"I earned that meal!" the boy stormed.
"So go and eat it," Tuntun replied, and snickers came at Elbryan from every bush. "You. needn't worry that it will burn your tongue."
"Elbryan," Juraviel warned when he saw the boy ball his fist at his side.
Tuntun held up a hand to her elvish companion, silently bidding Juraviel to let her take care of this situation. Juraviel knew what was coming, and though he did not like it, for he thought it too soon in the boy's training, he did on some levels agree that the lesson might be necessary.
"You want so badly to strike me." Tuntun tittered.
Elbryan fumed but couldn't, in good conscience, punch this diminutive creature, half his weight, if that, and a girl besides!
Tuntun's bow came up, faster than Elbryan could follow, and the elf let fly an arrow, down the path. It struck the bowl of stew, overturning it and making a mess of the meal. "You'll get nothing more this day," Tuntun said sternly.
The knuckles on both of Elbryan's hands were white by this point, and the muscles along his jaw strained taut. He started to turn away, thinking that he had to hold his control, had to let all the insults pass, but before he got halfway around, Tuntun slapped her bow across the back of his head.
Elbryan let fly a wide-arcing left hook as he spun back toward the elf. He missed miserably, Tuntun ducking low under the predictable blow, and kicking him twice in rapid succession, once on the inside of each knee.
Elbryan stumbled and squared himself; Tuntun tossed her bow aside, held up both her empty hands, and motioned for Elbryan to come on.
The boy paused. The forest was silent, totally silent, about him, and Juraviel made not a move nor any indication of how Elbryan should proceed.
It was his choice to make, he realized, and so he crouched low; hands out wide, feeling his balance on the balls of his feet. He waited, and waited some more, until Tuntun relaxed, and then he sprang like a hunting cat.
He caught the air, nothing more, and didn't even realize that the elf was not in front of him until he heard wings fluttering behind him and felt a series of sharp punches on the back of his head.
He wheeled, but Tuntun turned with him, staying behind him and punching out a veritable drum roll on his upper back. Furious, Elbryan finally launched himself sideways, putting some ground between him and his elusive opponent.
"Blood of Mather!" Tuntun said sarcastically. "He fights as any lumbering human might!"
Juraviel wanted to respond that Mather had fought the exact same way in the first years of his training, but he let it pass. Let Tuntun have her fun this day, the elf decided; that would make his victory all the sweeter when Elbryan finally proved himself.
On cue, Elbryan came back in, measuring his steps this time, not taking his eyes off the dancing elf. Tuntun was on the ground again, swaying slowly, hands waving before her.
Elbryan saw an opening and let fly a combination left jab, step, and right cross. He meant to retract the left, which missed, that he could roll his shoulders and put some weight behind the right. He meant to do a lot of things, to follow the combination with a shoulder tackle or another quick one-two if the opportunity presented itself. He found, however, that as soon as his left arm extended, his fist flying so tantalizing near Tuntun's swaying head, that his moment of control had passed.
Tuntun turned in accord with the punch, her head fading back across to Elbryan's right, her right hand catching the boy's wrist and pushing outward, her left hand coming back in and catching the outside of his elbow, driving in.
As Elbryan's arm locked, and before he could even step in and begin the cross, Tuntun turned her right wrist over and down.
Elbryan had no choice but to follow, scampering out to the left a step before tumbling hard to the ground, crashing into one nearby bush. To his credit, he didn't fight the roll or even try to break his fall. He went right over and came back out low, scrambling for Tuntun's legs.
The elf straightened and stiffened, and leaned forward over the lunging boy's head and shoulders.
Tuntun's strength surprised Elbryan, for he could not break the elf's position, and then he was surprised even more as Tuntun locked her hands together and brought them down hard onto the tender area just below Elbryan's right shoulder blade.
The boy felt the strength leave that side of his body. He staggered down again, was barely even conscious that his hold on the elf was broken. He noted the elf's spring, heard the wings fluttering. He went up fast to his knees, realizing that he was vulnerable. He heard a snicker, then felt the explosion as Tuntun, half turning and landing easily on one foot right between the boy's ankles, let fly a kick with the other, up between Elbryan's thighs to catch him right in the groin.
The boy went down hard, clutching and groaning, feeling suddenly weak and nauseous.
"Tuntun!" he heard Juraviel protest, and it seemed to him as if the elf's voice had come from far away.
"He fights like a human," Tuntun answered indignantly.
"He is a human!" Juraviel reminded.
"All the more reason to kick him hard." The laughter from the forest was painful to Elbryan, at least as much as his wounded groin. He remained on the ground for a very long time, eyes closed, curled in a fetal position.
Finally, he opened his eyes and rolled to find Juraviel alone standing near him. The elf offered a hand, but Elbryan stubbornly refused, struggling shakily to his feet.
"Suffer the barbs, my young friend," Juraviel offered. "They are not without merit."
"Lick a bloody cap," Elbryan cursed, a common insult among humans, but one referring to powries. Elbryan hardly knew what a "bloody cap" was, and so the meaning of his own curse was lost on him.
It wasn't lost on Juraviel, though, for the elf had battled the fierce, evil powries many times over the centuries. Recognizing the boy's ultimate distress and embarrassment, Juraviel generously let the insult pass.
Elbryan walked a crooked path to the food and stubbornly salvaged what he could. That done, he hoisted the last basket and started back the half mile to the trough.
Juraviel followed silently, some distance behind. He wanted to make the most of Tuntun's painful lesson, but he wasn't sure that Elbryan was in any frame of mind to learn.
Titters came at Elbryan from the shadows several times as he walked. He ignored them, didn't even hear them, lost in his self pity, consumed by frustrated rage. He felt so alone and isolated, felt as if he would have been better off had these vile elves not come and rescued him from the fomorian.
Back at the trough, Elbryan began his more difficult work. He took up one of the saturated stones and squeezed it with all his strength over the trough.
When the porous thing was light once more, the flavored bog water extracted, Elbryan tossed it near the basket and took up the next. All too soon, before he had even finished with the first basket, his forearms ached from the effort.
Juraviel walked past Elbryan to the trough and dipped his cupped hands in.
He stared at the water for a moment, eyeing its hue, then sniffed its delicate bouquet. The combination of bog water and milk-stones, as the elves called them, produced some of the sweetest juices in all of Corona. From this raw product, the elves would make their intoxicating wine, Questel ni'touel to the elves, but known to the wide world simply as "boggle." The swamplike connotation of the name was usually completely lost on the humans, who thought the term a mere reference to their state of mind after but a few sips of the potent liquid. Not that many humans had ever tasted the elixir, for the elves did not deal openly in the juice. Their contacts in the wide human world were discrete and few, but the elves did enough trading so that they could bring desired items, curiosity pieces mostly, and a sampling of songs of the few human bards who could bring them pleasure, into their valley.
"A good take today," Juraviel commented, hoping to draw the boy from his sour mood.
Elbryan grunted and did not reply. He took up another stone, held it high over the trough and sq
ueezed with all his might, hoping to splash the juices enough to wet Juraviel.
The elf was too quick and wary for that.
Juraviel nodded at the surprising effect, though, taking note of the boy's gain in strength after just a few short weeks. He thought to leave Elbryan then, but decided to try one last time to calm the boy, to put a positive meaning on the embarrassing and painful lesson. "It is good that you have such spirit,"
Juraviel said, "and better still that you keep it under such control."
"Not so tight a rein," Elbryan replied, growling with each word. To accentuate his point, Elbryan lifted the next stone, and, instead. of holding it over the trough, hurled it into the brush nearby, an act of defiance and of finality. Even if he went and retrieved it, the liquid within the stone had been tainted and was no good.
Juraviel stared solemnly at the spot where the stone had bounced for a long moment. He tried to view things through Elbryan's eyes, tried to sympathize with the frustration, tried to remember the terrible tragedy the youngster had suffered just this past season.
It was no good. For whatever had happened, today and in the days and weeks before, this stubborn behavior could only lead to disaster. Juraviel turned on Elbryan swiftly and suddenly, wings lifting the elf into a short hop. One hand grabbed the back of Elbryan's hair, the other cupped under the boy's chin, and though Elbryan, at least as strong as the elf, got his arms up to defend, when Juraviel turned his arms, turned Elbryan's head, the boy had no chance to resist. Juraviel took full advantage, put Elbryan off balance and kept on twisting, angling the boy over the trough. Quite a bit of juice might be ruined, but Juraviel figured the loss was worth it.
He put Elbryan's head under the liquid, brought him up, sputtering, then dunked him again. The third time, he held the boy under for what seemed like minutes, and when he brought Elbryan up and subsequently let him go, the stunned boy fell to the ground, gasping desperately.
"I am your friend," Belli'mar Juraviel said sternly. "But let us both understand the situation from the proper perspective. You are n'Touel'alfar, not of the People. You have been brought into Andur'Blough Inninness to be trained in the way of the rangers. This is fact, it has begun and there can be no turning back. If you fail in this, if you do not prove yourself worthy of elven friendship, you cannot be let out into the world with the knowledge you have attained of our home and of our ways."
Even as Elbryan started to protest, horrified at the thought of becoming a prisoner, Juraviel finished grimly, "Nor can you stay."
Elbryan's thoughts shifted to the illogic of it all. He couldn't leave, and he couldn't stay. How could that be?
The boy's jaw drooped as he realized the only remaining possibility, as he considered that Tuntun would carry out his execution, if Juraviel would not, without hesitation.
Humbled, he said not a word, but went right back to his work, as Juraviel left him.
That night, Elbryan sat upon the bare hillock that he claimed as his own, under the starry canopy, alone with his thoughts. Images, memories of the time o€ his past life, a few weeks that sometimes seemed as a few minutes and other times a few centuries, careened about the edges of his consciousness. He tried to concentrate on the present, on the simple beauty of the starry sky, or on the future, the questions of infinity, of eternity. Inevitably, though, that led Elbryan to thoughts of mortality and thus to the recent fate of his family and friends.
Piled in the emotional jumble were Elbryan's mixed feelings concerning the elves. He did not understand these creatures, so gay and full of almost childish spirit at one moment, so deadly and stern at the next. Even Juraviel! Elbryan had thought the elf his friend, and perhaps Juraviel was, in his own inhuman way, but the ferocity and ease with which Juraviel had put the boy under the trough water was amazing and frightening. Elbryan had always thought himself a bit of a warrior. He had killed goblins, after all, though his body was far from maturity. Yet measured against the speed and agility of the elves, the fluidity of their movements, substituting perfect balance for lack of weight and strength, Elbryan truly felt a novice. Juraviel, lighter and smaller, had put him down with astounding ease, a simple movement for which Elbryan had no counter.
So now here he was, in a land enchanting and terrifying, sharing the forest with these creatures that he could not understand and could not defeat.
Sitting on that hillock that night, Elbryan felt as if he were alone in the universe, as if everything around him — the world and the elves, the goblins that had attacked Dundalis and the folk he had known in the village were but a dream, his dream. Elbryan realized the arrogance of that notion, an almost sinful pride,. but he was so much out of control, so insignificant, so vulnerable, that he suffered the barbs of his conscience for the sake of his sensibilities.
On that hillock, under that sky, Elbryan dared to play God, and that emotional game allowed him to sleep finally in peace and to wake with the determination to go on, with the gritty confidence that today, this day, he would eat hot stew for lunch. He collected his baskets and ran for the bog.
And when he slipped back beside the tenth and last basket, he saw steam still rising from his tea.
It was difficult, exhausting work, repeated every day, endlessly. But it was not without its benefits. As the weeks became months, and they became a year, and then two, Elbryan was hardly recognizable as the short gangly boy that Jilseponie had once beat up. His legs grew strong and agile from carrying loads and dodging traps. His chest and shoulders grew broad and thick, and his arms, particularly his forearms, bulged with iron-hard muscles.
By the tender age of sixteen, Elbryan Wyndon was stronger than Olwan had been.
And Olwan had been the strongest man in Dundalis.
CHAPTER 11
Cat-the-Stray
"Corner table, Cat," called Graevis Chilichunk, the barkeep and proprietor of Fellowship Way, reputedly the finest inn in all the great city of Palmaris.
Fellowship Way, or the Way, as it was commonly called, was not a large establishment, boasting only a dozen small, private rooms and a single common bedroom in the upstairs guest quarters, and a tavern that could hold no more than a hundred, and that with most folks standing. But Graevis, a fat, balding man, perpetually smiling, full of laughter and cheer and with the warmest of hearts, had made the place the best of the cheapest, so to speak. The noble visitors to Palmaris mostly stayed at the more haughty establishments, those near or within the duke's castle, but for those who knew, for the lesser merchants and the frequent wanderers, there was no better place in the world than Fellowship Way. In the Way, a single piece of silver would get you a hot meal, and a mere smile, whether you were a paying customer or not, would coax from Graevis or from most of the other usual patrons or workers a marvelous tale. In the Way the hearth was always blazing, the beds were always soft, and the song was always loud.
The young woman sighed deeply, paused a moment, then consciously worked hard to erase the perpetual frown from her face as she made her way to the three men calling her from the corner table. She was aware of their eyes upon her as she approached; always the men looked at her that way. She was in her mid-teens, but had the shapely body of a woman five years older. She was not tall, just four inches above five feet, but that only made her golden hair appear even thicker and longer. She brushed at it and shook it as she crossed the room, for with her sweat and the grease from the meal she had just helped prepare, it clung uncomfortably to her neck.
"Ah, the pretty lady!" one of the men cooed. "Be a good girl for me," he added, winking lewdly.
The young woman — Cat-the-Stray, she was called by the folk of the Way — tried unsuccessfully to hide her scowl. She caught herself quickly, though, and covered it with a smirk she thought must have appeared, at least a little, as a smile. Not that the seated drunk was even looking at her face; his eyes never seemed to angle quite that high.
Another deep breath steadied her. She thought of Graevis, dear Graevis, the man who had rescued her fr
om a past she could not remember, the man who had taken in a broken little girl and, with his warm smile and warm heart, helped her to heal, at least enough so that she had become functional once again. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the movements, a dance they seemed, of Pettibwa Chilichunk, Graevis' boisterous wife. When she had first come to know the woman, Cat had thought her simple. Pettibwa was forever laughing, dancing with her tray from one table to the next. She got pinched at every stop, hugged by every patron who left at night, but she never seemed to care. Indeed, Pettibwa loved every moment of it. If she had a free hand when a man pinched her on her ample buttocks, she would pinch him right back; often she would grab a man along the path of her table-to-table dance and sweep him with her across the room. And it was all done in such good fun that neither Graevis nor any suitor of her unsuspecting dance partner ever seemed to care.
It took grim Cat a long while to learn the truth of Pettibwa. The woman was not simple, far from it. Pettibwa just had an unrivaled love of life and of other people.
Cat loved her — as much as she had loved her own mother, she believed, for though she could not remember her own mother, she couldn't imagine loving anyone more. Sometimes that thought only made the young woman even sadder than usual.
She took the order from the three — no surprise here, just three more mugs of the cheapest ale — then turned to the bar. She stopped short when the winker gave her rump a solid slap, and she stood there, suffering their laughter. She wanted to turn and lay him out flat on the floor, and anyone who had witnessed Cat's temper knew that she could have done it easily enough, but her eyes met the gaze of Graevis, soaking in his smile. By all his motions — bobbing head, sparkling brown eyes — he was silently telling her to let it pass.
Not that Graevis wouldn't protect her. He had taken her in, heart and soul, and loved her at least as much as he loved his own son, the surly Grady.
No man would ever take advantage of Cat while Graevis drew breath — and Pettibwa, too, for that matter — but in the Way, a slap on the rump was not to be made into a big deal, especially not considering the everyday actions of the boisterous proprietress.
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