The Elves of Cintra

by Terry Brooks

  “I’m Helen Rice,” she told them, and she held out her hand for each of them to shake.

  They did so, giving their names and Cheney’s, in turn. But Hawk did not recite the litany of the Ghosts. It would be hard enough getting her to listen to him as things stood.

  “Someone sent you to guide us?” Helen Rice asked him.

  He nodded. “I think so.”

  “You think so?” She stared at him. “Was it Angel Perez?”

  He looked in her eyes and saw something that told him what to say. “She didn’t give me a name. She said I was to come to you and take the children to a safe place.”

  “Where is she? What’s happened to her?”

  He shook his head. “Can you tell me where we are?”

  “Hawk!” Tessa whispered in astonishment.

  Helen Rice was looking at him now as if he had come from another planet. “Let me understand. You were sent to guide us, but you don’t know where you are?”

  “I know where we are going, but not where we are.”

  She started to say something and then stopped. “All right. We are on the south bank of the Columbia River, maybe a hundred miles east of the city of Portland, Oregon.”

  Hawk looked at Tessa. “South of Seattle,” she confirmed. “Look, what’s this all about? I have to tell you that I am in no mood for games. I just marched two thousand children and their caregivers all the way up here from southern California. The pace was grueling, and not everyone was up to it. Those who made it are exhausted and short of patience. Please get to the point.”

  “We have to cross the river.” He glanced at the maps, and then looked back toward the town. “I saw a bridge earlier,” he said. “We can cross there.”

  Helen Rice shook her head quickly. “A militia has it fortified and defended against anyone trying to cross without paying a fee.”

  “What sort of fee?” Tessa asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. We were told to wait here, not cross to the other side.” She shifted her gaze back to Hawk. “We outnumber them, but they are better armed and have less to lose. I can’t risk the lives of these children attempting to force our way past. Not without a better reason than you’ve given me so far.

  “Besides.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m not convinced I should do what you tell me. You don’t know who sent you. You don’t know who we are. You don’t know where you are. You don’t seem to know much of anything. Your intentions are good, I think. But the road to Hell and all that. It makes me suspicious. I’m having real difficulty believing that you are who we’ve been waiting for.”

  Hawk understood. He would have felt the same in her shoes. He was just a boy, nothing special. Why should she believe for one minute that he was someone who could help? Why should she place hundreds of children under his direction without knowing more? He understood all that, and yet he had to find a way to make her do exactly what her instincts and training told her not to do.

  “You should believe him,” Tessa said suddenly, trying to help. “Hawk is more than what he seems. He is special, different than the rest of us. He was told so by a Knight of the Word.”

  “Angel Perez is a Knight of the Word,” Helen Rice said.

  Hawk shook his head, unwilling to lie to her. “No, this wasn’t her. This was someone else. A man. His name is Logan Tom.”

  He looked back toward the river again. He could feel his concern for their safety pushing hard at him to do something. The longer they waited, the more dangerous their situation became. He couldn’t explain his certainty about this, only that at this moment it was so strong, he could not ignore it. He couldn’t explain, either, why he was compelled to guide these people, the children especially, except that something of what the King of the Silver River had told him in those gardens had resurfaced the moment he saw who was down here. Now, standing in the presence of Helen Rice and in the center of all these children, he found a fresh connection with his gypsy morph self—the part of him that was Faerie, the part that was born of Nest Freemark, the part that combined the magic of both.

  That magic surfaced now within her finger bones, which were still tucked away in his pocket. It spit and crackled against his flesh like tiny electrical charges, demanding to be set free.

  “There is an army coming,” he said, knowing all at once that it was true. “From the south.”

  “That old man,” Helen Rice said at once. Her lips tightened. “How do you know this?”

  “The army is too big for you,” he said, avoiding a direct answer. “You won’t be able to stand against it on this side of the river. If you cross, though, you might be able to hold the bridge.”

  “Or blow it up.” Her fierce gaze was locked on him. “But it’s still too dangerous to attempt a crossing with the children. Not without something more than the warning you’ve given me, Hawk.”

  “If I can get you across that bridge safely, without a struggle and without putting the children in danger,” he asked, “will you go?”

  She hesitated, weighing the offer, her doubts fighting her need to believe in this boy, her fear that he deceived warring with her desire for him to be the one.

  “Please,” Tessa said softly. “Let him try.”

  Helen Rice gave the girl a quick glance. “All right,” she said finally, her gaze shifting back to Hawk. “You have one chance.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Y OU HAVE ONE CHANCE,” Helen Rice told him, then quickly added, “And we don’t move the children anywhere until we have complete control of the bridge and I am convinced it’s safe to do so.”

  None of which surprised him. It was what he would have insisted on if a stranger was proposing to take the Ghosts across a bridge guarded by armed militia. Hawk hadn’t thought for one minute that it would be otherwise.

  His immediate concerns were much larger. He didn’t know yet how he was going to get control of the bridge. He didn’t know how he was going to disperse the men guarding it. He only knew that he was meant to try.

  “I’ll bring enough people to hold the bridge against a counterattack if you can find a way for us to take it over,” she continued. “Enough to hold it until the rest are able to break camp and bring the children across.”

  He nodded his agreement in silence. His commitment to what he was about to attempt was strong, but his fears were huge, as well. He understood the reality of his situation. He was acting on faith and on instinct. It was hard to tell which he was relying on more. If either failed him, he was probably going to die. He didn’t give any indication of this as he smiled reassuringly at Tessa, seeing his own fear mirrored tenfold in her eyes. He felt small and inadequate. He felt almost foolish.

  But there was a voice inside urging him on, telling him to believe, to accept that this was something he could do. The voice was his own and that of the old man in the gardens and his mother’s, as well. It was a single voice that shifted in pitch and tone, but never in strength.

  You can do this, it insisted.

  Helen Rice called back those she had been talking to when the guard had brought Hawk to her and told them what she intended. There was grumbling and more than a few objections, but she overrode them all. She told one of the men, a big fellow with a shock of red hair whom she called Riff, to gather two dozen of their best to take to the bridge. He nodded without argument and left to do as she asked.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were marching down the riverbank toward the bridge. The day had turned darker still, the clouds thickening and the air dampening as the promise of a fresh storm grew stronger. The wind had picked up and was blowing dust and debris everywhere, and it forced the company to walk with their heads bowed and their eyes all but shut. Hawk walked with Tessa and Cheney in the forefront of the company next to Helen Rice. His thoughts were of other times and places, of how he had walked the streets of Pioneer Square with the Ghosts not so long ago, carrying prods and viper-pricks, living in the ruins of their elders, street kids trying to stay alive. How
fast it had all changed. Everyone from that time save Tessa and Cheney was either dead or lost. He couldn’t even be sure he would see the other Ghosts again, although he believed in his heart that he would. But he knew that if he did, he would see them and they him as a different person—as this new creature, this mix of boy and gypsy morph, of flesh and blood and magic, and it would not be the same.

  It would not ever be the same.

  “What are you going to do?” Tessa whispered to him.

  He shook his head. How could he respond when he didn’t know the answer? And yet, he almost did. He could feel the tingle of the finger bones against his body where they nestled in his pocket, a clear indication that something was happening. He could sense the transformation even as it happened, a shift from what was familiar to something entirely new and different, something that lacked any recognizable frame of reference. It was an awakening of a force that had lain dormant inside him—for how long, he couldn’t say. Perhaps only since his visit to the gardens of the King of the Silver River. Perhaps all his life. But it was there, and it was real, and it was growing by the second.

  He tried to identify what it was. At first, he couldn’t. Then all at once he understood. It was in the way his senses were responding to his surroundings. He could smell the earth, dark and green and mysterious, a well of living things forming a chain of life that stretched as far as his mind could conceive. The smell was of each of them, and he could sort them through and identify them in a way he had never been able to do before. He could put names to them; he could visualize their shapes and uses.

  But that was only the beginning. He could taste the wind. He could savor it as if it were food placed in his mouth. He could taste the elements of the storm as they roiled and surged through the clouds overhead, metallic and rough. Thunder and lightning, distant to the point of being barely discernible, were sharp and raw against his palate. Electricity jumped off his skin in invisible sparks, small jolts that he could feel connecting to the tingling of his mother’s finger bones, as if they shared a commonality, an origin. He could hear things, too. Things that no one made of flesh and blood should have been able to hear. The whine of limbs caught in the rush of the wind, straining to keep from breaking. The whisper of grasses complaining of the same. The rattle of bark. None of it close enough to be seen, all of it so distant that the sounds should have been undetectable. Yet he could hear.

  More baffling, he could hear the groan of the earth herself from deep inside where none of what was happening on the surface had any bearing. Plates shifted and a molten core bubbled and spit, and the heat rose to mix with the cool, causing expansion and contraction, forming and re-forming, the birth of new life and the death of old. He could almost reach out and touch what he could smell and hear and taste and feel, as if his arms extended to the lines of power that ringed the earth and were joined with them.

  He knew all this without having been schooled even in the possibilities. He knew from his own transformation, from the way he recognized how he was different, how he had been remade in his visit to the gardens of the old man.

  He reached down and touched Cheney between his big shoulders, and the dog lifted his head in response. The gray eyes shifted to settle on him, and for just an instant Hawk believed that the wolfish dog understood what was happening.

  He looked ahead to the bridge itself, a huge ugly span of girders and struts, the paint long since peeled and stripped away, the bare metal beneath rusted and scarred by weather and time. It had the look of something that might rise up from its sleep and attack in the manner of a giant insect. The comparison chilled him, recalling the centipede and the terrible struggle the Ghosts had survived in their Pioneer Square home. He stared at the bridge and willed it not to move.

  “Better get ready,” Helen Rice said sharply, disrupting his thinking.

  They had reached the steps that climbed to the bridgehead. Already the militia guards were forming up across the mouth, taking note of the size of the group approaching. No warning had been given yet, so Helen took her company of men and women up the steps in a line, warning them to stay ready, but to keep their weapons lowered. Hawk walked right behind her as she led the way, his stomach churning, his heart beating fast.

  What was he going to do? He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t even have a weapon. He was woefully unprepared.

  As they reached the flat that approached the bridge, Helen’s company spread out to either side, stopping where she told them to, still fifty feet from the nearest barricades and soldiers. The men on the bridge had all come forward to the near end, weapons held ready, eyes shifting nervously as they waited to discover what was happening. Atop the bridge spans, more soldiers crouched in metal crow’s nests. There was a tank of some sort at the far end, and a pair of spray cannons set to either side of the gates warding the bridge entrance.

  Too many weapons and men to do this without serious damage to both sides, thought Hawk. He glanced at Tessa, who gave him a brave smile.

  “What are you going to do now?” Helen Rice asked him quietly.

  He stood where he was for a moment, letting his emotions settle and his scattered thoughts come together. He waited until he was calm inside, until he could measure his heartbeat and feel the steady pulsing of the finger bones against his thigh. He waited until he could sense their response to his thinking—until he could gauge whether they would slow or quicken. He waited until he could feel something of that pulse seep into him, join with him, and become more than an external presence.

  He waited to discover what he should do to fulfill his need. He waited for guidance and understanding, for this strange co-joining with the external world to reveal its purpose.

  “Hawk,” Tessa whispered, an unmistakable urgency in her voice.

  He walked forward alone, not directly toward the militia and the barricades, but toward a ragged clump of scrub, stunted trees, and withered vines growing bravely to one side of the approach. He was responding to the voice, but acting on instinct, as well. His course of action was decided, but its intended result still remained vague and uncertain. He could feel the eyes of both armed camps on him, could almost hear what both were thinking. He wondered at the stupidity of the militia holding the bridge, playing with matches while the rest of the world was already afire. What did they think they were going to gain by trying to collect a fee—whatever its nature—from those seeking to cross the river? What was the point of such an undertaking in a world like this?

  He knelt amid the scrub and trees and vines, running his fingers over dried-out grasses and leaves.

  The world at his fingertips, waiting to be reborn; the thought came to him unbidden. Life waiting to be quickened.

  I know what to do, he realized suddenly.

  He took the withered plants in his hands, closing his fingers gently but firmly, taking care not to crush their brittle stalks. He held them as he would a child’s fingers, reaching down into their roots by strength of will alone. He could feel them stir, coming awake from the deep dormancy into which they had lapsed. They took their nourishment, fresh and new, from him, from the magic that he fed them, come to him from a source still unknown, one that might have its origins either in his mother’s finger bones or in his own life force. But it came from the earth, as well, from the elements that were intrinsic to her soil and rock and metal and molten core.

  Come awake, he urged the plants he held in his fingers. Come awake for me.

  That he might be able to do this was at once astonishing and exhilarating. That he could command magic of any sort was the fulfillment of the promise made to him by Logan Tom in the revealing of his origins and the delivery of his mother’s finger bones. He had not dared to think it possible—yet he had known, too, that it must be if he was to do what he had been given.

  His whole being was attuned to and connected with the earth upon which he stood and to the plants that rooted within, and in that instant he was changed forever. No longer a boy, a street kid only, h
e was a creature of magic, too, a gypsy morph come into being, its potential realized.

  The result was instantaneous. Vines and brush and grasses erupted from the earth at both ends of the bridgehead, exploding all around the barricades and weapons and the men who staffed them. They shot out of the earth as if starved, as if reaching skyward for the sunlight, for the air, for the rain, for whatever they were lacking in their dormancy. But their emergence was his doing alone, and they were obedient to his command. They fell upon the barricades and the defenders, upon metal and human alike, enfolding them in ropes of green that wrapped about like cables to make them all fast.

  The militia never had a chance. They never even managed a single pull on their triggers. The handguns were ripped from their fingers, and the tanks and cannons were throttled in place. The men themselves were bound as if by ropes, the greenery first making them fast and then climbing the entire bridge, wrapping about the metal spans and struts, about everything that formed the body of the structure until nothing remained visible. In the end, there was only the bushy, dripping green of plant life extending end-to-end, the whole of the bridge and its barricades and its defenders become part of a vast jungle. The entire swallowing took only minutes and left the onlookers standing with Tessa and Cheney staring in shocked silence.

  “Oh, my God!” whispered Helen Rice softly, speaking for them all.

  IT TOOK THE CAREGIVERS the remainder of the day to decamp and move the children across the bridge to a new site that Helen and her advisers had chosen, one that Hawk instinctively felt was easier to defend. After releasing the entrapped militia, they set them free on the south side of the bridge and assumed control of the barricades leading to the new camp.