by Mark Anthony
Tanis felt a quiver go through him. “She told you that?”
“No,” Flint replied. “I put two and two together. Now come on.”
Tanis reluctantly let the dwarf lead him again, albeit at a slower pace and without the arm-tugging that had accompanied the first leg of their journey. “Who is she?”
“A midwife. Retired, anyway.”
“Where does she live?”
“I don’t know.”
Tanis dug in his feet again. “Then how will we know when we get there?”
“Trust me.” The dwarf’s voice was curt. Flint resumed walking, and Tanis had to keep going or be left behind.
Minutes later, they emerged from the trees into the western portion of Qualinost, overlooking the site of the Grand Market. At this time of night, the open space was nearly deserted, of course. But on the other side of the park more rose quartz homes had sprouted, gleaming with a purplish hue in the blue evening light.
Flint accosted a middle-aged elf. “Can you tell me where I can find the midwife Ailea?” he asked, panting from the effort he’d expended so far.
“Eld Ailea?” the man repeated, looking from Flint to Tanis with a befuddled look. “Down that way.” He pointed. “Don’t waste your time. Hurry!”
“Come on, Tanis!” Flint said, thanking the man and trotting in the direction the man had indicated. “That one looked confused.”
Tanis smiled and jogged loosely to keep up with the short-legged dwarf. “I think he was wondering which of us was the father-to-be.”
Flint’s pace slackened. “Now that’s an interesting thought,” the dwarf said, grinning wickedly. “I wouldn’t mind dandling your and Laurana’s kiddies on my knee. ‘Uncle Flint,’ I’d tell them to call me …” He stopped teasing Tanis when he caught the glower on the half-elf’s face.
Soon they came to a crossroads. “Which way now?” Flint mused. He asked directions of an elven woman, strolling along the street with a basket of yarn. Wordlessly, she gestured with the basket at a tall, narrow house built of quartz, with a gray granite doorstep and matching window frames. The downstairs was dark, but a warm light glowed through the shutters of the second-level window.
Tanis hung back. “Flint, I don’t think …”
“Sure you do,” the dwarf said, and pounded on the door of the abode. He shoved Tanis in front of him and stepped back into the shadows.
They waited in the dark, the chill air making them shiver as they watched a lamp flare within the home and heard footsteps descending stairs and approaching the door. “Coming, coming, coming,” an alto voice sang.
Soon the door swung open, and Eld Ailea poked her catlike face out, gazing up at Tanis.
“How far apart are the contractions?” she demanded.
“What?” Tanis asked.
Her voice picked up an impatient tone. “How long has she been in labor?”
Tanis gaped. “Who?”
“Your wife.”
“I’m not married,” he said. “That’s part of the problem, you see. Laurana wants to …”
But Eld Ailea had spotted Flint. She looked from the dwarf to Tanis, and understanding dawned in her face. She swung the door open wider. “You are Tanthalas,” she whispered.
“I am.”
“Come in, lad. Come in, Flint.”
Moments later, half-elf and dwarf were standing in one of the most crowded homes Flint had ever seen. Tiny paintings in frames of wood, stone, and silver cluttered every horizontal surface, hung from every inch of wall space. The midwife had even fastened the miniatures on the back of the door to the street. Nearly all the paintings, of course, were of babies—newborns, toddlers, and young children. Some, for variety, were of mothers with babies.
Eld Ailea pushed her guests into cushioned chairs before the fireplace, the half-elf doffing his scabbard with Flint’s sword and leaning the weapon against the stone wall that encapsuled the fireplace. Then the elderly elf, waving aside their offers of help, made a new fire and bustled off to the kitchen to collect items for a late-night tea.
Flint picked up one painted miniature from a low, square table; it showed a newborn elf, ear tips drooping, almond-shaped eyes closed in sleep, tiny hands bunched, squirrel-like, under its chin. In the lower left was the scrawled initial “A.”
Ailea returned with a plate of dark brown biscuits with currant-and-sugar glazing. Flint closed his eyes and breathed; he smelled cloves and ginger. These delicacies would make up for the lack of ale, he decided. He replaced the painting on the table and noticed a few of the wooden toys he’d given the midwife scattered nearby.
“Ah, you found Clairek,” the midwife exclaimed. “The daughter of a friend, born just last month. And there”—she pointed at the other miniatures on the table—“are Terjow, Renate, and Marstev. All born in the last year.”
“I thought you were retired,” Flint commented.
She shrugged, and a lock of hair escaped from the silver bun at the back of her head. “Babies are always being born. And when someone needs me, I’ll not say, ‘Sorry, I’m retired.’ ”
Finally, after each guest had munched one of her feathery biscuits and drained a cup of black tea, Eld Ailea prepared to place the tea items on the small table, but it was too cluttered with portraits and toys. She spoke a few sharp words in another tongue and—Flint blinked—suddenly an open space just the right size was available among the miniatures. She placed teapot and biscuit plate in the spot, within easy reach of her guests, and sat on a low footstool. Both Flint and Tanis jumped up to give her their cushioned chairs, but she declined.
“This is better for an old lady’s back,” she said with a wink.
She gazed at Tanis as though she had been waiting for this moment for years, drinking in his features with her eyes, seemingly oblivious to the half-elf’s squirm. She murmured, “His mother’s eyes. That same lilt. Have they told you, son, that you have Elansa’s eyes?”
Tanis looked away. “My eyes are hazel. They tell me I have the eyes of a human.”
“As do I, Tanthalas,” Eld Ailea commented softly. The firelight flickered across her triangular face, and her eyes crinkled in gentle humor. “I also have the shortness of my human forebear. In a forest of elves that grow tall like aspens, I am … a shrub. But the world needs shrubs, too, I guess.”
She laughed gaily, but the half-elf looked unconvinced. She continued.
“I am part human, but I am also part elf, Tanthalas. I may be short, but I am slender—and that’s an elven trait. My eyes are round and hazel, but my face is pointy and elven. Look at my ears, Tanthalas—elven, yet I wear my hair like a human, to the consternation, I might add, of some of my elven patients.”
She laughed, and her warm eyes were liquid in the firelight. “Like humans, I am open to changes. Like elves, however, I have some habits that I will never modify—even if someone has the unmitigated gall to suggest a way that probably is better.”
Tanis’s gaze reflected wonder and, Flint thought, loneliness. But when the half-elf spoke, his voice was bitter. “But your human traits are not those of a rapist, I’ll warrant.”
Eld Ailea winced, and Tanis had the grace to look embarrassed. The midwife excused herself to refill the biscuit plate, and when she returned, her eyelids were red.
“I am sorry, Eld Ailea,” Tanis said.
“I loved Elansa,” she replied simply. “Even half a century later, it pains me to think about what happened to her.”
She passed him the plate, which he handed to Flint without looking at. Then she resumed her seat and clasped her arms around her knees. Suddenly, Flint saw how she must have looked as a young elf in Caergoth—lithe and lively and wonderful. He hoped she could look back on a happy life.
“Tanthalas,” she said, “I had hoped someday to meet you again—to compare the man with the baby. I must say you are much, much quieter as a man”—and she laughed silently to herself—“but you also are less trusting, which is, I suppose, to be expected in any adul
t. But I can see that your life at the palace has not been easy. I hoped to learn something of you by talking to your friend here. I’m glad he brought you to me now.”
“Why didn’t you contact me before?” Tanis asked. His eyes were dark.
Eld Ailea sighed, reached for a spiced biscuit, and set small white teeth into the treat. She chewed and wiped her mouth with a napkin before answering. “I decided long ago that I would not seek you out while you were but a child, that because the Speaker of the Sun was set on raising you as an elf, seeing me could only be a constant reminder of your ‘other’ half.
“But I realize now that my absence was a mistake. And I apologize.”
Tanis, without taking his gaze from her worn face, groped for his tea mug and took a sip. Eld Ailea warmed the drink with a refill, and Tanis sipped again.
“I gave you your name, you know,” Ailea said. “It means ‘ever strong.’ I did that because I knew you would need great strength to live in an elven world. You may find, as I did, that you will have to live away from Qualinesti for some time before you can appreciate both parts of yourself.”
Tanis’s voice dripped contempt. “Appreciate the part of me that’s like an animal?”
She smiled. “I like to think that I have the best traits of both races. Remember, Tanthalas. You have a father who, yes, certainly, was a brutal, terrible human being. But through him, you are related to many other humans who, most likely, were much better than he.”
Tanis blinked. Flint could see that the old midwife had shed a new light on his viewpoint.
“I …” he stammered, then gulped down his tea in one swallow. “I’ll have to think about this.”
Eld Ailea nodded, and the conversation veered to other topics, especially the news announced at the palace that afternoon. As it turned out, Ailea had already heard.
“Lord Tyresian …” she mused. “I have heard that he is very … traditional.”
Flint queried, “Did you deliver him, too?”
Ailea shook her head. “Ah, no. Well, not exactly, young dwarf.”
Young? Flint shook his head, then thought that he probably was, in comparison to her.
“Why ‘not exactly’?” Tanis pressed.
Ailea hesitated. Tanis pounced. “It was because of your human blood, wasn’t it?”
Eld Ailea hesitated again, then nodded. “I’d have put it another way, but it comes to that, yes. I attended Tyresian’s mother early in her confinement; things seemed to be going well, and I had high hopes of her delivering a healthy infant.”
She trailed off. “And?” Tanis asked.
Ailea looked into the fire, her words lifeless. “Tyresian’s father came into the room and discovered who was attending his wife. He ordered me out, but I remained outside, near the home, in case I was needed after all. He sent for a full elf to stay with Estimia, but none was available.”
“When he learned that, he ordered the children’s governess to deliver the baby,” the midwife continued. “The poor lass had never attended a birth, much less actually delivered a baby. But Tyresian’s father—I could hear him shouting even through the rock walls of the mansion—said that any full elf woman would be better than a part-human.”
Tanis opened his mouth to say something, but Eld Ailea continued on. “Then I heard Tyresian’s mother screaming.” Ailea’s face contorted as though she were still at the scene. “I pounded at the door. I begged them to let me come in and help Estimia, but Tyresian’s father came outside himself and forced me away. He said he would have me arrested if I did not go away.”
“Interesting, considering Qualinost has no jail,” Flint noted drily.
Eld Ailea rose and selected a miniature of a pretty elven woman from the mantle. She brushed slender fingers over the uneven paint. “Tyresian lived, but Estimia died.”
She wandered around the room, Flint and Tanis following her progress in the firelight as she touched a frame here, a cheek there. When she arrived at the door, she swung around and said simply, “Tyresian’s father said the death was my fault.”
Tanis gasped. “How?”
She looked down and, suddenly officious, smoothed her loose gray skirt. “He said I must have done something wrong before he had a chance to order me away.”
“That’s absurd,” Flint snapped. Tanis nodded, his face angry.
Ailea nodded. “Yes, it is,” she said calmly. “I have my weaknesses, but incompetence is not one of them.” She returned to the kitchen with the mugs, teapot, and plate, and Flint followed her to help, leaving Tanis browsing through the baby portraits in the entry room.
“When you were at my shop,” Flint said, hoping to prolong the conversation even though it was nearly midnight, “you told me that you’d delivered the Speaker.”
“And his brothers,” Ailea added, handing Flint a dish to dry with a towel that apparently used to be a woven shirt of the sort she’d worn to Flint’s shop. “Why?”
“I’m curious about the third brother.”
“Arelas? Why?”
“The Speaker said Arelas was sent away from court because he was ill, but he didn’t say what illness his brother had. Do you know?”
Ailea rinsed the teapot in a bucket of clear water brought in from a well behind the house. “I’m not sure anyone knows. He was fine until he was a toddler, but about the time he learned to walk, well, he changed.”
Flint looked up from under one salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Changed? How?”
Eld Ailea’s voice took on the tone of someone used to telling stories to babysitting charges. “One day,” she said, “he, his brother Kethrenan, his mother, and I went for a picnic in the Grove,” naming the tree-shrouded area between the Tower of the Sun and the Hall of the Sky. “Arelas wandered away and got lost.”
“Did you find him?”
“Not at first. We combed the area, but it was as though the earth had swallowed him. We saw no sign.” She handed the teapot to the dwarf. “Someone must have found him, but we never discovered who. After three days of fruitless searching—Solostaran’s father must have called out nearly every soldier in Qualinesti—little Arelas was found sleeping on the moss in the courtyard of the palace one morning. He must have wandered in—or someone brought him in, past the guards—through the opening to the gardens. He had been covered with a cloth, to keep him warm.”
Flint gave the burnished copper teapot one last polish with a rag and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table. “He became ill?”
“Very. He had a fever when we found him. He hovered near death for days. I administered what nostrums I had. I used what magic I could, but I cannot cure. I can only ease symptoms. No one was able to help. Finally, the Speaker at that time ordered Arelas sent to an elven cleric outside Qualinesti.”
Flint leaned against a countertop as Eld Ailea sloshed clear water around the ceramic container she’d used to wash the dishes in. The conversation seemed to have reminded her of other things, for she continued to speak after she’d laid the container, upside-down, on the counter near Flint’s elbow. “Solostaran and Kethrenan were relatively easy deliveries—as easy as childbirth ever is, of course. But Arelas … even before he was born, he was not … right. He simply wasn’t positioned correctly within his mother. The birth took more than a day, and I finally had to use forceps to deliver him, something I try never to do.
“That time, however, it worked out fine,” she said cheerfully. “Nothing but a little cut on his arm, and it healed quickly, left only a scar. Just a little mark shaped like a star. It reminded me of the mark that I’ve heard some of the Plainsmen place on young men when they reach manhood.”
“Now, come, Master Fireforge,” she said briskly, placing strong arms on the dwarf’s shoulders and turning him around, “let’s see what young Tanthalas has been up to.”
They returned to the main room. Tanis stood next to an open cupboard near the front door. “You painted all these portraits,” he said, his reddish brown hair swishing against his leather
jerkin as he turned.
“From memory, yes,” Ailea said, smoothing the braid that encircled her head and ended in the bun at the back of her head.
“Is there one of me?” His voice was gruff from his attempt to be offhand. Flint found himself hoping the midwife wouldn’t disappoint him.
“Not down here, no.” Tanis’s shoulders sagged at the reply.
“I keep your painting in my room,” she added, and stepped efficiently to a stone stairway that led up from the entry room, left of the door to the kitchen.
Flint found himself exchanging a wordless glance with the half-elf as they marked the elderly midwife’s steps above them. It was well past midnight now, and the two had to rise in mere hours for the tylor hunt, but Flint would have died rather than hurry Tanis away now.
Suddenly Eld Ailea was standing on the bottom step, and Flint found himself wondering whether her magical skills included teleportation. She was remarkably quick-footed for someone several centuries old.
“Here,” she said, and handed Tanis a portrait encased in an ornate frame of silver and gold filigree, and a steel pendant on a silver chain. “The pendant belonged to Elansa. She gave it to me before she died.”
Almost reverently, Tanis took the painting with one hand and the pendant with the other, seeming not to know which to examine first. The half-elf’s greenish brown eyes looked wet, but it may have been the effect of the light. “So this is the face she saw,” the half-elf whispered, and Flint found himself turning away to stare into the fire. The smoke was to blame for his own misty vision, certainly.
Eld Ailea looked over his shoulder. “You were a robust infant, Tanthalas—remarkably healthy for one whose mother was so frail by the time he was born.”
Tanis swallowed, and Ailea continued, her voice barely audible to Flint, only several feet away. He wondered if that was the voice the old midwife used to sooth laboring mothers, to bring calm to colicky infants. “Elansa loved Kethrenan dearly, Tanthalas. She decided, early in the pregnancy, I think, that she didn’t want to live without her husband, but she stayed alive, hoping the baby was his.”