“One reason I left,” said Samuval. “Targonne and officers like this Milles enjoy being the ones in charge for a change, and they will not be pleased to hear that they are in danger of being knocked off the top of the mountain. You may be certain Milles will send news of this upstart to headquarters.”
Mina climbed down from her horse. Leading Foxfire by the reins, she left the field of battle, walked into the camp. The men cheered and shouted until she reached them, and then, as she came near, moved by something they did not understand, they ceased their clamor and dropped to their knees. Some reached out their hands to touch her as she passed, others cried for her to look upon them and grant them her blessing.
Lord Milles watched this triumphant procession, his face twisted in disgust. Turning on his heel, he reentered his command tent.
“Bah! Let them skulk and plot!” Galdar said, elated. “She has an army now. What can they do to her?”
“Something treacherous and underhanded, you can be sure,” said Samuval. He cast a glance heavenward. “It may be true that there is One who watches over her from above. But she needs friends to watch over her here below.”
“You speak wisely,” said Galdar. “Are you with her then, Captain?”
“To the end of my time or the world’s, whichever comes first,” said Samuval. “My men as well. And you?”
“I have been with her always,” said Galdar, and it truly seemed to him that he had.
Minotaur and human shook hands. Galdar proudly raised Mina’s standard and fell in beside her as she made her victory march through the camp. Captain Samuval walked behind Mina, his hand on his sword, guarding her back. Mina’s Knights rode to her standard. Every one of those who had followed her from Neraka had suffered some wound, but none had perished. Already, they were telling stories of miracles.
“An arrow came straight toward me,” said one. “I knew I was dead. I spoke Mina’s name, and the arrow dropped to the ground at my feet.”
“One of the cursed Solamnics held his sword to my throat,” said another. “I called upon Mina, and the enemy’s blade broke in twain.”
Soldiers offered her food. They brought her wine, brought her water. Several soldiers seized the tent of one of Milles’s officers, turned him out, and prepared it for Mina. Snatching up burning brands from the campfires, the soldiers held them aloft, lighting Mina’s progress through the darkness. As she passed, they spoke her name as if it were an incantation that could work magic.
“Mina,” cried the men and the wind and the darkness. “Mina!”
8
Under the Shield
he Silvanesti elves have always revered the night.
The Qualinesti delight in the sunlight. Their ruler is the Speaker of the Sun. They fill their homes with sunlight, all business is conducted in the daylight hours, all important ceremonies such as marriage are held in the day so that they may be blessed by the light of the sun.
The Silvanesti are in love with the star-lit night.
The Silvanesti’s leader is the Speaker of the Stars. Night had once been a blessed time in Silvanost, the capital of the elven state. Night brought the stars and sweet sleep and dreams of the beauty of their beloved land. But then came the War of the Lance. The wings of evil dragons blotted out the stars. One dragon in particular, a green dragon known as Cyan Bloodbane, laid claim to the realm of Silvanesti. He had long hated the elves and he wanted to see them suffer. He could have slaughtered them by the thousands, but he was cruel and clever. The dying suffer, that is true, but the pain is fleeting and is soon forgotten as the dead move from this reality to the next. Cyan wanted to inflict a pain that nothing could ease, a pain that would endure for centuries.
The ruler of Silvanesti at the time was an elf highly skilled in magic. Lorac Caladon foresaw the coming of evil to Ansalon. He sent his people into exile, telling them he had the power to keep their realm safe from the dragons. Unbeknownst to anyone, Lorac had stolen one of the magical dragon orbs from the Tower of High Sorcery. He had been warned that an attempt to use the orb by one who was not strong enough to control its magic could result in doom. In his arrogance, Lorac believed that he was strong enough to wrest the orb to his will. He looked into the orb and saw a dragon looking back. Lorac was caught and held in thrall.
Cyan Bloodbane had his chance. He found Lorac in the Tower of the Stars, as he sat upon his throne, his hand held fast by the orb. Cyan whispered into Lorac’s ear a dream of Silvanesti, a terrible dream in which lovely trees became hideous, deformed monstrosities that attacked those who had once loved them. A dream in which Lorac saw his people die, one by one, each death painful and terrible to witness. A dream in which the Thon-Thalas river ran red with blood.
The War of the Lance ended. Queen Takhisis was defeated. Cyan Bloodbane was forced to flee Silvanesti, but he left smugly satisified with the knowledge that he had accomplished his goal. He had inflicted upon the Silvanesti a tortured dream from which they would never awaken. When the elves returned to their land after the war was over, they discovered to their shock and horror that the nightmare was reality. Lorac’s dream, given to him by Cyan Bloodbane, had hideously altered their once beautiful land.
The Silvanesti fought the dream and, under the leadership of a Qualinesti general, Porthios, the elves eventually managed to defeat it. The cost was dear, however. Many elves fell victim to the dream, and even when it was finally cast out of the land, the trees and plants and animals remained horribly deformed. Slowly, the elves coaxed their forests back to beauty, using newly discovered magicks to heal the wounds left by the dream, to cover over the scars.
Then came the need to forget. Porthios, who had risked his life more than once to wrest their land from the clutches of the dream, became a reminder of the dream. He was no longer a savior. He was a stranger, an interloper, a threat to the Silvanesti who wanted to return to their life of isolation and seclusion. Porthios wanted to take the elves into the world, to make them one with the world, to unify them with their cousins, the Qualinesti. He had married Alhana Starbreeze, daughter of Lorac, with this hope in mind. Thus if war came again, the elves would not struggle alone. They would have allies to fight on their side.
The elves did not want allies. Allies who might decide to gobble up Silvanesti land in return for their help. Allies who might want to marry Silvanesti sons and daughters and dilute the pure Silvanesti blood. These isolationists had declared Porthios and his wife, Alhana, “dark elves” who could never, under penalty of death, return to their homelands.
Porthios was driven out. General Konnal took control of the nation and placed it under martial law “until such time as a true king can be found to rule the Silvanesti.” The Silvanesti ignored the pleas of their cousins, the Qualinesti, for help to free them from the rule of the great dragon Beryl and the Knights of Neraka. The Silvanesti ignored the pleas of those who fought the great dragons and who begged the elves for their help. The Silvanesti wanted no part of the world. Absorbed in their own affairs, their eyes looked at the mirror of life and saw only themselves. Thus it was that while they gazed with pride at their own reflections, Cyan Bloodbane, the green dragon who had been their bane, came back to the land he had once nearly destroyed. Or so at least, it was reported by the kirath, who kept watch on the borders.
“Do not raise the shield!” the kirath warned. “You will trap us inside with our worst enemy!”
The elves did not listen. They did not believe the rumors. Cyan Bloodbane was a figure out of the dark past. He had died in the Dragon Purge. He must have died. If he had returned, why had he not attacked them? So fearful were the elves of the world outside that the Heads of House were unanimous in their approval of the magical shield. The people of Silvanesti could now be said to have gained their dearest wish. Under the magical shield, they were truly isolated, cut off from everyone. They were safe, protected from the evil of the outside world.
“And yet, it seems to me that we have not so much as shut the evil out,” Ro
lan said to Silvan, “as that we have locked the evil in.”
Night had come to Silvanesti. The darkness was welcome to Silvan, even as it was a grief to him. They had traveled by day through the forest, covering many miles until Rolan deemed they were far enough from the ill effects of the shield to stop and rest. The day had been a day of wonder to Silvanoshei.
He had heard his mother speak with longing, regret, and sorrow of the beauty of her homeland. He remembered as a child when he and his exiled parents were hiding in some cave with danger all about them, his mother would tell him tales of Silvanesti to quiet his fears. He would close his eyes and see, not the darkness, but the emerald, silver and gold of the forest. He would hear not the howls of wolf or goblin but the melodious chime of the bell flower or the sweetly sorrowful music of the flute tree.
His imagination paled before the reality, however. He could not believe that such beauty existed. He had spent the day as in a waking dream, stumbling over rocks, tree roots, and his own feet as wonders on every side brought tears to his eyes and joy to his heart.
Trees whose bark was tipped with silver lifted their branches to the sky in graceful arcs, their silver-edged leaves shining in the sunlight. A profusion of broad-leafed bushes lined the path, every bush ablaze with flame-colored flowers that scented the air with sweetness. He had the impression he did not walk through a forest so much as through a garden, for there were no fallen branches, no straggling weeds, no thickets of brambles. The Woodshapers permitted only the beautiful, the fruitful, and the beneficial to grow in their forests. The Woodshapers’ magical influence extended throughout the land, with the exception of the borders, where the shield cast upon their handiwork a killing frost.
The darkness brought rest to Silvan’s dazzled eyes. Yet the night had its own heart-piercing beauty. The stars blazed with fierce brilliance, as if defying the shield to try to shut them out. Night flowers opened their petals to the starlight, scented the warm darkness with exotic perfumes, while their luminescent glow filled the forest with a soft silvery white light.
“What do you mean?” Silvan asked. He could not equate evil with the beauty he’d witnessed.
“The cruel punishment we inflicted on your parents, for one, Your Majesty,” said Rolan. “Our way of thanking your father for his aid was to try to stab him in the back. I was ashamed to be Silvanesti when I heard of this. But there has come a reckoning. We are being made to pay for our shame and our dishonor, for cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, for living beneath the shield, protected from the dragons while others suffer. We pay for such protection with our lives.”
They had stopped to rest in a clearing near a swift-flowing stream. Silvan was thankful for the respite. His injuries had started to pain him once more, though he had not liked to say anything. The excitement and shock of the sudden change in his life had drained him, depleted his energy.
Rolan found fruit and water with a sweetness like nectar for their dinner. He tended to Silvan’s wounds with a respectful, solicitous care that the young man found quite pleasant.
Samar would have tossed me a rag and told me to make the best of it, Silvanoshei thought.
“Perhaps Your Majesty would like to sleep for a few hours,” Rolan suggested after their supper.
Silvan had thought he was dropping from fatigue but found that he felt much better after eating, refreshed and renewed.
“I would like to know more about my homeland,” he said. “My mother has told me some, but, of course, she could not know what has been happening since she … she left. You spoke of the shield.” Silvan glanced about him. The beauty took his breath away. “I can understand why you would want to protect this”—he gestured to the trees whose boles shone with an iridescent light, to the star flowers that sparkled in the grass—“from the ravages of our enemies.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Rolan and his tone softened. “There are some who say that no price is too high to pay for such protection, not even the price of our own lives. But if all of us are dead, who will be left to appreciate the beauty? And if we die, I believe that eventually the forests will die, too, for the souls of the elves are bound up in all things living.”
“Our people number as the stars,” said Silvan, amused, thinking that Rolan was being overly dramatic.
Rolan glanced up at the heavens. “Erase half those stars, Your Majesty, and you will find the light considerably diminished.”
“Half!” Silvanoshei was shocked. “Surely not half!”
“Half the population of Silvanost alone has perished from the wasting sickness, Your Majesty.” He paused a moment, then said, “What I am about to tell you would be considered treason, for which I would be severely punished.”
“By punished, you mean cast out?” Silvan was troubled. “Exiled? Sent into darkness?”
“No, we do not do that anymore, Your Majesty,” Rolan replied. “We cannot very well cast people out, for they could not pass through the shield. Now people who speak against Governor General Konnal simply disappear. No one knows what happens to them.”
“If this is true, why don’t the people rebel?” Silvan asked, bewildered. “Why don’t they overthrow Konnal and demand that the shield be brought down?”
“Because only a few know the truth. And those of us who do have no evidence. We could stand in the Tower of the Stars and say that Konnal has gone mad, that he is so fearful of the world outside that he would rather see us all dead than be a part of that world. We could say all that, and then Konnal would stand up and say, ‘You lie! Lower the shield and the Dark Knights will enter our beloved woods with their axes, the ogres will break and maim the living trees, the Great Dragons will descend upon us and devour us.’ That is what he will say, and the people will cry, ‘Save us! Protect us, dear Governor General Konnal! We have no one else to turn to!’ and that will be that.”
“I see,” said Silvan thoughtfully. He glanced at Rolan, who was gazing intently into the darkness.
“Now the people will have someone else to turn to, Your Majesty,” said Rolan. “The rightful heir to the Silvanesti throne. But we must proceed carefully, cautiously.” He smiled sadly. “Else you, too, might ‘disappear.’ ”
The lovely song of the nightingale throbbed in the darkness. Rolan pursed his lips and whistled back. Three elves materialized, emerging from the shadows. Silvan recognized them as the three who had first accosted him near the shield this morning.
This morning! Silvan marveled. Was it only this morning? Days, months, years had gone by since then.
Rolan stood to greet the three, clasping the elves by the hand and exchanging the ritual kiss on the cheek.
The elves wore the same cloak as did Rolan, and even though Silvan knew that they had entered the clearing, he was having a difficult time seeing them, for they seemed to be wrapped in darkness and starlight.
Rolan questioned them about their patrol. They reported that the border along the Shield was quiet, “deathly quiet” one said with terrible irony. The three turned their attention back to Silvan.
“So have you questioned him, Rolan?” asked one, turning a stern gaze upon Silvanoshei. “Is he what he claims?”
Silvan scrambled to his feet, feeling awkward and embarrassed. He started to bow politely to his elders, as he had been taught, but then the thought came to him that he was king, after all. It was they who should bow to him. He looked at Rolan in some confusion.
“I did not ‘question’ him,” Rolan said sternly. “We discussed certain things. And yes, I believe him to be Silvanoshei, the rightful Speaker of the Stars, son of Alhana and Porthios. Our king has returned to us. The day for which we have been waiting has arrived.”
The three elves looked at Silvan, studied him up and down, then turned back to Rolan.
“He could be an imposter,” said one.
“I am certain he is not,” Rolan returned with firm conviction. “I knew his mother when she was his age. I fought with his father against the dreaming
. He has the likeness of them both, though he favors his father. You, Drinel. You fought with Porthios. Look at this young man. You will see the father’s image engraven on the son’s.”
The elf stared intently at Silvanoshei, who met his gaze and held it.
“See with your heart, Drinel,” Rolan urged. “Eyes can be blinded. The heart cannot. You heard him when we followed him, when he had no idea we were spying on him. You heard what he said to us when he believed us to be soldiers of his mother’s army. He was not dissembling. I stake my life on it.”
“I grant you that he favors his father and that there is something of his mother in his eyes. By what miracle does the son of our exiled queen walk beneath the shield?” Drinel asked.
“I don’t know how I came to be inside the shield,” Silvan said, embarrassed. “I must have fallen through it. I don’t remember. But when I sought to leave, the shield would not let me.”
“He threw himself against the shield,” Rolan said. “He tried to go back, tried to leave Silvanesti. Would an imposter do that when he had gone to so much trouble to enter? Would an imposter admit that he did not know how he came through the shield? No, an imposter would have a tale to hand us, logical and easy to believe.”
“You spoke of seeing with my heart,” said Drinel. He glanced back at the other elves. “We are agreed. We want to try the truth-seek on him.”
“You disgrace us with your distrust!” Rolan said, highly displeased. “What will he think of us?”
“That we are wise and prudent,” Drinel answered dryly. “If he has nothing to hide, he will not object.”
“It is up to Silvanoshei,” Rolan replied. “Though I would refuse, if I were him.”
“What is it?” Silvan looked from one to another, puzzled. “What is this truth-seek?”
“It is a magical spell, Your Majesty,” Rolan answered and his tone grew sad. “Once there was a time when the elves could trust each other. Trust each other implicitly. Once there was a time when no elf could possibly lie to another of our people. That time came to an end during Lorac’s dream. The dream created phantasms of our people, false images of fellow elves that yet seemed very real to those who looked on them and touched them and spoke to them. These phantasms could lure those who believed in them to ruin and destruction. A husband might see his wife beckoning to him and plunge headlong over a cliff in an effort to reach her. A mother might see a child perishing in flames and rush into the fire, only to find the child vanished.
Dragons of a Fallen Sun Page 17
