Quickly, she looked at the others. “I’ll see you all again.”
It was as much of a promise as she could make.
Leaning into Smoke, she ducked her head as the horse went out the doorway. She didn’t look back.
Beyond the doorway a stench filled the air, the smell of all the dead things.
Smoke didn’t like it, shying, tossing his head and snorting but she got him turned west and south and gave him his head.
As well as she could see in the dark, even with the fading moonlight, it was still unnerving to travel where so many of the creatures of the borderlands still might roam.
The first pearly light of dawn was blooming in the sky by the time they were close enough to the castle for her to slide off and set Smoke loose.
“Go give them a show, horse, lead them on a merry chase,” she said and smacked him on the rump.
He kicked up his heels and went. The Guards would have a hard time herding him back where he belonged.
She ran, even as tired as she was and she was very tired. She needed to run off the twitching of her muscles, the endless second thoughts.
The chance had been there to be free. To not go back. To not have to face Tolan and the thing that resembled her father. There hadn’t been any choice really but it didn’t make her want it any less. It would only have put Elon and the others in a difficult if not impossible position. She knew that, she did.
So far she’d managed. Somehow she would do so for a few more weeks. This way, perhaps she might learn more about what Tolan planned.
There was an eddy by the river where the water wasn’t so fierce and she liked to swim.
She waded in, the water shockingly cold, holding her sword above her head. Her arm stung.
There was a tear in her shirt. That scratch.
She rinsed it well and studied it. It looked clean enough. The water washed the stench of boggins and boggarts from her clothing as well. There was a rock in the center that would be warmed by the sun now. Later the trees would shade it and it would be cool. She put the sword on the rock for long enough to duck her head under and rinse the smell of blood and death from her hair. Then, wearily, she crawled up onto the rock and went to sleep.
The sun was fairly high when a voice awoke her, calling to her. One of the guards.
One she knew, thankfully.
“Milady,” he called, for the third or fourth time.
Yawning and stretching, she sat up. “Gilberth. What’s wrong? Why are you here?”
“That Tolan, he’s been looking all over for you. I thought you mighta come here as I know you like to take a swim. He sent folk to search for you, so I thought I might warn you.”
“Has he? Why? I’m here.”
“Well, he’s in a right fury he is. You’d best go back.”
With a sigh that wasn’t feigned, she said, “All right. Catch this, would you?”
She tossed him the sword, which he caught neatly and handed back to her when she came out of the water.
At the gates, she handed him the sword again. It wouldn’t do to have Tolan see her with it. Or Tolan to see Gilberth. She wouldn’t have another suborned who’d been kind to her.
“Would you take that to my rooms, Gilberth?”
He nodded and trotted off.
Tolan waited in the courtyard, standing stiffly. “Where were you?”
A number of people stood around, carefully not watching.
Korin stood by the stables, watching intently. Not leaning against the wall, as was his wont. There was no piece of harness in his hands to thread absently between his fingers, looking for weak spots. He simply stared, his brown eyes still.
Men’s eyes were never as still as Elven ones were. Most people looked around while they talked, seeing things, looking for someone. When their eyes were still, they were usually lying or trying to convince you of something.
The eyes of Elves were always still, looking intently at you, listening to every word. Yet you knew they were aware of everything that went on around them.
Korin’s hands had never been still, they’d always had something in them, a harness or a bridle. There was no piece of leather in them now. His hands were still and his eyes were still, too, waiting, watching.
That wasn’t like him.
He should have left. She’d wanted him to leave. There would be no help for her there ever again, she knew. In her heart she grieved, but didn’t dare show it.
She clasped her hands behind her back to hide the tear in the sleeve of her shirt.
“I went for a run and a swim.”
It was no more than truth, just not all of it.
“Your father was worried,” he chided. “Very worried.”
Properly contrite, she said, “Should I go and apologize to him?”
“No, but in future you should tell someone where you’re going,” he said.
There was no mistaking the warning in his look. It wasn’t a request, it was an order. From this point onward she would have to tell them everywhere she went.
Unless she was certain she couldn’t be caught.
The thought of what would happen if she was curdled the emptiness in her belly.
A burst of laughter from the parapets somewhat ruined the effect of Tolan’s glare.
He turned it instead on the Guards that leaned between the crenellations on the outward side as they watched and called out jeers and gibes to those below.
Ailith and Gilberth had given the poor Guardsmen a wide berth as they’d tried to herd Smoke back into the makeshift paddock beside and behind the castle. It was fairly amusing to watch and Smoke was having a grand time, his great head tossed and his ears twitched, tail high as he danced and darted around them.
“I will,” she assured Tolan, soberly, trying not to picture the scene on the other side of the wall.
The guards wouldn’t thank her for it if they knew but it made it hard to keep a grave face.
“Get that horse back in the paddock,” Tolan shouted upwards, irritably.
She took the opportunity to escape and considered herself lucky to have gotten off so lightly, thanks to Smoke.
The sword was on her bed, bless Gilberth. That saved her from explaining why she’d had it.
Just as suddenly she stopped as an odd crawling sensation crept up the back of her head.
Something was wrong. There was a buzzing in her ears, that wasn’t really in her ears.
Gilberth hadn’t been the only one to be in here.
Her gifts! Panic struck her.
She closed the door quickly and got on her hands and knees to feel under the bed. The longsword to match her shortsword and the bow Dorovan had gifted her were still there.
That wasn’t it.
Something.
Her breath was short and her heart pounded.
Something wasn’t right.
It was something around her bed.
She tore the sheets from it and tossed the pillow aside. Nothing.
It was still there, that mindless humming.
She pulled up the wool and straw-filled mattress. There was nothing there but the strapping beneath it.
Slowly, she ran her hands across the mattress. A chill went through her.
As soon as her fingers got close, she knew what it was. A soul-eater.
Tolan’s voice hadn’t worked, so now they’d tried another way.
Frantically, she searched, looking for the cut or tear, the rip in the seams. There, a place where the seam parted.
She had few fancy clothes but there were still pieces of her mother’s dress.
With Elven-silk wrapped around her fingers, she felt through the mattress. She didn’t look at what she found, never touched it with her bare fingers. Binding it tightly in the remaining pieces of the dress, she tied a long piece of thread around it and dropped it down the garderobe. The thread held it suspended far below but she could pull it back up if she needed. The thought that she might need to wear it, even temporarily, si
ckened her.
The terrible humming faded. She felt better but her hands were shaking, her stomach rolling.
This might work in her favor, though, and buy her time.
Tolan would expect her to act differently. She could be dreamy for a while, imitate her mother as she had acted during those last days. To all appearances she would take to her rooms as her mother had.
The only question was would he be able to tell it was a sham?
The sun was setting. It was time for dinner.
She brushed out her hair, her stomach churning. She didn’t want to go down there to the Great Hall but she must.
Her father, or the soulless thing that was now her father, looked up as she came in.
It was so hard to look at his face and not see memories of a thousand happy moments. And one terrible one.
Tolan craned his head around, too.
The smell of food made her nauseous. Although she’d eaten nothing all day, she could only pick at her meal The long night, the few hours of rest and that thing in her room had left her tense and anxious. She was exhausted and she hated this pretense.
“Is something wrong?” Tolan asked, his eyes glittering.
“I don’t feel well,” she said, not looking at him. It wasn’t a lie. “I’m tired. Father, may I be excused?”
His eyes, too, had that ugly brightness, that anticipation. It made his familiar face look like an odd mummer’s mask – the distorted face-like masks that mummers wore when they danced their way through the village on holidays.
“Of course,” he said and smiled.
There was no real sympathy there. If he’d been her father in truth, there would’ve been. Later, her real father would have brought fresh bread and weak soup from the kitchens with his own hands to make her feel better. This was just a mask, a trumpers mask, an ugly distortion of what her father had been.
Relieved, she fled but not far. She didn’t want to sit and pretend, to look at their faces and have them look back but she wanted to know what was said between them. In only her court shoes, which were little more than slippers, she moved nearly silently, creeping into the library to crawl behind the shelves.
“That’s easier,” Tolan said with satisfaction, in that odd high-low voice. “Much easier. Proximity will do much of the work, as with your lady wife, Geric. Time will tell, time will tell.”
Now she knew for certain.
So that was how they’d caught her mother.
It explained the dreaminess. A Soul-eater. Sleeping with it each night, all the time she’d spent in her rooms. It seemed you didn’t have to wear it for it to have an effect on you. That buzzing though, that hum, how had her mother not heard it? Had she dismissed as a trick of the ear? She didn’t know.
Unconcerned, Geric asked, “How long?”
Leaning back in the chair, Tolan propped his arm with his mug of wine on the arm. He shrugged a little.
“Enough. You took some time. Selah surprised me, she took far longer than I expected. Strong wills and stubbornness seem to run in your family, Geric. They do, they do indeed. Tell me more of good King Daran.”
Ailith listened for a while as her father spoke, randomly, his thoughts jumbled and the topics wandering.
It was his voice, his face, but not his manner. He’d never rambled so aimlessly. Tolan kept having to remind him of his topic. Listening to his voice she remembered the thousand times she’d sat by her father’s knee listening to him talk about the affairs of Court, or those in town, the clear judgments he’d rendered.
After a while, she crept carefully from behind the shelves and went up the stairs.
Elon stood by the entry to the ruins, looking out on the bodies of the borderland creatures, out into the silent, starlit night. Somewhere, out in that darkness, Ailith of Riverford was riding home. She’d been brave and forthright. And he’d let her go.
“There was no choice, Elon,” Jareth said.
Perhaps Elon didn’t need to hear it but it needed to be said.
Jareth needed to say it, for himself.
There had been no choice. None.
Geric as King was the ultimate law within his Kingdom. The Agreements and the Accords stated that clearly. Even Daran High King had no right to interfere within the borders of this realm, save for two exceptions – a clear and proven violation of the Agreement or open rebellion that threatened the peace and safety of all. Neither was the case here. There’d been no violation of the Agreement that they could prove, there was nothing in it or the Accords to account or cover for this and Jareth had seen no sign in the castle or the village of open rebellion.
Nor was there likely to be with the captain of the Guard in thrall.
“We can’t break the law.”
Elon said nothing for a moment, turning the small ball of silk with its dangerous contents over in his fingers. He and Jareth had both warded it, rendering it somewhat safe.
Choices and judgment. Elven law allowed for them. He had chosen. This odd presentiment, the sense of impending doom that hovered at the edges of his thoughts warned him that greater forces were at work here than they knew. Greater forces than applied to just one person. The laws of Men and the Agreement. In all the many hours he’d spent with Daran, with the Council, with his own people and the Dwarves, he’d never considered the laws of Men. Had never really looked at them in truth. Without looking at them, he’d still sworn to uphold them. That was on him.
There was a greater law still that bound him. Honor. He couldn’t find a way to reconcile his honor with that vow. He couldn’t violate one and not violate the other.
She’d known she had to go. She wouldn’t have gone with them and had known it. The thought didn’t offer him any solace.
“He knows,” Colath said, quietly.
In the end, it had been Elon’s decision to make. First among equals. They’d given him their opinions but to him fell the greater weight of making that final verdict. Colath didn’t envy him that.
Jalila said, “She’s clever, she’s done well so far. Better by far than many would. Calm, controlled. She keeps her humor.”
Clever, yes. Clever enough to outwit the master of one of these? Elon wondered, fingering the warded amulet in its insulating ball of cloth.
Where had it come from? How had this Tolan come by it? It was another piece of that mosaic, the pattern still not clear.
They would have to find Talesin.
Of all Elves now, he was the only one of that age not to have gone to the Summerlands. His wizard’s magic had stretched his life far longer than even the most long-lived of their people.
Talesin. Both Elf and wizard. He might know something, have another piece of this peculiar mosaic.
This Tolan was also a piece but where did he fit into it, was he merely a player, or the mastermind behind it?
And what was the final plan?
There had been nothing about the man to alarm Elon, nor Jareth. Both of them were well attuned to magic and its use. He thought back carefully. There’d been nothing. That worried him as well. Not as much as the other but it had deeper and longer implications. They relied on that instinct. What if there was something they missed, another like this Tolan? There was so much at stake.
What was one life measured against so many? How many lives, if what he felt looming on the horizon was true? Hundreds, thousands, his people, Men, Dwarves. Trade all those lives for one?
This solved nothing. The decision had been made and now he must live with it.
He raised his head. “Rest for a while. We came here for a purpose and that hasn’t changed. We have another. I made a promise. I’ll keep it. There are a few hours left until daylight, we should take what rest we can.”
They dragged the bodies of the dead creatures out. Elon took first watch and no one argued.
Jareth thought he wouldn’t sleep, he was so tense. The events of the night, the revelations and that damned charm had left him shaken and troubled. All of it chased him down to a restl
ess slumber.
Sleep claimed Jalila, too. Her dreams were haunted by shapes and forms that swam through endless darkness.
It didn’t claim Colath soon, though he gave the illusion.
No, he watched Elon, his true-friend, stand in the doorway and turn the small ball of warded silk endlessly in his long, agile fingers. It was like him. He’d learned to compromise as men did, treading the fine balance between integrity and necessity but he didn’t like it. A man of honor, he didn’t live easily with those choices. He wouldn’t live easily with this one.
The sun was just lightening the sky when they rode out the next morning. Their breakfast was travel bread eaten in the saddle.
As they left the walls of the old ruins behind Elon said, “If we hear no word of her we’ll come back this way before we turn south.”
It was the last he said of it until they found the Hunters and Woodsmen.
Chapter Seven
Ailith crouched behind the shelves listening – as she had for two weeks and more. Sometimes what they spoke of made her shiver. There were times when she sensed Tolan held things back, not for lack of trust but because his minions didn’t need to know. She learned to hear hesitation in his so-smooth, so even voice.
What the man was who was once her father was becoming was something else, less erratic. Somehow he, it, retained her father’s memories, thoughts and observations but he was cold. Very cold.
Of them all Caradoc seemed the least changed by his wearing of the soul-eater.
He’d always been a hard man, very sure in his duty and purpose. In this, he seemed to have become only more so.
Plans and plots. What they did say had her clasping her arms around herself.
They waited to secure Riverford. Waited for her majority ceremony to secure the succession.
It was only a few days away.
The guests would start arriving soon.
Geric had invited some of the other lesser Kings but his was a minor kingdom far from the Heartlands.
It wouldn’t be the lavish affair to which some of those lowland and heartland Kings were accustomed. Nor was it likely they would come, although they would send gifts.
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