“I can leave any time. What about you?” he asked. “You just got here; do you want to rest this afternoon and start fresh tomorrow?”
“No, I want to get back. I want to get to the front and get revenge for Lucretia and everyone else we lost,” Vinetia said fiercely.
“I need to tell some folks I’ve been reassigned,” Kestrel thought out loud. “Would you like to wait in my quarters while I make the rounds to let my instructors know that I’m leaving?”
“Will I be able to wash up there?” Vinetia asked.
“Yes, absolutely,” Kestrel agreed. They stood and left the office.
“Belinda, I’ve received orders to return to Center Trunk,” Kestrel told the woman at the desk outside the commander’s office.
“Oh Kestrel! That’s unusual,” Belinda replied, a look of concern on her face. “I didn’t expect we’d lose you so soon.”
“Vinetia and I are going to return to the capital this afternoon. I’d like to tell the commander personally. Do you know where he is?”
“He’s either at the armory, or the depot, checking on supplies,” Belinda answered. “I’m going to miss you; we never really had a chance to get to know one another, did we?” she asked.
“No, I am sorry we didn’t,” Kestrel agreed sincerely.
“Will you return?” Belinda asked.
“I have no knowledge,” Kestrel shook his head. “I didn’t know I was coming here when I was assigned, and I didn’t expect these orders to go back to Center Trunk. They just keep me in the dark.”
“You two have a safe trip, and I’ll inform the commander if you don’t find him to tell him yourself,” she said, then stood and came around the desk to hug him, surprising him with the unexpected affection.
Together Kestrel and Vinetia left the office, and Kestrel took Vinetia to his lodging, leading her up to the top floor. “You’ve had a nice place here, haven’t you?” she asked as they entered the doorway and she looked around.
“So, have you been sleeping with the commander’s secretary?” she asked bluntly, surprising him with the directness of the question.
“No, I’ve hardly seen her. I met her the day I first arrived, and she was friendly, but then I didn’t see her again until today, and she was friendly again,” he explained.
Vinetia sat on Kestrel’s bed and started to remove her boots. “Well, maybe it was smart not to get involved in company politics, sleeping with her, but it sure looks to me like the door was open for you.” She stood and unbuckled her belt, letting her pants drop.
“I’m going to bathe. You can watch if you want to, or you can go make your reports,” she told him as he looked at her in surprise. “I expect I’ll be on the front lines in another fortnight or less, and there won’t be time or opportunity for modesty if we’re fighting, so that’s how I’m going to treat life from now on.”
“I’ll go now. I’ll be back,” Kestrel said, hastily backing out of his room as he saw Vinetia start to lift her blouse up over her head. He turned and ran down the stairs, then paused to clear his head of all the drama that cluttered it, and considered what to do next. He decided to try the armory first, to find Commander Casimo and possibly Arlen as well.
Neither of his hoped-for targets were at the armory, so he decided to go to the stables next, to meet Arlen there, and he was fortunate to find his teacher with his horse already saddled. “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to come today,” Arlen said.
“I just got new orders to return to Center Trunk,” Kestrel said breathlessly after running to reach the stables quickly.
“Center Trunk?” Arlen looked at him quizzically. “Kestrel, what are you going to do in Center Trunk? They don’t have any trainers there, and you’re not ready to go out on a mission.
“Don’t get me wrong, you’re doing very well. You’re one of the best students I’ve had, and with just a few more weeks you’ll be ready. But you’re not ready to go out now,” Arlen said intensely, his hand holding onto Kestrel’s.
“I don’t know what my orders will be, or why they’re bringing me back to Center Trunk,” Kestrel said. He wondered how far he was from being ready in Arlen’s eyes; he felt that he had made great progress in the past several weeks, and was possibly able to compete with humans using their own weapons. “I’ll let them know what you said if they give me an assignment,” he assured Arlen.
“There’s been a human attack out west, past Elmheng,” Kestrel told Arlen. “The humans burned a lot of forest and killed a lot of our guards. You may see more students coming up here for training if this turns into a nasty war.”
Arlen’s eyes widened. “All the more reason for you to finish your training before you do anything stupid. We’re going to need well-trained agents — you come back here and finish up,” he squeezed Kestrel’s hand. “Now I suppose you’re going to tell me you won’t be cleaning out the stables your next turn either? This is tragic!”
Kestrel smiled at Arlen’s reversion to his typical comical persona. “If I come back here, I promise I’m taking my turn cleaning out the stables,” he pledged, then departed to go to the depot, hoping to find Casimo. The commander was not there either, and so Kestrel went to see his language tutor.
“You can’t pass as a native human with your accent right now, but you could make yourself understood if you had to,” the man told him. Artur was considered the best human-speaker among the elves at Firheng, though Kestrel had sometimes idly wondered how that compared to elves who traveled to Estone and spoke the human language as a matter of trade.
He doubled back past the office building, where Casimo was still not present, then at last he returned to his own quarters, where he was relieved to see Vinetia fully dressed, and ready to go. He took time to pack his meager belongings, then joined Vinetia in the doorway as he looked around his apartment for the last time. “Let’s go by the commissary and get some food to take with us,” Kestrel suggested.
They went and gathered bread and fruit, then left the base and walked through the city, neither of them saying anything to the other. Kestrel’s mind was whirling with thoughts of Lucretia; he wanted to ask Vinetia more about the missing guard, but the hardened attitude that Vinetia had displayed in his room deterred him from raising Lucretia, or any other topic.
They passed through Firheng, and Kestrel reflected on how little he knew about the city where he had just spent so many weeks living. He hadn’t met any civilians, and only occasionally ventured off the base to buy food from the street vendors. He couldn’t call Firheng home, but he felt like he was leaving home, compared to Center Trunk, and a future that might or might not be there, and that might expect him to become a spy, something he would have never planned for himself.
He might be assigned to return to Elmheng, he speculated, walking along the forest road with Vinetia without paying any attention to the world around him. He might once again see Cheryl, and he could ask if she had ever received any of his letters.
He could see her father Mastrim again, and he could ask the commander if his message had specifically told Colonel Silvan to consider Kestrel as a candidate to become a spy. That message, those adventures, had been so long ago, it seemed! His life had become nothing but one continuous training session in Firheng, and it was hard to believe that he had been touched by the human goddess, conversed directly with the elven goddess, rescued and talked to Dewberry the sprite! That brief episode of life filled with adventure was one that had disappeared, buried under the layers of language and combat and horses that had been pushed into his life.
The sun had nearly set, he realized with a startled assessment of the world around him. The road ahead was dim, particularly for his eyes, which were not as sharp as those of a full-blooded elf like Vinetia. “How much longer would you like to travel tonight?” he asked.
She stopped and sighed. “We’re not going to make it to a village tonight; we started too late.”
“We could climb a tree and settle in for the night,
” Kestrel offered, suggesting the traditional elven resting place.
“Perhaps we should,” Vinetia agreed, and in her voice Kestrel heard less of the afternoon’s hard edge.
He let her select the tree they would climb, and then they ascended the elm, reaching a level at which the forking branches were high above the ground but still sturdy enough to support their weight as they settled into two forks close to each other. They passed a few food items back and forth and grew comfortable as a glimmer of moonlight filtered through the leaves above.
“How did you do in the archery tournament after I left?” Kestrel ventured to ask, when he judged the time might be suitable for conversation.
“I lost in the qualifying round in the morning,” she replied. “I was up against tough competition.
“But both the champion and the runner-up were the two you beat in the last round you shot in. You could have been champion if you had stayed,” Vinetia told him with some enthusiasm. “And everyone in our squad knew it, and the top two finishers knew it as well. The second place archer came up and told me that himself after it was over.”
“There was quite a little stir you know, you showing up for one day out of the blue, burning through the competition, then disappearing,” she went on.
“Lucretia tried to maintain her cool exterior, and no one really figured it out, but I know the two of you had something you shared. You got to hug her goodbye in a way that wasn’t just polite that morning you took off; she didn’t warm up to strangers in a hurry or give out hugs randomly. She knew you were leaving before anyone else,” Vinetia told him.
“We talked over the midday break, when she took me back to the armory to get more arrows,” Kestrel replied. He didn’t want to lie to the girl in the tree with him, but he couldn’t tell the whole truth, the truth about how Lucretia had discovered him talking to Dewberry the sprite. “And then we were having dinner together when Colonel Silvan’s guards came and found me and took me away to receive orders, so she knew about that. That’s when I was ordered to come up here to Firheng, something I never expected,” Kestrel explained.
“Isn’t that something,” Vinetia said. “An elf like you is attractive to her, after all the really good-looking elves busted their backs trying to get her attention, and failed.
“You’re not really that bad looking,” she added. “Just different. You’re an elf all the way through; no human could handle a bow the way you can.” She yawned. “I miss her. I never really said goodbye because we thought she was just on a short training mission to Elmheng; no one dreamed she was going off to war.
“That’s why I want to get to the front, so I can kill as many humans as I can and get revenge,” she said, then yawned again.
“I’m sorry,” Kestrel said softly. “I’m still getting used to the idea she’s dead. I know it must hurt you to have lived with it for all these days. Go to sleep Vinetia, and tomorrow we’ll make some progress towards getting you back to Center Trunk and on your way to getting revenge.” He listened, but heard no reply except the very gentle sound of Vinetia’s breath, as she fell asleep in her fork in the tree. He let his own head rest against his part of the trunk, and slowly fell asleep as well, thinking about Lucretia, the lovely maiden elf guard who had sought adventure and escape from predictable boredom. He hoped she had been exhilarated by the action in battle, and had died a quick, painless death.
They each woke at the same time early the next morning, when two squirrels began loudly chittering at one another in the branches just above them. Both elves slipped down to the ground and separated to attend to their needs, then reunited and began trotting along the road at a vigorous pace, determined to cover as much distance as possible. That night they stopped at an inn just past sunset, comfortable with one another after occasional conversations during their journey. They discovered that they had no message to demonstrate their right to receive free housing at the inn, so they pooled their resources and shared a room and a bed, sleeping back to back with no thoughts of harm in the arrangement. Their third night on the road they stayed in a tree again, and late on the fourth day of their trip, they returned to Center Trunk just as the guards were closing the gates to the base for the night.
During their journey, when they slowed down to rest and talk, or when they went to bed at night, they talked about their lives since the tournament.
“So you’ve been training every day on these human weapons?” Vinetia asked the night they were in their room at the inn, their backs pressed against one another as they lay on the mattress. “Do you think they’ve ordered you back to Center Trunk to start teaching the rest of us how to fight like the humans?”
“There are better teachers than me,” Kestrel replied. “They need to bring my instructor back to Center Trunk if they want someone to help the guard learn to fight that way.”
“The reports from the survivors of the battle at the fire say there was that kind of fighting going on. Maybe it’s something we all need to learn if this isn’t going to be the usual type of war,” Vinetia had mused.
“Maybe,” Kestrel doubtfully agreed.
“What will you tell Colonel Silvan about spying?” Vinetia had asked the next day.
“I’ll tell him my trainers say that I’m not ready, and I don’t know if I want to be one,” he replied.
“What if they tell you it’s the best way for you to help get revenge for this attack?” Vinetia pressed. “What if you can help find out about the next attack before it happens? You could save others from suffering Lucretia’s fate.”
Her comment touched on the main point that Kestrel was stuck on as he debated his future. He hadn’t asked to be trained as a spy; he didn’t envision himself as a spy. He thought he was a normal elf guard, despite his mixed heritage; he could pass as an elf much more easily than he could pass as a human. But he realized that Silvan might have some compelling argument that he wouldn’t be able to deny, and that was what he feared — that he would be persuaded to agree to try to be a spy for the elves.
So when the two of them arrived in Center Trunk, he decided to go with Vinetia to her squad’s barracks, and spend the night there, rather than report to Silvan’s office so late at night, so that he could put off for a few more hours the conversation that he feared to participate in. He fell into an empty bunk and slept in his clothes, then arose groggily in the morning at the sound of others starting to stir, and slipped away from the barracks quarters.
He knew he had to go see Silvan, much as he dreaded the thought. With slow steps he walked through the morning air that was dense with mist, shrouding his view as he journeyed around the base, and he walked past his destination once before he realized that he had missed it in the fog. Minutes later he was on the steps, then up the stairs to the doorway to Silvan’s office, where Giardell was already standing on duty.
“Guardsman Kestrel, reporting for duty,” he spoke to Giardell, “as ordered by Colonel Silvan.”
“The colonel’s not here yet,” Giardell replied, looking at Kestrel in a manner that weighed his appropriateness for an audience with the spy master of the elves. “He won’t be here for a bit more this morning. Why don’t you go to the baths and clean yourself up so you’ll be more presentable?”
It was a question, but clearly a strong suggestion, and Kestrel decided to act on it. At the very mention of the word bath he had imagined how refreshing it would feel to soak in hot water.
“I’ll go do that. Which way are they?” he replied, and listened to the directions Giardell gave.
“Tell the colonel I was here early and I’ll be directly back,” Kestrel asked, and then he was down the hall and down the stairs, leaving Giardell to muse whether the youngster was up to the challenge that Silvan had planned for him.
When Kestrel returned to the office door an hour later, he looked and felt better. Giardell left him standing in the hallway while the guard went into the office, then returned and motioned for Kestrel to enter.
Inside,
Silvan sat at his desk, crisp, clean and alert to start the day, making Kestrel glad that he had taken his bath and improved his own state before the meeting.
“Welcome back, Kestrel. You’ve been hard at work in Firheng, I understand,” Silvan began.
“Yes sir, I tried to do everything they taught me,” he answered cautiously.
“And you’ve heard about the disaster we’ve suffered?” Silvan questioned.
“The fire and the battle?” Kestrel clarified. “Yes.”
“Vinetia filled you in? That’s good,” Silvan responded. “We lost an enormous number of guard members, probably the worst loss in the lifetime of anyone alive today. We weren’t prepared for that type of attack, and our lack of knowledge and preparation hurt our people badly.
“I understand you lost a couple of acquaintances too, Kestrel. I’m sorry about that,” he added.
“A couple?” Kestrel asked. “Vinetia told me about Lucretia; was there someone else?”
Silvan paused and closed his eyes, while his fingers rubbed circles around his temples. “I’m sorry, I forgot that you wouldn’t have any way of knowing. The majority of our casualties came from the Elmheng contingent of guards; you probably knew several of them, but I was thinking of Commander Mastrim.”
Kestrel’s vision grew blurry, and his throat felt thick. “Commander Mastrim?” he echoed in disbelief.
Silvan let only a momentary pause pass. “The Commander died bravely, and helped save the lives of others. When it became apparent that our guards were in a tight situation, Mastrim led a charge directly into the humans. He and virtually everyone with him were killed, and the rest were captured and taken away to be made slaves. Mastrim sent the rest of our guards back into the forest, and at least a few were able to work their way around the fire and bring us back news of the defeat. The rest perished.”
Kestrel was taking deep breaths, trying to overcome the shock he felt. Mastrim was dead, which was terrible. Now Cheryl and her mother were alone in Elmheng without him. And others had died as well; Backsin and many of his other friends in Elmheng were probably victims of the human attack; he hadn’t thought about the losses. The idea of a battle had been abstract and nebulous, other than the report of Lucretia’s death; now it grew oppressively real.
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