Of Dark Elves And Dragons

by Greg Curtis

  Finally, just when she had begun to think the worst was over, he vanished again, and this time when she went out to his home it was to find it full of more people, silver people, elves, wizards, priests and others of every race and activity. That made no sense, though it did rather speak to her when she saw the worried looks on their faces that Alan was more than he appeared to be, and that he was in trouble. They however could tell her nothing except that they didn’t know, and had sent her packing in short order.

  Whatever he was involved in, she figured it was important, and it somehow involved the silver people. She just hoped it had nothing to do with that shameless silver harlot. Or the walking dead.

  “Elves!” The cry came from somewhere further up the street and Rosalie looked up like everyone else to see a patrol of elves making their way through the town. That was unexpected. Elves, traders mostly from Nightfire, wandered into town from time to time, but these were rangers, and not dressed in their parade ground silver, but rather torn leathers and dirt.

  Thirty or so men and women at arms, longbows and swords at the ready, trotting casually yet still maintaining strict formation down the street on their trained steeds. They weren’t on parade, they were on duty, and by the looks of things they’d seen battle. They hadn’t come out of it unscathed either.

  Many wore bandages, even many of the horses, and though the elves sat up straight in their saddles she wasn’t fooled. They were tired and broken. They were retreating not attacking. And they needed help. They needed at the least the care of an apothecary, and even as she understood that, Rosalie reached for her cloth bag of medical supplies and waited for them to arrive. Somehow she was certain that that was why they’d come.

  “We were told that there is a healer here?” The leader of them, a ranger with half his hair missing and evidence of extensive burns under his bandages asked the question as they reined in at the inn, and all she could think was that he must be in terrible pain. And he wasn’t alone. Many of the other rangers had injuries and nasty burns as well.

  “I am an apothecary in training.” She stepped forward self-assuredly, pleased that she could say such a thing at all, and knowing from her master’s lessons that it was important for an apothecary to always look to be assured. It gave their patients confidence. They needed that, especially when she was all they had.

  “Step inside the White Tail Feather and I will see to your injuries.”

  “Rosalie!” Her father looked down at her from the top of the wagon where he was stacking supplies, worried, and perhaps he had reason. The soldiers had said as much. Leave, and leave quickly.

  “Father, I have to help them. It is my duty.” She smiled at him like the little daughter she had once been. “Leave Cleo and I’ll catch up to you in a few hours.”

  With no more that could be said, she grabbed her bundle of supplies off the back of the wagon and stepped into the inn once more to begin work.

  It was oddly familiar to see the inn full so early in the morning, although none of the patrons were either human or drinking, the minstrels weren’t playing and no one was behind the counter serving either. It was almost as though they hadn’t spent the entire morning packing up and preparing to leave like the rest of Silver Falls. And even though it had only been a morning and they hadn’t left she’d already been missing her home. Then again as she and her sisters weren’t running around carrying great jugs of ale, mead and cider Rosalie figured she could live with that. Still, just seeing so many patients sitting there, wounded, burnt and bleeding, some of them in very poor shape, that wasn’t so good. It would have been good to have had her master there to guide her as well, but he had left the town earlier that morning and she was all alone. At least she had plenty of supplies.

  She took a deep breath to control her nerves and then indicated to the first of them, a woman who seemed to be in particularly poor shape. Her eyes spoke of pain and exhaustion, and her posture, even as she tried to stand up straight, said she was badly injured.

  “You.” It was probably rude, but then she didn’t know the woman’s name or proper elven etiquette, and manners weren’t so important just then.

  “Over here please. And I’ll need plenty of warm water and bandages as well.”

  Rosalie soon had the woman sitting on the side of one of the tables, and was helping her out of her torn and burnt leather jerkin, something she didn’t enjoy. But then the injuries underneath revealed why as her burns had wept through her vest and soaked into the leather, before they had dried into a solid mess. As careful as she was, just getting the leather jerkin off her caused the woman to flinch more than a little, even though she tried not to show it. Soldiers and their pride. Eventually though, the jerkin was on the table beside her and Rosalie could see what she was dealing with. Even through her cotton vest it didn’t look good.

  “More warm water please.” Somehow she knew the bowl she had beside her wouldn’t be nearly enough as she began the task of bathing the wound and vest, softening the congealed blood so she could cut her free of the vest.

  “What happened?” Partly it was professional, asking the question in case it told her anything about the wound that she needed to know to treat it, but she was also curious. Elves as she understood it, were always leery of fire, living in the trees as they did.

  “Bone dragon.” As answers went it wasn’t much, but it shook Rosalie to the core as it spoke of things far too terrible to imagine. It also spoke of the war coming on them too fast. They all knew the most terrible beasts of the necromancer’s army were coming even if they tried not to speak of them, but so soon? Bone dragons were the necromancer’s most powerful of soldiers, and from what little she remembered of her schooling, they had only appeared at the very end of the last war. When the necromancer’s power had been at its height, those terrible monsters of the sky had ruled the lands, killing millions with their cascades of fire, and destroying cities. It seemed that time was upon them once more.

  “It’s a bad burn.” And it was, the burn began on her left side just above the waist and then spread all the way across her back, a weeping, blackened mass of drying blood and noxious sepsis that smelled terrible. “It should have been treated days ago.”

  As the water softened the congealed mat of blood and pus that was her back, she began the slow and delicate process of cutting away the cotton vest, managing at least to not cause her too much more pain.

  “There were many more badly hurt than I, and very few healers. Nightfire was still burning when we left.”

  “Oh.” Rosalie busied herself cutting out the back of her vest and loosening the material so that she could see what she was dealing with, and trying not to think about what the woman was telling her. It sounded too much as though there had already been an attack on a town. That was a frightening thing, even more so when it was an elven town, actually a small city from what she understood. They had strong magic to defend themselves with. In fact from her history lessons she recalled that it was the elves who had finally defeated the necromancer fifteen hundred years before. Maybe that was why they were being hit early and hard.

  Soon enough she had the entire back of the woman’s vest cut free and hanging, and she reached for the salve.

  “This will hurt a little, and it’ll feel cold. But it will help to heal your wound and numb the pain.” She wasn’t surprised when the woman flinched and drew her breath in sharply the moment she applied the spelled honey and berberine salve. But she said nothing, didn’t cry out, and stoically endured the pain as Rosalie gently rubbed the salve in, covering her entire wound in the white cream. Soldiers, unwilling to show pain. Maybe that was a good thing when there were so many more waiting for her.

  “Now I’ll bandage your wound, and then you can dress in one of my spare vests. But you have to know that the wound needs regular bathing, and the dressing will need changing tonight and every night to come for at least a week.” She gestured to one of the other rangers who was busy with a knife cutting up clean
bed linen - her father was going to be upset about that if and when they returned - and he brought the pile of bandage squares and ties over to her.

  Soon she had the bandages in place and tied down firmly, and the woman was if not healed then at least she was in less pain as she reached for her leather jerkin. Rosalie fancied she would be more comfortable for a while, and some of the spells infused into the salve would hopefully stop any more fever demons from invading the injury. She had practised those small magics for many days and months in order to get them right. The signs were good that she would recover, although she was likely to carry the scars for the rest of her life, and she might well become stiff as the scars tightened. If only Rosalie had completed her training, but she still had several more years to go. Maybe they would find another apothecary in due course. Someone who had completed their training.

  Rosalie handed her a vest from her travel bag and sent her patient off to the kitchen where her mother normally prepared the meals for their patrons, and where a pot of rosehip tea was brewing over the fire and tried not to think about the woman’s future and the further care she would need. There was no point if there was nothing she could do.

  “Drink at least two cups of the tea with plenty of honey. It will bring you strength.” Meanwhile she called for the next patient, a man with what looked like a deep wound to the back of his shoulder. Something large and sharp had torn a hole in him, and by the looks of things, no one had done anything about it. He’d just pulled on his leather jerkin and ignored it. Tough, but not clever.

  “Demon’s breath I wish that wizard were here now.” The woman winced a little as she pulled on her leather jacket instead of drinking her tea, and maybe her words were harsher because of the pain. But still they were intriguing.

  “Wizard?” Rosalie couldn’t really take her attention too far away from her work, but wizards, they were interesting. There were so few of them in the world, and their names were almost legends. If there was a wizard involved she wanted to hear about him.

  “The Feralis druid. His armies are sorely needed.” Despite knowing her duty Rosalie actually stopped applying the wound care poultice to her patient as she looked up at the woman in shock.

  “Alan Feralis?” She couldn’t believe it could be the same man. After all Alan was a woodsman and an annoying one at that, though very sweet, but how many Feralis’ were there? At least she managed to return to her work quickly enough, draining the wound with the poultice before covering the exposed injury with the honey and herb extract salve to promote healing and ease the pain and fever, and her patient didn’t seem to notice her moment of inattention.

  “That’s the one. We passed his home on the way here, but it’s still empty, and his armies are weakening by the day.”

  “Armies?” Despite her shock she had to ask.

  “The titans of stone and fire. He builds them and sends them into battle, but without him around they seem to be weakening.”

  “Alan makes the stone giants?” She was shocked, not sure she could believe the elves, even though they were known far and wide for their truthfulness. The huntsmen though, she had seen them arrive and even treated a few of them before they’d realised who they were, and she remembered the stone giants only too well. But each of the victims had claimed it was the wild demon spirit of the forest that had attacked them, and their descriptions of him, a pillar of fire and a titan of flame, they did not sound like Alan. And neither, as she recalled when she had told him of their arrival in the centre of town, had he admitted knowing anything of them. In fact he had asked her about it, wanting to hear all the details.

  “Summons them out of the ground.” The leader, Ulnor she thought he was called, butted in to the conversation as he kept fiddling with his bandages. She wondered who’d dressed his wounds, and from the roughness of the work suspected he had. “You know him?” There was something in his stare that spoke of the importance of her knowing Alan. Still she saw no reason to deny the truth.

  “Yes. We’ve been courting for about a year.” There was a sudden silence in the room as everyone stared at her and Rosalie felt distinctly uncomfortable about then. Still she concentrated on her work and didn’t let it bother her. There was too much to do.

  “And he never told you he was a wizard?” The man seemed surprised, but maybe something more than that too. She shook her head, knowing he had a point. Alan should have told her, and maybe in time there would be a reckoning for that. At the very least there would be some apologising.

  “The Goddess be praised! The most powerful druid in the lands, First Kingdom if what the elders say is true, and he doesn’t even reveal his nature to his woman? Some time ago he destroyed the castle of Calumbria. Who did you think did that?”

  “The spirit demon?” Rosalie was already beginning to understand that there was no such creature, and trying not to turn red as she realised how badly she’d been deceived by the one man who was never supposed to lie to her. Especially when everyone was staring at her, eyes open wide. The woman laughed, a little disbelievingly before she turned back to their leader.

  “Ulnor you above all of us know we have traitors among us. If they ever heard of Rosalie here, they could prove very dangerous. They could take her as a hostage against him. We must protect her.”

  “Yes.” He stared intently at her for a few very long heartbeats, studying her, perhaps wondering if she was telling the truth. “She is in danger. Besides, a debt is owed.”

  “A debt?”

  “We are those among the rangers who have unfairly harmed Alan’s people, the dark elves. We have committed crimes against them, and were it not for his showing us the truth, we would still be doing so. His lesson was difficult, our punishment harsh in measure to our misdeeds, but still his lesson has been learned. We owe a debt to his people for our misdeeds. And we owe a debt to the wizard for showing us our misdeeds. Escorting you to safety may in some small way repay him.” He said it so evenly as if it was only the weather being discussed, but Rosalie was certain there was an entire world of shame underneath. He was an elf, one of the most proper people to walk the land. He would do everything he could to make up for his crimes, and none would be able to stop him.

  “We will take her to the new lair.”

  “No.” It came out of her mouth almost by itself, but Rosalie was never going near a lair in her life. Dragons were terrifying creatures, and though they might be fighting the undead alongside them, she didn’t trust them. Being inside their lair, in the dark and alone, that did not strike her as somewhere she wanted to be. “I will go south with my family.”

  “That’s not safe.”

  “Safe enough, and in case you doubt it, I am more than capable with my longbow.” It was true too, sort of. She did win all the village archery competitions, but there was a world of difference between shooting at a painted target and shooting at an enemy. The elves of course managed a polite chuckle. No mere human was ever going to measure up to their yardstick in archery.

  “Then you come with us.” Ulnor seemed to be certain of himself, and that was a worry. But she already knew they were going to need a healer for at least the next few weeks. Their injuries were not so minor that they would simply heal up after one treatment. On the other hand she didn’t exactly look forward to the idea of going into battle.

  “Do you want to tell my father that?”

  “Those are your choices.” He stared evenly at her with his green eyes and she knew he wasn’t about to bargain with her. “You ride with us and we keep you safe as we escort the people to safety in the southern lands. Or we take you to the new lair.”

  “Bull scat!” Rosalie knew he was serious, and also that they would need her skills, and she didn’t like it. Yet it was also a chance for a little adventure, and that was something she’d always dreamed of, even when her family had wanted her to settle down, maybe with Alan, and run a nice little apothecary in town. Especially then actually.

  “You tell my father!”

>   “I will do so.” With no more than that he simply stepped outside of the inn to where her family was still loading the wagon, and Rosalie knew her fate for at least the next little while, was sealed. Still she continued with her work methodically, resisting the temptation to even groan quietly to herself.

  Somehow she even kept working when she heard her father start yelling, knowing there was nothing she could do.

  Though maybe in time, when she found him, she could have some strong words with a certain deceiving wizard. Maybe she could even stick an arrow in his seat. Not enough to kill or cripple him, but painful enough that he would understand her displeasure at being deceived.

  Chapter Twenty Four.

  “Hold that demon cursed line!” Langrew bellowed the command to his men, knowing it was unfair. The undead were everywhere and holding a line against them was impossible. With the enchanted arrows and bolts they’d been given they could kill them quite easily, the skeletons and zombies at least, but there were so many of them, and they kept slipping around their lines.