Roger awoke sometime later, in the dirt of his cell that was turning to mud from Roger’s own spilling blood. Aware of a presence behind him, the man turned his head about.
De’Unnero stood at his dungeon door, blocking the flickering firelight behind him, seeming even larger and more ominous in silhouette.
“We will speak again when you are well enough to feel the pain,” the monk promised. “And well enough to understand the pain that will befall your dear Dainsey should you refuse.” With that, the monk walked away.
Roger settled back into the mud. Hours had passed since the beating, he knew, and yet De’Unnero had stood there, waiting for him through all that time, just to make that one comment.
Even through the haze and pain of the beating, it was that last image of determined De’Unnero’s imposing silhouette that stayed with Roger, that brought to him a sense of hopelessness beyond anything he had ever known.
Chapter 27
When Aydrian Came Home
THE WEATHER HAD COOPERATED WONDERFULLY, AND WITH HIS MAGICAL GEMSTONES, Aydrian could light a fire on the wettest wood with ease. Those gemstones had made the trails so much easier, as well, for whenever they came upon a difficult obstacle along the road, Aydrian simply took out his malachite and used its levitational powers to take even the largest wagons across.
Thus the army out of Palmaris had made great progress out into the Wilderlands, crossing the frozen Moorlands without incident and moving up into the mountains. They all suspected that they were getting close to this strange enemy, the Touel’alfar—a fact confirmed that very night when whispering comments filtered throughout the encampment, melodic voices bidding them to “turn back,” warning them to “go away, go home.”
More than a few of the Kingsmen were unnerved by the ghostly whispers, but Aydrian wandered throughout the camp, full of enthusiasm, telling his men that the mere presence of the elven voices confirmed that they were drawing near to their goal.
“They try to scare us away,” he explained, “because they know that they cannot beat us in the field. When we find Andur’Blough Inninness, as we soon will, the Touel’alfar will have to flee or die!”
Bolstered by his words and supreme confidence, the soldiers began shouting back threats and shaking their fists at those wind-carried whispers.
Convinced that the men were back in line, Aydrian went to his own tent, securing a pair of guards at the entrance and three others strategically placed around the sides. Inside, the young king lit no candle, but rather, sat in the darkness, clutching his soul stone. The elves were near!
His spirit walked out of his body a moment later, drifting through the encampment and tuning in to the whispers on the wind. Soon after, he found a group of Touel’alfar in a copse of trees in a shallow dell a few hundred yards to the north. They were in the branches, mostly, some alone, others sitting in pairs, and all of them whispering.
Aydrian knew their tricks; the elves could magically throw their voices, could weave a net of sound or the absence of sound by the very timbre of their song.
He could be out here with a fraction of his army and send them all running, he knew, and he intended to do just that. But then, as his spirit was moving to depart, Aydrian noticed a familiar face among the elves, the only one who had truly befriended him those years ago when he was a ranger-in-training.
Belli’mar Juraviel.
The last time he had seen Juraviel, the elf was setting out on the road to the south with Brynn Dharielle. Apparently, after helping Brynn gain her throne in To-gai, Juraviel had returned.
Aydrian was sorry of that. Of all the Touel’alfar, he felt friendship with only this one, and he didn’t want to be forced into destroying Juraviel with the rest of them.
But so be it.
His spirit soared back to his encampment and his waiting corporeal body, then a moment later, he burst outside. “I need our hundred best soldiers ready to march with me immediately,” he told the guards at his tent flap. “Be quick to your Allheart leaders and see to it!”
The two men rushed off.
Aydrian looked to the dark north, a smile growing on his handsome and strong face. “First contact,” he whispered. “First victory.”
“They are well-schooled and disciplined,” Juraviel said to Cazzira as they sat together on the low boughs of a tree. “I would have expected no less of a force led by Aydrian.”
“Why is he coming?” Cazzira asked, and it was not the first time. “If these humans are as deserving as you have told my people from the beginning, then why has young Aydrian betrayed the trust of the Tylwyn Tou?”
Belli’mar Juraviel looked away, his expression grim. Dasslerond had told him of her last encounter with the young ranger, of Aydrian’s magical assault that had nearly left her dead. She had known that he would return—which was why she had honestly bid Jilseponie to help her to fight the young king—and so this marching force had not been wholly unexpected.
Juraviel had led a sizable force of Touel’alfar out of Andur’Blough Inninness then, moving to shadow the approaching army, using the elven song to try to dissuade some soldiers.
It wasn’t working.
“Blynnie Sennanil has them in sight,” came the call of another elf from the base of the tree, and the pair looked down. “At your word, she and her archers will begin punctuating our warning with arrows.”
For Juraviel, this order was about as difficult as any he had ever issued. On this point, though, Lady Dasslerond had been uncompromising; if the humans couldn’t be persuaded to leave by magically enhanced whispers on the night breeze, then Juraviel was to strike terror into their ranks, stinging them in the dark, killing them as they slept.
He hesitated only long enough to remind himself of Dasslerond’s expression when she had sent him out, one that left no doubts in his mind, as there were obviously none in hers, that Aydrian would indeed find his way to Andur’Blough Inninness, and that Aydrian meant to destroy it.
“At her discretion,” Juraviel replied, and the elf below disappeared into the shadows.
“Perhaps someday you will find it in your heart to answer me,” Cazzira remarked when Juraviel turned back to her.
Her tone and look stung Juraviel’s heart. “Perhaps someday I will better understand why young Aydrian is so removed from the hearts of his father and his mother,” he answered, putting a gentle hand on Cazzira’s delicate fingers. “Nightbird was as great a human as I have ever known, and Jilseponie proved to be a worthy companion for him.”
“You have never spoken of either with anything less than sincere admiration,” Cazzira agreed. “But what of Aydrian? How is it that he, raised in the shadows of your valley, has turned so wrong?”
“It may be precisely that,” Juraviel replied. “I do not believe that we were wise in bringing the baby Aydrian into our care that dark night on the field outside of the human city of Palmaris. Does a child not belong with its mother?”
“All ill has come from it,” Cazzira agreed. “Jilseponie hates you, and Aydrian hates you. Powerful enemies.”
“Jilseponie is wounded and disappointed, but she is no enemy,” Juraviel insisted.
“And Aydrian?”
“He is angry, and he is misguided—more so than I ever would have believed possible.”
“They will not leave,” Cazzira observed. “We will be forced to fight them.”
That did not seem like a welcome option to Belli’mar Juraviel.
Cazzira shuddered then, suddenly, her dark eyes going wide as she glanced all about.
“What is it?” Juraviel asked, coming on his guard.
“A coldness,” the Doc’alfar female replied. “I do not know. Something passed us, much like the sensation of the spirit departing the human bodies when we offer them to the bog.”
Juraviel, too, glanced all around nervously, trusting Cazzira’s senses, though he knew not what she meant. A moment later, they locked stares.
“I know not,” Cazzira said again.
They marched in hard toward the copse, with Aydrian out front and leading the way, and with Sadye right beside him, playing a rousing song on her lute, the music lifting the spirits of the men all about their king.
“Touel’alfar!” Aydrian cried. “I will see your Lady Dasslerond!”
When no answer came forth, the young king lifted his hand toward the left side of the small and fairly contained grouping of trees and sent forth a burst of brilliant, stinging lightning. He shifted right immediately and fired again, singeing the trees and lighting several boughs.
He brought his free hand up behind him and waved left and right, and his disciplined force broke both ways, rushing to encircle the trees around both sides.
Aydrian strode forward powerfully. “Now, I demand!” he shouted. “Or I shall tear your precious valley down around you!”
A score of small arrows whistled out of the trees, every one slashing unerringly toward the young King. Aydrian didn’t flinch, other than to grab Sadye and pull her defensively behind him. He knew the designs of the Touel’alfar and understood that all of those arrows would be tipped with silverel. He reached into the magical gemstones set in the chest plate of his magnificent armor and brought forth a wave of magnetic energy that turned the bolts as surely as any shield.
And then he reached out again with his graphite and loosed a series of devastating lightning strokes that cut searing lines through the trees. And then he shouted out for a charge, and his soldiers rushed the copse, waving swords and spears.
Arrows reached out at the charging soldiers, and several fell clutching devastating wounds.
In front of the trees, Aydrian watched closely, marking the source of an arrow and responding with a lightning blast that threw the poor elf out the other side, dropping her charred form to the ground.
“By god,” Sadye whispered, her mouth agape. “Aydrian … this is …”
He wasn’t even listening. He charged straight in behind that last blast of sizzling energy, bringing forth his magnetic lodestone shield and a second, bluish white glowing energy about his body.
He heard a cry, and recognized Juraviel’s voice, the elf telling his kin to run away.
Under the trees went Aydrian, reaching into a third stone, the ruby set on the pommel of Tempest, his wondrous sword. The fireball engulfed the central area of the copse and had most of the elves running, and had a few others tumbling from the boughs, their bodies aflame.
Aydrian scrambled out to the right, to see an elf faced off against one of his soldiers. The poor lumbering Kingsman strode forward and took a roundhouse swing that never came close to hitting. The elf skittered back out of reach, then came forward with sudden and devastating efficiency, driving his slender sword in through a seam in the man’s armor.
As the man fell away, clutching a brutal wound, a smiling Aydrian took his place.
“And so we meet, traitor,” said the elf, whom Aydrian recognized as Tes’ten Duvii. “For years, I have desired my chance at laying low the errant son of Elbryan the Nightbird!” With that, the elf came forward, but in a measured way, the thrust of his sword more to measure Aydrian’s response than any honest attempt to hit.
Aydrian didn’t have time to play. He leveled Tempest at his enemy and sent a surge of energy through the graphite he had set in the pommel, and a bolt of lightning struck Tes’ten full force, lifting him from the ground and hurtling him backward to smash into a tree. Aydrian’s lightning held the poor elf there for a long moment and charred the tree behind him.
“And so you had your chance,” the young king taunted, though the elf was far beyond hearing him or hearing anything ever again. “Do you feel fulfilled?”
With a grin that was, in truth, more a grimace, Aydrian turned aside. “Juraviel!” he cried. “I know you are about! Come and face me here and now!”
But Juraviel did not come out, as far as Aydrian could see, and as abruptly as it had begun, the fighting was over.
“They’re running off to the west!” one Kingsman cried.
“Do we pursue, my lord?” another man closer to Aydrian asked him.
Aydrian smiled and shook his head. “Let them run—all the way back to Andur’Blough Inninness. They have nowhere to truly hide.”
Soon after, Aydrian’s expeditionary force returned to the main group, bearing six dead and nearly a score of wounded, several seriously, and leaving behind the seven Touel’alfar who had fallen, all but one killed by Aydrian’s magical blasts.
When they returned, Aydrian soon learned that his encampment had not been quiet in his absence, for groups of elves had begun striking at the soldiers helter-skelter almost as soon as he had departed. The men were doing well in responding, offering batteries of archers to launch devastating volleys in the general direction whenever a tiny arrow came in from the darkness, but as yet, they had located no enemy bodies.
“Kill them as they come into view,” Aydrian said to his commanders. With Sadye beside him, the woman still obviously shaken from the fight at the copse, he went into his tent.
“They think that they can stand before me,” Aydrian said. “They still do not understand the truth of Aydrian Boudabras!”
“How profoundly you hate them,” Sadye remarked. “Back there, at the copse of trees …”
“I repaid the slavers,” Aydrian interrupted, and he motioned for Sadye to sit beside him. Then he lifted the soul stone for her to see, offered a wink, and closed his eyes, falling into the hematite, spirit-walking once more.
Drifting into the trees, he soon enough found a pair of elven archers.
Aydrian didn’t hesitate, sliding into the body of one of the elves, catching her off her guard and pushing her spirit from her body. He knew that he couldn’t likely hold out for long—the Touel’alfar were strong of will, much more so than any human!—but he didn’t need long. In control of the body for only that brief moment, Aydrian darted from the trees, waving his elven arms and crying out.
His spirit was pushed from that diminutive form, willingly so, in time for the returning elf to see the host of deadly arrows speeding her way. Any one of the ten that hit her would have slain her.
Back in the trees, the other elf was crying out for his foolhardy companion when Aydrian assaulted him as well.
But this one, more prepared perhaps because of witnessing the fall of his companion, fought back more forcefully, crying out “demon!” over and over again to warn his friends. He even managed to shout out, “Possession!”
The human archers homed in on those cries, though, and sent their arrows soaring into the trees. Ninety-nine of the hundred that came in missed the unseen mark.
But it only took one.
Weary from his great exertion, Aydrian nonetheless tried to continue, his spirit sweeping along the perimeter of his encampment.
But the Touel’alfar were never slow to react, and the young king found no others in the area.
Back in his corporeal form, Aydrian instructed his soldiers where to run out.
They returned shortly thereafter, bearing a grievously wounded elf, lying near death with an arrow through his side.
Aydrian found enough strength to use his hematite again to prevent the elf from dying.
“Keep him bound and under heavy watch,” the weary king told his men. “This one will lead us true to Andur’Blough Inninness at first light!”
Belli’mar Juraviel and Lady Dasslerond stood on a high ridge along the mountains outside the mist-covered vale that housed Andur’Blough Inninness. The midday air was crisp and cold, a brilliant sun shining overhead. It all seemed so calm and peaceful, a moment frozen in time.
But both elves knew otherwise. Both knew that Aydrian and his army were fast approaching.
“He moves unerringly toward us,” Dasslerond remarked.
Looking at her, her eyes closed in concentration, her green gemstone cupped in one hand, Juraviel knew that she spoke correctly. He knew it anyway, for the scouts had been coming in all morning,
and every subsequent report showed that the distance between Aydrian’s marching army and Andur’Blough Inninness was fast closing.
“I have ordered the skirmishers away from the humans,” Juraviel informed his Lady.
Dasslerond looked at him out of the corner of her dazzling golden eyes. “The first line of defense of the Touel’alfar has always been to strike at any approaching enemy from the shadows,” she remarked. “To wound our enemies in body and in heart in the hopes that they will turn from their folly.”
“We cannot strike at Aydrian’s flanks,” Juraviel explained, though he knew that Dasslerond needed no explanation. “We have struck at him almost continually since the open fight at the trees. He finds our skirmishers and reveals them to his soldiers, or he attacks them with his own magics. A score of our people are missing, my Lady, and I fear that most are dead or captured.”
Dasslerond closed her eyes at those burning words. The Touel’alfar were not a numerous folk in the human-dominated world, and twenty was no small number to their ranks.
“You would have us enter our valley and hide it within the mists of the emerald,” Lady Dasslerond reasoned.
“At once, my Lady.”
“Aydrian has a prisoner,” Dasslerond informed him. “The emerald of our people has shown this to me. He scours her thoughts with his soul stone and she leads him, despite herself, to us.”
“You can hide Andur’Blough Inninness even from her, then,” Juraviel reasoned. “We must abandon her.”
Again came that cold stare out of the corner of Lady Dasslerond’s eye. For a moment, she seemed as tall and terrible as Juraviel had ever seen her, but that instant passed, leaving Dasslerond appearing diminished and shaking Juraviel’s faith in her before she ever admitted, “I cannot.”
Juraviel’s hopeful look turned to one of confusion.
“Our captive kin would demand no less of you!” Juraviel argued.
“I can leave her to her fate, though it troubles me,” Lady Dasslerond clarified. “But even so, I cannot hide our valley from Aydrian.”
DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) Page 212
