Armageddon's Children (27 page)

He wanted to ask more. He wanted to know all about the Elfstones and everything else he had just heard the tree reveal. Mostly, he wanted to hear the tree speak to him again. But he couldn’t think what to ask, and before he could his chance was gone.

–Do not fail me, Kirisin Belloruus. Do not fail the Elves. Do what I have asked of you–

The branch lifted away and the voice went still. Kirisin waited, but nothing further happened. The Ellcrys was silent. He exhaled slowly, his mouth dry and his face hot. Everything that had just happened felt surreal, as if he had been lost in a dream.

“What am I going to do?” he whispered to the air.

HE WAITED UNTIL
dawn, until after the greeting, until the rituals were satisfied, then gathered the Chosen together at the edge of the clearing and told them what had happened. They sat close, listening, their eyes skittering from face to face. When he finished, they stared at him as if he had lost his mind. The doubt on their faces was unmistakable.

“Don’t you believe me?” he demanded angrily. He clenched his fists. “I know what I heard!”

“I know what you
think
you heard,” Biat said, skepticism clear in his tone. “But maybe you imagined it.”

A few of the others nodded in agreement. They
wanted
him to have imagined it. Kirisin shook his head angrily. “I didn’t imagine anything! She spoke to me. She told me some sort of change is coming, and it’s going to destroy everything. She told me we have to go somewhere else and take her with us. She talked about Elfstones and magic and histories and secrets. I heard her clearly enough.”

“Sometimes whole groups of people think they see or hear something that never happened,” Giln said quietly.

“The Ellcrys never speaks to anyone,” added Raya. She shifted her dark eyes toward Kirisin. “Never.”

“Never before, maybe,” Kirisin said. “But she spoke today. You can pretend anything you want, but it doesn’t change things. Stop talking about hallucinations and dreams. What are we going to do?”

“Erisha,” Biat said suddenly. “What do you think we should do?”

Erisha didn’t seem to hear him. But when everyone grew silent, waiting on her, she said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing!” Kirisin repeated in disbelief. “Don’t be ridiculous! You have to go to your father and tell him what has happened!”

Erisha shook her head. “My father won’t believe any of this. I don’t even know if I do!” She was suddenly angry. “I am the leader of the Chosen, Kirisin. I say what we do and don’t do. We need to wait on this, to make certain about it. We need to see if she speaks to any of the rest of us. Then we can decide.”

“That sounds sensible to me,” Biat agreed, giving Kirisin a look that said,
Be reasonable.

Kirisin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What do you mean, wait to see if she speaks to the rest of you? What sort of advice is that? She told me she depends on us for help! What sort of help are we giving her by waiting?”

“You don’t really know what you heard!” Erisha snapped. “You just
think
you know! You daydream all the time! You probably hear voices all the time. You would be the first one to imagine something that never happened! So don’t lecture the rest of us about what we should do in this matter!”

Kirisin stared at her, and then looked at the others. “Does everyone else think the tree didn’t speak to me, that I imagined it?”

He waited for a response. There was none. Everyone looked somewhere else. He couldn’t tell whether they were on his side or Erisha’s. In truth, it didn’t matter. They could sit around talking about this until the cows came home, but it wouldn’t help. What they had to do was to find out if there really were Elfstones. They had to discover if anyone had ever heard of a Stone called a Loden. Mostly, they had to do something besides bury their heads in the sand.

He refused the possibility that he might have imagined the Ellcrys talking to him. His mind was made up on that point. The humans and demons had found a way to destroy everything, and the Ellcrys was warning them that they had to do something about it. It was their job to protect and preserve her. She depended on them for that. Unless they were intending to abrogate their responsibilities toward her, they had no choice. They had to do what she asked.

Kirisin stood up. “The rest of you can do what you want. But I’m going to speak to the King!”

W
ITHOUT GIVING THEM
another glance, Kirisin stalked out of the clearing. The other Chosen shouted after him, telling him to come back, warning him that he was acting too quickly, not thinking things through. He was making a mistake, he heard Erisha shout. He ignored her, ignored them all, furious at their refusal to do more than find reasons to delay doing anything. Even Biat, his best friend. He had expected better of him. But then he always expected better of everyone except himself.

He was the one who always prevaricated. He was the one who should have been questioning this whole business.

But he wasn’t doing so here. Why was that?

The question almost stopped him in his tracks because he had no answer. He experienced a momentary sense of stepping over a line, of making a decision that he would look back on for a long time to come. But his anger and his forward momentum kept him going when common sense and second thoughts might have turned him around. He had stomped away with such finality that going back now would be the same as crawling back, and he wasn’t about to do that. Stopping to debate his reasons for accepting on faith what the Ellcrys had told him was pointless. He couldn’t explain it because his commitment to the Ellcrys transcended reason or argument and went to the heart of his service as a Chosen. He couldn’t speak for the others, but that was the way it was for him. What the Ellcrys had told him this morning had only strengthened his determination to fulfill his obligations to serve and protect.

Why am I forsaken?

The words chilled him. It was an accusation he could not ignore.

What he couldn’t understand was Erisha’s failure to act. Why hadn’t she agreed to talk to her father? It was almost as if she was afraid to approach him about it. He couldn’t think of any reason for that, but he didn’t pretend to know everything about their relationship, either. He supposed being the daughter of the King carried with it a set of built-in problems, the kinds that were always hidden from the general public. His father and mother had certainly had their share of troubles with Arissen Belloruus. It shouldn’t seem strange that his daughter might have a few, as well.

Still, she had been adamant about not speaking to him.

Again, he almost stopped and turned around, a small whisper warning him to watch out. But his mind was made up.

He passed from the gardens into the surrounding trees and walked uphill through homes that might easily have been mistaken as part of the forest if you were looking at them from a little farther off. Elven cottages and huts burrowed into the earth, formed extensions of the forest old growth, and sat like nests in the trees. They were like spiders in their webs—you had to be close and you had to be looking to spot them. Even the trails Kirisin followed were virtually undetectable, reworked and rerouted on a regular basis to avoid giving them away. Elves had learned long ago to walk lightly in the world.

Of course, walking lightly didn’t solve all the problems of the world, especially in these times. Not everyone shared the sensibilities of Elves. Sickness and decay had penetrated even here, a direct consequence of the poisons injected into earth, air, and water by humans everywhere. The fallout from their wars had spilled over into Elven homelands, as well. The Elves knew about healing, but there was only so much anyone could do. Until now, the Elves had fought back using skills mastered over countless centuries, but their efforts were beginning to fall short. The poisoning was too pervasive; it had penetrated too deep. Without the use of the magic that had sustained them in the time of Faerie, they were fighting a losing battle.

Even Arissen Belloruus, famous for his optimism and insistence on Elven ingenuity as a solution for all things, must know this.

The Belloruus home sat astride a heavily forested hilltop; its rooms and passageways were worked deep into the earth so that virtually the whole of the rise was wormholed. There were numerous entrances and exits, dozens of light shafts and windows, but none that were visible until you got close. All were heavily guarded. He was still fifty yards away, coming up the incline toward the main entry, when the first of the Home Guards intercepted him. The Home Guards were the King’s personal defenders, an elite unit formed of Elven Hunters whose specific duty was to protect the royal family. He was known to the pair who challenged him, and so he was allowed to pass. He went in through the main entrance, announced himself to the personal aide on duty, and was directed to take a seat along with several others who had come in ahead of him.

There he sat, waiting.

He passed the time by trying to dredge up from memory what little he knew about the Elven histories.
Look there for your answers,
the Ellcrys had told him, so that was what he must suggest to the King. The histories were old, so old they could be traced back all the way to the beginning of the ancient wars between good and evil. It was then that the Elves and their Faerie allies created the Forbidding out of magic and shut away the dark creatures that had plagued them since the Word and the Void had begun their battle for control of all life. It had been a long, bitter struggle, but in the end the Elves had prevailed and the demons and their like were defeated and imprisoned. It was the creation of the Ellcrys that made victory possible and allowed for the confinement of the evil ones. Everyone knew that story, even those who had never read a word of the histories.

He had seen these ancient tomes while visiting Erisha some years ago. They were kept in a special room that was always locked when not in use. The books were watched over by the royal historian, Culph, a formidable oldster possessed of an even more formidable temper. Kirisin had met him only once, and once was enough.

For the most part, the Elven histories were the property and concern of the Kings and Queens of the realm, and lesser folks were not allowed to peruse them. They were too fragile and too easily damaged for them to be made available to all, and perhaps it didn’t matter anyway since they were said to be sketchy about much of what had happened in the early years. The books themselves had been recorded and bound only a dozen centuries ago, their contents translated from written notes and oral history gathered together from hundreds of sources. It was impossible to say how much of it was accurate. Certainly some of it was too thin and dated to be of any use. But perhaps the Loden and the seeking-Elfstones were important enough to Elven history and culture that whatever was written about them would be essentially correct.

He had to hope so. Because if there wasn’t something in those books about the seeking-Stones and the Loden and the whole business of how to save the Ellcrys without uprooting her…

So his thinking went, unraveling like thread off a spool, spinning out into a pile at his feet.

By the time he was summoned, two hours later, he had lost most of his enthusiasm for what he had come to do and all of his patience. Everyone else had been taken ahead of him, even though he was a member of the royal family. He couldn’t help but think that this was the King’s way of letting him know that he had slid a long way down in the royal pecking order since the confrontation with his parents over splitting the Elves. That hadn’t involved him personally, but it seemed he might be paying the price nevertheless. He made a mental note to ask his sister how she was faring as a member of the King’s personal guard.

“Kirisin!” the King exclaimed. “What a pleasant surprise!” He was a big man with a booming voice and expansive gestures, and the exuberance of his greeting seemed to refute the possibility of any personal antagonism. “But why aren’t you in the gardens with the other Chosen?”