Elayne opened her mouth, then seemed to think better of it and closed it again. She grunted and focused back on the road ahead. He wanted to push for more, but her brow was knit in a way that said don’t and loudly. He certainly didn’t want her to yell at him again, that had felt particularly crummy last time.
He almost said how impressed he had been with Rosalind in an attempt to change the subject, but then stopped, looking harder at her. She was lost in thought, and he knew his voice wouldn’t be welcome wherever her head had gone. In fact, he thought, his voice might not be welcome at all, and he might just deserve that. Instead, he watched her from the corner of his eye, waiting for her brow to soften.
***
As the day wore on, Rosalind and Bix traded stories of what life in their respective cultures was like. Yes, they both had spectacles, no they were not made of the same things, though Rosalind couldn’t confirm of what exactly human glasses were made. They agreed on what foods tasted best—all of them—and that one of the worst things was a long stretch between meals as they shared some of the cheese she had packed. And kobolds, as it turned out, had their own monarchical government in their caverns underground, but the enforcement of laws was left almost entirely up to Fate, a god that Rosalind had worked out to be the same as their own goddess Fa’te, but there was some disagreement about the size of her ears.
Elayne interjected when Rosalind prompted her but was quick to fall silent again when Frederick joined in. He seemed to notice, but she wasn’t ready to speak to him just yet. She was torn by his help, coming from nowhere yet proving itself genuine so far. It juxtaposed in her mind with the memories of arriving at Yavarid Castle with three of her father’s best bannermen ten years ago, the way King Harry had started when he saw her, the way Queen Astrid sighed so heavily and looked away. The disgust and disappointment when they realized she had become their burden was painful, but worse was when her friends had gone cold, scared even, gossiping that what she had was catching, that the curse had not only physically deformed her but scarred her mind as well. None of them had bothered to ask after the truth.
And now Frederick acted as though none of that had happened at all.
They traveled into the night, but even in the thickening wood a chill fell on them, and the darkness overcame their best sense of direction with branches blocking out the night sky. They found a small clearing off the forest path and gathered a pile of sticks and kindling. Frederick had gone to light it but turned to Elayne instead. “Am I correct in remembering you have the gift?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“Would you do us the honor?” He gestured to the pile.
Surely he could light the thing himself. “I can’t conjure fire.” She locked eyes on the wood pile, not wanting to lie directly to him.
“Oh.” He blinked up at her, then with a flick of his wrist lit the branches by pulling a small spark out of thin air the way only human mages could. “I guess I don’t remember properly.”
He did remember properly, Elayne thought, seating herself next to the wood pile and staring into the growing flame, but she hadn’t used that ability in a very long time.
After scarfing down the reserves they’d brought, Rosalind convinced Frederick to help her with a bit of training. In the dancing light of the fire, he swung at her ever so gently, but when she knocked him hard in the face, he laughed and paid much closer attention. Elayne sat with Bix, watching. The kobold had shared some berries from his rucksack with them, and she offered him a second thanks. He grinned up at her, his smile wide and teeth sharp, but it was a comforting sort of grin.
Elayne pulled A History of Hallowmarch from her satchel and squinted down at it, hoping she could read by firelight.
“Are you traveling home?” Bix asked, tilting his bulbous head to the side so that one of his ears flopped over.
Elayne paused as she flipped through the pages to find her place. “To the elven enclave?” She shook her head. “No, I’m not Trizian.”
“But you are an elf?” He picked out the words carefully.
Elayne stared down at the words as she found where she’d left off. “My mother was an elf, from Apos’phia, and my father was a human.”
“Oh, a crossblood?”
He’d said the word so casually, she suddenly wondered if it had ever been as offensive as she always felt it was. Apparently she wore those thoughts on her face, even as she peered down into the book.
“Was I not supposed to say that? I only ever read that word.”
“No,” she said quickly, “I mean, it’s not really used kindly. Not by people who don’t have blended heritage themselves, that is.”
Bix nodded, assured. “Well, that explains it anyway. You don’t really look like an elf, but you have those ears. I really like them.” He wiggled his own.
Elves were known for their beauty, so of course Elayne didn’t look like one. She touched the point that stuck out from between coarse strands of hair, but instead of turning away and growling about how she didn’t appreciate sarcasm, she felt the urge to tell the kobold the truth. And so she closed the book’s cover. “I look like this because of a curse.”
Bix brightened. “A curse? I’ve read about lots of curses! Hereditary ones, some going back tens of generations, curses on lands to be fallow or haunted, curses on monarchs for dastardly deeds and disloyalty. What is afflicting you?”
She let out a long, low breath and glanced at Rosalind and Frederick trading blows, wholly absorbed. “I guess it’s sort of that last one. I’m from Heulux. Are you familiar with it?”
Bix leaned toward her, the firelight dancing in the reflection of his spectacles. “I’ve only read one book on the place, the only one I could ever find. Did you escape? Through the wall? Did you scale it? Or is there a door?”
“There isn’t an actual wall around Heulux, that’s sort of a…myth,” she started, “They call it a miasma.”
“Right.” Bix was nodding. “A gaseous atmosphere, sometimes unseen, that is noxious and sickening to those who breathe it, usually of an enchanted origin.” He was like a walking bookcase.
“Yes.” She swallowed, looking into the fire. “When the uprising happened ten years ago, that’s what walled in the duchy. The people inside, the elves and the humans and the…crossbloods, they can’t escape it from what I understand. I got out before the miasma completely spread over the city. The elves that took over Heulux, they marked me—well, one elf did—so now I look like this.” Elayne waved a hand over her face.
“Why does that sound so familiar?”
Elayne watched Bix tap a finger on his head. She gave him a moment to think.
“You’re that Elayne?” His eyes widened even more, though she hadn’t thought it possible. “The Exiled Duchess of Heulux?”
She smiled nervously. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Wow! I read there was only one Orraigh survivor, and that she was one of the very few that escaped Heulux, but I never imagined I would meet her!”
Elayne swallowed at the name of her father’s family, the one she, nor anyone else, used anymore. “I can’t believe that’s all in a book somewhere.”
“There’s at least one in the library in Breen, near where my clan’s from.”
She knitted her brow and looked deep into the fire. Breen was known for being the scholarly bastion of the south, not a place of rumors and hearsay. “And what…what did the book say about my mother?”
The excitement that had been all but radiating out of Bix dried up almost instantly. He sat back and focused on his clawed feet as he dug a toe into the dirt. “It said,” the kobold told her quietly, “she was a traitor.”
Elayne felt the word pierce her chest like a dagger. Traitor. The downfall of Heulux, the death of elves and humans alike, including her own father, had been her mother’s fault. Elayne had heard the whispers, worse than anything anyone would say about her face: her mother, Cressyda, had been sympathetic to the rogue elven cause in Apos’phia. They plot
ted to take back Heulux from the human empire, and the nexus along with it.
She wrapped her hand around the pendant once more. Cressyda, they said, had tricked the Duke of Orraigh into the first royal marriage between a human and an elf to take down the duchy from the inside. It had never made sense to Elayne; her mother had been the steward of the nexus long before her father was even born—if her mother had hated humans, if she had been plotting all along, Elayne had never seen it, and if Cressyda had been such an integral part of the coup, then why was she dead?
“Books say lots of things though,” Bix offered quietly.
“They sure do.” Elayne took a deep breath, her eyes tracing over the letters of Hallowmarch on the cover in her lap. “Would you like to read this? I think I’m going to try and get some sleep now. Big day tomorrow.”
Bix nodded and Elayne passed the book off with a withering grin then balled herself up into a cloak. She let only a few tears escape, but no one heard her.
CHAPTER 8
The reclamation of Heulux was, as most elven affairs are, many hundreds of years in the making; however, it took but a single night to accomplish. It was unsanctioned by the elven homeland of Apos’phia, but led by a candidate for the Elder Elven Council, Alaion Eir’faren. The duchy was walled in through a magic heretofore unseen, theorized as an amalgam of elven aether manipulation, mage conjuring, and wizardcraft, and has proved impenetrable.
- from A Brief Account of the Fall of Heulux, Cecilia Sarvius, pub. 1417 PA
Tavaris hated this part. He kept expecting it to get old, but it just never did. The crossbloods always left crying and shaking which was totally embarrassing, but worse than that, it just felt icky. He wished he could have at least had Wren with him, but his father never allowed Wren near the nexus.
This new crossblood had been dumped at the edge of the nexus by Vulras, his father’s idiotic second hand who then stalked back into the shadows to watch with a sickening grin. Tavaris only saw crossbloods this way, bent over that dark basin and terrified—they were never out in the market and definitely not in any other part of the castle—but they kept showing up somehow.
Alaion put a hand on the back of the crossblood’s neck, pushing him down to look into the black pit at the center of the room. The half-elf’s hands were gripping the jagged edge, no doubt fearful of falling in though that was dumb: no one ever did. The space was dim, and Tavaris wished they’d leave the doors open to the throne room once in a while as a giant, gaping hole in the ground, swirling with dark, chaotic aether didn’t offer much light, and the weird, black stones that climbed up the rounded walls weren’t exactly helping. If not for the openings at the top of the tower that rose up over them higher than the rest of the castle, it would be dark as pitch, and even then the cloudy sky only afforded so much light to radiate inside.
Melorya was there too, of course, frowning. She was almost always frowning, but that was why, he supposed, his father liked her so much. She was mean, even to Alaion, and she never smiled despite that Tavaris was always trying to get her to. But she was apparently good at what she did. And Tavaris hated what she did.
The elven woman opened her book. Tavaris had tried to touch that book once, years prior. That had been a bad idea. Just touching the cover gave him a shock that left his fingertips blackened for a week. He tried wearing gloves to cover up the crime, but Melorya saw right through that, ripping them off during one of their lessons and smacking him in the back of the head. “Stupid boy,” she’d hissed, thwacking him again. “Do you want to lose an arm?”
“I just wanted to see,” he had moaned back.
“If you cripple yourself on this thing your father will have my head!” She hit him again. Somehow he didn’t quite believe her. If only it had happened a year or two later she might not have noticed as his hands now had changed, the pale skin of them lined with veins that grew a darker blue every moon.
In the hollow space of the nexus tower, Melorya’s words were breathy and light as she read from the book, so unlike her normal, sullen tone. She spoke in a tongue that no one else seemed to be able to understand except the crossblood. Tavaris suddenly wished he knew this one’s name.
He wasn’t sure how old this half-elf was—he didn’t quite understand how humans or crossbloods aged since it wasn’t important—but he was certainly young, younger than most. He had spindly limbs and a narrow chest and a long face. When Tavaris had smiled at him, he just looked back with that same sort of awe most of them had. They were stupid, he supposed, like his father said, but less like animals than plain old humans what with their elven blood. It was that blood that made them worse, it had been explained to him: crossbloods were an abomination. They knew too much and not enough at the same time, and Maw would be better without them. Tavaris felt sorry for the boy.
And yet, he didn’t exactly understand why his father wanted to kill them all if he needed one. Especially a very specific one. It was all the kind of confusing that made his head hurt because he’d found evidence to the contrary in books he’d squirreled away in his room. He could always make a good argument for the intelligence and kindness of humans and crossbloods in his head, but ultimately decided those things were best left hidden in the pages at the bottom of his trunk.
The boy bent over the nexus had been struggling, but as Melorya’s words became louder, his face lost its pained look. Blankly, he stared downward, his hands softening on the broken stones and sinewy vines that crawled up around the edge of the chaotic, magical basin. He looked, for a moment, like he knew what he was doing.
Alaion’s grip on the boy’s neck tightened, and the corners of his mouth twisted into a smile. Bent over the crossblood, the elf breathed heavily, and he almost looked happy. That wasn’t possible, Tavaris knew, because Alaion never left these rituals happy. But for a second—
A rumble resonated from deep in the nexus, shaking the tower room. Tavaris planted his feet more firmly and held his breath, watching the darkness inside swirl, sapphire and amethyst, reacting to Melorya’s words. This was how it went, but it would be over soon, and Alaion would curse and walk away.
But then a speck of white light blossomed from the nexus’s center, and Tavaris’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be.
The crossblood cried out in a strangled, sickly voice. His hands flew up to his throat, and blood crested his lips, dripping to the floor in long strings of spittle.
Alaion’s grip tightened, and he shouted at the boy, “No, damn you!” When Melorya’s voice faltered, Alaion raised his free hand and pointed at her. “Do not stop!”
Melorya hesitated, her eyes bouncing from the crossblood to the elf, and then back.
“Finish!”
With a quickness, her voice filled the room again, faster, ragged. Tavaris had heard the words before, but never like this. His heart thumped just as quickly.
The crossblood was choking on his own blood as it began to pour out of him, but the light in the nexus was growing. It was working.
And then the boy’s body went lax. The rumbling ceased, the light faltered, and Melorya fell silent. Alaion shook the crossblood, and then with a sigh, dropped him at the edge of the basin. The body fell lifelessly forward, his head slamming into the vines and rocks.
Alaion turned away from the nexus immediately. He did not even bother to watch the white spark recede. There was the anger Tavaris knew so well, and there it went out the door with the flash of a black cape and a mumbled curse on all of humanity.
Tavaris looked to Melorya. She was stood with a hand covering her mouth. Her eyes were wide and glassy, but when she saw Tavaris staring at her, she snapped the book shut and swept across the room. As she grabbed Tavaris’s arm, she mumbled to herself, “There just aren’t enough of them to push the border all the way across Yavarid. Not without the crystal.” She pulled him out the door with her, past a still-smiling Vulras, but he got one look back at the body. It still didn’t move.
CHAPTER 9
Stiff and sore, Elayne
was unsure whether spending an entire day straddling a horse or an entire night on the hard forest floor was worse, but she was happy enough to stand the next morning and stretch as tall as possible. Rosalind was sprawled on the ground still, a stream of drool trailing down her cheek from her open mouth, and Bix was curled up just beside her, but Frederick was already awake and bent over the fire. He’d seen her stand, of course, and she watched him for a moment as he turned a skewer over the flames.
“How long have you been up?” she asked, wincing as she took a few measured steps.
“Not long.”
The meat on the sticks was fresh. Whatever he hunted, he’d already flayed and dressed, and so his answer was dubious. “You should have woken us, we can help.”
He raised his brows. “I thought you might appreciate the extra rest. The enclave is not terribly far from here, and neither of you are used to life out on the road.”
She wanted to snap back that she knew he had comfortable quarters back at Yavarid Castle just like they did, but Frederick was often gone, visiting this duchy or quelling that minor uprising, and, at this at least, he was more experienced. “Well, thanks,” she mumbled, dropping down across the fire from him.
“Your friend is very strong.” He gestured to the sleeping Rosalind. “She’d make a promising brawler, honestly.”
Rosalind let out a sharp snort in her sleep.
“Oh, I know. She’s constantly seeing how much she can lift and how fast she can run. In fact she used to pick me up and do sprints until she decided I wasn’t heavy enough anymore.” Elayne chuckled. “She was actually sent to the castle to train to be a lady-in-waiting for whoever Quilliam marries though.”
“Oh?” Frederick’s head popped up rather quickly then.
“But Queen Astrid gave up on her. Ro is pretty proud of that.”
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