Kindred Spirits

by Mark Anthony

The Speaker almost laughed then. At least, a smile flickered across his lips. “Ah, I should have expected it, really. Her childhood playmate has become a handsome young elf lord. What wonder is it that she fancies him? For while he has been raised as her brother, she knows this is not truly so.”

  Tanis waited, unsure what to say, but the interview appeared to be over. Moments later, he was back in the corridor, alone.

  Chapter 17

  The Hunt

  Tanis watched the sunrise from the vantage of the Hall of the Sky. The pale beams glinted like copper on the Tower of the Sun and sparked like fire off the city’s crystal and marble buildings. As the sun rose above the horizon, it intercepted a far-off bank of dark clouds that hung low in the sky. The sun set the clouds ablaze, turning them from dull gray to blazing crimson in minutes. The clouds seemed thicker than they had the previous evening. Tanis made his way back to the palace, heading for the stable, where Belthar, his three-year-old chestnut stallion, was quartered.

  Outside the gray granite stable, the nobles of Qualinost were already gathered. Tyresian, wearing black leather breeches and steel breastplate, shouted orders to Ulthen from the top of his bay stallion, Primordan. Miral lounged against one wall of the stable, cloth bags of spell-casting items dangling from the belt of the hooded red tunic he had exchanged for his customary robe. The knee-length tunic was split down the middle, allowing the mage to ride a horse comfortably. Several other nobles, whose names Tanis couldn’t remember, chatted in a group to the left of the stable door. Nearby, Litanas saddled the mage’s gelding. Porthios stood off to one side, watching but saying little; his brother, Gilthanas, wearing his black guard’s uniform, mimicked his stance, to Porthios’s apparent discomfiture. Tanis nodded to his cousins as he entered the livery stable to retrieve Belthar. Later, as he led the stallion forth onto the cobblestones of the stable yard, he saw Xenoth approaching from the palace and Flint, on Fleetfoot, riding in from the south, Tanis’s sword flapping at his side. On the other side of the pack animal rested the dwarf’s battle-axe.

  “Now there’s a memorable pair—a dwarf on a mule and an elf so old he probably knew Kith-Kanan,” Ulthen shouted to Gilthanas, who glanced at his brother and quickly masked a smile. Porthios looked annoyed. Tanis paused by the Speaker’s heir, holding Belthar by the reins and waiting for Flint to bring him his sword.

  Lord Xenoth reached the stable yard first, his ankle-length robes, the color of the storm clouds gathering overhead, fluttering around his legs. He asked Tyresian where he could borrow a horse; apparently the adviser didn’t own one.

  “By the gods, Xenoth is going to have to ride sidesaddle in that outfit!” Porthios muttered to Gilthanas and the half-elf. “Even Laurana rides astride. Go give him a hand, Tanis. He can ride the mare Image.”

  Tanis handed his reins to Gilthanas and strode off to help Lord Xenoth. Despite the upheaval of the last few days, even though he knew the group of volunteers would seek a deadly beast that already had slain several elves, he was happy to be a part of the hunt. The half-elf felt a twinge of excitement shiver through him. He had never been invited to ride with Tyresian or Porthios on one of the elf lords’ stag hunts—they were reserved for the highest of elven nobility—but this time Tyresian could not stop him. Tanis closed his eyes, imagining the branches whipping green and blurred past him as he galloped with his mount through the forest trails. It was going to be glorious.

  In the dim light of the stable, Xenoth peered into stall after stall, apparently seeking a mount that was suitable for him—or, perhaps, suitable for the rider he had been decades earlier. Tanis went over to Image’s stall and called her name, and the mottled head of the elderly mare appeared over the top of the half-door. A gentle creature, she whickered softly in response; Tanis and she had been friends for years, and she pricked her ears now, eyeing his pockets for apples or other delectables. He pulled a carrot out of his tunic, cracked it in half, and offered it on a flattened palm. He watched as her rubbery lips sought out the trifle, fed it into her crunching maw, and snuffled around for the other half.

  “Sorry, that half’s for Belthar,” he said, then raised his voice. “Lord Xenoth. I have your horse for you.”

  At the other end of the stable, Xenoth paused by the stall of Alliance, a huge warhorse that even Tyresian could barely control. The adviser shook his head, silver hair gleaming in the gray light, and pointed at the beast. “I will ride this one,” Xenoth said. “Get him ready for me.”

  Alliance lunged over the partition, teeth narrowly missing the wizened elf’s hand. Xenoth leaped back with a cry. Tanis, shaking his head, led Image out of the stall, and a stableboy leaped to prepare the horse for riding.

  “Ride Image,” Tanis said. “She’s a fine, gentle horse.”

  Xenoth’s face went ruddy with anger. “Are you saying I can’t handle this horse?” he demanded. He gestured again, and Alliance went crazy trying to snap the morsel that the adviser kept waving in front of his face.

  Tanis sighed and stepped closer. “I’m saying that Kith-Kanan himself couldn’t handle that horse.” He heard footsteps behind him and guessed that Xenoth’s screechy voice had attracted the attention of the other volunteers.

  Xenoth’s blue eyes protruded slightly; his voice trembled. “I was quite the horseman in my prime, half-elf.”

  “I’m sure you were, Lord Xenoth.” Tanis tried to keep his tones low and even, on the theory that what would quiet a panicky horse also would work with a hysterical elf. “But you don’t even own a horse now. It’s been awhile since you rode. Why not start out with a slightly … easier … mount?” He heard a muffled snort from behind him; his neck prickled with the realization that quite an audience had gathered. Seeking to end the brouhaha quickly, Tanis reached forward and laid a hand on the adviser’s silken sleeve.

  “Leave me be!” Xenoth cried. “I will not be manhandled by a … by a bastard half-elf!”

  Several of the elves behind Tanis gasped and others burst into laughter. Tanis felt his chest contract and his hands clench. He took one step toward the adviser, whose eyes widened in fear. Behind Xenoth, Alliance bared his teeth again.

  “Tanis. Lord Xenoth.” The words were spoken in a baritone that brooked no disobedience. Tanis turned.

  It was Porthios. “Tanis, go out to your horse. Xenoth, you will ride Image or you will not attend this hunt.”

  Porthios stood like an avenging god, his golden green hunting garb glittering like the Speaker’s ceremonial robe. His eyes flashed in anger. The other courtiers fell back, looking slightly ashamed. Porthios waited until Xenoth moved from Alliance to Image, now ready for the hunt. Tanis pushed between Ulthen and Miral and stalked toward the stable’s double doors. Porthios’s voice halted him, however.

  “Tanis,” the Speaker’s heir said. “I am sorry.”

  The half-elf waited, not sure if Porthios intended to say more. Then he shrugged and went out to Belthar.

  Half an hour later, the volunteers were ready. Xenoth sat astride Image, the adviser’s robes bulked up around his thighs, revealing long, skinny legs in black leggings. Xenoth, who actually appeared to be a passable horseman, stayed near the back of the group. Tyresian, Porthios, and Gilthanas stood at the front.

  Tanis’s stallion pawed at the dewy cobblestones, and it snorted, breath fogging on the cool, damp air. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to ride a horse, Flint?” the half-elf asked.

  “You know very well I can’t,” the dwarf said grumpily, his face pale and weary after only three hours of sleep. “I’m deathly afr—er, allergic to horses.”

  The dwarf gave a loud sneeze just for emphasis and then blew his nose like a trumpet in his handkerchief. Tanis’s mount nickered, apparently in reply.

  “Well, who asked you?” Flint said hotly, glaring at Belthar. The stallion rolled its eyes, showing the whites, and its ears went back as it chomped its bit.

  “All right, you two,” Tanis said, giving the reins a tug. “That’s enough.”

>   The horse snorted again, as if to say he didn’t pretend to understand the peculiarities of dwarves. Nor did Tanis, always.

  Tanis glanced at the other courtiers and young nobles who were mounting their steeds in the steadily brightening light, but few paid him much attention. Most likely they had taken his argument with Xenoth as just another sample of his human temper, though for the life of him he couldn’t see that Xenoth had behaved with elven coolness, either.

  Still, he felt a pang of excitement. Whatever the events of the last few days, to be finally given the chance to ride alongside the others …

  He searched the gathering of elves. Tyresian sat straight and proud upon his mount, clasping the reins in black-gloved hands. Porthios was astride his gray steed next to the elf lord, and Gilthanas waited just behind them on a roan mare, a pretty creature with delicate legs and a finely drawn head.

  A trumpet call rang out then, high and sweet on the clear air, and Tanis mounted his horse, reining Belthar in to stand near the others. Tyresian’s gaze flickered in his direction for a moment, but it seemed an uninterested look, and then the elf lord turned his attention back toward his companions.

  Tanis checked the arrows in the quiver at his knee; after leaving Flint last night, he’d spent an hour attaching to shafts the steel arrowheads the dwarf had made for him. The hard metal might be just what was needed against the scaly hide of a tylor. Then Tanis adjusted Flint’s sword in its scabbard at his side. It was awkward—a short sword or even a long dagger was a more common blooding knife, used to dispatch, say, a stag that had been brought down with an arrow. But they were after a bloodthirsty lizard as long as several elves. Who knew what weapon would serve the hunters best?

  Besides, Tanis was too proud of the sword to have left it behind. Its handguard glimmered coolly in the dawn light, like tendrils of silvery smoke that had somehow been frozen in place. In the middle of the handguard …

  “Flint!”

  The dwarf looked up from his seat on the gray mule’s back.

  “You fastened my mother’s amulet to the handguard,” Tanis said. Tyresian and Miral looked aside at the half-elf.

  The dwarf sounded petulant. “Well, I told Ailea I would, didn’t I? Spent two hours in the middle of the night on it, too. Poked holes in the handguard—nearly broke my heart to do that, I might add—and the pendant and then ran a chain link through ’em both.” He huffed. “Amazing, the things I’ll do for a damsel in distress.”

  Tanis smiled and shrugged. The midwife hadn’t qualified as a “damsel” for some time, but he suspected that the dwarf was just a bit sweet on Eld Ailea, despite the several hundred years that separated them.

  Tyresian’s voice broke through the chatter. “Is everyone ready?” he asked quietly. Tanis had to hand it to the elf lord; he had the presence to command.

  Tanis patted his sword. In addition to the sword and the quiver of arrows ready by his right knee, he wore his short bow on his back and carried a leather flask of wine, in case the creature injured anyone. Tanis checked everything and then nodded. He was ready.

  An elf lord, one of those whose names Tanis didn’t recall, moved his mount forward to face the gathered group, to speak a ceremonial benediction for the start of the hunt. He was a thin, sharp-faced elf with hard gray eyes.

  “We pray to Kiri-Jolith today, war god of good,” the gray-eyed elf lord said, as the volunteers bent their heads. “We ask him to stand with us as we search out and face this terrible creature that has plundered our land and killed so many of our kindred elves.”

  Tanis heard Flint snort beside him. “Beast almost killed one of their ‘kindred dwarves,’ too, only four days ago,” he muttered. Tanis hushed the dwarf.

  “We also ask the intercession of Habbakuk, god of animal life. May your skills of the wild and your knowledge of the harmony within nature be with us today.

  “And if one of us fails to return, may you, Habbakuk, receive his soul.”

  “So be it.”

  “So be it,” the others echoed.

  Then the trumpet-bearer gave another call, and the hunters spurred their mounts, guiding them through the streets of Qualinost to the western edge of the city. They clattered past the guard tower at the southwestern corner of the city, where two of Qualinost’s encircling bridges arched toward land, then the horsemen continued past the overhead structure to the foot of the long bridge that crossed the ravine carrying the Ithal-inen, the River of Hope. There they halted at the very edge of the ravine. Out of sight, way off to the right, Tanis knew, was the landing, the Kentommenai-kath, where he and Flint had picnicked not long before. Tanis saw Flint take one look at the five-hundred-foot drop right before him and pull Fleetfoot back to the rear of the crowd. The dwarf’s face carried a sheen of perspiration.

  Tyresian nodded to the captain of the palace guard, who nudged his horse forward a pace and called out to the assembled volunteers. His voice echoed in the ravine as the aspens swayed around the hunters. The morning breeze was chilly, but Tanis’s excitement kept the half-elf warm.

  “The tylor was last spotted far to the south on the west side of the ravine,” the guard captain said. He pointed, and a dozen pairs of eyes gazed off to the left as though they expected the creature to burst from the shrubs at any second.

  The captain continued, and the gazes of the hunters returned to him. “Remember several things: One, tylors’ flesh changes color to match the land on which they travel. It is extremely effective camouflage.”

  Tanis, guiding Belthar back toward Flint, noticed the dwarf glance half fearfully at a nearby oak tree, almost as if he thought a tylor could masquerade as a tree.

  “These creatures are intelligent,” the captain called. “They can speak Common. Therefore, be careful what you say. Do not, for example, call out strategies to your comrades. The creature will hear and understand you.

  Gilthanas pulled his roan to the other side of Flint. The Speaker’s younger son was dressed in the black leather jerkin of the ceremonial guards. The early morning breeze blew his gold hair back from his brow. He looked a great deal like Laurana, Tanis thought, certainly much more so than Porthios did. Gilthanas had changed a good deal himself these past years, though nothing to keep pace with the changes Tanis himself had experienced. Still, Gilthanas was more an elf lord than a child now, and while he looked small, almost lost, within his guard’s uniform, he sat straight upon his roan, his green eyes proud.

  “In addition,” the guard captain said, bringing Tanis’s attention back to the fore, “while tylors prefer to kill by biting or by lashing their victims with their tails, they also can use magic. If they are losing a battle, they often will move out of range and use spells. Be aware of that. I am told we have the mage Miral with us today as a protection against the tylor’s magic.”

  “Oh, terrific,” Gilthanas muttered. “Miral. We’re doomed.”

  Despite himself, Tanis looked across Flint and grinned at Gilthanas, who, obviously surprised, smiled back. Tanis realized that he hardly knew Gilthanas anymore. The two had been so close as children, but they had grown up and grown apart. Gilthanas had spurned Tanis to cast his lot with the court, seeking his friendship and recognition there. And, with Porthios’s help, he had gained both.

  “Tylors,” the captain announced, “move very slowly in cold weather. That is why we are leaving so early today. We hope to corner the creature before it warms itself in the sun. And it appears, from the look of the clouds”—and several elves murmured at the gathering of thunderheads to the west—“that we may have the weather on our side.”

  The captain saluted to Lord Tyresian, who returned the gesture. Then the elven lord raised one arm to the volunteers, and silence reigned as the hunters waited expectantly.

  Faint yellow light suffused the eastern horizon, but to the west, the sky was dark, as if night still reigned there. The storm had been hovering above the distant mountains for several days now, gathering strength, its clouds building higher, growing darker.
During the night, it had begun to move eastward, like a great dark wall across the sky, threatening the land. Flashes flickered within the swirling clouds, and already Tanis could feel the faint rumble of thunder, charging the air.

  The trumpet called out on the air then, and Lord Tyresian raised a black-sleeved arm to motion the hunters onward across the bridge. With a glorious cry, the elves spurred their mounts, triple-file, onto the bridge, and Tanis felt himself shouting with them, the sound bursting from his lungs onto the morning air. It was a cry as old as the world itself, as old as life and death.

  “Reorx save me,” Flint muttered to himself as Fleetfoot, Belthar, and Gilthanas’s mount approached the bridge. “At least I’m in the middle. Lad”—and he turned suddenly to the half-elf—“you will tell me if I’m about to dive over the edge, now, won’t you?” When Tanis agreed, the dwarf tilted his face downward and Tanis saw Flint’s eyes clench shut, just before his hair swung forward to hide his features.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Gilthanas asked sharply. “Is he ill?”

  Tanis shook his head. “A moment of prayer. It’s a dwarven religious tradition.” He saw a smile flit across Flint’s knobby features. The smile was followed in time by an audible sigh of relief as their mounts’ hooves sounded on wood no longer, but on the beaten rock of the western side of the ravine.

  In the green wood, the air was fresh with the fragrances of pine sap and mushrooms, an almost medicinal scent that left his head clear and heightened his senses. He heard every rustle made by the small forest animals in the underbrush, saw the outline of every leaf, sharp against the sky above. The trees moved past him as the elves pressed their mounts along the twisting game trails, deeper and deeper into the forest.

  The morning continued chilly, with occasional drizzle as the storm clouds marched in from the west. Trackers from the palace guard moved ahead of the main group of volunteers, but with no success. The only animals the hunters saw were squirrels, chipmunks, and one groundhog, slender from a winter’s hibernation. The squirrels and chipmunks darted away immediately. The groundhog peered over a log atop a hillock and watched until the hunters had passed.