Kindred Spirits

by Mark Anthony

  As Tanis entered today, the market was just beginning to break up in the low light of the sun. He descended the stone stairs leading down to the tile circle where the merchants were gathering up their wares. He tried on a copper bracelet and examined a quiver filled with arrows painted yellow and green, but he had left his small purse of coins at the palace, so he was forced to disappoint the merchants hoping to make one more sale before the day ended.

  He was just leaving the market when a tall, familiar figure caught his eye, recognizable even at this distance and in this crowd because of her luxuriant blond hair and lithe figure. It was Laurana, and her brother Gilthanas was with her.

  Tanis sucked in his breath and tried to edge behind a potter’s booth, but an old elf gently pushed Tanis back.

  “The shop is closed,” he informed the half-elf.

  “But …” Tanis said.

  “The market is over,” the elf said firmly. “Come back tomorrow.”

  Tanis stumbled backward, but before he could turn and dash away, he saw Laurana’s green eyes gazing at him, and he swallowed hard. He couldn’t run now, not when the young elf lady had seen him. Even now, her coral lips had parted in a radiant smile and she was hurrying across the tired marketplace with an astonishing mixture of determination and grace. Marketkeepers, both men and women, paused at their work and watched with respect and admiration as she moved by. Gilthanas trailed behind her, looking less pleased than she.

  “Tanis!” Laurana called as she drew close to the half-elf. Her voice was resonant as a bell. She reached out slender arms and caught Tanis in a brief hug, then turned to Gilthanas and said, “I haven’t seen Tanis in nearly a week. I think he’s avoiding us.”

  Gilthanas, flicking his golden hair away from his eyes, looked as though that would be fine with him.

  Tanis sighed and shifted uncomfortably, acutely aware that the Speaker’s daughter continued to hold one of his hands—and just as aware that the people around the trio were noting the exchange and raising their eyebrows. He tried to back out of her grasp, and Laurana released him; a faint frown creased the skin between her eyes.

  Surprisingly, it was Gilthanas who diverted Laurana by asking if Tanis were going to the Tower for the big announcement the next day.

  “What is it?” Tanis asked. Laurana shifted back a step and pouted slightly, then appeared to change her mind and join in the conversation. At age thirty, she seemed to be half-woman, half-girl, and Tanis never knew which part of her personality would be in ascendancy when he spoke with her. As a result, he had been avoiding her.

  “I don’t know what the announcement is,” she said. “Father won’t tell anyone. All I know is that he looks worried and Lord Xenoth looks pleased, which always concerns me.

  “You look wonderful today, Tanis,” she said suddenly. Her green satin dress shimmered in the deepening sunset. All of a sudden, he was tremendously aware of his human blood. He felt huge and ungainly. Although she had years to go before she would be considered “grown up” in elven culture, she had attained her full adult height; still, she was so slight, bright, and quick that he felt like an ogre next to her.

  Gilthanas, looking annoyed, put one hand on his sister’s arm and said, “Laurana …” warningly. Tanis blushed and looked down at the outfit she’d praised: a sky-blue shirt under a leather vest fringed with feathers, and brown breeches woven of softest wool. He still preferred beaded moccasins to the more customary elven boots; it was a habit he’d found difficult to outgrow.

  Laurana flounced, and Tanis suddenly saw the spoiled girl she’d been only a few years before. Her voice, however, was that of a woman. “Gilthanas, I will do as I please,” she snapped. “We have discussed this. Now leave it.”

  Tanis felt awkward. The days he and Gilthanas had spent together, running about the city or trekking deep within the forest, seemed shadowy and far away now, as if they were a dream rather than something that had ever truly been. They had been friends. Now Tanis couldn’t think of anything to say, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  Gilthanas nodded shortly at the two of them. “I’ll leave, then.” He wheeled and stalked away, threading through the departing merchants and their carts.

  “I am sorry,” Tanis said, more to himself than to Laurana, but the elven woman didn’t appear to have heard him. Instead, she took his hand and drew him along with her through the Grand Market.

  “I don’t know what father has planned for tomorrow,” she complained. “All I know is that no one in government ever simply comes out and says anything. Even the most ordinary proclamation has to be accompanied by sheaves of parchments, yards of ribbon, and gallons of sealing wax.”

  Tanis found himself smiling. Adjusting for a certain amount of hyperbole, Laurana was right.

  “Perhaps they are declaring tomorrow National Elvenblossom Wine Day,” he suggested.

  Tanis was so rarely whimsical that it took Laurana a moment to match her mood to his. She laughed. “Or passing a resolution urging every elf to eat quith-pa at every meal?”

  She giggled again, and suddenly Tanis felt like a child—not the sullen youngster he had been, but the carefree child he could have been under different circumstances. The thought made him both happy and sad.

  As always with the half-elf, it seemed, sadness won out. “Most likely, it has to do with the tylor,” Tanis said.

  Laurana shivered. “That’s probably true. Palace guards were out all day, but none was able to find the creature.”

  She appeared to lapse into deep thought, and he wondered what conversational shift she was making now.

  They had reached the edge of the Kith-Kanan mosaic, leaving the clamor of the Grand Market behind them. Laurana drew him up the stone steps and through a break in the blooming lilac bushes at the edge of the mosaic, into a small clearing. The bushes dulled the sound from the public area; suddenly, Tanis was aware of how alone they were.

  Laurana pulled a small, tissue-wrapped package from the pocket of her dress. “I have something for you,” she said. “I’ve been carrying it around all week, hoping to see you.”

  “What is it?” he asked, puzzled, but Laurana only smiled mysteriously. At that moment, she was not at all a child, and Tanis shifted uncomfortably.

  “You’ll see,” she said, and then suddenly she stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, ignoring his incipient beard, her touch as cool and soft as the spring air. A scant moment later, she had slipped through the lilacs and out of sight, only the faint fragrance of mint lingering where she had been. Bemused, Tanis touched his cheek, unsure what she was up to. With a shrug, he unwrapped the small parcel.

  A sudden coldness sank deep into Tanis’s stomach despite the warmth of the spring air. On his palm, in the sunlight filtering between the new leaves of the trees, glimmered a ring. It was a simple thing, fashioned of seven tiny, interlocking ivy leaves, gleaming as bright and gold as the hair of the elven woman who had given it to him. It was lovely, delicate, a ring one might place on the hand of a lover. Tanis shook his head, clenching the ring in his fist.

  Still shaking his head, Tanis emerged from the lilacs moments later, slipping the slender ring into the pocket of his vest until he could ponder its meaning.

  “Interesting,” said a cold voice.

  Tanis whirled. Standing at the top of the steps, shaking in anger as several laden tradesmen watched and waited to get by, stood Lord Xenoth.

  “Tanthalas Half-Elven,” the elf lord said portentously. “You will come to regret this.”

  As Tanis, blinking, watched Lord Xenoth stomp away in indignation, he had no doubt that the elf lord was right.

  Chapter 11

  A Visitor From the Past

  The sound of hammer blows rang like clear music on the spring morning air. Flint grinned fiercely as he worked the crimson-glowing slab of steel, periodically quenching the metal in an oaken half-barrel of water. Sweat trickled down his soot-stained brow.

  He had begun late the previo
us day, shucking his blanket onto the bed, tossing down a mug of ale—for his frail health, he concluded—then firing the forge and hammering irregular chunks of iron into several small bars of metal. He beat the bars into strips and heated them to a high temperature in the charcoal fire, converting them to carbon steel. Then he sandwiched the strips into a slab, continually reheating the slab in the coal and thrusting it into cold water to harden the metal.

  Now, finally satisfied with the thinness and evenness of the piece of steel, he lifted it from the heat of the forge with a pair of iron tongs and quenched it again. Clouds of steam hissed into the air like the breath of some fabled dragon, until finally the metal had cooled. Flint set it on his workbench and eyed it critically. It was still rough and crude—little more than a flat strip of steel, really—but soon enough, it would be something far different—a magnificent sword. Flint’s blue eyes glimmered, for already he could see the finished weapon, smooth and shimmering, beneath the blackened surface of the steel bar.

  Flint wiped away the sweat and grime from his forehead and gulped water from a tin ladle dipped in a bucket in the corner. He sat on a low wooden stool and closed his eyes for a moment. He’d arrived in Qualinost two days ago, and already it seemed as though he had never left it for the winter. How long had it been since that day he had first set foot in the city? Probably twenty years to the very day, he thought, opening his eyes to glance out the window.

  Outside, the new leaves of the aspen trees flickered emerald and silver in the sunlight.

  His heart felt right in Qualinost, and despite the occasional unfriendly stares from Lord Xenoth, Litanas, Ulthen and Tyresian—stares rarely converted to comments because of Flint’s popularity with the Speaker of the Sun—the dwarf felt almost as if he belonged in the elven capital more than anywhere else on Krynn. Not for the first time, he wondered what his relatives back in the dwarven village of Hillhome would think of him now.

  A small chime sounded on the smoky air, and Flint looked up to see the door of his small shop opening. Hastily he tossed a cloth over the bar of steel on the workbench. It wouldn’t do to have the surprise spoiled.

  “Flint! You’re still alive?” Tanis Half-Elven said with a smile. “I thought I would need to arrange a funeral.”

  Flint reached hastily for his handkerchief, snuffled, and affected a frail expression. “As my mother would say, ‘Don’t count your chickens on the other side of the fence,’ ” he said.

  A flutter of incomprehension flitted across the half-elf’s face; Flint’s mother’s sayings tended to affect him that way. Then he shrugged and forged ahead. “Are you in the mood for another adventure, Flint? I thought perhaps we could search again for the tylor.”

  Uppity snit, Flint thought, and his grin returned.

  “You still haven’t got it through that thick skull of yours, have you, lad?” the dwarf said gruffly. “I have work to do. I don’t have all day to parade about the city all dandified, like some folk.”

  Tanis laughed, looking down at his outfit. He wore the same clothes that had drawn Laurana’s eyes in the Grand Market yesterday: blue shirt, fringed vest, and woolen breeches.

  “Flint,” Tanis said, his hazel eyes dancing, “take a day off.”

  “ ‘Day off’?” Flint sniffed, assuming a martyred air. “Never heard the term in my life.”

  At that, Tanis laughed aloud.

  Flint glowered at him. “You young folk don’t know the first thing about respect, do you?” he grumbled. Young folk … the words echoed in his mind, and then it struck him again as it had several times since he’d returned from Solace. Tanis was a far cry from the lad he had been when Flint had first come to the elven city. Even after just that first winter, Flint had been stunned by the changes, by how much more … well, how much more human the lad had looked. Especially compared to the other elves, particularly the younger ones, who seemed to have changed so little.

  Flint himself looked hardly different than on the day he had first set foot in the Tower of the Sun, except perhaps for those few flecks of grey—well, maybe more than a few—that had found their way into his beard and the dark hair he still bound in a thong behind his neck. Aside from a deepening of some of the lines on his face and a slight expansion of his midline—a change Flint would flatly deny—he was still the same middle-aged dwarf, his steel-blue eyes just as bright and his grumbling just as common.

  But Tanis was a different story. He had grown tall in these last years—not as tall as the Speaker, but enough that Flint was forced to crane his neck to speak to him. The differences between the half-elf and his full elf kindred were more apparent now. He was stronger than any of them, and his chest was deeper, though compared to a strong human man, he would have appeared slender. His face, too, showed evidence of the changes. His features lacked much of that characteristic elven smoothness, looking more as if they had been hewn from stone rather than polished from alabaster. His jaw was square, the bridge of his nose straight and strong, and his cheeks angular. And of course, his eyes were less almond-shaped than the eyes of other elves.

  Back in Solace, Flint knew, Tanis would be considered a handsome young man, but here … well, most of the residents had seemed to have grown used to him by now, and much of the staring had ended—or at least had given place to occasional muttered comments, never uttered loudly enough for Tanis or Flint to actually confront the speaker. Still, it had been a hard time for Tanis. Humans matured so much faster than elves and dwarves that Tanis seemed, to his elven kindred, to have changed overnight.

  “Shouldn’t you be doing something now?” Flint said testily, making sure to keep himself between Tanis and the concealed sword.

  “Like what?” Tanis asked. He seemed to sense that something was up with the dwarf.

  “Like doing whatever it is that you do around here,” Flint finished grumpily. “I’m too … too ill to entertain you today, lad. I need my rest.” He peeked out of the corner of one blue eye to see if the half-elf was buying this.

  Tanis shook his head. So Flint was in one of those moods.

  “All right, Flint. I was going to suggest we go off on a bit of an adventure”—Flint’s eyes went wide, and a sudden sneeze burst violently from him—“but I guess it can wait until another day.” The half-elf scratched absently at his chin.

  “Better take a razor to that thing again,” Flint said, “or let it grow. One or the other unless you want to look like a highwayman.”

  Tanis looked startled, and he ran a hand across his cheek, feeling the stubble of a few days’ growth of beard. A gift from his human father—or a curse, however you wanted to look at it, Tanis supposed. It had become noticeable a year or so ago, and Tanis still hadn’t gotten used to it. He’d have to take the razor, the one Flint had fashioned for him, to it again.

  “Why you’d want to shave a perfectly good beard in the first place, I wouldn’t know,” Flint complained.

  Tanis shook his head absently. Let it grow? He couldn’t do that. Flint saw this, and so let it go.

  “All right, Flint, I’ll leave you to your grumbling,” Tanis said. “I really came by to deliver you a message. There’s going to be some sort of announcement at court tomorrow afternoon, and the Speaker asked me to invite you.”

  “Announcement?” Flint said, drawing his bushy eyebrows together. “About what?”

  Tanis shrugged again. “I have no idea. The Speaker’s been closeted with Lord Xenoth and Tyresian for a day. I suppose you’ll find out when I do.” With a smile, the half-elf left the shop. The small chime sounded on the air again. Flint waited a long moment, just to be sure Tanis wasn’t coming back, and then he uncovered the sword, rubbing his hands together. Ah, yes! It would be a wonderful sword!

  Soon, the rhythmic music of his hammer could be heard again on the warm spring air.

  Flint’s shop was destined to receive a few more guests that day. The sound of Tanis’s footsteps on the tile streets had no sooner receded than the chime sounded again. Flint flung
the cloth across the sword once more and hastily stood before the weapon.

  But it wasn’t Tanis. It was an old woman, aged even for an elf—but Flint thought he saw a hint of human blood there, too. She was short and wiry, dressed in an eccentric fashion for an elf; elves tended to prefer flowing garments, but the old one wore a loose green top of some open weave and a gathered wool skirt that reached nearly to the ground, making her appear even shorter than she was. In fact, she was nearly eye to eye with the dwarf, a situation he had never experienced with an adult elf. The eyes that peered from the triangular face, however, were round and hazel—another hint at some human forebear. Flint would warrant that the human blood had come into her family line centuries before the Cataclysm. The wideness of her face across her eyes, combined with the narrowness of her chin, gave the old woman a catlike appearance. Unlike other elves, she wore her silver hair in a braid and a bun, exposing the ears that reflected her elven heritage. Her fingers were so long and slender that they appeared out of proportion to the rest of her body. Like Tanis, she wore moccasins; these were embroidered in deep purple beading, matching her skirt. Over all, she wore a lightweight hooded cloak of mottled lilac and pale green.

  Attached to her skirt was a toddler, who looked up at the wrinkle-faced woman with an expression akin to adoration. The little boy—who hadn’t been walking for many months, judging from his death grip on the woolen skirt—smiled milkily at Flint.

  “Flink!” the youngster said, and dared loosen one hand’s grip enough to point at the dwarf and smile at the old woman. “Flink!”