The Inheritance

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  Lindenlea’s voice cut into this thinking, sharp through the muffling snow. "Keth, look." She pointed to the eastern bridge, to a runner jogging along the silver path.

  "My lord prince!" he cried. He stopped, sketched a bow, and leaned over the parapet. "A messenger has come for you, Prince Kethrenan. He waits in the king’s chamber."

  Lindenlea’s eyes narrowed, and Kethrenan could almost hear her thinking. A messenger waiting in the chamber of the Speaker of the Sun carried no word of little moment. In spite of himself, the restless prince's heart rose.

  Voices followed Kethrenan down marble corridors, dry whispers ghosting in his wake. A servant spoke to a servant, women in the dun robes of the kitchen. Outside Solostaran’s library, a scribe gestured to the quill—boy who'd come with a basket of freshly sharpened pens. In the shadows of the corridor, their blue robes seemed like deeper darkness as the scribe, her silvery hair the only gleam, leaned near to murmur. When they saw the prince, they looked away. That looking away spoke more and louder than any voice.

  The skin prickled on the back of Kethrenan’s neck, a hunter's hackles rising. He'd been feeling that since he'd left Lindenlea behind, sending her to make certain of all watches posted in and around the city. They had seen something in the attitude of the guardsmen on the bridges to make them slide narrow-eyed glances at each other. The nearer they came to the Tower of the Sun, the more alert the warriors became.

  Servants melted away before the prince, slipping into chambers and alcoves, gliding silently out of his way until, at last, Kethrenan stood in the doorway of his brother's chambers. Silent, he kept himself in the shadow, observing.

  Within, Solostaran stood like a candle’s bright flame, king of the Qualinesti elves. He had his hand upon the shoulder of a thin, frail man. Beyond, two others stood close together, elves dressed in the rustic gear of one of the outlying villages. Kethrenan noted that they looked like kin to each other, and then he dismissed them.

  Solostaran helped the frail man to sit in a deep, high-backed chair. They were an odd pairing, the Speaker and the man he helped. Tall for an elf, Solostaran was thinner than his brother. Kethrenan could see in him the blood of the great hero-king Kith-Kanan. It shone in the keen glance of his eye, in the strength that had nothing to do with brawn and everything to do with surety and grace. He was the flame of his people, their spirit incarnate, their heart and soul. But the other… the other looked like a beggar brought in from the gate, ragged and pale and sickly.

  "Keth," said the Speaker, who knew his brother's step and didn't need to turn to see him. "Here is a sad homecoming."

  In the shadows, the two strangers sighed. One glanced at the other. One slipped a hand into the other's. Brother and sister, Kethrenan thought absently. Upon the woman's cheek a small tear slid, drawn by the simple word, homecoming.

  Kethrenan’s eyes narrowed. He didn't know those two and he didn't know the man his brother said had come home. Surely that was a stranger leaning upon the arm of Solostaran as the Speaker helped him to sit.

  The prince narrowed his eyes against the candlelight glinting off the black and white marble tiles of the floor. Here and there, in random pattern, one or another of those tiles was marked with the shape of a lily, white on a black tile, black on a white—the sign of some ancient king's love for a woman who, in her time, embodied scandal and who now only embodied a wisp of recalled legend. The Tower of the Sun was rife with such ghosts of older times, older feuds and hatreds and loves. It was part of the luxury of the place, a luxury of history, a luxury of fable. The place also reflected a luxury of design. An extravagance of glass wall brought the orchard and the city itself into the Speaker's chamber. Oftentimes, it brought sun pouring into the room, golden and warm. This day, that wall brought only gray gloom, and the apple trees and pear trees outside the window seemed like old men and women, gnarled and twisted and angry with age. It was left to banks of tall candles to provide light in the chamber, and torches in black iron holders. This light showed Kethrenan his brother's guest.

  He was small as a youth, scrawny, shriveled, and wrinkled like an unfledged bird. His head bobbed on his neck as his hand lifted to pluck at Solostaran’s sleeve, and the Speaker whispered something to the trail one.

  Who is it, Kethrenan wondered, that my brother says has come home?

  The man's face shone white against the emerald silk cushions of the chair. He turned—perhaps Kethrenan had made some sound at the door—and the prince knew him. Cold to the heart, he knew him, and he saw that he was maimed, the side of his head naked where his ear should have been.

  "Gods," he whispered, crossing the room in swift long strides. "Demlin! Gods, what's happened to you?"

  Solostaran looked up and gestured sharply. In his eyes was the sudden flicker of annoyance Kethrenan had known all his life.

  "Easy, Keth," he said, his hand on Demlin’s shoulder. "The man is not strong."

  Demlin, greatly reduced, looked up at his lord, the man he had served all his life. Tears stood in his eyes, and Kethrenan shuddered with prescient chill. The pain of his maiming would never have wrung tears from Demlin. Something worse did.

  Dull, gray light from skies the color of unloved iron crept into the room, and it seemed to Kethrenan that candles and torches could not stand before it.

  "My lord," Demlin whispered, "I—"

  "Where is Elansa?" Kethrenan’s voice sounded like stone. "Where is my wife?"

  "My lord…"

  Gently, the Speaker of the Sun put his hand on the servant’s arm. Demlin looked up and took the cup of wine his king offered. He merely wet his lips, not having the strength to drink that liquid fire, but even the small taste seemed to hearten him.

  "My lord, Princess Elansa has been stolen."

  In the far shadows, the two strangers, the elves who were kin, moved closer to each other. One sobbed, the woman. The other put his sheltering arm around her shoulders.

  Demlin took a breath and said, "She is being held for ransom, and there are but two days for you to go and fetch her home before"—he tasted the wine again— "before she is killed."

  Killed.

  Solostaran glanced at his brother.

  In Kethrenan’s belly, coldness turned to fire. The fire raced to his heart and changed into fury. He was a man of battlegrounds, a warrior who knew what happened to women who fell into the hands of men unbound from the rules of law—soldiers in battle-lust, outlaws cast out from all society and virtue.

  Solostaran knew it, too. "What is wanted, Demlin?" he asked. "However much gold, however many jewels, we will find them."

  Demlin shook his head. "It isn't jewels they want, my king. They want… they want two wagons piled high with weapons. They want these taken to the borderland, that place known as the Notch. They want no one to go but the ones who drive the wagons. They will kill her, otherwise."

  The outlaws wanted treasure, indeed, the one prize no sane man would ever grant them. Arm us, they demanded. Put your best swords into the hands of your enemies.

  And yet, how could they withhold?

  "Go," Solostaran said, and though his brother's cheeks shone pale with anger and underlying dread, Kethrenan heard the voice of a king speaking to his warlord. "Go, brother. Spare no man or woman. Spare no weapon. Go and bring home our princess."

  Standing in the iron light of the hard day, Lindenlea watched as Kethrenan slipped on the shining shirt, the ring mail chiming as he settled it on his shoulders. He poured back the metal cowl as though it were a hood. He felt her regard, and her unvoiced question, as he reached for the tooled leather scabbard and slid it onto the broad black belt he wore slung low on his hips.

  She wanted to say, "Cousin, how are you?" She said nothing, knowing he wouldn't answer. Everything he was, Kethrenan kept locked away in the coffer of his heart, doling out little pieces when it seemed fitting. It did not seem fitting for him to display what his heart felt now, the fear and the rage. No warrior should see that in her commander. She should
never be given the chance to wonder whether he was truly in command of himself, lest she begin to worry that he could not command his army.

  Kethrenan’s hand loved the fit of the sword’s grip. He loved the weight of the weapon on his hip. He was no archer; he was a bladesman, yet he'd become used to feeling the weight of his weapon low, as archers feel their quiver. Low he liked it, right where his hand fell naturally to grasp. The sword he fitted into the sheath, its sliding releasing the pungent smell of the lanolin from the lamb’s wool lining.

  Lindenlea eyed the sword and the gleaming grip. Diamonds winked on that grip. Sapphires shone on the hilt, and one baleful ruby eye. She leaned against the doorway of her cousin's bedchamber and said, "With the oldest sword you own, you go after her?"

  "Yes," he said. "The oldest and the best."

  He jerked his head at her, a silent command.

  "Three troops," she said, her words clipped. Now she was a warrior reporting to her prince. "Sixty warriors, armed, mailed, angry as fire—and at your command, my lord."

  Sixty. It would do. They would depart before nightfall, running out to the border and keeping themselves secret in the woods. No clanking army of dwarves, no trampling herd of humans, sixty elves, even geared for war, would go silent as the falling snow, slipping like wind through the forest until they found their hiding places. From shadows, in darkness, gray-cloaked, they would watch as two wagons of weapons rumbled into the Notch, as delivery of the ransom was made, and the princess was returned to her people.

  Then they would fall upon those outlaws like terror. They would harry and slaughter, and they would leave nothing but corpses for the ravens.

  Lindenlea would drive one of those wagons. Kethrenan himself would take the other. Gray—cloaked as the others, their shining mail hidden and their weapons at their feet, they would seem nothing more than drivers of the wagons.

  Kethrenan looked around. His bedchamber was as much like a warrior’s barracks as anything else. Spare bed, small chest for his clothing, his favorite weapons hung upon the wall to gleam and glare. When he was Lord of the Guard, he dressed here. When he was a prince in his brother's court, he would have Demlin fetch him glittering gear from the coffers in his wife's rooms.

  Demlin. Another vengeance needed working. Kethrenan grinned a feral grin. It was as if he tasted blood in the back of his mouth.

  He turned his head a little and looked out the window to where the curving wall of another chamber put a broad window eye-to-eye with his. A courtyard lay between, paved with sandy-colored brick in a pattern of Elansa’s design. "We can meet," she had said, "here in the courtyard and no one will see us, so private will we be." So private—for the walls were high and draped in summer with wisteria, in winter with jasmine. There were other ways to meet of course, and one was in the bed of one or the other of them, access gained for a knock at the door which stood, never locked, between their many—roomed chambers.

  "Come play prince with me," she would whisper at the door, and he would leave his stern chamber for the luxury of hers.

  "Come play warrior-maid with me," he would growl, laughing at the door and holding it wide.

  Kethrenan winced, thinking of his bed, her bed…

  "No," Lindenlea said, seeing his glance. She stepped into the room. "Don’t think about that, Keth. She's a quick-witted girl, your princess. She'll take care of herself, and she will be well when you find her."

  "Do you think so?" he said, but he didn't care about her reply. He settled his sword in its sheath. Rough hands would touch. The hands of outlaws would paw. Humans might already have claimed a princess of Qualinesti. Kethrenan’s mouth filled with the bloody taste of rage, hot and coppery. So strong the flavor that he moved his tongue around behind his teeth, wondering if there were truly blood there.

  Lindenlea didn't offer more false assurances. He needed only to look into her eyes to see that she felt what he did: They would find Elansa, and they would avenge her. No matter if she were well and whole. No matter if she were defiled. Those gods-forsaken outlaws who had laid hands on her, if only to snatch her away and no worse, had earned their deaths the moment they touched her.

  He did not doubt that Elansa would rejoice to see the blood of her captors run like rivers down the naked stone in the moaning lands where now she lay prisoner.

  Elansa counted the days with difficulty. The iron sky made it hard to track the sun. No shadow lay on the ground in such even light. She saw no moons at night, and all her life had become a narrow torment of walking, interrupted only by the agony of a sleep that brought no rest. She no longer stumbled or fell. That had nothing to do with strength or with having become accustomed to traveling stony ground in boots whose leather soles were beginning to split at the seam. She would not fall, for if she did she knew she would not rise again. Brand would have to kill her and give over his scheme for ransom. She did not want to die. She wanted—more than she had ever wanted anything—to reach the ransom point, to see not two wagons filled with weapons but an army of elves geared for killing.

  It would not matter if she were killed in the fighting as long as she lived long enough to see Kethrenan spit this outlaw Brand on his lance.

  And so she walked, the joints of her ankles, her knees, and her hips aching. When in rare moments she could be still, she sagged against a boulder, head low and groaning, her muscles cramped in painful spasms. There was not enough water to drink. They rationed what they had in the rank-tasting leather water bottles, but no outlaw willingly shared with her.

  "No sense in it," Arawn had said. "She's either soon back to her forest, or dead. Why waste the water on her?"

  Char pointed out that here was another example of why Arawn wasn't known for long-headedness. "She dies before the ransom point, idiot, and what do we have? Blisters on our feet and a dead elf. She gets there, maybe more."

  Grudgingly, Arawn admitted that was so. Nevertheless, he was not the first to share his water bottle. No one had found running water since Char and Tianna had spotted the goblins. In this more westerly part of the barren land it seemed there had been little enough water in good seasons. Now, there was dust.

  Dust blew constantly, so that Elansa’s throat burned, and her eyes felt dry as the earth itself. Her skin stung. Her cheeks and throat and arms were wind-scoured and raw. Her hair hung tangled and matted until, in frustration, she could have wept—had she tears.

  After the second day, Brand called Tianna and Ley to him. They went aside from the others, talking quietly, and when he came back to the fire, he came back alone. The two went off into the night, loping across the ground as though full sun shone and they had a packed trail ahead of them. No one seemed the least curious, but Elansa lay a long time awake, wondering. She had not seen the gray line of the Qualinesti forest since the day before. She thought—she could not be sure, and so perhaps she hoped—that Ley and Tianna had turned west when they left the camp, back toward the forest.

  Elansa looked at Char, sitting a small distance from her. It was, she realized, the distance he'd sit if there had been fire between. She thought she would ask him, "Have they gone to the forest?" But she didn't. He carried two leather bottles, one for water and one for dwarf spirits. His water bottle lay beside his foot, and the other sat upon his knee. He was not a good one to talk to when he'd been pulling at that bottle, sliding from surly to nasty to dangerous.

  The night’s cold fingers crept beneath the folds of her dusty green cloak. The hound Fang dropped down beside her, his breath smelling like blood and whatever he'd killed for his supper. Elansa curled into a tight ball of aching muscles and fell into what passed for sleep.

  Before dawn had changed the dark of night to watery gray, Char’s booted toe nudged her awake. Fang was gone, but only lately. She had the sense of the hound’s nearness. Char dropped something to the ground beside her, a small strip of rabbit meat. His water bottle he set down more carefully, and it was that Elansa took first, drinking in quick greedy gulps before the dwarf’
s hand darted to take it back.

  She noted two things in that moment. Char’s hand was strongly scarred, as though fire had kissed it, and she had, in the last few days, acquired the habit of drawing breath to snarl when things were taken from her. She didn't now. She'd have gotten his boot the same way Fang might if he'd snarled. Still she felt it, the tightening of the throat, the instant when her lip would curl…

  She thought, Who am I? She climbed to her feet, refusing to groan or even wince at the pain and the stiffness. Who am I? A woman who knows why a dog snarls.

  The goblins on the east side of the Forest-Down-Around-the-Hammer-Rock-But-Not-Too-Close held mixed opinions about how lucky they were that the hob Gnash had come to take over things. Some puked up old legends about how living with that hobgoblin as master was a lot like living in the Abyss. There, they said, the only bird in the sky was the vulture, and if Gnash was a bird, he'd have been a vulture. Most, though, didn't go on with god-talk. Goblins had little to do with that, for gods—so everyone believed who wasn't an elf gone fey with age or a dwarf whose brains were calcified to stone—were no more than shadows. Most sensible people believed there were no gods now, just a bunch of stories you tell to children to make them shut up their babble and wail or they'd find themselves in worse straits.

  For the most part the goblins who used to belong to Golch and now belonged to the hob Gnash took what came, and often enough it was booty from raids on villages and travelers foolish enough to go into the borderland without a strong escort. It was a good enough life. Goblins didn't mind waking each morning in their little hovels with the scraps and bones of their meals scattered round the ring of ashes that used to be the night’s fire—as long as among the litter they could see the wink and gleam of weapons, the naked limb of a captured elf woman flung out in dream-tormented sleep from beneath a rough blanket, a human woman, any kind of woman not goblin….