by Anne Logston
The ringtail remained with Val even when he prepared for sleep, curling its body against his warmth as if appreciating his companionship. Val wondered if his mother looked out through the ringtail’s eyes, or if this was merely one of her four-footed friends. There was no way to know.
Val sighed, closed his eyes, and began to wait.
Chapter Eleven—Ria
Ria cowered under the meager shelter of a bush, shaking and near tears, as she tried to force a little air back into her lungs despite the burning ache in her sides. It seemed that each time she stopped, something roused her to new flight. She couldn’t be sure whether those noises were only harmless forest creatures—whatever those might be—or some savage creature hunting her, or hostile elves with bows and spears ready to shed her blood.
She’d thought the wall guards and the Blue-eyes her greatest obstacles. Leaving the city, however, had been the easy part. She’d chosen a spot to enter the forest as far to the north as she could, hoping to avoid the Blue-eyes’ territory. She’d approached the forest openly and at a snail’s pace, giving the elves plenty of time to express their displeasure if they did not want her to come closer, or their welcome if they did. To Ria’s dismay, however, there’d been no reaction at all; not a single elf had made himself or herself known, either to welcome Ria or to drive her away. Perhaps this area of the forest was uninhabited, as Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah speculated many areas were, since the invasion had wiped out entire elven clans and rendered many parts of the forest too damaged and empty of game for habitation.
Ria was no more than a few dozen steps into the forest, however, before confusion and a growing uneasiness replaced her excitement. She’d never imagined such a place. Tall trees and bushes all around her blocked her vision; even in the thin fringe growth only a little starlight filtered through. The sounds and scents that assaulted her sensitive ears and nose were strange and frightening. Despite her fear, Ria had resolutely pushed deeper into the growth, hoping that someone would come to meet her. No one came.
As Ria made her way deeper into the forest, however, she began to sense uneasily that someone or something was very much aware of her presence. Suspicious rustlings in the bushes, small noises, the sound of footsteps, and strange, unfamiliar scents were all around her, working their way between her and the edge of the forest, as if driving her inward. Ria had walked faster, then trotted, trying to look in every direction at once, stumbling clumsily over the unfamiliar undergrowth. The sounds had suddenly seemed all around her, and she could no longer tell which direction was which; at last, terrified, she’d panicked and fled those sounds this way and that, fled and fled and fled again, and now she could no longer even begin to guess which way she’d come. She could be drifting into Blue-eyes’ territory for all she knew, or she could be wandering in circles. In the forest darkness, with a thousand leaves blocking her view of the stars, there was no way of calculating direction. She’d fairly given up hope of any elves coming to welcome her; if there were elves in this area who meant her no harm, they would have made themselves known.
Her brief time in the forest before had not prepared Ria for this journey. She’d had no time to realize how confusing a place it was, where one tree looked so much like every other tree around it, where too many plants tangled around her feet and too many strange sounds and smells kept her confused and disoriented. She could do nothing but stumble onward, hoping to cross some path or landmark, or perhaps a clearing or a hill from which she might gain a vantage point over her surroundings.
But she was so tired, scratched by branches and brambles, bruised from stumbling into trees and falling, and shaking with fear. Sometime after she’d entered the forest, she’d blundered through a patch of short, bristly plants that stung her legs like a swarm of bees despite her stout cloth trousers, and now her legs burned and itched furiously. Insects hummed in the darkness and bit, leaving itching welts. Her newly healed leg was aching furiously now. Surely hours had passed. Jenji had ridden her shoulder until they reached the forest, but the chirrit was as much a stranger to this alien and frightening place as Ria herself, and now he cowered in her tunic, trembling as hard as she.
Rustling in the bushes right behind her. Ria’s heart leaped with terror and she bolted from her bush, only to collide with a tall form whose Mack clothing had blended perfectly into the darkness. Ria glanced up into a dark, exotic face and golden eyes that gazed coolly down at her, and she felt the world begin to dissolve around her as it had when she’d been shot. It was too much; Ria let the world go and slid gratefully into darkness.
Her next awareness was of cool water at her lips and an arm supporting her shoulders. There was no disorientation; Ria remembered her last waking moment and bolted upright, spilling the water down over her front. She’d been hot and sweaty before, but she’d cooled as she lay on the ground, and she shivered as the water soaked her tunic. She turned to face her captor—benefactor?—and was amazed to see, instead of the tall black figure she’d seen before, a slender elven woman no taller than Ria herself, with tumbled tawny hair as curly as Ria’s own black locks, with merry golden eyes now warm and foil. Again there was no moment of doubt or disorientation; Ria knew exactly whose hand steadied her shoulder, whose smile warmed her to the depths of her spirit.
“Mother,” Ria whispered, and then those arms, twined with vines and flowers and festooned with images of berries and butterflies, were warm and strong around her. There were a thousand things Ria had thought she might say at such a moment, unhappy and angry and resentful things, but somehow they all seemed foolish and needless; everything was said in those warm eyes, in the arms that held her tight, tight, in the heart she could feel pounding as hard as her own, in the hands she could feel shaking against her back. Ria sighed and let her anger flow out of her with her fear, leaving a certain weary peace behind in their wake.
Chyrie sat back and smiled at her daughter, then picked up the cup Ria had knocked out of her hand. She only had to reach a short distance to fill it again, and Ria realized that her mother—or possibly the strange elf she’d seen—had moved her while she was unconscious; they were on the bank of a small stream in a growth of forest so dense that little sunlight trickled down through the leaves. This time Ria accepted the cup gratefully.
When Ria had drunk her fill and washed the sticky tear tracks from her face, Chyrie led her away from the stream to a small camp; she’d simply brushed the leaves from the soil in a circular area, dug a tiny fire pit, and spread a few warm skins to sleep on. A clay pot had been set close beside the fire, and Ria could smell simmering vegetables and, to her surprise, meat. She’d thought Chyrie would not hunt, not according to what Lady Rivkah had told her about beast-speakers.
Jenji, smelling the food, chittered and poked his nose out of Ria’s tunic. Chyrie gave a hoarse yelp of surprise, the first sound Ria had heard her make, and leaned closer to look. Ria embarrassedly fished the chirrit out of her tunic.
“You had a chirrit once, didn’t you?” Ria asked softly. “Lady Rivkah said so; the mage who taught her had it, and he died, so you took it. Her name was Weeka, wasn’t it? This is Jenji.”
Chyrie started at Ria’s words, almost wincing, as if Ria had shouted suddenly in her ear or distracted her from listening to some other conversation on which she’d been concentrating deeply. Chyrie reached out to stroke Jenji with a careful fingertip; Jenji crooned with delight and leaped from Ria’s hand to Chyrie’s, scampering to Chyrie’s shoulder and nuzzling her face. Ria suppressed a sudden surge of irrational jealousy at Jenji’s desertion and the sense that some communication passed between the chirrit and the elf—why not? Her mother was a beast-speaker, wasn’t she, and Jenji a beast—but she quickly forgot her resentment when she saw Chyrie’s rather wistful smile. Yes, it’d been sixteen years, and Weeka had probably not been young; the chirrit must have died some time ago.
Chyrie glanced at Jenji, tilting her head with such a listening air that Ria found herself straining her own ea
rs; then a look of worry crossed Chyrie’s face. To Ria’s surprise, Chyrie all but pushed her down to the ground, fairly attacking Ria’s left trouser leg in her haste to push it up. Ria scowled as she saw the angry red rash stippling her leg; that certainly explained the itching. Then Chyrie was examining the pink scar of Ria’s arrow wound with some relief, and Ria understood.
“It’s all right,” Ria said. “My friend Cyril healed—”
Chyrie was nodding her understanding before the words had left Ria’s lips, and Ria fell silent. Did her mother hear Ria’s thoughts before the words were formed? Well, if she could hear the thoughts of beasts, why not those of her daughter? She’d been called a beast a time or two. Ria chuckled at the thought, and Chyrie, meeting her eyes, chuckled too as if understanding the joke.
Chyrie rolled Ria’s trouser leg back down with a sigh of relief, then turned aside to rake the pot away from the fire with a stick. When the stew had cooled somewhat, they ate it, Ria bringing out some of her journey bread for them to sop up the gravy. She found that some of the dried meat had vanished from her pack; that explained the meat in the stew. Chyrie looked so longingly at the cheese in Ria’s pack that Ria laughed and gave it to her.
After they had eaten, Chyrie pulled several pots, jars, and pouches out of a fur bag (where had she gotten the fur? Ria wondered) and ground several substances together to a paste in a small stone bowl. She scraped the paste into a small clay jar and gave it to Ria, indicating in gestures that Ria was to rub the paste over the rash on her legs, Ria obeyed, and the paste alleviated the furious itching of the rash to some extent.
Ria had assumed that her mother would stay with her that night; to Ria’s utter surprise, however, Chyrie gave her daughter an apologetic glance and vanished into the darkness when Ria was ready for sleep. Jenji appeared unafraid, however, and Ria was so weary after the day’s exertions that despite the unfamiliar forest sounds, the lumpy pallet, and her solitude, she was quickly asleep.
When she woke to Chyrie’s touch on her shoulder, it was barely light. Chyrie gave her daughter no time for breakfast, however; two does were waiting at the edge of the camp, and Chyrie had already bundled together everything except the furs Ria was sleeping on. Ria had never so much as touched a living deer, much less ridden one, but she was offered no alternative; Chyrie helped her to mount, then mounted her own doe, and they were off.
Ria had read Lady Rivkah’s accounts of elves riding deer through the forest, and it had sounded very exciting, but the reality was somewhat more uncomfortable. Unlike horses, the deer were sure-footed in the forest and did not need to follow the winding elven trails, pursuing a straighter course directly through the underbrush. The does’ hides were tough enough to offer them protection from the swinging branches and raking thorns, but Ria found her cloth leggings less helpful, and the rash on her legs was itching again. The doe’s back, too, quickly became very uncomfortable, as there was no way to avoid the hard ridge of the deer’s spine without sitting far back on its rump, and Ria quickly wished for the padding of a saddle. Chyrie apparently was not troubled by these discomforts or by the biting insects that had come for deer blood but, it appeared, liked elf blood even better. Ria quickly found herself wishing she’d remained on foot. The travel might have been much slower, but it couldn’t have been any more miserable.
As hours passed and Ria slowly grew accustomed to the annoyances of deer-riding, however, she found that there was plenty to distract her. The forest by day was a much less threatening and confusing place than it had seemed by night. The arching canopy of leaves was awesome in its height and thickness, and the rays of green-tinted sunlight filtering through dappled the ground. The trees were not all alike as they’d seemed in the darkness; there seemed to be as many kinds of oddly shaped leaves and rough or smooth bark as there were wildflowers on the plains. There was an endless variety of birdsong to listen to, and so many new and interesting creatures to watch that Ria was dizzied. Chyrie appeared to be on good terms with everything; she amused her daughter as they rode, bringing squirrels or birds to her hand where Ria could look at them closely and even touch them. Despite these distractions, however, Chyrie kept the deer to a quick walk, not stopping even at midday for dinner; Ria finally took some of the preserved food from her pack to eat as she rode. She couldn’t imagine why her mother would feel the need to hurry; now that Ria had found Chyrie, and hopefully soon her brother, she didn’t much care where in the forest they went, or how long it took to get there.
Twice they passed what Ria realized from Lady Rivkah’s accounts were clan markers—glowing symbols on large stones. Those symbols gave Ria pause to worry despite Chyrie’s apparent familiarity with their route. They were passing, obviously, through several territories, and not really making any special effort to be quiet and inconspicuous; might some of the clans not attack them, as the Blue-eyes had done? Perhaps they’d stayed in the territories of more friendly elves; otherwise, why hadn’t the strange dark elf Ria had seen killed her? Or perhaps her mother was using the animals of the forest to look for elven patrols so they could be avoided.
Ria had her answer when Chyrie’s deer ahead of her suddenly came to a stop. Ria glanced up, startled, and then gasped as she found herself gazing into half a dozen pairs of very elven eyes. She’d never seen any of her people besides her mother (well, and a brief glimpse of the elf in black) in her life, and for a moment she was too surprised to be frightened; then, seeing no spears or arrows immediately pointed in her direction, she was too curious for fear.
These elves were not as exotic-looking as her mother with her brilliant skin designs or the male in black leather she’d seen. In fact, the few elves she’d seen from the eastern cities were more odd-looking with their golden hair and blue eyes and graceful movements and strange clothes. These elves were anything but elegant, dressed in plain leather tunics and trousers, only two wearing low leather boots and the rest barefoot. They were a good bit taller than Ria and Chyrie, almost as tall as Ria’s human foster parents, and their sun-browned skin and dusty brown hair and brown-green eyes seemed almost commonplace. Only the pointed tips of their ears and the elven cast of their features distinguished them from any human peasant.
The elves stood silently, their eyes wide, apparently as surprised by the intruders on their land as Ria was by them; then Ria realized they were staring at her mother, and what she had mistaken for surprise was something closer to awe.
Very slowly, almost timidly, a female stepped forward. She lifted a necklace of animal teeth from around her head and held it out gingerly toward Chyrie.
“You honor us with your presence, Grandmother,” she whispered, and Ria had to concentrate hard to understand what the woman was saying. She’d worked hard at her Olvenic all her life, but she’d never heard it spoken by a native of the forest, and the accent in which the young woman spoke it was very strange. Did her brother speak like that?
Chyrie smiled a little sheepishly and accepted the necklace, nodding and hanging it around her own neck. Then one of the males stepped forward also, extending a lumpy hide bag.
“The fruits of our hunt, Grandmother,” he said, also whispering. “We’d be greatly honored if you’d accept this meat for yourself and”—he glanced at Ria, his eyes widening—“and your daughter.”
He could tell she was Chyrie’s daughter just by looking at her? Ria swelled a little with pride as Chyrie accepted the game bag. Obviously her mother was a person of some importance here. But of course she was; hadn’t Rowan told Lady Rivkah that Chyrie had turned the whole forest against the invaders, beating the barbarians back in the final battle?
Ria would have liked to see more of the strange elves, perhaps talked with them, but Chyrie was in a hurry to continue onward. They rode all day, stopping well after the sun had set. When Ria finally slid from the doe’s back, she almost screamed in pain; she was unaccustomed to riding more than a short while, and that with the comfort of a saddle, and her muscles ached with a hard, fierce
pain. Immediately Chyrie was beside her, concern and regret plain in her expression, easing Ria to the ground and massaging her thighs, and calves until the cramps eased. Chyrie applied more salve to the itchy rash on Ria’s legs, scowling so puzzledly that Ria wondered if her mother had expected the rash to be completely gone. Gesturing sternly to Ria to stay where she was—Ria was only too glad to comply— Chyrie made another small camp, then helped Ria to move to the fur pallet. Ria had learned during the journey to Allanmere how to dean game and set it to roasting, and was proud to be at least that much help as Chyrie built a fire; after what Lord Sharl had said to her on the wall in Allanmere, Ria was determined to be of use to her mother.
Again, without explanation, Chyrie disappeared into the forest, leaving Ria with only Jenji for company; however, she returned only a short time later, her arms full of tubers, greens, and berries for their supper. The little preserved food Ria had eaten that morning and at midday might as well have been nothing; Ria’s stomach rumbled plaintively as the food cooked, giving off the most delightful aromas. As soon as the food was ready, Chyrie ate as heartily as her daughter; Ria realized guiltily that Chyrie had had nothing at all to eat that day and was probably even hungrier than Ria herself, and how long might it have been since Chyrie had fresh meat?
After supper Chyrie rooted through her pack and brought out a clay pot of some pungent-smelling salve that she proceeded to rub into Ria’s sore thighs; then once more she left Ria alone in the camp. Ria was too tired to fret over this fact, but it puzzled her; was Chyrie keeping watch all night, or did she just not want to sleep near her daughter? At least Jenji showed no inclination to stay with Chyrie instead of her, so that Ria wasn’t left completely alone.
