She didn’t see it until they were quite close. It was easy to miss in the pitch-black of the night. A small collection of buildings and watchtowers were hidden among the trees. It was all made of aged wood that looked like it had originally been intended as a temporary settlement, but had ended up staying a long time. When she looked closely, Novikke could see dark figures moving between the buildings.
She stopped walking when she saw it. An icy hand gripped her heart and made her jaw clench. This was their destination. He was going to take her in there, and the night elves were going to do who-knew-what to her and then execute her. Because she was a spy. And even if they believed she wasn’t, she was still an enemy.
The worst part was that her death would be for nothing. It wasn’t as if she would be a martyr or a hero. She was not someone whose sacrifice would be for a good cause, and she had no brave face to put on. She was just afraid and alone.
It had appeared so unexpectedly, without ceremony. She was not prepared for it. She was suddenly angry at Aruna for not forewarning her.
When Aruna realized she’d lagged behind, he stopped and turned to her.
She didn’t move.
His face was impassive and unyielding. He seemed less and less human as the moment went on. Maybe she’d been a fool to ever have seen him as anything but inhuman.
She looked around desperately for something to write with. He reached out and took her arm firmly before she could find anything. She dug her heels into the ground and pulled away from him. He jerked in surprise and immediately turned to lock his hands around her wrists.
“Kharasha zeh!” he said. His voice was low. He was trying not to attract attention.
Novikke gave a half-hearted resistance, leaning away from him. She knew it was too late to run. She glanced up at the distant figures at the outpost. He could still change his mind and take her away from there without anyone noticing.
She shook her head. “Please don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t take me in there. Don’t do this.”
His brow twitched, and he almost looked sympathetic. For a moment, she thought he was considering it.
Then he turned, still gripping her wrist, and pulled her toward the outpost.
As they entered the circle of buildings, a dozen unfriendly, unfamiliar faces glared out at her from the darkness. They were little more than faint outlines to her eyes.
It looked like a military outpost. A pair of elves passed them, wearing dark leather armor and carrying ominous spears.
People stopped what they were doing to turn and stare. She wondered if another human had ever set foot here. Probably not, judging by their reactions.
They stopped in front of a door. Aruna looked at her, possibly considering whether he needed to tether her to something to keep her from running. He glanced around at all the eyes on them, and he seemed to come to the same conclusion Novikke had—that there was no chance of her going anywhere. He went inside and shut the door behind him, leaving her alone outside.
Novikke turned to look at the center of the camp. A good number of them were still staring. Most of them looked at her with disgust, and the rare ones who smiled looked like they were thinking of doing something horrible to her. She avoided eye contact.
When Aruna had been gone several minutes, a pair of them approached her. She kept her gaze carefully averted, hoping in vain that they were heading to the door and not to her.
They stopped in front of her. Reluctantly, she looked up. A man and a woman glared at her.
“Ardanian?” the man sneered, not quite pronouncing it correctly through his accent.
Novikke supposed ignoring him wouldn’t go well. “Obviously.”
He looked her up and down. His gaze was half leer and half loathing. “Why are you not restrained?”
She inched farther back against the wall. “Because I haven’t fought,” she said, which was strictly not true, but was a simpler explanation than the truth.
Several more elves approached behind the first two.
He put on a surprised face. “You don’t fight?” he said. “Ardanians want to fight anything that moves. They will fight a songbird if it gives them a wrong look.”
There was a short laugh from the others.
“I don’t want to fight anyone,” Novikke said carefully.
“Of course you do,” the man said. He took a dagger from his belt and offered it to her hilt first.
Novikke looked down at it. The man was smirking at her. The others stared, waiting. He was baiting her. He was giving her the opportunity to stab him with it, and when she inevitably didn’t, he’d gloat over her cowardice.
When she didn’t take it, he forced it into her hand and closed her fingers around the hilt.
“Come on, Ardanian,” he said, drawing his sword and backing away a few steps. “Fight me.”
Novikke didn’t move. She held the dagger against her midsection. She didn’t dare make so defiant a move as dropping it, but she didn’t want to look threatening, either. They were looking for a reason to hurt her.
“You are afraid of a fair fight?” he said, feigning surprise again. “If you had fifty of your friends with you, then you would be ready to fight me, I think. That is the Ardanian way.”
There was another wave of snickers. A crowd had gathered by then. Someone grabbed her wrist and shoved her toward the man. She stumbled and fell to the ground at his feet.
She twisted to look up at him. The dagger was still gripped tightly in her hand. Without thinking, she held it up between him and herself.
He laughed and swept his sword in a lazy arc toward her chest, and she took the full force of it on the crossguard of the dagger. She winced and nearly dropped the dagger as the impact vibrated through her hand and wrist.
“I’m being brought to your leader for questioning,” she said in a desperate rush. “You can’t kill me.”
“We will not damage your voice, human. Don’t worry.” He moved to swing the sword toward her again. Novikke flinched.
And then someone was shouting above the noise of the crowd. The man’s blow never landed.
Aruna pushed through the crowd. Novikke let out a tight breath. She’d never been so glad to see him.
The crowd stepped back as he arrived. He spoke to the one with the sword, making a placating gesture. The man shot Novikke another look of distaste before reluctantly lowering his weapon.
Aruna turned to her, looking at the dagger clutched in her hand. She’d forgotten she was holding it by then. She carefully set it on the ground beside her. Aruna motioned for her to get up.
She didn’t hesitate. The faster she got away from the mob, the better. When she was close enough, he took her roughly by the back of her collar and pushed her through the crowd. She stifled a sound of protest.
The man who’d challenged her caught her arm as she passed, stopping her short. He said something to Aruna. Novikke didn’t like his tone. She disliked his hand clutching her wrist even more. She glanced up at Aruna, who was suddenly feeling a lot more like an ally than an enemy.
Aruna said something quiet and stern to the man and peeled his fingers away from her. Finally, the man backed off.
Aruna pulled her away from the group and around the side of a building. As they rounded the corner, his choking grip on her collar softened and then released. He took her arm instead, and led her into a dark room lit by a single lantern hanging from the rafters.
She put her back against the wall beside the door, half expecting someone to come chasing after them, but when a few moments had passed and no one else had entered, she began to relax.
She couldn’t tell what purpose the building served, but it didn’t look like an interrogation room. Wicker baskets and pots and boxes crowded the floor, and shelves lined the walls. A collection of swords designed in the unique Varai style hung on one wall. There was a kitchen at the back of the room, and clusters of drying herbs hanging from the ceiling.
It was oddly homey, and was nothing
like any of the Ardanian army facilities she’d seen. This kind of disorganized, multi-purpose space would never have passed muster there. She looked around at the clutter. This was what passed for a supply room here, and an armory… and a kitchen, apparently.
Aruna gave her a stiff look, which she returned, and then he went to speak with the lone occupant of the room, an older woman who’d been working at the kitchen as they entered. She didn’t look like the military type. Probably because she wasn’t.
The Varai didn’t have a military in the same way Ardani and Ysura did. They had strong, well-trained fighters and mages, but not in the vast numbers that Ardani had, and without the same hierarchy and organization.
The people here looked like warriors, but they did not look like a matched set the way Ardanian soldiers did. They all wore different clothes and armor and carried varying types of weapons, more like a militia than a real military.
The Varai had seldom needed to fight in actual battles. Their defense of their borders and their infrequent raids on neighboring towns were carried out by small but deadly teams, and they didn’t involve themselves in the wars of other nations. And on the rare occasions when someone did foolishly try to march into Kuda Varai, the forest did an excellent job of defending itself on its own.
The woman helped Aruna gather some things from the various boxes and shelves around the room. By the time they’d finished, his pack was twice as full as it had been when they’d arrived.
He looked up at Novikke and seemed to remember something. He turned back to the other woman, saying something that made her frown. She started searching the clutter again. It took her longer to find whatever he’d requested this time.
Finally, she emerged from the depths of a chest with a small book in hand, which Aruna accepted with a broad smile and a grateful dip of his head. Novikke felt a flutter in her chest. She’d never seen him smile like that. Probably because she’d only ever seen him interact with herself and Zaiur, and he didn’t like either of them enough to smile at them that way.
When he returned to her side, he was writing something in the book with a charcoal pencil. The book was blank, made to be written in.
He held it up for her to read. “Are you hurt?” he’d written.
She shook her head. He looked relieved. Novikke felt another annoying flutter. He wrote some more.
“I’ve been instructed to bring you to another outpost a night’s travel from here. We will go there now.”
She felt faint with relief. She’d been spared for another day. She resisted the urge to say something sarcastic, and merely nodded.
◆◆◆
When they’d been walking for a while, she tapped him on the shoulder and made a writing motion with her hand. He handed her the book and pencil, then looked over her shoulder to watch her write. She tried to ignore the heavy, dark presence of him conspicuously close to her.
“What happened to Zaiur?” she asked.
His face darkened. She would have expected anyone else to disregard her and keep walking. But she wasn’t really surprised when he took the notebook and started writing without hesitation. She was beginning to suspect that he enjoyed talking to her.
His job seemed to involve a lot of traveling and camping in the forest. She suspected that he spent a lot of time away from cities, like she did. If he was anything like her, he probably got lonely and bored. Maybe he was secretly pleased to have someone new to travel with.
“He continued ahead of us. We determined that one of us would be enough to escort you.”
His handwriting, now that she saw it in a book and not in the dirt or scratched on a rock, was small and tidy, in contrast to her own writing, which was a messy scrawl of irregular, malformed shapes.
She supposed it would be overly self-important of her to think that he’d encouraged Zaiur to leave for her sake. It must have been a coincidence.
“You don’t like him,” she guessed.
He shrugged.
“You argued a lot.”
He nodded.
“Why?”
He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “He says a lot of things,” he wrote vaguely.
“He does worse than just say things,” she noted dryly.
He frowned a little, then shrugged again, as if he didn’t know how to respond.
“You don’t mind that?” she pressed.
His frown deepened. “I stopped him,” he pointed out.
Novikke felt her lips twitch in annoyance. “I suppose you want another medal for that?” she said. “For not quite being totally despicable?”
Aruna canted his head, looking like he didn’t like her tone.
She put the pencil to paper, trying to suppress the anger and desperation that was threatening to spill over.
“I’m no threat to you. You saw that I was traveling alone. I don’t know anything about the attacks on your outposts. You have nothing to gain from keeping me here.”
She looked up at him, hating the knowledge that her life was entirely in his hands. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
“Do you believe me?” she wrote.
“Yes.”
There was a start.
“Do you think I deserve what they are going to do to me at the next outpost?”
He looked like he hadn’t expected such a direct attack. He hesitated long enough that Novikke got impatient and started writing again.
“Will you feel any guilt at all when they kill me?”
She waited, but he didn’t take the notebook. She turned the page and scrawled another line.
“Just let me leave. Take me out of the forest, and you’ll never hear from me again. No one will know the difference. Please.”
A crease formed between his eyebrows. He took the pencil from her. “You’re asking me to commit treason.”
“Treason?” she said, laughing bitterly. “That’s a big word for someone as insignificant as me,” she wrote.
He sighed and shifted his feet, looking like he was tiring of this conversation. “It’s not my decision to make.”
She could hardly believe she was having this discussion. That he had the audacity to be annoyed at her for reminding him what he was doing to her. Like he was perfectly aware of what was going to happen to her and had decided to simply not think about it instead of helping her.
Novikke drew a hand over her face. She didn’t know what to do to get through to him. “Don’t let them kill me,” she wrote miserably.
He took the notebook from her after she’d finished writing. “They will not kill you.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Night elves are not kind to humans.”
“Do you believe you know more about Varai than I do?”
She couldn’t tell if he thought she was stupid or if he really believed they would have mercy on her.
“Why wouldn’t they kill me?”
“We are not evil. We don’t harm the innocent without cause.”
She had to stifle a dismissive laugh. They would ever see an Ardanian as innocent.
“I will speak for you.” He paused. “I’ll tell them that you helped me.”
It took her a moment to understand what he meant. The wound sealer she’d given him several nights ago. She’d thought he’d forgotten about it.
She’d done it because she hadn’t wanted to be alone with Zaiur. But she supposed the result was the same either way. She’d saved his life. Maybe he was more grateful than she’d realized.
“You are not like other humans,” he wrote.
“There are a lot of humans like me.”
“If there are, I haven’t met them.”
He tapped a finger under the words “I will speak for you” again, giving her a reassuring nod, which gave her little comfort. Then he closed the book and kept walking, as if that settled the matter. Novikke frowned at his back, but had no choice but to follow.
Chapter 6
Novikke’s eyes were on the ground as they walked, so she didn’t noti
ce that their surroundings had changed until a flat, white, square stone appeared under her foot.
The trees had thinned out, and before them were the ruins of what might have once been a city square. The soft bluish light of the moons lit it up in the night.
A patchy floor of smooth stone and blue, green, and violet overgrowth stretched in every direction. Broken structures, crumbling and laced with moss and lichen, rose up like ghosts all around them. Most were collapsed, but a few towers remained, standing out like pale trees in the dark forest. Dotted between the remaining buildings were jumbled piles of stone blocks.
Night Elves of Ardani: Book One: Captive Page 7
