Her comment touched on the main point that Kestrel was stuck on as he debated his future. He hadn’t asked to be trained as a spy; he didn’t envision himself as a spy. He thought he was a normal elf guard, despite his mixed heritage; he could pass as an elf much more easily than he could pass as a human. But he realized that Silvan might have some compelling argument that he wouldn’t be able to deny, and that was what he feared – that he would be persuaded to agree to try to be a spy for the elves.
So when the two of them arrived in Center Trunk, he decided to go with Vinetia to her squad’s barracks, and spend the night there, rather than report to Silvan’s office so late at night, so that he could put off for a few more hours the conversation that he feared to participate in. He fell into an empty bunk and slept in his clothes, then arose groggily in the morning at the sound of others starting to stir, and slipped away from the barracks quarters.
He knew he had to go see Silvan, much as he dreaded the thought. With slow steps he walked through the morning air that was dense with mist, shrouding his view as he journeyed around the base, and he walked past his destination once before he realized that he had missed it in the fog. Minutes later he was on the steps, then up the stairs to the doorway to Silvan’s office, where Giardell was already standing on duty.
“Guardsman Kestrel, reporting for duty,” he spoke to Giardell, “as ordered by Colonel Silvan.”
“The colonel’s not here yet,” Giardell replied, looking at Kestrel in a manner that weighed his appropriateness for an audience with the spy master of the elves. “He won’t be here for a bit more this morning. Why don’t you go to the baths and clean yourself up so you’ll be more presentable?”
It was a question, but clearly a strong suggestion, and Kestrel decided to act on it. At the very mention of the word bath he had imagined how refreshing it would feel to soak in hot water.
“I’ll go do that. Which way are they?” he replied, and listened to the directions Giardell gave.
“Tell the colonel I was here early and I’ll be directly back,” Kestrel asked, and then he was down the hall and down the stairs, leaving Giardell to muse whether the youngster was up to the challenge that Silvan had planned for him.
When Kestrel returned to the office door an hour later, he looked and felt better. Giardell left him standing in the hallway while the guard went into the office, then returned and motioned for Kestrel to enter.
Inside, Silvan sat at his desk, crisp, clean and alert to start the day, making Kestrel glad that he had taken his bath and improved his own state before the meeting.
“Welcome back, Kestrel. You’ve been hard at work in Firheng, I understand,” Silvan began.
“Yes sir, I tried to do everything they taught me,” he answered cautiously.
“And you’ve heard about the disaster we’ve suffered?” Silvan questioned.
“The fire and the battle?” Kestrel clarified. “Yes.”
“Vinetia filled you in? That’s good,” Silvan responded. “We lost an enormous number of guard members, probably the worst loss in the lifetime of anyone alive today. We weren’t prepared for that type of attack, and our lack of knowledge and preparation hurt our people badly.
“I understand you lost a couple of acquaintances too, Kestrel. I’m sorry about that,” he added.
“A couple?” Kestrel asked. “Vinetia told me about Lucretia; was there someone else?”
Silvan paused and closed his eyes, while his fingers rubbed circles around his temples. “I’m sorry, I forgot that you wouldn’t have any way of knowing. The majority of our casualties came from the Elmheng contingent of guards; you probably knew several of them, but I was thinking of Commander Mastrim.”
Kestrel’s vision grew blurry, and his throat felt thick. “Commander Mastrim?” he echoed in disbelief.
Silvan let only a momentary pause pass. “The Commander died bravely, and helped save the lives of others. When it became apparent that our guards were in a tight situation, Mastrim led a charge directly into the humans. He and virtually everyone with him were killed, and the rest were captured and taken away to be made slaves. Mastrim sent the rest of our guards back into the forest, and at least a few were able to work their way around the fire and bring us back news of the defeat. The rest perished.”
Kestrel was taking deep breaths, trying to overcome the shock he felt. Mastrim was dead, which was terrible. Now Cheryl and her mother were alone in Elmheng without him. And others had died as well; Backsin and many of his other friends in Elmheng were probably victims of the human attack; he hadn’t thought about the losses. The idea of a battle had been abstract and nebulous, other than the report of Lucretia’s death; now it grew oppressively real.
“It is a terrible thing,” Silvan said. “Even here in Center Trunk, the people know it is a terrible thing to lose so many of our guards in a war, especially a war we didn’t even know was coming, because we didn’t have agents among the humans to give us warning.”
“Are they going to attack again? Are they going to burn down more of the forest? Do you want me to go pray to Kai to make the rains come again?” Kestrel asked.
“We don’t understand what they plan to do,” Silvan answered. “After they won the battle, and after the forest fire had consumed itself burning all those trees, they took their great machines, and their army, and their captives, and they left. They’re completely gone, and we don’t know where or why or for how long.
“They could come next month, but probably not too much later than that because they’ll be getting into the rainy season and winter. Or they may come back in the spring and start a real offensive against us – they may burn a trail of conquest all the way to Elmheng for all we know,” the colonel told Kestrel.
“We need your help Kestrel, even more than Commander Mastrim or I realized. We need you to go over to the human side and spy on them for us, so we can find out what their plans are,” Silvan said.
“I’m not ready to be a spy, my instructors said so,” Kestrel automatically replied.
“We’re not talking about immediately; we’ll send you back to Firheng for more training, before we send you out to the humans. My gut tells me that they will not attack again before the spring. We’ll have time to train and transport you so that you can infiltrate their army, learn what they have planned, and bring the information back to us.”
“I’m not ready, and I’m not human,” Kestrel repeated and enhanced his refusal.
“You are our best hope of preparing for the next attack, so that we can get revenge for the deaths of Lucretia and Mastrim. We don’t want to see others die just as pointlessly,” Silvan said intently. “I know this is asking a lot of you Kestrel, more than is fair to ask. But I believe you can do this, and you have the friendship of two sets of gods. You will be protected.”
“I’m not human,” Kestrel returned to his strongest argument. “My ears may not look perfect among elves, but they look even less like human ears, and my eyebrows are still strong for a human.”
“We can change that,” Silvan said haltingly. “We believe we can change your appearance. You’ve already got a build that’s almost human. You would fit in as if you were one of them.”
Kestrel’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What do you have in mind?” he asked suspiciously, worried about what Silvan would propose.
“We have a doctor who can cut your ears so that they look human,” Silvan said. “They’ll grow back to about the shape they are now, but it will take a couple of years. You’ll have plenty of time to move about among the humans before there’s a problem.”
Kestrel flinched at the thought of someone carving his flesh, cutting away pieces of his ear as though it were a piece of clay to sculpt into shape. He knew that ears could regenerate, unlike among humans; one of his friends had lost part of an ear, and it had regrown within a few months. It hadn’t taken two years.
“Are you sure they’d grow back? I’m elven enough?” he asked.
“
We think so,” Silvan said. “Honestly, Kestrel, we won’t know for sure until we go through with this, but we believe that since you’re three quarters elf, and your ears are mostly elven, they should grow back.”
“And if they don’t, I can just keep spying for you anyway?” Kestrel asked cynically.
“That thought has crossed my mind,” Silvan admitted. “But I really don’t think it will happen. I think that in two years’ time Lucretia or Mastrin wouldn’t even know anything had even been done to you.”
“How will the doctor cut it?” Kestrel asked, realizing that he was considering the question.
“We’ll knock you out so that you’re insensible – probably with ale, lots of ale,” Silvan explained. “And then it will be a very quick matter of a few snips and sewing some of the flesh back in place so that it grows back the right way. You could go back to Firheng right away, and the ears could heal while you continued your practices and studies.
“In a couple of months you’d be ready to go on some training excursions, and then you’d have the chance to go out on your own to help us protect the Eastern Forest,” Silvan finished.
“May I think about it?” Kestrel asked, fearful that he was going to say yes, fearful that he was going to be turned into a human, and never return to being an elf. Even with his semi-outsider status as a mixed breed member of the society, he felt a devotion to the Elven race and culture, and Silvan made everything sound a little too simple.
“Of course Kestrel. We’re asking a lot of you. Take some time to think about it, but don’t forget how much good you could potentially do. We might be able to turn the tables and defeat the very forces that killed Mastrin and Lucretia,” Silvan pressed him. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow morning and let me know what you’ve decided.
“You probably haven’t toured the city ever, have you?” Silvan asked. “Here,” he scribbled a note hastily, and gave it to Kestrel, standing to reach across his desk. “Give this to Giardell, and he’ll arrange for you to have a guide give you a tour of the city today, so you can relax and enjoy seeing the sights.”
“Thank you, sir,” Kestrel replied, standing, ready to leave the office and the sight of the wise face across the desk, the face that made the arguments that compelled him to want to agree to do everything asked of him.
He walked to the door and let himself out, then handed the note to Giardell. “The colonel said to give this to you,” he explained.
Giardell read it momentarily, then handed it back. “Go down to the first floor and go to the last door on the left, on the street side of the building. Give the note to Alicia and tell her she’s assigned to take you on a tour today.”
“Just like that?” Kestrel asked, surprised at the ease of the delegation of the duty.
“Just like that, you’ll be on your way to being led around the city by someone who was born and raised here. She’ll show you things you’ll never think to ask to see,” Giardell confirmed.
“A whole day’s worth? How much is there to see?” Kestrel skeptically quizzed.
“You’ll find out if you go see Alicia,” Giardell told him. First floor, last door on the left,” he gave a motion as if he were brushing Kestrel away, but it felt as though it were a friendly gesture, urging him to go off to have fun.
Kestrel turned and walked down the hallway, wondering how much fun he could have as he contemplated a future with painful bodily mutilation, cultural alienation, and a dangerous immersion in the land of a foreign race.
Downstairs he proceeded to the proper door and knocked. There was a moment of silence, then the sound of movement, and then a muffled voice called, “Come in.”
“So you’re Kestrel?” the girl in the room asked. She was sitting behind a desk, a desk that was covered in paper, and she looked as though she were engaged in an effort to organize the mounds of information before her.
“Yes; how’d you know?” he asked.
“Colonel Silvan asked if I could lead someone named Kestrel around the city today,” she said matter-of-factly. She shuffled another pile of papers, then stood and looked at him directly. “Of course I told him yes – who’s going to say ‘no’ to the colonel? And then you’ve walked in, a stranger, so it seems logical that you’d be Kestrel.”
She had dark hair, unusually dark for an elf, and it was piled high atop her head in a style that Kestrel had seldom seen before. She was dressed in a uniform, a military jacket over a blouse, along with a matching skirt, something else that Kestrel had rarely seen. All in all, her appearance was of someone who seemed naturally inclined to work behind a desk, and who would want to work behind a desk.
“If you’ve got work to do, we don’t have to go,” Kestrel motioned to the piles of paper.
“I better go,” she said, without warmth. “The colonel must have asked me for a reason.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked, stepping around her desk towards him.
He shook his head at the question, thinking to himself that if he knew what there was to see, he wouldn’t need a guide. “I’ve only seen this base and the field where the archery competition was held,” he told her. “Anything else would be new to me.”
“Let’s go to the palace,” she said decisively, and she walked past him to the door, then out of the room without a backward glance, leaving Kestrel to hastily exit the room as well, closing the door behind him as he hurried down the hallway to catch up.
Kestrel had never had a tour before, and hadn’t known what to expect, but the next hour was not what he would have guessed a tour could be. He and Alicia walked side by side through the streets of the city, and never spoke a word to each other. Kestrel tried to ask questions about their surroundings twice, but received no answer from his guide, and so he passively walked beside her, looking about at the buildings and trees and people that were traveling through the city in the morning. He let his mind wander just as his body wandered, and his imagination worked to assign duties and missions to the people he saw. Some were easy, such as the woman carrying two large loaves of bread, or the small boy lugging a large pail of water away from a well.
But others were mysteries to him, such as the quartet of guards in splendid uniforms, marching in precise step along one narrow side street, no evidence of military or regal service needed in the area, or the elves carrying bundles of firewood towards a pile of timber on a street corner.
The day grew warmer as they progressed, and the sun rose higher in the sky above. Alicia stopped suddenly, and Kestrel stopped too, wondering what the reason was for the halt to their urban march. They were in a nondescript residential area, Alicia having swerved off a main boulevard for the first time.
“You go over there; I’ll be in here for a little while,” she gestured to a small courtyard as she directed him, then pointed at an adjacent building as she talked about herself.
“Is everything okay?” Kestrel asked.
Alicia didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she placed her hands behind her head, and within her hair, so that after a few moments of deft finger movements, the pile came off in her hand, revealing a daringly short haircut for a female elf, one that was little more than twice the length of Kestrel’s own. He stared at her in amazement, seeing her in a completely different way, her eyes suddenly appearing large and captivating, her ears prominently revealed, the delicate whorls enticing. She then pulled on one sleeve of her jacket, and tugged it off before she switched hands and juggled her hairpiece so that she could pull herself free from the other jacket sleeve as well.
She wore a sheer white blouse beneath the jacket, and her further transformation made Kestrel’s eyes bulge from his head in astonishment at the suddenly attractive profile she showed. “It’s too hot to walk through the city dressed like this,” she explained, her arms spread wide, each hand holding one of her removed items.
“This is my father’s building; I’m going to go in here and change into some cooler clothes, and then we can carry on,” she added, and as she
did, Kestrel noticed the moisture on her blouse as it clung to her body, evidence of her warmth.
“I’ll wait there,” he agreed, dumbfounded, and ambled towards the courtyard as she turned her back to him and went into the building nearby. The neighborhood wasn’t seedy, but it wasn’t far from it, Kestrel judged, observing both the lack of maintenance of the buildings as well as the dress and the attitudes of the passers-by.
He sat on a stone bench and watched the leaves in the bushes tussle in the breeze, his eyes half closed, when he heard a sudden high-pitched scream, one that jerked him to his feet, and sent him running in panic towards the source, the building where Alicia was changing outfits.
He crossed the threshold of the doorway she had entered, and saw a dim, narrow passageway. He had no clue which direction to move towards, when he heard another scream, in a voice he thought was Alicia’s, coming from the upper floor of the building, somewhere in the back. He charged up the steps, and saw shadows in motion as he reached the upper hallway.
He ran down the hallway to the open door, where he saw the source of the shadows; two men were shoving and abusing Alicia, who was nearly undressed, pushing her back and forth forcefully between one another as though she were a plaything, a toy they could bat around the way a cat played with its prey at times.
Glancing around, Kestrel noticed a broom leaning against the wall next to the door he occupied. Without hesitation he grabbed the broom, and began to wield it as though it were a battle staff, rushing at and jabbing the handle at the two ruffians, knocking their heads, poking their stomachs, whacking their knees. The two were unprepared for the assault, one which Kestrel launched with ease, without even consciously considering the moves he was making. The stick flowed fluidly back and forth, even as the two assailants changed the direction of their action and came towards Kestrel, leaving Alicia slumped and dazed on the floor where they abandoned her.
The frontal assault on Kestrel never reached him. He furiously began to bludgeon the two men as they attempted to fight him, and their courage broke after only a few moments of focused attack. With arms covering their heads, they fled around Kestrel and out the door, the sounds of their stomping boots echoing down the hallway. Kestrel began to chase them, then heard Alicia softly moan as he departed the room. He stopped, turned, and re-entered the chambers where she lay on the floor. There was blood running from her nose, and she wore a pair of skivvies, but there was not much else covering her skin.
The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 01 - The Healing Spring Page 14
