the sprite reappeared, much larger, about the size of a three-year-old child.
“She mourns because he’s gone to the place called death,” Elessario said, “and she can’t follow him there.”
“That’s right, yes.”
They were sitting on the billowing grass with the sprite between them, leaning her head into Elessario’s silken lap.
“Every now and then I wonder what it would be like to die,” Elessario said. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. I can only make guesses. I suppose it’s a lot like falling asleep—but you’ve never been asleep—sorry.”
“I’m growing very tired of finding out that there are all these things I’ve never done.” But she sounded sad rather than cross. By then, the sprite was sitting on her lap and was larger again, like a child of nine or ten, cradled in her arms and silent. “If I go to live among the People, if I go to be born and someday die, what then, Dallandra?”
“I don’t know. None of us can know what would happen then.”
“I’m growing very tired of you telling me that there are all these things you don’t know.”
“But I don’t know them. The only one who can find those answers is you.”
They were walking among roses, with the sprite, tiny again, skipping ahead. All at once the little creature threw back her head and sniffed the air like a hunting dog. For the briefest of moments she froze, then darted into the air, swooped round them in joy, and disappeared.
“Something’s made her happy,” Dallandra remarked.
“Maybe her bard’s been reborn.”
“Oh no, it’s much too soon! Although, I don’t know about the Round-ears. It might be different for them.”
The lands of the court shifted and gleamed around them in a burst of moonlight, and now and again music drifted in warm air.
“Oh, lovely—the moon’s rising,” Dallandra said. “It’s so hard, to believe that I’ve been here seven whole days.”
All at once, just from, saying the words aloud, their import pierced her mind. How could it have been seven days, only seven short days, when enough time had passed for Nevyn to travel to the elven lands and leave them again, for Maddyn the bard to appear, then die, and now, maybe—no, it was quite likely, really— be reborn again, Dallandra shrieked aloud and felt the cry tear out of her as if by its own will.
“Elessario! You’ve lied to me! You’ve tricked me!”
“What?” She spun, around to stare, then suddenly burst into tears. “Never! Dalla, what do you mean?”
“How long have I been here?”
Elessario could only stare while tears ran down her cheeks. Dallandra realized that she would have no way of understanding such things as the passing of time.
“Take me to your father. Where’s your father?”
“Here.” In full court garb, draped in a cloak of silvery blue and wearing a golden fillet round his yellow hair, he came strolling up to them. “I’m the trickster, Dalla, not my poor little daughter. Time runs different here in our country.”
“You never told me.”
“You never would have come.”
“If you had gods, I’d curse you by them.”
“No doubt. You know, I’m rather sorry I lied. What an odd sensation.”
“Let me go home.”
“Of course. That was our bargain, wasn’t it? Home you shall go, and right now.”
“No!” Elessario howled. “Please don’t go, Dalla.”
“I’m sorry, child, but I have to. You can come visit me in my own country, like you used to do before.”
“I want to go with you now. Please, let me come with you and live with you.”
Suddenly the air grew cold, and the moon slipped behind dark clouds. In the murky light torches gleamed on armor and sword; shields clashed, men swore, banners snapped and fluttered as an army rushed toward them, Alshandra riding hard at their head. With a frown of mild disgust, Evandar threw up one hand and snapped his fingers. All the charging soldiers turned into mist and blew away. Stamping one foot, Alshandra stood before them.
“Dallandra will never leave. She’s turned my daughter against me, and I shall have her in return. It’s the law and it’s fair and she’s my prize.”
“I made her man a promise,” Evandar said. “And I shall keep it.”
“You made the promise, Evandar Yellow-hair, not me. She shan’t leave. If our daughter is going away because of her, she’s staying to be my prize in return.”
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.
When she went into labor, in fact, Aderyn was miles away, showing some of his disciples the proper way to dig up medicinal roots. By the time they got back to camp, Dallandra was shut away in Enabrilia’s tent with the attending women around her, and by elven custom, he would have been kept out even if he’d wanted to stay with her. All evening he sat by the fire in a circle of other men, who said little, looked grim, and passed a skin of mead around until at last an exhausted Enabrilia came to fetch Aderyn to the tent.
“A son,” she said. “And he and his mother are doing well, though . . . well, no, they’re both doing splendidly.”
“Tell me the truth,” Aderyn snapped. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really. Dallandra did very well, and while she’s tired, she’s alert and strong and all. It’s just that the baby was so quiet. He never cried, not even when he started breathing.”
As he hurried into the tent, Aderyn was remembering all those old stories about changelings and wondering what sort of child his wife had birthed. Yet the baby certainly looked normal enough, though much more human than elven. Although his ears were sharp and close to being slightly pointed, his eyes had human irises and pupils, and his face and hands were round and chubby rather than being long and slender. Unlike the women of Deverry, elven women never wrapped their babies in swaddling bands; propped up in a big pile of cushions, Dallandra was holding him, loosely wrapped in a light blanket, while he nuzzled her breast. Aderyn knelt down next to her, kissed her on the forehead, then merely stared for a long time at the wrinkled, reddish creature with the soft crown of pale, pale hair. His son. He had a son, and at that moment he felt young again, felt, indeed, that he’d never loved the mother of that son as much as did right then. Yet if he told her, would she only pity him the more? An old man, gloating over a child as proof that he was still a man?
“What shall we call him, Ado?” Her voice was soft, trembling in exhaustion. “I was thinking of my father’s name, but truly, I haven’t seen him in so long now that it wouldn’t matter if you wanted to call him something else.”
“I truly don’t have anything else in mind. Stupid of me, but you know, I never even thought about names to this moment.”
She winced.
“Are you all right? Does something hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” She looked up with a forced smile. “The name I’m thinking of is Alodalaenteriel. We called him Laen for short.”
“Well, that sounds splendid. If you like it, why not?”
Although the baby became Alodalaenteriel in Elvish, Aderyn tended to call him by a Deverry-sounding nickname, Loddlaen, because it was a great deal easier to say and a pun as well, meaning “the comfort of learning,” which amused him. As the years passed, though, it became an omen, for learning and Loddlaen both were the only comforts left to him.

Dallandra was never quite sure exactly when she decided to return to the Guardians. She realized first that she didn’t particularly love this baby she was saddled with. After the birth, she was oppressed a good bit of the time with a heartsick sadness that she could neither understand nor explain away. The slightest wrong word or look would make her burst into tears, and Loddlaen’s crying was a torment. Aderyn took to keeping the baby with him unless Loddlaen needed feeding. Dallandra disliked nursing him. At first, when his sucking made her womb contract in the usual manner, she felt none of the pleasure some women feel, only cramping pains; when those stopped, her milk was scant, leaving him hungry and making him cry the more. Although Enabrilia tried getting him to suck sheep or mare’s milk from a wad of rag, this animal food only made him vomit convulsively. The one joy Dallandra had during those days was seeing how much Aderyn loved his son, although even this was spoiled by the bitter thought that her man no longer cared about her anywhere near as much as he did their child.
Half starved as he was, Loddlaen might have died very young from some fever or another, but when he was two months old, they traveled to an alardan where Dallandra found a woman named Banamario who had just given birth herself. Banamario was one of those women who produce milk in great quantities, enough for her own child and two more, most likely, as she remarked, and her breasts caused her great pain unless she expressed the milk one way or another. Dallandra handed over Loddlaen without a qualm. When she saw how fondly Banamario smiled at the nursing baby, how gently she stroked his pale, fine hair and how softly she touched his little roundish ears. Dallandra felt stabbed to the soul by guilt pure and simple—she didn’t care half as much for her own son as this stranger did. Since she was elven, born to a people who saw every infant as both a treasure and a weapon laid up against their extinction, the guilt burned in the wound for days. Yet even so, she took to leaving Loddlaen for long periods of time with Banamario, who was nothing but pleased to do a favor for the Wise One.
At times, as she rode alone out in the grasslands, away from the noise and bustle of the alardan, she would think of the Guardians, particularly of Elessario, whom she badly missed. She would wonder, too, if she’d love Loddlaen more if only he were a daughter instead of a son, but she knew that the real trouble lay between her and Aderyn. They should have both been young when their son was born, should have treasured him and squabbled over his upbringing and loved each other the more for it. No doubt they would have had another child, maybe two, even, over the course of years. Now, all that was denied them, and she was dragging herself through a world turned flat and sour by her memories of the splendor of life in another, easier world. She felt, too, like a person who’s been forced to leave the campfire halfway through one of the bard’s best tales and never gets to hear the ending: what did Evandar have in mind for his people? More and more, in fact, she found herself remembering Evandar, particularly the way he’d told her to come back if she should be unhappy. He knew, she would think, he knew that this would happen to me.
On the day before the alardan was to break up, Aderyn arranged for Banamario and her man to leave their alar and join his and Dallandra’s. Knowing that Loddlaen would be fed and loved more than she could feed and love him seemed to settle the question in Dallandra’s mind. That evening, when she stopped into the wet nurse’s tent to kiss Loddlaen goodbye, she felt a stab of guilt at how easy it was to leave him behind, her round little baby with the solemn eyes and the perennial smell of sour milk hanging about him, but as soon as she walked free of the camp, the guilt disappeared—indeed, she never truly thought of Loddlaen again after that day. She went about five miles west until she found a stand of hazel trees, growing thick and tangled at a place where three streams came together to form a proper river. She’d known them once as rivulets, two hundred years ago and long before the hazels had grown there, but year after year of rain and runoff had deepened them down.
Among the hazels Evandar was waiting, leaning against a tree and whistling a heart-piercing melody. She found that she wasn’t even surprised that he would know and come to meet her. It was so good to see him again that she also realized, with a twist of her heart, that she was beginning to fall in love with him.
“You’re certain you want to come back?” he said.
“I am. It’s so odd. I hate being a mother, but it’s made me ready to be a midwife. I’m assuming, anyway, that some of you will have the courage to take up your birthright.”
“Elessario at least, and maybe some of the other young ones.” All at once he laughed. “That’s a fine jest, take up your birthright. It took me a moment to understand. You know, I’m feeling solemn, and that’s something I’ve never really done before.”
Side by side they walked into the opalescent mist, where the flat road stretched out, waiting for them, between the dark hills and the fair mountains. When she raised her hand to her throat, she found the amethyst figurine hanging from its golden chain.
“And what of you, Evandar? Won’t you pass into my world once and for all, when the time comes?”
“How could I, knowing what I know, having what I have?”
“If you don’t, you’ll lose your daughter.”
He stopped walking and glared at her like a sulky child.
“I can be as underhanded as you if I have to be,” she said, grinning. “But think of this. If you went first, Elessario would follow you. She loves you even more than you love her. Just think: you could save her by saving yourself.”
“You wretched trickster!” But he laughed with a toss of his head. “Let me tell you something, Dalla. I know now what missing someone means, and how bitter a thing it is. Do you know why?”
“I think I do, actually. But what of Alshandra?”
“She’s left me. She’s gone farther in.”
“Farther in?”
“It’s not a good thing. But I’ll explain later.”
When he kissed her, the mist closed around them, and the road changed itself to sunny meadow, bright with flowers.
At that moment Aderyn knew in a stab of dweomer cold that she’d gone again. This time, he neither wept nor cursed, merely told the wet nurse that Dallandra had such important work to do that she wouldn’t be back for a while. Wrapped in the joy of having two babies to love and a new alar to help with all the hard work of them, Banamario merely remarked that it was all the same to her. That night, though, when Aderyn fell into a restless sleep in a tent grown suddenly huge and lonely again, Dallandra came to him in the Gatelands.
In his dream it seemed to him that they stood on a high cliff and looked off over the misty plains. They must have been on the western border of the grasslands, he realized, because he was looking east to a sun rising behind storm clouds in a wash of light the color of blood, which he knew for an evil omen. She was wearing, not her elven tunic and trousers, but a long dress, belted at the waist with jewels, of purple silk. As one does in dreams, he knew without needing to be told that her dress was of the style worn in the long-lost cities of the far west.
“I came to apologize for leaving you again,” she said. “But then, you didn’t really want me to stay, did you.”
It wasn’t a question, but his heart ached at the unfairness of it, that she would think he wanted her gone when all he wanted was to be able to love her again.
“I don’t blame you for leaving,” he said instead. “There was naught left for you in our world, was there? Not even the baby could delight you anymore.”
“Just so. But still, I want you to know that—”
“Hush! You don’t need to explain anything to me, or apologize anymore, either. Go in peace. I know I can’t keep you bound to me any longer.”
She hesitated, her eyes filling with tears, her mouth working in honest sadness, but at the same time her image was fading, turning faint and pale, turning in to mist and blowing away into the gray and ugly light of a stormy morning. He was in his own tent, sitting up and wide awake, hearing Loddlaen cry in his big hanging cradle of leather stiffened with bone. Aderyn rose and got the baby, changed him, and took him to Banamario’s tent, which stood right next to his. As she nursed him, Aderyn squatted down nearby and thought of the two ebony arrows with silver tips, lying somewhere in his tent wrapped in an old blanket, those pledges from the Guardians that had turned out sharp and deadly indeed.
“There’s the good boy,” Banamario was crooning. “Not hungry anymore, is he? What a good boy! Here’s your papa now, Laen, go to Papa.”
Aderyn took the baby and shifted him to one shoulder to burp him while Banamario took her own child, a boy named Javanateriel, and set him at her other breast.
“When do you think Dallandra will be back, Wise One?” she asked, but absently.
“Never.”
She looked up, deeply troubled.
“The dweomer has strange roads, Banna. She’s chosen one to walk that leads where none of us can follow her.”
“I see, but Wise One, I’m so sorry!”
“For me? Don’t be. I’ve accepted it.”
But from that day on, Aderyn could deny Loddlaen nothing, not even when he grew old enough to beg for things that he should never have had.

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