Twilight of the Elves

by Zack Loran Clark

  Even under the circumstances, Zed must be beside himself with excitement to see Llethanyl. Was he thinking of it as a sort of homecoming?

  He would come back, right?

  “What is that?” Liza said, peering down at the book.

  “Ah, yes,” Brock said. “ ‘Shambling Slime, the Ooze that Walks Like a Man.’ Apparently its weaknesses include fire and sharp weapons. So I guess we have that in common.”

  “ ‘Walks like a man’?” Liza complained. “Shouldn’t it be ‘walks like a person’?”

  “Really?” Brock said. “That’s the part that disturbs you?”

  “Liza!” Micah shouted as he entered the yard.

  “What!” she shouted back.

  Fel took a small step away, her smile faltering again. She still wasn’t used to the Guerra sibling dynamic. Possibly, elven siblings tended to be less outwardly murderous toward each other.

  “Have you seen my traveling cloak?” he asked again.

  “No,” she said.

  Micah growled. “You couldn’t have said that before I came all the way down here?”

  “First of all,” Liza said, “your cloak looks exactly the same as everybody else’s! Second—”

  “Oh, no,” Brock said, a realization settling upon him a split second before it did Liza.

  “Micah,” she said darkly. “Why do you need your traveling cloak?”

  A self-satisfied smirk broke across Micah’s face. That was what he’d wanted her to ask from the start. “Didn’t you hear?” he said. “Frond and the queen of the elves need a healer for their quest to liberate Lefanol. And I’m the best they’ve got.”

  Fel winced, presumably at his pronunciation of Llethanyl. Liza flinched, too, but Brock guessed it was for other reasons.

  “You’re also the only healer they’ve got,” he said, hoping to lighten the mood.

  It didn’t work. “You’re on the mission?” Liza demanded.

  “Of course I’m on the mission,” Micah said, smiling widely now. “Brock, I tried to get you on the team, too. You know, in case we run into any locked doors?” Here he drew his sleeves back and flexed his biceps. “But Frond called these her ‘skeleton keys.’ Said they should be able to open just about anything.”

  Brock and Liza rolled their eyes at the obvious lie, but Fel perked up. “I knew Frond was kind. She keeps her heart warded, but carries within it the seeds to a magnificent tree.”

  Micah faltered midflex. “She what?” he asked. Fel took a deep breath, preparing to launch into an explanation, but he spoke over her. “No, you know what? Elves are weird, and I’ve got packing to do, and that’s that.” He winked at Liza and flicked his chin at Brock. “Wish I could heal your bruised egos. But even I’m not that good.”

  Liza stared after her brother in disbelief as he strutted back across the yard.

  “Well, I think we’ll all breathe a little easier these next few weeks,” Brock said lightly. “Assuming he remembers to pack his—”

  In a single fluid motion, Liza gripped the end of Brock’s hammock and flipped it, dumping him out onto the ground. Then she leaned in and gripped the fabric of his shirt.

  “You!” she spat. “Plan!”

  “—socks,” Brock said.

  “I want us on that mission, Brock,” she stated, a vicious gleam in her eyes. “Make it happen.”

  She stalked away, leaving Brock dazed upon the ground. Before he could gather his wits, Mousebane sauntered up, dropping a dead rat beside him.

  Brock recoiled, scooting swiftly away, and he brought his backside down on something squishy—the hot water bottle had fallen with him from the hammock, and now wetness saturated his pants as it burst beneath his weight.

  “Perfect,” he muttered.

  Fel was practically bouncing in place. “It’s just so sweet!” she said.

  “Sweet?!”

  “It means she likes you, silly.”

  She patted Brock on the head and skipped off.

  “You mean the cat, right?” he called after her. “You’re talking about the cat?”

  They gathered for a funeral before dawn. The entire guild and all the elven rangers were there at the edge of the forest as the sky began to lighten by degrees above the endless trees and Broken Roads that stood between Freestone and Llethanyl.

  For all the talk of the adventurers’ steep mortality rate, none of Brock’s guildmates had died since the Guildculling, and for that, he was grateful. But he was no stranger to funerals. His last remaining grandparent had passed peacefully in her sleep just a year ago, and Brock had held his mother’s hand from the moment the funeral pyre was lit until the fire burned out and all that was left was ash.

  An elven funeral, however, was an altogether different affair—and despite the cold, the elves showed no interest in rushing through the ritual, which involved a series of speeches that Brock, of course, couldn’t understand. The hole, at least, had been prepared the night before; a rectangle of pure black against the white snow.

  “I still can’t believe they’re going to bury him in the ground,” Brock whispered to Jett. They stood apart with the rest of the adventurers, on guard for any threat from the woods. But Brock’s eyes kept drifting over to the clutch of elves and the dark pit they encircled. “It’s too weird.”

  The dwarven boy nodded slightly. “It’s all weird, though. The things people do. You don’t see it when you’re steeped in it. But from the outside looking in . . .” He rubbed his shaven chin, which was chafed pink in the cold. “You know my people put the ashes of our dead into molten metal? We forge things with them. Weapons and shields. Boots, for all I know!”

  “I think I read that somewhere,” Brock said. “Not the boots part.”

  “I’m just guessin’,” said Jett. “I’m a dwarf, but I’m also a Freestoner from birth. Sometimes the two things fit together, and sometimes they don’t. I try not to judge any of it.” He clucked his tongue sadly as four rangers brought forth a small pinewood box—the vessel that held the child elf’s body. “Shame about this boy, though. Do you know what happened?”

  “I heard he was sick,” Brock answered. “Born sick, and the voyage was too much of a strain. He never recovered.” Brock looked from the box to the top of Freestone’s wall, where the mourning women he’d first seen in the temple stood among a small group of elves—and a larger group of knights. Only the rangers, the queen, and her retinue had been allowed through the gates. Anyone else who wished to attend the funeral had to do so at a distance, and at swordpoint.

  The sight hurt Brock’s heart, but even at this remove he could see that the rage and the grief were gone from the women’s faces. It was clear they found peace in the idea of burial, whatever Brock thought about it. Every elf in sight was a picture of tranquility, Fel included.

  Zed, on the other hand, was a mess. Tears streamed freely down his face, and he pressed his lips together tightly to avoid making any sound. Brock wanted to go to him, to sidle up and whisper a joke, but Zed had positioned himself in a tight cluster of those chosen for the mission to Llethanyl. There was no way for Brock to reach him without making a commotion. Then Zed saw Brock looking, and hastily wiped the tears away.

  One elf was doing most of the talking. Brock recognized him as Selby, one of the queen’s two remaining ministers. As Brock had pieced it together, the ministers provided counsel to the queen. The position obviously held some sort of cultural significance, too, for Selby to be conducting this ceremony now. He wore an elaborate headdress of gleaming bronze, with projections radiating outward like a child’s drawing of the rays of the sun. His voice was musical, rising and falling and rising again, and Brock felt for a moment as if he were drifting upon it, the way people in stories drifted on the sea, an expanse of water said to be so huge you couldn’t see the end of it.

  Then there was a creaking of branches, and Brock’s eyes cut back to the trees, his heart in his throat. It was just the wind. This time.

  He focused his attention on
the woods after that.

  Eventually Selby’s voice came to a halt, and Brock risked another glance at the funeral. Selby had opened a small window in the pinewood vessel’s lid. He placed within it a wooden flute and a tarnished gray dagger.

  “What is that about?” whispered Brock.

  “It’s for the little lost one,” Fel whispered in response. “Now he will have what he needs on his return, whether it is a time of peace or . . . not.”

  Brock couldn’t help but think that, given the current circumstances, burying the dead with a weapon was an especially bad idea.

  As the rangers who held the box slowly lowered their burden into the hole, Selby produced a sphere of bronze. It was about the size of a cannonball, but hollow. Brock could see clear through it where the bronze had been worked into elegant swirling patterns that left gaps in its surface. As the others took up spades and began shoveling icy dirt atop the coffin, the minister chanted, and smoke poured from the sphere in his hands. It drifted in the breeze, finding its way to Brock’s nose.

  “That’s myrrh,” Fel explained. “It will keep this lost one safe, ensuring a peaceful slumber and warding off evil.”

  “Let’s hope.” Brock shuddered, turning his head to watch the forest again. The space between the trees was as dark and forbidding as that hole in the ground.

  Jett’s gaze was not on the forest, but on the wall at their backs, where the elven witnesses were being escorted away under heavy guard, leaving only a few remaining Stone Sons as sentries. “Isn’t this all a bit obvious?” Jett said. “As secret missions go, I mean.”

  Brock considered the adventurers and the rangers gathering at the forest’s edge. The queen herself was there, though dressed as a common ranger, longsword at her hip and longbow at her back, her hair in a tight plait. He’d been raised with stories about the warrior kings of Freestone’s past, but the current reality of royal life in the human city kept the king and his family cloistered far from any danger. The elves clearly lived by a different philosophy. If he hadn’t met the queen only days before, he never would have recognized her. Certainly not from the top of the wall.

  “It’s a good plan, actually,” Brock conceded. “A big party goes out, practically the entire guild, all at once—and then most of them come back the next day. Overnight excursions into the forest aren’t that rare, and the knights aren’t counting heads—especially with a funeral to distract them. So they’ll never know a small party is still out there.”

  A good plan, yes; but it would also be quite easy to sabotage, Brock knew. He’d even considered doing it: going to the king, telling him what Frond and Me’Shala had planned without his consent. The king had been quick to arrest Frond for her insubordination when the wards had been corrupted. It wasn’t difficult to imagine the fury her current actions would incite. At the very least, the mission would be shut down, Frond reprimanded, and Zed kept safe.

  But fury was like fire: easy to stoke and hard to control. The king might not be content with blaming Frond. The whole guild could be punished, and the elves, too. And Queen Me’Shala seemed the type to meet fury head-on. If the tension between the two royals bubbled over . . .

  More suffering. That was all Brock could imagine as a result of stopping this mission now. And despite his misgivings—and he had serious misgivings—he didn’t want to stop the mission, not really.

  If there was even a chance the elves could take back their city, he wouldn’t be the one to stand in their way.

  Brock noticed Liza glaring at him, but if that made him doubt his decision, the sight of Zed trembling with excitement squashed those doubts in an instant.

  “Come on,” Fel said. “All that’s left is to cover the coffin, and then we will be expected to return to the guildhall. It’s time.”

  She led Brock and Jett to where the rest of their friends had gathered. Liza had turned her fierce gaze away from Brock to address Zed and Micah and Jayna. “You three look out for one another, you understand? Whatever else you have to do, you need to have one another’s backs.”

  Zed nodded solemnly, Micah picked at his teeth, and Jayna stepped forward, her eyes brimming with tears. “We’ll be okay,” she said, smiling bravely.

  “I know you will,” Liza said, and she embraced the other girl. “You guys are the best. And you’re going to save Llethanyl.” She pulled back, but kept her hands on Jayna’s arms. “Think of how much magic you’ll learn along the way!”

  Jayna’s eyes cut over to Hexam, who was pawing through his supplies for one last check. With himself and Zed both potentially crucial to the mission, the archivist had insisted on bringing Jayna along as well. It seemed he put more stock in her magical education than she’d thought, and that revelation had been exciting enough to undercut her anxieties.

  The wavering tears in her eyes were gone now, replaced with the spark of that excitement. She hugged Liza once more.

  Brock couldn’t help being impressed. He’d initially resisted the idea of Liza as their leader, and now he wondered how he ever could have imagined it going another way. Liza didn’t shoot mystical darts or heal with a touch, but it was obvious why the others looked up to her.

  Even Micah. She embraced him next, and though he affected annoyance, he leaned into it.

  “I’ll admit it, I’m jealous,” Jett said to Zed. “Do you know what I’d give to see a dwarven city?”

  Zed frowned. “Yeah, but Llethanyl is overrun by the undead. Not quite how I’ve imagined it.”

  Jett shrugged as if it were a minor inconvenience. “So waggle your fingers at ’em.” He waggled his own. “Set ’em ablaze. See the sights. Then you come back to us.” He leveled his steely gaze at Zed, the one that made him seem taller than Brock, taller than Frond. “You come back to us, Zed, all your parts intact. Do you hear me?”

  Zed’s ears flushed pink in the dawn light, and he smiled. “I promise.”

  “Good,” Jett said, the hardness gone from his eyes in a blink. “And bring us back some elven sweets, or we won’t be opening that door for your half-lazy half butt, you hear me?”

  Zed giggled, and the sound of it broke Brock’s heart a little. He hadn’t heard his friend laugh like that in some time. But he couldn’t say whether that was because Zed hadn’t been laughing, or if Brock simply hadn’t been around to hear it.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said, pulling his friend into a hug. The fox charm Zed wore beneath his shirt felt sharp, but he didn’t pull away.

  “Are you sure you’ll even notice I’m gone?” Zed said.

  Now Brock pulled away.

  The dawn was making slow progress, and with Zed’s back to the forest, Brock couldn’t make out his expression.

  “Zed, I’m sorry I haven’t been around much. It’s . . . complicated, and—”

  “I’m teasing, Brock,” Zed said. He slapped his friend’s shoulder. “I just mean I’ll be back before you know it. I won’t even need to ‘waggle my fingers’ once I get the hang of this.” Smiling, he held up the jeweled rod he’d been carrying around almost nonstop since their night in Halfling’s Hollow.

  Brock felt a new worry bloom in his chest. “Zed, that thing isn’t . . . like the staff you used that time, is it?”

  The smile dropped from Zed’s face. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You know,” Brock said, lowering his voice. “It’s not . . . tainted? Not dark magic, right?”

  Zed’s eyes went stony. “It’s just an implement, Brock. It’s no more tainted than the mage who uses it.”

  “Oh. That’s—that’s good.”

  “I thought it didn’t matter,” he said, his voice straining a little. “I thought you didn’t care, that Hexam was right, that magic was magic.”

  “I don’t care,” Brock said, looking around cagily. Jett had taken a step back, retreating from the argument, but they were well within earshot of a dozen adventurers. “I don’t,” Brock repeated, whispering. “It’s just that some people would.”

  “What
are you trying to say? Just say it!” Zed’s voice cracked, and Brock knew for certain they had an audience now.

  And isn’t this typical, he thought bitterly. The Lady Gray had Brock tied around her pinky because of Zed’s mistakes. And Zed was mad at him?

  “I’m just saying don’t be reckless out there,” Brock said, grinding his molars to keep his voice down, to force the appearance of calm. It made his words come out sharp. “There are people here who care about you, who worry.”

  “Well, if you see any of those people, tell them I’m just fine,” Zed snapped. “Tell them I know how to take care of myself.” He turned and walked away, stomping into the throng of guildmates.

  The worry in Brock’s chest flared white-hot, consumed by anger. Zed was the last person he expected to talk to him that way. The last person who had a right to.

  Through the haze of his anger, he was dimly aware of the good-byes all around him. He swept the crowd, unseeing, until his eyes landed on Frond.

  The guildmistress was leaving final instructions with Lotte. She showed no emotion whatsoever, all flint and steel against the backdrop of the chattering, anxious guild around her. She, and the austere queen beside her, seemed to be the only ones who registered the true gravity of this mission.

  It wasn’t an exciting opportunity to see a foreign city. Or an expedition into the unknown.

  They had one real purpose: to kill the creature that had taken Llethanyl.

  It was an assassination. Frond was the killer, and Zed was her weapon.

  The Broken Roads from Freestone to Llethanyl were just that: wide avenues of cracked stone bricks, now smuggled by green fingers of ivy beneath a cloak of frost.

  Zed and the small party had woken early that morning, after a tense night of camp. The rangers had stood guard in shifts, allowing the main party as much rest as they could claim from the cold.

  But Zed had slept fitfully. His dreams troubled him.

  He dreamed he was kneeling in a smoke-filled forest, tugging desperately at the mythril chain around his neck. The chain had become molten and hot, and though Zed scrabbled to pull it off, his worrying fingers couldn’t find the clasp. It had melted away. In his nightmare, the edges of his fox charm were blackened and burned, smoldering with eerie green embers.