by Mark Anthony
Tanis smiled thinly and nodded his agreement. Yes, indeed, it was suppertime. The half-elf moved three paces to lean against another pear tree.
Flint tried again. “Care to join me for”—What did one offer elven children? Although Tanis’s thirty years would make him a young man in human years, a thirty-year-old elf was years away from being considered grown up—“some supper?”
“With elvenblossom wine, perhaps?” the half-elf asked. Flint wondered if the Speaker’s ward were laughing at him. The dwarf had become able to sip the perfumey drink without gagging—for state occasions, for example, when sharing the elven wine was part of court decorum. “Ah, Reorx’s beard,” Flint muttered, and he shuddered.
Tanis examined Flint, a half-smile still playing on his lips. “You dislike that wine,” the half-elf finally said.
“No. I loathe it.”
“Why do you drink it, then?” Tanis asked.
Flint surveyed the half-elf; he seemed sincerely curious. “As a stranger, I’m trying to fit in here.”
Off in the distance, a child’s shrill laugh accompanied the shriek of a wooden whistle. At least one parent was going to be less than thrilled with Flint this evening. Tanis sneered. “Are you trying to be ‘one of the elves’?” he asked, almost contemptuously.
Flint debated. “Well …” he said, “when in Qualinost, do as the Qualinesti do. My mother used to say that, or something very similar.” He caught a whiff of baking venison, and his stomach growled, but he maintained his stance. Oh, how he wanted his supper. Oh, how he wished he’d never started this conversation. The half-elf kept sneering, but his eyes seemed to beg for reassurance, and the dwarf suddenly thought that maybe the sneer was directed, not at him, but at Porthios and Tyresian and the others. “Don’t try, Master Fireforge,” Tanis said.
“What?” Flint asked.
Tanis pulled a half-ripe pear from the tree, dropped it to the moss, and ground it under the heel of his oiled leather moccasin. “Don’t try. They’ll never accept you. They don’t accept anyone who’s not just like them.” He kicked the fruit off to one side and stalked off without another word. Soon his figure was lost in the trees.
Flint walked slowly back into his shop, closed the door, and put the empty sack in the hutch. Somehow he wasn’t in the mood for supper anymore.
Chapter 4
A Lesson
A.C. 288, Early Fall
Tanis strode along the road from Flint’s shop, his moccasins scuffing against the blue and white tile. He cursed himself for his stupidity. Why had he been so curt with the dwarf? Flint Fireforge seemed to have the best of intentions; why hadn’t the half-elf responded in kind?
Without paying much attention to where he was going, Tanis found himself pacing across the Hall of the Sky in central Qualinost. Patterned into the tile of the open area, now shrouded in twilight, lay a mosaic showing the region of Ansalon centering on the elven city; the map detailed lands from Solace and Crystalmir Lake at the northwest to Que-Shu at the northeast and Pax Tharkas at the south. The half-elf stared at only one point on the map, however: Solace, the dwarf’s adopted home. What kind of place was it?
“Imagine, to live in a house in a tree,” he said, his whisper swallowed by the silence hanging over the deserted square. He thought of the elves’ stone buildings, which never quite lost their chill. Would a wooden house in a tree be so warm?
He kicked at a loose tile that marked the position of the village of Gateway, between Qualinost and Solace; the movement sent the shard spinning. Contrite, and hoping no one had seen him deface the sacred map, he bounded after the chip and returned to replace it, kneeling. Then he sank back on his haunches and surveyed the open area.
The chilly twilight air carried delicious scents of supper and warm echoes of dinnertime chatter. Tanis stood slowly and stared around the Hall of the Sky; around him, the purplish quartz spires of elven homes, rectangles of lamplight along their curved sides, poked like the beaks of baby birds above the rounded tops of trees. Girdered all around by the arched bridges, with the gold of the tall Tower of the Sun still reflecting the sun’s rays in the evening sky, the city was a remarkable sight; understandably, the Qualinesti elves believed it was the most beautiful city in the world. But how could elves bear it, living and dying in the same place?
Did his dissatisfaction, Tanis wondered, come from his father? From his human side?
Tanis raised his gaze to the deepening sky; almost as he watched, the evening darkened and stars began to appear directly overhead. He wondered about the myth that the Hall of the Sky once had been a real structure, guarding some rare and precious object, and that Kith-Kanan had magically raised building and object into the sky to hide them, leaving only the map that had formed the building’s floor. As a toddler, he’d been told by the other young elves that the exact center of the map was a “lucky spot”; stand there and wish very hard and you would get what you desired, they claimed.
“I’d like to go up there, to see that hidden place in the sky,” he whispered fervently now. “I’d like to see all of Ansalon. I’d like to travel, like Flint … to have adventures … and friends …”
Looking around embarrassedly, hoping no one had seen or heard him, Tanis nonetheless continued to wait—not really hoping, of course, that a magical being would appear to grant his wish. Naturally not, he told himself. That was a child’s dream, not a young man’s. Still, he waited a few minutes more, until a breeze through the pear trees raised goose flesh on his arms and reminded him that it was time to go home.
Wherever that was, he thought.
“History,” Master Miral told Tanis the next morning, “is like a great river.”
The half-elf looked up. He knew better than to ask the tutor what he meant. Miral would either explain his point or make Tanis figure it out himself. Either way, questions would gain the half-elf nothing but an irritated wave of the hand.
Today, however, in the dim light of Miral’s rooms in the Speaker’s palace, the mage was inclined to be garrulous.
“A great river,” he repeated. “It begins with small, clear streams, single voices, rushing quickly past their banks until they join their waters with other streams, growing larger and larger as they mingle again and again, until the small voices of a thousand tiny streams have been collected into the roaring song of a great river.” He gestured widely, caught up in his metaphor.
“Yes?” Tanis prompted. The half-elf widened his eyes in the shadowy room; for as long as he could remember, the mage had kept the windows in his quarters blocked off. Bright light, Miral explained, affected the potency of the herbs and spices that formed the basis of the little magic he did. Besides, strong light hurt the nearly colorless eyes that Miral kept shaded in the hooded recesses of his deep burgundy robe. Tanis had long wondered why the Speaker had hired a mage to tutor his children; at one time, Miral had taught Laurana, Gilthanas, and Tanis—Porthios had been too old for a tutor when Miral arrived at court—but Laurana now received lessons from an elf lady. Gilthanas and Miral, on the other hand, had clashed from the start; the speaker’s youngest son now took lessons in weaponry only—from Ulthen, one of Porthios’s friends, who was well-born but chronically without money.
Tanis, fond of the eccentric mage, had remained with Miral, who was one of the few people at court who did not treat the half-elf with polite iciness. Perhaps the difference in Miral’s attitude toward him had to do with the mage’s years outside Qualinesti, Tanis reasoned; although Miral was an elf, he had not grown up with elves. All the more reason to leave Qualinost someday, the half-elf thought.
Miral now pointed a bony finger at Tanis, and the hood fell partially back from his face. His eyelashes and brows, like the shoulder-length hair that puffed from the hood of his robe, were ash-blond, lighter even than Laurana’s tresses. Miral, with his shelves upon shelves of books, his magical potions, his habit of taking exercise indoors by pacing the corridors of the Tower late at night—a habit that raised giggles and conje
cture from the young elves—had the colorless look of one who spent too much time in the dark.
“The great river,” Miral continued, and Tanis shook his head, trying to regain his train of thought, “in turn flows into the deep and endless sea. History is like that sea.”
The mage smiled at Tanis’s befuddlement, and the expression gave Miral’s sharp features the look of a falcon. “And although it might be simplest to study the great oceans and rivers—the wars and mighty events of ages gone by—sometimes the past is best understood by listening to the music of a few of those tiny brooks instead, the stories of the single lives that, one by one and drop by drop, made the world what it was.”
Awash in the mage’s rhetoric, Tanis inhaled the potpourri of spicy scents that managed to escape from corked containers around the room, knowing Miral would get to the point eventually. While another young noble might have dreaded these lessons, Tanis looked forward to his hours with Miral. There were other subjects to study, as well as history: the written word, the movements of the heavens, the workings and habits of living things. But all of it was interesting to the half-elf. “For example,” Miral said, settling back onto a huge pillow covered with cured hides of woodland stags, and waving Tanis into a similar, smaller, but no less comfortable, chair off to one side, “have I told you about Joheric?”
When Tanis shook his head, the mage told this story:
“As you know, Tanis, elves are the embodiment of good; theirs was the first race on Krynn.” Tanis opened his mouth to ask if the other races believed they too were the first, but the mage silenced him with a look.
“The elves were affected less by the passage of the Graystone than the other, weaker, races were, but—”
“Tell me about the Graystone,” Tanis interrupted, hoping this storytelling session would last into his early afternoon archery lesson with Tyresian.
Miral glared, and the shadows seemed to draw in deeper around the pair, as though the light reflected the mage’s ill-humor. “I’ve told you about the Graystone. Now …” The mage’s voice resumed hoarsely. “… We were less affected by the Graystone than other races were, but still the passage of the stone—which, as you know, is the embodiment of chaos—gave rise to unsettlement wherever it went.
“In Silvanesti, where I hale from …” This was news to Tanis, who sat up, prepared to ask a question, but instead slumped back down with another glare from the mage. “In Silvanesti, near the main city of Silvanost, lived an elven lord and his two children, a son named Panthell and a slightly younger daughter named Joheric. As was custom there in the years before the Kinslayer Wars, the eldest son stood to inherit his father’s title, his lands, and his wealth. The daughter, Joheric, would receive a large enough dowry that some young elf lord would be encouraged to marry her, but she would have no title to anything else that her father owned.”
“That seems unfair, put that way,” Tanis interjected.
Miral nodded and drew his robe tighter around him. “So it seemed to Joheric,” the mage continued. “The situation tortured Joheric, especially as it seemed obvious to her that she was the worthier child. Elven women, then as now, were trained in weaponry, though then, as now, their use of weapons was more ceremonial than practical. The men still did most of the fighting, when it became necessary.
“Well, Joheric was so skilled with a sword that she could defeat her brother, Panthell, in the mock battles they held about the castle. She was stronger than her older sibling, and smarter. But because she was the younger child, she knew that eventually she would see everything she thought she deserved passing to the unworthy one. Everyone should be able to see, she reasoned, that Panthell was a poor fighter, with no moral judgment at all. She knew that he was not above thievery, that he was greedy and a coward, and that, moreover, he was none too bright.”
Tanis’s stomach growled and he glanced at the plate of toasted quith-pa that the mage had placed just out of reach on a low table near the two chairs. The half-elf had come in too late the previous evening to join the Speaker’s family at the dinner table; misgivings about his conversation with Flint had kept him awake until the early morning hours, and then when he’d finally fallen asleep, he’d risen too late to break his fast before hurrying off to see Miral.
The mage, however, correctly interpreted the abdominal gurgle and the wistful glance, and uttered a command in another language, a command that, with no help from elven hands, sent the plate sliding across the table toward the half-elf. Tanis grunted his thanks, spread a slice of quith-pa with pear jelly, and stuffed it in his mouth.
Miral continued. “Joheric grew increasingly bitter over the knowledge that all her skills, all her talents, would gain her nothing. She yearned to go into battle and bring glory to her house. Soon the Dragon War gave her that opportunity. The war drew her father into fighting, and he, over his son’s vehement protests, sent Panthell off to join the other elven soldiers. Joheric, however, remained at home, practicing her swordsmanship, her skill with the bow, until she was sure she could defend herself with honor. Long months went by, however, with no word of Panthell since he’d left with his regiment.”
“He was killed?” Tanis asked.
“Joheric’s father feared so. He feared his son and heir had been captured. Joheric went to her father and vowed to find her brother—a vow nobody at home took terribly seriously because, after all, she was a girl and she was only twenty-five or so, younger than you are now. In the cover of night, she left the castle and set off through the forests of Silvanesti, hunting for her brother’s regiment.”
“Did she find him?” Tanis asked around a mouthful of quith-pa. He picked a crumb off his sand-colored breeches.
Miral nodded. “She did, but not in the way she’d expected. She came upon Panthell just as the regiment of elves was engaged in battle with a troop of humans. She fought her way to his side, where she discovered, to her horror …” the mage’s voice trailed off. “What do you think she learned, Tanis?” Miral prompted.
Tanis looked up and swallowed. “What?” he repeated.
Miral resumed. “Panthell was fighting on the side of the humans.”
The half-elf felt a thrill go through his body. He sat up so swiftly that the room spun from gray to black before his eyes. He shook his head to clear it. What was Miral trying to tell him?
Relentless, the mage continued, no longer meeting the half-elf’s eyes. “Joheric was so enraged that, without thinking, she shouted her brother’s name and, when he turned toward her, ran him through with her sword. It turned out that the elves had been seeking the human troop that Panthell had joined and was leading. The elves decimated the humans and brought Joheric home a hero.”
“A hero? For killing her brother?” Tanis gulped. He’d heard the Silvanesti elves were colder, more calculatingly rational than the Qualinesti, but …
“For killing a traitor,” Miral corrected. “She inherited her father’s estate and went on to great success as an elven general.” He stopped and cast a glance at his student.
Tanis was horrified. “That’s it?” he demanded, his tone rising despite himself. “She killed her brother and was rewarded for it?”
“For the rest of her life, she was troubled by sadness,” Miral conceded. “For years afterward, she was pursued by dreams of her brother, nightmares in which she ran him through again and again and again, until she awoke screaming.”
Tanis considered, looking around the shadowed room but seeing instead an armored elven woman impaling her own brother in battle. “Bad dreams seem a poor price to pay for slaying another elf,” he said finally.
“It depends on the dreams,” the mage said.
The two sat in silence for a short time, until Miral leaned forward. “Do you understand the moral of what I’ve told you?”
The half-elf took the last bit of quith-pa and thought some more. “That one person can change the course of history?” he offered.
The mage’s face displayed approval. “Good. What e
lse?”
Tanis thought hard, but no reasonable alternative came to him. The mage leaned close, his eyes suddenly shards of crystal. “Decide which side you’re on, Tanis.”
Startled, the half-elf felt his face go white. “What did you say?” he asked weakly.
“Decide which side you’re on.” Then the mage turned away.
At that point in the morning’s lesson, Laurana arrived, and Miral called a break, prompted also, no doubt, by the shock that still showed on his young pupil’s face. The lad had to learn the hard truth sooner or later, the mage thought; Tanis couldn’t exist half-elf and half-human without choosing which race to align himself with. Still, it had pained Miral to hurt his young pupil, and he wished he could have found a gentler way of making the same point. If Tanis didn’t develop a shell between himself and the court, he’d go through life bruised and battered.
Still, it was a shame, the mage thought.
Tanis returned several minutes later, having successfully fended off his youngest cousin’s attempts to lure him into the sunshine for some childish fun.
“There might be few days like this left before winter,” the Speaker’s daughter had argued. “You’ll blink your eyes, and winter will be here, Tanis.”
She had laughed, but Tanis had shivered a little. He already could feel the winds of winter in his bones, and he knew, somehow, that the changing of the seasons meant more to him than it did to other elves. Maybe it was that he could feel himself changing with the season, growing older. Maybe it was that individual seasons meant more to races that expected fewer of them than the elves did; a half-elf lived a shorter life than the centuries that a full elf could expect, although a half-elf in turn could expect a longer life than humans could.
The mage and his pupil turned to a new subject—the workings of wings. Miral had found a dead sparrow and a brown bat in a walk through the woods this morning; he and Tanis examined the two creatures lying on a tray on the tutor’s desk, illuminated by a lamp that lent the room a scent of spiced oil. Still, as the two stood head by head examining the dead bat and the bird, there was a strain between master and pupil. Tanis tried hard to turn his attention back toward Miral’s lesson.
