by Lori Holmes
At least all of his immediate enemies had been defeated. The pit was now devoid of food. He’d enjoyed most of what the elf had brought him, though none had appealed as much as those red berries.
The only thing he could not bring himself to choke down were a couple of large, tough looking roots. The flavour was so bitter it was offensive. He tossed those out of the pit so the elf would not see the leftovers whenever she returned. She may well use her power over him and force him to eat them.
Try as he might, he could not stop himself from thinking and remembering the look on her face as she had vowed that she would protect him to the end. What bothered him the most was his own response. The feelings that had arisen in his heart as she looked at him in such a way disturbed him more deeply than he cared to admit. He could not make sense of them and he knew for certain that they should not exist.
She was an elf and for that alone, he should hate her with all his being. Elves had tried to kill him as a boy. His own kin. His mother’s family. They had stolen his childhood memories and tried to kill him for being who he was. A half bred abomination.
Hate rose within at the thought. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of his chief and his clan, he would be dead. He had no memory of the event. He only remembered waking, dazed in the middle of an elf settlement. The elves had all been dead apart from the women and children his clan had captured. The trees had been blackened and burned.
His chief was the first thing he remembered, huge and terrifying to the boy he had been. At first Khalvir had borne an irrational hate for the man but he had soon come to see the truth of what the chief told him. The elves hated him. He saw it standing openly in the faces of the captives as they had travelled with his new clan. Each one of them had been filled with pitiless loathing. They had spat upon him whenever he had foolishly tried to help the weak, naming him a Forbidden abomination and that everything was his fault. He had never forgotten.
And it was more than that. In some secret corner of his soul that was forever lost to him, he knew he had been hated by his elven kin and that he had hated them in return. He knew it to the centre of his bones. They would be his enemies until his dying breath.
And so he brooded, ignoring the she-elf as much as he could whenever she visited with more food to keep him alive. She spoke occasionally but he did not respond. He tried to avoid the emotions she evoked, emotions that seemed to break loose from that very same forgotten corner of his soul. They shook the basis of all the beliefs he clung to.
The days blurred together, dull and unchanging. The Light Bringer rose and fell in the sky. Khalvir wished he could see her bright face, have her clear light cut through the ever growing confusion in his soul. The forest was endlessly dim and hazy beneath the suffocating canopy, filling his mind with its cloying atmosphere. It was becoming harder to separate reality from a dream.
Only her visits broke the tedium, becoming the unwanted highlight of his very existence. He hated that he was becoming so reliant on her. He refused to talk to her for it would encourage more doubt to arise. Nevertheless, he watched her. She was terribly young. Still in her teen years, he guessed, but her presence was soft and restful, unless otherwise provoked.
He still found her eyes to be the most fascinating feature. They were impossibly expressive and betrayed a lot of what was going on inside her mind even though half of the time he wished they didn’t. There was a sadness there. She had known loss. She had known hardship. She cared too much. He could see it in the haunted shadows that dappled the indigo depths. And… there was a growing fear inside them. The latter concerned him more than it should and he couldn’t help but wonder at it. What would happen to her if her people found out she was keeping him? Another unwanted emotion took hold inside his heart. Fear. Fear for her.
After three days of inactivity, he could bear it no longer. He needed to do something, anything.
The she-elf sat across from him in her usual position. She was silent for once, seemingly giving up on trying to coax a conversation out of him. Her eyes were distant, the skin around them tight. She was brooding over something. The frown between her brows was becoming a permanent fixture.
He realised in that instant that he missed the sound of her voice and he broke his long held silence.
“You’re quiet today, elf.” He kept his expression cool. He could not let her know how much he was beginning to depend on her presence.
Her gaze barely flickered his way. “I was under the impression that you did not like me talking,” she murmured to the ground. “It’s not as if you talk back much.”
Huh. Khalvir shrugged and let her have the point, turning over the fruit she had brought carefully in his fingers. “I suppose if you have to be here, listening to you chatter breaks the tedium.”
She lifted her head, her somber expression lifting despite his best efforts to keep his words as uncaring as possible. It struck him then that maybe she was becoming just as dependent on him as he was on her and maybe that was something he could take advantage of. He should not pass up this opportunity.
“Well, what do you want to talk about?” she asked.
“How many are in your tribe?”
“Fifteen.” She answered, naively not thinking twice about volunteering this information to an enemy. She was far too trusting.
Shock rippled through him at the answer. “So few?”
Her temper flared. “Yes, thanks to the Woves. It is only by the grace of Ninmah that we survive at all.”
He ignored her outburst. He was too distracted. Fifteen would barely appease his chief after all the long seasons of fruitless searching.
“Are there other tribes?” Perhaps he could salvage something from all of this.
“Not that we have found.” She kept her eyes on the ground, hiding their emotion from him.
That wasn’t good. Khalvir continued to turn the fruit over in his hands. He picked another subject. That growing fear was still present upon her face, scrawled in the tightness of her skin.
“What would your tribe do if they found out you were coming here?”
The laugh that came from her lips was bitter, the concealed terror in her eyes burning to the fore. He had been right in his suspicions. “That is something I try hard not to think about.”
Will they kill you? He didn’t ask aloud. Grief ripped through him at the very notion. He forced it away. “I am your enemy,” he said. “The enemy you say threatens your people’s very survival and yet here you are risking capture and probably death to keep me alive. Why?” He had asked himself this question a hundred times but he was still no closer to an answer.
“I have told you why,” she muttered to an uncaring rock.
Irritation and awe rippled through him at the knowledge that she would risk herself so for someone she once knew. Her loyalty must know no bounds. He sighed. “He must have been very dear to you, this boy you knew, for you to risk yourself in such a way.”
She gazed at him, the pain in her eyes was almost more than he could bear. “Yes,” she said. “He was.”
“I am sorry you lost such a person.” And he was sorry for her pain. He couldn’t help it. But he had to try and make her see sense. He had to make her let him go. For both their sakes. He seized upon a new tactic. “Let me ask, would he have wanted you to risk yourself in such a way?”
She brushed quickly at the tears sliding down her face. “Probably not.” She admitted. “But it is no less than he would have done for me if the situation was reversed so, what choice do I have? We promised to look after each other. I am not going to break that vow.”
Khalvir shook his head in disbelief. “And this boy was like me?” He gestured to his clearly half-elven appearance.
Her eyes were enigmatic. They seemed to say that he wasn’t seeing something that was clearly before him. He took her silence as a confirmation. She had loved a creature like him. Again he was both moved and infuriated by her. Moved because he couldn’t imagine such love. Infuriated bec
ause she was yet again shaking everything he had ever believed in. She should despise someone like him. “You… are not what I expected from an elf.”
She smiled sadly. “Probably not but here I am nevertheless, foolish as it may seem.”
Khalvir felt the wall of hate that he had been fighting so hard to keep around his heart, crumble and fall away. It wasn’t just her strange magic keeping him from killing her now. No matter how much he wanted to, he could not hate this elf.
He looked her straight in the eye as she frowned, letting her know how serious he was. “You should not be putting yourself at risk. You… I do not think you are someone who deserves death.”
His words did nothing to sway her. “I can take care of myself,” she replied, firmly. “I know what I am doing and it is the right thing to do.”
It was hopeless. He growled low in the back of his throat.
She rose somewhat reluctantly to her feet and he realised with a pang that her time was up. She had to go back to her people. “I promise to come back tomorrow,” she said. “Please stay quiet and wait for me.”
His eyes lifted. “Tomorrow. I’ll be here.”
He watched her leave and couldn’t help feeling that she was taking a little piece of his now defenceless heart with her.
No, no, no. Khalvir buried his face into his knees and stared into the darkness of his self-made cave. Confusion twisted his thoughts. He no longer knew how to feel and that frightened him. He could feel himself falling further and further under her spell.
He needed to get out of this pit, out of this accursed forest. If he could just breathe clear, fresh air again, his mind would be freed and his sense of self would return. He longed to be rid of this confusion and half remembered sensations. Raising his head, he whistled long and loudly into the stillness.
Relief coursed through him when he was rewarded with the faintest answer.
His men were coming for him.
* * *
The distant whistle came like music to Galahir’s ears. After all the interminable nights of searching and leaving the forest each dawn with an ever diminishing hope, at last: a sign.
“Was that-?” Banak queried at his side as he withdrew his fingers from his mouth.
“Yes,” Galahir breathed. “That was Khalvir. He answered us.” Galahir could hear the relief and joy in his own voice. The exhaustion lifted from his shoulders.
His friend was alive!
* * *
9
Building Trust
She did not come back.
The next morning came and went. Every so often he caught himself staring hopefully into the sheltering leaves and branches, waiting for them to move and for her face to appear. But as the slanting light shifted direction, he knew that she was not coming.
She had promised to return and she had not. He knew he should feel relieved. The more he saw her, the greater his feeling of confusion grew. He could not afford to fall into the trap of caring for her more than he already did. His men were coming for him, he would soon be away from her hold on him and know his own heart once more.
Nevertheless, the disappointment stung and he was angry. He should have known better than to trust an elf witch. He could not understand how he had so easily forgotten a whole lifetime of learning after just a few days of knowing her. This betrayal brought home just how much of a fool he had already been.
Furious, he paced around his prison like a cornered spear cat. In the deepest recess of his heart, he knew it was not the sense of betrayal that made him fractious; it was the fear. She had not struck him as one who would break her word easily. Something had happened.
Anxiety clutched at his heart at the thought of what could have befallen her. Perhaps she was dead, discovered by her people. A chill swept through him and he sank stiffly to the ground. His limbs ached. He was exhausted. Sleeping on bare rock night after night was taking its toll. Where is she?
Hunger gnawed. The elf’s food was hardly enough. He struggled to keep his thoughts from imagining hunks of sizzling meat straight from the campfire. But at least what she had brought was adequate to sustain him, to keep the terrible hunger at bay. Now she was gone. He would not survive without her.
He felt a fresh wave of annoyance for having let himself become so dependent on her visits. It had cost him. He should have been seeking ways to escape, not looking forward to the next time he would look into her eyes. He pushed away the crushing thought that he might never see them again. He could not entertain such thoughts now. He should not be having them anyway.
He whistled hopefully but there was no reply. After that first faint answer the previous night, he had heard no more. He began to fear he had imagined it but, real or not, for now he was on his own. His eyes went to the walls. Time to do what he should have done from the start. It was time to get out of this pit. He tested his muscles. He still hadn’t returned to full strength but it would have to be enough. Now the elf was gone, he was only going to grow weaker. It was now or never.
He studied the walls of his prison. They were not as smooth as they appeared at first glance. He was sure he could manage it. He listened, aware that it was not only this pit that ensnared him. He could hear nothing from above. Only the usual sounds of the forest that never rested. A wolf pack had to go and hunt sometime. He would just have to be careful that he was not the target.
Determination hardening with every moment, he selected the most likely place for escape; the roughest part of the wall he could find. The foot and hand holds barely earned the title but they would do.
His first attempt landed him back on the rock after he had climbed no higher than his own shoulder. That sequence of holds would get him nowhere. He moved to try a different route. Then another as that proved just as futile.
As the Light Bringer began to wane somewhere unseen, her fading light found Khalvir battered, bruised and close to exhaustion. Each attempt had pitched him hard to the waiting rock below. His leg screamed at the abuse. It was a testament to the she-elf that it had not yet re-broken. He forced the thought of her from his mind. There was one more route left to try.
He clambered back to his feet. Setting his will and ignoring the pain of his body, he faced down his enemy, catching hold of the first hand hold for the final time. He was careful, choosing only the tried and tested grips, no matter how far he had to reach. Up he went. And up. His heart began to beat faster. This was higher than he had yet achieved. Up. His legs and arms shook from the effort of clinging with the barest tips of his fingers and toes. He gritted his teeth and fought on. Only the slight overhang could stop him now. Victory was in his grasp. He paused gathering his remaining strength, then went forward.
His weight yanked him back, threatening to plunge him into the depths below. It was impossible. He was almost inverted with the ground when his hold failed. His stomach found his throat as he tumbled away into the darkness. He seemed to fall forever though he knew in reality it only lasted for a few sickening heartbeats. He crashed into the waiting rock, his right hand beneath him. He felt it when the bones in his fingers shattered.
Stifling the scream that wanted to break past his lips, he panted against the pain and propped himself, one-handed, into a sitting position at the bottom of the rock wall. Wincing, he looked down at his crooked and now useless fingers. Agony ripped up and down his arm. He removed the hand from his hazing vision and put it gingerly on the cold rock, hoping to numb the sensation. The bitter tang of defeat washed over his tongue. There would be no escape for him. Not now.
This pit would be his tomb.
That was the last thought he had before unconsciousness pulled him under.
Something warm was touching his hand. He was freezing and the warmth was soothing. Consciousness returned slowly. Everywhere hurt. He didn’t think there was any part of his body that wasn’t bruised. The sharp ache in his fingers shot up his arm as he twitched them unconsciously. The warmth tempered it.
Warmth.
He opene
d his eyes.
And she was there, like the magical being that she was, appearing and disappearing in the darkness. It felt like a dream and he drifted with it. She did not know that she was being watched. Her eyes were intent on studying his hand as she traced his rough skin with the delicate tips of her fingers.
He had never studied her face this close before. She was beautiful, he realised. Her large indigo eyes that so captivated his soul were in turns as easy for him to read as a game trail and yet as mysterious as the Sacred Pools within the mountains. The colour of them off set honey shade of her smooth skin. Framing all was the black waterfall of her hair.
Quite suddenly, he wanted to reach out and catch the stray strand that blew across her face, just to see if it was as soft as it looked. His tomb suddenly seemed that much brighter.
And that frightened him. The veil of the dream lifted.
“Don’t.”
The sound of his voice startled her. He felt a stab of loss as she hastily dropped his hand and he was quick to hide the broken fingers from sight. “Don’t what?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Creep up on me. I don’t like it. I could hurt you and I gave you my word that I would not.” No one had ever been able to creep up on him like she had just done while he slept.
“I’m sorry.” She looked contrite. “I did not mean to.” She nodded at the hand he had hidden from her, frowning. “What have you been doing?”
He felt the first stirrings of annoyance with her. Here she was, alive and well after making him think she was dead, after letting him think he would die here. Here she was once again stirring feelings in him that he should not have. He should not let her get so close. He had vowed to not let her touch him.
