Fortress Draconis (7 page)

Resolute ducked beneath a low maple branch. “There was nothing to do, boy. If we fail in our mission, her fate won’t matter.”

“And that mission is?”

The Vorquelf smiled cruelly. “Seeing if you’re steel or bronze, boy. If you’re the one, you’ll save the world. If you’re the other, you’ll be lucky to save yourself.”

The trail took them up and around through a narrow pass where stones scraped both of Will’s shins as he rode. After a short while it opened into a small copse of birch, then down into a vale that made Will’s breath catch in his chest. He let his horse wander off the trail and start cropping grasses while he just sat in the saddle and stared.

Until this journey and his education by Resolute, Will had not known one plant from another. While his trip had not been long, he had absorbed a great deal. He’d even been able to identify his leaf as looking like something from an oak, though the silver metal matched nothing he saw growing in field and forest.

At least until now…

Rows of silverwood trees lined the trail into the vale. Other plants clung to these trees, bursting with gorgeous flowers, lush and plump and colorful. Bushes were ripe with berries that looked like raspberries, but were pumpkin orange. Other flowers and undergrowth seemed familiar, but somehow more vibrant, more green, more alive than plants not a league back down the road.

Crow rode over and took the reins from Will’s hands. “Come on, this is nothing.”

That comment surprised Will. “What is this place?”

“The shadow of another place.”

Crow nudged his horse’s ribs with his heels and the two animals trotted forward through the silverwood arbor. At the bottom of a slight hill, the trail curved around to the left, through plots of cultivated soil. Will recognized none of the vegetables hanging from those plants, but the chickens that scattered as they rode up seemed quite common. He saw a pen with goats and sheep in it further along, but no farmhouse to go along with the fields and livestock.

Crow reined up behind Resolute and the packhorses, near the mouth of a cave. A female elf emerged from it. Will supposed she was a Vorquelf, since her eyes were almost entirely copper, but they had a white dot at the center of each. Those dots flicked back and forth, as if she were watching them dismount, but Will saw that her gaze followed sounds, not people.

He wondered for a moment if she were Resolute’s wife. He doubted any female would be stupid enough to want Resolute for a husband, but having him for one would explain why she lived in a place that was hard for him to visit.

Resolute crossed to her and dropped to a knee. He took her right hand in his and kissed it. “Our absence has been unforgivable.”

She patted his head gently, as if he were a dog. “Forgiven because it was unavoidable. I have seen where you have been, Resolute. And Kedyn’s Crow, he still travels with you.”

Crow swung from the saddle and hugged the elf. “It has been too long.”

She freed herself from his embrace. “And this one you’ve brought. Who is he?”

Her voice caressed his ears and his heart began to pound faster. Will didn’t know who she was, but for Resolute to kneel before her meant she was important. Still, Will didn’t need that evidence to know how special she was. Something inside of him realized they shared a kinship, a bond.

Will slid from the saddle and fished the leaf-bag from within his tunic. He held it out. “I’m Will, a courier. This is for you.” As much as he didn’t want to surrender it, he also knew, deep down, that it was never meant to be possessed. It was meant to be put to a use, and she was the one to use it.

“I am Oracle, and I thank you, Will.” Her slender fingers stroked his hands as she accepted the pouch from him. She smiled, and Will felt certain it was because of the leaf. “Wilburforce, yes, a wonderful name. I intended no disrespect.”

“I, urn, th-thank you.” Will found his mouth suddenly dry. “No problem.”

“Good.” The word came softly from her mouth, then she closed her eyes and opened the bag. The silver leaf seemed to shine more brightly than ever before as she brought it into her hands and the full light of day. She clasped it flat between her hands, the silver so brilliant that light fled through her flesh, outlining her bones in black. “Yes, oh, yes, this is an important piece. Come, now, come with me.”

She turned on her heel and all but ran into the cave. Will started after her, but Crow grabbed his shoulder. “Slowly, Will. She knows the cave well and the darkness does not bother her.”

The youth nodded. “Her eyes. She’s blind, isn’t she?” Resolute growled. “Some sight is gone, but she sees what she must see.”

Will frowned. “Can’t you ever just say yes?”

“Some questions just don’t have simple answers, boy.” Crow gave Will’s shoulder a squeeze. “Yes, she is blind. She has been for a number of years now.” Will’s eyes widened. “How did it happen?” Resolute, half hidden in the shadow of the cave, scowled. “She did it to herself.”

“What? Why?”

“Here’s an answer that’s simple for you, boy….” Resolute’s voice echoed from inside the cave as he disappeared. “She didn’t want someone else using her eyes.”

Will followed Resolute into the cave and passed through a narrowing before the path cut to the left. There it widened somewhat into a flat ovoid space several yards across at the widest point. A small fire guttered in a makeshift fireplace fashioned of stones. It generated more heat than light, with the smoke rising to fill the chamber’s low roof. A bit farther along the path, the smoke, like water pouring gently over a dam, streamed out and rose through a crack in the cave’s roof.

The Vorquelf’s bulk blocked Will from seeing into the next chamber, but he knew it was going to be something spectacular. Light, a greenish silver, glowed around Resolute’s outline. Resolute ducked his head to make it through a small opening and Will followed, his head unbowed.

Then he stopped, his breath frozen in his lungs.

For the whole of the journey to the mountains, Resolute had ground on about how little Will knew about the world. Will had learned from him, at times grudgingly, other times gratefully; but never had Will let go of his conviction that he knew far more than Resolute suspected or would ever know himself. The cavern into which he walked stripped that smugness away from him.-

He felt as lost as a wandering toddler in the streets of Yslin.

The soft brilliance of glowing minerals and lichens illuminated the cavern, which Will guessed was big enough to house four of the Hare and Hutch inns. Pillars of flowstone upheld a dark roof within which sparkled lights like stars. He even thought he recognized some of the constellations, but so many seemed alien to him.

More remarkable than a night sky set in stone was the cavern itself. As Will took a step forward he felt as if he were moving through something fluid—not as dense as water, but certainly not air. He really could feel it pressing against him, softly and gently, like the weight of a light blanket. It didn’t hurt or make him uncomfortable, yet it dragged on him the way the air did on a humid day.

All around him, throughout the cavern, things hung in the air. Leaves and branches, here and there, as if they were the only visible part of trees hidden by an invisible fog. By his feet he saw the skeleton of what he took to be a rabbit, painstakingly reconstructed, with a moth-eaten cape of fur draped over it. Beyond it, springing from atop a rock, another skeleton hovered in mid-leap, clawed paws ready to rend the rabbit. Looking at it Will could almost see the muscles layered on its bare bones, the rippling of them and how that would shift the color of the hunting predator’s coat.

Yet more impressive than the bones and branches were the murals. At first Will could not tell what they were because when he looked at them from the entryway, all he saw was a slender stripe of color. As he moved further into the room, however, the colors spread out into long rectangular landscapes and vistas. Through them—some were painted, others the product of chalk or of bits and pieces of stone and leaf mosaics that just hung there in the air—he could see how a boulder had been transformed into an ocean headland, or a stone spire became the edge of a valley. And as he stared longer at any one picture, the reality that defined it seemed to fade. The colors mixed and fused, then bled into depth. He wanted to reach a hand out and through them to touch the place they represented.

Resolute caught his left wrist before he could touch a painting. “Don’t.”

“No? It seems so real.”

“It is, orwas” Resolute’s voice broke ever so slightly, surprising Will. “How much do you know of magick, boy?”

Will felt his rebellion returning, but he only shrugged.

Oracle turned from where she had been brushing a light blue circle of paint onto what was, for all Will could see, air. “Resolute, you make it sound like an accusation. Wilburforce would know nothing of magick, for he has not had the opportunity to be trained.”

Part of Will wanted to frown with her use of his full name, but from her mouth it sounded right. It wasn’t used the way Marcus and some of the others had, to scold or ridicule him.The way she says it makes it fit me.

Oracle smiled at Will and opened her hands, leaving the brush and small bowl of pigment she’d been using hanging in the air. She stepped around them, opening her arms to encompass the whole room. “This is a place of magick, a very special place, and you are now one of two men who knows of its existence.”

“Thank you?” Will’s confusion knitted his brows together. “Why would you trust me?”

“We have to, Wilburforce.” She turned and nodded toward Resolute. “The acorn, please.”

The Vorquelf dug into a small pouch on his belt and produced an acorn. It looked like many others Will had learned to identify on his trip, save that it had a red-gold sheen to it instead of brown or green. Resolute flipped it toward Oracle. The acorn traveled quickly through the first half of its arc, then slowed and started floating, as if it were a feather caught on a whisper.

Oracle opened her right hand, splaying long pale fingers, and the acorn came to rest in the center of her palm. “This acorn came from the very tree that produced the leaf you found, Wilburforce. In magick, many things are linked. Some links are natural, such as the link between a leaf and a tree. Do you understand?”

Will nodded.

“Some links are forged. By way of example, this acorn is something Resolute has carried for two years. It contains traces of him, much as a stone you’d held in your hands for hours would have some of your warmth.”

Will nodded, then realized that because she was blind, she could not see him. “I understand.”

Resolute snorted. “She knew. Heard your brain rattling in your skull.”

Oracle closed her eyes and sighed. “Your impatience, Resolute, must it color everything?”

Resolute started to answer in Elvish, but Oracle frowned. “In the common tongue. He should hear this.”

“If we must.” Resolute’s nostrils flared. “Perhaps my impatience need not spill over, but we do not know if he is the one we need or not.”

“The acorn led you to him, did it not?”

“The acorn led me to the leaf, and you said the leaf would lead to him. This boy could just be a link in a chain.”

She smiled and opened her eyes slowly. “It was not easy for me to blind myself, yet you refuse to even see.”

Will fidgeted. “You may be speaking words I understand, but, um, I don’t understand.”

“Understanding will come, Wilburforce.” She turned a circle, almost gaily, with the hem of her white robe flaring out, her long white braid arcing behind her. “This place we created from bits and pieces of our homeland, Vorquellyn. You know the story: a century and a quarter ago the Aurolani host overran the island and we were driven out.

When elves are about your age, they are bound to the land of their birth through a ritual. It makes us responsible for our homeland, ties to it so we feel its pain. Those elves who were bound to Vorquellyn were in such agony because of the island’s rape that they abandoned the world.

“This left the unbound—Resolute, Amends, me, others—to wander the world and fight for our homeland. We hoped, a human generation ago, that the war against Chytrine would free Vorquellyn, but it did not. So we began to act covertly. Here we bring together artifacts of our old home, for those things link us to it. As we get more, the link grows stronger.”

Will glanced back toward the outside. “The trees, they were grown from seeds from Vorquellyn?”

“No, Wilburforce, things from Vorquellyn we bring in here. Those plants came from other elven homelands, though originally were grown from Vorquellyn stock.” She shrugged. “We had hoped that growing them here might allow us to establish a homeland. While they do provide a link, it is a weak one, since conditions here are not the same as they were on our island. In this cave, however, the power grows. I can sometimes hear the breakers, feel the sea breeze, smell flowers and fruits.”

Resolute scratched along his unshaven jaw. “To create this place—the idea for it came from a series of prophecies Oracle uttered at the time of the war—we demanded keepsakes from the Vorquelves. Some, like Predator, held out. As we get more, the power grows.”

“Why not just go to Vorquellyn and get what you need?”

Resolute began with one of his low and sinister laughs, but a frown from Oracle cut him off. “Wilburforce, these things came from Vorquellynbefore the taint settled over it. Anything from there now would serve to warn our enemies of our presence, and we cannot have that.”

The youth nodded slowly. “How am I part of this?”

The blind Vorquelf sighed and turned away from him.

“Follow me.” As she walked deeper into the cavern, she swept past the edge of one mural and descended from view.

Will trailed after her quickly and hurried down a narrow stairway that had been crudely hacked from the stone. Glowing lichen marked the top of the passage, though he was in no risk of hitting his head. It twisted right and then left again, descending sharply during the last twenty yards, and opened into another smaller chamber that he figured was roughly below the heart of the room above. Lichen and minerals also provided illumination here, and for the barest of moments, Will envied Oracle her blindness.