by T. O. Munro
He would not have taken her with him, if it could have been avoided, but he knew she would not like to be left behind and in truth he did not like to leave her. He was a keen student of the rage that bubbled within her. He had dragged her spitting and screaming from a confrontation with the necromancer. He could taste when it was time to distract her and when it was time to let her roam alone. Though well intentioned, he did not think that any other of his own people, still less of Glyndower’s would be able to manage her as he had.
“What if these dead stir, just like the others?” Persapha asked. “What if they come at us?”
Vlyndor began to edge down the slope. “It was only the necromancer’s will that made them angry. Without him, and I do not see his scarlet cloak here, then I am sure no karib would harm another, even a karib summoned from death by that man’s malice.”
“I don’t trust him,” Persapha said, following her adopted father down the slope. “He could be anywhere.”
They trod warily around the fallen skeletons, but none rose to challenge them, or even raised so much as a pure white knuckle at their passing. Vlyndor was halfway through the field of skeletons when he realised the medusa had stopped, standing stock still. He spun round, alarmed that maybe a land shark had seized her, though the long walk across the desert had shown that most of Grithsank’s denizens shied away from the aberration that was the medusa.
He hurried back to her side. “What is it?”
She pointed at the ground. A scrap of scarlet cloth no bigger than her hand lay half buried in the sand. Vlyndor bent low and brushed the sand aside. There was more cloth, a sleeve, its bright patterns much faded by sunlight before it had been covered by the sand. Persapha knelt beside him, scraping at the dust with both hands. He had to wave a hand to quell her urgency. The fluttering of their digging could attract all manner of creatures that lived below the surface.
In more patient mode they uncovered the whole of it. A skeleton within a set of faded robes, no tail, its outstretched hand held five full fingers. A human. Vlyndor rolled it gently over, brittle bones fell from within the cloth. The ribs were missing. The sandsnake that had felled him would have feasted on his viscera. Vylndor had buried enough hollowed out bodies to know how these animals worked. They could devour a prone corpse from below, without once breaking the surface, or marking their victim’s backs.
He tried to stop Persapha from picking up the skull that had been left by the high cylindrical collar, but she had turned it in her hands before he could speak. It was only the back of a skull, the front was missing, a great void from forehead to lower jaw where the snake would have eaten its way into the ripe grey matter.
“Would he have suffered?” Persapha asked, placing the incomplete skull carefully on the ground.
Vlyndor watched her carefully as he answered, his tongue flicking out to taste her emotions. “A land shark devours whole, but a sandsnake paralyses its victims with a poison that incapacitates the body but keeps the meat alive and fresh. It can take days for a snake to eat a whole person, returning many times to feed.”
Persapha nodded slowly as she absorbed this information. She drew a deep breath, he caught a bitter taste on the wind, but then she breathed out. “He did not deserve to live, but there is no pleasure to be taken in another’s suffering,” she said.
Vlyndor smiled and tasted honey. She looked at him brightly. “You know what this means?”
“Yes,” he said, still smiling.
“It is safe for us to go home, for all of us to go home.”
***
It was not an uncomfortable cell and whatever fate awaited him, even death, Haselrig felt a freedom from fear he had not known in two decades. Rugan’s growled threats of vengeance were as the fury of an angry toddler compared to the dread which Maelgrum had constantly inspired. The half-elf could only kill him, while Maelgrum could and had done so much worse. He took the half made symbol from his pocket, the guards had not seen fit to take so plain an artefact from him. An imperfect crescent carved from wood, a token barely fit for a child. He stroked its outer edge as a long forgotten prayer found its way to his lips.
His reverie was broken by the opening of the cell door. He looked up and said, “you came then?”
The scarred girl stood in the doorway, the white haired sorceress at her shoulder. “I heard you had a message for me.” The girl stood tall, her eyes fierce, but there was a brittleness to her voice.
Haselrig nodded. The guard had done as he was bid and, whatever fate the half-elf’s justice might bestow, he could at least discharge one obligation laid on him.
“Your father asked that I speak with you.”
“My father?” She trembled a little and Elise reached to support her. But the girl shook off the woman’s hand and stepped into the small cell. “What did he tell you?”
Haselrig closed his eyes and summoned up that last image of Bishop Udecht alive. The bishop being swept from his workroom by two outlanders under Rondol’s orders, so calmly accepting of the fate that awaited him. “He said ‘Tell my daughter I am sorry and I loved her, from afar maybe, but always.’ His last thoughts were of you.”
Hepdida’s lip was trembling, her eyes widening a little in surprise at the emotion which seized her.
Elise’s expression was darker, a look of scorn accompanied her caustic demand, “Why would the bishop trust such a message to a traitor like you?”
Haselrig spread his arms as wide as the manacles would allow, accepting the rebuke within the question. “As Udecht said himself, who else was there for him to tell?”
“This is some trickery,” Elise thundered. She reached for Hepdida’s shoulder. “We should go, leave this traitor to contemplate his sins.”
Again the girl shook the sorceress aside and stepped further into the cell. “Tell me about him,” she said. “Tell me everything about him.”
And Haselrig did, everything he knew, everything he could remember, he told the scarred little girl. And she knelt on the floor before him, and listened her eyes sparkling, her cheeks damp. Haselrig reached towards the scars on her face and told how Maelgrum had marked her father with parallel dark stains of frostbite. He told how only the threat against his daughter had secured the bishop’s limited co-operation. He skated lightly around Udecht’s final fate, but the girl demanded detail seizing his arm and begging that he spare her nothing. He was grateful to confess that he had not been there at the end, that he had only recovered the bishop’s body from the crag it had been cast upon.
“I interred him beneath a pile of rocks on a low rise to the south of Morwencairn,” he told her. “He lay there still, quite at peace when last I called at the city.” Quintala’s unwarranted dallying at Morwencairn had given Haselrig many an opportunity to visit Udecht’s simple grave. He had been relieved to find it quite undisturbed, save for a small spray of flowers that lay upon it, and each morning a different humble bouquet had replaced the one left the night before.
He gripped the girl’s hand as she knelt head bowed before him. She would not let him see her face. “I have too many sins to beg any favour or forgiveness,” he told her. “But believe me when I say, I wish you and your cousin have the victory over Maelgrum. And when you do, I hope you will be able to grant your father a memorial more fitting to his courage than the one I could build.”
She sniffed and rose, still not meeting his eyes. “Thank you,” she said. Behind her the sorceress still glowered at Haselrig, the fury undimmed by the long minutes of silence as she had stood mute witness to his testimony. Her joints creaked as she stepped aside to let the girl past. They exchanged a brief look. The sorceress murmured a question too soft for Haselrig to hear. The girl replied, “I’m all right, I’ll be fine.”
He looked away from their private moment and heard the cell door swing shut. When he looked back Elise stood there still, alone, eyes bright and fierce, hands gripping her staff.
He arched his eyebrows in enquiry. He did not trust himself to sp
eak.
“Well,” she snapped. “Have you any message from my father, any word from beyond the grave to another abandoned daughter?”
Discomfort made him mute. This was a conversation he had not anticipated nor would he have chosen it.
“You were there when he died, you must have been.”
“I have been there when many men died,” he replied. “You must be more specific.” It was nerves, or maybe the emotional exhaustion of his exchange with the bishop’s daughter, which drove his unwise attempt at levity.
The sorceress bent and seized his chin as Rugan had done pressing harder than the half-elf, though the cracking of her knuckles meant the action must have pained her as much as it did Haselrig. “You know of whom I speak. I am not some girl to be fobbed off with a traitor’s crocodile remourse. I have twice Hepdida’s years all filled with suffering that someone must account for, someone must pay for. Now speak true and fast, how did Marius of Nanor die? Where lies his body, that I might honour him.”
He gulped and nodded his understanding while rage swept her onwards.
“You deceived my father with promise of money to pay for a cure, a cure to the curse your witch of an accomplice had bestowed on me and my sister.”
Again he nodded. “We needed your father,” He admitted. “My reading of Chirard’s writings showed where the Kinslayer had burrowed into the buried halls of Maelgrum. We needed access to the cell where he had concealed the entrance to that fire blasted passage. Your father held the keys, literally.”
“And when did you kill him? Where did you leave his remains?”
Haselrig drew a deep breath. This part was hard, harder than any story of sin he had so far told. “It wasn’t just his access to the cells we needed your father for. There was more.”
“What? Tell me, traitor.” Her eyes flicked back and forth across his face a sharp glint of suspicion seasoning the fury of her gaze.
He sighed and hoped he could tell it quick enough that she would let him finish before the rage seized her utterly. “The Vanquisher imprisoned Maelgrum’s soul in a great gem. When that happened, the Dark Lord’s body withered to dust. We could release the soul, but we needed a body, one close to death but not passed, which Maelgrum’s soul could seize and bind his mind to in a physical form.”
“What did you do?” Four words, each enunciated with separate leaden weight.
Haselrig brushed his hand over his scalp, manacles clanking as he did so. He spoke quickly, factually, as though it were someone else’s story he was telling. “We bound your father and laid him down with the gem upon his chest. Xander cut your father’s wrist. We needed him to be weak, at the very edge of death, but not yet gone. While he bled we began the enchantment to reverse Maelgrum’s imprisonment. When the gem shattered, Maelgrum’s spirit seized your father’s body and transformed it into his own.”
“Maelgrum is wearing my father’s body?” Horror dripped from her lips.
Haselrig made no comment or action. His silence was all the answer she needed. Elise spun away, jaw working in an anger she could not express.
“I should kill you,” she said at last.
“Yes,” he agreed. “You probably should.”
She turned to spit fury in his face. “For seventeen years I thought my father abandoned us, betrayed us. Fled from his duty and his family because he was a coward who could not face what he could not solve. I’ve carried guilt for being the daughter of a deserter and I’ve hated him for it. I’ve sullied his memory with my scorn, I’ve buried every happy childhood moment beneath the weight of my misery. And all… all because of you. Because of your treacheries, the great and the small. You must die.”
She swung her staff high above her head. “We all must die,” he said, closing his eyes and tightly gripping the paltry carving of a crescent.
No blow came. Still no blow came. He opened his eyes. A guard stood in the open doorway alarm etched on his features, watching the sorceress. Elise had stepped back, the staff not swung to strike but levelled to point, to jab at his face. “You’ll not make that of me,” her voice trembled. “I’ll not be a creature of hate because of your crimes. You’ll not get the mercy of death at my hands.”
He bowed his head. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” she spat. “I’ll give you nothing to thank me for. I may not kill you, but I wish no joy, only the long tortured contemplation of your guilt. You are cursed Haselrig, more cursed than I ever was. I hope it will scar you inside as deeply as I have been scarred outside.”
He nodded. “There is one thing,” he said. “One service I would provide.”
“You have provided enough.”
“When first we met,” he hurried on, anxious to get out a message that she could remember later, even if her fury might prevent her from comprehending it now. “I had just come from the forest. There is a treasure I hid there which may serve your queen’s interests if only it can be conveyed to her.”
“What treasure could you have brought, traitor?” Beneath her scornful disbelief there was a faint note of curiosity. He hoped it would be enough.
***
Summer was always glorious in the Silverwood and never more so than now. Marvenna strolled with her solitude through the sinuous elegance of Lord Andril’s garden. It bore no resemblance to a human garden. No ordered rows of plants bending to the petty imaginations of men. This was a vast acreage of forest where Andril had been wont to walk. The elf lord had left his mark in the careful casting of an acorn here or there, the encouragement of one plant over another. Centuries of careful prompting of the living forest had merged and separated the flora in a dozen subtle ways. The trees formed natural arbours and leafy avenues which linked serendipitous open spaces. Marvenna walked between two oaks to enter another clearing where the canopy of leaves had split and where the sun’s rays could play across the the forest floor.
It was here and now that the steward felt closest to her departed lord. This was where she and he had once gloried in the tangible proof that the forest was part of a great interconnection of living breathing things. The whole Earth itself was an entity that could be a gracious partner or a terrible foe to those who lived upon it, craving its protection and its gifts.
This was also the time and place where she could be alone, momentarily free from the cares of stewardship. This portion of the forest had been sacred to Andril, his own preserve where none could disturb him while he communed with the soul of the forest and the father of elves. It was a privilege she had inherited, a space where all knew to let her alone with her thoughts.
But her ear caught a strain of music, a song, an intruder in her private domain. She frowned, though it was hard to hold to that displeasure, for the singer had a voice of subtle power. It leant new nuance to an old song of when Talorin elf-father walked the Earth before the sun first rose.
She slipped into the undergrowth with scarcely a rustle of one frond of a fern to mark her passing. With soft steps, breaking not a single stem, she circled round to come upon the singer from behind. He strode the forest path with no care lost in his own music and she walked unnoticed in his footsteps not wanting to disturb him until the song was done.
He held the key note, a long clear sound that soared into the distance like an arrow, while other melodies within the song fell away and faded from sound. This was the moment in the story of Talorin which always brought a lump to her throat. When the father of the elves finds that even the long years of his kin were not enough and that time would steal them from him, their music fading, as he alone went on.
It was then that he had chosen to leave the world and found the Blessed Realm. And at that point in the song of the story the long held note of Talorin faded and the other songs rose up to meet it as the father of elves found his home and his kin together, but set apart from the world.
She had never heard it sung so beautifully before and as the last echoes of the song thrummed through the trees, she brought her hands together in
applause.
The singer spun round, alarmed to find someone had crept so close behind him all undetected. It was Elyas. He took her in at a glance and bowed. “Forgive me, Steward Marvenna, I had not thought to find you here.”
“Why not?” she replied with a smile. “This is the steward’s garden, in truth you should not be here unless by my invitation.”
“I’m sorry, my lady. I had merely been seeking a space to rehearse an old song for my own amusement.” He waved an arm at the forest around them. “There was no-one here and this beauty seemed a fair spot to inspire my song. I did wonder though, why no other elves should walk along such paths.”
“It is the habit of obedience,” she reminded him. “One that the silver elves have learnt well. This was Lord Andril’s private preserve before it was mine and I daresay the memory of my absent lord is a stronger incitement to deference and obedience than my own present authority.” The sombre fire of the song still filled her senses. It moved her to a more smiling self-deprecation than had she and Elyas been elsewhere and in more company than alone together in Andril’s garden.
“I am sorry for my trespass,” Elyas said. “I had not realised that there were areas of the forest reserved for so few.”
Marvenna’s mouth twitched a little in annoyance at the carping rider appended to the elf’s apology. But she would not let her mood be dimmed. The glory of his music resounded in her head; for that pleasure she would indulge him a while longer.
“You sing exceptionally well,” she said. “Does the lustre of your voice mean you have at last found some happiness in the Silverwood?”
“There was always happiness to be had here, in the company of my people and of yours.”
“But your fears for your errant Captain Tordil, have they faded?”
Elyas frowned. “I have a responsibility to my people which holds me here, but I would welcome any news there was of Tordil.” His grey eyes bored into her with a soft intensity. “Perhaps you have heard something?”
