by NS Dolkart
“I know,” Phaedra told her. “I figured if you had sent Atella to find ingredients that would represent us islanders, the situation must be dire. All we ever did to the fairies was escape from them.”
Psander eyed her skeptically. “You give yourselves too little credit. My understanding was that Bandu had bested the elves in one of their games, Criton had defeated one of their living castles in a battle of wits, and Hunter had slain more than one elf in hand-to-hand combat. I’m sure if all this is true, your support and Narky’s were not immaterial.”
“Thank you,” Phaedra said. She felt herself blushing. Psander clearly respected her; respected all five of them. Phaedra knew that Narky would have scorned her for feeling so flattered, but she couldn’t help it. Psander did not express respect for people often, and she respected them.
“But I will admit,” Psander added, “your overall assessment was correct. I reached for these shadows of you because I am running out of tools. Any day now, the fairies may recognize our weakness and slaughter us all.”
“How have you kept them away so far?” Phaedra asked. “Atella said you turned your wards around, but your wards were for keeping the Gods from seeing you. I don’t understand how those could be useful against the elves, even reworked. My conception of magic is as a sort of universal poetics, where ingredients are all representational. Am I missing something?”
The wizard shook her head. “You are not. My wards are useless against the fairies. But they don’t know that, and their lack of knowledge is what has kept us safe so far. Atella is repeating what I told her, which is more or less the truth. I have reversed my wards entirely: where once they were keeping my hall invisible to the Gods, they now project a feeling of the Gods’ might. That is all. When the elves come to my walls, they feel that projection and, so far, they have chosen caution. I have not told the villagers this truth because their minds are so easy for the elves to read – they have not learned to guard them as I have.”
“But you’re telling me?”
“I am telling you. And that means that I cannot let you leave my hall until you have learned to protect your mind.”
Phaedra gaped at her. “You’ll teach me?”
Psander smiled at her shock. “You have proven yourself fully capable of learning, and I am in need of an assistant. I will be glad to teach you everything I know.”
36
Hunter
Hunter stayed with the villagers when Phaedra went to talk to Psander. He asked them about their food stores, their foraging habits, their ability to avoid starvation, and found that they had adapted themselves quite quickly to their surroundings. Psander had deemed it too dangerous to go out hunting, and they had responded by becoming quite good trappers. They set their traps well within Psander's wards of alarm, where the elves could not ambush them, and they caught enough meat to supplement their remaining stores of grain while they waited for more to grow. They had cleared most of the tents out of Silent Hall’s courtyard so as to leave room for a small field of wheat and oats, and the displaced families had moved into Psander’s tower. They had also cleared away space for a modest vegetable patch just outside Psander’s walls.
The trouble with trapping was that nearly every animal in this world seemed to be omnivorous, if not altogether carnivorous. If the villagers were too late in checking their traps, they were liable to find their prey already feasted upon by a great blue cat, or an unfamiliar pig-thing, or a flock of pigeons.
When he asked them to show him what defenses they had in case the elves did eventually attack, they pointed to the walls.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Then you need weapons.”
They had axes, at least, for chopping wood, but they were not balanced the way a weapon ought to be, and Hunter knew how fast the elves could be with their war sickles. So he set off with Atella’s father and two younger men to gather boughs for halfspears and quarterstaffs. He had learned stick fighting as a boy, before Father had given him his sword, and he thought he could teach it passably. Besides, he knew nothing of forging swords.
They would want weapons with some reach on the elves anyway – the elves were fast, brutal fighters, and the villagers would need every little advantage they could find. When the boughs were gathered and cut, Hunter set himself to teaching anyone who had time to learn. He started with the simplest drills, repeating them over and over until his students dropped their staves out of exhaustion. Then he had them gather more, smaller branches so that the children could practice with them too.
It would take months for the villagers to be even passable with their weapons, divided as their time was between training, trapping, and farming. He knew that. He also knew that in an actual fight, the elves would have every advantage. So when they broke for the evening meal, he set about devising a way to turn the elves’ advantages against them.
Phaedra tried to talk to him while they were eating, but he had to apologize multiple times for inattention. His mind was fully engaged with the problem of fighting the elves, and he could not be distracted. He gathered only that Psander had offered to train Phaedra in magic, and that she was very excited about it – of course she was. He congratulated her and went straight to bed.
He awoke before dawn and went outside to repeat the drills he had taught the villagers, adding some other ones and refamiliarizing himself with the weapon. At his peak, Hunter’s swordsmaster had always said, a warrior would become one with his weapon. He would stop thinking and engage fully with each moment, seeing and responding to the slightest motions of his opponent with a perfectly blank mind. Now Hunter tried to build a further step on top of that: he tried to train himself to think while he acted, but in ways that contradicted his motions. If he could teach himself to cut high even as he thought about attacking low, then he could turn the fairies’ mind-reading against them.
It was surprisingly difficult. With his swordsmaster, he had reached the point in his training when one no sooner thought of an attack than one had done it. He frequently found himself accidentally letting his actions match his thoughts, or vice versa. The village children, watching from the walls, must have wondered why he kept making frustrated sounds after each perfectly executed cut.
But he needed this to work. If he could master his new contradictory-thought fighting style, then one day his students would too. The elves would find them far more capable of defending themselves than they expected.
His life became a never-ending cycle of military preparations, both internal and external. He began introducing his theories into his training of the villagers, hoping to skip straight over the empty-minded fighting that had taken him years to learn. Most of the villagers were frustratingly slow to learn even the basics of stick fighting, but he thought that could have been expected. His swordsmaster had always called him an exceptional talent – he could not expect others to catch up to him so quickly.
“Cut low!” he would bark at his students while they were practicing a high parry. The trainees looked at him with annoyance and confusion, but he had already explained his reasoning, and could only tell them to keep not-quite-ignoring his instructions.
“Memorize my words,” he would say, “visualize what I am asking you to do. But do the opposite.”
The villagers hadn’t realized that fairies could read minds – it had shocked and horrified them when Hunter had explained the truth. Their reactions to that information convinced him to wait before explaining how nearly impossible elves were to kill. He had seen elves survive beheadings, which made him wonder if they were altogether immortal. He didn’t think so, but he couldn’t know for sure.
He hoped it wouldn’t matter. Mortal or not, elves were still made of flesh and bones – bones that could be broken. If an elf was crippled and incapable of fighting, that was sufficient. A live elf might even be useful to Psander, if they could capture one.
Psander watched with apparent amusement while he tried to train the
villagers. She clearly didn’t believe they would ever be able to resist the elves in arms. He meant to prove her wrong. What did Psander know of armed combat, anyway? Many of the villagers were coming along quite well, by Hunter’s standards: Atella’s father took naturally to the training, as did a pair of brothers who were grandsons of old Garan, and there was one nine year-old girl, Tritika, who imitated Hunter with such adroitness that he was sure she would be quite formidable given five or six years. He hoped they would live that long.
Of course, there was no knowing how well everyone was doing on the mental side of the training, visualizing movements other than those they were making. Gods knew, Hunter was having enough difficulty himself. At best, he could manage a mental-physical split about half the time, and that was never mind the fact that he had no proof the technique would work at all. He was relying on the assumption that these mental acrobatics would confuse the elves more than a closed mind would have – if he was wrong, then all was for naught. The elves had probably spent hundreds of years mastering the use of their long-handled sickles. Weapons training alone would never overcome them.
There were other benefits to his interactions with the villagers, though. Hunter and his friends had first met them a year and a half ago, when they had generously helped nurse Narky back to health, and sheltered and fed the islanders while they waited for the boy’s recovery. They were good, kind people, and yet they had grown suspicious of the Tarphaeans after they had joined with a group of bandits on Psander’s orders. Later, the wizard had used ingredients the islanders had brought her to make charms that sickened the villagers while bolstering Silent Hall’s defenses. And then, to cap off their betrayal, Hunter and his friends had helped transport them all to the horrifying world of the fairies.
During all this time, the islanders had taken advantage of these people just as Psander had, and barely given them more thought. Now Hunter was finally getting to know them, making friends, sharing meals, and working with them in the courtyard and the vegetable garden when he wasn’t too busy teaching them to fight. He inspected traps with his new friends, chopped wood with them, lived his life with them.
He even considered moving to live with them instead of in his room in Psander’s tower, but that would have taken him farther from Phaedra. True, she spent most of her time now holed up with Psander learning the mysteries of the universe, but she still stopped by sometimes to talk, and to give him an update on her progress. He didn’t want to lose that.
He thought he loved Phaedra. No, that was a lie – he knew he loved her. Seeing her so happy only reinforced how important she was to him, how much he liked to see her so excited about her life. She was radiant, her troubles forgotten as she limped hurriedly toward the library, day after day. He wanted her to look that excited about him.
He had never expected for them to come back to the elves’ world, let alone for them to be happy there, but strange as it was, they really were both happy. Phaedra wasn’t the only one benefitting from their time here – training the villagers to fight the elves filled Hunter with such purpose that he sometimes forgot that he had not always meant to be a combat trainer. Here was the aspect of his life that had gone missing when Tarphae was drowned. Here was the nation he would fight for, the army he would lead in battle. His answer to that little boy, Emmer, felt true: he was here to save them.
Even the older villagers believed that now, and the admiration and respect they showed him made him feel stronger, wiser, more attractive. He wondered if Phaedra could tell.
He was out one day checking on traps with Atella and her father when the alarm sounded. Or perhaps ‘sounded’ was the wrong word – it was more like a very loud feeling, telling him that one or more elves had passed within the range of Psander’s wards. Hunter and his companions immediately broke into a run, cursing. They had been right on the edge of the wards’ range for that particular trap – if they were unlucky, they might not make it back to Silent Hall before the enemy did.
They were lucky this time. They made it to the fortress just as the door was closing, and after some small amount of shouting, Psander opened the door to let them in. “You were cutting it awfully fine,” she scolded them.
“We ran back as quick as we could,” Atella’s father said, panting.
“You were almost too late,” Psander answered. “They’re just testing the boundaries now, but they still would have loved to catch you outside these walls.”
“They’re testing the boundaries?” Phaedra asked, horrified. She had come hurrying along behind Psander to open the gate to Hunter and the other two. “Can we afford for them to do that?”
“Not at all,” the wizard answered grimly. “These tests are building up to an attack. But I don’t see that there’s much we can do about it. Today’s scout will try to sniff out the nature of our defenses, as will each future one, and they will report back to their queen. If I could capture them before they returned home, I would.”
That stopped Hunter in his tracks. “I can,” he said.
Psander looked at him appraisingly. “Are you sure?”
“Is there just one of them?”
She nodded. “So my wards tell me. If they have found a way to make my wards lie to me…”
“Hunter,” Phaedra said, but when he looked at her, she said no more. She was smarter than he was – she knew full well that letting him try to capture the scout was worth the risk to Hunter’s life. If he couldn’t defeat an elf in single combat, he was of no use to the people of Silent Hall. And anyway, if he couldn’t defeat an elf, they were probably all doomed.
But her eyes expressed more than resignation, and more than pain at his risking of himself. They expressed trust. Belief. Love.
Atella brought him a staff, and Psander opened the door for him. Hunter took a deep breath and stepped back outside.
He walked as far as the edge of the trees before he stopped. He had seen elves disguise themselves as thorny bushes once, and had no intention of being caught off guard. “Come out and fight me,” he called into the woods. “You want to test our defenses? Test me.”
A gentle breeze blew out of the forest, but no one answered his call. Hunter stood waiting. Had the elf scout failed to hear him? Was he being ignored on purpose? Or was this long wait only a ploy to make him nervous?
“Maybe you’ve heard of me,” Hunter shouted. “I am Hunter, who beheaded Raider Two of the Illweather elves, who rescued human children from that castle and left this world in triumph. If you’re too afraid to face me, I don’t blame you.”
A buck trotted into sight, standing among the trees and staring at him. Hunter eyed it skeptically. He hadn’t seen any deer here before, and he expected this animal to turn into his elf scout any moment. “What are you waiting for?” he asked it.
The creature bared its teeth at him – sharp, pointed teeth that never belonged to any deer. Then it lowered its antlers and galloped.
Hunter didn’t have long to realize that this creature was not going to transform into the expected human shape before it was practically upon him. He tried to imagine smashing its head in while he crouched and swung at its legs instead. His blow connected with a sharp crack and the animal ploughed into the ground beside him. He rose quickly and went for the head this time, jabbing his staff into the base of its skull. The creature began to crumple forward, but it was already transforming as it tucked in its head, did a front somersault, and rose as a man.
In the daylight the elf’s hair and skin were blacker than night. His hair flowed past his shoulders, and he wore clothes that looked like they were made of silver. In his hands he held one of the cruel elvish sickles that Hunter had grown all too familiar with. He looked, dismayingly, no worse for the wear despite Hunter’s blows. Then he grinned, baring those same pointed teeth, and leapt to the attack.
For a time, Hunter forgot all about his new strategy and let his mind go blank, acting and reacting on instinct alone. He blocked and thrust, dodged and swung, never planning h
is next move until he was already doing it. He was glad then for every obsessive moment he had put into his training over the last few years: even against the ancient warriors of this godforsaken world, he could hold his own. The staff might not be his weapon of choice, but he still fought like a natural.
The trouble was, so did the elf. Hunter’s opponent dodged or parried each attack Hunter sent his way, grinning all the while. No droplet of sweat shined off his unnatural skin as the elf leapt and spun, pressing the attack. Soon, Hunter began to realize his disadvantage in this fight – he might be just as fast, but his weapon was inferior. It cracked as he was blocking one of his opponent’s swings, and then broke in two.
Hunter retreated, still blocking his opponent’s blows with what now amounted to two jagged clubs. He considered throwing one of the clubs at the elf warrior, and saw the elf react to the possibility with a slight adjustment of his weight. The technique could really work, then! Hunter feinted with his mind again, and swung both clubs together at one of the elf’s hands.
It was a ludicrously small target, but he hit it nonetheless. His opponent cried out in pain as Hunter broke his fingers and then, with another hard swing, knocked the sickle out of his hands altogether. Hunter dropped the club in his left and swung again, this time for the head. His swing should have ended the fight, but the elf raised his good hand and caught the club in an iron grip, twisting until the splinters forced Hunter to let go. So he changed tack and leapt after the sickle.
He got the sickle off the ground just as the elf landed his first blow on Hunter’s skull. There was a cracking sound – from the wood, thank goodness – and his vision went fuzzy for a moment, but Hunter was not one to let this throw him. He jabbed upward and retreated, getting his bearings. The elf advanced again. As he did so, Hunter swung for his legs with his mind, and with his body, aimed instead for a killing blow.