by Simon Archer
I’d gotten a good look at the animal when I’d lunged at it, and I realized that it wasn’t an animal, but a female forest elf. It was the first time I’d really gotten to look at a live forest elf, and I noticed they weren’t nearly as menacing as they had seemed during the attack. The elf was small and clearly human-like, though her face was furry and pointed like a fox. Thinking back to what Marinka had told me about the forest elves, I reasoned that that must be the animal that this elf shapeshifted into during her formative years.
I darted after the forest elf into the trees, hollering out to my companions that they needed to wake up now and help me get our food back. I caught up to her on the beaten path in the dirt and started to hum a spell to retrieve our pack. I hummed while I ran, hoping that the spell would work even though I didn’t have time to stop and draw a circle or play my cello.
Thankfully, it did, and a tendril of golden light formed, darting out in front of me and creating the shape of a hand. It reached out to grab the pack, but the forest elf was agile and leapt out of the way. However, the arm still grazed her side, pushing her down and causing her to stumble and fall to the ground.
I heard a cry from behind me, and Nadeine rushed out, tackling the forest elf when she was already down and pinning her to the ground, holding her sword to the creature’s throat. I hesitated for a moment, eyes glued to the scene, and then shook myself back into action, running over to grab the pack. I opened it and made sure all our food was still there.
“Who are you? Who sent you?” Nadeine snarled, pressing her sword into the forest elf’s neck and drawing a trickle of blood. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Bernsten and Marinka catching up to us.
“Please, I’m no one,” the forest elf croaked, wriggling under Nadeine and struggling to get out from under the sword.
“Maybe let up a bit, Nadeine,” I said, eyeing the trickle of the blood curling down the forest elf’s neck. “She can’t talk.”
Nadeine scowled at me but did as I suggested, moving her sword back an inch away from the forest elf’s skin.
“Answer the questions,” she growled.
“My name is Freyja,” the forest elf said, holding up her arms. Her voice was squeaky yet also strong and confident. “I am no one to you, I swear. I’m no one to anyone. I was just hungry. You took my deer from my trap. Please… I was just taking back what was mine.”
I averted my eyes at that. I hadn’t thought about how we had probably been taking the deer from someone who needed it, probably even more than us. My face grew hot with shame.
“We’re sorry,” I said, still not looking at the forest elf. “We were hungry, too. We weren’t thinking…”
“Of course you were not,” the forest elf snapped, an edge in her tone now. “You kingdom elves never think. Neither did the mountain elves. You just take and take and take from us and our forest, with no regard for what that means for us.”
“Leo Hayden is right,” Bernsten said, stepping forward and holding out a hand to the forest elf as if in offering. “We are sorry. We should not have taken prey that we had not caught ourselves. You may take what is left of the deer meat.”
“What?” Nadeine asked, relaxing her grip on Freyja slightly and turning to stare at her brother. “We need that meat.”
“But Sister, it was not ours to take,” Bernsten said, meeting her gaze. “We may catch our own game just as easily.” Nadeine scowled but relented.
“You were not sent by Viktor?” she asked, turning back to the forest elf.
“What? The other kingdom elf?” she asked, looking at Nadeine quizzically.
“Yes,” Nadeine said, shifting her tone from interrogative to inquisitive and moving off of Freyja, though she kept her sword raised so the forest elf wouldn’t flee. “Do you know of him?”
“All of us know of him,” Freyja said, scowling. “He is ruining this forest, just like your people always do.”
“How so?” Marinka asked, speaking for the first time and stepping forward to stand next to Bernsten.
“He is draining the forest of its resources and forcing my people to serve him,” Freyja said, meeting Marinka’s green eyes with her own wild yellow ones. “In all fairness, I’ve never met him, and until recently, his reach didn’t extend so far into the forest. But I’ve heard whispers of him for years.”
“Where is he?” Nadeine asked, a new sense of urgency taking over her voice.
“From what I’ve heard, he dwells in a fortress of his own making on the edge of the forest, by the mountains,” Freyja said. “I steer clear of there. He controls the whole other half of the forest. I stay on this side of the center if I can help it.”
“We were attacked on our first night here by forest elves we believe were working for Viktor,” Marinka said. “Do you know anything about this?”
Freyja shook her head. “I’m sorry.” Her eyes darted between all four of us, but they dwelled on me, looking my mage’s robes up and down. “I’ve heard whispers of him, though, that he will use his magic against us. That he can kill us.”
“And you still chose to take our pack?” Bernsten asked, and I could have sworn he looked kind of impressed.
“I was hungry,” Freyja said simply. “And it was my deer.”
“Indeed,” Bernsten said, raising his eyebrows and nodding.
“Can I have my deer now?” Freyja asked impatiently, shifting on her feet and eying Nadeine’s outstretched sword with wariness.
I tossed the pack to her, despite Nadeine’s protestations. I figured she’d earned it, and we hadn’t. Nadeine lowered her sword, and Freyja moved to leave.
“Wait,” Marinka cried out. Freyja turned and stared at her. “Will you help us?”
“Help you?” Freyja asked, and her face lifted in a way that I imagined indicated she was raising her own eyebrows.
“Help us?” Nadeine scoffed at the same time.
“Indeed,” Marinka said, and she seemed to be trying to convince Nadeine even more than Freyja, her gaze shifting between the two of them. “You know this forest far better than any of us. And we can offer you food and protection in return.”
“She is a forest elf,” Nadeine hissed, adding emphasis to every word.
“Exactly,” Marinka said, gesturing around at the forest. “We do not belong here. She could be of help to us. And she clearly harbors no affection for Viktor.”
“I believe we should consider this, Sister,” Bernsten said, turning to Nadeine.
“She is one of them,” Nadeine said, gesturing wildly at Freyja. “She could turn on us at any moment.”
“Then we will simply have to make sure she does not,” Marinka said.
“How?” Nadeine asked.
“We could keep the current watch schedule,” I offered. “She’ll never get the chance to attack us.” Nadeine’s face softened a little at this suggestion, but she still seemed unconvinced.
“She is only one forest elf, Sister,” Bernsten said, gesturing towards Freyja. “She can cause us little harm.”
“But why take the risk?” Nadeine asked. “We are doing fine on our own. We have not been attacked since our first night.”
“But think ahead, my friend,” Marinka said. “We do not know the forest well. What if we are unable to find the center on our own? And if we are, what then? Our quest’s success hangs on our ability to converse with the forest elves and gain information about Viktor. What reason will they have to help us? And if they do not, how will we find Viktor? This is an invaluable opportunity. We will need forest elf allies, eventually. Let us take one on now.” Nadeine seemed to deflate at this, her shoulders slumping. She turned from Marinka to Freyja and back again.
“Very well,” she said, at last, sighing. “But we will do as Leo said. She is not to be left unattended. We will continue with our four-person watch schedule at night.” Marinka, Bernsten, and I all nodded in assent.
“Of course,” Marinka said. “This is reasonable.”
“What say
you of this arrangement, forest elf?” Bernsten said, turning back to Freyja. “Will you join us on our journey?” Freyja’s eyes darted between the four of us now, but they came to rest on the pack of deer meat in her arms. She opened it and looked inside.
“How did you cook this so quickly?” she asked.
“I used a spell,” I said. “It didn’t take very long.” Her gaze continued to dart from the contents of the pack to me and back again.
“You have other spells like this?” she asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “I have spells for setting up shelter, cooking, making fire, and foraging for food.” Her eyes met mine and stayed there this time.
“You have yet to go hungry in the forest?” she asked.
“No,” I said, surprised. “We’ve had plenty to eat.”
“And you have not had to sleep in the rain?” she asked, holding my gaze.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I mean, I think it rained one night, but we have our tents and a tarp.” Freyja nodded curtly.
“Very well,” she said. “I will come with you, if you agree to share your resources with me. I’ll lead you to the center. If you wish to speak with more of my kind, there are some people I know staying not far from here. I can take you to them.”
“Of course,” I said. “What’s ours is yours.” Nadeine shot me a dirty look, and I just shrugged at her.
“Alright,” Freyja said, dropping the pack to her side and taking a step towards me. “It’s a deal.” She reached out her hand, and I shook it. I could feel the sharp twinge of her claws against my palm, but other than that, I was surprised to find that her hand felt normal, albeit small compared to those of humans. I smiled at her.
“Deal,” I said. Then, turning to the kingdom elves, “We should go back for our stuff.”
We all turned to return to our campsite, a team of five now instead of four. Nadeine continued to watch Freyja warily. I figured her skepticism was healthy for the group, just like Marinka’s trusting nature had proven to be.
17
Freyja’s friends… or at least, her acquaintances, as I didn’t get the sense that she had many friends… were about a day and a half’s journey ahead of us, so we packed up our things and continued on our way. As it turned out, we had been headed in the right general direction, but had we continued as we had been going, we would have missed the center by about a mile. So it was good that Freyja had decided to join us.
The forest elf turned out to be useful in other ways, too. She helped us find a stream to refill our water canteens, which was something we had been worried about even though we brought quite a bit with us from the kingdom, and she helped us select a much better area to set up camp for the night.
“Your other site was too out in the open,” she explained as she led me through the underbrush on the way to her preferred site. “You were easily visible from the main path. It wasn’t difficult for me to find you.”
“We checked from the path, and we couldn’t see it,” I said, confused.
“You couldn’t maybe, but I could.” Freyja gestured to her own eyes. “Us forest elves can see better than you can at night. We’re not nocturnal animals, per se, but we have night vision. We also have enhanced senses based on our shift animals. You must select a campsite based on what we can see, not what you can.”
“Shift animals?” I asked, batting a small branch out of my face.
“Yes,” she said with a nod. “The animals that we shift into during our adolescence.”
“You’re a fox,” I said. It wasn’t a question. She nodded, and so I pressed on. “Why?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know why we possess the forms we do. I only know that it suits me.”
“How so?” I asked, continuing to follow behind her. She was much faster than me, traversing the tangled terrain with little difficulty.
“I like this form,” she said, identifying and stepping over a puddle with ease. “It enables me to escape detection easily. I am also nimble, able to climb trees well. Not all forest elves have this ability. It gives me an advantage in finding shelter, hunting, and keeping to myself.”
“So you don’t travel with other forest elves much?” As I asked that, I promptly plunked my foot into the same puddle Freyja had so deftly avoided. “Eww,” I groaned, pulling my foot out and revealing a slimy mess. The forest elf merely let out a soft clicking noise that I took to be laughter.
“No,” she said when she was done laughing. “My family passed away many years ago, and I never found another clan I was comfortable traveling with for long. I like to keep to myself.” She shrugged. “It’s easier that way.”
“Is it, though?” I shook my foot to throw off some of the slime. “It must get lonely sometimes.” She shrugged and turned away from me, so I added hastily, “I just mean, you must miss your family sometimes.”
“You get used to loss in the forest,” she said, not turning back to look at me.
“People die a lot?” I asked.
Freyja sighed. “You have gotten a very skewed vision of this realm from the kingdom elves, Mage.” She finally turned to face me again. “The war between the kingdom and mountain elves wreaked havoc on my people. While we’ve always been more nomadic than the other races, we used to have some kind of loose centralized authority. Now, there is nothing, really.” She shook her head sadly. “The center has some organization, and Viktor has gained control of the other side of the forest at great cost to his new servants. We lack a steady source of food and water, have little stable shelter, and are still unrecovered from the devastation the war wreaked on our population. All for a conflict we had no part of. We only wish to be left alone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down. “Marinka told me the war wasn’t kind to your people, but I didn’t realize how bad it was.”
“Well, you can make up for it by finding this mad kingdom elf and leaving our forest with him,” she said a bit harshly. “Then, never return.”
“That’s the plan,” I said, not knowing how else to respond. We walked through a gap in the trees and arrived in a clearing.
“See? This is the kind of place you should be setting up camp,” Freyja said.
“Isn’t it a bit far from the road?” I asked, turning to look behind us. I couldn’t even see where we had left the kingdom elves on the beaten path.
“That’s the point,” Freyja said, staring at me blankly. When she did that, her yellow eyes were kind of spooky.
“Will we be able to find our way back?” I squinted through the trees.
“As long as you’re with me,” she assured me, “you’ll always find your way.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Stay here,” Freyja said, and then bounded back through the trees to where we had come from. I heard her let out a loud whistle, and she returned to me, followed several minutes later by Nadeine, Bernsten, and Marinka.
I drew a makeshift circle in the surrounding grass. It wasn’t as visible as the ones I’d drawn in the dirt. It was more of a stretch of matted grass amidst a lot more grass, but it would do. Bernsten and Nadeine set our supplies out on the ground, I conjured up my cello, and I played the spell to set up camp. At the sight of the blur of golden light around the supplies, Freyja let out a sharp intake of breath. I glanced over and found she was watching me and the light intently, her pointed ears wiggling upwards in anticipation.
“Then it is true what you say,” Freyja said when I was finished. “You are a mage.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, running a hand through my hair.
“My friend Leo Hayden is not merely a mage.” Bernsten walked over to me and slapped me between the shoulder blades, his voice booming through the trees. “He is a master of his craft already with only a few short weeks of practice.”
“How is this possible?” Freyja asked, looking from Bernsten to me.
“Well, I knew how to play this thing called music in my own world, and it had pretty much all the same
rules as the magic here,” I explained with a smile. “So there wasn’t really a whole lot to practice. Just matching things I already know to different spells.”
“I suppose this is somewhat interesting,” Freyja said hesitantly, trying hard to look disinterested. But for the rest of the evening, I kept catching her glancing at me, and every time she walked past our packs hanging from the branches above, she would pull on it, as if testing to see if my magic still held up.
We pushed onward the next day and finally reached Freyja’s ‘acquaintances’ the following afternoon. Freyja, who preferred to travel alongside us instead of joining one of us on our horses since she was so quick on her own feet, darted off the road and into the underbrush without warning.
“Oi!” Bernsten called out as Nadeine dismounted her horse and rushed after the forest elf. “Where are you going?”
Freyja’s pointed nose poked back out of the underbrush. “I am finding my friends, Kingdom Elf, and attempting to help you,” she sniffed. “So shut it unless you want to be attacked by Viktor’s thugs.”
“You cannot expect us to trust you to go off on your own,” Nadeine said incredulously.
“And you cannot expect a group of forest elves to do as I ask if I show up with a bunch of their enemies,” Freyja retorted.
“We are not your enemies,” Nadeine said with a scowl on her lips.
“I beg to differ,” Freyja said, her lip curling upwards in a very real snarl.
“I believe it is time to trust her,” I said, trotting my horse over to where Nadeine stood. Nadeine scowled again.
“Me too,” Marinka agreed.
“Thanks, Marinka.” I looked between Nadeine and Freyja. “Look, we get it, your people have a complicated history together. But that was a long time ago. We have the same goals now, and I think it’s long past time you moved on and decided to trust each other. What other option do you have at this point if you want this guy gone?” Nadeine and Freyja both looked at me in shock, and then Freyja turned to Nadeine, shooting her a pointed look and waiting for her response.
