by Ellyn, Court
Moccasins tied up to his knees allowed him to move as silently as breath. A sleeveless jerkin of gray-green suede and butter-soft leather leggings helped him meld with forest shadow. On a wide belt rode the antler-handled dagger and its identical twin, as well as a quiver of gray-fletched arrows. On his forearm a leather guard, and climbing both arms from wrist to elbow a series of stripes like those of a dune lion, tattooed in green.
Starting after him, Zellel said, “You’ve had trouble.”
“Aye,” Laniel replied. “Fortunate we found you before the naenion did. They were poking around up here this morning, looking for spring fawns.”
“You pushed them out?”
“Do you see them hereabouts? A good thing we swept out the riffraff, seeing as we have the pleasure of unexpected guests. Your presence is always the highlight of our lives, Zellel.”
The old avedra grumbled. While Zellel seemed to take the war of words seriously, the elf merely laughed.
Bringing up the rear, Kieryn doubted that laughing at Zellel’s expense would be welcomed by either party, so he kept silent. Not that he felt much like laughing. Entering a clearing, he caught glimpses of other lean shadows half-hidden behind trees and shrubs. Some even perched in the branches, as confident above the ground as squirrels. All were dressed and armed like Laniel, though none of their faces were marked as elaborately as his. In Elaran, Laniel either gave them an order or announced the all-clear, for one by one, twenty individuals emerged into the clearing. Some greeted Zellel, some merely frowned at the stranger. Kieryn felt what the lamb must feel before the wolves pounce.
“My dranithion,” Laniel told him. “Don’t worry about them, they’re just curious.”
Aye, curious like a band of assassins measuring up a target.
Zellel grinned in response.
Laniel peered around the clearing, looking puzzled, then called up into the canopy, “Lyrienn! Come now. You’re going home.”
A small voice descended from a wide andyr, “Na.”
Laniel sighed. “Ana, grant me patience.” To Kieryn he whispered, “My sister. She pretends to be shy. She’s nothing of the kind. On occasion she likes to escape the city and run the trees with us.” He called to the andyr tree. “Don’t be foolish, Lyrienn! If you don’t come down, our guest will think you don’t approve of him.”
“Na, h’osti,” said the tree. “Na khumiv och ya duinove fann oän. Biëv arroit ardja.”
“She says you don’t look like a human. You’re too tall,” Laniel explained. “The only other human she’s seen is Zellel. Lyrienn! Speak the human tongue. They’re our guests.”
“She thinks we’re all that short?”
Laniel took Kieryn’s question as a blow to his opponent and crowed with laughter. “You beat me to it. Damn.”
Zellel stood by, sucking his teeth. “Hilarious,” he said. “My revenge will be the more so, you hulking, giant fools.”
Laniel tried to smear the laughter off his face, but succeeded only when he returned his attention to the matter of his sister. “Lyrienn, I will not tell you again. Come down, or I’ll have Lothiar lock you in the darkest, dankest dungeon in all Avidanyth.”
“Oh, you will not,” the tree replied. Laniel started forward to prove his word, and the voice quickly added, “But I’ll come down anyway.” Thirty feet overhead, the she-elf emerged on a bough as thick as a man’s torso. Rather than leather, she was draped in a blouse of shimmering pale blue silk. The blouse was tucked into snug white trousers and those into white thigh-high boots, a bit scuffed and muddy. A gloved hand took hold of a thick rope disguised as a vine, and she slid down into the clearing.
With an unmistakable edge, Laniel urged, “Come greet our guest, sister.”
Lyrienn accepted the command as a challenge and planted her feet. “I heard his name, I know who he is. And he, no doubt, heard mine.” Her voice was to the ear as still water is to the fingers. A torrent of gold hair fell in soft curls past her waist, and her face was so poignantly beautiful, it pained Kieryn to look on her.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, lady,” he said. She waved a hand to dismiss the idea, but for some reason she wouldn’t look him in the eye. With a haughty lift of her chin, she said, “Shall we go? Why are we lingering? Let’s move.” She began up the trail without waiting for her brother.
Laniel clenched his teeth and swore, “Ryshach. Never again, Lyrienn, I swear it.”
She waved a hand to dismiss him as well.
Laniel clapped his hands together, startling Kieryn, the horse, and the mule, and bellowed, “Dranithion!”
Every elf in the trees came to attention. If Laniel received little obedience from his sister, the Guardians of the Wood offered theirs without hesitation.
Kieryn followed Lyrienn and Laniel along the trail. The rest of the dranithion glided silently on both flanks and far to the rear, felt rather than seen.
I can’t believe it, Kieryn told Zellel, we’re among elves. They’re nothing like what I expected.
The Elarion are pompous, make no mistake. Falconeye tolerates us, so his troop will say and do nothing to offend us.
But Elarion are creatures of Magic like we are, why would they not accept—
Laniel turned abruptly, a motion so fluid that no human could have emulated it. “That is extremely rude,” he said. “I can sense what you’re doing, but that doesn’t mean I can hear you, Zellel, you know that.”
“It’s my fault, m’ lord,” Kieryn admitted. “I initiated it. I didn’t realize.”
The green stripes on the elf’s face relaxed. “It’s Laniel. If I own a title, it’s ‘Captain.’ But only my people trouble themselves with that. Zellel refuses to elevate me with any title whatever, so I won’t ask you to bother either. Speaking aloud is the courtesy I hope you’ll extend, avedra. When outsiders are among us, we Elarion speak duínovan for your benefit, not ours. But come.” He continued after his sister. “Up ahead we’ll make camp for the night and reach Linndun late tomorrow afternoon.”
“Linndun is Lady Aerdria’s fortress?” Kieryn hazarded.
Laniel beckoned for Kieryn to join his side, and another Elari materialized from the foliage to take Diorval’s reins. Kieryn nodded his thanks and caught up with Laniel. “Linndun,” he embellished, “is Her Ladyship’s city. Every five miles surrounding the city, and along the fringes of the wood, are guardhouses that act as strongholds in times of war. These are our only dwelling places.”
“Do you fight the ogres … uh, the naenion, often?”
Laniel grinned. “Hard to believe that wars are waged in your own land without your people knowing, isn’t it?” He didn’t wait for a reply but added, “The strongholds, you may be interested, were originally built in guard against humans.”
“And Linndun?”
“Here long before the Human War.”
“The Elf War?”
“The same,” Laniel said. “In those days our cities dotted the continent, the first cities to ever exist. Before we came, humans lived in hovels and isolated hamlets belonging to various warring clans. Nothing like a common enemy to unite a race.” Laniel must’ve detected Kieryn’s unease, for he said, “Talk of war between your fathers and mine is inappropriate. Let us find something else.”
Kieryn’s curiosity knew no bounds. Changing the subject was easy. “Where did your kind come from then?”
“Your kind, too, avedra,” Laniel said. “Unfortunately, you ask the question I can’t answer. You’ll have to ask Aerdria of such matters. She’s one of the few among us who was alive then. She witnessed the Crossing and the War both.”
“But the War took place almost a thousand years ago. Are you saying the Lady is immortal?” He had read legends of elven longevity but expected nothing surpassing millennia.
“Certainly not immortal,” Laniel replied. “What else has Zellel not been teaching you? Shame on him,” he added loudly over his shoulder.
The eavesdropping Hereti only grunted.
&nb
sp; “None but fairies and dragons are immortal,” Laniel went on. “But to the short-lived humans, we may seem immortal. To us, humans pass away in a blink of time. On the other hand, a fly may live for only a day, and to him, you seem immortal.”
Kieryn chewed on this for a while, then asked, “Well, how old are you?”
Laniel laughed, baring perfect white teeth. “I was born just after the Human War ended. Bhodryn the Great was king of Westervael.”
The creature leading him through the trees looked as young and strong as any human in his prime. “You must think us infants.”
“You, yes. Him,” he said of Zellel. “I doubt he was ever young.”
“Fight me sometime, Elari,” Zellel retorted. “Young is irrelevant, as I would soon show you.”
Laniel conceded a point to the old man, then continued, “My older brother, Lothiar, is some fifty years older than I, and he saw the War. He lived through the brutality of it.”
Was there no avoiding this incendiary subject? “And your sister?” Kieryn asked.
“Lyrienn is eight hundred years younger than we,” he answered with a smile, enjoying Kieryn’s bewilderment, “and she’s as impossible as any youth.”
After hiking through the thickening dusk for a couple of miles, Lyrienn led the dranithion to a hill bare of trees and underbrush, but carpeted with a thick fall of sweet, musty leaf litter. Diorval’s caretaker tethered the animals at the base of the hill, where another of the dranithion removed their saddles, brushed and fed them. Others piled up firewood and kindling they had gathered along the route.
Divesting himself of excess equipment, Laniel gestured at the fire pit in the center of the hill. “Avedra, if you please.”
Zellel argued even with that simple request: “You can’t start a fire on your own?”
Laniel shrugged and said, “When there’s an easier way …”
“Who said it’s easier for me? You wouldn’t know the first thing about it, elf.”
Before Laniel could form an appropriate riposte, the pile of wood exploded with flame. Laniel dove away to avoid a singed backside. Kieryn was amazed: Zellel hadn’t even looked at the kindling, only made a tiny waving gesture with his hand. Now the old avedra stood over the startled Elari with a satisfied grin. “Truce?”
Laniel sprang to his feet. “There’s no such thing.”
When the fire lowered to a bearable intensity, Laniel, Lyrienn, Zellel, and Kieryn gathered around it, while the other Elarion remained just beyond the ring of light, keeping a wary vigil.
“Ogres venture this deep into the Wood?” Kieryn asked, observing the sentries.
“Rarely,” Laniel answered. “But it’s best to be cautious.”
A she-elf with hair as black as the Abyss came into the light and propped a pair of deer haunches against the log upon which Laniel sat and commenced setting a spit over the flames.
“Aye, good work, Nyria,” Laniel lauded, eyeing the venison.
When she’d skewered the legs onto the spit, she retreated into the darkness again, as elusive as the night wind.
Laniel nudged his sister with an elbow and pointed at the spit. “Make yourself useful.”
Lyrienn’s lovely mouth opened to reply, but he’d left her no room for argument. “Yes, Your Majesty,” she groused, rising to tend the meat. “No matter if I return to Linndun with no eyebrows left me and scorched cheeks.”
“You didn’t have to come at all!” Laniel bit. “I’ll not bring you again, and that’s an end to it.”
Having crossed a boundary, Lyrienn bit her tongue. A moment later, she lifted contrite eyes, but when Laniel ignored her, she left the fire and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Now, brother, I’ll be good. I promise.”
He tried to shrug her aside. “You’ve lost my heart, so forget it.”
“Oh, stop. You’re not as mad as all that.” For good measure, she nipped the pointed tip of his ear.
“Go away, you’re embarrassing me.”
Lyrienn laughed and returned to her duty at the fire.
Watching them, Kieryn choked down a longing for his own family. The ache in his thigh had subsided, which was either a good sign or the very worst. He tried not to think of his brother but rather observe the ways and mannerisms of the Elarion. Were they really so different from humans? Laniel ate venison from the tip of his dagger; Lyrienn daintily picked at the meat with slender, nimble fingers, then swiped the grease onto Laniel’s leggings and shrugged when he scowled at her. “Such a gallant brother,” she said, eyelashes going to work. “You’re a charming napkin.”
Near the end of the meal, a dranithi climbed the hill and begged his captain permission to play. Laniel deemed the area safe enough, so the dranithi sat on the edge of light with a long fat flute and filled the night with a haunting melody. But for the silken sound of their voices and the firelight making pearls of their hands and faces, the dranithion might’ve been any human militia in Aralorr. Kieryn decided there must be less obvious differences that had driven a wedge between human and elf. Their magical practices, perhaps, or their heightened perception of the world’s pervading energies? But were these enough to instill within humanity a hatred for the race? Had they ever gotten along? The histories Kieryn had studied went back only as far as the Elf War and the founding of Westervael. He couldn’t recall ever reading a mention of why these things had happened.
The Lady would know. But would she tell Kieryn the truth? Did he want to know the truth?
Tossing the last of the unwanted portions of venison into the fire, Kieryn thought of a more benevolent question. “The tattoos on your face, Laniel, they denote rank?”
“They do.” He indicated three lines snaking over each cheekbone. “These are given to every member of a military corps, we Dranithion, the Dardrion—Aerdria’s Moon Guard—and the regular city militia.” Brushing a forefinger across three vertical lines between his eyebrows and three more on the under-curve of his chin, he explained, “These belong to captains alone. Among the Dranithion, there are four captains, one to guard each of the four directions of the wood. I was granted the Northern Sector two hundred years ago when my father died. Lyrienn was just a baby.”
“I was not a baby.”
“You were three.”
Lyrienn relinquished the argument and took up the lesson, “Among the Moon Guard, there is only one captain. And he is our brother, Lothiar.” She couldn’t help boasting. “The colors, Laniel, explain about the colors.”
He sighed but complied, “Ours are green, but when you come to the city, you’ll recognize the city corps by their red marks, the Moon Guard by their blue.”
“And the color around your eyes?”
“Ah, a blessing. That our eyes—and the souls behind them—may be wary and see only truth.” He turned slightly to the side, so that the firelight lit his right arm and a strange symbol that Kieryn had overlooked. Laniel, he realized, had made certain Kieryn remained on his left, keeping his fighting arm free. The mark looked somewhat like a number three with an extra slash across the top, a dot within the fat lower belly, and another dot below the top slash. Proudest of this symbol, Laniel said, “This is the keldjeq, granted every warrior when he earns his bow. It’s all anyone needs to see to know you’re a force to be reckoned with.”
“That’s true enough,” Lyrienn muttered, earning a chuckle from Zellel.
Laniel ignored them both and added, “And they’re not tattoos. They’re applied with magic by Aerdria herself. If I should earn—or desire”—he said with a scoff—“a position among the Dardra, for instance, the color can be altered instantly.”
“And those?” Kieryn asked of the cat-like stripes climbing Laniel’s forearms.
“Ogre kills.”
“How many?”
“I haven’t counted them in a while. We grant the stripes to ourselves, so when we return to the city, Aerdria knows we’re doing our job.”
When Kieryn ran out of questions that he considered safe to ask, the f
our atop the hill rolled themselves into pallets around the embers. Below the hill, the dranithion bedded down as well; a couple climbed silently into the canopy to keep watch. Kieryn stared up at the dark leaves sighing and nodding in a balmy, perfumed breeze and observed, “I can’t see the stars.”
“Aye,” Laniel replied with unmistakable sadness. “Even if you could, the Veil over the Wood causes them to look muted, fuzzy. Only the moons and the brightest of the stars are clear over the city. Living within the Veil provides a certain amount of safety, but it denies us a greater freedom, too. You might think it a small price to pay, the loss of the stars. But—”
“No, I don’t think it a small price,” Kieryn said, angry suddenly. Injustice always made him angry, and hatred for the generous, soft-spoken Elarion certainly seemed unjust. Would Da’s opinion of the Elarion change if he had been the one to share their fire and meat tonight?
“Don’t let it trouble you,” Laniel said. “Rest, avedra. Tomorrow, you will see the heart of our world. Besides Zellel, you will be the only duínovë in two hundred years to see Linndun.” Laniel chuckled. “But don’t let that keep you awake.” He must’ve known it would, for long after the dranithion grew still with sleep, Kieryn lay listening to a pair of owls comparing voices in the distant trees and wondering what Kelyn would say if he knew his twin spent the night in the company of elves.
~~~~
The next morning, Kieryn woke up with Zellel shaking his shoulder and shouting in his ear: “Get up, boy, hurry!”
When Kieryn came to his senses, he saw the Elarion arming themselves and turning feral eyes northward. Scrambling to his feet, he blurted the first word that came to mind, “Ogres?”
“Aye,” Laniel said and thrust the hilt of a sword into his hand.
“But I’m no warrior,” he cried.
“With any luck you won’t need to become one. You’re to stay here. Lyrienn, stay with him.”
Kieryn began to protest, Don’t leave her in my care, but the words withered when he saw Lyrienn buckling on a belt studded with a double row of throwing knives. She grinned at him, and he wondered who would be protecting whom.
