The Journey to Karrith

by Ted Neill

  She did not wait for comment or even agreement. She simply kicked her own horse, parted the cadre of squires behind her, and hoped they were not too late. There was no relief for her mount; she drove him hard through the scrub and shifting rocks along the dry wadi, briars and branches whipping her legs. Soot croaked and flapped his wings overhead. Half the riders peeled away to the north where the slope of the canyon wall was gentle and they started climbing in a cloud of dust.

  How few they seemed once divided.

  Their way on the south slope of the canyon was not as easy, the horses floundering on the scree. From halfway up, however, she had a better vantage point on the rim of the canyon to the east. There the cliffs were bristling with Maurvant archers nocking back their arrows, their shadows long in the setting sun. They were dressed like barbarians, in skins, and leather, not a shining plate of metal armor among them. Their faces were covered in chalky white paint streaked with lines of red, black, ocher, or blue. It was one thing to hear about the enemy, to build him up in one’s mind, but to see him on the field of battle was to make the conflict and the coming violence real.

  Gail felt bile rising in her throat, her hands trembling with the fever of the fight. They would be spotted any second and lose the element of surprise. Worse, their opponents had the high ground. They could not afford to continue struggling with the horses.

  “Dismount!” she cried. “Take the rest of the hill on foot.”

  A few squires stubbornly tried to make the rest of the climb mounted, only to have one of the horses tumble with a whinny and crush the leg of the rider.

  One down already.

  The others took to running up the slope, most passing her with their longer strides. But when they reached the top they showed their inexperience, hesitating, gathering around Patrick who simply looked back to her for instruction. She knew they were past the point of strategy. Already she could see the other half of their party riding down the archers on the north rim. Those on the south rim had already spotted them.

  “What are you waiting for? Charge them!”

  The squires were nothing if not brave. Once the order was given they brandished their swords and went running pell-mell towards the archers. She followed, her stature denying her the opportunity to lead at the front, but she knew Patrick would be there and would rise to the occasion. From atop the rim she was afforded a clear view of the canyon floor. King Talamar and his men were surrounded, their shields thick with arrows, while Maurvant riders circled. Desperate, she found herself searching the purple and blues of the Antan cavalry for the verdant green of Darid’s surcoat. She breathed such a sigh of relief at seeing him alive lined up next to the king that she surprised herself. A wave of protectiveness surged within her along with rage towards the enemy. She drew out an arrow, nocked it back in her bow, steadied herself, and let it fly at a Maurvant archer. He twisted as the arrow struck home in his neck just as one of the squires came and cut him down from behind. She grabbed a second arrow and a third, picking her targets out from the Maurvant that were not engaged yet with the squires. Without plate armor they made for ripe targets, her biggest constraint was avoiding her own men. A Maurvant tribesman, flakes of white paint in his long mustache, spotted her and came rushing, a stone battle ax raised above his head. No time to nock an arrow, she drew both her swords, tucked and rolled beneath his strike, spun up, hamstrung him with a quick swing then lowered her second blade to his neck.

  She could see his pulse beating in his throat, sweat smearing the paint on the edge of his jaw. His eyes betrayed his fear, his knowledge that he was lost, but so close—as close as she had been to so many other men she had murdered—she lost her desire to release his life blood into the dirt. Instead she kicked away his ax and indicated with a shake of her head for him to run.

  He wasted no time, scrambling up, turning and sprinting away, kicking up dirt with each running footstep.

  She was a mystery to herself now, surprised at the waning of her own bloodlust. But there would be others she could not spare. She sheathed her swords and took a knee beside the edge of the cliff, taking aim at the Maurvant riders below. The turnabout on the cliffs above had caught them by surprise and their ring of riders had scattered in panic when arrows began to rain down on them from both the north and south walls.

  “Don’t hit our people!” Gail cried out as a slew of arrows from squires with little experience stuck into the earth near their own cavalry. She let one arrow after another loose until her fingers peeled and ached. The tide was turning below with the king and his men breaking out of the dome of shields they had formed and now striking down the Maurvant riders. The Maurvant, sensing their own plan turned against them, charged the Antans, making a courageous last stand, though some fled along the dry riverbed, and still others fell to their knees to surrender. Gail pulled arrows from the dead Maurvant around her and used them again. Before she might not have spared those Maurvant who surrendered, but this time she did, something like mercy having taken root within her. So she saved her arrows for those who rushed the line of Antan knights, letting the cowards flee and the trusting surrender.

  When all was done there were more Maurvant covering the ground than their own. Cries of triumph rang out from the canyon. Gail dropped back on her haunches, then her rear, her legs spread out before her, her chin hitting her chest in exhaustion. Patrick slapped her on the back, his face spattered with blood, his grin exultant as he laughed. “Looks like you just might be a hero, Alex.”

  Soot settled on her shoulder and croaked as if he approved.

  Chapter 19

  The Fire Point

  It was not difficult for Haille to excuse himself as he was not engaged in conversation like the others. He imagined his companions did not even make note of his departure except for Adamantus, whose large eyes followed him from across the room as he stepped around a cluster of laughing elves and slipped out through the stone archway they had entered through earlier in the evening. His eyes still not fully adjusted to the dark of the night woods, he stumbled once off the paved path. He spread his arms out, feeling for the trunks to his left and right until he had some idea of the space. Then he saw her. He had no doubt that she wanted to be seen, otherwise with her soft footfalls and liquid movements, she easily could have disappeared into the night. He opened his mouth to greet her but he stubbed his toe on a root and nearly fell over instead. She smiled. But as she did so, the bandage on her face crinkled and her smile faded like a child’s chalk drawing washed away by rain. She seemed to recede back into the shadow before speaking.

  “You watched me today, at the ceremony,” she said.

  “I did,” he said, deciding there was no use in lying.

  “And you spent the day playing with Sandolin and Maylief’s elflings and sleeping in the sun.”

  “Seems I was followed as well.”

  “You were.”

  “But you did not come out.”

  She was quiet a while, brooding. “No.”

  Haille expected an explanation. He did not get one, but then again, the bandage was explanation enough. She turned to walk away. He was afraid he had offended her, and was vexed at why. Girls were so difficult to understand, perhaps even more so if they were elves, he thought.

  To his relief she turned. “Come on, follow me.”

  He did so. Haille felt like a kitten following a string. She moved through the passages among the trees without a sound. Occasionally they passed through an empty plaza, lit by the same torches giving off silver-blue light. But as they neared, the torches would fade, only to light again once they had moved beyond them. As a result, they moved in a shell of darkness. He had no doubt that it somehow was Veolin’s work. He stumbled a few times, which were the only times she would look back, allowing him to see her face. The rest of the time she was turned away, making her hard to see, her black garments, topped with locks of black hair, melting seamlessly into the dark.

  There was no denying the fact that he could
not keep up. At times, he followed in the light of the relit torches, only guessing where she was in the darkness ahead. Finally, she stopped and waited under a smoldering lantern. Haille came up panting. A small door waited, carved into the bole of the tree before her. Veolin stooped under the lantern, reached to her face, and drew the bandage away, watching him closely for his reaction. The wound was awful, the skin torn in three gashes, the tendons of her face beneath exposed. Was that bone he could see through the cleaved muscle? Whatever it was, her cheek was ruined. He felt a twinge of discomfort—a shivering from his throat down to his toes, accompanied by a guilty sense of voyeurism. Veolin’s own expression was inscrutable, reproachful, challenging—the light, the way her facial muscles had been destroyed made it impossible to tell.

  She finally turned her eyes back to the doorway. Stuffing the bandage away and leaving her wound open to the air, she said, “This is the way,” then pushed in through the door. Her voice was strange, more certain now, as if she had stripped away a certain inhibition when she had drawn away the bandage.

  They went up twisting corridors, bored right into the column of the tree. As they rose, up and up, passing by holes and windows, Haille felt gusts of cool air and heard the sounds of the nighttime forest. In a few places the tunnel branched off into two directions. Veolin slowed there, letting him catch up before she continued on.

  “These are tunnels I used to run through as a child to escape from my brothers and their friends. They were always picking on me as an elfling.”

  “Until you were old enough to fight back?”

  “Until I was old enough to beat them.”

  As they rose higher, the tunnel grew steeper so that Haille couldn’t help but crawl. He guessed that it would have taken a brave elfling to climb so high at a young age. The passage grew airy as the walls became a lattice work of interlocking branches. Soon they were crawling up stairs made of the very branches themselves: branches as thick as a leg, as thick as forearms, then just as thick as fingers. Haille looked left and right. Beyond the immediate branches were stars that hung like fruit of the trees between the boughs. As the branches continued to thin, the leaves became busier with the growing breeze, and then it was all gone.

  The sky opened up all around him with a wind that was like a gasp. Stars as numerous as the sand upon the beach tumbled over each other in the sky, all the way to the edge of night on the horizon. All around them were the endless undulating treetops that swayed like ocean waves and made a sound like rain falling. It was a sound he realized he had been hearing all day, except from far below. The top of the tree had been flattened to grow into a platform. Veolin walked along it a few feet ahead of him, her body bouncing as if on a wire. Haille reached down to feel what darkness they were walking upon. It was a solid interweaving of branches. He probed it for holes and any he found were no deeper than half a finger.

  He took a few unsure steps. The floor was springy, giving slightly. Veolin stood just at the edge, the leaves of the forest whispering below her. He came up alongside, testing his weight. She took no notice of him and when he looked into her eyes he saw that they were remote. He chose to respect her silence and looked away. The stars were of all colors—red, blue, gold. He never would have believed they could possess so many different hues. It was like looking on stars with whole new personalities—completely different from the cold ice faces he had gazed upon from his chamber window. These were hot and varied like jewels. The ones on the edge of the horizon wavered and shimmered like insistent embers, smoldering in the thicker, lower air of the earth.

  “They call this place the Fire Point,” Veolin said, her eyes still engaged in the sky. “When I was young, I imagined it was named so because here the stars look as if they are on fire.”

  “They do. So is that the reason?”

  She shrugged.

  “Most likely it was because this place was used to signal another tower like it, farther in the woods, with firelight. But my father never told me that. He let me go on believing it was named after what I imagined.” She paused and looked to Haille as if to measure his response before she continued, “He was that sort of man, who would gladly indulge imagination, to revel in it, than to bother about fact. ‘Facts are for humans,’ he used to say. Gullaine Alistair. That was his name. He was a human.”

  “Human?”

  “Hence my name, Crossborn. Father was extraordinary. Caring, gentle, giving. But also dangerous. We knew he was a great fighter, but we knew not why or from where he had learned his skills. He seemed loath to teach us such arts, but as vaurgs moved closer to our lands, we began to glimpse his knowledge. It was prodigious. He taught us all how to defend ourselves, even though it was against his wishes that we should live in a world where we had to. He was a man in love with the beauty of the world, not violence.” She stared downward, her chin nearly on her breast, then looked up again into the stars, a smile now on her lips. “Once, upon finding bubble bees burrowing into a bench in our house, instead of dropping oil into the holes to kill them, he disassembled the bench and mounted it in glass on our wall so we could watch the bees’ progress as they laid eggs, grew larvae, and created a nest. I remember him holding me up on his shoulders to watch. It is no wonder my mother was willing to marry outside her kind for him.”

  “I did not know my mother,” Haille said, looking down and tapping at the branches idly with his foot. Her hand moved to his elbow, anticipating that he was going to step forward, towards the edge. He was not, but he stepped back anyway, and felt disappointed as she removed her hand and its pressure. “My father is all I have left,” he continued, “which is why I want to tear through these woods and reach him.”

  She was staring directly into his face and he felt somewhat conspicuous. She pointed to the horizon. Haille turned. He had lost any sense of direction climbing up the tree.

  “That is south, where Karrith lies. There he waits.”

  All the views from the top looked the same to him—but now this horizon seemed different, simply from the knowledge that under those smoldering stars was a camp where his father lay asleep. The anxiety from earlier returned but this time he found his words flowing, his thoughts open, “And yet . . . I don’t even know how he will receive me.”

  “What do you mean?” Veolin said, turning her face to him. His gaze fell her wound.

  “I . . . I suffer the shaking sickness. I don’t know if you elves are afflicted with it, but I fall into seizures, unexpectedly. In my father’s eyes I’m weak, of body, and character. I’m broken. He was ready to send me away before, before I ran away.”

  “You ran away?”

  “To find a cure, but I gave it to Katlyn instead, to save her from a fatal wound.”

  Veolin said nothing, instead taking a deep breath. For a while they both watched the leaves twist in the breeze at their feet.

  “Then she is indebted to you.”

  “We’re friends. Even though I have not always been a good one, she would do the same for me.”

  “I see.” She was quiet for another long pause before she cleared her throat, “You will leave tomorrow with or without the elder’s approval.”

  “How is that?”

  “I will lead you through the woods whether they agree to it or not.”

  “Why would you do that for me? You hardly know me.”

  She turned to him, a flash of anger in her eyes, he pressed forward nonetheless, “I could be no different from the other conquerors descended of Hillary Hillbourne. What about the repercussions, the reprisals your own people would take upon you?”

  “They matter nothing to me, and don’t insult me by inferring that I could not deal with my people and their disapproval. I have faced it my whole life, being a crossborn,” she said, her tone firm.

  “I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend. I just wondered why you would grant me such kindness, being who I am.”

  Now it was her face that turned away. He thought it was out of anger and he regretted ruining t
he candor of the moment, but when she spoke, her voice was timid.

  “There is a question of what connects us now. You and your friends saved my life. But your ancestor betrayed my people. As a race we may be opposed, but as individuals, perhaps we are friends. I am at least in your debt and obliged to fulfill it.”

  “I would like to be . . . friends.”

  She nodded, turning to him, a glimmer in the corner of her eyelashes, “After all, you’re not the only one that feel’s broken.” She gestured to her wound, her fingers stopping short of touching it. “The other elves . . . they are happy I have been saved. Do not doubt that. But they look at me differently, as if I am some terrible accident, a monster like the vaurgs, their poison in my very blood. I am a tragedy now, a sigh. A pause in the conversation when you shake your head and say, ‘She was beautiful once, it is so sad,’ then move on.”

  Haille took a deep breath. He could feel the coldness of the air in his throat and lungs. Why did he want to reach out and take her hand in his so much just then? “I still think you are beautiful. The vaurgs can’t change who you are.”

  She wiped her eyes and shook her head. He could see her righting herself. The pain she had let him glimpse was being shielded again behind iron walls. He wondered if Val had felt the same sense of inadequacy when Haille had tried to push the Captain away. How he wished he had the words Val did, to soothe her, to answer the questions raging in her mind. But his mouth froze, his thoughts stuck on the fact that he simply wanted to touch her, console her. His hands began to tremble. He made fists and looked away, thankful for the darkness to cover his awkwardness. Restraint was best, he told himself. Who was he to do such a thing as reach out and make contact, to be so presumptuous, after all she was an elf and he, he was descended from a traitor who had betrayed her people.

  “We should go now,” she said, her voice faint on the wind, her thoughts, he knew, somewhere else.