Earthstone

by P. M. Biswas

  “How many?” asked Emeraude tightly. “How many are there?”

  “Thousands,” said Soma in a horrified hush. “Thousands upon thousands.”

  Tam swore loudly and sincerely, letting out a string of expletives as inventive as it was explicit.

  Loren nudged Tam with his foot, as they were still seated across from each other. “I’m not certain how Danis being the whoreson of a triple-horned goat’s behind is relevant—or even anatomically possible—but would you just shut up?”

  “It’s not a goat’s behind. It’s a goat’s arse. Don’t you even have the courage to swear honestly?”

  “Explicitness is not honesty.”

  “It is when a necromantic sorcerer with an army of the undead is marching toward us! Hell, it’s practically mandatory!”

  “For humans, maybe. We elves have a battle to plan. Juveniles like you should stay out of it.”

  “This ‘juvenile’ is the only person present who’s actually fought against those gruesome death-puppets, so I of all people shouldn’t stay out of it.”

  “She is right, my son,” said Eras, and Loren slouched sullenly, crossing his arms like the juvenile he was. “Tam, human of the humans—”

  “Please,” Tam begged. “King Eras, could you not address me by that title? No offense, but it’s driving me up the wall. And there aren’t even any walls here.”

  “Tam, then. I assume that when you saw the Axenborg scouts approaching the border, they did so across the mountain pass of Mount Zivan?”

  Tam straightened, eager to offer her expertise in the only area she had expertise to offer. “Erm, yes. They passed directly under the peak of Mount Zivan, through the tunnel formed by Zivan’s weird arm thingy.”

  “Weird arm thingy?” Loren snorted derisively.

  Tam glared at him. “The overpass, all right? Is that textbook enough for you? It’s Mount Zivan’s natural overpass, an arc of rock that crosses over from Axenborg into Astaris. That’s the only route into Astaris through the Mountains of Mordeth, narrow though the trail is, capable of holding no more than three soldiers abreast.”

  Emeraude met Eras’s eyes. “Which means that an army of thousands would take days to trickle through to our side. Even undead soldiers are possessed of only two legs. They may march through the pass somewhat faster than the living, since they will not have to camp for sleep or food, but they will be as hindered by geography as any ordinary human would be. Given how narrow the neck of the overpass is, they will clog up its entry, thousands of them gathered at the mouth of the pass. Unmoving. Easy targets.”

  “Easy targets for what?” Alfernas demanded.

  “For the Earthstone.” Eras’s eyes never left Emeraude’s. “It appears that the queen and I are thinking along the same lines. The Earthstone can bring Mount Zivan down on Danis’s soldiers while they are gathered at the overpass.”

  “To bury them all alive?” Loren guessed. “But they aren’t alive. Wouldn’t they just get back up again?”

  “Get back up from under what?” Tam countered. “Tons of rock? Boulders bigger than buildings? Remember, they can’t recover if they’re hacked to bits. There may be life in each individual limb—unholy life fueled by the Firestone—but if all the limbs are crushed or detached, they won’t be able to operate like limbs should. It’s ghastly, but it’ll work. If they’re all squished like ants beneath the weight of an entire mountain, there won’t be any getting up after that. They’ll be just smudges of tissue by then,” Tam said with satisfaction. “Bloody little smears. Like swatted flies.”

  Loren looked ill. “Aren’t you reveling in that gory scenario a tad too much?”

  “Reveling in the survival of both our peoples too much? Oh, go suck on an egg, weakling.”

  “Why would I suck on a—”

  “Ahem,” Eras interrupted. “If we may return to business? We must dismiss this session to convene another vote.”

  Emeraude, who must have surmised that the elves had a democratic mode of government, asked, “King Eras, did you not say that the elvish laws were absolute when it came to intervening with the theft or abuse of the Stones? What role could a vote play in such an ‘absolute’ decision?”

  “An intervention is mandated, but the manner of that intervention still requires a vote. The key vote will be between Alfernas’s viewpoint and mine—the view that the elves can and should protect themselves without an alliance with the humans, and the view that the elves can only adequately protect themselves through an alliance with the humans. Once that vote has been taken, your nation and mine will move ahead together—or part ways, if that is what the outcome of the election dictates.”

  “Then this is an election of the utmost importance. We humans should leave you to it. Should we retire to our tents outside the Wanderwood in the interim, while you conduct the vote?”

  “No, no,” Eras said courteously. “You are our guests. Nala will take you to a hall where you may rest and replenish your energies. Dinner will be brought to you there. It will be vegetarian, as we do not eat meat.”

  Emeraude bowed her head to hide a strange smile. It made Tam realize that it wasn’t so much that Eras was being polite by providing accommodations to the human delegation, but that he wanted the human delegation to be supervised, and keeping them in the Wanderwood was the best means of supervising them. Every tree here was a spy, every leaf an ear pricked to listen in on any words exchanged by the human queen and her ministers. “We appreciate your hospitality,” Emeraude said blandly. “Please, Sentinel Nala, lead the way.”

  Nala—who was either oblivious to the finer points of diplomacy or just didn’t care about them—rejoined her team of Sentinels and surrounded the human party. All the better to “guide” them to their accommodations.

  “Well!” Tam dusted off her knees as she got up. “Seer Soma, it was a pleasure to meet you. Loren, not so much. Farewe—”

  “Wait.” Loren latched on to Tam’s forearm. His hand didn’t wrap all the way around it, outlandishly elongated though Loren’s fingers were, because Tam’s forearm was a spear-wielder’s forearm, muscular and broad. Loren stared down at it, nonplussed.

  “What?”

  “Um. I….” Loren was still staring. “I have something for you.”

  Tam leered. “Is it what a husband customarily has for a wife?”

  Now Loren just appeared confused. “What a husband…?”

  “What he has in his britches, of course.”

  “Wha—no!” Horrified, Loren dropped Tam’s arm and whipped his head around to where Soma still sat cross-legged near them. “In front of the—you cannot talk like that before the Seer!”

  “I am a Seer, lad, not a prude.” Soma was smiling benevolently… or was it teasingly? “You needn’t be so scandalized on my behalf when I, myself, am not.”

  Loren’s horror seemed to double, and Tam burst out laughing, clutching her stomach as she wheezed. “Oh. Oh, Loren. You’re hilarious. You’re the prude. All I have to do is embarrass you and you go off, squawking like a plucked chicken.”

  “I’m—I’m not embarrassed!”

  “No, you’re just glowing a brighter red than the Firestone probably does. Now, that? That’s what I call a blush.”

  “If you’re quite done humiliating me for your own amusement—”

  “No,” said Tam cheerfully. “I’m not.”

  Loren ignored her and plowed on. “—and if you’re not concerned about what happened to your horse or your spear, then you can go along with the rest of your delegation and feast on leaf-bread for the evening.”

  Well, Tam was curious about what Maple was doing and where Tam’s armor and weaponry was stashed, if it hadn’t been demolished altogether. But worse still…. “Leaf-bread? By the gods, no wonder you elves are so off in the head. You’re all malnourished. Even if you don’t feed on meat, haven’t you ever heard of roast pumpkin? No? Buttery peas? Mashed potatoes? Courgettes, of all the—and I despise courgettes, but even they’d be an
improvement on leaf-bread!”

  “Leaves from our plethora of plants carry a variety of nutrients and provide a balanced diet. Plus, we do have lentils.”

  “Lentils?” Tam shuddered. “Spare me. Just take me to see Maple. It’ll be more tolerable than the collective breakdown the human ministers will be having. I’ll leave Queen Emeraude to soothe their ruffled feathers.”

  “Come along, then.” Momentarily laying his bow aside, Loren knelt before Soma and pressed his forehead to her bare feet in what Tam presumed was a gesture of veneration. “Thank you, Mother, for being careful with my bonded and for not harming her.”

  “How could I harm such an adorable child, even in error?” Soma petted Loren’s cheek in a maternal fashion. “Go, go. Spend some time together with her.”

  Loren looked very much as though he’d like to object to that as his reason for asking Tam to go with him, but his reverence for his Seer likely prevented him from contradicting her. When he saw Tam gawping at him in disbelief, he scowled. “I was only thanking her out of formality. It was in my self-interest that you be unharmed, or I would have felt your pain and it would not have been pleasant.”

  “You were never pleasant to begin with.”

  “If I am so unpleasant, then why are you still with me?” Loren picked his bow up and settled it across his shoulders, its belt crisscrossing his quiver full of arrows, which were just as flimsy and ceremonial as the bow itself. Wasn’t Loren mortified to be carting that around? But he only sniffed haughtily at Tam’s critical examination of his bow. “Do you want to see your friend Maple or not?”

  Tam did. So she bid her queen adieu before gallivanting off after Loren. If the bastard ended up throwing her back into the Pool of Healing, like a letter stamped as “Return To Sender” by Astaris’s postal service, then Tam would just have to swim her way out. She was nothing if not a survivor.

  Chapter Four

  MISSION

  IT WAS only Loren’s presence that kept Tam from being accosted by a flock of those carnivorous, people-faced birds. They followed Tam and Loren overhead, flitting from branch to branch, rotating their heads all the way around to keep Tam within their sights. The head-rotating was almost as creepy as… everything else about them.

  Tam categorically refused to edge closer to Loren, even if some instinct within her spurred her to do so. “Why do I get the feeling they’re fantasizing about plucking my liver out with their claws and eating it?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Loren disdained her. “They’re just being protective of me.”

  “Of you? Against who, me?” Tam pondered it for a while. “So they’re sure you’d lose to me in a fight. Heh. That’s kind of flattering.”

  “That’s not… I wouldn’t lose to you.”

  “Really?” Tam taunted Loren. “Let’s test it out, then, shall we?”

  “Are you suggesting we engage in armed combat while our rulers are negotiating a truce? Because that seems counterproductive, to say the least.”

  “Sayeth the princeling who’s using excuses to avoid a good, healthy spar.”

  “It won’t be very healthy when my arrow pokes a hole in your eye.”

  “Thinkin’ of poking holes in me, eh?”

  To his credit, Loren managed to stop himself from spluttering. He did go roughly the shade of a tomato, though. “Are all humans this lewd?”

  “No, and normally I’m not either. But you’re just too easy to get a, ha, rise out of. And I figured Nala was prickly, but I can’t rile her up like this. She’s ten times more stoic than you.”

  “Nala is a Sentinel. Sentinels have to be stoic.”

  “What, is it in the job description?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “There’s way too much manner in your speaking,” Tam remarked. “How about some genuine cussing every now and then?”

  Loren sighed the deep, protracted sigh of the fed-up. “Like I said, explicitness and honesty aren’t the same thi—”

  “Yes, they are,” Tam steamrolled right over him.

  “Do you ever let anybody complete their sentences?”

  “Not if I can help it.” Tam sidestepped a spiderweb that curved inward like a silvery gossamer bowl, dotted with small black specks that must be other insects. “By Astar, Kay would love cataloging and classifying all these species.”

  “Who’s Kay?”

  “The human prince. Queen Emeraude’s son.”

  “But you’re on close enough terms with him to be familiar with his hobbies? Are you not a peasant? I was given to believe that human society was more striated than ours.”

  “Firstly, only Kay would know what ‘striated’ means. Because I don’t. Secondly, yes, he’s my friend even though he’s a prince. He isn’t a prat like you are. He wouldn’t stuff up a healing like you did. He’s been researching healing potions all his life.”

  “So have—” Loren broke off, flushing. “Never mind.”

  “Oooh. Oooh, but I have to mind. Is the elven princeling dissatisfied with his rank as prince? Would he prefer being a healer? Is that why you went so far to save me, because you had the chance to heal somebody?”

  “I’ve… I’m… I’ve looked into herbs. Somewhat.”

  “Somewhat, as in, looking the occasional herb up in an encyclopedia, or reading the encyclopedia cover to cover and imprinting every twenty-seven-letter genus into your brain?”

  Loren paused. “The latter,” he said eventually. Shortly. Like he was confessing to a shameful misdeed.

  “Kay’s like that too. Why’re you so hung up on it?”

  “My kind don’t…. We are supposed to learn from nature itself. Not by artificial means. So while there are healing texts composed in archaic Elvish by our ancestors, from before the Stones were formed, common wisdom for the last few centuries has been to learn by bonding with the earth, as we Earth Elves are meant to. Knowledge gained by book-reading is distrusted because it is considered a shallow knowledge, a knowledge of appearances and not essences.”

  “But you….” While Tam was often relegated to the ranks of the boneheaded, growing up with Emeraude’s inescapable perceptiveness had taught her a thing or two about being perceptive, herself. “You don’t connect to the earth that naturally, do you? That’s why you bungled healing me as badly as you did. Not the healing part, but the bonding part. You couldn’t separate your life force from mine. That’s why… that’s why you were so ashamed of it, weren’t you? When your father asked you about it? Because it was an admission of not being elf-like. Of not being as effortlessly connected to the earth as you ought to be—not just as any elf, but as an elven prince.”

  Loren didn’t say anything for a while. He looked away from Tam and up at the birds following them, as if fearful of what they thought about him too.

  “Look, they clearly love you,” Tam said awkwardly, unused to being the comforter, let alone to comforting Loren. She couldn’t even understand why she was doing it. She should be stomping on Loren’s weakness and cackling. She should be rubbing it in for everything it was worth, for every grain of salt that would make Loren’s wounds sting and smart.

  But Loren had healed her wounds, hadn’t he? He hadn’t stomped on them. So she had to be decent and not stomp on his. Tam was a warrior, after all; kicking a man when he was down was dishonorable in the extreme. She would never stoop to it. Never.

  Reassured that she wasn’t going barmy, Tam continued, “The birds, I mean. They feel connected to you. That’s why they’re so protective of you. Your people love you too.”

  “Only who they think I am. And that is a sham.”

  “It’s not a sham. Nobody can maintain a sham for years and years.”

  Loren’s lips twisted. “Sayeth the human with no comprehension of what time is to immortals.” He glanced at Tam, and then away again, his cheeks a dull red. “Why am I even telling you this? I can’t abide you. I can barely stand to be in the same forest as you.”

  “That hurts,” Tam
said mock-sincerely. “Not even the same clearing? A whole forest? Tsk, tsk. Didn’t we just have a lovely heart-to-heart?” Abruptly, it occurred to Tam that their conversation may not have been as confidential as they would’ve liked. “Sodding hell. What if the trees spied on us? What if they blab about everything you just said to all the elves back home?”

  “Concerned for my reputation? How uncharacteristic of you.”

  Tam scrambled to restore her professed indifference to Loren’s well-being. “I’m not concerned. I’m just wondering if you spilled the beans on yourself like the incompetent you are.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself over this incompetent, then. Only the king and the Seer are so deeply bonded with the earth that they can closely communicate with the trees. And they both already know I’m not what I pretend to be.”

  “Pretty?” Tam waggled her eyebrows.

  Loren glowered. “Princely.”

  “Well, princely prince, are we there yet?”

  “Almost.” Loren pushed aside a curtain of leaves. It was suspended from a tree not unlike a weeping willow, except that its leaves were a sapphire blue that glittered like jewels in the sunlight. Past that shimmering curtain lay the glade of the Pool of Healing; Tam could recognize it by now, its topography intimately known to her. She hadn’t encountered that weeping willow before, though. Sure enough, when she turned around, the curtain of leaves from which she’d emerged was gone.

  Just gone. Like it had never been there. In its place stood a tree with low-hanging crimson fruit as bright as rubies.

  “Er.” Tam backed away from it slowly. “Am I imagining it or does the forest rearrange itself?”

  “It does.” Loren studied her quizzically. “Are not all living entities capable of movement?”

  “This is more movement than I’d expected of trees. Do they get up and walk?”

  “No, the trees are stationary. It is the land that shifts periodically. It tends to shift more during daylight hours, however, because it absorbs energy from the sun.”