Once Upon a Quest

by Anthea Sharp

  She doesn’t feel bad for babbling, because the barbarian goes on to tell her about the elves, their pointy ears, their too-pretty features, their disdain for violence, which led them to recruit mortal warriors against their will. He isn’t from Caledonia. They stole him from across the sea from a land called Svitjod. The elves have strange powers—just by knowing your name they can compel humans to do whatever they want, and some of them have powers like creating fire and ice, light, darkness, and illusions. They don’t think much of humans.

  He pauses the story here and there to point out features of the landscape, such as, “There is a village not far from here, and they often bring their sheep to that meadow there. Take care they don’t see you,” and the like.

  At last, they reach Miles Cross. It lies just across a wood and stone bridge crossing a small brook. The crossroads is paved too, and then the road wanders on again, unpaved. There is no one in sight, but the mud around the crossroads is pitted with so many hoof prints and wheel rivets that Margarites thinks an Elvish army must have passed by.

  “The entrance to the elf realm, Alfheim, is here,” he says, though Margarites sees no entrance to anything.

  “Odin, All Father, has ordered them to leave Earth to the humans, and they’re slowly leaving.” He continues, “I have been guarding their retreat for over a hundred years.”

  That’s too long, obviously, and she thinks he must have his Latin wrong, or he’s exaggerating, but doesn’t think she knows her numbers well enough to dispute it.

  He turns away from the crossroads and they continue on for a while, him still talking about the terrain. She thinks she understands why he speaks so much. She can’t imagine daemon-demi-god-like beings would give much attention to a mortal, just like masters give little attention to kitchen slaves … well, the wanted kind of attention. She’d at least had other slaves to talk to until she fled. She only had three days’ worth of words stored up this morning; likely he has years.

  They walk west along the road, and he points out the hill where the Elf Queen lives and tells her, “Don’t go there, but if you see any elves about in the forest, pay them no mind. They’re not royalty, and won’t hurt you. Just don’t tell them your name.”

  Her stomach chooses to protest the point by growling loudly.

  He draws Svinnr up short. “I’m keeping you from your lunch,” he comments. By the time she gets home, gets the bird plucked and roasted, it will most likely be dinner, but she says, “It’s all right.” And it is. She has a (very) little stale bread left, some mushrooms, tubers, herbs, pine flesh and sprigs, and now this grouse. Food she has, but company is something she lacks. She wasn’t aware of how much she needs it.

  Turning Svinnr about, he says, “I’ll take you home,” and then they’re both largely quiet, except when he reaches back into his saddlebag and produces some odd-shaped flat bread filled with nuts and dried fruit, and says, “Here, this will tide you over.” She takes it with greedy fingers, and has half devoured it when she realizes she still hasn’t said thank you. She’s still uneasy about it. Thanking him would be like being a groveling slave to a master. Her brow furrows, and yet, it’s not—free people say thank you—it shouldn’t make her insides quiver. She just doesn’t know how to go about it.

  When they arrive at her door, she has a comprise in mind. Pointing to the satchel with the bird, she says, “Come back this evening and I’ll share it with you.” As though it could make up for saving her life three times.

  “You’d invite me to dinner without even knowing my name?” he asks, helping her down.

  Margarites blinks at this. She had never thought to ask, not to be rude, but because it hadn’t been her place, and now she has committed some horrible gaffe. “What is your name?” she says, flushing crimson.

  His lips quirk. “I am called Tam Lin.”

  Grasping her satchel more tightly, Margarites looks at the ground. “Well, Tam Lin, do you want to come to dinner?”

  “If it’s in my power, I will be here.” He bows, and in a few minutes, she is alone.

  She turns the words over in her mind. “If it’s in my power.” She still hasn’t answered how she escaped, and that’s the one thing he wants to know. He is a slave. She hadn’t recognized it at first, because he’s a soldier, but he is. He is so strong, he must be under some enchantment, and unable to escape. Her brow furrows.

  She wants it to be within his power to come to dinner, more than anything she’s ever wanted in her life, and knows that it is dangerous to want something so much. Nodding to herself at her own foolishness, she sets to work preparing the grouse anyway. He probably won’t come. He will be detained.

  And then she has another more terrifying thought. Maybe finding that her escape was just a fluke, he’ll lose interest in her completely.

  * * *

  Tam Lin does return that night. The strange metal stand with a wing and a half-pipe turns out to be a hand pump, and he teaches her how to use it. He compliments her cooking—apparently, pine is a thing they eat a lot of in Svitjod, and he misses it. They never speak of Margarites’s escape. Margarites talks of Rome and tells him of indoor heating that isn’t magic and fountains, too. He doesn’t believe men could do such things (the hand pump is of dwarven design.) He tells her he isn’t particularly tall among his people, and about lights that paint the northern sky. Margarites thinks that might be an exaggeration on his part.

  She is breathlessly happy, and the happiness feels as magical as the candles that light of their own accord and bathe everything in golden light. She thinks she might wake up and find everything is just a dream. She knows that something will take the golden luster off of the evening, and it will be terrible. Maybe he’ll try to kiss her … his eyes are glowing like he might. What would she do then?

  Not long after that thought flutters between her ears, Tam, sitting on the floor near the metal oven like her, stands abruptly. Eyes focused on a point on the wall, he says, “The Elf Queen is calling me. I must go.”

  He strides to the door, and as his hand reaches for the latch, Margarites calls, “Do you want me to pack some food?” She wants to hold onto him just a while longer.

  Tam’s hand shakes so violently that the latch rattles. “I … must … go.”

  He leaves, and it’s maybe worse than if he’d tried to kiss her.

  * * *

  The next evening, Margarites hears the clump of Svinnr’s hooves and her spirits jump. She practically skips from the tower, and finds Tam Lin, already dismounted, lifting a brightly polished, cylindrical copper container that is as long as her forearm. “I ate all your bread last night,” he says looking too pleased with himself. “I’ve brought you something better to make up for it.”

  He had eaten the remainder of her bread, softening it up in the grouse drippings, just as she had. She had missed it for her morning meal, but there is no flour in the forest. Her eyes light on the container—he’s brought flour or wheat—something she’ll never find in the forest. She bounces on her feet, and her mouth waters a bit.

  Lifting off the lid, he presents the contents to her.

  Margarites’s eagerness turns to fury. “Oats? You brought me oats?” Her lip turns up in disgust. He thinks her no better than an animal, just because she was a slave? He is like the learned slaves in her old master’s employ, who looked down upon the regular house servants.

  “What is wrong with oats?” he asks. The coldness of his voice says, you think you deserve better?

  “This is horse food!” she declares. “No Roman would touch this.”

  “No wonder you’re all so short!” Tam Lin snarls. He grabs his saddlebag and storms into her home, leaving her glaring at a bored-looking Svinnr.

  Turning on her heel, she charges back into her home, and finds Tam Lin pouring a portion of oats into a pot.

  “I won’t eat them,” she hisses.

  “More for me,” he counters, adding water to the pot as well.

  “You’re going to use my
stove?”

  Tam Lin glares at her. “You’re as stuck up as any fancy elf,” he says.

  Margarites’s jaw falls, and maybe her heart, too.

  Tam Lin takes a packet out of the saddle bag and sprinkles a pinch of salt into the mix. He also takes out a tiny pot half the size of his palm and puts it to the side. He stirs the gruel in the little pan, and then stands back. The stove is already hot, and it doesn’t take long for the contents to boil. It’s strange to see him in the kitchen, wearing armor, and stirring the diminutive pan. It would be almost comical, except that he is frowning, and looks like he might take out his sword and chop her in half at any moment.

  “I had to trade with a dwarf to get these oats,” he mutters. Shaking his head, he storms out, saying, “Don’t take them off the stove.”

  She watches from the doorway as he goes to attend to Svinnr, and then she looks back at the pot. Grabbing the spoon, she stirs it and blows on the foam before it boils over. Her brow furrows in frustration. This is probably all just an elaborate prank he’s playing. She’ll eat the stupid horse food and he’ll laugh, and …

  Her shoulders fall. No, it isn’t a prank. She just wants it to be a prank. She has insulted the one person who has been kindest to her since she’s come to Caledonia.

  She picks up the tiny jar he’s left away from the heat, opens it, and sniffs. It’s butter. In Rome, it is used for cosmetics, for smooth skin and shiny hair. It’s not consumed often, but Margarites has used it on her master’s table before. Some of her old master’s guests described it as “barbarous,” which is precisely why she was ordered to serve it—to be wild, extravagant, and exotic. She likes the taste. It’s mildly sweet, and very rich. This little jar would be rather expensive. She looks at the oats. Would he waste butter and salt on them?

  Tam comes into the tower at that moment, and she backs away. He tastes the oats and dumps a heaping spoon of butter into them, just as she’d feared. Whisking the pan away from the stove, he leans against the wall and proceeds to eat the oats from the pan, his expression treacherous.

  It seldom helps a slave to apologize. If the punishment for an infraction was a beating, the master wouldn’t let an apology suffice because he said, “It will just encourage bad behavior.” But she’s not a slave anymore …

  She blurts out the words. “I’m sorry.” They sound about as melodious as a honking goose.

  He lifts his eyes from the pan and glares at her. “Do you want some?”

  They don’t smell bad. She should try them even if they smelled rancid.

  “Yes,” she says. “I will try some.”

  He holds out the spoon to her.

  Taking it gingerly, Margarites tries a small bite, chewing the warm grains slowly. They’re slightly chewy, but not like horse food. “They aren’t bad,” she admits. And they’d probably be delicious on a cold morning.

  “Not bad,” he mutters.

  “They’re good,” Margarites says. Better than the bland, starchy tubers she was going to have.

  He lifts an eyebrow. “Do you want some more?”

  “Yes, please,” she says.

  They split the oats and eat in relative silence, sitting on the floor as they had the night before. “Thank you,” says Margarites when she can’t stand the quiet anymore. “For the oats and … everything.”

  Tam shrugs. “It wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done anyway.”

  Margarites thinks of the men they encountered yesterday. He’d chased them away as surely as the Romans. “How can it be that I can stay here, but the local people and Romans are not allowed?”

  Tam smiles wolfishly. “Well,” he says. “The queen didn’t want to order me to keep all humans out. There are locals who offer her sacrifices of small things that feed her vanity, and there are other human warriors in her service and in the service of gods she wouldn’t wish to annoy. So, she was more explicit. No warrior, slave, merchant, or woman who controls the keys to the house, or craftsperson of the local people may walk upon these lands without offering sacrifice—and the Romans never, since they are lettered, and Odin wants the elves, gods, and other magical beings away from all the lettered people first and foremost.”

  “To the Romans I am still a slave,” says Margarites.

  “If you are a slave, who is your master?” he asks.

  Margarites blinks, seeing the logic. She is neither exactly a free person or a slave. She puts down her bowl. “But I am Roman, I was born in Rome, and lived my whole life there,” she says, wondering why she is arguing. Her mother was Greek, like her name.

  “A citizen?” he asks. “I understand that for the Romans, if you’re not a citizen, you’re not really Roman, and I think, when speaking of Romans, I should abide by the Roman definition of what a Roman is, don’t you agree?”

  He’s bending the Elf Queen’s law for her. A slow smile creeps across her face. “Thank you.”

  His lips quirk and his eyes hold hers too long. She looks down at her bowl. He’ll kiss her, she knows it. And she doesn’t know what she will do.

  * * *

  Tam does kiss her, later after the oatmeal. It is a soft kiss, on the cheek. Margarites doesn’t like her body. She doesn’t like how it betrayed her by drawing the attention of her master and his friends—though they’d say often how Margarites with the tattoo on her forehead is disfigured. But where Tam Lin’s lips touch her skin, fire spreads through her, warming her in ways she didn’t know she could be warmed, and it’s wonderful. Still she freezes.

  Tam Lin draws back. “Forgive me,” he says, the words sounding as mournful as the winter wind in leafless trees.

  She’s been in the room when Caerusa or Maelusa was “entertaining” the master. She knows how she should giggle, laugh, pet his chest, and smile. She should say, there is nothing to forgive. She should say, do it again. She should, at the very least, raise her eyes. But she can’t do any of those things, and the knowledge of that makes it even harder to move. Her breathing comes too fast and her heart pounds.

  “The queen calls. I must go,” Tam Lin says, and she is alone. The memory of the candle light on his armor hangs in her vision like a ghost.

  * * *

  Escape

  He doesn’t come back the next day, or the next, or the day after that.

  Margarites wants to believe that everything he told her about the elves and gods is a lie—that it is something he said just to impress her. But she runs into the wolves one day. They look at her with great amber eyes and then lope away. She remembers their interest the first night, and Tam saying, “I will tell the wolves to leave you alone,” and knows he is responsible for their disinterest.

  A few days later—more days without Tam—Margarites meets a woman in the woods on her way home from gathering mushrooms. The woman isn’t much taller than Margarites—perhaps because she doesn’t eat oatmeal—but she is incredibly beautiful. Her skin impossibly smooth, her green eyes wide and luminous, her glossy hair the color of a hazelnut shell. She wears a tunic like Margarites’s that has simple holes for her arms, and like Margarites’s, stretches to her feet, but it looks newer, and the green color is more vibrant. There is delicate darker green embroidery at the neck and feet, and her cloak is almost diaphanous.

  “Oh, hello,” says the woman with a friendly smile. “What is your name?”

  It isn’t like Margarites to tell her name to random strangers she meets in the wood, but she feels compelled to answer. The woman is so charming.

  “Marg—”

  The woman’s smile broadens and she tosses back her hair, revealing pointed ears, and Margarites remembers Tam Lin’s warning, “They can compel you to do anything if they know your real name.”

  “—usa. Margusa,” she finishes, hating the “usa” at the end.

  Snickering, the woman says, “Margusa, touch your nose and bark like a dog.”

  Margarites’s eyes go wide.

  The elf woman’s eyes narrow. “Margusa isn’t your real name,” she says ac
cusingly.

  And oddly, Margarites feels relief to have a not-quite-god confirm that. “It doesn’t seem to be any more, ma’am.” Not wanting to anger a not-quite-god, she holds out the large earthenware jar in her hands. “Would you like some mushrooms?”

  The woman’s eyes widen, and she says, “Oh, my favorite! I will take those.”

  Whisking the jar from Margarites, she winks. “And in return, I won’t tell the queen that Tam Lin’s letting you stay here.” She tsks. “He’d get in so much trouble, but he is so lonely for human company … one hundred years is nothing for us, but I imagine it’s like one thousand years to a human. The queen should have let him have a companion years ago.” Looking back at Margarites, she says, “Now that we’re friends, won’t you tell me your real name?”

  “I am so sorry, ma’am, but—” Margarites shakes her head vigorously.

  Sighing, and grumbling something about, “Tam Lin spoiling all the fun left,” the woman leaves, as silent as a shadow.

  The meeting confirms several things all at once—Tam Lin wasn’t lying about the elves—and he is putting himself more at risk than he let on by letting her stay. She drove Tam away, because she’s terrified of him—not that he will hurt her—but by what he makes her feel, and how much he makes her feel it. She’s seen slave girls who’ve fallen in love, their giddiness and stupidity, and inevitable broken hearts.

  She scowls. He probably just wanted to use her and to toss her aside, like her old master did to his slaves. “Lonely” probably means that he hasn’t had a woman in a hundred years …

  She closes her eyes and touches her cheek where he kissed it, as though she can somehow recapture the warmth. She’s being an idiot. He could have turned her out, but he hasn’t. He could have “had” everything, but he didn’t.