The Inheritance

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  "Not all," Char said one night as he sat pulling on his leather bottle, the one that held dwarf spirits.

  It seemed inexhaustible, like a vessel from legend, something touched by gods and made to replenish itself after each sip. But Char did not sip, and no vessel is inexhaustible. He had his stashes, though—a keg here, another there, and woe the cave that had nothing to offer. Roundly cursed, it became a place the dwarf couldn't wait to leave, and his discontent did, some nights, poison everyone’s sleep—the pacing if he waked, the groaning nightmares if he slept. Not that night, though, the one upon which he felt warm enough in the belly to become expansive.

  "We got no notion of all the ways in and out of any cave we find, but we got me, little princess. A dwarf in the womb of the world… ah, he'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be able to find his way to anywhere."

  They lived mostly beneath the ground. It was not the raiding season. It was winter, and no one traveled the roads. Brand didn't send his men outside the mountain but to hunt. He didn't like to stay too long in one place; he didn't like the idea of settling in. He had upon one hand elves who'd like to kill him for a kidnapping they felt was sacrilege. Upon the other hand he had a feud with a hobgoblin to prosecute. He had, too, a hoard of weapons to cache, a princess's ransom. This he took grim satisfaction in doing, storing swords and fat quivers and graceful bows in every cave that seemed secret enough to him. He conferred with Char, and he spoke in firelit plannings with dark-haired Arawn and the elf Ley. The outlaws who sat beyond their fire seemed content to wait, rolling the bones to gamble, kicking hounds that got too near a supper, honing weapons, and talking about those friends who'd died of a goblin’s sword or a Warrior's arrow. In low voices, they spoke of the hob and his fire-staff, but only to whisper. Like all the godless, these humans were superstitious, having no faith upon which to depend or to turn for explanation of things uncanny. They believed that to speak of such things as magical weapons, talismans, or any artifact from the days before the Cataclysm was to invite bad luck to the fire.

  The work Brand planned was a great backing and forthing, the whole treasure of two wagons unloaded and piled in one deep cave, the pile of them reduced a little at a time by outlaws sent to bring forward what they could carry. They weren't so many as they had been before they'd been caught between Kethrenan’s warriors and the hob’s goblins. Their numbers were reduced to a dozen. Still, they managed to carry all they had, for they considered it good work, as miners consider working veins of gold good work. They broke up the wagons with axes, reducing them to splinters. The horses they set free to fare as best they could. At the end of the autumn, with the winds blowing harder through the stonelands than anyone remembered, no one thought the beasts would fare well for long.

  In their caves, the outlaws were warmer perhaps than any creature outside could remember being. Four were warmer than most. There were but three women among them—Dell, Tianna, and captive Elansa. Dell and Tianna had long before proved with their weapons their right to decide whether or when they would share their Tianna seldom took one of the men to her bed. Dell seemed well enough pleased to keep warm with Arawn. No one contended, not even Brand, though it was true that when Tianna could not be found sleeping alone, she was found sleeping with bearded Brand.

  Those were two who could choose. Elansa was the third who could not. Upon her, men's eyes glanced in the day, at night they watched more closely, and she felt their dangerous hunger, their eyes like the glowing eyes of wolves circling beyond the campfire. More, she often woke feeling a hand out of the dark, the breath of a man leaning near, hot on her neck, wondering why he could not have what Brand had, what Arawn did. When this became distracting to Brand, he called them off as if they were dogs, saying there was but one of her and he wasn't going to lose another man fighting over her.

  "No one gets her," he said. "Not now, anyway."

  Arawn, for Dell was not near to hear, gave Elansa a long look, and his eyes narrowed in a way that made her shiver. He closed his hand around the hilt of the sword, the long elven weapon never far from his hands. This was Keth’s sword.

  "A prince's blade," he liked to say when he was in the mood to boast. "Whatcha gonna do with 'er, Brand? She's no use to us for ransom any more. We got that." He looked around at the outlaws, grinning. "Any other use she might be, you say no to."

  Brand lifted his head, glancing from Elansa to the outlaws, who listened with various pretensions to noninterest.

  "There's a use for everything, Arawn."

  He didn't say more, but he told Char to see to it that no one fought over the captive woman. Char took his usual choice. The hound Fang kept near her in the day and slept near her in the night.

  Yet, hound or no, Brand's command notwithstanding, the outlaws looked—young Chaser, Swain the old man, and Ballu, of indeterminate age and skinny as a scarecrow. She could hear Pragol breathing in the darkness, the firelight on his bald pate as he turned in his blankets to stare at her. She heard red-haired Loris whispering that Brand didn't have a right to say yea or nay to this.

  "Spoils is spoils, an’ ain't we each got a right?"

  There were others—a man named Bruin, one named Kerin, who had hardly any teeth in his head even though he wasn't an old man. They watched too, with hungry looks. Only Ley didn't, and Char kept his distance.

  She was not safe, no matter what Brand thought. She knew it, as women know.

  In this season of lost things, Elansa lost sight of the sky. She lost the feel of the wind on her face, and she couldn't remember what birdsong sounded like. She forgot how to taste anything but food either burned black or not cooked enough. In the first weeks, she dreamed of scented baths and wisteria-hung gardens, and she woke forgetting those perfumes. Soon, she lost even the dreams.

  Having lost sight of the sky, she lost track of days. Having lost the two moons, bright Solinari and red Lunitari, she didn't know how to track the nights, but she was, after all, a woman, and her body knew how to track the tides of time. One day, in the deepest part of winter, in a cave that might have been north of Qualinesti or south of it, she realized that a month had passed without its usual tidings. And then another did, and the news she got of her body made her weep. In quiet corners, far away from the outlaws with only Fang to watch, she wept to know that she was with child. In her womb had quickened to life the son or daughter of the Qualinesti royal house, Kethrenan’s child.

  She prayed, weeping, and she called upon the gods for strength, for courage. When she didn't know how she would find those things or accept them if granted, she begged for mercy. How would she carry a child, she a prisoner? How would she nourish herself and so nourish the life growing within? When she dared consider it, she wondered: I-low will I bear this child if ever it is brought to term?

  And then, because this was the season of lost things, on a trek through the dark underground, in the womb of the world, she lost what she had lately found. In pain, with blood and weeping, her body cast out the child, the prince or princess. Then it was no hound who saw her sorrow. Then it was the half-elf, Tianna. She was not gentle or solicitous, but there was that about the look in her eyes, those almost-elven eyes, that suggested she understood.

  One after another, they passed her. Dell, not looking to see what the prisoner and the half-elf were doing. She was a woman; she knew. The hounds went by, smelling loss, and the men went by, though most didn't look at her, not even out the corner of an eye. They knew, too. Only one stopped, just a moment hanging on his heel. Brand jerked his head at Tianna. She nodded. Some communication had passed between them that Elansa hadn't the wit or will to decipher.

  Tianna put her hand on Elansa’s shoulder, just a small touch. "You and I," she said, watching the others go by, "we can stay here a while. Until you can walk again."

  Elansa nodded, and she crouched in the darkness, no more able to rejoice for the loss than she'd been able to rejoice in the quickening. When she finished her weeping, she cleaned herself as best s
he could and walked into the darkness, into the echoing womb of the world.

  In the season of lost things, the elves of Qualinesti fared as the rest of the western part of the continent did. Their forest did not preen, their beasts did not warn, and the winds blew like rage-filled phantoms through the naked branches of oak and elm, maple and apple, and pear and aspen. It snapped the boughs from heavy branched pine trees so that the land closest to the stony reaches between the kingdom of the elves and that of the dwarves looked beaten. The forest had burned there at the end of autumn, set alight by a hobgoblin’s magic, and while the fire had not jumped the gullies and glens and gulches that acted as a firebreak, it had done enough damage to make woodshapers mourn.

  All mourned in the forest of the elves. They sorrowed for the trees burned in battle and the boughs stripped by winter, and most of all for a princess lost. Her story ran round the kingdom in low whispers. Someone made a song of it by autumn’s end, and that song went with the bitter wind through the kingdom. In the villages and the cities they prayed for the princess who had gone out from her home to succor the ailing trees in Bianost, lovely Elansa Sungold stolen from her merciful mission and taken away by thieves.

  Round the golden towers of Qualinost the sighs of the ladies and the maidens who had attended her made a gentler sound than the sobbing of the wind across the Plains of Dust, but no less a sad one. If some in Tarsis went mad from the wind, the folk of Qualinesti did not go mad with grief. They were elves, and elves have a way of feeling that isn't much like the way quick-hearted races do, or even dour dwarves (who are no less quick to kindle than any one else.) The fire of feeling runs in the elves, burns the heart, sizzles in the blood, kindles the soul. Those who think that isn't the case are mistaken. Sometimes they are mistaken fatally. It is with elves, though, that they don't much like to unfurl the feeling as though it were a banner to snap and sing and flourish in the wind.

  And yet, there wasn't an elf in Qualinost, from the lowliest servitor in the humblest shop to the Speaker of the Sun himself who didn't think that their stalking Prince Kethrenan, who prowled the stonelands when the weather let him, who filled up the city with his own restlessness when even the mad would not brave the wild winds in that treeless land—there wasn't a one who didn't feel what the prince felt.

  "He is as cold as winter," said one of the serving girls in the Tower of the Sun. This she whispered to her lover who had brought wine from the cellar one evening when the sky had been three days changed to lead, filled up with dark clouds that would lower but not release.

  "In the temples they pray for our stolen princess, and they pray for our prince, and all our broken hearts. But I'm thinking they should pray for all the world, because when you look at our prince, you think, ‘Why, it must be him brought this winter down on us all.’ Him and his cold rage."

  Her lover didn't argue. He hardly ever disputed her in any case. Things were much warmer, much easier, much more satisfying if he kept himself agreeable. But here he genuinely thought she was right. He thought the prince was indeed like some dire spirit of loss, a shade of winter.

  Gods help us all, he thought later, as he poured for first the elf king and then his ice-eyed brother.

  The hall was filled that night with Solostaran’s glittering guests, lords and ladies, the members of his senate, those contentious representatives of the Houses of Qualinesti who liked best to jockey with the king for power when it seemed there was a chance to exercise some. They did not tonight. No power was to be had there, in that public hall whose walls and floor were of marble as stark and cold as the winter without, not when the matter of a kidnapped princess hung so coldly over the gathering, the sorrow unspoken, ever-felt.

  One of the senators looked around her at her fellows, at Solostaran and his children, young Gilthanas and Porthios, for this gathering was made to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Gilthanas. He was still a romping lad, as his brother, but he managed solemnity this night. It hadn't been difficult for either, for they grieved the loss of their aunt as everyone did. Not a senator had occasion—as in times past—to look at another, raise a brow and say quietly, "They are boisterous, those boys. One hopes that will pass…."

  This senator who had raised her brow in times past admired the decorum of the boys now. She was the Head of House Cleric, a woman who regularly bestormed the gods in their temples with prayer for the sake of the stolen princess. She watched the wine-server fill the golden goblet set before Prince Kethrenan. She thought, gods help us, for we will live in a land colder than Icereach itself and live there forever if our Princess Elansa is not found.

  But then she saw the color come to the prince's pale cheek, just a quick flash of blood beneath the skin as a servant, maimed Demlin, whispered something to him. Kethrenan looked up and caught the eye of his cousin seated halfway down the table. Lindenlea stood, murmuring something to her dinner partner. She had dressed herself in flame-colored silk and whitest ermine. For tonight's dinner she'd hung earrings of amber from her ears, piled her hair upon her head, and held it there with diamond-crusted combs and golden pins. Yet when she rose, the rings on her arms and the necklace she wore rang a little, reminding the cleric of the chime of a mail shirt.

  Beside his brother, the elf king leaned close and blood leaped to his cheek as well. Anger, the Head of House Cleric wondered, or hope? Solostaran gestured, a quick wave of the hand. Go! And Kethrenan did, with a nod to Lindenlea, who followed at once.

  Like a sword, thought the Lady Cleric as she watched the prince leave. He's like a well-honed sword leaping suddenly to hand. She thought that was a good image, for she was a poet. Like a poet, she felt the truth of it in her bones.

  Someone had just brought word to cause a weapon to be drawn forth, and that weapon was Prince Kethrenan.

  "Listen," said Lindenlea, her hand on the prince's arm to still him. All his restless energy filled the barracks, crackling. "I’m not telling you not to do this—" His sudden sharp glance did not frighten her. She knew him, and so she simply quirked her lips in wry challenge. "I’m only saying, don't trust him, Keth."

  "I know what you're saying. You've been saying it since we left the Tower. But you also tell me Demlin’s seen him, and he thinks I should listen."

  Demlin, indeed. Lindenlea didn't say anything to that. One-eared Demlin was a man of single purpose, well matched to his master. Neither Keth nor Demlin thought about much other than the recovery of Elansa. If in the Tower of the Sun they said the prince was driven by his vengeance, in the servants’ quarters they knew Demlin was obsessed by it. Master and man, they shared a kindred grief. First one and then the other had been forced to let the outlaw Brand take away the woman they were sworn to protect.

  Kethrenan and Lindenlea stood in an empty barracks, a deserted mess. Wind howled outside the windows, and the dark finger-bones of skeletal apple trees scratched against the panes. They’d smelled snow on the air as they’d walked from the Tower of the Sun to this realm of soldiers. Lindenlea had said it was strange that for all the cold and the wild wind they'd endured this winter, they had seen little snow. Kethrenan wasn't interested in how strange that was. The cold kept him out of the borderland. The wind would freeze an elf’s skin in an hour and sap the strength from limbs. What matter if snow attended or didn't?

  "Where is he?" the prince asked. He was no less finely dressed than his cousin, though perhaps not as brightly. He went in black and red, and his cloak was steely gray—the colors of a blooded sword. He paced the deserted room with a measured stride, as though he tried to reckon out the length of it. Once or twice, he dropped his hand as though to touch the hilt of the sword he had belted on. It was not the one he would have worn this night. That one was in the hands of an outlaw.

  As was his wife, in one way or another.

  Kethrenan tasted blood, as he had since first he'd learned of Elansa’s kidnapping; as he had when the recovery had failed and the only satisfaction he'd had of that day was that his warriors had kille
d half a hundred goblins. Even that was a lean satisfaction. The hob had gotten away, he and his burning staff.

  A sharp voice called out suddenly. Kethrenan knew the tone, if not the man. He didn't stop his pacing or look around. On the heels of that cry came another. Upon the silver spans hemming the city, guard called to guard. "Avrethe!" they shouted in Elvish to the full guard, to all the city. All is well! In Qualinost, folk. marked time by those calls.

  Avrethe!

  A sharp rap of knuckles on the stout oaken door turned Keth from his pacing.

  "That’s him," Lea said. Her eyes went from the prince to the door. "Be careful, Keth."

  Be careful. He could be lying. Be careful. It could be a trap. Be careful….

  Kethrenan jerked his head at her, a wordless command, and she opened the door. Wind whirled brittle leaves into the room. A pennon of torchlight streamed ahead of the bearer. Lindenlea stepped back, gesturing the two elves in. Necessarily, the gesture included their companion. Wrists tied and led by a thick rope round his neck, the third one might have been better termed a prisoner.

  "Now why," whined the goblin, his blue-brown skin looking like spoiled meat in the torchlight, "why is it I'm all the time hearing about the famous hospitality of elves, and this—" He looked up at the elves, tall above him. "This is what I get? I've not come to do harm. No, I've come for other reasons, and—"

  The prince turned his back on the whining creature. At this feigned royal disinterest, one of the guards hit the goblin in the back of the head, staggering him.

  "Shut up, unless you have something more than complaints to give the prince."

  The prisoner righted himself with difficulty and whined a little more when his fur cloak slipped from his narrow shoulders to the floor. The barbaric thing, naught but a bear's scraped hide, hit the floor hard, the head of the dead beast making a dull, empty sound on the wood floor. He bent to retrieve it, smoothing the fur back from the head and staring a moment into the empty eye sockets. When he looked up again, he didn't flinch. He didn't wince to meet the eyes of the elves, not even those of the prince.