An Heir to Thorns and Steel

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “It is possible,” Almond said.

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Kelu said. “Just because he consorts with humans doesn’t make him a human-lover. The elves will say anything about each other if it means they can contrive a new excuse to kill one another.”

  “Try to kill one another,” I said absently.

  “Destroy,” Kelu said. “The word is destroy. Rend limb from limb and cast the bits into fires. I wouldn’t get to hoping much.”

  “Do you have a better suggestion?” I asked. Relieved of its saddle the drake had not moved clear of me, so I leaned on it, all too willing to have it support my spent body.

  “No,” Kelu said with a sigh. She looked at Almond. “Have you ever been there?”

  Almond shook her head.

  “Then I guess we’ll just head south until we meet the river,” Kelu said. “And hope that e Sadar is good to humans in a way that Morgan will appreciate.”

  The world had become a beautiful gradient of lilac shadows and creamy sand, blending together, losing focus. Almond’s arms slipped around me. She whispered, “You should lie down, Master. We can continue in a few hours.” Her words dissolved into the colors and I nodded, let her and the drake guide me to the silk and warmth of the strand. And there I wondered if Kemses e Sadar would love or destroy me... wondered before I dreamed my perilous dreams if the world itself would have me first.

  The drake came to a halt on the outskirts of Erevar several days later. I had suffered more than usual on the last leg of our trip, and the genets were keeping me up when we entered the city.

  But oh, Erevar. I could have wept. The drake had not taken two steps onto the first of its stone roads when several humans walked past—strode past, shoulders back, eyes bright and focused, talking in congenial tones. From the back of the beast I watched their heads as they joined the flow of traffic leading into the city. Everywhere I looked I found humans: engaging in discourse, walking with purpose, conducting their affairs unfettered. Dressed poorly or well, passing in and out of houses and businesses, resting beneath the shades of the palms and sharing ripely aromatic fruits that wafted their exotic perfumes to me on the fresh breeze that skated the river. There were elves also; though rarer they were far easier to spot, numinous and beautiful, leaving after-images.

  I noted only one anomaly, and we had penetrated deep into the city by the time its consistency caused the observation to coalesce: all the humans were marked on the forehead. The colors varied, some in bold, stark inks and some in gilt or white, but all of them, from the eldest to the newest babe, had a blood-flag mark on his or her brow.

  Was it all a lie, then, their seeming contentment, their health? Perhaps they were better-kept slaves. Pets, like the genets. By the gray weariness that settled on me I knew I had expected more... had hoped that perhaps here was a place not only of justice for the oppressed, but also of secret truths, a place I could sift through the extremes of the stories of saints and tyrants and see what remained.

  I closed my eyes, surrendering to disillusionment. I had seen all I needed to see of Erevar. Leaning heavily on Kelu, I said, “Where do we go?”

  Kelu glanced up and down the cross-street. “Toward the manor, I’m guessing.” She slapped the drake’s neck with the reins and it flowed back into the streets, slinking around the slower pedestrians, wagons, and horses. Almond tightened her arms around my waist, and cradled between them I let myself be carried toward the master of the city. I had not even the energy to wonder if he would be kind or cruel. If my adventure ended here I would not fight it. We rode through the mingled smells of the city, of palms and mangos and sweat and the sea, of sun-baked clay and the distant musk of human and horse sweat. I thought then that the conversations around me seemed subdued, as if the pulse of the city had been depressed.

  “My master is here to petition the blood-flag Sadar,” Kelu said, rousing me from my stupor. I opened my eyes and found a soldier at the head of the drake, a glittering elf in fancifully sculpted armor, all flared metal and enamel arabesques. The silver cloisonné sigil on his breast trapped my gaze in its whorls of blue and green.

  The soldier stepped closer, squinting up at me. “Petition days are at week’s end.”

  “Please sir,” Almond whispered. “He is in dire need, and we have heard of the generosity of the blood-flag Sadar.”

  The guard sighed. “Pass on,” he said. “But I fear you will find little aid here today... or perhaps ever again.”

  “Sir?” Kelu asked, ears flipping forward with a sudden tension.

  “The blood-flag defends the city,” the guard said, the cadence of the words evoking ritual and foreboding.

  Almond’s arms tightened. Kelu bristled and asked, “Do you know the terms?”

  “No,” the guard said. “The lord’s aide will know. Go to the manor proper and present yourself at the door. They will tell you whether there is a master left to petition.”

  “Thank you,” Kelu said and urged the drake on. As we loped down the long path through the ornamental gardens, I asked, “The blood-flag defends the city?”

  “A more genteel way of taking people’s property and wealth from them,” she said. “Instead of killing everyone and destroying all the buildings, they duel.”

  “Dueling,” I said. It seemed a sensible alternative to rapine and pillage. Not civilized, certainly... we’d outlawed it for a reason. But my standards for civilized behavior in elves were far lower, and for people who couldn’t be killed dueling was surely just an exercise.

  “Horrible, horrible,” Almond whispered against my back, so soft I almost lost the words to the wind. “Oh.”

  “At least one good thing about this,” Kelu said. “That guard talked to me.”

  “Like a person,” I said.

  “Yes. So maybe e Sadar is what they say he is when they smear his reputation.”

  The drake carried us to the front of the manor. The road curved around its facade, the better to offload passengers from carriages, and the entrance was on the second floor, accessed by exterior stairs that coiled up to a broad balcony. Our arrival, unannounced and without entourage, inspired confusion; the servants hesitated before approaching us, and only one trudged on to greet us. Beneath the silver-inked sigil on his brow his face was drawn, and his green, blue and silver livery hung awkwardly off shoulders hunched with fatigue. “You have come to see the lord of Erevar?”

  “Yes,” I said, having recovered some sense of curiosity.

  “Is it too late?” Kelu asked.

  “I don’t know,” the man said. “He is still in the arena. You are welcome to wait here, but we don’t know how long it will be.”

  “How long has it gone on?” Kelu asked.

  “Since dawn,” the man said. “It is a line duel, with fire.”

  Kelu’s jaw dropped.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is a line duel and what’s fire to do with it?”

  The man looked up at me, considering. Then he said, “It means that the entire family of the challenging blood-flag has called our master.”

  “A line,” Kelu said, her voice husky. She cleared it, then said, “When one of the challengers is cut down, then someone else from his family replaces him... but the defender can’t rest or be replaced. The one still standing at the end keeps the city.”

  “That’s... “ No words supplied themselves to describe the senselessness. “Since dawn?”

  “Since dawn,” the man said. “We are fortunate that our lord is good with arms and is well-loved by his chosen.”

  “And the fire?” I asked.

  “Means that the victor may destroy the losers,” the man said. “The parts are tossed in the fire to burn so they may not regenerate.”

  My gorge rose.

  “Which way is the arena?” Kelu asked.

  Almond squeaked.

  “Follow the road past the fountain to the east, behind the manor,” the man said. “It is the only round building on the estate.”
r />   “Thank you,” Kelu said.

  “Pray for our master,” the man said. “If he falls, this dream of Erevar will die. Even your kind have gentler lives here, genet.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” Kelu said, “but I’ll hope for the best.”

  As the drake turned his head to the east, Almond whispered, “Are you sure we should go? We could wait in the manor....”

  “We need to know if he’s alive or dead,” Kelu said. “If he’s dead or about to die, we need to get out of here as fast as we can. Someone who hates e Sadar enough to request a line duel with fire is not going to be any friend to us.”

  Almond whimpered.

  “We don’t have to stay,” Kelu said, exasperated. “One look should be all it takes.”

  Numb with horror, I hoped she was right.

  The only round building off the trail past the fountain was a thing of incongruous elegance, unexpectedly large. It was not so much round as faceted with dozens of slightly angled stained glass panels in blue, green, garnet and frost, and surrounding it were low ivory-trunked trees with slim curling limbs heavy with narrow leaves. The pattern of pale green shadows and fragments of colored light on the ground dizzied my eye, so that when the drake came to a halt outside Kelu had to tug on my pant leg to attract my attention.

  “Come on,” she hissed. “Let’s get this done.”

  I slid off the back of the drake, almost crumpling. Almond grabbed the yoke of my shirt on the way down, steadying me, and even the drake turned its head to peer at me. They had to prop me up as we walked toward the tall, thin doors, inlaid with colored glass in a filigree frame. The two guards waiting there looked at us—what a sight we must have presented!—and simply opened them. We entered the arena of the blood-flag Erevar, and left forever at the threshold my innocence in the ways of elven warfare.

  The scent struck me first, a gagging miasma, burnt flesh, blood, sweat and a sweet and pungent incense. They twined together in the fat smoke trails that billowed from four great bonfires set at the cardinal directions, each ringed with a hedge of long, wrapped poles. Glittering spectators wavered in and out of view as the smoke tore around them. On opposite sides of the arena stood two groups: at the far end a knot of glowering elves, armed and oiled, and on the near end a bare handful of humans and elves, tense and miserable.

  And in the center of this tableau two elves... one dark-haired panting youth, streaked in trails both clear and atramentous; they cut his face and arm into nonsensical patterns as he leaned forward, and so I might be forgiven for not realizing that the shadow clustered beneath his brow was an empty eye socket, weeping blood and humors. He clung to the sword in one hand as if he couldn’t unseal his fingers.

  The other, his back to me, was crouched low. What I took for a cloak was hair, gleaming silver hair that brushed the dirt floor.

  As the genets stopped, bracing me between them, the silver-haired man lunged toward the youth, who stumbled back. With a flash of steel and glass the man sliced a knife across the dark elf’s eyes—passing entirely through his nose as if through wax—and the other in the opposite direction, through his throat, exposing his windpipe. As the youth collapsed, gagging, the silver-haired man swooped down and put a boot to his shoulder. I heard the crack of his shoulder dislocating before I realized the silver-haired elf was sawing at the arm.

  And that even as he did so, the tremendous wound over his opponent’s throat was sluggishly sealing.

  I swayed, and Kelu held me in place.

  “Do you need to vomit, Master?” Almond whispered.

  Vomiting... that required believing my eyes. The man on the ground was flopping now, fingers digging trenches into the earth.

  He was reaching for his sword.

  Mesmerized, I watched as the taller elf stomped on his hand and then ground into them with his boot-heel, hard enough to snap the bones. Through his teeth he hissed, “Yield.”

  The youth wheezed, unable to speak, but struggled weakly for his fallen weapon. The man over him dragged his head back by the hair and slit his throat again, holding it open this time so that the blood pumped in great gushes from the severed arteries, soaking the mottled earth. The youth’s emptied eye sockets seeped thickly over his cheeks, caking his mouth with blood and gore.

  “Yield,” the elf said, voice ragged. “Yield now and I’ll let you live.”

  The youth’s bloody mouth twitched... and then his hand snapped out and yanked the other’s ankle out from under him. The taller elf rolled as he fell and faster than I could track lunged back to his attacker, scooping him off the ground and sprinting for the fire. The youth scratched at his face, clawed at his throat, but his opponent threw him into the fire, snatched one of the wrapped poles and impaled him. And there as the youth flailed the silver-haired elf held him pinned, leaning into the pole, until at last the convulsions stopped.

  Kemses e Sadar straightened, gore-stained hair falling in front of his hard face, and tossed the pole to the ground. “Next,” he rasped.

  He was fierce and hard and bright, even wounded, even bloodied and bent. He was the most magnificent elf I had ever seen.

  I collapsed between the two genets and emptied my stomach. The clash of blades resumed and I wondered wildly how anyone could bear to witness this violence against nature with equanimity.

  A cool hand touched my shoulder then.

  “Friend?” a woman asked in a husky contralto.

  I looked up and into the kohled dark eyes of another human, tears stiffening the smooth olive skin of her cheeks. Black curls fell past a strong nose, full lips, breaking up her face... but not enough that I could fail to see the creases drawn around her mouth by fear and exhaustion. Nor did she shine; like the humans of Amoret’s manor she seemed to have been sapped of some vital quality.

  “P-pardon?” I asked.

  “Are you a friend,” she asked. “A friend of our keeper-lover, Kemses e Sadar.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We came for help,” Almond whispered from my side.

  “If we see the end of this, you will have it,” she said. “He turns no one away.”

  I looked past her shoulder, glimpsed the steel glimmer of a sword’s quillions pressed flush to another elf’s belly.

  “Don’t,” she said, turning my face. “Don’t look.” And then she embraced me and shuddered. Numb, I put my arms around her and closed my eyes tightly as something squelched and blood hissed, splashing the earth. When I opened them again, a man was standing alongside us, so strongly stamped with the woman’s features that they could only be kin. He was watching the duel with a grim face, dark curls obscuring his eyes but leaving his clenched jaw visible.

  Again the nauseating stench. This time with screams. And then Kemses’s rough voice. “Break.”

  “This will be your second to last,” another voice said.

  I lifted my head. Kemses’s back was to us, leaving us with a full frontal view of a seething male half his size, hair tied back in a tight coil, shoulders hunched and body almost vibrating.

  “I know,” Kemses said at last.

  “Only one more break after this one,” the other repeated. “And there are still eight of us left.”

  “I know,” he said again.

  The elf’s shrug had the violence of anger as he turned away. His clump of family consisted not just of elves, but also humans... humans collared and yoked together like cattle. The group parted to accept him and together they turned on the humans. The ghost of those predatory hands glided over my skin and I shivered.

  Kemses came to us then, so tall he towered over us where the woman held me braced between the genets on the ground: all shadow and silver gilt and blood-soaked skin weeping trails of sweat and grime.

  “My lord, my love,” the human man said, holding out his arms.

  And then that stern and savage mien... dissolved. Kemses stepped into the human’s embrace and bent his head down to rest on the glossy curls, leaning ever-so-slightly. My breath c
aught at the sight of them.

  “Take from me, please,” the human said.

  Kemses shook his head, eyes closed.

  “Please,” the man said. “If you fall...”

  “We couldn’t bear it,” the woman holding me whispered. “Please, beloved. Use us to your purpose.”

  “Take it,” the man said, sliding his arms up the elf’s lean torso. “Or God damn it, I’ll force it on you.”

  Kemses laughed a hollow laugh and kissed the man’s brow. “Far be it from me to gainsay you, Galen.” And then he wrapped his arms around the human and pressed him close and I waited for the disgust, for the revulsion, for the rape that I could sense happening on the other side of the arena even now...

  ...and it never came. The man rested his brow against the taller elf’s and their breathing slowed and synchronized until it came in tandem. A sense of tranquility swept them, so compelling I could only stare in shock and a nameless longing. As I watched, Kemses’s edges glimmered as if lit by an unseen sun, and then the colors in his skin and hair flared, incandescent. The human wobbled and fell against him, and Kemses caught him in gentle arms, lowered him to the ground beside me.

  For a moment, we locked gazes and Kemses’s brow crimped in puzzlement. Then he looked to the woman and said, “Take care of him.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she murmured, and then he returned to the arena to face his next opponent, hair rippling like a banner.

  The woman took her kin in her arms, and I lurched to my feet to force myself to watch the violence, to learn its vicious lessons... to begin to understand exactly what it meant to be immortal. I had attended some of Chester’s practice bouts, but they had nothing on the brutality and cruelty of elven duels.... and within the first exchanges, I saw magic.

  I understood then how far gone Kemses had been when he called the halt... for the fight with magic defied belief. His stole became a whip, fouling the weapons of his attackers; the hair I took for ornament turned back blows and sliced thousands of cuts when flung past enemy skin. Magic sped the passage of his blades and corrupted the flesh in its wake, hardened his body against blows and repaired him from ridiculous wounds. Nor were objects the only recipient of this force, for he did not move so much as ripple, fluid as a stream; fell and leapt with a speed and grace no human could have matched. And magic kept him from dying, over and over and over again.