The Elves of Cintra (37 page)

She was very tired and very sad.

They won’t come for you, you know. No one ever comes for you once you’re gone.

She could hear the boy with the ruined face speaking those cruel words, and the memory chilled her. But he was wrong. This was her family, and her family would never leave her. Not the Ghosts. Not Owl and Sparrow and Panther and the others. They would come.

She gained the highway and followed it south toward the place where she had left them. They would come, she told herself again and again.

Just before dawn, as the rising sun turned the sky a strange silvery red below a bank of heavy smoke and ash from a fire whose origins she could only guess at, they did.

TWENTY-TWO

F
OR NEARLY TWO WEEKS,
Simralin led her brother and Angel Perez north through the high desert east of the Cintra, following the spine of the mountains they had entered after fleeing Arborlon. The days were hot, the nights cool, and the air dry and filled with the taste and smell of iron. They traversed long stretches of sandy soil studded with scrub brush and wiry trees whose branches had somehow kept their bristle-ridged leaves and rocky lava fields that suggested how the world might have looked when it was first being born. The miles disappeared behind them, but the look of the land never changed. After a time, Kirisin began to wonder if they were actually getting anywhere or simply going in circles, but he kept his concerns to himself and placed his trust in his sister.

In any case, all his spare energy was tied up in keeping watch for the demons tracking them. He knew they were back there, following soundlessly and invisibly, waiting for their chance. Sooner or later they would appear, intent on killing them all, probably when least expected. He tried not to let his distress show, to be more like his sister and Angel Perez, who were always so calm and steady. Nothing seemed to disturb either of them. Of course, they were more used to living like this, to being either the hunter or the hunted. They had learned long ago to coexist with uncertainty and edginess. He was still trying to figure out how to deal with both, and the effort was draining him. He wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t eating, and he was barely able to think of anything else. The repetitive nature of their travel only added to his sense of dread. Each day was a fresh slog through a forest of fears, a mind-numbing trek toward the disaster he knew was waiting. Nothing he did could dispel this certainty and the effect it was having on him. He could barely remember what life had been like before. His time as a Chosen, as a caretaker for the Ellcrys, might have happened a hundred years ago.

But there was an unintended and oddly positive aspect to his distress that he had not anticipated. He had begun this journey filled with pain and grief for the dead he had left behind. He had thought he would never feel good about anything again, haunted by what he had witnessed and how he had failed to prevent it. But day by day he found himself experiencing a gradual erosion of his despair, a wearing-away of the once seemingly unforgettable images of Erisha as she lay dying. He was able to stop trying to picture Ailie and old Culph in their final moments, as well. It didn’t happen all at once or even in a way that was immediately recognizable. It wasn’t that he was healing, but that his hurt and grief had been crowded out by his fears and dark expectations. There was no room for the former when the latter consumed his every waking minute.

The strength of his conviction that the King was responsible for all three deaths continued to grow. Perhaps it was that certainty and the anger that accompanied it that kept him from collapse. Each night, as they huddled together in whatever shelter they were able to find, they spoke of the killings and the reasons for which they were carried out. There seemed little doubt about any of it, save for the part that had allowed Kirisin to survive and escape with the blue Elfstones. Given the fact that they had been caught so completely off guard coming out of the underground tombs of Ashenell, it seemed that killing both Chosen should have been a sure thing. Angel thought that perhaps it was Simralin’s quick action that had saved him. Putting out the four-legged demon’s eye and leaving the dagger embedded in the socket had worked just enough damage that it was only able to reach Erisha. Simralin, on the other hand, thought that the demon had simply taken on more than it could handle, and that they had all contributed to its failure to succeed.

Kirisin wasn’t sure what he thought, save that he was certain the demon in hiding among the Elves was Arissen Belloruus. He wondered what they were going to do to reveal this even if they found the Loden and returned it to Arborlon and the Elves. How were they going to remove the threat before they closed away the city and the Elves as the Ellcrys had asked of them?

“One step at a time, Little K,” his sister replied when, after more than a week out, he finally managed to voice his concerns. “We can’t solve it all at once and maybe we won’t even know
how
to solve it until we get to that point. You don’t want to look too far ahead in something like this.”

They were seated on a ledge at the beginning of a downslope off the high desert, looking north toward the eastern slopes of the Cintra Mountains and beyond to the silvery thread of a wide river. It was after crossing the river that they would reach Syrring Rise.

“You didn’t solve the secret of the hiding place of the Elfstones all at once,” Angel pointed out. “You had to solve it piecemeal.”

Kirisin screwed up his face. “It’s just that I keep thinking we aren’t going to have much time to do anything but use the Loden once we find it and get back to Arborlon. Maybe we will have to shut the demon away with our own people just because we can’t figure out who it is.”

“One demon, thousands of Elves,” said his sister. “Pretty decent odds, even if it happens.”

“Tell me something more of the history behind this tree we’re trying to save,” Angel asked suddenly. “What is it that makes it so important?”

Simralin and Kirisin exchanged a quick glance. “You tell her, Little K,” his sister said. “You’re the one who knows the story best.”

Kirisin drew up his knees and hugged them to his chest. He didn’t want to tell anybody anything, didn’t want to talk at all. “This is what our histories tell us, so I’m just repeating,” he said, forcing himself anyway. “But I think it is mostly true. Before there were humans in the world, there were Faeries. The Faeries were the first people. All sorts, all kinds, good and bad. Like humans. Elves were one of the stronger, more dominant species. They believed that all life had value and should be preserved. Others did not. The bad ones. So there was a war. The Faeries fought in the same way humans fight except that many had the use of magic and some of their magic was very powerful. Eventually, the practitioners of dark magic began to gain an advantage. Their intention was to dominate the other species and redesign the world in a way that better suited them. They could do that, given enough time and space.

“The Elves led a coalition of Faerie creatures who opposed the dark magic users and their allies. The war lasted a very long time. Centuries. In the end, the Elves and their allies prevailed. They created a talisman through the use of a combination of elemental and blood magic—the most powerful magic of all—to construct a prison for their enemies. The talisman was the Ellcrys, the only one of her kind, a tree that would live thousands of years and maintain a barrier behind which the Faerie creatures that practiced dark magic and their allies would be shut away. The barrier was called the Forbidding.”

“And the Ellcrys is what keeps the Forbidding in place?” Angel interrupted. “Her magic is the catalyst?”

He nodded. “For the Forbidding to endure, the Ellcrys must be kept healthy and strong. The Chosen were formed after her creation to ensure that she stayed so.”

“So if the Forbidding fails…”

“The demons escape,” Kirisin finished. “Back into our world. Faerie demons no one has seen in thousands of years. Monsters of all sorts. Creatures of dark magic. Worse than those the humans have spawned, maybe.”

“Perhaps they would kill each other off,” Simralin offered with a wry smile.

“Perhaps they would kill all of us off first,” Angel replied. She shook her head. “How is it that these things are created? What permits them life? I believe in the Word; I have seen its power and spoken with its servants. The Word created everything. But I keep asking myself. Why did it create things like this? Why does it permit demons to exist?”

Kirisin shrugged. “In the world of Faerie, the demons and their kind were always there. What difference does it make? They exist and they threaten us. Humans have done nothing about it. Humans don’t even work to protect the world they live in like the Elves do. They don’t seem to know how to stop the demons from claiming everything. That’s why we’re where we are now.”

His anger surfaced and carried him away for a moment, and he remembered too late to whom he was speaking.

“Little K,” his sister said softly. “Angel knows.”

He stopped talking abruptly as he felt the color of his embarrassment rise from his neck into his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s nothing.” Angel gave him a quick smile. “You meant it, and you were right to mean it. Humans have failed themselves and their world, and they are going to lose everything because of it. That’s why we’re here. Because all we can do now is pick up enough pieces to begin putting everything back together again.”

“Seems that way,” he mumbled, still ashamed of his outburst.

“Tell me about the Loden, Kirisin.”

He shook his head. “There isn’t much to tell. No one knows exactly what it does. Not even old Culph knew. It is a powerful Elfstone, mined and formed in the early days of the Faerie world like the others. It operates alone—unlike most Elfstones, which work in sets. It disappeared a long time ago, and the histories don’t say anything about it.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” she asked. “That there’s no mention of it at all?”

Kirisin had thought that himself more than once. A talisman of magic as powerful and important as the Loden should have had a special place in the Elven histories. Why wasn’t there any mention of it?

“I don’t know why there isn’t anything written,” he admitted. He thought about it some more. “The Ellcrys said, when she spoke to me that first time, that I was to use the seeking-Elfstones to find it, then to carry the Loden to her and place her within it.”

“Maybe the Loden acts as a sort of barrier in the same way as the Ellcrys,” Angel suggested. “But what are you supposed to do with it once you find out how to put the Ellcrys inside?”

“And what about the Elves?” Simralin finished.

There were no ready answers for any of these questions, and in the end all they could do was speculate. But it helped them pass the time and gave them a chance to examine anew the nature of their undertaking and its importance to the Elven people. Kirisin was already invested in the effort and Simralin, too, if less so. But Angel was a different story. Her commitment was tenuous, at best. She was still trying to come to terms with what she had been given to do. The boy understood her reticence and accepted it. The Elves were not her people and the battle not hers to fight. She had her own struggle against her own enemies. As a Knight of the Word, she was fighting for the human race, not for the Elves. She hadn’t even known of the existence of the Elves before Ailie came to her. She had accepted what the tatterdemalion had told her she must do, a charge given directly by the Word. It was in the nature of her service that she must do so. But that didn’t mean she had embraced it emotionally. Her charge had been a different one until now. It wasn’t as if she could simply walk away from it without looking back, without wondering if she had made a wrong choice, without asking herself if she had jumped from bad to worse.

Kirisin would have wondered the same thing if he had been in her shoes. He would have balked at helping the humans who had done so much to destroy his world and endanger his people. He might easily have refused. He gave her credit for not doing so. She was risking every bit as much as he had in believing that what she had been asked to do was important and necessary.

But her heart was not necessarily as committed as his sister’s and his own to their undertaking, and he worried that at some point her reticence would prove a dangerous failing.

He worried, but unlike so much of what troubled him, he kept this particular worry to himself.

A
NGEL
P
EREZ
was indeed conflicted. Conflicted enough that she was becoming increasingly disenchanted with her place in the world. It wasn’t that she didn’t intend to do her best to help Kirisin and his sister in their efforts to find the Loden Elfstone; it was that she wasn’t yet convinced that this was what she should be doing. Ailie had said so, but Ailie, her conscience in this strange business, was gone. She had only herself to turn to for reassurance, and she wasn’t finding much of what she needed by doing so.