Foundations Broken and Built

by Jeffrey Quyle

  The next day, Lumene had been in Silas’s room with Forna, making her habitual, and slightly inexplicable visit to the room, when the Speaker woman Sloeleen had entered the room as well. It was a wild coincidence, Forna thought, that both the Trackers and both the Speakers at the palace all happened to be acquaintances of Silas’s.

  “Majesty,” Sloeleen had spoken to the royal personage uneasily. “I’ve received a message from the Speaker in Ivaric, demanding that Amenozume must surrender to that kingdom, and make repatriation payments at once to address the attack on the Ivaric fleet.

  “There have apparently been a great many Ivaric corpses washing up on the mainland shorelines with a lot of jetsam from the fleet wreckage in the past few days, I’ve heard through some channels,” the Speaker added by way of expanding on her official report. “Ivaric is furious, and fearful; they’re worried that the people on the mainland will learn of this and start to think maybe Ivaric can be defeated after all.”

  Lumene smiled grimly as she received the report, then turned and looked away from the others without speaking, looking out the window as she contemplated the absurd demand.

  “They’re confused and frightened,” she spoke with her back still turned to the others in the room. “Tell them that they will receive no payment, and they must never send any of their forces here again, or the Abomination will unleash a new storm upon their land.”

  “You know he wouldn’t do that, even if he was here!” Forna couldn’t help herself from making an outburst.

  Lumene turned to look at her.

  “But they surely don’t know he’s not here, or that he’s anything but ready to strike another blow at them. They’ll back off their threats for a while and give us time to hope and pray that he returns from wherever he is,” the Princess said.

  “It sounds risky,” the Princess admitted, “but who knows if they even have an army left to invade us with? Have you received any reports of shortages of guards in Avaleen or elsewhere?” she asked.

  “I’ll make some inquiries,” Sloeleen offered, then took her leave from the room.

  “We’ve got to find him,” Lumene’s words were softly spoken, meant for herself more than Forna.

  “Have you asked the temple?” Forna suggested suddenly, wondering to herself why she hadn’t thought of the temple location previously. “It’s where he hid in the city for several days before the great battle storm,” she offered.

  “Which temple?” Lumene turned and looked at her intently.

  “Krusima’s,” Forna answered.

  Chapter 3

  “How much longer does he have to do this? The spring water can heal your injuries in just a couple of hours,” Gail asked her husband as they sat on the grassy sward alongside the sacred pool of water in the Eastern Forest. Kestrel and his wife had been unexpectedly called by Kai and Kere to attend to Silas in the healing spring nearly a month before, and they had left their western marches to travel to the heart of the Eastern Forest.

  Kestrel had rented rooms in the nearby inn; the presence of his human wife in the parochial village’s inn had been a source of great local astonishment, but had been gracefully accepted because of Kestrel’s high status. Silas’s presence was unknown to the locals; Kestrel saw no point in announcing that a second human was also in the vicinity. It would be sure to rouse the local community, and lead to too much attention being focused on the healing spring besides. So, the extra human was kept hidden from the surrounding elves.

  Every morning Kestrel – with or without his wife– had made the short journey from the inn to the spring, and had placed Silas in the spring water. Silas was unconscious, never showing any signs of awakening. Nor for that matter did he show any signs of injury; his body was unmarked, though some element of his core was obviously gravely damaged.

  In the evening, Kestrel removed Silas from the water, and left him on a cot that was located a short distance from the water.

  Silas’s failure to revive after weeks of soaking in the spring water was astonishing and depressing to Kestrel, but he continued to carry out his attendance on the human’s treatment, in accordance with the direction the goddesses had explicitly given him.

  “He’ll revive when his body and the spring water think the time has come,” Kestrel answered Gail on the morning of her question.

  “But since that’s not likely to be today, I’d like to go send off a report to Firheng to let them know that we’re spending time here,” Kestrel said. “If you’ll just stay and keep an eye on him in the water, I’ll be back by midday.”

  “Go on with you,” Gail offered her husband her release from the spring. “I’ll be fine staying here with the sleeping boy for a bit.”

  Kestrel smiled his thanks, kissed his wife’s cheek, then loped away with the unfathomable speed that his elven heritage allowed him to apply so effortlessly to his movement. Gail sighed, then sat in the chair that Kestrel had crafted for her. She looked at the unconscious, recumbent Silas in the water, then lay her head back, and closed her eyes.

  She wanted to be home, back in the Western Marches, where she could tend to Kestrel’s palatial home, work with the steward, and keep watch over her two young children. She loved to live among the elves of the Marches, who had accepted her freely as one of their own, despite her human heritage. She was treated kindly and listened to deferentially – her red hair was even praised as a thing of beauty among the elves!

  Kestrel had turned over to her the management of the harvest market, the quickly-famous open air market in the Western Marches where elves and imps and even a few bold humans traded produce and goods and especially mushrooms at certain times of the year. Gail had succeeded in keeping the market a place where buyers and sellers continued – and wanted to – converge to trade, and even helped it expand in size.

  But now her wish to be planning the next step in the expansion of the market field had been set aside for the trip to the spring, to watch over the human boy.

  Kestrel didn’t know where the boy came from. The pair of them had met before, but the places the human had named were all places that Kestrel had never heard of.

  “He should surely be finished with his treatment by now,” a voice spoke in the immediate vicinity of Gail. She snapped her head forward and her eyelids bounced open in response to the unexpected voice.

  A tall and beautiful woman, one of breathtaking beauty, emerged from the opening of the path that led to the spring. She was a human.

  Gail was astonished by the sight of the human appearing far within the heart of the elven domain, a place where Gail herself was an extraordinary anomaly despite her years as the wife of a high-ranking peer of the realm. There was no explanation for what another human would be doing in the middle of the Eastern Forest; despite an uneasy détente between the two races, humans were not invited into the Forest. And there was no explanation for how the woman might find her way to the hidden, holy spring.

  And there was surely no way the woman should have known anything about Silas’s healing regime.

  “He’ll be done any day now,” another voice surprised Gail again, making her heart pound twice as fast as it also shocked her. Gail swiveled to look behind her, and saw an elven woman, one as equally beautiful in the graces of her race as the human woman. She was walking along the edge of the pool of spring water.

  The two women walked in silence a few more steps, until they met and stopped. They stood directly above the spot where Silas lay in the water.

  “May I help you, my ladies?” Gail stood and timidly spoke to the women’s backs.

  They paid her no attention.

  “He was absolutely drained,” the elven woman spot. “It was a desperately brave act on his part to release so much of his own life energy.”

  “He was fortunate to have a member of his own lineage with him. But he was foolish,” the human paused in her speech, “or at least poorly informed, to think he could take my own energy and manipulate it freely as if it were his own,
without suffering consequences from the act.”

  “But he did what you needed,” the elf pointed out. “He accomplished a tremendous victory.”

  “In the short run,” the human agreed. “It was a setback for L’Anvien, there is no doubt. But not a disabling loss. Our young human has hopefully learned something from the experience.”

  “The time has come to do more than disable L’Anvien. The demigod has stirred up trouble that has come to stretch from your continent to my own race here in the west. L’Anvien must be destroyed,” the elf emphasized vigorously.

  “I agree, and this young man is growing up rapidly. He’s fighting a very good fight. My husband is bringing him along to become a hero for the ages,” the human responded. “But,” she paused.

  “He cannot fight the entire battle to its end by himself?” the elf finished the human’s sentence as a question.

  “Precisely,” the human used just the one word to answer.

  “And you would like to see an ally, perhaps?” the elf answered.

  The human turned her head and looked back at Gail for the first time.

  “Yes,” she replied after she returned her gaze to the unconscious boy in the water. “We both know he can do this, and you do need to settle the indirect disturbances that L’Anvien raised among your people.”

  “Don’t point fingers at me,” the elf answered calmly. “With both L’Anvien and the Viathins kicking the leaves, my people had a great deal of stress to recover from. This respite has been much needed.

  “But I see your greater point,” she added.

  The elf too turned and looked back at Gail and pointed at her with one finger for just a moment, then redirected her eyes to Silas. “You know, he’s almost good enough to be an elf. It’s too bad his ears don’t have a little bit of point to them.

  “You’ll have your ally, don’t fear. Carry on with your campaign,” she told the human calmly.

  “We will do so. Thank you, sister,” the beautiful human woman answered warmly.

  “It’s nice to work with you again, sister. Why is it that we only get together for these troubles?” the elf asked.

  The human shrugged. She raised a hand and held it out in front of her, in the air above Silas’s body, for a moment, and then she was gone.

  “So, I suppose I have to summon the imps?” the elf asked the empty air. Then she too held her hand out in the air above Silas for a moment, then she also startled Gail as she shook her head a second before she disappeared.

  Silas suddenly began to cough.

  Gail realized that she had been frozen in place, virtually paralyzed, during the conversation in front of her. The extraordinary conversation. She had not moved, other than to blink her eyes, while the two goddesses had stood in front of her and discussed their plans for changing the world. Using Silas.

  And Kestrel. They clearly meant to use Kestrel.

  Silas coughed again, and Gail stood up, then stepped over and knelt at the edge of the water, so that she could reach down and grab his shoulders, trying to lift them to help him keep his face above the water line as he returned to consciousness after his long, induced period of unconsciousness.

  Silas sputtered and opened his eyes, blinking several times before he rubbed a hand across them, then sat up, resting on the sandy bottom of the pool and looking around.

  “My lady,” he spoke to Gail, in an accent that was light and lilting, unlike any she had ever heard.

  “Are we at the elven spring?” he asked. “The land and water look right, but you look just as human as I do, except that you’re so much prettier.”

  The boy didn’t know where he was, Gail realized. But she knew, and she knew why he was there; it was because of, her mind paused as it tried to grasp the explanation that she was sure she had known just moments ago. She knew – or had known – why Silas was in the water. Except now she found her memories were foggy, and perhaps even growing foggier. She couldn’t tell why he was there, though he obviously must have been injured in some way.

  “I am a human,” she paused in her confusion for only a moment, then answered Silas. “But I’m married to an elf, well, mostly-elf. We are in the Eastern Forest, the homeland of the elves, or one of their homelands.

  “You’re in the healing spring. Kestrel and I have been here for some time keeping an eye on you while you rested in the spring water,” Gail explained.

  Both of them looked upward at that moment, as shadows appeared. A group of imps had materialized overhead.

  “Silas friend, and wife of Kestrel-friend, we are so glad to see you. Will you not place us in the spring waters now?” Odare asked, speaking immediately. “It has been quite some time since we brought you here before, when Silas-friend gave the great and blissful joy, the true, friendly kindness, of letting us have a small moment of happiness in the water, after we brought you here as requested?”

  Silas stared blankly at the small blue woman as he tried to comprehend her request and to put together the facts and implied facts that she had cited.

  He was at the healing spring. That seemed undeniable. Beyond what he saw, he was becoming aware of the feeling of complete healthiness that permeated every fiber of his body. It was truly the water of the spring.

  The sprites had brought him to the spring. Odare said so, and he had no doubt. Only they could make the journey from Amenozume to the spring. But Silas didn’t remember the trip, or even asking for the trip. He remembered nothing at all, he suddenly realized.

  He closed his eyes and thought. He remembered nothing. Then he remembered Forna, and the top of the Speaker’s Tower, and the mighty fleet that had sailed towards Amenozume to carry out Ivaric’s destructive intentions.

  The storm. The Storm. He remembered the vast storm, the clouds and the winds.

  He remembered Kai’s power, the energy that had mingled with his, and answered to his control as he had fought against the invading fleet.

  “Friend Silas?” Odare’s voice was inquisitive.

  Silas opened his eyes and looked at the sprite, then looked at the human woman on the shore.

  “Did we win the battle?” he asked her.

  “I know nothing of any battle. I only know that Kestrel and I were directed to come tend to you at this spot,” Gail replied. “And so we came, and we’ve been here ever since.”

  “How long has that been?” a new sense of doubt crept into Silas’s mind. He didn’t know what the aftermath of the invasion had been, and now he worried that he didn’t even know when it had been. Minutes ago? Hours?

  “More than a fortnight, but not a month yet,” Gail replied.

  Silas’s eyes widened in shock.

  “Odare? Did you bring me here weeks ago?” Silas turned to ask the sprite.

  “Well, yes and no. I certainly helped, and I dare say I was a leader,” Odare began.

  “Hmp,” Stillwater cleared his throat.

  “Not the only leader!” Odare gave her companion a glare. “And as I was about to say, as heroic as I am, I did not carry you all alone. Others were involved as well.”

  “And it was weeks ago?” Silas clarified.

  “Oh yes, the moon has come full and new since then,” Odare answered.

  Silas’s eyes glazed over momentarily as he pondered his inexplicable situation, but then they came into focus, and he rose to his feet.

  “How can I place you in the waters when you haven’t even disrobed yet?” he asked Odare in a cheerful tone.

  “You will know no one who can disrobe faster than I can!” Odare rose to the challenge and let her clothes drop into a small pile on the grassy lawn within seconds.

  “That is perhaps not something to brag about,” Stillwater said drily, receiving an Odare extended tongue in response.

  The other sprites also disrobed, and Silas carefully placed them one by one in the water.

  “You may carry me last, Silas-friend,” Stillwater offered. Silas gave the sprite a suspicious glance, then processed to put the tw
o unknown sprites in the water after Odare, but before the reluctant Stillwater.

  “Silas, good friend,” Stillwater said as Silas held him in the air over the water, “I have to confess something to you.”

  Silas paused. “Yes, my friend?” he gave an inquisitive expression.

  “It pains me to admit this to you, but I have been living a lie,” the sprite announced gravely.

  Silas looked at him quizzically.

  “I am not a sprite,” Stillwater announced.

  Silas stood in silence, expectantly, waiting for the punchline to the joke.

  “And?” Silas asked after several seconds.

  “I am not a sprite,” Stillwater repeated his declaration. “I am an imp. And so are Odare, and the others.”

  Silas starred in non-comprehension.

  “Sprites and imps are different,” Stillwater said insistently.

  “to one another, the differences are very evident,” Gail spoke up, trying not to grin while trying to help Silas and Stillwater, “but to humans, there is little difference. Imps have gills in their necks, which are not always easy to see. And many imps have different shades of blue skin from sprites. The imps live not too far from here in the Swampy Morass, a land right on the borders of the Eastern Forest. My husband Kestrel is the Warden of the Western Marches and the neighbor to the imps. He’s been to their capital city, Blackfriars.

  “I don’t know where the sprites live, but it is a different place. The two races are very compatible. A sprite princess, Dewberry, married an imp and is the queen of the imp nation now,” Gail continued.

  “Dewberry is a sprite, and you’re an imp?” Silas interrupted to ask Stillwater.

  “Yes,” the blue being agreed.

  “Why would Silas think that you are a sprite?” Gail asked.

  “We were used as sprites,” Stillwater replied. “Odare, Fowler, Graccio, myself, many others. The sprites put on their ceremonial dance, and Dewberry wanted it to seem as impressive as possible, so she recruited many, many imps to join the sprites in the dance for the humans in that city where we met Silas on top of the tall building.”