The Elves of Cintra (24 page)

“I’ve been asleep. I’m not on duty again until day after tomorrow—today now, I guess. Dawn’s not far off.” The big Elf looked from face to face. “What do you need me to do?”

Simralin told him. He listened without comment, typical of Tragen, who seldom had much to say in any case. “Can you do it?” she finished.

He nodded. “Stay out of sight until I get back. No lights. No movement. Lock up after me.”

He went out the door and shut it tightly behind him. Simralin gave him a moment to get clear and then slid the heavy bar latch into place.

They moved over to the shadows behind a shuttered window that let them peer through the slats into the night and crouched down to wait.

After a few moments of silence, Kirisin said, “Are you sure you can trust him?”

His sister nodded without answering.

“You didn’t say anything to me about how you felt about him.”

He felt her eyes on him as he stared studiously out the window. “I didn’t have a chance. This is new.” She touched his shoulder so that he was forced to look at her. “Besides, I’m not sure yet how I feel.”

“He seems pretty sure.” He hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “But never mind. I like Tragen.”

Simralin grinned, pretty and flushed. “Well, it’s all right, then. But don’t get ahead of yourself. He’s interesting enough for now, but maybe not for more than that.”

Kirisin grinned back. He glanced at Angel to catch her reaction. But the Knight of the Word didn’t seem to be paying attention, sitting back and away from them, staring at nothing. He started to speak to her and stopped. What he had mistaken for disinterest was something else. There was pain in her eyes, a ripple of loss and remorse. He could read it clearly, and it surprised him that he could. She might be thinking of Ailie, but she might be thinking of someone else, too. She would have lost more in her short lifetime than the tatterdemalion, he thought. And he wondered again about what she had survived before coming to Arborlon and the Elves.

Tragen was gone for the better part of an hour. When he reappeared, the first glimmer of dawn was beginning to appear through breaks in the forest canopy, and the shadows were starting to recede. He came out of the trees at a swift walk, looking neither left nor right. Simralin opened the door to admit him.

“Culph is dead,” the big Tracker announced as soon as the door was closed again. “I found him in his sleeping chamber, torn apart. The damage was bad, but I could tell it was him.”

Kirisin squeezed his eyes shut.
We were too slow!
He rounded on Angel. “I told you it wasn’t him! I told you!”

“Stop it, Little K,” Simralin snapped. “She only said what the rest of us were thinking—that it
might
have been him, not that it was.” She shook her head helplessly. “I thought it was him, too. So we’re back to the King.”

“Or one of his ministers,” Angel amended. “Or anyone else standing around when Ailie was in the Council chambers. We can’t be sure.” She reached over and touched Kirisin on the shoulder. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

“We should have warned him,” the boy whispered to no one in particular. “We should have done something.”

“I don’t think there was much you could have done,” Tragen said. “He was killed hours ago, long before the King’s daughter.” He looked at Simralin and shook his head. “I don’t know what is going on, but it isn’t good. Once they find the old man’s body, things will only get worse. They’re looking for you. All of you. They’re combing the city, house by house. You have to get away while you still can.”

Simralin shouldered her pack. “Looks like we don’t have any choice. We’re leaving.” She moved over to him, reached up to touch his cheek, and kissed him on the mouth. Kirisin watched, intrigued. “I have to ask you to do something else. I need you to go to Briar Ruan and warn my parents not to return, to stay where they are until they hear from me. Will you do that?”

Tragen looked at the floor. “I had thought I would go with you.”

She shook her head. “Then you would be one of us. I can’t allow that. Besides, you will do me a bigger favor by warning my parents. Perhaps I will have need of your help again before this is finished. There has to be someone here I can turn to.”

He hesitated a moment, and then nodded. “All right, Sim. But I don’t have to like it.”

She kissed him again, a deeper kiss, and this time Kirisin looked away. “You don’t have to like it,” she told Tragen. “You just have to do it.”

She opened the cottage door, peered out momentarily, and then led Kirisin and Angel back into the night. They moved swiftly toward the shadow of the surrounding trees, eager to gain their concealment, to blend into the darkness. In the distance, south toward the city, the buzz of activity had grown more pronounced. In the east, the sky was flooded with light from the sunrise.

Kirisin glanced back to where Tragen stood in the doorway watching after them. The big Elf waved halfheartedly, and the boy waved back.

But his thoughts were of Culph and Erisha and Ailie and his nagging certainty that everything he was trying to do—for the Elves, for the Ellcrys, for those with him, even for himself—was going wrong.

FOURTEEN

W
ITH
S
IMRALIN IN THE LEAD,
the fugitives made their way clear of Arborlon, glancing back over their shoulders at every turn, scanning the trees and pathways of the city they were fleeing, watchful for signs of pursuit. For a time, those signs were everywhere—lights fading in and out of the buildings they slipped through, shouts and cries in the dawn’s silent waking, voices in the distance, shadows in the trees, their fears and doubts heightened at every turn. Elves and demons both would be hunting them, and the odds of discovery were huge.

Even as the sounds diminished and the number of cottages dwindled, their fear of being caught trailed after them like their shadows. There was for Kirisin a pervasive sense of futility about their efforts. It was impossible that no one would catch them, that all efforts at finding them would fail. He waited for the movement or sound that would confirm this certainty. He knew his sister and Angel were waiting, too. No one talked; no one even looked at the others. All eyes swept the forest; all ears strained for the smallest sound. The Elven Trackers were too skilled and experienced to be fooled; the demons were too determined and relentless. One or the other would find them.

Yet somehow, neither did. Somehow, they got clear.

Eventually, they were climbing into the mountains, pushing deeper into the Cintra. The high passes were more difficult to navigate, and that was why Simralin was taking them there. She wanted to make it harder for those hunting them to discover their trail by choosing terrain that would hide best any evidence of their passing. Neither Kirisin nor Angel questioned her decision. Both understood that Simralin was the one they must rely on to get them safely away, the one who best knew how. Their primary objectives this day were to put distance between themselves and those who followed, and to hide any traces of their passing.

As their trek wore on, Kirisin found himself feeling marginally better. Although he knew it was coming, no evidence of immediate pursuit revealed itself. Perhaps the Elves and demons were still attempting to discover where they had gone. With luck, neither might have realized they had fled the city. Both might think they were still in hiding, waiting out the storm. Whatever they thought, they did not appear to be tracking them yet.

As well, movement seemed to help lessen the pain of what had happened to them in Ashenell. Even though he could still see Erisha’s face in those last moments—confused, scared, and shocked by the knowledge of what was happening to her—the immediacy of her death had diminished and a determination to make it count for something had surfaced in its place. He could not bring his cousin back; he might not even be able to gain justice for her. But he could finish what together they had set out to do. He could find the Loden and use it to help the Ellcrys and the Elven people. Nothing of what had occurred, however dreadful, had done anything to cause him to rethink his commitment or his promise to the tree. He had lost three people he cared about and suffered a strange sense of violation as a result of their deaths, but those losses only increased his resolve.

They climbed into the mountains all morning, ascending until they were through the first of the passes and deep amid the highest peaks. The air was thin, and breathing came hard. It was cold, too, and Kirisin shivered inside his tightly wrapped travel cloak. All around him the sky was a clear, bright blue, and the brilliance of the light caused him to squint sharply as he walked. He felt the solitude of the rock and the earth close about him like a wall, but was not afraid.

He thought of his parents more than once, wishing he had been given a chance to say good-bye to them and to explain what he was doing and why. He thought of how relieved they would have been if he had been able to tell them what had happened. He worried that something bad would befall them because of this failing, that Arissen Belloruus would find a way to make them suffer for what he perceived to be their son’s treachery.

Mostly, he thought about the King, who now, almost inescapably in the light of everything that had happened, seemed the demon that had hidden itself among them.

When they stopped at midday to consume a short lunch, he could contain himself no longer. “I just don’t see how anyone but Erisha’s father can be the one who’s responsible for what’s happened,” he began all at once.

Angel shook her head. “I don’t like it that he’s so obviously the right choice. Ailie was right. Demons do everything they can to shift suspicion from themselves when they’re working in secret. That’s been their history since the beginning.”

They were eating from a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese and washing it down with Elven ale, sitting up on the rocks in the lee of an overhang that provided some shelter from the wind. Even so, their words were carried away almost as soon as they were spoken, and they had to lean close to one another to hear. Overhead, sparse clouds spun like great, frothy pinwheels, caught in the air currents generated by the peaks.

Kirisin shaded his eyes from the blinding orb of the sun. “But the King was the one who told Erisha not to pursue the Ellcrys’s plea for help. He was the one who told me not to do anything or tell anyone until I heard from him, and then I never heard a word. He was the one who lied to me about what he and Erisha knew. Even when you and Ailie confronted him, he tried to cast doubt on what you claimed. He blocked every attempt to find the Elfstones.”

“He also stood to gain from the deaths of Ailie and Erisha,” Simralin added. She handed the aleskin to Kirisin, who drank deeply. “Sooner or later, he would have been placed in proximity to Ailie, and she would have exposed him if he was a demon. You said as much yourself, Angel. And killing Erisha gave him a way to blame us for what happened and force us to flee. Now he can hunt us down and kill us, and no one will do anything to stop him.”

“Culph was probably killed because he discovered the truth,” Kirisin continued. “He was still poking around in the histories, trying to find out something more about Elfstones. He probably got caught where he shouldn’t have been.”

“Arissen Belloruus hasn’t been himself for some time now, but more so of late.” Simralin took back the aleskin from her brother and passed it to Angel. “He was always high-strung and temperamental, but in recent weeks he has been especially edgy. Everyone could tell that something was bothering him.”

They stopped talking and waited for the Knight of the Word to say something in response. Angel shrugged. She adjusted herself on the rocks, putting aside her food. “Demons live long lives. This one is probably very old and has been in place for a long time. It is a changeling, so it would have assumed various identities over the years, switching off one disguise for another when it became necessary or convenient to do so. It could have been an animal as easily as a human. Changeling demons can take the shape of any living creature. But this is what you should remember. The reason they make their choice of disguise is what matters. This demon was set in place to keep an eye on the Elves, to make certain they don’t interfere in the affairs of humans, to keep them in their Cintra enclave until it’s time to dispose of them for good.”

The Elves stared at her in disbelief. “What do you mean,
dispose of them
?” Kirisin managed.

Angel paused, choosing her words carefully. “The demons and their kind have a very specific goal—to eliminate the human race. They are doing so in a variety of ways, but however they achieve it they want us all dead. When they finish with us, they will go to work on the Elves. They leave you alone for now because you don’t present an immediate threat. I didn’t even know you existed until Ailie told me. You are only a myth to humans. You work hard to keep it that way, mostly by staying apart, staying hidden. That serves the purposes of the demons exactly. By the time they come for you—which they will—there won’t be any humans left to take your part. You will be on your own, and you will be overrun and destroyed. Every last one of you.”

Kirisin looked as if he had been struck a physical blow. “They want to kill us all?”

Angel nodded. “The Void’s path is one of destruction.”

“Is this the destruction the Ellcrys was warning us about?” the boy pressed. He was trying to make sense of what he was hearing, but its implications were so overwhelming that he could not. “The end of the world she says is coming?”

“I don’t know.” Angel resumed eating, her face maddeningly calm given the pronouncement she had just made. “Destruction comes from any number of sources and in any number of ways, and it is hard to know which form the one that finishes us will take. The Knights of the Word have struggled long and hard just to contain the demons and their armies of once-men. But we lack the ability to see far enough ahead to know what most to fear.” She bit off a chunk of bread and chewed. “It takes every ounce of energy we have just to try to keep alive those the demons hunt.”