The Inheritance

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  It was the seeing that killed her, her attention on her prince. Lindenlea didn't see the goblin's arrow winging from her left. And of course, she didn’t feel it. She fell to the bloody ground, dead before her horse trampled her.

  On the Tharkadan, Elansa saw the elves cut a path through the goblins. She saw two bright figures, elves in gleaming mail, spur their mounts for the place in the dark horde where the fire flashed. That light. She knew it. It was magic’s light, and she knew that it ravaged the hobgoblin.

  Char sucked in a sudden breath.

  "That’s him," the dwarf said. "There's the hob." He laughed, and he nudged Brand with his elbow. "There, it looks like a couple elves have an eye for him."

  Char leaned on the parapet, watching as one of the elves fell, like a star falling out of the sky, bright to the ground.

  Elansa groaned. It was as though she had fallen. It was so far away she couldn't know who that was. She couldn't see the elf's face when the arrow plucked away life. She heard a cry, though, faint and far and carried on the cold wind.

  "Lindenlea! Lea!"

  So cried her husband, the warden of Qualinesti, in the moment he lopped the head from the hobgoblin. Then, his sword dark and running with the blood of all this killing, Prince Kethrenan looked up, and again he saw his wife on the battlements of Pax Tharkas. Who else of the elves saw her, saw a princess held captive, kept close between two outlaws, a dwarf and a rough human. Kethrenan saw another thing, and all the heat of battle drained out of him. His blood ran cold in his veins. Whoever else of the elves saw her then, saw her bow her head to weep. Kethrenan saw her rest her cheek upon the shoulder of the bearded human, of Brand the outlaw. He saw her turn in his embrace and hide her weeping against his chest.

  While the lengthening shadows lay on the stone floor of the room that had, for days, been her home of sorts in Pax Tharkas, Elansa sat with her back against the wall. Brand's cloak covered, and his sleeping furs made her warm. The broken tiles of the mosaic floor shone where the shadows did not fall and the dust had been scuffed by foot traffic. A great silence sat upon the room, upon the fortress itself. For a time there had been a flurry of coming and going as Brand and his few had gone into the cellar to see that no threat remained. None did. They found the corpses of gully dwarves and two dead goblins, only lately gone cold. It had been Char who had found the Chamber of Columns and the opened crypts.

  "Ain't but a few got opened," he said, "and nigh more than a dozen or two left closed." He shuddered. "You can feel them in there, behind their doors. You can feel them smelling the blood, the flesh on your bones."

  Raised in Thorbardin and on all the proud stories of the dwarven past, Char knew his history. He knew as well as Elansa who those undead had been, a long time ago when honor had moved them and a dark magic had not yet touched them. At Char's insistence, they sealed the doors as best they could and left the corpses behind.

  Through this, Elansa sat alone, waiting.

  Outside the battle had ended. She heard the martial voices of elves, soldiers setting up camp, giving orders, accepting orders, now and then laughing in the flush of their victory. The cries of ravens haunted the sky when night came, and wolves padded down from the mountains. Most of the killed goblins burned upon a high pyre. This Kethrenan commanded not to do them honor but to clean the field before the gates. Over the elves, small cairns of stone were being laid. It was a small honor to keep the wolves away. No one expected the little piles to stand long.

  Sometimes Elansa slept, close in Brand's arm. He held her against him, gently. In her sleep, she smelled the blood of his wound, the sword cut that had torn the flesh of his right arm below the shoulder. The wound was bound and no longer seeping. He never groaned over it or even looked at it after Dell cleaned and dressed it. He was used to these things, the pain and the healing. When she did not sleep, she simply sat waking, as now.

  And so she saw the shadows of the day’s ending on the floor as she listened to the elves outside the wall. She looked around and saw the outlaws, Dell and Char and grieving Ley, these few who remained to Brand. They looked like they always did, like foxes in the den. Wary, they watched the door, and they talked in low whispers. Brand himself said nothing. He simply sat with the princess in his arm.

  "You will go when you wish," he said to her. "We made our bargain."

  But Elansa was too weary to go. She had strength only for sitting, for leaning against Brand. This he let her do, hearkening to the ravens and the cries of elves on the battleground, listening to the opening of the gates of Pax Tharkas and the clatter of hooves in the courtyard. If he wondered what fate he would meet, he and his three friends, he didn't speculate aloud or burden her with his thoughts. He simply let her rest.

  But Brand did rest with his sword across his knees.

  In the room, the outlaws stirred. Near the door, Char stood straight. Mail sang in the corridor, jingling. Booted feet trod the stone, heavy. Only one came, an elf off the battleground. None need guess who he was. Char went to the door, opening it before Kethrenan could.

  "Welcome to Pax Tharkas," said the dwarf to the elf prince. His voice held only a small note of irony. "We’ve been expecting you."

  Kethrenan stood in his battle gear, mailed and helmed and weaponed. He stood covered in blood and dust, his face all keen edges, his eyes like swords. Elansa’s breath caught in her throat, as it had so many times before when she'd seen him like this, the prince come home from battle. Then, in the halls of the Tower of the Sun, she had felt a thrill to watch him stride into the room, to smell the battle still on him. Now, she did not thrill to see him. Now he looked dangerous, and fear snaked cold in her belly, for the look he turned on her was one of disgust.

  When she moved, Brand loosed his hold on her a little.

  "Keth," she said.

  Kethrenan ignored her. He glanced at Char only to see that he was no threat. He pushed past him, swept the room with a cold stare. One and another, the outlaws looked at him. None stood, and Dell, in the far corner, honed the blade of her dagger, making steel and stone sing. Kethrenan dismissed it. Last, he looked at Brand.

  "You," he said. "Move away from my wife."

  Brand kept his place. He did not move his arm. Elansa felt him quiver, as a hound does to a call. He lifted his head. The danger she sensed, he understood.

  "Move," Kethrenan said.

  Brand's lips moved in a long slow smile. His eyes narrowed. Elansa’s belly tightened. She tried to move, but he held her.

  "My lord prince," Brand said, naming the elf courteously.

  Dell rose from her place in the corner, and the singing of stone on steel ended. Near the window, Leyerlain Starwing had the dark look of one who stares at an end. Perhaps it wasn't Kethrenan in his thoughts, but it was the prince at whom he directed his glance. Behind the elf prince Char stood with his back to the door, his throwing axe to hand. No one offered harm, but no one stood down.

  Brand rose, and he stood before Elansa. In his left hand, he held his sword. It was not his natural hand for holding a weapon. Still he gripped it strongly, neither raising it nor grounding it.

  Kethrenan lifted his head. "Do you threaten me?"

  Brand appeared to consider the question, then allowed as how he probably did, indeed, threaten. "But it doesn't have to come to that if you go gently with your wife."

  The color drained from Kethrenan’s cheeks. Beneath the grime of battle and burnish of the sun, his skin went ashen.

  "Elansa," he said, his voice cold as the winter of her captivity. "Move away from that human scum so I may kill him."

  She rose, and the doing was easier than she'd imagined. She’d found strength, but she knew not where. Head high, standing in her rags, she said, "You will not kill him, husband. I do not wish it."

  Kethrenan’s eyes widened for the briefest instant, then they narrowed.

  "Husband, I am ready to leave here with you, but I won't leave over the bodies of these people. Brand and I made a bargain between us
. I upheld my part, and doing that I made certain you had only goblins to face, not worse." She put her hand upon the sapphire phoenix, the wide-winged bird upon her breast. Soft, Elansa said, "Now Brand is prepared to uphold his part of our agreement. Let it be, Keth."

  She spoke, without considering her voice and what the softness of it might reveal. Elansa saw horror and disgust warring in her husband's eyes as he understood, as he gleaned the true meaning behind her words. She saw them overwhelm disbelief and change into anger.

  "He… he has had you."

  Had, he said. That word made her skin crawl.

  "He has had you, and you stand here shameless without the decency to have killed yourself!"

  In the silence between them, the cries of ravens sounded very close, the call of death.

  Brand moved Elansa aside and named the elf prince a coward.

  "Coward, aye, that's what you are. You'd rather she killed herself than lived? You'd rather find her corpse than find her alive? Elf, you have no idea what courage your wife has. You have never seen it in your fine and golden towers. I have seen it. I have tested it, and I have tasted it." Sneering, he said, "You don't deserve her."

  White to the eyes, Kethrenan drew his sword. Steel sang from the scabbard, the blade flashed up, and someone cried out.

  Kethrenan shouted in Elvish. "Valth! Caslth! Valth!"

  Whore! Slut! Whore!

  Two swords rose. Kethrenan’s flashed first and fell to kill the woman he named whore. Brand moved swiftly. He took the blow, the whole blade into his breast. Elansa screamed and fell, covered in blood as a dagger whistled past her ear. Again, blood, spurting, spraying, and she saw her husband fall, Leyerlain’s dagger in his throat. The room erupted in cursing and cries of fear. Elansa wailed, for she kneeled with her back to the corpse of her husband and Brand's body in her arms.

  Brand looked at her, his eyes dim, blood bubbling at the corners of his mouth. Kethrenan’s sword had cut so deeply into his lungs he would soon drown in his own blood. Still, he held her with his eyes and tried to speak.

  What was to say? What words would serve? None.

  "My girl," he whispered. Only that, for a long moment, while someone sobbed, and someone else cursed. Only that, and then, "I loved the courage of you. I love…" And then, the soft sigh, the last breath leaving.

  Elansa felt him go. She felt him die. There in her arms, she felt it, and she saw the life go out of his eyes. She lifted up her head to keen.

  "Wu-la! Wa-la! Wa—la!"

  The terrible grief-cry silenced the room, and then Char took her and pulled her to her feet. Brand slid from her, fell away, and she tried to cry out, but she had no voice for anything but keening.

  Elansa would not go with the elves. She said so with the last of her tears on her thin cheeks. She would not go with people whose prince would have killed her for choosing to live. The outlaws gathered around her when she stated her will, and Char shook his head.

  Dell didn't understand.

  "He's dead," she said, glancing scornfully at Kethrenan. "Who's to know what he said or didn't say, what he knew or didn't? Go home, princess. You can now."

  Leyerlain understood well, though.

  "Let her do what she wants," he said. He said so wiping his bloody dagger on the leg of his pants. Not once did he look at the prince he'd killed or the outlaw lord whose life he'd hoped to save. Ley knew about endings, it seemed, more than anything else. He didn't look at Elansa. "Let her do what she wills. I'm out of here. Kethrenan’s warriors are going to come looking for him soon. I'm not going to be here when they show up."

  So saying, he turned and walked away. He didn't go alone. Wordless, Dell followed. They would find their way together, or they would part. This was the pattern of their lives, the way their fates were woven. Only Char remained, and of the last three outlaws, he grieved the dead man most.

  "Princess," he said, his voice rough with emotion as he took Elansa’s arm and helped her to stand. "We have to leave, if that’s what you want to do."

  She nodded. She wanted nothing else.

  "Then we'll go through the tunnels again," he said. "Just you and me, we'll get back to Hammer Rock and see what we can think of after that."

  Again, Elansa nodded. She heard his words, she understood, but she couldn't think about that now. Neither could she take her eyes from the dead, her husband and the man who had been her kidnapper, who had, by some mysterious alchemy of events and emotion, become, almost, her lover.

  Slowly, with great care, she took the sapphire phoenix from her breast, slipping the chain over her head. Here was the inheritance of ages, a treasure she was obliged to pass from her own hand into that of her daughter. She did not think, kneeling beside the body of a man who had seen in her the kind of courage she herself had not known existed, she did not think of unborn daughters. She thought of him and how in the courtyard he had harried creatures of darkness into the light so that she might kill them. She remembered how he had looked at her upon the wall, his eyes shining to see her. He had seen a thing about her that her own husband could not see, and he had valued it to the cost of his own life.

  With great gentleness, she slipped the chain over Brand's head and settled the phoenix upon his bloody breast. She bent, kissed his cold lips, and felt all the coldness of winter and stone settle in her heart.

  "Char," she said, "we cannot let him lie here like this."

  Him, the outlaw. She didn't think about the prince.

  But Char said there was no time. Out in the courtyard the voices of elves had taken on the tenor of those who are wondering: Where is the prince? Where is the princess?

  "We have to leave him," the dwarf said. "Let him lie here in this his stone fastness." His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. "It’s all the reason he took you, princess. Just to find a high place, a fortress in the mountains where he could harry goblins and fight feuds you in your golden city never knew existed. And here he died. Leave him. Let it be his tomb till time makes his bones into dust and all the tale is forgotten. It’s time to go now, if you mean to leave."

  She went. Her hand in his because he would not let go, she followed Char out of the ancient chamber that had once hosted elf kings and dwarven thanes, the chamber that now hosted only the dead.

  Chapter 18

  Elansa looked down the road, the long road leading out of the stonelands and into the forest and all the way to Qualinesti. She had not seen the place through all the winter. It seemed as though years had passed. As she had left the city, so would she enter, on horseback. Char had bought a good mare for her in one of the hamlets between Pax Tharkas and the forest—a little roan with white spots on her shoulders like sun-dapple. On this mare she'd ridden the hard road, and though the dwarf never left her, he did not ride. He led her mare, walking. At first he did so because she was too bowed down with grief to guide the mare. The deaths, the run through the tunnels and back to Hammer Rock, these things were like measures of stone upon her heart. She did not rouse from that grief until the night she knew she was with child.

  "How can you know?" Char had asked, for he thought that not enough time had passed for her to know in the usual way. "How can you be sure?"

  She'd smiled, but sadly. "You are a man," she said. "You don't know what it is to feel your body talking to you. I am a woman. I know."

  He took a long drink of dwarf spirits, for he had some again, a fine fat skin of it—bought, bartered, or stolen one day when he'd gone out of the tunnels to hunt. Drinking, he considered what she said. In the end, he simply shrugged, unable to argue.

  "But what's to do?" he asked. "What will happen to an elven princess who comes home carrying a human's child?"

  She would be cast out. She would become as Leyerlain Starwing had become. She would be named dark elf. No one would speak to her. Her name would be as a curse. This, not because she had lain with a human. It happened. It was tolerated, though barely. She would be cast out because she had betrayed a prince by failing to erase with h
er own blood the shame of having forsaken her lord husband to be with a human.

  Char heard all this in sorrow, drinking. He thought about it long and hard. For days he said nothing as they went through the weary tunnels, and then in the cave below Hammer Rock, he told her he had an idea.

  "Tell them you were raped," he said.

  She looked at him long. "No. Brand never raped me," she said at last. "He gave me a choice between him and—"

  "Between him and rape," Char said. "He did that for complicated reasons, but you're right. One was because he wouldn't see you raped. It’s no matter now, though. That was then. Now you have to do for yourself, princess. Tell them in Qualinost that you were raped. Tell them that, and tell them your prince died bravely defending you against your rapist." He took another drink, enjoying the fire of it. "And tell them you've known for a time you got a child from Brand. That should take care of the matter of you not having the decency to kill yourself."

  Elansa considered, but she said nothing.

  "Tell them," he said, "for the sake of the child."

  If she said she'd been raped, her child would have a home. It would be able to live among its mother's people, and that might not be a perfect life, but it would be better than the life of an exile. Whoever this child would be, maid or man, it would have the strength of its mother and its father. Whoever this child was, it would endure and thrive.

  The sun lay on the road, fighting the way home. Elansa sighed and leaned down from the mare's back to touch Char’s shoulder.

  "Will you come with me?" she asked.

  "All the way. Don't worry, princess. I'll tell them your tale and make it stick You don't have to do more than nod to it."

  Elansa pressed her hand to her heart, and then, shyly, to her belly. There lay her child. As greatly as she had grieved an unknown child lost, a long time ago in winter, that greatly did she love this known child now. These lives, she thought, the lost one and this one found, started with men, but they always came to her to keep or lose. She must keep this one safe. She must see this child to the light.