Padlur reached to his belt for his blade, but Imony cocked her head and gave him a look. “Please, child,” she said. “Don’t make me ruin this young man’s face by ripping my brush free. He is pretty enough right now, but the scar will not flatter him.”
Sten and Spundwand it found all quite amusing, and allowed themselves another hearty laugh. “Sten,” said Imony, noticing the warrior for the first time. “And my friend Brickboots.”
“Good evening, Imony,” said Sten. “Kohel there is no threat. He is with me. You can release him.” Imony responded again with fluid motions. She freed Kohel and was seated on the grass in front of them. Nergei admired the beauty in her movements, the way each part of her seemed to dance or to keep harmony with every other part. Nothing wasted. “Imony is a practitioner of a sort of combat that trains one to make a weapon of whatever happens to be around,” he said, directing his comments not to Kohel, or Padlur, or even Nergei, but instead to Luzhon. “And in the absence of things, her hands and feet suffice.”
“What can I do for you, Sten?” said Imony.
“Well, my dear,” he replied, “we have been asked to—”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“Imony?”
“I will accompany you.”
“I didn’t tell you where we are going. Or why. Or even that we will be leaving the city for possibly quite a while, Imony.”
“Yes,” she said. “No matter. I’m going to come along. I have decided. I look forward to whatever it is we are going to do. It is always good to be with my dear old friends Sten and Brickboots.”
“Well, then,” said Spundwand, looking at Kohel, who was rubbing his nose. “You see how charming my friend is, young man?”
“Brickboots is coming with us too, yes? And we’re going somewhere? Should we leave now?” asked Imony, suddenly lively and engaged. She walked to the edge of the clearing, where she had secreted a small pack. In it, she placed the rolled parchment in a wooden tube, and from it, she took a pair of worn leather sandals, which she slipped on in two clean circles of her arm. She tucked her brush above her ear, slung her pack on her back, and began walking to the road. The party had to hurry to keep up.
“Enthusiastic,” Sten said, again to Luzhon. “And better than that, she has no interest in gold. She wants only to travel. And be near Brickboots.”
“Brickboots?” Luzhon said to Spundwand.
“A name she has for me,” he responded dismissively.
Imony turned her head. “Try as I might, I can’t seem to push our mutual friend down, young one. He is impossible to get off his feet. Where do we go now, Sten?”
“We need range and we need magic, Imony. I think I know a pair who might be able to help us there. We go back to the city and search.”
On the market green, Sten saw the first of the siblings he’d come to see, the elf woman Magla. The market street had been partially cleared, creating a makeshift range for Magla and her newest mark, a human bowman who didn’t yet know that he was indeed a mark, a man full of confidence who would soon part with his gold. Sten would never call Magla a thief or a hustler—she would not have suffered him to try, and he had seen her knock down men as big as him over less—but that did not mean she was above using the ignorance of the city’s less-worldly citizens against them. And how ignorant they were, thrown off by both her sex and her beauty. Sten watched as she removed her green cloak, revealing the tall slimness of the woman beneath. Magla wore black leather armor that fit tight against her lithe body while leaving her shoulders and arms bare, save for a leatherwork bracer strapped against her pull hand. She was pretty—even Spundwand, who had no great love for elves, would have to agree—with the high cheek bones and pale, smooth skin of her race. Despite the grace of her movements, there was strength in the muscles of her bare arms, her leather clad legs, in the long, sure fingers of her hands nocking an arrow into her bow.
Sten watched her face, compared it to the face of the male human who would shoot first. His was bright, animated, ruddy with drink or else excitement. Hers was pale, passive, empty of everything but the shot.
Maybe empty of that too, thought Sten. He’d seen it before: A warrior who had failed to prevent some atrocity—or else committed one themselves—and who could not forgive, could not forget, until what wrong they had done became the center of their being, replacing whatever better thing had been there before.
He might have been wrong about Magla, hoped he was, but as he watched her fingers upon her aquiver bowstring, he did not believe that he was.
“Watch this,” said Sten, directing Nergei and Luzhon’s gaze away from the human archer—already pulling his bow back, already firing too fast, so that even Nergei knew the man would miss the target—and toward the elf woman instead. Kohel followed their gazes, burning the whole time. In the mind of that man, that old man, who had been engaged to come to Haven and protect their village, the orphan and the girl had become the authority to which he demurred. The orphan and the girl, instead of Kohel, the rightful leader, inheritor of the role of primary, head of Haven. He had been relegated as merely a hanger-on, merely an associate to a young man without land and without even a father. And a girl who he had decided was not worthy of his name—perhaps only worthy of being a concubine to him when he had wed and settled into his role as leader of Haven. Perhaps he would cuckold her husband—some farmer—one day. He looked to Padlur for someone to share his frustrations, but the other boy was engrossed in the preparations the archers were making.
Kohel turned back just in time to watch the human take his shot, missing the ceramic jug by less than a foot to the left. An impressive miss at that distance, but still a miss, and Kohel could not help voicing his disappointment. “Too bad,” he said. “But surely the best to be done at this range. I doubt the woman will do better.”
At first, Kohel thought no one had heard him. He was about to repeat his prediction when Sten turned and smiled. The old warlord put a finger to his lips, then made a motion from his eyes to the elf, urging Kohel to watch closely. Kohel sighed, crossed his arms, and waited.
The elf maiden raised her longbow—“A magnificent weapon, better than anything in Haven,” whispered Padlur—then lowered it again, turned to her opponent. “We could increase our wager,” she said, a smile in her voice, if not on her face. “You could shoot again, and then after you miss, I could take my shot.”
The man grimaced, but the crowd—bigger already—clamored for more. Stroking his beard, the man asked, “How much do you wish to increase it?”
“So far we are indebted equally. But if you are to get two shots to my one, shouldn’t you pay twice as much?”
“I do not know if I have that much,” the man said, his hand hovering over the purse at his belt. “Or else I would gladly show you that only bad luck prevented my first shot from winning the bet outright.”
“Well, if you are not a man of great means—” The crowd laughed at Magla, who waited for them to stop before she continued. “Perhaps you had best not bet at all. But since you already have, and you are so sure, perhaps you could find the coin, or else borrow it from another.”
The man was stammering, nervous about losing more money, on top of the losses of pride and silver he had already suffered. Kohel watched his face, saw that the man was too unnerved to shoot straight, even if he had the skill. He would be a fool to bet again, and yet the elf might have left him no other choice, if he wished to escape the shame he had coming.
If Kohel had the means, he would loan the man the money himself, just to save his face in front of the elf trickster.
While Magla and the archer talked, another elf pushed himself to the front of the crowd. Or not an elf, but a half-elf. Dressed in colorful finery Nergei had rarely seen, it took the old man’s apprentice longer than it might have to realize that the half-elf’s elaborate tunic and leggings were more like his own robes than those of his fellows; there were subtle pockets sewn into the sleeves and the waistband, an
d perhaps other, more concealed places, as well. The half-elf was a mage of some stripe, but he did not want it to be obvious, did not need it known by everyone who saw him.
Seeing the fair-haired wizard, Nergei regretted his own robes, which pretended after the learned and the arcane, and inside of which was only Nergei, neither of those things. I fool no one, he thought, except, occasionally, myself.
There was little time for self-doubt, as the elf was soon speaking, his words clipped and fast, his hands busy beneath them. “A human and an elf, locked in mortal combat, as in days of old, as in the stories of those days! The pretense of such a thing, at least, with much wagered and also weapons drawn. What good it does my old heart to see you two with faces heated and feet planted, ready to fire arrows across this city street until one or the other is undone.” Then he was reaching into his own belt, pulling a heavy-looking purse from beneath his tunic. “I have watched with great joy from the back row, hoping that one or the other might prove the better, so that I might then go to my cups in greatness. I do not like to go drunk to my bed at night without knowing which half of my poor lineage is the better half, and I believe here we might have some way of proving the day’s opinion.”
By then, the whole crowd was watching, fixated, and Nergei was no different, until Sten tapped him on the shoulder, subtly pointing to Magla’s face. It took Nergei a moment to see what the warlord wanted him to see, but there it was—below the passive porcelain of her face, she was nervous in a way she had not been when it was only her bow that she had to trust.
“What do you say, good man?” asked the half-elf, reaching into his purse and retrieving a handful of silver. “Are you sure enough of your skill to shoot again, or at least sure enough of your ableness to pay me back? How about we tip over that purse of yours, and I’ll cover whatever you cannot? I am feeling flush and generous. And must see you shoot again.”
Freed of the half-elf’s charismatic spell, Nergei watched not the half-elf but Magla, then the human archer, whose own face was wet with sweat. And yet what other choice did he have? His shame at losing the bet would be one thing, but he had lost his reason not to continue, and had no way to refuse gracefully. The half-elf and the human emptied his purse into the dirt, counting coins until a total was arrived at. The half-elf added a smaller number to the pile, then scooped the whole up into his hands.
“Now that I’m an investor, I hope you’ll understand if I want to hold onto the whole until the bet is over.” The half-elf smiled, then backed away toward the edge of the crowd before the man had a chance to object, while motioning down the still-cleared street. “I believe it’s still your shot. Go, then, my good man. Make our heritage proud. Glory for our human ancestors and all that.”
Out of the corner of his eye Nergei saw Sten smile too, the expression spreading steadily across his carved face, like a man in the middle of remembering a very old joke, one that never failed to please.
Magla and the archer again took their stances. In the crowd, side bets were placed on the pair, with the odds suddenly shifted away from the human toward the elf warrior-maiden, more impressive than ever before, even though she had yet to fire a shot.
As the man pulled back his bow again, Nergei felt a touch upon his arm, which he at first assumed was again Sten, wanting him to see some other intricacy of the scene. Within the first linger of the touch Nergei knew it was not Sten, not even close, but Luzhon, who, in her excitement, wanted to share it with him.
More than anything else in the world, Nergei wanted to look to his left, to see what expression waited upon her face.
More than ever before, he was unable to look, too afraid of what hopes might be confirmed or dashed upon the look. And so he didn’t look. He watched the contest, too distracted to take in the subtleties in the relationships between the elf woman, the half-elf mage, and the human archer, who would soon be parted from the full contents of his purse.
The man’s arrow flew through the air again, and for a moment Nergei thought it might hit the jug, spectacularly ending the competition and winning the man his money back. Then the arrow seemed to veer to the left—a mistake of perception, or else skill—and thudded again into the stall beyond the jug. The arrow was still quivering in the wood when the elf let loose her own arrow, so quick on the heels of the miss that no one saw her let it go from the taut string of her bow.
All they saw was its slipping through the jug cleanly, leaving a small hole punctured through the front and the back of the ceramic vessel. Then the sound of the arrow thwacking into the same stall as the man’s.
Then the jug, disintegrating around the hole, while all along the street the onlookers cheered the sight and the sound of Magla’s victory. Nergei, Luzhon, and Padlur all cheered along, while Sten and Kohel both kept silent, although each for different reasons. Sten watched the human archer’s disappointment change to anger even before the vibrations of the winning arrow had stopped at the other end of the stall. Kohel saw the same sight, felt a righteousness clench at his heart. Surely the elf had tricked the human, so the human would make her pay.
“A cheat!” cried the human, looking around the crowd for support. “An impressive shot, sure, but not genuine. A magic arrow, perhaps, or else an enspelled bow. There’s no other way a woman would beat me, and an elf at that.”
The man’s face was ugly with his losing, and Luzhon said so to Nergei. “Look at him trying to convince people the elf cheated. She’s magnificent, and everyone here must be able to see it. I wish I was as strong as she is.”
Nergei agreed—of course he agreed, as he would have no matter what Luzhon might have said—but still he said, “Now it only remains to be seen if the rest of the crowd feels as you do, or as he does.”
Abruptly the half-elf returned to the forefront of the scene, bringing with him the twice-heavy purse containing the human’s half of the bet, plus the half-elf’s own contribution. “My good man, your shot was as excellent as any other’s, and there’s no shame in the losing. Perhaps it was a breeze—although I myself felt nothing—or else some other cruel manifestation of nature. But surely there’s no need for claims of cheating, or of sorcery. You have lost, and, by the bonds of our proxy, so have I. And so to the winner I present—”
Then the smiling half-elf held out the purse to the elf archer, who reached out to take it with a smile of her own. Before the purse could reach her waiting palm, the human reached out and tried to snatch it from between them. The half-elf withdrew it quickly, held it above his head.
“Now, I dislike losing as much as anyone, elf or human, but we have lost, and now it is time to pay our debts. So stand aside.” The half-elf again tried to hand the purse to Magla, and again was blocked from doing so.
It was Magla’s turn to speak. “Human, you had no worries about my abilities being enhanced by sorcery when we first entered this bet, the one were so sure you would win. Now stand aside and let me collect what I won.”
The human sneered, looking uglier by the moment. “I know of the trickery of elves, you know. In the Great War, at the fall of the empire. When I was just a boy, I was told my great grandfather was a High Archer, in the company of the last shield-commander of Grandmoor, and it was the betrayal of the elves who were meant to fight beside him that doomed his life. Elves like you.”
“Not elves at all,” said Magla. “Eladrin. Hardly the same thing, and immaterial to our disagreement in any case. I was not at Grandmoor, and did not betray your dead grandfather. Nor have I cheated you here. My shot was straight and true, and yours was not. That is all that has transpired between us.”
“You weren’t at Grandmoor, but I’ll bet you remember it. I can see it in your bow.”
Magla bent down, retrieving her green cloak and casting it over her shoulders before securing it at her neck with an intricate clasp, made of a silver-cast leaf meant to be inserted into a slender loop of gold. She touched the clasp with her fingers, then held up her bow to create a barrier between herself and the hu
man, the other onlookers. “If you know so much now, then you knew what I was before you ever approached me, ever offered your bet. I am Magla, daughter of Magden, daughter of Magdalene, descended from the great archer-elves of Lastwood, where your ancestors cut the lumber to build the first hovel-start of your lost city, cutting and dragging our trees without leave. And still we allowed it, because we knew you acted out of ignorance. For a thousand years we watched as your kind allied yourself with the eladrin, who had their own cities to build, and we said nothing, did nothing to stand before either race, whose destinies we did not desire to shape or control. Yet, after a thousand years of living together in alliance, you humans never learned to be able to tell the difference between an elf and an eladrin, and so when war came you burned our forests with their cities, even though we had nothing to do with your squabbles. And now here you are, ready to again bring your failed history to bear against me, a single elf apart from her people, a people who in any case had nothing to do with what grieves you.”
The human took a step back, then found his nerve again. He drew back his own cloak, revealed the short sword hanging beside his belt. “Do not speak to me in this way, elf. Me and my fellows did sight you from the very beginning, and they pressured me into making our bet. We are all descendants of those who your cousins slaughtered, and each man among us bears the bow of his father’s father.”
At that, Nergei and the other children of Haven began looking around for the hidden bowmen, only to find they were no longer hidden. A half-dozen men stood up upon the rooftops of the market village, each of them training their identical bows down upon Magla.
Kohel clapped Padlur on the back, causing Nergei to turn around just in time to hear him say, “Look how impressive those men are! These are the kind of mercenaries we should be hiring.”
The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) Page 10
