by P. M. Biswas
“Magnanimous now that you’re the victor, eh?”
“I’m not the victor.” Loren helped Tam up and guided her to the pond. “You won.”
“No, you did.” The outcome was the outcome. Tam accepted it.
“I wouldn’t have survived that attack of yours in a real battle, when you threw dirt at me and I didn’t recover quickly enough. In a real battle, you wouldn’t have reversed your spear like that. You wouldn’t have hesitated to kill me.”
“With a pretty face like that?” Tam joked. “Maybe I would. It’d be such a waste otherwise. Or that’s what my new commander, Maryada, would say, anyhow. She’s got a disturbing obsession with elves.”
Loren grimaced. “I’m… not sure I want to know.”
“I didn’t either. Believe me.”
Loren deposited Tam at the Pool of Healing and submerged her hand in the water, just like before.
“Well,” Tam said. “This is becoming a pattern.”
“Only because you always place yourself in danger, and then you get hurt, and then I have to heal you.”
Loren bit his wrist lightly, just enough to cause blood to bead along the bite. Its silver threads unspooled into the pond when Loren inserted his hand into the water. Then Loren leaned against the same tree Tam was leaning against, their sides pressed together.
“You should’ve told me.” Tam was transfixed by those strands of silver as she hadn’t been before, because she wasn’t frightened of them anymore. She was already bonded to Loren; it wasn’t like it could get any worse.
“Told you what?” Loren was watching attentively as the wound on Tam’s shoulder healed, closing up millimeter by millimeter within the torn, bloodied gap in Tam’s tunic.
“That you’ve had training. Military training. Then I wouldn’t have treated you like such a prat.”
“Of course I’ve had training. All Earth Elves are trained in arrowcraft. It is the form of warfare most suited to a forest like the Wanderwood.” Loren shrugged. “The other elves may have their own specialties. It is said that the Water Elves of the sea can wield the harpoon.”
“The harpoon?” Tam’s eyes got so huge, they all but popped out of her head. A harpoon was basically a giant spear, wasn’t it? The ultimate spear, even? “I have to meet the Water Elves,” Tam breathed. “I don’t care how it happens. But it has to happen. I have to throw a harpoon at least once before I die.”
Loren seemed bemused by Tam’s spear-madness. “You’ll die sooner than that if you’re not careful. But the more pressing question is, why do you equate a person’s worth with their military training?”
“What? I don’t—” But did she? Did Tam instantaneously have a deeper respect for those who could fight… and win? “That’s not true. I do respect people who don’t have training.”
“Just not as much as those who do.” Loren repeated Tam’s thoughts almost verbatim, and Tam scowled.
“I respect Kay. Kay’s not a soldier. And I respect the queen.”
“Both of whom have armed themselves in their own ways—Kay with knowledge, and the queen with strategy. That much is plain even to me.”
“Even to you? So you admit to being as thick as a brick, then?”
Loren just carried on. He was becoming more and more difficult to derail. Dammit. “Perhaps it is because you have equated your own worth with your ability to wield weaponry and go to war. You cannot imagine how a person can have worth without that.”
Tam’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish’s. This was the kind of vivisection she expected from Emeraude, not Loren. “That’s sly of you,” she complained. “Using the bond against me like this.”
“The bond…?” Loren blinked at her. “Tam, I need nothing but my own two eyes to see your very visible biases. You might as well be carrying a flag announcing them. A very big, very red flag. That’s on fire.”
“You mean like your face when you blush?”
But Loren was undeterred. “If you can expose my own secrets to me, I have every right to do it to you.”
“So this is revenge? Is that it? That’s just pathetic. As pathetic as you are.” Then, out of the blue, Tam recalled that there was a crucial vote underway for the elves and yet here their prince was, sparring for fun. “Don’t you have to vote? What have you been doing with me all this while? Go! Go!”
Loren huffed. “I can’t vote.” Was he pouting? He was pouting, wasn’t he? “I’m too young.”
“Too young to vote? How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
Tam gawped at him. “You said you were immortal! You can’t be eighteen and immortal!”
“Being immortal doesn’t mean never being born. It just means never dying.”
“You were born eighteen years ago? Are you sure?”
Loren preened. “Why, did you think I was more mature than that?”
“No,” Tam said. “I reckoned you were about five.”
Loren knocked his shoulder against hers, forgetting that Tam was wounded, and they winced simultaneously as pain sizzled through Tam’s nerves—and Loren’s. “Sorry,” Loren rasped. “That’s. Ow. Sorry.”
“Forget about that! I’m almost healed.” Tam was more fixated on Loren’s age. “How come you can’t vote if you’re eighteen? Eighteen is the age of majority among humans. I’m seventeen, and I’ve been praying and praying to turn eighteen. I can’t vote or join the army until then.”
“That’s because you’re mortals,” Loren said patronizingly. “You have shorter lifespans, so you must do everything earlier.”
“What a phenomenal insight,” Tam responded, dry as gin. “Thank you for reminding me of my own mortality.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I was speaking in jest, princeling.”
“When are you not? To answer your question, no, I can’t vote until I’m a hundred.”
Tam just sat there stupefied. “Until you’re what?”
“A hundred years?” Loren looked at her in puzzlement. “Also known as a century? Do you not measure time like we do?”
“No, that’s….” Tam threw her head back and guffawed, loud enough and boisterous enough to make her shoulder twinge. “And I thought my wait was long. Blimey. Astar take pity on you and your eighty-two years of waiting. I’ve only got one. It puts everything in perspective.”
“Don’t laugh so much,” Loren scolded her. “You’ll reopen your wound.”
“Too much pain for you to take, rose-boy?”
“What do I have to do with roses?”
“You’re like one.” Tam waved vaguely. “Somehow. I don’t know exactly how, but you are. One of those tall roses with their petals pulled up tight.”
Loren let out a startled chuckle. “That’s called a bud.”
“No, what comes after a bud. Still uptight, but slowly opening up. And soft. And easily bruised. Ready to wilt at the slightest disapproval.”
“So, to you,” Loren reiterated, “I’m a delicate flower with no self-confidence?”
“Aye.” Tam smirked. “A rose without thorns. Unless your thorns are your arrows, but they aren’t you. They’re outside of you. You have to borrow them just to pretend to have defenses.”
“If we’re comparing each other to plants,” Loren said in a vengeful tone, “then you’re a cactus. Sturdy and sharp and liable to cut anyone that approaches you.”
That was surprisingly flattering. “Thanks for the compliment.”
“A very short cactus,” Loren clarified. “A tiny one.”
“Oi,” said Tam.
“The sort of cactus you can put in a pot the size of your hand and leave on the windowsill to scare away crows.”
“At least I can scare away something. You wouldn’t scare away a feather, let alone a whole crow.”
“I—” Loren’s attention swung back to Tam’s shoulder. “It’s healed,” he said with relief. The silver threads of his blood dissipated into the water, and he withdrew his fingers from the pond, flicking droplets off his finger
tips. “How do you fare?” he asked. “Can you walk?”
“I got shot in my shoulder, not my calf. I can walk. I could walk before you healed me.”
“There’s no need for indignation.” Loren got up and extended his hand to Tam in assistance, but Tam eschewed it and scrambled up on her own.
“I said I could walk.” Tam batted Loren away. “You’ve healed me twice. Twice! If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to indebt me to you.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get killed by any means available.”
“Not by any means.” Tam puffed up proudly. She was the queen’s herald, after all—and soon she’d be the queen’s soldier. “If I do die, I have to die in battle. No other means will be acceptable.”
Loren was gazing at her with an odd expression.
“What?”
“Do you never doubt yourself?”
A memory flashed through Tam’s mind of that wretched chat she’d had with Emeraude, before Tam’s escapade to the border, and how she had doubted herself then. “Once, maybe.”
“Once, she says,” Loren mumbled to himself. “Maybe, she says.”
“Don’t you doubt yourself less now? After our spar?”
Loren was gazing at her oddly again, but this was a different type of oddness. Tam couldn’t identify it.
Mayhap the prince could do with some reassurance. “Look, let’s do a salute,” Tam offered generously. “To mark our beginning as comrades.”
“Comrades?” Loren’s voice squeaked as he said it. Why did it squeak?
Tam eyed Loren warily, lest he turn into a mouse. The elves were magical; who knew what they could do? “We’ve sparred,” Tam explained. “That makes us comrades. Not comrades that get along, necessarily, but comrades nonetheless.”
“I see,” Loren said weakly. Then, like he was just repeating fairy-tale terms he’d heard somewhere, he rambled, “Comrades. Chums. Pals.”
“Not chums. Not pals. We’re not friends, all right? Not yet. Just comrades.” Tam cleared her throat. “But that’s a big deal too.” Maybe a bigger deal. She didn’t say that.
Perhaps Loren sensed it anyhow, through that irritating bond of theirs, because he only nodded dumbly. He just stood there, looking down at Tam, his arms hanging loosely by his sides.
“Don’t you know how to do a salute? Bloody hell.” Loren had Tam blaspheming at ten swear words a minute. “Listen. I wouldn’t even be saluting you if you hadn’t sparred with me and if I hadn’t realized you were….” Competent? Bearable? For some reason, neither of those words seemed entirely accurate. “Before the spar, I misjudged you as a spoiled prince brought up all coy and cuddly, incapable of fighting off a flea, with balls smaller than blueberries.”
“Blueberries?” Loren squeaked again.
“But I was mistaken.” Tam stuck out her hand. “This is a salute among my people. Here, grasp my forearm. I’ll grasp yours.”
Loren moved jerkily, clasping Tam’s forearm as Tam clasped his. “N-now what?” he asked, after they’d been standing there, arms clasped, for a few moments.
“Now, nothing.” Tam tugged at her arm. “Let go, already. The salute’s over.”
Loren let go. His hand clenched on empty air, and he stuffed it into his pocket as if to hide it. “Thank you,” he said roughly. “Comrade.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” Why on earth was this so uncomfortable? Suddenly self-conscious, Tam barreled on. “Anyhow, it was good to see your pretense at gentlemanliness replaced by honest rage. We should do this more often.”
Seemingly recovering from his momentary strangeness, Loren rallied with his usual gusto. “You mean, you taunting me and manipulating me into striking you with whatever weapon I have handy?”
Tam was just grateful that the salute and its ensuing awkwardness were over with. “That sounds about right.”
“I….” Loren twitched abortively toward the nearest tree, which was riddled with arrows. “I should retrieve my arrows.”
“Then retrieve them. What’s the problem?”
“Are you—can you stand on your own?”
“I swear, Loren, if you play nursemaid with me one more time—”
“I’m off! To get the arrows!” Loren hurried across the clearing to every tree he had punctured—which was most of them—and reinserted the arrows into his quiver.
“Don’t you feel bad for the trees you shot arrows into?” Tam asked idly. “Didn’t you say they were sentient?”
“Yes, but they do not experience pain like we do. They don’t have a nervous system comparable to ours.”
“I am a nervous system, right about now. Very nervous.” Tam rubbed her shoulder absently; healed though it was, it still throbbed distractingly. “I hope the vote doesn’t go in Alfernas’s favor. That bigoted bastard. He’s out to ruin the alliance before it’s even born.”
“Alfernas is a master illusionist. Many of the wards around the Wanderwood are his, as are the wards on the sacred cloth that enfolds the Stone. The cloth conceals the Stone’s power so that the Seers of the other elements cannot detect it. That is why Alfernas’s opinion has weight amongst the voters.” Loren settled the final arrow into his quiver. “In any case, the vote should be over by now.”
“May Astar have swayed it in a direction favorable to the alliance.”
“It wouldn’t be a fair vote if it was swayed,” Loren pointed out.
“Just for today, I’ll take a jot of unfairness. More than a jot, if it gets us out of this soup with Danis before we all get boiled to death in it.”
“What a delightful image.”
“Thank you. I do try.” Tam straightened. “I have faith in your father, though. With him in charge, the vote would’ve gone well. I can foresee it.”
“Foresee it? Since when did you become a prophetess?”
“Since I saw how your father dealt with the previous vote. It was a democratic vote, yes, but he made a speech before the vote that gently encouraged his subjects to vote a specific way. He was very subtle about it, but after years of watching Queen Emeraude orchestrate court politics, I caught him doing the same. If he handles this vote in a similar fashion, the alliance will sail through.”
“Very perspicacious of you.” Loren beckoned Tam to him, and they left the clearing together. Despite the chaos that had recently been unleashed upon the area, Maple was asleep in her corner by the bush of yellow flowers, curled up in a semicircle with her muzzle tucked between her hooves. Tam scratched her between the ears, which Maple flicked in her sleep.
“I wish I was a horse,” Tam said wistfully. “Not a care in the world.”
Loren snorted. “If you want to be a horse that badly, I’m sure we can oblige.”
Tam gasped. “You elves can do that? You can turn folks into animals?” When Loren only chuckled, Tam persisted. “Well, can you?”
Loren never did answer her. He was too busy chortling.
THE ELVEN court was emptying of voters when Tam and Loren got there, and the human delegation was being guided into it from an arched, tree-lined pathway.
But rather than the delegations sitting opposite each other on the floor as they had done before, a second, less imposing throne had been temporarily erected beside Eras’s. Emeraude was invited to sit upon it, with the ministers of both elfkind and humankind seated in front of the platform on which the thrones were placed.
In spite of her status, Soma wasn’t on the platform but was cross-legged as she customarily was, bare-footed on the earth, likely because she required direct contact with the earth to work her magic.
The knot of fear within Tam unraveled. So the elves had voted for the alliance. That could be the only reason for Emeraude to be seated next to the elven king. The atmosphere was of a verdict having been reached, and the elven ministers were clear-eyed and determined. The only exception was Alfernas, who bore a disgruntled moue, but even he could not challenge the voting process of his own people. Tam resiste
d the urge to point at him and cackle victoriously.
Had Tam been wiser, she would’ve requested a change of clothes from Loren. Instead, when they entered the elven court, Tam was still wearing her bloodstained tunic. It immediately attracted the scrutiny of King Eras and Queen Emeraude, who were now stationed on their thrones.
Eras’s brows lowered. “My son,” he enquired with a menacing mildness, “why is the human herald sporting an injury after having accompanied you?” What went unsaid was the accusation, What did you do to her?
“Father.” Loren fidgeted. “My apologies for returning the herald in this state. We were…. That is, I was….”
“We were playing,” Tam blurted.
“Playing,” said Eras flatly, still not taking his eyes off his son. “Are you both toddlers?”
“But she’s—” Loren faltered. “She is healed, as you can see.”
“Why did she have to be healed?”
Tam jumped to Loren’s defense again. “I—I tripped and fell on a sharp branch!”
Emeraude joined the conversation belatedly, as if despite herself. A faint smile pulled at her mouth. “Did you fall upside down, Tam? Because only then could you have acquired an injury on the very top of your shoulder.”
“I… was dangling from a tree?” Tam gesticulated wildly. “Upside down? That’s when I fell.”
“Astar help us,” Emeraude murmured, and shared a commiserative glance with Eras, as if they sympathized with each other’s parenting challenges. “Well, at least they’re getting along better now, whatever it was that they did.”
Loren went a dull red. Did he blush constantly? This was getting ridiculous.
“Indeed.” Eras indicated that Loren and Tam take their seats. “Let us resume our negotiations.”
Tam seized Loren’s sleeve and lugged him to a spot in front of the platform, close to where Soma was. It was nice being near her. Soma always emanated peacefulness; it was a warm, perpetual glow at the back of Tam’s mind. Tam would miss her after leaving the Wanderwood.
Eras began speaking. “As you may have guessed, my guests—”
“Was that a pun?” Tam whispered to Loren, only to have him elbow her in the guts. “Ouch!”