Eleanor

by S. F. Burgess

  “Find anything interesting?”

  Eleanor jumped at Conlan’s question as he stepped silently out of the darkness. Settling next to her, dropping his collection of ingredients carefully in front of him, he pulled his small, sharp knife out of his boot and began chopping and peeling.

  “I need you to teach me your language,” she said, not taking her eyes off the book.

  He stopped chopping and stared at her with his unfathomable look.

  “What?” Eleanor demanded.

  “I was wondering just how good your memory is,” he said softly.

  He’s worried about me figuring out what his grandfather said. Her curiosity flared again. She smiled. “I have a great memory, but you can stop panicking, I don’t remember anything your grandfather said – without meaning, the words just don’t seem to stick.” Bingo! Eleanor thought as Conlan’s face revealed both his relief and his discomfort that she had known what he was thinking.

  “So, will you teach me?” she asked.

  Conlan nodded thoughtfully. “OK, but can we eat first?”

  After dinner, Conlan presented her with a couple of cookies wrapped carefully in a napkin; they were from the tray of food his grandfather had provided, but she had missed the opportunity to try them. She offered him one, but he simply smiled and insisted they were for her. Resting her back against the fallen tree trunk they had made their camp in front of, Eleanor nibbled the cookies, trying to commit the sweet, delicious taste to memory. Conlan opened the book at the first page and began reading. Running his finger under the words, as if reading to a child, he read the first sentence in Dwarfish. His voice gave the harsh, snarling language a beauty and resonance it did not really possess. He stopped and read the sentence again, translating into English as he went, then he read it again in Dwarfish. After a while, Eleanor recognised what he was reading – it was the story Conlan had told them about the elements and Alaric, the first King of Mydren. Having to repeat the same line several times, they did not get very far into the story, but they did get as far as the picture of the man with the beard.

  “Who’s that?” Eleanor asked.

  “Alaric,” Conlan said.

  Eleanor stared at the picture, unable to shake the feeling that she was missing something.

  Their journey home passed uneventfully. Conlan was more relaxed and Eleanor enjoyed the comfortable companionship they shared, as well as keeping up her sword practice. He took their time together to teach her about Mydren. Eleanor was impressed by the scope of his knowledge on everything from the local flora and fauna, to setting up camp and caring for Rand, to the political structure of the Lord of Mydren’s inner council. He was far more patient with her attempts to learn Dwarfish than he was with her attempts to learn to fight. While her stuttering, stammering ineptitude left huge scope for him to mock her, he would only gently correct her. It was not a particularly difficult language structure to learn – the grammar and sentence building were remarkably close to English – but it was just slightly more formal. However, Eleanor found the pronunciation ridiculously complicated, and the rules about when and where one added growls and snarls were incredibly difficult to learn, as they seemed to revolve around who one was talking to and what emotion you wanted to layer into the words. In an attempt to help her learn, Conlan had stopped talking to her in English almost completely, talking to her throughout the day in Dwarfish. Since she wanted to talk to him, to learn about the world she lived in, this actually became Eleanor’s biggest incentive to use the language. By the time the mountains of home were in sight once again, he was reading the book in Dwarfish, with Eleanor only interrupting occasionally when there was a word she failed to recognise.

  After the story of Alaric creating the Avatars, there were stories of some of the adventures they had had together and how they had shown him the noble virtues. Eleanor found these stories fascinating, as they gave the Avatars much more depth. They were not just tools Alaric used to tame the environment; they had tried to improve the lives of those around them. The book also talked about the Talismans the Avatars had fashioned, but any real information was sadly lacking. While the explanations of what the Talismans were and how important they were to the Avatars left Eleanor in no doubt as to how much they needed them, there was no mention of how they were used. There was also precious little information on how they were meant to work together beyond what they already knew, and there was no mention at all of shields or how to remove them. The way the book presented it, the Avatars were able to connect with Alaric long before they created the Talismans, which enhanced their power. When she mentioned this, Conlan pointed out that his grandfather had thought they needed the Talismans, and since they still had no way to get rid of his shield, at least it would give them something to do while they figured that problem out. Towards the end of the book, the style of writing changed and the tone of the book became almost like a diary, the author writing about the betrayal of the king and how his last loyal servants had tried to carry the six sacred objects to safety. The author became very cryptic about where the objects had gone, saying only that they were ‘taken to their hearts’. According to the author, all the servants had succeeded, except for the one carrying the crown. He was captured and the crown fell into the enemy’s hands.

  “Conlan, how are we meant to find these things?” Eleanor asked in Dwarfish.

  He looked at her, confused, and then gave her an amused smile.

  Eleanor sighed. “What did I say?”

  “You just asked how we were going to find tree stumps,” Conlan said, reverting to English.

  Eleanor closed her eyes and tried the sentence again. Conlan nodded, switching back to Dwarfish. “You are not going to pass as a native any time soon, but that was much better, and to answer your question I do not know about the other Talismans, but I have seen that wand before.”

  “Where?”

  “The Jektar have it.”

  “What does Jektar mean again?” Eleanor asked.

  “Elves,” he said in English.

  “Real Elves?” Eleanor asked, images of handsome, lithe men running through her head.

  “Yes, although their blood line has become as corrupted as their features,” Conlan said grimly, the Dwarfish allowing him to add an undercurrent of distaste for the topic of discussion.

  “Corrupted?”

  “It takes a lot of strength to wield magic, Eleanor. Occasionally there are humans born with the natural ability, but not often, and those that are tend to end up dead or under the control of the Lords of Mydren. The Elves are highly magical beings who use both natural and unnatural magic, but through the ages they have mixed their blood line with humans and the magic has twisted and distorted their bodies and – in some – their minds.”

  “There are two types of magic?” Eleanor asked confused.

  “No, magic is magic; it is simply the manipulation of energy, just like the energy you hold within you. It is how you access that energy which makes the difference. For example the magic you practice is natural magic.”

  Eleanor stared at him. “The magic I practice?”

  “Eleanor, you blow holes in solid rock – what did you think you were doing?”

  Eleanor felt this needed a reply, but once she had opened her mouth she realised she had no idea what she wanted to say.

  Conlan chucked. “You really did not know, did you?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “I knew I was doing something, but it never crossed my mind it was magic. It just seemed normal… well, normal for me anyway. Natural magic, unnatural magic, what is the difference?”

  Conlan looked thoughtful. “Let me give you an example. I want a piece of wood to fuel my fire. If I used natural magic I would find a seed in the earth and gently encourage it to grow, giving it energy so that it would grow far faster than normal, and when the tree was grown I would cut a branch from it. If I was to use unnatural magic to achieve the same thing I would take the same seed, the building block of life, and through
concentration and sheer willpower I would force it to grow and assume the shape of the branch.”

  “So natural magic is good and unnatural magic is bad?”

  Conlan shook his head. “No, Eleanor, magic is just energy. I told you – it is what you do with it that makes it good or bad. All unnatural magic means is that the magician is working outside of the normal rules of nature. This can be very useful on occasion, but it takes a vast amount of strength, knowledge and control to use unnatural magic.”

  Eleanor’s churning mind again provided her with an insight into what Conlan had just said. “That is how you created me, with unnatural magic.”

  Conlan nodded, smiling at her. “And you did not turn out so bad, did you?”

  Eleanor blushed and quickly changed the subject. “So these Elves use a lot of unnatural magic. Are they friendly?”

  “No.”

  “Will we have to steal the wand from them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Let me guess: they live in some high, impenetrable tower somewhere?”

  Conlan smiled. “No, they live in the Whispering Sands, a vast empty desert.”

  “Great! We can find them though?”

  “If we head out into the desert, they will find us.”

  “How do you know the Elves have the wand?” Eleanor asked.

  “I have a… a friend, an Elf called Trey, I was with him when I saw the wand.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there is a lot more to this story?”

  Conlan sighed. “I met Trey in a town called Drent on the edge of the desert. He had come looking for supplies, I had come looking for the Elves.”

  “Why?”

  “Eleanor, if you want to hear this story, be quiet!”

  She nodded, shrugging away her annoyance. Conlan continued. “People do not like Elves and do not trust them, and to be honest they have good reason. I actually had to stop some of the locals beating Trey to death.”

  Eleanor shuddered as her mind proffered the image of Conlan being attacked by the crowd in Bremen.

  “Trey was very grateful. Afterwards we got talking and he seemed friendly enough. I told him I was looking for someone to help me create Avatars and he agreed to take me to his tribe’s elders, as he felt sure they could help. On the journey to the meet the elders he asked me about the Avatars and I told him far more than I should have; I was young and stupid, but it was actually pleasant to have someone to talk to who did not mock.”

  Eleanor smiled, amused that Conlan would admit to ever being young or stupid.

  Conlan sighed. “What I did not know was that Trey was a very minor player within his tribe’s politics, but that he had big ambitions. I think he saw the power an Avatar would give him as a way of realising those ambitions. The tribal elders listened to my request, and I noticed that one of them had a wand like the one in the book. They refused to help and then banished me back out into the Whispering Sands, effectively a death sentence. Trey came to find me and took me back to Drent. I was not in a particularly healthy state and he convinced me he could help me create an Avatar. I did not see the harm in trying.”

  “And Will paid the price,” Eleanor finished for him. Conlan nodded, his eyes haunted.

  “I had made no preparations, taken no time to study his culture. I just ripped him away from it. It nearly drove him mad. It would have destroyed a weaker person. Trey then tried to kill me so he could take control of the power he assumed this new Avatar would possess, but Will fought him off, wounded him, causing him to flee.”

  “Will defended you?”

  Conlan nodded. “I was too weak to protect myself. If he had not, Trey would have killed me. I owe Will a lot.”

  She could hear the affection and respect in Conlan’s voice and it made her smile. She wondered if he had ever told Will how grateful he was. Eleanor stared into the fire, slowly processing this information. A disconcerting realisation hit her, she pulled the book off Conlan, back onto her lap and began running back through the last few pages until she found the part about the sacred objects. And there it was, the author talking about six sacred objects, not five – there was another object that they knew nothing about.

  “Conlan, we are missing one,” she proclaimed. “The book describes six sacred objects, but we only know about five.”

  “I know about the sixth object.”

  She turned to look at him; he was giving her that inscrutable look again, like he was examining her soul. She waited, knowing that badgering him would not make him answer her any quicker.

  “The sixth object was a person – the betrayed king’s granddaughter, the last of his line, a fifteen-month-old called Fraya,” he explained quietly.

  “So Alaric’s bloodline is not lost.”

  Conlan shook his head. “No, not lost, just buried by time and secrets.”

  Eleanor was going to ask what happened to the granddaughter, when everything suddenly slipped into place and the answer flashed through her mind with such clarity there could be no doubt.

  “The picture of Alaric… that is why it looks so familiar: it is you! You with a beard; older, but it is still you! Alaric is your ancestor and you are a descendent of the royal bloodline. That is how your grandfather knew all this, why he had the book in the first place,” she said, shocked.

  Conlan nodded solemnly.

  Eleanor stared at him. “Wow, I have never met a king before.”

  Conlan laughed. “I am as much a king as you are a goddess!”

  “Do the others know?”

  “Will knows, I had no choice but to tell him.”

  Eleanor nodded. “Does your father know that you are Alaric’s descendent?”

  Conlan shook his head. “The secret has been passed on from father to eldest son for generations. My mother was an only child, and my grandfather despaired that the line would die out, but then I turned up and he made me heir to the secret. At this moment in time the Lords of Mydren – and more importantly my father – regard me as an annoyance, a silly boy with an obsession, and they assume I will fail. But announcing myself as the descendent of Alaric would be like declaring war on them. They would take that rather more seriously. I do not need to be king to balance the elements and save Mydren. While nothing would give me greater pleasure than removing from my father and his cronies the power they covet, I am not stupid enough to start a war I have no hope of winning.”

  Eleanor considered this for a moment. “Why did you have to tell Will?”

  Conlan smiled. “Because he is as bright as you and was rapidly coming to his own, slightly inaccurate, conclusions.”

  “Did you just say I was bright?” Eleanor asked slowly.

  “Yes, Eleanor, I said you were bright; deeply annoying, incapable of taking orders and impossible to shut up, but very bright.”

  “Guess you have to take the good with the bad. You are not exactly the easiest person in the world to deal with either, you know.”

  “Then I suppose we suit each other well.” There was something in his voice – a hint of affection perhaps? Eleanor was not sure, but it made her feel warm inside.

  Conlan leaned back against the large log behind them. Eleanor closed the book, and hugging its familiar bulk to her chest she curled herself into a ball, pulling her blanket over her, and watched the fire crackle.

  She was tired, but sleep would not come, there was too much information clamouring for her attention. She heard Conlan moving around, stretching himself out behind her, and soon his breathing was a slow, regular rhythm. Eleanor rolled over again slowly, the fire warming her back. He lay on his side in front of her, head on his arm, face peaceful, and she silently admitted that as much as she was missing home, she had liked having Conlan all to herself. Knowing she had to face it sooner or later she let the suppressed thought out from where she had been hiding it. You’re in LOVE with him! it screamed at the top of its lungs, causing her to catch her breath. It was true of course, she realised as soon as the thought was out. She loved his qu
iet presence, his ability to absorb the very worst his world hit him with and still be able to care, the impression he gave of strength and control while inside he was hurt and frightened and his stubborn refusals to give in. Eleanor tried to snap herself out of it. That’s more than enough hero worship, it’s not as if he’s ever going to love me back. How did he describe me? ‘Deeply annoying, incapable of taking orders and impossible to shut up…’ doesn’t sound much like a declaration of love. The desire to reach out and touch his face was almost irresistible; however, the thought of having to explain herself when he woke up kept her still. Instead she closed her eyes and tried to sleep, a small hope flashing through her head, and she smiled to herself. Maybe she would dream about him.

  Dragons and Dreams

  “Eleanor… Eleanor?”

  The voice, his voice, sounding irritated. She opened her eyes. The light stung, blinding her for a moment. Half-remembered dreams still filled her head. Confused, she sat up, the book falling open into her lap.

  “I’m awake,” she mumbled, raising her hand to cover her eyes. She had not slept well and her head throbbed and her tongue felt sticky.

  “Are you alright?” Conlan asked, irritation heavy in the question.

  “Yes,” she replied, the irritation mixed with his oddly courteous question confusing her further. “Are you?”

  Conlan’s irritation seemed to raise a notch. “I’d be better if I’d had more sleep.”

  Eleanor looked at him blankly, her throbbing brain having problems working out how his lack of sleep and obvious irritation with her were connected.

  “You talk in your sleep,” Conlan informed her.

  Eleanor felt the blood drain from her face. What did I say? Her look of horror brought a wry smile to his lips.

  “You were talking about something called a ‘dragon’,” he said. Eleanor knew he had noticed her relief. Desperately looking to hide her embarrassment she began pulling the fragments of her dream together.

  “I dreamt about a dragon that lived in a waterfall. It killed me,” she whispered.