Stealing the Elf-King's Roses

by Diane Duane

  They drew Lee. They would have drawn any living thing. Lee stepped close to the nearest rosebush and held out her hand to one of the roses, felt the heat of it—the power of desire bound into the bloom, like blood blazing in the heart. Then she turned to another and leaned down, with tears in her eyes from the scent and the blinding light, to bathe her face in the cool white fire of innocence. She stood upright again, looking around her, rubbing the pain out of her eyes to take it all in—this vast chorus of virtues, large and small, preserved here for how long?—but all hidden in plain sight, burning in the hills above where her home would have been were it in this world. And the existence of this garden had never once been suspected by the Alfen here—or by her own world, when sometimes, at twilight, the power of the roses burst the barriers between the worlds and shone briefly through.

  Laurin was watching her, and the pain was in his eyes, too. “All the things that were worth keeping of what we were,” the Elf-King said, “all the things I would have preserved, if I could, through the change; in symbolic form, preserved in essence, they’re all here.” He looked around him. “It was wrong of me to do this. But I couldn’t help it.”

  “And to think they told me it wasn’t real,” Lee said.

  “They always wished it wasn’t,” Laurin said. “But they couldn’t stop my ancestor from making that first garden, either. He insisted on reminding them of what they were… and of where his power lay, in defining them as he defined himself. Nor could they stop him from manifesting that power just as he pleased.”

  He saw her shocked look. “Yes, of course it was real once,” he said. “Here and there, versions of the story persist, though they tried to wipe them out. Once upon a time, very long ago, some of us thought we might be able to coexist with humans. It was my direct ancestor, the one who first made that garden, who let humans into it; that place where my people’s uniquenesses were cultivated, revealed, as these are. And the humans didn’t care for what they saw. They destroyed that place.” He looked around him in sorrow. “His successor, another of my ancestors, took the lesson and started the work of closing Alfheim off to mortals. It took a long while. Partly they used the rings, the ‘made gates,’ to reverse-engineer our space and stop every place from becoming a door to every other place. Partly they used men’s own mortality against them, as a tool to forgetfulness. Even in the space of one lifetime, humans forget things so quickly…”

  He looked around at the roses. “But our own memory of those first disasters, where our species met and wounded one another most intimately, wouldn’t go away; and what the Elf-Kings remember, their world can’t forget. The light of that first old garden still seeps through the gates of twilight and dawn, which my latter forefathers forgot to include in the curse.” He shook his head, laughing helplessly. “Alfheim’s memory is so powerful that sometimes the light seeps right through into other worlds. I’ve even seen it in Ellay. Plan how you may, every spell has loopholes— But the stricture against planting another such garden in that place remains. The story says that should it happen, the humans would destroy not just that, but our whole world.”

  “But you made this one anyway,” Lee said, looking around her in wonder.

  “One has to put one’s love, one’s power, somewhere,” Laurin said. “Or it dies.” The sorrow in his voice tore her. “That old Elf-King, who loved his people’s virtues so, and the flowers he made of them—the King who was so sure of the virtues of humans—he was my direct ancestor, as I said. Most Alfen think he was a fool; deluded by too much kindliness, too much confidence in the good intentions of mere mortals. But I would always think about him, when I was younger. I would think, ‘Maybe he wasn’t so far wrong. How can it be bad to put your love somewhere that people can see it? How can it be bad to preserve what you love?’ And when I became Elf-King, and took possession of the house here, I couldn’t resist. These hills were so like the country around Aien Mhariseth—what I always longed for when I was young, and couldn’t have. I thought, ‘Just a small garden, in exile… in his memory, remembering how he tried to make it work between my people and the humans of the other worlds. How could that hurt?’”

  He looked around him like a man who’s been denying a fatal disease for a long time, but now is brought face to face with it. “I discovered how my ancestor had made the roses first. I made them again. My will kept them secret, even from my own people, for a long time. But they found out, and began to plot my overthrow. I never thought that recreating the garden here would bring Alfheim’s doom…”

  Lee reached out to another of the flowers, felt the heat of it, and felt the blossom shivering with Laurin’s fear. “What’s happening to your people isn’t because of you,” she said. “It’s their nature.”

  “The two are the same thing,” the Elf-King said, “close enough. What I am, they become. That’s what they’ve made of me, what our world has made of me—what I was bred to be, over all this time. As I go, they go. And I can’t go where they need to go if they’re going to survive…”

  He looked at her. And Lee Saw his thought, the thing he couldn’t say: Not by myself, at least.

  The sound of something being smashed against the gates started to racket around in the space below the hillside. “Not much time, Lee,” Gelert said: and his voice was shaking. The sound of it shocked her—not from its unfamiliarity, but because she felt the same way; as if everything was shifting under her feet, as if time was running out not just for them, but for everything else as well. This was what she had felt coming ever since she and Gelert turned poor dil’Sorden’s casework in—the sense of something massive, catastrophic, coming closer and closer, ready to roll over them all like the clouds piling up out over the sea, leaden, towering, full of final threat. We’re going to die, she thought. They’ll take their King and kill him; they’ll kill us, too.

  But there was more to it than that. Can a whole world be afraid? Lee thought. Can a universe have a soul, and feel terror? Or desire? Even if the world all around us isn’t strictly his universe— this part of it is. All the parts are parts of all the whole; every spot is every other spot, no matter how they may have reverse-engineered this space…

  The congruencies made her mind whirl as she stood there among the roses that burned fierce in the growing darkness, defying the ban against their visibility this one last time, while the being who had planted and nurtured them with his will, and hidden them, and held them dear, stood there gazing into the darkness, waiting for the end.

  Not just the fear of one universe, Lee thought. They all touch, here. It’s the fear of all of them. If this place is part of the most central of universes—because he’s here—then where better for a universe’s soul to be, its heart? And now it’s afraid, they’re all afraid, of what’s about to happen.

  If he dies, then his people and his world die. As his people and world go…sooner or later, we go too, and our worlds with us. How can the rest of the worlds not react to something like that—feel the fear as he feels it, as we feel it?

  But there Lee stopped. It wasn’t just feeling that was required of her: not just sharing that desperate desire for self-preservation. To do Laurin any good, she would have to see through the appearance to the reality—even here at the heart of things, at the center of the universe most devoted to hiding its heart, to keep it from being hurt as it was hurt once before. She would have to see through the Elves, right down to the individual realities; see not just through the Elves, but through the Elf.

  She looked down at her shaking hands, and saw something that shocked her; some of their wrinkles were fading. They looked younger than they had.

  Lee put one hand to her face, felt the difference between yesterday and today, and froze. This is what this world offers you if you’ll just back off now, Lee thought. The bribe. The same one it offered the Elves. And they took it, and got so used to taking it that the thought of giving it up looks like death to them. It’s not this world’s fault; it’s too malleable to human desires. Wh
o wouldn’t want to be young and beautiful forever? You’d have to be crazy to walk away from something like that. And the Alfen didn’t. So the world keeps them that way… and they keep the world keeping them that way.

  It would keep me that way too, if I stayed here…

  But Lee pushed the thought away, with the help of the crashing noise coming from the gates down below. “Laurin,” she said. “Will you give it up? All of it?”

  “To save all this?” he said, almost too low to be heard. “To save everything? You know I’d die to do that.”

  “It may take more.”

  He looked at Lee, shocked, uncomprehending. “Dying is easy,” she said. “Living, and being completely known, that’s hard. That’s what has to happen.” She swallowed hard; she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next “The beauty,” she said, “the immortality. They’re what’s going to kill your people. And what they’d rather die than lose.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But if you lose them—If you throw them away—”

  “How can I do that? I don’t know how—”

  “It’s not just my Sight you need,” Lee said, “You have to see yourself as mortal, too. That’s how it goes in court. I See… then you accept it as the truth. It’s not something that’s done to you. You choose.”

  He stared at her. Was it hope, or anger, starting now to rise in his eyes? In this light, as the roses dimmed with his fear, Lee couldn’t clearly see. But that’s the problem. I can’t rely on them for illumination now. It’s my own Sight that’s going to have to show me the way. “Well?” Lee said.

  Standing there in the dimming fire of the roses, for just a moment he looked at her, and without warning Lee Saw him, Saw right to the heart of him—the heart of a man alone, afraid, and uncertain what to do; just a man, and mortal—the uncanny Alfen beauty at last irrelevant. Suddenly she realized that for him, at least, mortality lay not in death or the lack of it, but in not knowing what to do, not knowing what was going to happen afterward, when “afterward” was forever: the loss of control, not just for a lifetime, but for eternity. The concept of the surrender of that certainty was there, too. But could he manage it? As she looked at him, he actually covered his face with one hand, hiding his eyes. Part of him was resisting, even now. He can’t help it, Lee thought. This world has its own ideas about self-preservation, even if they’re erroneous. It’ll keep him the way it’s kept him all these centuries, even though he dies of it; even though it dies of it.

  “Well?” she said again.

  He had no answer for her; only, as he uncovered his eyes, a stricken, pleading look; a whole species looking through one entity’s eyes, beauty and immortality pleading just to be left the way they were, left alone. But that look wasn’t all Lee had to go on. Before he had covered his eyes, his will had looked out first.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Lee said, and closed her eyes to See better.

  “What?”

  The crashing noise came up from the gates again, a big ruinous sound: explosives, perhaps. Lee ignored it. Equally the cry of utter anguish that went up from just a few feet away was meant to distract her; she refused to let it do so. Lee looked at this man with all the concentration her training had taught her, looked at him as fiercely as she had looked at dil’Sorden’s dying soul or at any human being who’d ever stood in the dock before her. Under her gaze the Elf-King writhed and cried out, at first just in his own pain, desperate against the beginning of a final fate more terrible than any mere sacrifice by death. This was where we left off, she thought. This is where it started: and now I finish it. Or it finishes me.

  The shouting got louder, started to turn into screaming. It wasn’t just the Elf-King’s pain, now, not just his fear or anguish, but that of all the others native to this world, shaped by it and by the needs they’d learned from it. Desperate, their universe was crying out to them in their own bodies and souls, warning them of the gift about to be withdrawn from them by the stranger, the attacking enemy. Once more they were being violated from outside their world: once more the things that made them uniquely themselves were about to be stolen from them by the ephemerals. Look at them! the song warned. They are deedless and cripple, their life is the length of a dream; how little and valueless a thing is that life, laid by yours—ineffectual, small—

  No! Lee cried inwardly, while in her the Sight fought with the writhing painful appearance that now began to flow over everything like early morning fog, twisting what it touched. It twisted the man who fell to his knees not far from her, hiding his face, his head in his arms, unable to bear what he was beginning to see. It twisted Gelert, so that he howled in pain and betrayal and crouched down among the cloudy dark shapes of the great rosebushes, in which the fire of the roses now began to be smothered in that writhing darkness like flame in the heart of smoke. And that darkness was reaching out to Lee now, smothering, furious, intent on killing her vision.

  Sorry, Lee said inside her. I answer to a higher authority. You may be a universe, but that’s all you are; and the Worlds were made for us, not we for them!

  The darkness flowed all around her, choking, strangling. But Lee turned her mind from it, refusing again to be distracted. There was other business. Nearby a man already kneeling had dropped to hands and knees, moaning in pain and fury, hands clenched full of dirt. Which one was the master now, him or his world, was in doubt, and in the balance. But the Balance is Hers, Lee thought. And mine—! She groped toward the Elf-King through the smoky uncertainty, reminding herself that this one was no different in its way than the uncertainties she dealt with every day at a crime scene. So often the irrationalities of the physical universe tried to blur the path to the truth, but they always failed if the practitioner remembered What she worked for, and kept her intention—

  Lee’s surroundings, in contact with the heart of that crouching figure, were intent on her, too. The smoke started giving way to flame, slow-moving for the moment, but scorching. Soon the true brushfire would get loose, the illusion against which even Lee would have no defense for long. No use playing the extinguisher at the top of the flame, she thought; go low, go to the source, or nowhere! But she was going to have to do her work differently here. This world wasn’t the largely insensate kind of universe the other worlds had become, malleable in the physical sense but passive in the moral one. And it certainly wasn’t as horribly passive as the newfound world had become. Poor Terra! Lee thought, no matter how bizarre it might be to feel sorry for a whole world as if it was a drug addict or a kitten someone had tried to drown— something damaged from the start and doomed to a sorry fate unless someone took responsibility for being kind to it. If this is a trend, we have to stop it from spreading. Because who’d want to live in a world like that?

  A long red line of flame ran along quick as a fleeing rattler along the hillcrest above her. And since pity isn’t turning me from my intention, Lee thought, here comes his rage. The flame started reaching down toward her from the crest of the hill like clawing fingers, full of the Elf-King’s buried fury, which had always known this day would come.

  The fire sped up, the fingers of flame running together into a single wall that came plunging down the hillside, rockslide-swift. Lee watched it come, and Saw it to be unreal—the world’s fear speaking to her through the Elf-King’s power. But he showed me what to do about this, she thought, and stood her ground, gazing up into the fire and imposing her will upon it. It splashed away to either side of her, as the rocks had fallen away from the Elf-King when Dierrich tried to call the mountain down on top of him. Here, through Laurin, she had access to the same power he had been using, the same certainty of mastery—and more than that because the roses were here, the fire of his irrational and unconditional love for them burning fierce in them. A lot of power available, Lee thought, as she started to feel the earth rumble under her feet. Huge amounts. But still not quite enough—

  The world around her was becoming really frightened. The shaking under her
feet got worse, and a harsh sharp clattering noise from above now heralded the first stones starting to fall down the hill—the world using the oldest weapon the Ellay basin afforded it. What mastery Lee was acquiring second-hand from the Elf-King wasn’t going to be sufficient to keep them all from being killed before what needed to happen had a chance. I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to do this, Lee thought, trembling with terror. Not here at the heart of things, where anything could happen. But there’s no choice now, can’t wait any more, the stakes are too high—

  Lee gulped, braced herself, and then laid herself fully open inside, not to Alfheim, but to the only thing she was sure was stronger—and that she feared more. “Justice here present,” she cried, “be in me now, see the truth I See, and make Truth manifest!”

  And without hesitation, swift and terrible, far more powerful here at the center of things than in the outer universes, unmitigated, She came—not merely personified, and to Lee’s astonishment, not alone. Lee struggled to hold herself upright in the blast and whirl of light and imagery that descended on her, surrounding her with an air that sliced her from inside like swords when she breathed it in. Something more central than mere Justice or mere Death informed it, a Power senior to both and somehow unifying them—ready to bring its invincibility out of theory and into the physical sphere, if someone would show it the way. That awful conjunct Power looked at the Elf-King through Lee, and waited.