The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 04 - A Foreign Heart

by Jeffrey Quyle

  But the ominous comet was visible too. It was halfway up the eastern sky, and so bright now that it was faintly visible if one knew where to look. Kestrel had watched it every clear night of his trip through the mountains, and the more he saw of it, the more he imagined it was truly a baleful omen of something to come. He stopped staring at it, and swam to the edge of the pool, climbed out, then grabbed his pants and started to pull them on.

  “I saw your butt!” he heard a girl’s voice and whirled around. The little girl from the cabin was sitting up in the water, pointing at him and laughing. “When you got out of the water I saw your naked butt!” she giggled.

  “Turn around,” she told him. “I want to get dressed.” Kestrel studied her silently, then turned away from her and pulled his shirt over his head. He heard soft splashing sounds in the water, and started to turn his head.

  “No peeking!” the girl spoke with an authoritative voice. Moments later he knew she was on land, and then she called. “Would you help me with this?” she asked.

  Kestrel turned to see that she had pulled her blouse over her head, and had the top of her head jammed into a sleeve. He gently helped her correct the misalignment, then pulled the blouse down and into place.

  The girl’s head popped through the neckline, and she looked up at him. There was a smile on her face, and her arms shot out through the sleeves, then wrapped around his waist in a hug. “I love you! Thank you! I feel great! Your spring water made me healthy again,” she told him.

  “What’s your name, child?” Kestrel asked her as he patted her head and held her against him. He felt enormous satisfaction is seeing how fully the girl had recovered from her illness.

  “I’m Moorin,” the girl said.

  Kestrel froze, his movements terminated in shock.

  “Did you say Moorin?” he asked a moment later.

  “Yes,” she answered. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like my name?”

  “I do. I do like it. It’s a very pretty name,” Kestrel answered, then fell silent again in confusion.

  “May I have one of those?” the girl asked him.

  Kestrel looked down as he felt her arms release her grip on him, and saw that she was pointing at the pile of fruit.

  “Yes. Yes, help yourself,” he paused, “Moorin.

  “I’m going to wake up the imps now,” he said, as he began to woodenly lift the small blue beings from the water, his mind lost in a daze as he reeled at the implications of the girl’s name. No, he told himself, the Moorin he was supposed to rescue was of mixed blood, just as he was. The name was only a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence.

  As he continued in his distracted motions he heard a loud, sudden shriek, one filled with pain and fear. He whirled around and saw a wolf grabbing Moorin’s leg, and pulling the girl into the bushes along the fringe of the poolside greenery. Kestrel reached for his knife and tossed it at the wolf, who disappeared into the shrubs. The knife blade disappeared from sight in the greenery as well, while Moorin’s shrieking upper torso still remained in sight.

  There was a yelp, and then the thrashing activity in the bushes ceased. Kestrel leapt over and pulled Moorin free from the jaws of the dead wolf, then carried the crying child to the edge of the spring and plunged her leg into the water.

  “There, there Moorin, you’re okay,” Kestrel tried to sooth the girl as he raised her leg out of the water to examine her wounds. The bite was a set of clean punctures, and Kestrel was confident that the water from the spring would quickly repair the damage.

  “The wolf is dead,” he assured her. “I killed it with my magic knife.”

  “You’ve got a magic knife?” the girl sniffed, her sobs turning to whimpers as Kestrel distracted her. “How is it magic?”

  “Lucretia, return,” Kestrel said. He held his hand up where Moorin could see it, and saw the look of amazement that blossomed in her widened eyes when the knife suddenly flew into his hand.

  “Can I see it?” she asked, and Kestrel carefully handed it to her.

  “This is not a toy, so be careful,” he warned her, then let her examine the knife, before he gently took it back.

  “How did it become magic?” she asked.

  “The goddess Kai gave me some special magic, and I put some of that magic in the knife,” Kestrel said slowly.

  “Can we go home now?” the girl asked. “I want my mother to see how good I am! She’ll be so happy!”

  Kestrel looked over at the imps, who were starting to stir. “As soon as the imps are awake and ready.”

  Minutes later the imps gathered in a circle around the two travelers, and returned them to the interior of the cabin. The cabin was crowded; and the arrival of the imps, the elf, and the girl caused loud shouts momentarily. As soon as Moorin arrived she unwrapped her arms from around Kestrel and dashed straight to her mother, who was surrounded by men carrying axes, clubs and pitchforks.

  “That’s him! That’s the elf that took Moorin,” Kristen shouted. “He’s healed her! She’s healed!” the mother broke into tears.

  The imps floated in the air in a line in front of Kestrel, who backed against the wall as he faced an apparent mob. He pulled his knife out and held it cautiously in front of him, while he scanned the room. Not far from where the mother and daughter hugged, he saw his fishing acquaintance from the day before.

  “What’s going on?” he directed his question to the fisherman.

  “My son,” he placed his hand on the shoulder of a large man next to him, “and Kristen were arranging all the neighbors into a lynch mob to go looking for you and the girl.”

  “Not a lynch mob,” the son denied, “just a search party.”

  “I told them you would do no harm, but they didn’t listen to me. They never do,” the fisherman said. “I told them you’d given me that water that made me feel so young-like this morning, and besides, it didn’t seem likely that they could go anyplace those blue things were able to disappear to.

  “But they’re not too bright, either one of them, so here we have a houseful of men for no good reason, and you’ve brought Moorin back looking as right as rain,” he finished.

  “Thank you Kestrel,” Moorin called from across the room. She left her mother’s apron and ran over to the elf to hug him again.

  “So you’re an elf, huh?” her father spoke up.

  “Mostly,” Kestrel answered, holding the girl loosely as he watched the crowd in the room. “One grandfather was human, but the rest of my family is elf.”

  “From the North Forest? What took you up into the mountains?” one of the other men asked.

  “No, from the East Forest,” Kestrel answered, drawing blank stares. “I’m heading to the North Forest. I passed through Graylee, and went up over the mountains to come this way.”

  “I didn’t know there was a way blazed through the mountains in that direction,” someone else answered.

  “It turns out there’s not,” Kestrel said dryly, with a grin, and the ice broke, as the others in the room grinned back. “It wasn’t easy even in the summer time, and it would have been impossible in the winter; there’s no good way through. I would have been smarter to sail the long way around.

  “I expect you all want to get back to your lives,” he said after a pause. “If you’ll let me leave now and tell me what path to follow to Narrow Bay, I’ll be on my way.” He felt uncomfortable; after all the time he’d spent in Graylee and Hydrotaz among humans, he suddenly felt his elfishness keenly as he stood trapped among the humans in the rustic cabin, and he wanted to escape into the open forest.

  “You must stay!” Kristen protested. “Let me feed you some breakfast. I’m so sorry about that scene last night. Let me make it up to you.”

  Some of the men were turning from the interior of the cabin and starting to exit, pausing only to take a last look at the blue imps that floated overhead. Kestrel heard Moorin’s father thanking them and expressing appreciation for their arrival to help.

  “No, I’d really ra
ther get on the road. I have a long route ahead of me; I want to get to Narrow Bay,” he begged off, and started edging towards the door.

  “What direction do I need to go?” he directed his question to the fisherman.

  “Follow our path north about five miles until it crosses a stream,” the old man told Kestrel, walking towards the door with him. “It’s just a ford, not a bridge, but it’s not a big stream, and that’s no problem for you anyway,” he grinned.

  “Then a mile after that you come to a real road, and you go left, to the west,” he added. “That road starts out as a country road, but you stay on it, and it’ll take you right on through a few villages, it’ll become a proper highway, and then it’ll go right up to the gates of Narrow Bay.

  “I walked that road several times when I was a young man, taking goods to the market. You’ll find it’s an easy trip,” he said as they reached the door.

  “Thank you,” Kestrel told the old man. He turned to address the imps. “Stillwater, your folks are free to go.”

  “Thank you friend, for the bath last night,” Odare called, and then the sprites were gone.

  “I may call upon you again soon,” he called after them into the empty air. “Be prepared.”

  “Good bye Kestrel!” Moorin’s high voice called out. He looked back at the girl sitting on her mother’s lap, showing her the already healing marks in her leg from the wolf bite, and waved to her, then stepped out the door into the freedom of the open air. He shook hands with his acquaintance the fisherman, and then astonished the men milling around in the yard as he started to sprint away, desiring – feeling compelled – to leave the humans behind as quickly as possible.

  The skies were cloudy in the countryside, blocking any view of the comet in the morning sky, and so Kestrel felt a slight sense of greater security as he passed through the countryside without the sight of the ill omen overhead. By nightfall he was nearly to the city walls, he suspected, based on the increasing density of settlement he passed. He found a small woodlot, and climbed a tree, reflecting that once he entered the city, he might have few nights left to sleep in a tree, few nights left to enjoy solitude and reflection, and then the rain started to fall, and he thought that sleeping in a city inn room wouldn’t have been such a bad choice.

  By the middle of the next morning he was walking along the wharfs at the water front, looking for a ship to carry him across the North Sea’s mouth of water to North Harbor. Narrow Bay appeared to be a city as large as Hydrotaz, but one in which elves were evident – not prominent, but evident and accepted by humans. Kestrel saw more than a dozen other elves, mostly walking in pairs or groups of threes, mostly men, but with a couple of women as well. They nodded companionably at him as they passed, but some of the humans nodded just as pleasantly as well.

  Kestrel found a wharf that appeared to be lined exclusively with ships from Estone, and he turned to walk up the heavy wooden planks, enquiring whether any of them would be traveling to North Harbor. A small freighter admitted plans to do so as soon as its cargo was loaded, and so Kestrel announced that he was a Captain of the Fleet, which led to his request as to whether they had a berth space available for him to travel with the ship.

  “A Captain of the Fleet? An elf?” the first mate replied skeptically.

  “Hold on,” Kestrel said, as he removed his various articles and goods that he had carried for so long, then removed his shirt to reveal the ship’s tattoo that decorated the right side of his chest, across from the perfect scar of a lady’s handprint on his left breast.

  “That’s proof enough,” the officer said, scratching the back of his head, and he assigned a bunk to Kestrel. “We’ll be there first thing tomorrow; it’s a short trip, and we’ll probably anchor in the bay for most of the night before we touch land after sunrise tomorrow,” he explained.

  Kestrel went to his bunk and stayed out of the way as the ship left the wharf not many hours later. He’d seen little of Narrow Bay, but felt little need to see the city, as he focused on his journey ahead. He lay down and felt the ship move through the water, as the sounds of the sails and the hull and the crew all filled his ears. That night he was introduced to the Captain, after the ship dropped its anchor in the calm waters off North Harbor.

  After the polite conversation, Kestrel returned to his bunk and his mind pondered his introduction to the girl named Moorin. He thought about the little girl he had helped heal. It didn’t seem possible that the settler’s daughter could be the girl he had been prophesized to save. Yet the circumstances seemed so like the unique qualifications of the prophecy that he couldn’t imagine there being another opportunity for him to rescue a girl with such a name and then save her as well. He had never understood how that double duty was possible, what it meant, but he knew that between the healing of the illness and the dispatch of wolf he had clearly done both for the little girl from the frontier cabin.

  And if, he grappled with the question he asked himself, if he had carried out the prophecy, what more was there for him to do in the northern lands, in North Harbor and the Northern Forest, other than to try to discover if there was a partially-elven girl of breath-taking beauty? Couldn’t he simply turn around and return south? He could go back to Graylee, and help Philip fight Namber further; or he could try to figure out how to take the fight against the Viathins right down to Uniontown; or he could simply return to the Eastern Forest.

  But it didn’t make sense. Moorin was not a half-breed, as far as he had seen. There was nothing earth-shaking in importance about the pioneer girl, nothing to justify a prophecy. And he didn’t feel any sense of completion, no soul-satisfied sense that his duties on behalf of the deities was done.

  “Approaching shore sir,” a voice awoke him. He had been dreaming and musing and sleeping and thinking, he realized. His mind had spent the night time trying to make sense of his circumstances. As he sat up and saw the dim sunlight filtering down into the ship’s hold, he realized it was past dawn, and the ship was on its way into the city to unload and reload cargo. And despite his soul’s busy night of trying to make sense of his circumstances, he had reached no conclusion about what to do next.

  This meant, he decided, that there was no harm with continuing to move forward with his journey north into the elven lands, unless or until something disrupted his trip. There would be nothing wrong with going to Kirevee, the capital of the northern elves, to visit and see them. He would be one of the very few eastern elves to have made such a trip in memory he knew, and perhaps the only non-trader to make such a journey to visit the distant branch of elves in the north. Maybe he could at least satisfy his curiosity about whether the false Moorin had spoken truly with her claims that the northern elves rode horses and eschewed crickets as a food source, and whether there was a true Moorin who was as extraordinarily gorgeous as he imagined.

  There was no reason to suppose that the northern elves would have to be exactly the same as the eastern elves, he realized abruptly as he started to prepare his goods for disembarkation. There was no sound reason for elves to avoid riding horses, and having experienced the practice so often himself, he wished his own people would not sidestep the opportunity to use the animals. Only the myth of the centaurs in the east caused his nation to miss the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of horses.

  The ship gave a slight shudder, and Kestrel suspected that they had arrived at the dock. He listened to an increase in the amount of activity on the deck, a sign that the stevedores from the docks were already coming aboard to start unloading the crates destined for North Harbor. He worked his way up to deck, saw the first mate busy talking to a group of men, and waved his thanks, then wove his way through traffic and obstacles to reach the dock.

  The sky was blue in North Harbor; the comet was visible not too far above the horizon. The harbor smelled of rotting seaweed and city sewers, causing Kestrel to waste no time leaving the docks and working his way into town.

  He was hungry. He wanted breakfast. He sa
w a number of inns and restaurants open and serving food, and he saw a number of elves. More than in Estone, more than in Narrow Bay, he saw that elves made up perhaps as many as one in twelve or ten of the people in the streets. And he saw a bakery, denoted by the sign overhead with an oven and loaves of bread, whose clientele appeared to be mostly elves. It was the place he wanted to go, to get elven food, to observe his distant kindred, and to ask questions.

  There was a line just inside the door, and Kestrel stepped into the back spot, listening to the conversations taking place within. There were many orders for rolls – jelly rolls, nut rolls, lavender rolls, and various other rolls. He watched what happened, and saw that the exchanges involved small breads that he would have called biscuits, but that were apparently called rolls in the north.

  The customers and servers were all speaking elvish, but even though they were spoken in his native tongue, the conversations took place in a clipped accent and a quick conversational style that was hard for him to follow. He listened closely, but the words seemed shortened and hurried, so that by the time he got to the front, Kestrel was only half sure he knew what to say.

  “I’d like a pine nut roll,” he said in a neutral voice.

  The old man behind the counter looked at him without moving. Before Kestrel’s turn the man had been a living display of perpetual motion, grabbing rolls, collecting money, giving change, seeming to act before he even heard the order of most customers. But Kestrel’s unusual accent had stopped him cold.

  “What’d you say?” the man asked.

  “I’d like a roll for breakfast. Do you have rolls with pine nuts?” Kestrel repeated. He was sure he had heard another customer order a pine nut roll already, and he knew what a pine nut was, and how it tasted.