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WHEN PERTYC, GWERBRET Aberwyn, and his family and retinue were ready to take up residence their new city, the gwerbret insisted that Nevyn stay in Cannobaen as its virtual lord for as long as he liked. When the spring came, the place settled down rapidly into the drowsy routine of keeping the light burning and the lightkeeper’s family fed. Nevyn poked around the broch and finally decided to use a chamber up on the top floor for his work. After he got it swept and cleaned, it was pleasantly sunny—when Cannobaen had sun, a rare thing in the summer—and its three windows gave him a dramatic view of the sea and the countryside. Once it was furnished with a long table, a set of bookshelves, a charcoal brazier, and a comfortable chair, he could pick up his interrupted work on the talisman again, though he did set mornings aside to tend the ills of the local folk. Every now and then a letter came from Aberwyn, either telling him what news there was or asking his advice on some small matter. Nevyn would answer promptly, then return to reveling in his solitude.
It was on a warm morning in late summer, just about the time of the last apple harvest, that Nevyn saw from his tower room a horseman riding toward Cannobaen. Thinking that it was the usual messenger from Pertyc, and that the servants would see to it that the man had a meal and a place to sleep, he went on studying some diagrams of sigils that he’d brought from Bardek. In a while, though, there was a cautious tap at the door. Swearing under his breath, he opened it to find Maer. His eyes were so weary, and his face so thin and pinched, that he seemed to have aged ten years. Nevyn was shocked to see the silver dagger back in his belt.
“If I’m disturbing you, my lord, I’ll just ride on.”
“What? Of course not! I take it you’re not here as Pertyc’s man.”
“I’m not.” He looked down at the floor and bit his lower lip as if he were fighting back tears.
“Well, let’s go down to the great hall and have some ale, and you can tell me what’s gone wrong.”
“It’s simple enough, my lord. Glae’s dead.”
Nevyn stared, gape-mouthed.
“Childbirth?” he said at last.
“Just that, and our son dead with her. The baby was just too big, the midwife said, and it was like the birthing beat them both to death.” His face went dead white, and he trembled, remembering. “Ye gods, I had to get out of Aberwyn. His grace asked me to stay, but I just couldn’t bear it. So I thought I’d come tell you the news and say farewell, and then it’s back on the long road for me.”
“My heart aches for you, and more for Glae.” Nevyn felt a stab of guilt, a wondering if he could have saved her if only he’d been in Aberwyn, but at that time, he had none of the knowledge nor the surgical tools of a Bardek physician to cut open a womb and try, at least, to save the babe if not the mother. “But don’t make some hasty move, lad.”
“That’s what Lord Pertyc said, too, but I know my own mind, my lord.” He looked up with the faintest ghost of a smile. “But I’ll take that ale, sure enough, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Over the ale Maer told Nevyn more details about Glae’s death, but as he rehearsed what had been for everyone concerned a time of horror, his voice stayed cold and flat, his eyes fixed and distant. Only his bloodless face betrayed the effort it was costing him to stay calm. During the story the blue sprite appeared to sit beside him on the bench. She was frankly gleeful, clapping soundless hands and showing her mouthful of pointed teeth in a wild grin. Yet when at the end Maer glanced her way, she stopped grinning abruptly and arranged her face into a decent imitation of sadness.
“Does she understand what’s happened, Nevyn?” Maer said.
“She doesn’t, lad. She doesn’t have a real mind, you know. So don’t be harsh with her if she’s glad her rival’s gone.”
“I was furious at first. But then I started thinking about some of the things you’d told me, and I figured well, she’s like a clever dog, no doubt, and naught more.”
“Brighter than that, because she can understand speech even if she can’t use it. Have you ever seen a monkey or an ape?”
“A what, my lord?”
“Animals they have in Bardek. But if you haven’t seen them, my comparison won’t do you any good. Think of her as a little child, then.”
By being persuasive enough for a Bardek politician Nevyn managed to get Maer to stay for three more days, but nothing he said would change the silver dagger’s mind about leaving Pertyc’s service. The gwerbret, it seemed, had told him that he could come back anytime; the most Maer would allow was that someday, if the long road got too cold and hungry, he might think about returning.
“If you live that long, I suppose,” Nevyn remarked one night at dinner. “What are you planning on doing? Getting yourself killed in some battle straightaway?”
“I’m not, my lord. If it was suicide on my mind, I’d have drowned myself in Aberwyn Harbor, but I’m not the sort of man for that. It’s just that, well, what else can I do to earn my dinner but fight?”
“Have you thought of riding west and finding the Westfolk? Calonderiel gave you an invitation, you know, when they were leaving.”
“So he did. Do you think he meant it, my lord?”
“The Westfolk never say anything unless they mean it.”
A flicker of life woke in Maer’s eyes.
“Ganedd’s going to be making one last trading trip west soon,” Nevyn went on. “Why don’t you go with him?”
“He’s got his father’s business now? I thought Ganno would go to sea for sure once he had the chance.”
“Well, his father’s a broken man, you see. He sits and stares all day at the ocean and naught more. So Moligga and the younger lad need Ganedd, and then there’s Braedda.” Abruptly Nevyn caught himself and shied away from the subject of happy marriages. “But you could stay in the Westlands for the rest of the summer, say. Then see how you feel in the autumn. My heart aches for you, but you know, Glae wouldn’t have wanted you to throw your life away.”
Maer started to speak, then wept like a child. Nevyn flung an arm around his shoulders and let him sob, so long and so hard that Nevyn realized he’d kept himself from weeping during all the long weeks since Glae’s death.

In the normal course of things Nevyn’s cure would have worked. Maer would have visited the elven lands, a world different enough to completely distract him, then most likely returned to Aberwyn with his mourning behind him. But Nevyn hadn’t’ reckoned with the blue sprite, or, rather, with Elessario.
In the endlessly shifting land of the Guardians, the seeming of only a few hours had passed since Dallandra left them to return to Aderyn. When she saw her friend walk down the road toward home, Elessario rushed blindly away. Her feeling of pain was too ill defined to be called grief, but it was bitter enough to make her throw herself down in the grass and weep. At about the time Dallandra was giving birth to Loddlaen, she stopped weeping, the pain forgotten as fast as it had come, and went in search of company. When Dallandra was returning, Elessario was far away, sitting by the soul of a river and watching her friends dance. It was there that the blue sprite found her, at roughly the same time as Maer and Ganedd were joining the fall alardan out in the Westlands.
Although Elessario had forgotten her grief already, she did remember Dallandra and all the things they’d discussed. One of those discussions involved compassion and the helping of others for no reason beyond their hurting. Somewhere in her growing core of mind, Elessario wanted to please Dallandra so badly that she was willing to follow her teachings, even though, unfortunately, she remembered them by rote rather than understanding their basic principles. When she saw the sprite’s honest pain, and once she understood what caused it, she decided to help the poor little thing to the best of her abilities in the hopes that Dallandra would be proud of her. Child though she was, Elessario’s abilities were considerable.

When the fall alardan was preparing to disperse, and Ganedd was talking of riding back home with his newly acquired horses, Maer was faced with the choice of going with him or of riding with Aderyn and his alar down to the winter camps. He was still so grief-struck and lonely that the choice was a hard one simply because making any decision was hard. Every day he woke to the irony, still fresh and ghastly after all this time, that he’d never realized how much he loved Glae until he lost her. If you could go back, he would think, just for one day, just one rotten day, and live it over, knowing what you know now . . . ! Then he would shake his head hard, as if he could physically throw off his Wyrd, and get up to face another morning. A further irony vexed him, too. Now, when he would have been grateful for a little company, the blue sprite seemed to have deserted him. In all his long weeks in the elven lands, he never saw her once.
Finally, though, the morning came when the Westfolk were striking their tents, and Ganedd’s men were linking the horses on lead ropes. Maer walked through the falling camp with Calonderiel and tried to make up his mind. South with the Westfolk or east with Ganedd?
“Tell me,” Calonderiel remarked. “If you do go back with Ganno, what’ll you do then?”
After six weeks among friends, the idea of riding the long road again looked less appealing than it had in the heart of his mourning.
“Ah well, go back to Aberwyn and tell Gwerbret Pertyc he was right after all.”
“And then sit around in his stone tent all winter long?”
“I catch your drift, all right. Well and good, then. I’ll stay with you, if you’ll have me.”
“Naught I’d like more.”
At that time Aderyn’s alar consisted of himself and his son, the banadar, his warband of twenty and their families and tents, and a dozen other families as well, all of them, of course, owning flocks and herds. With so large a group they needed a winter campground to themselves and finally found one in a deep canyon about two miles from the sea. As usual, they set up the tents along the riverbank, but the herds would graze at the canyon’s rim. Since Calonderiel’s current woman friend rode off in a huff soon after they arrived (his women tended to come and go as frequently and as fast as the Wildfolk), Maer moved into his tent with him. Maer insisted on taking his turn at riding herd; he may have been a guest, but he disliked eating someone’s food and doing nothing in return. When he wasn’t on watch, and on the increasingly infrequent sunny days, he would often go riding, climbing out of the canyon, then letting his horse amble across the grasslands for aimless hours.
It was on one of these solitary rides that he saw the sprite again, not that he recognized her at first. On a sunny morning he came to clump of hazels standing where three streams joined to make a proper river. Since his horse was thirsty, he dismounted, slacked its bit, and let it drink while he looked idly around. Sitting among the trees was an elven woman, dressed in a long tunic, or so he thought at first.
“Greetings.” He trotted out one of his few Elvish words, then switched to Deverrian. “Am I disturbing you?”
With a shake of her head and a toss of waist-length blue hair, she stood up and took a few steps toward him. Her skin was a deadly sort of pale, but otherwise she was very beautiful, with enormous blue eyes and a full, soft mouth. When she smiled, her teeth seemed on the sharp side, but they were white and no longer pointed. He was intrigued enough to drop the horse’s reins and go to meet her. Glose up, she smelled of roses.
“Maer?” she said.
“How do you know my name?”
“I’ve known you for ever so long. She said you wouldn’t recognize me, though. I guess you don’t.”
“I don’t, truly. She? Who’s she?”
“Just she. A goddess.” She paused for a slow seductive smile. “I can say words now. I love you, Maer.”
It was her remark about the words that made him recognize his blue sprite, somehow transformed. With a little yelp he stepped back.
“What’s wrong? I’m a real woman now.”
“Not by half you are!”
Her eyes flooded tears. Maer turned and ran for his horse, but as he was mounting, he could hear her sobbing. He was just frightened enough to keep riding, but her tears echoed in his memory and hurt. He knew what it was like to lose a beloved, didn’t he? The poor little thing, he would think. Trying to turn herself into a woman to please me! It was grotesque, really, and embarrassing as well as frightening—or so he saw it. As he did some hard thinking on the ride home, he decided that this mysterious “she” couldn’t possibly be a real goddess. Most likely she was just another member of the Wildfolk, unless she was something far worse. Like everyone else he knew, Maer believed in all kinds of spirits and ghosts, off in the Otherlands somewhere, who could at certain ill-omened times come through to his world. Meeting one was geis, bad luck, and so many other awful things that he refused to tell anyone about his experience out of the real and honest fear that everyone would shun him from then on.
That night he fell into an uneasy sleep and immediately dreamt of her. In the dream, it seemed that he was lying, wide awake but unable to move, in his usual blankets in Calonderiel’s tent. She materialized through its side, scorning the tent flap, and sat down to stare at him, merely stare in a teary-eyed reproach until he could no longer stand the silence.
“I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“Please come talk to me, Maer. That’s all. Please come back and talk to me.”
“Do you live in those hazels?”
“I live in her country. I visit the hazels. And I can visit the camp, but not when the mean old man’s around.”
“Who?”
“The owl.”
Maer supposed that Aderyn did rather look like an owl, now that he thought of it. Automatically he went to sit up, only to find himself awake in a dark tent with Calonderiel snoring over on the other side. A dream, was it? But a cursed real one! When he fell asleep again, he bad only his usual dreams of Glae.
What with the continual wash of quick autumn storms and his herding duties, it was some weeks before Maer saw Little Blue-hair again. She’d been on his mind, though, out of simple guilt. He felt like a man who’s come home late at night without bothering to light a lantern and in his blind progress through the house manages to trip over and injure his faithful dog. Finally, on a sunny morning between, two storms he rode out looking for her. When he found no trace of her in the hazel thickets, he rode upstream a ways through grass so tall and wet that it clung to his horse’s legs as they rode through. Still no sign of her. With an anxious eye for the dark clouds building and piling to the south, Maer considered turning back, but up ahead was another thicket. Sure enough, when he rode up, he saw her, standing between two trees and smiling, so brilliantly happy to see him that it ached his heart.
“You did come. Finally.”
“Well, the weather’s not been the best, you know.”
Maer slacked his horse’s bit and as an afterthought unsaddled him to let him roll and rest. Leaving the animal peacefully grazing, he walked into the thicket. She sat down on the ground, gracefully spreading what seemed to be a long blue skirt out around her like a gracious lady. Automatically Maer sat, too, facing her.
“Now, I can’t stay long.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s growing late, and there’s a storm coming. I don’t want to get soaked, and I don’t want to stay out in the cold all night, either.”
“Oh.” She tilted her head to one side and considered. “I can understand that.”
“Good. Now look, little one. We’ve got to talk about somewhat that you’re not going to like. You’ve got to find yourself a man from your own people and leave me alone.”
“Won’t!” Her eyes flashed in rage. “They’re all ugly and warty.”
Maer had to admit that the gnomes he’d seen—and they were the only ones who seemed to be male—weren’t the handsomest lot around.
“That’s too bad, truly, but it’s the way these things go. You know, I don’t think you should be listening to this ‘she’ you keep talking about. I think me she’s leading you down the wrong paths.”
“Not!”
“Oh, indeed? Then why is she messing about with the way you look? I’ll wager Nevyn and Aderyn wouldn’t be very pleased to hear about this.”
“Don’t tell them, Maer! Oh, please, don’t!”
She threw herself forward, so that she was crouching in front of him like a suppliant, and looked up teary-eyed. When she clasped his hand in both of hers, her flesh felt as cool and soft as silk from Bardek. Since he couldn’t manage to think of her as truly real, it was impossible for him to realize that she was dangerous. He smiled and patted her on the cheek.
“I won’t, then. But I still don’t like this so-called friend of yours. I doubt me if she’s a goddess. I’ll wager she’s some spirit or ghost, and she shouldn’t be leaving the Otherlands to mess about here.”
“Not a ghost. Not the Otherlands.” Her hands tightened on his as she stared up into his eyes so sadly, so wistfully, that his heart went out to her. “Would you kiss me, Maer? Just one little kiss?”
With a smile he bent his head and gave her a brotherly brush of the mouth across her lips. When he raised his head again, the hazels were gone. All around them in a glowy purple twilight stretched a meadow filled with summer roses, blooming in a drunken exhalation of scent. Maer shoved her away and lurched to his feet with a yelp. She laughed, rising, dancing around him in a swirl of skirt.
“You’re mine now, and we’ll be ever so happy.”
“Here, now! You take me back!”
“In a little while.” She stopped, smiling at him so winsomely that be would have been suspicious if only he hadn’t been frightened out of his wits. “Of course we’ll go back. In just a little tiny while.”
Since Maer doubted that she was capable of an outright lie, he was reassured enough to look round him. Some quarter of a mile away stood what seemed to be a dun, far more elaborate than the palace of Aberwym, maybe twenty fine towers, all joined together in a pattern that he couldn’t decipher and rising out of mist.
“Let’s go see her, and then you can go home,” the sprite said. “Please? Just for a little while?”
Maer let her take his hand and lead him toward the many-towered dun as the twilight turned all blue and silver. As they walked on, he could see it ever more clearly; a square sort of building, unlike any he’d ever seen, supported the towers, and a square wall, turreted at the corners, surrounded it, made of many kinds of stone, pink sandstone, gray limestone, the occasional decorative touch of green marble. He could see the windows turning golden with candlelight and hear music playing of such a sweetness that he felt he could weep. But at the same time the castle seemed to stop drawing nearer. Each step he took was like raising a foot made of lead; his legs turned numb, too, and he felt that he could barely breathe. The light began to fade in the windows ahead, although he was suddenly aware of another light, all golden and blinding, opening like a tunnel before him.
The last thing he heard before his etheric double broke up completely was the sprite, shrieking in agony.

Maer fell into trance just after noon, not long before the storm broke with all the fury of the first full tempest of winter. Lightning stroked down; thunder rumbled; his horse panicked and fled out across the grasslands. Unfortunately, since it was the horse he’d brought from Aberwyn, it couldn’t find its way home to the herds round the winter camp. (In time, it did wander into the herd of another alar, far to the west, but that was months later and an event of no importance at all.) All afternoon it rained as the storm proceeded slowly and majestically north, but Maer, entranced in the true and technical sense of the word, lay sprawled among the hazels. By sunset, the river was brimming in its banks, and still the rain poured down. Maer’s body, in a convulsion of cramped muscles that had nothing to do with mind, flopped over onto its back, then lay still. All evening clouds rolled in from the sea, rained, and moved on north. The river rose steadily, then round midnight spiled over and flooded, sending a first a thin sheet of water trickling through the grass and swirling round the knobby roots of the trees, then a pour, a spill of water traveling out and out and swelling as it ran. It covered Maer’s face some three hours before dawn and kept rising, but the rain stopped before the flood was deep enough to float his corpse more than a few feet away, where it fetched up against a tree and stuck.

Under normal circumstances, Calonderiel would have recruited the entire warband and gone to search for his guest when Maer didn’t return for the evening meal, but the floods were rising along the river that flowed by the camp, too. As soon as the swirling brown water started churning downstream, Aderyn and Halaberiel ordered the alar to begin packing. In an organized frenzy the People rushed round, stuffing tent bags, loading the travois, collaring dogs and children. By the time the water came within a few inches of the riverbanks, just at sunset, everyone’s portable goods had been hauled up to the canyon rim. Halaberiel and Aderyn walked along by the surging water and studied it in the last light fading from the clouds. Twisting and bobbing like some many-armed animal, an entire gnarled tree raced past.
“It’s going to keep rising,” Aderyn remarked. “I don’t need dweomer to tell me that.”
“Just so, Wise One. Very well. Let’s give the order to strike the tents.”
As they turned to head back to camp, they heard a woman shriek, a howl of terror and agony. A chorus of voices cut through the pound of rain: “He’s gone in!” Cursing under his breath, Halaberiel dashed to the river’s edge. Aderyn could just barely see a small blond head bobbing toward them some five feet from shore. Howling and keening, the child’s mother tried to throw herself into the river after the boy. Her man grabbed her and held her back just as the banadar dove, as smoothly as a seabird, into the torrents. Aderyn heard himself yell aloud, invoking the Lords of Water, as he ran downstream. At first he could see nothing but the surging brown and silver race; then two heads popped up, a small blond and a larger gray one.
“Hal! I’m keeping pace with you! Oh Lords of Water, help me now if ever I’ve aided you!”
With one arm crooked round the boy’s neck Halaberiel was struggling to swim with the other even as the raging current swept them both inexorably out to the estuary and the pounding, foaming sea. Although Aderyn never actually saw the Lords of the Elements, they must have appeared in answer to his cry, because Hal never would have been able to reach shore without some supernormal aid. As it was, he managed to struggle to within a bare foot of the muddy bank and thrust the boy into Aderyn’s grasping hands. Then the current grabbed him in turn and swept him on, swept him under in the churn and mill of white water pouring down to the waiting sea waves. Aderyn clasped the shrieking child in his arms and wept until the others caught up to him. Sobbing hysterically, the mother snatched the child from him as if he’d been the one who nearly drowned it.
“The banadar!” Calonderiel came running. “Hal! Hal!”
“He’s gone.” Aderyn caught his arm. “You’re the warleader for this alar now.”
Calonderiel threw his head back and screamed his grief into the howling wind. Aderyn grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.
“The tents! You’ve got to order the alar to strike the tents!”
With one last convulsive sob Calonderiel pulled himself together. As he ran off, he was shouting orders in a voice of command.
It was close to dawn, and the rain was slacking to a drizzle, before anyone said, “By the way, where’s Maer?” With a lot of snapping and cursing the warband rushed around through the sopping, improvised camp. Just as the gray and sullen dawn was breaking they returned with the news that Maer and his horse both were missing. Aderyn felt an icy finger of dread run down his back.
“He must have been caught in the storm,” Calonderiel said. “And these wretched Round-ears don’t know how to take care of themselves in open country. We’ll have to start searching for him right now.”
“If you’ll wait for five ticks of a heart together,” Aderyn said with some asperity, “I’ll scry for him and make your task a good bit easier.”

Since fires were out of the question, he used water for a scrying focus, appropriately enough, and saw Maer’s heaped and tumbled body against a hazel. With a high-pitched keen he broke the vision.
“Dead?” Calonderiel said.
“Drowned. But I don’t understand why. I found him in the midst of trees. Why didn’t he climb one? Ye gods, the water’s only a foot or so high around him.”
At the head of a grim procession Aderyn led them to Maer’s body. Calonderiel was as overwhelmed as he’d been by losing the banadar, but in this case, it was guilt as much as grief that was ripping at his heart. Maer was his guest-friend, and he’d failed him—that’s how Cal saw it, no matter who tried to argue otherwise. While Calonderiel wept and stormed, and Albaral wrapped Maer in a blanket with the ritual prayers, Aderyn left the hazel thicket and walked a few feet downstream to the place where three streams joined for the river. Three streams. The hazels. Aderyn swore under his breath.
“Evandar!” he yelled. “Evandar, can you hear me!”
No one answered, no one came. Only the wind blew over the rain-soaked grass in its endless sigh.
It was some days before Aderyn discovered what had really killed Maer. He scried by every method he knew, consulted Nevyn and learned two new ones, invoked the Kings of the Elements and the Lords of the Wildlands both, assumed his body of light and journeyed long and hard through not only the etheric but various portions of the astral plane as well until, a few scraps of information at a time, he pieced together the story of the transformed sprite’s unwitting murder of the only thing she loved. Eventually, many weeks later, he found and confronted her among the hazel thicket by the joining of three streams.
He went there on an impulse so strong that he knew someone was sending him a message, whether the Lords of the Wildlands or the King of Water he wasn’t sure, but either way, he wasn’t disposed to ignore it. As he rode up, he saw her pacing back and forth by the stream, head down as if hunting for something. To avoid frightening her, he dismounted and walked the rest of the way.
When she saw him, she snarled and swiped at him with one hand, curled into claws like a cat’s.
“I didn’t take Maer away.”
“You did! I saw you take him. You came with some of the elder brothers, and they wrapped him a blanket, and you all took him away.”
“His soul was already gone by then. He was dead. Do you know what dead means?”
She merely stared, then wept in a numb scatter of tears.
“Give him back.”
“There’s nothing to give back.”
“Yes, there is! You took him away. Where did you put him?”
Aderyn debated, then decided that he was desperate enough to bargain.
“I’ll show you his grave if you answer me three questions.”
“His what?”
“The place where we put his body. I warn you, though, that he can’t speak or move anymore.”
“I want to see him.”
“Then answer me the questions. First, who taught you how to speak?”
“She did. The goddess who helped me.”
“What did this goddess look like?”
“All sorts of things. She comes and goes and changes like I do.”
“Does she have a name?”
“A what?”
“A name. Like Maer. A word that belongs only to her.”
“Oh.” For a long moment she wrinkled her nose in thought. “Elessario. That’s her special word. Now show Maer to me. You promised, and I’ve answered all three.”
“So you have. Follow me, but I warn you, he’s all different now.”
With a rustle like grass in the wind she vanished, but her voice lingered briefly.
“Ride, and I’ll follow.”
As he rode back to the pretty spot in the canyon where they’d buried Maer (since Calonderiel had decided that his guest would have preferred the burial of his own people rather than a burning), Aderyn was considering strategies. Although he was afraid to openly contact the Lords of the Wildlands, apparently they’d been keeping an eye on him, because when he reached the grave, they were there, tall slender pillars of silver light, barely visible as a shimmering in the air. He felt rather than heard their thanks, knew wordlessly that they’d come to claim the sprite as one of their own so that they could heal her.
But she never came. All that day Aderyn and the lords waited, and all evening, too, until the last quarter moon rose to announce that it was midnight.
“She’s been too clever for us,” Aderyn remarked in thought. “I think she knows you’ll take her away.”
He could feel them agree in an exhalation of worry. One by one they winked out, like stars disappearing in the light of dawn, leaving Aderyn with the feeling that he wasn’t to trouble himself with the sprite any longer, that they would, one way or another, find a way to deal with her.
Maer, however, or, rather, the soul of the man who’d once been Maer, was another matter altogether. Nevyn agreed that his Wyrd might well have become tangled with things that were, at root, no affair of his. After all, the sprite had found him once before when he’d died and been reborn; now she had even more reason to search for him, her lost beloved.
“I take the responsibility onto myself,” Nevyn said through the fire. “Because of Maddyn. I never should have let him make a link with the Wildlands.”
“Oh, come now, you had no way of knowing where it would lead.”
“True. But still, I might have done some meditating. I might have gotten an inkling of what would happen, or at least that it was a wrong thing.”
“It might not have been a wrong thing if it weren’t for the Guardians. Let’s not forget that one of them’s been meddling in this mess. And that, somehow, is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have left them to Dallandra. I should have tried to know them myself, and maybe then—”
“All these maybes ill become us, my friend. What is, is, and we’re not the men to unweave Time and pluck this strand out again.”
“I know. Well, I suspect that when he’s reborn, Maer will come my way again. We’ll see what we can do for him then.”

It was a long time before Aderyn met that soul again, though, some three twenties of years, and even then it was only by chance. Late one summer, when the days were already growing short and the trees on the tops of hills and in other exposed places were turning yellow, his alar was traveling up in the northern plains, not far from the Deverry province of Pyrdon. One of their horses, a young stallion, got it into his head to break his tether and run off, following his natural instincts to get away from the reigning stud of the herd. A couple of the men went after him, of course, and out of a sentimental desire to see his own people again Aderyn left Loddlaen in charge of their tent and herds and rode off with Calonderiel and Albaral. The stallion’s tracks were easy to follow; in fact, in a few miles the tracks of another horse, one carrying some kind of load, joined them, and the two sets marched east in such a straight line that it was obvious that the stallion had either been stolen outright or picked up by a mounted rider while wandering loose. Since the second horse was shod, it was easy enough to guess that the rider was a human being.
Sure enough, the trail led them straight to the town of Drwloc, where it joined a welter of other tracks and petered out, but by asking around they discovered that one of Lord Gorddyn’s men had found a Westfolk horse and brought it in to the dun. Calonderiel was furious, swearing to slit the fellow’s throat for a stinking horse thief, but Aderyn ordered him to hold his tongue.
“We could at least go ask the lord about the matter first, I couldn’t we? If you’d only traded the stallion off to a herd that needed a stud, he never would have broken tether.”
“Well, you’ve got a point, I suppose. But this wretched rider could have come looking for the horse’s owner.”
“Would you have ridden alone into a Round-ear camp?”
Calonderiel started to snarl an answer, then stopped to think.
“A second point, truly. Let’s go talk to Lord Gorddyn.”
The lord’s dun was about three miles out of town, a solitary broch behind earthwork walls set up on a small hill. As they rode up to the gap in the earthen mounds that did duty as a gate, they saw a strange woman—or at least she seemed to be a woman at first—lounging on the grassy wall. She was slender and pale, dressed in a dirty, torn smock, but as they came closer, they saw that her long unbound hair was a deep blue, the color of the winter ocean. At the sight of Aderyn and the elves she leapt to her feet, then suddenly vanished clean away.
“What?” Calonderiel hissed. “What was that? One of the Wildfolk? It looked so cursed human!”
“So she did, indeed.” Aderyn felt a premonition of trouble coming. “Cal, I have the wretched feeling I’ve seen her before. This might not be a pretty thing we’ve stumbled onto.”
Lord Gorddyn turned out to be stout, balding, and good-humored, greeting them with no more fuss and as much friendliness as if they’d all been human beings. He insisted that they sit at his beat-up table of honor by the smoky hearth and drink mead out of dented silver goblets, then listened to their story of the lost horse.
“Well, he’s here, sure enough, lads. A beautiful animal, beautiful. What do you say I trade for him? Under Deverry laws he’s mine, because my man found him wandering loose, but under Westfolk laws he’s yours, so let’s not have a fight over it, eh? I’ve got two fine dun mares out in my stable, and you shall have both if you want.”
Faced with this utterly unexpected fairness, Calonderiel could do nothing but agree to look them over, and everyone trooped out to the stables. The mares were indeed fine breeding stock, young, healthy, and handsome.
“Done, then, my lord,” Calonderiel said. “I’ll take them gladly in trade for the stud for the sake of peace between our two peoples.”
“Splendid, splendid! That gladdens my heart, good sir. Here, lad!” This to a stable boy, who was hanging round to stare goggle-eyed at the elves. “Get those mares on lead ropes and bring them out to the courtyard.”
As they were leaving the stables, Aderyn noticed a young man lying on the straw in an empty stall. Even though the day was warm, he was wrapped in a blanket, and his face was a deathly sort of pale.
“My lord?” Aderyn said. “What’s wrong with that fellow?”
“He’s dreadfully ill, I’m afraid, and it aches my heart, because he’s one of my sworn riders and a good man, too. Our local herbwoman has him lie out here during the day, you see. She says he’ll soak up the vitality from the horses, and it’ll help him.”
Superstitious nonsense, that, but Aderyn refrained from saying so outright.
“I happen to be a herbman, my lord. Would you like me to have a look at him? Maybe I’ll see somewhat she missed, like.”
“Gladly, good sir, gladly. His name’s Meddry. I’ll just take our other guests on into the great hall.”
For all that Lord Gorddyn called him a man, Meddry was really little more than a boy, about fifteen and most likely brand-new to the warband. He was far too thin and hollow-eyed, with his pale blond hair sticking with sweat in wisps to his pinched face. When Aderyn knelt down beside him, Meddry propped himself up on one elbow, tried to speak, then began to cough, the most horrible hacking deep cough Aderyn had ever heard a man give. He threw one arm around Meddry’s shoulders and supported him until at last he spat up—not rheum, but blood, bright red and clotted. Aderyn grabbed a twist of clean hay and wiped his mouth for him.
“Dying, aren’t I?” Meddry whispered.
“Not just yet, and maybe not at all.” Aderyn came as close to an outright lie as he could get. “We’ll see what we can do for you, lad.”
“I can spot false cheer by now, herbman.” With a sigh he flopped back down into the warm straw.
Mostly to check how much vitality his newfound patient had left, Aderyn stared into his eyes, then nearly swore aloud as he recognized the soul who in his last life had carried the name of Maer. At that point he remembered the strange womanlike sprite he’d seen hanging round Lord Gorddyn’s gates, and his blood ran as cold as the sick boy’s.
“You’ve got a strange sort of lover, don’t you, Meddry?”
His face turned first so white, then so fiery with shame that Aderyn knew that his loose arrow had hit the mark.
“You’ve got to leave her alone. She’s what’s killing you. Hush! Don’t try to argue with me. Just listen. She’s so desperate to please you that she wants to look like a real woman. She’s doing it by feeding off your life. I can’t explain any better than that, but it’s making you ill.”
In a stubborn burst of energy he shook his head no.
“We’ll talk more later. You rest here for now, and I’ll send one of your friends to you.”
Aderyn hurried into the great hall, where Calonderiel and the other elves were just finishing up their mead and preparing to leave. He took Lord Gorddyn to one side for a hurried talk.
“My lord, your rider’s close to death.”
Gorddyn swore and stared down at the floor.
“I might—just barely might, mind—be able to help him. Tell me, how long has he been ill?”
“Well, he didn’t come down with the actual fever until the spring, and he’s only been spitting up the blood for the last few weeks, but truly, he started acting strange months ago. Last winter, it was, just after Samaen.”
“Acting strange? How?”
“Oh, keeping to himself a fair bit, when he was always the soul of good company before. He used to go for long rides out in the snow, and I think me that’s when his humors started to wither, out in the cold and wind and all. That’s what the herbwoman in town calls it, withering humors. And every now and then one of the other lads would find him talking to himself. Just talking to the empty air as if there was someone there.”
Aderyn felt the savage sort of annoyance that comes from seeing your worst fear confirmed.
“Well, my lord, I ride with the Westfolk these days, but our camp is only a couple of days from here. I need to ride back and fetch my medicinals and suchlike, but I’ll be back as soon as ever I can. Now, listen carefully. I know what I’m going to say will sound strange, but please, my lord, if you value your man’s life, do as I say. While I’m gone, set a guard over Meddry. Never let him be alone for a minute. He’s more than ill; he’s being troubled by an evil spirit, but one of the lesser sorts that walk abroad on Samaen. She must have fastened herself onto him then. It’s the spirit that’s drying up his humors. If there’s people around him—or so I hope, anyway—the spirit will be puzzled at first and leave him alone for a few days.”
Lord Gorddyn’s eyes went as a wide as a child’s, but he nodded a stunned agreement. Out in these isolated settlements, people took talk of spirits seriously.
When they left, they rode out fast, and Aderyn pushed everyone along as they traveled back to the camp. There he loaded up his medicinals, took a couple of fresh riding horses, and rushed back again. Although Aderyn wanted Loddlaen to come with him to study this interesting medical case, the boy—well, a young man by then, really—insisted on staying home, and as usual, Aderyn refused to cross his will. Aderyn was, of course, as worried about the spirit as he was about Meddry, no matter what he’d said to Lord Gorddyn. As he rode, he was planning how to approach her, and how he’d invoke the Lords of the Wildlands to help him catch her, but in the end, and for all his speed, he was too late. He rode up to Lord Gorddyn’s gates just in time for Meddry ’s burying, out in the sacred grove of oaks behind the dun. ^
“Ah, ye gods, what happened?” Aderyn burst out “I truly thought he had a couple of weeks left, my lord.”
“Good herbman, I’ve failed him badly, I’m afraid. Here, after this sad thing, we’ll talk. Go on into the dun and have the stable lads take your horses and suchlike.”
Later that afternoon, over mead Lord Gorddyn told Aderyn the tale. After the dweomermaster left them, they’d followed his orders exactly. The men in the warband took turns sitting with the lad and making sure that he was never alone for a minute during the day. At night they carried him to his bed in the barracks, where he slept surrounded by other men. Since he was so deathly ill no one even considered the possibility that he might get up and slip out on his own.
“But that’s just what he did, good sir.” Lord Gorddyn looked sick to his stomach. “Two nights ago, it was. All that day he’d been begging the men to go away, and he was raving, too, saying ‘I’ve got to see her’ over and over. They thought maybe he meant his mother, but she’s been dead these two years.” Suddenly he shuddered. “Maybe he did mean his mam, because truly, he’s seeing her in the Otherlands tonight, isn’t he? But anyway, they wouldn’t leave him. So when night came, they put him to bed in his bunk and brought him some broth and suchlike, but still they didn’t leave him alone. They took turns, like, eating dinner in the great hall so he always had company. Sometime in the dead of night, when everyone was sound out, he must have escaped. It’s cold these fall nights, Aderyn. Winter’s coming early this year, I swear it, to judge from the frosts we’ve been having. But be that as it may, Meddry got the strength from some god or other to get out of the barracks and walk all the way out of the dun. He didn’t get much farther, though. We found him not more than a quarter mile from here, up in the birch groves.”
“He was dead, I take it.”
“Just that. He had one of his coughing fits and bled to death.” Lord Gorddyn’s pudgy face turned a sudden pale. “But here’s the cursed strange thing. He was lying on his back with his hands crossed over his chest. Someone had laid him out, like, for burying. And me and my men asked around in town and in all the farms, and we never found anyone who’d even seen him that night, much less anyone who’d admit to doing such a thing, and frankly, I know my folk, and none of them would have done it without fetching me first.”
Although Lord Gorddyn wanted Aderyn to take his hospitality for the night, he made a raft of polite excuses and left well before the dinner hour. A farmer he met on the road told him exactly where young Meddry’s body had been found. On the far side of a meadow from the dun stood a copse of pale birches, standing silently now in the chill of an autumn afternoon as if they mourned the boy who’d died there. Since there was a nearby stream to water his horses, Aderyn made camp in the copse. He had a light meal, then drew a magic circle round the camp, sealed it with the pentagrams, and waited.
She came with the moonrise, an hour or so after sunset that night, came walking up to the trees just like a human woman, but her long blue hair waved and drifted around her face as if it blew in some private wind, and she was barefoot, too, in the rimy frost. Unlike a human woman, she could see the magic sphere glowing golden over the camp. She greeted it with a howl of rage that sounded more like a wolf than a human. Slowly and carefully, so as not to frighten her, Aderyn walked to the edge of the circle and erased a portion to welcome her in. She refused to come any closer, merely balled her fists and made a show of threatening him.
“Where is he?” she snarled.
“The boy you love? He’s dead, child.”
She stared with mindless blue eyes.
“You killed him, child. I know you didn’t mean to hurt him, and indeed, you need my help, too. Come now, let’s talk.”
Again she stared, her mouth slack.
“He’s gone away.” Aderyn tried to make her see. “Gone far, far away under the ground. He did that once before, remember? When you tried to take him to see Elessario.”
Her howl took him by surprise, because it was such a human sound, that time, as if all the grief and pain and mourning of the world were tearing her heart.
“I’m sorry. Please, child, come in and sit by my fire. Let me help you.”
She howled again, then vanished, leaving him to curse himself for a clumsy fool that he should let her escape so easily. Never had he expected her to love her victim so deeply and so well that she would react with true grief. He camped there in the copse for a fortnight, and every night he went searching the etheric plane for her, and during the day he meditated upon the matter and discussed it with the Lords of the Wildlands, but never did he or they find her again. (He did find out, though, that it was the lords who’d laid the poor lad out properly, as a small token of their desire to make amends.) Finally he was forced to admit defeat and leave to rejoin the People out in the grasslands, because winter was coming on, driving them down to the south coast. He reproached himself with his failure for years.
And for years the folk around Drwloc heard a banshee, or so they called it, wailing in the lonely places whenever the moon was at her full. At length she came less often, and finally, after a long, long time, she vanished, never to be heard again.

---

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WHEN PERTYC, GWERBRET Aberwyn, and his family and retinue were ready to take up residence their new city, the gwerbret insisted that Nevyn stay in Cannobaen as its virtual lord for as long as he liked. When the spring came, the place settled down rapidly into the drowsy routine of keeping the light burning and the lightkeeper’s family fed. Nevyn poked around the broch and finally decided to use a chamber up on the top floor for his work. After he got it swept and cleaned, it was pleasantly sunny—when Cannobaen had sun, a rare thing in the summer—and its three windows gave him a dramatic view of the sea and the countryside. Once it was furnished with a long table, a set of bookshelves, a charcoal brazier, and a comfortable chair, he could pick up his interrupted work on the talisman again, though he did set mornings aside to tend the ills of the local folk. Every now and then a letter came from Aberwyn, either telling him what news there was or asking his advice on some small matter. Nevyn would answer promptly, then return to reveling in his solitude.
It was on a warm morning in late summer, just about the time of the last apple harvest, that Nevyn saw from his tower room a horseman riding toward Cannobaen. Thinking that it was the usual messenger from Pertyc, and that the servants would see to it that the man had a meal and a place to sleep, he went on studying some diagrams of sigils that he’d brought from Bardek. In a while, though, there was a cautious tap at the door. Swearing under his breath, he opened it to find Maer. His eyes were so weary, and his face so thin and pinched, that he seemed to have aged ten years. Nevyn was shocked to see the silver dagger back in his belt.
“If I’m disturbing you, my lord, I’ll just ride on.”
“What? Of course not! I take it you’re not here as Pertyc’s man.”
“I’m not.” He looked down at the floor and bit his lower lip as if he were fighting back tears.
“Well, let’s go down to the great hall and have some ale, and you can tell me what’s gone wrong.”
“It’s simple enough, my lord. Glae’s dead.”
Nevyn stared, gape-mouthed.
“Childbirth?” he said at last.
“Just that, and our son dead with her. The baby was just too big, the midwife said, and it was like the birthing beat them both to death.” His face went dead white, and he trembled, remembering. “Ye gods, I had to get out of Aberwyn. His grace asked me to stay, but I just couldn’t bear it. So I thought I’d come tell you the news and say farewell, and then it’s back on the long road for me.”
“My heart aches for you, and more for Glae.” Nevyn felt a stab of guilt, a wondering if he could have saved her if only he’d been in Aberwyn, but at that time, he had none of the knowledge nor the surgical tools of a Bardek physician to cut open a womb and try, at least, to save the babe if not the mother. “But don’t make some hasty move, lad.”
“That’s what Lord Pertyc said, too, but I know my own mind, my lord.” He looked up with the faintest ghost of a smile. “But I’ll take that ale, sure enough, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Over the ale Maer told Nevyn more details about Glae’s death, but as he rehearsed what had been for everyone concerned a time of horror, his voice stayed cold and flat, his eyes fixed and distant. Only his bloodless face betrayed the effort it was costing him to stay calm. During the story the blue sprite appeared to sit beside him on the bench. She was frankly gleeful, clapping soundless hands and showing her mouthful of pointed teeth in a wild grin. Yet when at the end Maer glanced her way, she stopped grinning abruptly and arranged her face into a decent imitation of sadness.
“Does she understand what’s happened, Nevyn?” Maer said.
“She doesn’t, lad. She doesn’t have a real mind, you know. So don’t be harsh with her if she’s glad her rival’s gone.”
“I was furious at first. But then I started thinking about some of the things you’d told me, and I figured well, she’s like a clever dog, no doubt, and naught more.”
“Brighter than that, because she can understand speech even if she can’t use it. Have you ever seen a monkey or an ape?”
“A what, my lord?”
“Animals they have in Bardek. But if you haven’t seen them, my comparison won’t do you any good. Think of her as a little child, then.”
By being persuasive enough for a Bardek politician Nevyn managed to get Maer to stay for three more days, but nothing he said would change the silver dagger’s mind about leaving Pertyc’s service. The gwerbret, it seemed, had told him that he could come back anytime; the most Maer would allow was that someday, if the long road got too cold and hungry, he might think about returning.
“If you live that long, I suppose,” Nevyn remarked one night at dinner. “What are you planning on doing? Getting yourself killed in some battle straightaway?”
“I’m not, my lord. If it was suicide on my mind, I’d have drowned myself in Aberwyn Harbor, but I’m not the sort of man for that. It’s just that, well, what else can I do to earn my dinner but fight?”
“Have you thought of riding west and finding the Westfolk? Calonderiel gave you an invitation, you know, when they were leaving.”
“So he did. Do you think he meant it, my lord?”
“The Westfolk never say anything unless they mean it.”
A flicker of life woke in Maer’s eyes.
“Ganedd’s going to be making one last trading trip west soon,” Nevyn went on. “Why don’t you go with him?”
“He’s got his father’s business now? I thought Ganno would go to sea for sure once he had the chance.”
“Well, his father’s a broken man, you see. He sits and stares all day at the ocean and naught more. So Moligga and the younger lad need Ganedd, and then there’s Braedda.” Abruptly Nevyn caught himself and shied away from the subject of happy marriages. “But you could stay in the Westlands for the rest of the summer, say. Then see how you feel in the autumn. My heart aches for you, but you know, Glae wouldn’t have wanted you to throw your life away.”
Maer started to speak, then wept like a child. Nevyn flung an arm around his shoulders and let him sob, so long and so hard that Nevyn realized he’d kept himself from weeping during all the long weeks since Glae’s death.

In the normal course of things Nevyn’s cure would have worked. Maer would have visited the elven lands, a world different enough to completely distract him, then most likely returned to Aberwyn with his mourning behind him. But Nevyn hadn’t’ reckoned with the blue sprite, or, rather, with Elessario.
In the endlessly shifting land of the Guardians, the seeming of only a few hours had passed since Dallandra left them to return to Aderyn. When she saw her friend walk down the road toward home, Elessario rushed blindly away. Her feeling of pain was too ill defined to be called grief, but it was bitter enough to make her throw herself down in the grass and weep. At about the time Dallandra was giving birth to Loddlaen, she stopped weeping, the pain forgotten as fast as it had come, and went in search of company. When Dallandra was returning, Elessario was far away, sitting by the soul of a river and watching her friends dance. It was there that the blue sprite found her, at roughly the same time as Maer and Ganedd were joining the fall alardan out in the Westlands.
Although Elessario had forgotten her grief already, she did remember Dallandra and all the things they’d discussed. One of those discussions involved compassion and the helping of others for no reason beyond their hurting. Somewhere in her growing core of mind, Elessario wanted to please Dallandra so badly that she was willing to follow her teachings, even though, unfortunately, she remembered them by rote rather than understanding their basic principles. When she saw the sprite’s honest pain, and once she understood what caused it, she decided to help the poor little thing to the best of her abilities in the hopes that Dallandra would be proud of her. Child though she was, Elessario’s abilities were considerable.

When the fall alardan was preparing to disperse, and Ganedd was talking of riding back home with his newly acquired horses, Maer was faced with the choice of going with him or of riding with Aderyn and his alar down to the winter camps. He was still so grief-struck and lonely that the choice was a hard one simply because making any decision was hard. Every day he woke to the irony, still fresh and ghastly after all this time, that he’d never realized how much he loved Glae until he lost her. If you could go back, he would think, just for one day, just one rotten day, and live it over, knowing what you know now . . . ! Then he would shake his head hard, as if he could physically throw off his Wyrd, and get up to face another morning. A further irony vexed him, too. Now, when he would have been grateful for a little company, the blue sprite seemed to have deserted him. In all his long weeks in the elven lands, he never saw her once.
Finally, though, the morning came when the Westfolk were striking their tents, and Ganedd’s men were linking the horses on lead ropes. Maer walked through the falling camp with Calonderiel and tried to make up his mind. South with the Westfolk or east with Ganedd?
“Tell me,” Calonderiel remarked. “If you do go back with Ganno, what’ll you do then?”
After six weeks among friends, the idea of riding the long road again looked less appealing than it had in the heart of his mourning.
“Ah well, go back to Aberwyn and tell Gwerbret Pertyc he was right after all.”
“And then sit around in his stone tent all winter long?”
“I catch your drift, all right. Well and good, then. I’ll stay with you, if you’ll have me.”
“Naught I’d like more.”
At that time Aderyn’s alar consisted of himself and his son, the banadar, his warband of twenty and their families and tents, and a dozen other families as well, all of them, of course, owning flocks and herds. With so large a group they needed a winter campground to themselves and finally found one in a deep canyon about two miles from the sea. As usual, they set up the tents along the riverbank, but the herds would graze at the canyon’s rim. Since Calonderiel’s current woman friend rode off in a huff soon after they arrived (his women tended to come and go as frequently and as fast as the Wildfolk), Maer moved into his tent with him. Maer insisted on taking his turn at riding herd; he may have been a guest, but he disliked eating someone’s food and doing nothing in return. When he wasn’t on watch, and on the increasingly infrequent sunny days, he would often go riding, climbing out of the canyon, then letting his horse amble across the grasslands for aimless hours.
It was on one of these solitary rides that he saw the sprite again, not that he recognized her at first. On a sunny morning he came to clump of hazels standing where three streams joined to make a proper river. Since his horse was thirsty, he dismounted, slacked its bit, and let it drink while he looked idly around. Sitting among the trees was an elven woman, dressed in a long tunic, or so he thought at first.
“Greetings.” He trotted out one of his few Elvish words, then switched to Deverrian. “Am I disturbing you?”
With a shake of her head and a toss of waist-length blue hair, she stood up and took a few steps toward him. Her skin was a deadly sort of pale, but otherwise she was very beautiful, with enormous blue eyes and a full, soft mouth. When she smiled, her teeth seemed on the sharp side, but they were white and no longer pointed. He was intrigued enough to drop the horse’s reins and go to meet her. Glose up, she smelled of roses.
“Maer?” she said.
“How do you know my name?”
“I’ve known you for ever so long. She said you wouldn’t recognize me, though. I guess you don’t.”
“I don’t, truly. She? Who’s she?”
“Just she. A goddess.” She paused for a slow seductive smile. “I can say words now. I love you, Maer.”
It was her remark about the words that made him recognize his blue sprite, somehow transformed. With a little yelp he stepped back.
“What’s wrong? I’m a real woman now.”
“Not by half you are!”
Her eyes flooded tears. Maer turned and ran for his horse, but as he was mounting, he could hear her sobbing. He was just frightened enough to keep riding, but her tears echoed in his memory and hurt. He knew what it was like to lose a beloved, didn’t he? The poor little thing, he would think. Trying to turn herself into a woman to please me! It was grotesque, really, and embarrassing as well as frightening—or so he saw it. As he did some hard thinking on the ride home, he decided that this mysterious “she” couldn’t possibly be a real goddess. Most likely she was just another member of the Wildfolk, unless she was something far worse. Like everyone else he knew, Maer believed in all kinds of spirits and ghosts, off in the Otherlands somewhere, who could at certain ill-omened times come through to his world. Meeting one was geis, bad luck, and so many other awful things that he refused to tell anyone about his experience out of the real and honest fear that everyone would shun him from then on.
That night he fell into an uneasy sleep and immediately dreamt of her. In the dream, it seemed that he was lying, wide awake but unable to move, in his usual blankets in Calonderiel’s tent. She materialized through its side, scorning the tent flap, and sat down to stare at him, merely stare in a teary-eyed reproach until he could no longer stand the silence.
“I’m sorry I made you cry.”
“Please come talk to me, Maer. That’s all. Please come back and talk to me.”
“Do you live in those hazels?”
“I live in her country. I visit the hazels. And I can visit the camp, but not when the mean old man’s around.”
“Who?”
“The owl.”
Maer supposed that Aderyn did rather look like an owl, now that he thought of it. Automatically he went to sit up, only to find himself awake in a dark tent with Calonderiel snoring over on the other side. A dream, was it? But a cursed real one! When he fell asleep again, he bad only his usual dreams of Glae.
What with the continual wash of quick autumn storms and his herding duties, it was some weeks before Maer saw Little Blue-hair again. She’d been on his mind, though, out of simple guilt. He felt like a man who’s come home late at night without bothering to light a lantern and in his blind progress through the house manages to trip over and injure his faithful dog. Finally, on a sunny morning between, two storms he rode out looking for her. When he found no trace of her in the hazel thickets, he rode upstream a ways through grass so tall and wet that it clung to his horse’s legs as they rode through. Still no sign of her. With an anxious eye for the dark clouds building and piling to the south, Maer considered turning back, but up ahead was another thicket. Sure enough, when he rode up, he saw her, standing between two trees and smiling, so brilliantly happy to see him that it ached his heart.
“You did come. Finally.”
“Well, the weather’s not been the best, you know.”
Maer slacked his horse’s bit and as an afterthought unsaddled him to let him roll and rest. Leaving the animal peacefully grazing, he walked into the thicket. She sat down on the ground, gracefully spreading what seemed to be a long blue skirt out around her like a gracious lady. Automatically Maer sat, too, facing her.
“Now, I can’t stay long.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s growing late, and there’s a storm coming. I don’t want to get soaked, and I don’t want to stay out in the cold all night, either.”
“Oh.” She tilted her head to one side and considered. “I can understand that.”
“Good. Now look, little one. We’ve got to talk about somewhat that you’re not going to like. You’ve got to find yourself a man from your own people and leave me alone.”
“Won’t!” Her eyes flashed in rage. “They’re all ugly and warty.”
Maer had to admit that the gnomes he’d seen—and they were the only ones who seemed to be male—weren’t the handsomest lot around.
“That’s too bad, truly, but it’s the way these things go. You know, I don’t think you should be listening to this ‘she’ you keep talking about. I think me she’s leading you down the wrong paths.”
“Not!”
“Oh, indeed? Then why is she messing about with the way you look? I’ll wager Nevyn and Aderyn wouldn’t be very pleased to hear about this.”
“Don’t tell them, Maer! Oh, please, don’t!”
She threw herself forward, so that she was crouching in front of him like a suppliant, and looked up teary-eyed. When she clasped his hand in both of hers, her flesh felt as cool and soft as silk from Bardek. Since he couldn’t manage to think of her as truly real, it was impossible for him to realize that she was dangerous. He smiled and patted her on the cheek.
“I won’t, then. But I still don’t like this so-called friend of yours. I doubt me if she’s a goddess. I’ll wager she’s some spirit or ghost, and she shouldn’t be leaving the Otherlands to mess about here.”
“Not a ghost. Not the Otherlands.” Her hands tightened on his as she stared up into his eyes so sadly, so wistfully, that his heart went out to her. “Would you kiss me, Maer? Just one little kiss?”
With a smile he bent his head and gave her a brotherly brush of the mouth across her lips. When he raised his head again, the hazels were gone. All around them in a glowy purple twilight stretched a meadow filled with summer roses, blooming in a drunken exhalation of scent. Maer shoved her away and lurched to his feet with a yelp. She laughed, rising, dancing around him in a swirl of skirt.
“You’re mine now, and we’ll be ever so happy.”
“Here, now! You take me back!”
“In a little while.” She stopped, smiling at him so winsomely that be would have been suspicious if only he hadn’t been frightened out of his wits. “Of course we’ll go back. In just a little tiny while.”
Since Maer doubted that she was capable of an outright lie, he was reassured enough to look round him. Some quarter of a mile away stood what seemed to be a dun, far more elaborate than the palace of Aberwym, maybe twenty fine towers, all joined together in a pattern that he couldn’t decipher and rising out of mist.
“Let’s go see her, and then you can go home,” the sprite said. “Please? Just for a little while?”
Maer let her take his hand and lead him toward the many-towered dun as the twilight turned all blue and silver. As they walked on, he could see it ever more clearly; a square sort of building, unlike any he’d ever seen, supported the towers, and a square wall, turreted at the corners, surrounded it, made of many kinds of stone, pink sandstone, gray limestone, the occasional decorative touch of green marble. He could see the windows turning golden with candlelight and hear music playing of such a sweetness that he felt he could weep. But at the same time the castle seemed to stop drawing nearer. Each step he took was like raising a foot made of lead; his legs turned numb, too, and he felt that he could barely breathe. The light began to fade in the windows ahead, although he was suddenly aware of another light, all golden and blinding, opening like a tunnel before him.
The last thing he heard before his etheric double broke up completely was the sprite, shrieking in agony.

Maer fell into trance just after noon, not long before the storm broke with all the fury of the first full tempest of winter. Lightning stroked down; thunder rumbled; his horse panicked and fled out across the grasslands. Unfortunately, since it was the horse he’d brought from Aberwyn, it couldn’t find its way home to the herds round the winter camp. (In time, it did wander into the herd of another alar, far to the west, but that was months later and an event of no importance at all.) All afternoon it rained as the storm proceeded slowly and majestically north, but Maer, entranced in the true and technical sense of the word, lay sprawled among the hazels. By sunset, the river was brimming in its banks, and still the rain poured down. Maer’s body, in a convulsion of cramped muscles that had nothing to do with mind, flopped over onto its back, then lay still. All evening clouds rolled in from the sea, rained, and moved on north. The river rose steadily, then round midnight spiled over and flooded, sending a first a thin sheet of water trickling through the grass and swirling round the knobby roots of the trees, then a pour, a spill of water traveling out and out and swelling as it ran. It covered Maer’s face some three hours before dawn and kept rising, but the rain stopped before the flood was deep enough to float his corpse more than a few feet away, where it fetched up against a tree and stuck.

Under normal circumstances, Calonderiel would have recruited the entire warband and gone to search for his guest when Maer didn’t return for the evening meal, but the floods were rising along the river that flowed by the camp, too. As soon as the swirling brown water started churning downstream, Aderyn and Halaberiel ordered the alar to begin packing. In an organized frenzy the People rushed round, stuffing tent bags, loading the travois, collaring dogs and children. By the time the water came within a few inches of the riverbanks, just at sunset, everyone’s portable goods had been hauled up to the canyon rim. Halaberiel and Aderyn walked along by the surging water and studied it in the last light fading from the clouds. Twisting and bobbing like some many-armed animal, an entire gnarled tree raced past.
“It’s going to keep rising,” Aderyn remarked. “I don’t need dweomer to tell me that.”
“Just so, Wise One. Very well. Let’s give the order to strike the tents.”
As they turned to head back to camp, they heard a woman shriek, a howl of terror and agony. A chorus of voices cut through the pound of rain: “He’s gone in!” Cursing under his breath, Halaberiel dashed to the river’s edge. Aderyn could just barely see a small blond head bobbing toward them some five feet from shore. Howling and keening, the child’s mother tried to throw herself into the river after the boy. Her man grabbed her and held her back just as the banadar dove, as smoothly as a seabird, into the torrents. Aderyn heard himself yell aloud, invoking the Lords of Water, as he ran downstream. At first he could see nothing but the surging brown and silver race; then two heads popped up, a small blond and a larger gray one.
“Hal! I’m keeping pace with you! Oh Lords of Water, help me now if ever I’ve aided you!”
With one arm crooked round the boy’s neck Halaberiel was struggling to swim with the other even as the raging current swept them both inexorably out to the estuary and the pounding, foaming sea. Although Aderyn never actually saw the Lords of the Elements, they must have appeared in answer to his cry, because Hal never would have been able to reach shore without some supernormal aid. As it was, he managed to struggle to within a bare foot of the muddy bank and thrust the boy into Aderyn’s grasping hands. Then the current grabbed him in turn and swept him on, swept him under in the churn and mill of white water pouring down to the waiting sea waves. Aderyn clasped the shrieking child in his arms and wept until the others caught up to him. Sobbing hysterically, the mother snatched the child from him as if he’d been the one who nearly drowned it.
“The banadar!” Calonderiel came running. “Hal! Hal!”
“He’s gone.” Aderyn caught his arm. “You’re the warleader for this alar now.”
Calonderiel threw his head back and screamed his grief into the howling wind. Aderyn grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.
“The tents! You’ve got to order the alar to strike the tents!”
With one last convulsive sob Calonderiel pulled himself together. As he ran off, he was shouting orders in a voice of command.
It was close to dawn, and the rain was slacking to a drizzle, before anyone said, “By the way, where’s Maer?” With a lot of snapping and cursing the warband rushed around through the sopping, improvised camp. Just as the gray and sullen dawn was breaking they returned with the news that Maer and his horse both were missing. Aderyn felt an icy finger of dread run down his back.
“He must have been caught in the storm,” Calonderiel said. “And these wretched Round-ears don’t know how to take care of themselves in open country. We’ll have to start searching for him right now.”
“If you’ll wait for five ticks of a heart together,” Aderyn said with some asperity, “I’ll scry for him and make your task a good bit easier.”
Since fires were out of the question, he used water for a scrying focus, appropriately enough, and saw Maer’s heaped and tumbled body against a hazel. With a high-pitched keen he broke the vision.
“Dead?” Calonderiel said.
“Drowned. But I don’t understand why. I found him in the midst of trees. Why didn’t he climb one? Ye gods, the water’s only a foot or so high around him.”
At the head of a grim procession Aderyn led them to Maer’s body. Calonderiel was as overwhelmed as he’d been by losing the banadar, but in this case, it was guilt as much as grief that was ripping at his heart. Maer was his guest-friend, and he’d failed him—that’s how Cal saw it, no matter who tried to argue otherwise. While Calonderiel wept and stormed, and Albaral wrapped Maer in a blanket with the ritual prayers, Aderyn left the hazel thicket and walked a few feet downstream to the place where three streams joined for the river. Three streams. The hazels. Aderyn swore under his breath.
“Evandar!” he yelled. “Evandar, can you hear me!”
No one answered, no one came. Only the wind blew over the rain-soaked grass in its endless sigh.
It was some days before Aderyn discovered what had really killed Maer. He scried by every method he knew, consulted Nevyn and learned two new ones, invoked the Kings of the Elements and the Lords of the Wildlands both, assumed his body of light and journeyed long and hard through not only the etheric but various portions of the astral plane as well until, a few scraps of information at a time, he pieced together the story of the transformed sprite’s unwitting murder of the only thing she loved. Eventually, many weeks later, he found and confronted her among the hazel thicket by the joining of three streams.
He went there on an impulse so strong that he knew someone was sending him a message, whether the Lords of the Wildlands or the King of Water he wasn’t sure, but either way, he wasn’t disposed to ignore it. As he rode up, he saw her pacing back and forth by the stream, head down as if hunting for something. To avoid frightening her, he dismounted and walked the rest of the way.
When she saw him, she snarled and swiped at him with one hand, curled into claws like a cat’s.
“I didn’t take Maer away.”
“You did! I saw you take him. You came with some of the elder brothers, and they wrapped him a blanket, and you all took him away.”
“His soul was already gone by then. He was dead. Do you know what dead means?”
She merely stared, then wept in a numb scatter of tears.
“Give him back.”
“There’s nothing to give back.”
“Yes, there is! You took him away. Where did you put him?”
Aderyn debated, then decided that he was desperate enough to bargain.
“I’ll show you his grave if you answer me three questions.”
“His what?”
“The place where we put his body. I warn you, though, that he can’t speak or move anymore.”
“I want to see him.”
“Then answer me the questions. First, who taught you how to speak?”
“She did. The goddess who helped me.”
“What did this goddess look like?”
“All sorts of things. She comes and goes and changes like I do.”
“Does she have a name?”
“A what?”
“A name. Like Maer. A word that belongs only to her.”
“Oh.” For a long moment she wrinkled her nose in thought. “Elessario. That’s her special word. Now show Maer to me. You promised, and I’ve answered all three.”
“So you have. Follow me, but I warn you, he’s all different now.”
With a rustle like grass in the wind she vanished, but her voice lingered briefly.
“Ride, and I’ll follow.”
As he rode back to the pretty spot in the canyon where they’d buried Maer (since Calonderiel had decided that his guest would have preferred the burial of his own people rather than a burning), Aderyn was considering strategies. Although he was afraid to openly contact the Lords of the Wildlands, apparently they’d been keeping an eye on him, because when he reached the grave, they were there, tall slender pillars of silver light, barely visible as a shimmering in the air. He felt rather than heard their thanks, knew wordlessly that they’d come to claim the sprite as one of their own so that they could heal her.
But she never came. All that day Aderyn and the lords waited, and all evening, too, until the last quarter moon rose to announce that it was midnight.
“She’s been too clever for us,” Aderyn remarked in thought. “I think she knows you’ll take her away.”
He could feel them agree in an exhalation of worry. One by one they winked out, like stars disappearing in the light of dawn, leaving Aderyn with the feeling that he wasn’t to trouble himself with the sprite any longer, that they would, one way or another, find a way to deal with her.
Maer, however, or, rather, the soul of the man who’d once been Maer, was another matter altogether. Nevyn agreed that his Wyrd might well have become tangled with things that were, at root, no affair of his. After all, the sprite had found him once before when he’d died and been reborn; now she had even more reason to search for him, her lost beloved.
“I take the responsibility onto myself,” Nevyn said through the fire. “Because of Maddyn. I never should have let him make a link with the Wildlands.”
“Oh, come now, you had no way of knowing where it would lead.”
“True. But still, I might have done some meditating. I might have gotten an inkling of what would happen, or at least that it was a wrong thing.”
“It might not have been a wrong thing if it weren’t for the Guardians. Let’s not forget that one of them’s been meddling in this mess. And that, somehow, is partly my fault. I shouldn’t have left them to Dallandra. I should have tried to know them myself, and maybe then—”
“All these maybes ill become us, my friend. What is, is, and we’re not the men to unweave Time and pluck this strand out again.”
“I know. Well, I suspect that when he’s reborn, Maer will come my way again. We’ll see what we can do for him then.”

It was a long time before Aderyn met that soul again, though, some three twenties of years, and even then it was only by chance. Late one summer, when the days were already growing short and the trees on the tops of hills and in other exposed places were turning yellow, his alar was traveling up in the northern plains, not far from the Deverry province of Pyrdon. One of their horses, a young stallion, got it into his head to break his tether and run off, following his natural instincts to get away from the reigning stud of the herd. A couple of the men went after him, of course, and out of a sentimental desire to see his own people again Aderyn left Loddlaen in charge of their tent and herds and rode off with Calonderiel and Albaral. The stallion’s tracks were easy to follow; in fact, in a few miles the tracks of another horse, one carrying some kind of load, joined them, and the two sets marched east in such a straight line that it was obvious that the stallion had either been stolen outright or picked up by a mounted rider while wandering loose. Since the second horse was shod, it was easy enough to guess that the rider was a human being.
Sure enough, the trail led them straight to the town of Drwloc, where it joined a welter of other tracks and petered out, but by asking around they discovered that one of Lord Gorddyn’s men had found a Westfolk horse and brought it in to the dun. Calonderiel was furious, swearing to slit the fellow’s throat for a stinking horse thief, but Aderyn ordered him to hold his tongue.
“We could at least go ask the lord about the matter first, I couldn’t we? If you’d only traded the stallion off to a herd that needed a stud, he never would have broken tether.”
“Well, you’ve got a point, I suppose. But this wretched rider could have come looking for the horse’s owner.”
“Would you have ridden alone into a Round-ear camp?”
Calonderiel started to snarl an answer, then stopped to think.
“A second point, truly. Let’s go talk to Lord Gorddyn.”
The lord’s dun was about three miles out of town, a solitary broch behind earthwork walls set up on a small hill. As they rode up to the gap in the earthen mounds that did duty as a gate, they saw a strange woman—or at least she seemed to be a woman at first—lounging on the grassy wall. She was slender and pale, dressed in a dirty, torn smock, but as they came closer, they saw that her long unbound hair was a deep blue, the color of the winter ocean. At the sight of Aderyn and the elves she leapt to her feet, then suddenly vanished clean away.
“What?” Calonderiel hissed. “What was that? One of the Wildfolk? It looked so cursed human!”
“So she did, indeed.” Aderyn felt a premonition of trouble coming. “Cal, I have the wretched feeling I’ve seen her before. This might not be a pretty thing we’ve stumbled onto.”
Lord Gorddyn turned out to be stout, balding, and good-humored, greeting them with no more fuss and as much friendliness as if they’d all been human beings. He insisted that they sit at his beat-up table of honor by the smoky hearth and drink mead out of dented silver goblets, then listened to their story of the lost horse.
“Well, he’s here, sure enough, lads. A beautiful animal, beautiful. What do you say I trade for him? Under Deverry laws he’s mine, because my man found him wandering loose, but under Westfolk laws he’s yours, so let’s not have a fight over it, eh? I’ve got two fine dun mares out in my stable, and you shall have both if you want.”
Faced with this utterly unexpected fairness, Calonderiel could do nothing but agree to look them over, and everyone trooped out to the stables. The mares were indeed fine breeding stock, young, healthy, and handsome.
“Done, then, my lord,” Calonderiel said. “I’ll take them gladly in trade for the stud for the sake of peace between our two peoples.”
“Splendid, splendid! That gladdens my heart, good sir. Here, lad!” This to a stable boy, who was hanging round to stare goggle-eyed at the elves. “Get those mares on lead ropes and bring them out to the courtyard.”
As they were leaving the stables, Aderyn noticed a young man lying on the straw in an empty stall. Even though the day was warm, he was wrapped in a blanket, and his face was a deathly sort of pale.
“My lord?” Aderyn said. “What’s wrong with that fellow?”
“He’s dreadfully ill, I’m afraid, and it aches my heart, because he’s one of my sworn riders and a good man, too. Our local herbwoman has him lie out here during the day, you see. She says he’ll soak up the vitality from the horses, and it’ll help him.”
Superstitious nonsense, that, but Aderyn refrained from saying so outright.
“I happen to be a herbman, my lord. Would you like me to have a look at him? Maybe I’ll see somewhat she missed, like.”
“Gladly, good sir, gladly. His name’s Meddry. I’ll just take our other guests on into the great hall.”
For all that Lord Gorddyn called him a man, Meddry was really little more than a boy, about fifteen and most likely brand-new to the warband. He was far too thin and hollow-eyed, with his pale blond hair sticking with sweat in wisps to his pinched face. When Aderyn knelt down beside him, Meddry propped himself up on one elbow, tried to speak, then began to cough, the most horrible hacking deep cough Aderyn had ever heard a man give. He threw one arm around Meddry’s shoulders and supported him until at last he spat up—not rheum, but blood, bright red and clotted. Aderyn grabbed a twist of clean hay and wiped his mouth for him.
“Dying, aren’t I?” Meddry whispered.
“Not just yet, and maybe not at all.” Aderyn came as close to an outright lie as he could get. “We’ll see what we can do for you, lad.”
“I can spot false cheer by now, herbman.” With a sigh he flopped back down into the warm straw.
Mostly to check how much vitality his newfound patient had left, Aderyn stared into his eyes, then nearly swore aloud as he recognized the soul who in his last life had carried the name of Maer. At that point he remembered the strange womanlike sprite he’d seen hanging round Lord Gorddyn’s gates, and his blood ran as cold as the sick boy’s.
“You’ve got a strange sort of lover, don’t you, Meddry?”
His face turned first so white, then so fiery with shame that Aderyn knew that his loose arrow had hit the mark.
“You’ve got to leave her alone. She’s what’s killing you. Hush! Don’t try to argue with me. Just listen. She’s so desperate to please you that she wants to look like a real woman. She’s doing it by feeding off your life. I can’t explain any better than that, but it’s making you ill.”
In a stubborn burst of energy he shook his head no.
“We’ll talk more later. You rest here for now, and I’ll send one of your friends to you.”
Aderyn hurried into the great hall, where Calonderiel and the other elves were just finishing up their mead and preparing to leave. He took Lord Gorddyn to one side for a hurried talk.
“My lord, your rider’s close to death.”
Gorddyn swore and stared down at the floor.
“I might—just barely might, mind—be able to help him. Tell me, how long has he been ill?”
“Well, he didn’t come down with the actual fever until the spring, and he’s only been spitting up the blood for the last few weeks, but truly, he started acting strange months ago. Last winter, it was, just after Samaen.”
“Acting strange? How?”
“Oh, keeping to himself a fair bit, when he was always the soul of good company before. He used to go for long rides out in the snow, and I think me that’s when his humors started to wither, out in the cold and wind and all. That’s what the herbwoman in town calls it, withering humors. And every now and then one of the other lads would find him talking to himself. Just talking to the empty air as if there was someone there.”
Aderyn felt the savage sort of annoyance that comes from seeing your worst fear confirmed.
“Well, my lord, I ride with the Westfolk these days, but our camp is only a couple of days from here. I need to ride back and fetch my medicinals and suchlike, but I’ll be back as soon as ever I can. Now, listen carefully. I know what I’m going to say will sound strange, but please, my lord, if you value your man’s life, do as I say. While I’m gone, set a guard over Meddry. Never let him be alone for a minute. He’s more than ill; he’s being troubled by an evil spirit, but one of the lesser sorts that walk abroad on Samaen. She must have fastened herself onto him then. It’s the spirit that’s drying up his humors. If there’s people around him—or so I hope, anyway—the spirit will be puzzled at first and leave him alone for a few days.”
Lord Gorddyn’s eyes went as a wide as a child’s, but he nodded a stunned agreement. Out in these isolated settlements, people took talk of spirits seriously.
When they left, they rode out fast, and Aderyn pushed everyone along as they traveled back to the camp. There he loaded up his medicinals, took a couple of fresh riding horses, and rushed back again. Although Aderyn wanted Loddlaen to come with him to study this interesting medical case, the boy—well, a young man by then, really—insisted on staying home, and as usual, Aderyn refused to cross his will. Aderyn was, of course, as worried about the spirit as he was about Meddry, no matter what he’d said to Lord Gorddyn. As he rode, he was planning how to approach her, and how he’d invoke the Lords of the Wildlands to help him catch her, but in the end, and for all his speed, he was too late. He rode up to Lord Gorddyn’s gates just in time for Meddry ’s burying, out in the sacred grove of oaks behind the dun. ^
“Ah, ye gods, what happened?” Aderyn burst out “I truly thought he had a couple of weeks left, my lord.”
“Good herbman, I’ve failed him badly, I’m afraid. Here, after this sad thing, we’ll talk. Go on into the dun and have the stable lads take your horses and suchlike.”
Later that afternoon, over mead Lord Gorddyn told Aderyn the tale. After the dweomermaster left them, they’d followed his orders exactly. The men in the warband took turns sitting with the lad and making sure that he was never alone for a minute during the day. At night they carried him to his bed in the barracks, where he slept surrounded by other men. Since he was so deathly ill no one even considered the possibility that he might get up and slip out on his own.
“But that’s just what he did, good sir.” Lord Gorddyn looked sick to his stomach. “Two nights ago, it was. All that day he’d been begging the men to go away, and he was raving, too, saying ‘I’ve got to see her’ over and over. They thought maybe he meant his mother, but she’s been dead these two years.” Suddenly he shuddered. “Maybe he did mean his mam, because truly, he’s seeing her in the Otherlands tonight, isn’t he? But anyway, they wouldn’t leave him. So when night came, they put him to bed in his bunk and brought him some broth and suchlike, but still they didn’t leave him alone. They took turns, like, eating dinner in the great hall so he always had company. Sometime in the dead of night, when everyone was sound out, he must have escaped. It’s cold these fall nights, Aderyn. Winter’s coming early this year, I swear it, to judge from the frosts we’ve been having. But be that as it may, Meddry got the strength from some god or other to get out of the barracks and walk all the way out of the dun. He didn’t get much farther, though. We found him not more than a quarter mile from here, up in the birch groves.”
“He was dead, I take it.”
“Just that. He had one of his coughing fits and bled to death.” Lord Gorddyn’s pudgy face turned a sudden pale. “But here’s the cursed strange thing. He was lying on his back with his hands crossed over his chest. Someone had laid him out, like, for burying. And me and my men asked around in town and in all the farms, and we never found anyone who’d even seen him that night, much less anyone who’d admit to doing such a thing, and frankly, I know my folk, and none of them would have done it without fetching me first.”
Although Lord Gorddyn wanted Aderyn to take his hospitality for the night, he made a raft of polite excuses and left well before the dinner hour. A farmer he met on the road told him exactly where young Meddry’s body had been found. On the far side of a meadow from the dun stood a copse of pale birches, standing silently now in the chill of an autumn afternoon as if they mourned the boy who’d died there. Since there was a nearby stream to water his horses, Aderyn made camp in the copse. He had a light meal, then drew a magic circle round the camp, sealed it with the pentagrams, and waited.
She came with the moonrise, an hour or so after sunset that night, came walking up to the trees just like a human woman, but her long blue hair waved and drifted around her face as if it blew in some private wind, and she was barefoot, too, in the rimy frost. Unlike a human woman, she could see the magic sphere glowing golden over the camp. She greeted it with a howl of rage that sounded more like a wolf than a human. Slowly and carefully, so as not to frighten her, Aderyn walked to the edge of the circle and erased a portion to welcome her in. She refused to come any closer, merely balled her fists and made a show of threatening him.
“Where is he?” she snarled.
“The boy you love? He’s dead, child.”
She stared with mindless blue eyes.
“You killed him, child. I know you didn’t mean to hurt him, and indeed, you need my help, too. Come now, let’s talk.”
Again she stared, her mouth slack.
“He’s gone away.” Aderyn tried to make her see. “Gone far, far away under the ground. He did that once before, remember? When you tried to take him to see Elessario.”
Her howl took him by surprise, because it was such a human sound, that time, as if all the grief and pain and mourning of the world were tearing her heart.
“I’m sorry. Please, child, come in and sit by my fire. Let me help you.”
She howled again, then vanished, leaving him to curse himself for a clumsy fool that he should let her escape so easily. Never had he expected her to love her victim so deeply and so well that she would react with true grief. He camped there in the copse for a fortnight, and every night he went searching the etheric plane for her, and during the day he meditated upon the matter and discussed it with the Lords of the Wildlands, but never did he or they find her again. (He did find out, though, that it was the lords who’d laid the poor lad out properly, as a small token of their desire to make amends.) Finally he was forced to admit defeat and leave to rejoin the People out in the grasslands, because winter was coming on, driving them down to the south coast. He reproached himself with his failure for years.
And for years the folk around Drwloc heard a banshee, or so they called it, wailing in the lonely places whenever the moon was at her full. At length she came less often, and finally, after a long, long time, she vanished, never to be heard again.

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