“The front Lander forces, startled into action, attacked with no orders. I scrambled forward through the forest to the side of the clearing and climbed a high tree to get a good view of the crazed faces I saw on the ground. Landers and dTelfur alike lost control and fought viciously. But the dTelfur had no experience or history of combat and they quickly fell to the mightier forces. At the rear of the dTelfur contingent, Konifer stood high, calling frantically to the forces of nature for magic to aid his army. He demanded it honor his request of a doorway of distance to remove the Lander forces to a further plain as he watched his courageous people bleeding.
“I saw then, a circle of robed Landers who were exposed by the rushing front forces that had been intended to protect them. These five bloodmages hurriedly demanded a rift of time to destroy the initial enemy forces. They planned to gain themselves time before the full dTelfur army arrived.
“Both requests (for such is the true nature of conjuring) were hurriedly demanded and as Nature is wont to do, she granted both silly demands with a twist of her own capriciousness.
“Where the two spells met, a rift was created.
“I saw a blinding explosion at the center of the clash. An odd light expanded outwards like a package being opened and snow fell where it had passed. It stretched a broad distance across the burnt forest enclosing nearly all of both armies. A small point of skirmishing troops were left outside the edge and they continued killing each other as the light reached its circumference, pulsed once as if stretching to make sure it had reached as far as it could and then collapsed back in until it stood, one short gleaming path in the air fading away until it was merely a lightless shimmer as air over a flame. And where the winter light had touched, all were gone. The already dead and fighting wounded at the center, the mage circle, the troops from both sides, our dTelfur leader, the Lander queen. It took several moments for the few and scattered troops fighting on the periphery to become aware of the change. Some were struck down as they failed to parry a blow in their distraction. Many at the backs of the ranks who had watched the expansion/contraction of the circle of winter and now found themselves looking at an enemy a battlefield away, went mad.
“One Lander mage who had abandoned society as a young man had come out to watch the battle when the troops had passed his cottage. As the world usually works in ways man cannot comprehend, the mage happened to look up and see me. He noted the boy in the tree, then turned his back on the foolishness and went home.
“I watched as the few remaining dTelfur turned to run and were chased down by Lander soldiers. Geonn, the partner, one step beyond the circle of light when it pulsed and took his queen, ordered those guarde to cease their pursuit. And when they ignored him and killed their quarry, my friends, Geonn had them executed upon their return. Most didn’t return. The partner ordered his royal wing, what remained of the royal wing, to scout forward and report on the location of the next dTelfur contingent. I was climbing down to follow them when I heard his scream. I crawled out on a swaying branch to see Geonn standing unsteadily, pierced in the chest with a clumsy wooden dTelfur spear. A woman was running from him. She didn’t scream as a Lander guarde sliced her head clean off. Blood geysered from both wounds.
“‘dTelfur bitch! We will revenge ourselves on all your people for this, dTelfur lizard!’ The guarde spit on her body and tracked her blood through the grass at the field edge. The woman’s head rolled into the circle, but none of the brave guarde recaptured it. None even spit on it. None dared disturb the black circle of dirt that moments ago had held grass, tree stumps, friends, and enemies. The woman’s head did not disappear. It lay in the dirt and washed the rich soil in blood as her cheeks went pale. A breeze ruffled her hair from its braids into the sticky dirt. She was a plain woman with a thin nose and pointy chin. And she was not dTelfur.
“The wing of Landers beat me to my home. They traveled double-time expecting at every moment to meet the bulk of our force whereas I traveled in shock, watching behind me for fear of a Lander spear spitting me. They slept with two guarde and traveled with weapons unsheathed. I slept where I fell, under bushes or in the middle of wheat patches. They forded the Sapproach upstream from our bridge. In three days they reached the sleeping dragons. They encountered not one dTelfur in their entire journey. They searched the area. They found no dTelfur anywhere. They returned slowly to the leaderless Lander forces to inform their dead partner that what the Landers had believed to be the initial enemy forces had in fact been the entire dTelfur people.”
Scademann lifted his mug to his lips with still hands and turned his gaze from me to the distant landscape. “Not one dTelfur remained.”
The sounds of the dancesquare floated around the house to us; children laughing, stomping feet, voices singing nonsense in the band’s absence, even a man’s passionate whisper reached us from across the pond. We watched Scademann regard Nanda staring at the Dormounts. Her hair, for once released from its braids, rustled in the light evening breeze. It hung to her waist now and reflected the gold of the full moon, glinting red when a candleflame tilted her way.
She reached up and brushed a strand behind her ear. “What about the boy?”
“Pardon?”
“The boy.” She shivered a little. “The narrator. The young dTelfur boy who followed the forces and climbed the tree.”
I pulled a blanket from the back of the couch I sat on and took it to Nanda. “That’s how my guardian Mobious told me the tale. He told it from a little boy’s view to make it more interesting for me when I was a little boy.”
She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and glanced over her shoulder at me.
The caller spoke quietly to her, “There is a rumor.”
“Scade,” Girard stood and crossed for a refill from the bottle on the sideboard, guaranteeing its popular success, “wishful thinking cannot erase our sins.”
Scademann held out his glass to Girard and watched Nanda, “There is a rumor that some dTelfur survived and have bred in the wild.” Failing to get a refill from Girard, he began inching forward to climb out of the comfy chair. “Where did you say you were from, my not-a-lady?”
Nanda turned her gaze from me then. She laughed at him and left her place at the porch stairs, releasing the blanket into my arms. I had never imagined the possibility that Nanda might be dTelfur and I tried to search out her face for some hint that Scademann’s hunch may be correct.
“There is a tale in me,” she said, taking his cup from him, “that you will never call. But,” She smiled obligingly up at Girard and held out the cup which the towering ex-guarde filled, “I am not the surviving dTelfur.”
The surviving dTelfur. Ha. Scademann was speculating on the possibility of descendants of the dTelfur of 169ath. But three days later we were to meet up with Yenay, a forty-two frseason teenage son of a mother who had known Konifer personally yet looked not much older than Nanda who herself looked much younger than her twenty-five years. So much to share and I’m stuck here on the side of this mountain in America with no way to get home and help my people.
∞
I am not totally unhappy here. When I can let go of that which I can do nothing about, then I enjoy my new life. Nanda is calmer now. She doesn’t curl up in a ball and hide herself from me when we sleep. She even flirted with me a little last night. After we returned Kelly to Faite’s home, I joined Nanda at Murphy’s pub where she played and sang for some extra money so that we can move indoors before it gets cold. I surprised her by picking up the instrument during her break and playing Silent Night. I didn’t sing and she recognized it anyway. After she wrestled the guitar back from me to the approval of the entire crowd, she surprised me.
Her eyes twinkled, not entirely from the beers, as she looked at me over the wood. She twisted the knobs and plucked a few strings. Then she looked down, strummed once, and shut her eyes.
“Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?”
She made sounds come out of that p
iece of wood you would have never thought possible. I’ve been humming the song ever since I heard it on the car radio weeks ago. She had told me, emphatically, that she could not possibly recreate an entire big band on her little acoustic. But she played it! And the old men in the corner stomped their feet and sang along screaming about poor Caldonia’s hard head. One of them even stood up and sang out nonsense, sounding just like a horn from the radio. I couldn’t sit still and she struggled to keep playing while laughing at my clumsy dancing. The horn singer bought us both drinks and we bought him drinks and the bar bought us all drinks and the evening got plain ridiculous after that.
Later, when most everyone had gone but our old singing stomping friends and the barman, Nanda praised me for all the world to hear. She told them that I was the best darts player they’d ever meet. The challenge was accepted and I played against each of the men there and was almost bested by the one wife who showed up to collect her sodden man.
But we triumphed and we took all their money and they invited us back to do the same next Thursday, the fifth day of their seven sun standard. And none of it meant anything to me for Nanda was holding my hand when we stumbled finally out to the car in the cool blue light of dawn.
She smiled at me through the haze, “You’re okay Geoffrey Kaveg. I might not be so stupid after all.”
And here she comes now, out into the late morning sunlight, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her hair is a tangled mess, falling out of its braids and tickling her neck. She stumbled in the doorway of the tent with a hand reaching out for nothing to steady herself. Her head is probably throbbing like mine was until I made this tea.
“Good morning, songbird!”
She's peeling her eyes open under a shading hand and slowly identifying me, “Shut up.”
And she’s going to spend the whole day with Kelly and me since Faite has flown out of town without her again. Joy!
Thirteen
∞Nanda Junior’s journal∞
Summer
Somewhere far west of Tyurae, Kaveg
It’s hot. It’s really hot. Traveling isn’t so easy now and in addition to my sliced up arm, I’ve got a nasty bruise on the back of my thigh from that thing with Arinaud, One of Five. Geoffrey is furious with me for that. I argue with him when he tries to mention that I should try to be less violent, less active, but he’s right. I should take better care of myself. I need to take it easier on my body.
I think I’m in denial. It’s awfully hard to be, but I think I’m managing. It’s just that Geoffrey is so much more prepared for the future—for my future—than I am. He makes us stop every couple of hours to put my legs up and try to reduce the swelling and he’s slowed our pace. I don’t think it’s purely for my sake though. He’s scared. Although each delay increases the likelihood that the five will catch us and I would only be a hindrance this time in a close fight.
This is the first I’ve thought to write since we ran from Forte. We spent a very long time in the woods just walking away from the massacre. We took turns sleeping and I did think about writing during my watch but I was too scared. And I didn’t want to write about anything I’d seen. Then we got to Torscreek and there were so many things I had to learn. People are different here. That seems a silly thing to say. But really, deep down in who they are, they’re different, as a society, as individuals. I’m glad we have this time now on the plains. I’ve been confused almost constantly, trying to fit in. Now we’re alone again except for Toss.
I should join the boys. Geoffrey is wandering about over there under our shade tree with the guitar strung over his shoulder working on my Christmas present to him. He has a special relationship with music. He’s got a great ear; loves my playing, but he can’t get his fingers to do what he wants. I figured it would be easy to teach him cause he’s got coordination from the swordplay, sensitivity from the healing, and he loves singing. Can’t put two consonant notes together to save his life, but he’s got a nice voice. We worked out some sweet duets with him banging out rhythm while we were in the castle. The unicorns didn’t care, but the sapets generally found something else to do when I let him sing along.
∞
“Like you could do better?” I threw a spoon at the deserting sapets and jumped back in at the next chord change. But Geoffrey had stopped singing.
He looked at me in shock. “You’re defending my singing.”
“I have decided to celebrate the spirit of the Christmas season. I’ve lost track of the date but it’s got to be late December.”
“What’s the Christmas season?”
A few sapets were returning since Geoffrey had apparently stopped his howling...ly funny rendition of The Bear Necessities, one of the first songs I’d taught him—I discovered, quickly, it was easier to listen to bad Disney than bad Simon and Garfunkle. Jade and his constant companion, Purplish, resettled themselves in the pillows beside me on the hearth. We all generally ended up in my room for these little gatherings. Geoffrey and I found the little room we’d spent that first night in to be a kind of comfort zone and his room didn’t have a fur rug or a spit on the fire.
I smiled at the two birds. I can’t help but think of them as birds though it gets under Geoffrey’s skin when I misname them. They look like doves to me. Or pigeons, some of them. Doves and pigeons are the same creature anyway, right? People just call pure white pigeons doves cause it sounds more romantic. Well these sapets are not white. They’re red or yellow or blue or pink or whatever. The ones I think of as doves, like Jade, are painted a single bright color. Sapets like Purpelish who was mainly a dark purple with yellowish stains around her neck and belly, I think of as pigeons. The only argument that Geoffrey can get past me was that the sapets don't have the same little feet as birds. They had claws. Honest to goodness opposable thumb type claws like really tiny little Brontesauri. And they have strong musical opinions.
“Christmas is a holiday, a festival with really great songs.” I fingerpicked a counterpoint as I sang my sister’s favorite carol.
Geoffrey said it was the prettiest song he’d ever heard. Said it reminded him of the few quiet evenings he spent with his Mum and Da before they left. So, that was my Christmas present to him. I taught him the chord changes to Silent Night. It’s a pretty silent evening out here on the plain, except for his strumming.
There is a really good reason they call it a ‘plain.’ Because it is plain. It’s boring. A copse of trees here or there to break the monotony of the landscape or a random herd of something or other charging through or just grazing, but mostly the plain is grass. Miles and miles; days of grass. Brown grass. Green grass. Wheatlike grass and thornlike. Some of it edible, some of it poisonous. Toss says if we had continued on our original course we would have skirted around the great plain as villages preferred to have trees around for some feeling of coverage. There had been a couple of small villages out on the plains but when the dragon awoke, those few families ran for cover and were taken in by the people of the forests. Their houses had been leveled by the dragon so no markers remained of where entire villages had once stood.
Toss is crouched by the campfire stirring up some delicacy I don’t want identified and spicing it up with what’s left of the supplies Kivern collected for us in Tyurae last month. At least I think it’s been a little over a month since we gave Fierell and Arinaud a reprieve.
We’d thought we’d be staying in Tyurae longer. Geoffrey was considering revealing himself to his Aunt Fierell, asking what happened at Forte, who had attacked them, and did she know about the massacre. He remembered not liking his aunt, or his parents not liking her, but he hadn’t seen her since his parents’ funeral and Mobious kept him far from her then, so he was confused about his position regarding her. Or hers regarding him. I managed to clarify both.
∞
Kivern was escorting me about the village. I had wanted to go exploring by myself while Geoffrey visited the people in his guise as a traveling healer but she would have none of it. Said she h
adn’t had a free day in quarters and she’d love to give me a tour of her home. I was disappointed because I had been hoping to find somewhere out of Geoffrey’s sight to get in a good workout. Still, she was an interesting woman, rather serious but she had a good head on her shoulders and gave me a concise rundown of Fierell’s arrival with her entire armed entourage and the subsequent changes in the political and daily life of the villagers. We’d been in the Tyurae a few days and we’d both noticed that most of the people we met didn’t like to talk politics outside of the little pub that was kept free of the newcomers—Fierell’s people, not us—by having no name, no sign, and no front door. But Kivern and her bond, Denn, were vocal supporters of the circlet and they didn’t kowtow to the Forte refugees.
She kept me from the main thoroughfares, leading me instead through a series of side streets that had me completely lost in no time. She introduced me to everyone we ran into and each of them stopped what they were doing to talk to us. A baker went down to his ovens and handed me a fresh apple pastry out of a little window at the base of the house. A musician named Wolf sitting on the porch behind a wine merchant’s shop taught me the basics of his three-string loate. Then he unstrung a guiert from his back which was exactly like the guitar-type instrument I had taken with me from Forte and we traded ballads. I played Dave Brubeck’s, Softly William Softly and Wolf returned with Stedon’s Defeat which told the tale of the first time that Geoffrey’s parents, Stedon and Laurienel, met. Apparently they had twelve and thirteen—whoa, I’m writing like a Kavegan. Geoffrey’s parents were twelve and thirteen respectively when she stopped by Forte on her way from Stray Tor up to Voferen Kahago to prepare for the circlet. After her arrival, Stedon confessed to her brother, his foster brother Geoffe, the first, that he was in love with her. The twelve frseason Geoffe jumped on him and eventually pinned him in the dirt behind the stables, making him swear that Stedon would never look at his sister again.
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