“We didn’t send word or announce ourselves,” Frederick was quick to respond.
“No, no,”—she arched a thin brow at Elayne—“I have been expecting you for some time.”
Iowen led them through the wood for only a few moments. They had either been very close, or the stories about Trizians being able to cover a day’s worth of forest travel in just a few paces was true because they found themselves in the elven enclave almost immediately. Iowen’s words buzzed inside Elayne’s mind as the trees parted and they stepped into the clearing. She claimed to know Elayne was coming, but elves were often cryptic and strange for seemingly no other reason than to be cryptic and strange. And as for Trizian elves this was doubly so.
A small sect of the longest-limbed and finest-featured beings in all of Maw had traveled south from their homeland of Apos’phia long ago and taken up refuge in the Trizian Wood, a place that was so old it either lent its name to the sect or was named after them, no one was really sure. The humans of Yavarid, who had tangential knowledge of the oddness of that forest, had no qualms about this, and in fact assumed the elves would all be dead in a moon—the wood was grossly uninhabitable—but somehow the elves ended up taming the place.
Even to Elayne’s own elven family, Trizians had been a mystery, known for crafting a space out of the aether that didn’t really exist. She never had any idea what that meant, and of course no one could ever explain it, but the Trizians were essentially that weird kin about whom one would shrug and say they weren’t hurting anyone, but silently be grateful they didn’t show up to reunions. Being in the elven enclave, however, wasn’t clearing anything up.
The Trizians barely glanced at them as they entered, absorbed in their own affairs. The elves, almost human but distinctly not, were perched here and there on fallen trees or splayed out in wildflower patches with seeing stones that hovered just above them in the darkness of the forest. Under the glow of the soft lights, they looked ethereal, their slender fingers dancing on the air in front of them. It seemed they were playing invisible stringed instruments, but there was no music.
“El, look!” Rosalind’s voice was a harsh whisper as she grabbed her friend’s shoulder and pointed, but Elayne had already seen. The elves were cutting tiny fissures in the air with each of their graceful movements and dinkies were climbing out to furiously weave before them, only it didn’t appear to be messages they were sending, but something much more complex. Even Vyvyan would have been put to shame.
As they passed an elf who was poised, long-necked and long-legged atop a fallen, mossy rock, Elayne saw the dinky before him was weaving a replica of the scene, something like a portrait. Only this portrait was not toiled over for days by an artist, it took only seconds, and when it was complete, the elf leaned toward it, squinted, then with a small grunt in the back of his throat swiped it out of the air. The dinky let out its own squeak, the elf changed his position ever so slightly, and the dinky began again.
“What a peculiar magic.” Bix took a step toward where the elf was sitting.
Two others took notice of them then, springing to their feet and floating over, their light eyes locked onto the kobold. “Oh, how precious,” one spoke in dulcet tones, kneeling before them. She was carrying a small creature in her arms that was so fluffy the only features Elayne could make out was a set of tiny horns protruding from what she assumed was its forehead.
“Come here, come here, now smile.” The second guided him to stand between them, her hand touching him gently, but he moved under it as if compelled with a great force. The elf swiped at the air, and a dinky scurried out to weave their image in pastel-colored, silky strings that hung from nothing. “Very lovely, now what is your name, little creature?”
“Bix,” he told them, unblinking.
“Bix,” they both repeated in almost the exact same voice, offering him a pat on the head.
“What’s happening?” Rosalind whispered.
Elayne shrugged and hurried along to catch up to Frederick who had walked quite ahead with Iowen.
“If you understand our limitations, and indeed this is how you wish our debt to be repaid,” Iowen was saying as she tipped her head toward Frederick, “we are likely the most well-equipped to do so.”
“Yes.” He leveled a hand at her. “Do this, and we will be even.”
“Very well.” With a small nod, the elf set her heavily-lidded, grey eyes on Elayne. “Please, come with me.”
It was impossible to not be aware of beauty in a Trizian’s presence, and now that the strangeness of their actions had melted away, Elayne had nothing else to focus on as she followed Iowen through their village. Tall and slender, Trizians were like deer, moving through their secret domain, silent, graceful, sharply aware and yet at peace. Their skin was pore-less, features precise and pointed, and their hair was long and glossy, contrasting in either the blue-black of raven wings under moonlight or the shimmering silver of stars in the night sky. Everything about them was wholly pleasing and dreamlike.
Their homes were built into great, towering trees, neat, organic structures that climbed up the most massive trunks, wider around than Elayne’s chamber back at the castle. Seeing stones were suspended in crocheted hangers along makeshift stairways carved into the trees and lighting the way. High above in the canopy, bridges of intricately knotted ropes connected the landings that extended from the trees, though they appeared too narrow and too fine to support any human. Despite that elves were taller beings, they seemed lighter, and proved this by taking long strides hidden beneath gossamer robes and leaving the ground unmarked in their wake. Elayne was huffing just to keep up.
But they were passing all of the trees turned into homes and traveling deeper into the wood, leaving her companions behind. There were more Trizians here, elves gliding purposefully with parchment in hand, soldiers with bows strapped to their backs, and these ones were taking notice of her. She kept her head down and hurried after Iowen, turning her eyes on the ends of the woman’s pale robes. It was darker the deeper they went, but in the shadows there were hints of a different kind of light poking out in light blues, pinks, and purples, and she squinted through the ferns to see small sproutings of mushrooms giving off their own glow.
Distracted, Elayne suddenly met with a wall, solid and hard, and jumped back. Lady Iowen glanced over her shoulder, eyes only slightly narrowed. Despite that she looked like she was made of clouds, she felt as solid as a stone battlement. Elayne gave her a nervous smile in apology, but the elf only bade her forward with a delicately, if ominously, crooked finger.
They’d come to a very dark spot in the wood where the trees were not quite as large but huddled thickly together. There was a light up ahead, but they’d stopped just short of it where only one other Trizian stood.
Iowen placed a hand on Elayne’s shoulder. “Gael, we have a visitor.”
Her pupils were lighter than even the other elves’ greys and blues, and her hair was incandescent. Elves rarely showed their age until they came close to the end of their life, and Gael was no exception, as beautiful as any of the others, but there was a wisdom in her gaze that let Elayne know she had seen more time pass than the rest of them. A keen tingling pricked against her chest where the crystal lay.
As the elf beckoned her to come closer, the lavender silk of her robes rippled like falling water. She wanted so badly for her own footsteps to be silent like the others, but instead the dirt crunched beneath Elayne’s boots, and she was sharply aware of how ungraceful her steps were. She blinked up at Gael, the woman a head and a half taller than her, and managed a simple, “Hi.”
“Duchess Elayne, child, hello.”
She had never met Gael, of this she was certain, but she was eerily familiar.
“I hoped one day you might come to us.”
Her insides flipped; the Trizians had come to her once.
“We have been asked to lift the curse that plagues our young sister, and to return her true form.” Iowen was behind her sudde
nly, and she winced at the friendly name. No elf had ever called her, a half-human and the daughter of a supposed traitor, a sister before. She added, “If it can be done.”
“All things are possible, Iowen,” Gael told her without looking away. She took long, slender fingers and placed them on either side of Elayne’s face. Typically her boils hurt when touched, but this time there was only a slight warmth across her skin with an echo of something like pain far away. Gael guided her face with a hand under her chin, gently running a finger over her temple and up the length of one of her ears. The elf’s thumb traced Elayne’s too-thick brow, and then her fingers came to rest on her pock-marked jaw as if weighing her before fully cupping her face once more.
Gael’s eye twitched, and she snorted, “Oh, no, I can’t fix this.”
CHAPTER 11
“If a thing can be done, then magic can do it,” said Fox to Bear.
“And what about the things magic cannot do?” asked Bear.
Fox thought a moment and then replied, “Well, then those things simply aren’t meant to be done.”
- from The Fox and the Bear, an ancient Southvale fable
Elayne’s heart stopped. Her eyes burned, and her breath left her. With every step away from Yavarid Castle, hope had begun to fester in her chest, crawling over the fortress of resignation she’d made around her condition, slowly chipping away at the bricks of surrender. Seeing the Trizians, their perfection and mastery of magic, she halted any sort of rebuilding efforts, and if only for a few moments, she began to believe in the impossible. All for it to be dashed away in an instant.
The tears came all at once, and she rushed to cover her face, pulling away from Gael’s hands. Sobbing, she felt bolted to the ground despite wanting to flee. It was a dream—a nightmare, surely—but she was trapped under the weight of her sorrow and couldn’t possibly wake up.
“Ah, Gael?” Iowen’s voice mused quietly as Elayne tried to contain herself. “I believe you should clarify—”
“I’m sorry!” Elayne burst through tears and snot. “I shouldn’t have come here, I know I’m not welcome after failing you so miserably, I just thought—”
Iowen cleared her throat, a soft but arresting sound, and Elayne inhaled sharply. She wiped at her face, taking a trembling breath, and leveled her eyes back up at Gael.
“The curse, as the humans call it, on Heulux,” the elven woman said, “is something we Trizians cannot break. But your appearance? That can be rectified.”
Gael’s face betrayed nothing, and so Elayne looked from one stoic elf to the other, trying to maintain her composure but also figure them out. Despite all their progress in the magical arts, elven social skills were still fairly base, and so Elayne was very confused. “Uh, sorry, but I’m very confused.”
“Glamours, of course, to hide this.” Gael waved a hand delicately before Elayne’s face. “It will not be your true form, but it will be as good as any other. Iowen, please fetch Syl and Follyn.” The other elf left the two in the darkened wood then, and Gael leaned down to her ever so slightly. “The curse, however, is much more complex.”
Gael turned, her robes billowing softly in her wake, and Elayne followed her through the dense trees. They did not go far, but the forest around them changed as they stepped into a brighter clearing. Elayne glanced upward, expecting starlight to be illuminating the space, but branches reached over one another again and again so that the sky was completely obscured. Instead, the luminescent mushrooms were here in big, bright bushels, popping up with cone-shaped heads and glowing in soft, dazzling colors, illuminating the bases of the trunks that rung the narrow edge of the space. The roots all pooled toward the clearing’s center where they quickly dove off and into a basin as wide across as at least four cart lengths, and from its center came a soft, white glow.
“The nexus.” The word felt strange in Elayne’s mouth. It had never occurred to her that another one existed, but undoubtedly what she stood before was the same as the sacred place in Heulux that opened up to pure, chaotic aether. The place from where all magic came.
“Yes.” Gael was gazing out into it. “It is why we are here.”
“To preserve the magic,” Elayne said without thinking. It was what her mother had told her every time she was allowed to stand at its edge in the special chamber of her home. “I didn’t know there were others.”
“There are three.” Gael’s hands were folded before her, but her neck was craning toward the basin. “That is, we have found three. Here, in Apos’phia, and of course in Heulux. They were not connected until the Aegnap, but now they are many pulses of the same heart.”
Elayne gazed into the misty glow that went on forever below them. Lights, dim but distinct, danced around in the fog of the nexus, disappearing as soon as she tried to focus on them. She never thought she would see anything like it again, she even wondered if she had imagined the whole thing as a child, but now, staring into it, homesickness washed over her, heart aching and yet feeling so full at the same time.
Gael shifted toward her noiselessly and with long fingers, fished out something from below her robes. At the end of a cord hanging from her neck was a crystal shimmering brilliantly blue like the sky of a summer day. Elayne gasped and grabbed at her own, pulling it out unceremoniously. The shape was just the same as was the size, but when she held it up to compare, Elayne could suddenly see the color of her own was grey and foggy with a dark blue vein running through its center.
“From your mother,” Gael said. It was not a question, but Elayne nodded anyway. “She was the nexus’s protector in Heulux, as I am here. A thaumat stone is a symbol, to be used in our absence, and to assist a new being in communing with the nexus to become its new protector.”
Elayne studied her crystal a moment longer then looked up to Gael who was now staring at her a bit harder. “You mean me?”
“Well, I certainly don’t mean Alaion.”
“Alaion.” She practically choked on the name of the elf who had cursed her, and worse, had killed her father.
“No one is aligned with the nexus in Heulux now. Alaion has made many attempts, but he has only managed to corrupt the magic there.” Gael lifted a hand to gesture at the edge of the basin where hearty foliage grew. There was one leaf amongst the others growing black like a shadow, refusing to reflect the soft lights the mushrooms gave off. “Alaion’s corruption makes everything it touches ill and decay, slowly, but inevitably. When creatures die, their aether returns to the nexus to be born anew, regardless of how the aether inside them was used here on Maw, but once they are infected, the aether cannot be cleansed. It comes back dark and angry and devastating. It is a cycle he has created without interruption, perhaps not purposefully, but he cannot cleanse it without a thaumat stone.”
Elayne bit her lip, a vision of her own magic sucking the life from the forest swirling in her mind.
“We do not know if magic is finite, but we do know that elven power is not nearly as great as it once was. Humans having access to the nexus, the rise of mages, well…” Her voice trailed off as she gently tilted her head, peering into the basin. Her expression was still soft and stoic, but her brows knitted slightly. “It is what it is. We thought to separate the nexuses to preserve the others, but it doesn’t seem possible now. Elves simply cannot do what we once did.”
“Separate them?” Elayne asked in a whisper, “Do you mean breaking Heulux off from Yavarid again?” Her stomach dropped. She hardly expected to see Heulux again, but an impending sea between her and her home would drown any possibility of returning.
Gael chuckled, an odd, stilted sound. “Well, someone could once, but Maw is different now despite that Alaion and his faction would have it stand completely still. He is set on returning the nexus—each one—to elven control. That is, to his control. Apos’phia does not even want anything to do with him anymore.”
“They already are under elven control.” Elayne shook her head. “Apos’phia is entirely elven and humans don’t even come
into the Trizian Wood, and—”
“You.” Gael turned toward her. “The high elven council of Apos’phia was satisfied to lose control of Heulux to the humans centuries ago, even when they built their stronghold around the nexus, provided an elven sect always cared for it. But Cressyda broke with the long-standing tradition. She was meant to carry on the bloodline, wed an elf who had been chosen for her by the council, and pass down the role of steward to her child. But she chose your father instead.”
Elayne squeezed the stone around her neck. It was meant for her, as her mother had said, but it also was not.
“Alaion’s curse was more than just cruelty: it came from a place of betrayal and abandon. Deprived of the seat he thought he was owed at your mother’s side, he meant to destroy everything standing in his way, including the half-elven, half-human child who would make his own bloodline worthless.”
“You mean—”
“And yet you got away.”
Elayne’s eyes shot to the swirling lights of the basin, searching for answers. Her mother had been betrothed to Alaion first, but chose Lionel Orraigh, the human Duke of Heulux, instead. She could have easily brought Alaion into Heulux through marriage if she truly wanted to betray the humans, so why waste her time with Lionel and why have a crossblooded child who would inherit the very crystal Elayne was gripping in her hand? “So even though Alaion has his miasma and the throne, he still doesn’t have the nexus?”
“Not without the thaumat. In anyone’s hands, it can do great things. And I imagine in yours, the true steward, it would be even greater, your odd magic notwithstanding.”
Elayne glanced down at her own arms, turning them over. Her hands remained unsinged from, well, whatever had come out of her back in the forest. “I’ve always been able to do little things like conjure fire and make dandelions bloom, but after,”—she swallowed—“It all went…dark.”
She's All Thaumaturgy Page 9
