“What became of my son?” Mandred asked.
“He died a hero’s death. Alfadas was caught in an ambush and murdered by trolls, who took away his body. Alfadas’s elven friend Ollwyn went and brought him back and took bloody revenge for Alfadas’s murder. Your son was buried in Firnstayn. His final resting place is at his mother’s side, beneath Mandred’s Oak,” the king said softly.
Bitterness and pride fought inside Mandred. How he would have loved to share a few carefree weeks with Alfadas once again, as they had back when they first came to Firnstayn together. He raised his drinking horn to the ceiling. “May you find a place of honor beside Luth at the table of the gods,” he said. His voice was heavy with emotion. Then he tipped out a little of the mead as an offering to Luth and drained the horn.
“He will certainly have his seat at the table of honor,” said the king. He had stood up and now pointed at one of the columns decorated with gold. Hammered into the metal were broad bands of figures, warriors on horseback. Njauldred indicated one of the riders, who had driven his lance into the body of a giant. “See that? That is your son at the moment he killed Gornbor, the troll prince.” The king then gestured along the length of the hall. “You will find Alfadas’s likeness on almost every one of these columns. His deeds of valor are without number. Often he rode out with the elf Ollwyn. They hunted the scouts that the trolls sent out. He is our pride, but also our curse, for no one since has been able to match his heroism.”
“Are you still fighting the trolls?” Mandred asked.
“No. There has been peace between us for a long time. Sometimes, if a boat is driven far north in a storm, the fishermen catch sight of one of the large troll ships in the fog. Hunters in winter sometimes find their tracks in the snow, but the battles are over.” The king looked gravely at Mandred. “Why did you come here, Mandred Torgridson?”
“To see Alfadas, my son, one more time, and embrace him.”
The face of the king grew stony. “You know full well that no human lives through the centuries. Tell me the true reason you are here.”
The king’s tone startled Mandred. He sounded almost hostile. “When you travel with elves, time passes differently. I believed that only three or four years had passed since I last saw Alfadas. Look at me. I’m still a young man, Njauldred. But I’m the father of Alfadas.”
The king stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I see that your pain at the news of Alfadas’s death is real, so I will choose to believe you. Even so, your arrival in Firnstayn troubles me.”
Mandred was surprised and slightly irritated. “I am not after your throne, Njauldred.”
“I would let you have it if you wanted it,” replied the king peevishly. “I’m talking about your saga. And Alfadas himself said it many times.”
“Said what?”
“That you would return to your people in their hour of greatest need. But we do not live in need, Mandred. So I am wondering, what is coming? First, we find an elf woman, seriously injured, the first elf anyone in the entire kingdom has seen in more than thirty years. And now you. With an elven companion so graceful and distant as if he were an emissary of Death. I am deeply troubled, Mandred. Will there be a new troll war?”
The jarl shook his head. “I doubt it. I have no feud with the trolls. I’ve never even seen one.”
Njauldred pointed at the picture of Alfadas and Gornbor. “They’re terrible creatures. One of them is as strong as ten men, they say. Be glad if you never cross one’s path. No man alone can defeat a troll. Except for Alfadas.”
“What about this elf woman? Where did she come from?”
The king shrugged. “No one knows. She is seriously injured. She looks as if a bear attacked her. When she was found, she was nearly frozen to death. She has a high fever, and she speaks in her sleep, but we can’t understand her language. I hope your companion is a mighty sorcerer. The only thing that can save her now is powerful magic. My daughter Ragna is a skilled healer. She cooled the elf woman’s fever and stopped her pain, but her wounds have not healed, and it has been weeks now. She has been getting weaker and weaker. Ragna is afraid that she will die tonight. Now your companion is there.”
Mandred wished it were Nuramon sitting at the elf woman’s bedside now. He would have pulled her back even from the gods’ Golden Hall. But Farodin . . . the blond elf was a fighter, not a healer. “Can you take me to her?”
“Of course.” The king looked at him with large eyes. “Are you a healer, too?”
“No.” Mandred smiled. The king probably thought that anyone living through the centuries must be capable of anything.
They left the hall and entered a side wing. Mandred admired the artfully knotted tapestries that decorated the otherwise bare stone walls. Njauldred led him up a narrow stairway to a corridor with several doors. A shallow brazier kept the cold of the stone walls at bay. Before the last door stood a soldier with the young woman in the deerskin dress whom Mandred had seen earlier in the banquet hall.
Ragna spread her arms in helplessness. “He won’t let anyone in. At the start, we could hear their voices. It has been quiet for a long time now.”
“And there was a light,” said the soldier, awed. “Why don’t you tell them about that, Ragna? A silver light came from under the door. And there was a strange smell. Like flowers.”
“And there’s been no sound from inside since?” asked the king.
“Nothing,” the guard confirmed.
Mandred stepped up to the door.
“You’d better not,” said Ragna. “He made it very clear that he would not tolerate anyone else in the room with him. In the skalds’ sagas, the elves are more polite.”
The jarl grasped the doorknob. “He will accept me,” he said, though he was not at all certain. “But none of you should try to follow.”
Mandred stepped into the room and immediately closed the door behind him. He found himself standing in a small attic room. A large part of the room was filled by a bed. A colorful tapestry had been stretched across the beams of the sloping ceiling. It showed hunters in pursuit of wild boars. The room smelled like flowers.
A heavy woolen blanket and several sheepskins lay on the bed. A shallow depression showed in the mattress. Farodin was kneeling before the bed, his face buried in his hands. But Mandred could see no elf woman, and there was nowhere in the small chamber where she would be able to hide.
“Farodin?”
Slowly, the elf raised his head. “She has gone into the moonlight. It was her destiny to pass on the news.”
“You mean she’s dead?”
“No. It’s not the same thing.” Farodin straightened and stood up. His face betrayed no expression. “She is where all Albenkin go one day. She’s passed on her burden to me.” He drew his sword and tested the edge with his thumb.
Mandred had never seen his companion in a mood like this. He did not dare to speak. A single drop of blood trickled down the blade of the sword.
“Trolls,” Farodin said, breaking the long silence. “Trolls. There was a war with them, but it ended many years ago. At the end of the war, they captured a large sailing ship. Almost three hundred elves were on board, and they were carried away as prisoners. Some still live. Yilvina is one of them.”
“Yilvina? Our Yilvina?” Mandred thought of the young, blond elf woman. With her two short swords, she had always seemed invincible in battle. How could she have been taken prisoner?
“Yilvina and half a dozen others, yes. They are still alive, after more than two hundred years in captivity. Prince Orgrim, the leader of the troll army, simply held on to them, although peace had been restored long before.” Farodin pointed to the empty bed. “Shalawyn escaped. They hunted her like a wild animal. She was trying to get back to Albenmark to report to Emerelle.”
“Are we supposed to take her message to Albenmark in her place?” Mandred did not like the
idea of meeting the queen again.
Farodin wiped the blood off his sword with the blanket, then slid the blade back into its sheath. “It would be pointless to even try. Emerelle would send an emissary to the troll king’s court to inquire about the prisoners. The emissary would take Prince Orgrim to task, and Orgrim would deny outright that he still held any elves prisoner. The one witness to it has gone into the moonlight. And if Emerelle were to press the point and insist that Orgrim was lying, it might be enough to trigger a new war with the trolls. The queen won’t take that risk. Everything will stay as it is.”
“So Shalawyn escaped for nothing,” Mandred said.
“No, mortal. The trolls must pay for what they do to their prisoners. She told me everything.”
Mandred took a step back. Something in Farodin’s gaze put him on his guard. “What . . . what do they do?”
“Don’t ask. There is only one thing you need to know. Prince Orgrim will bleed for it. I will find a way to reach him, and he will regret what he has done.”
At the Oracle’s Gate
Nuramon walked ahead of Felbion along an Albenpath. He did not hurry. He could sense how the power of the path was being drawn by an Albenstar. A hope filled him, hope that he might finally reach the oracle Dareen.
Again and again, he had chased down false leads. The humans of Angnos were unable to tell the difference between magic and deception, and what they called an oracle was no more than a fraud. He had heard nothing from any of them that he could not have said himself. Since those disappointing encounters, Nuramon had focused his search on an old oracle, one who had been silent for a long time or who refused all visitors.
The route from Iskendria to Angnos and the journey through the kingdom had been arduous. He had detoured around towns and villages and only spoken to lone travelers and occasional hermits. No one recognized him as an elf. He wore a hood that covered his ears and part of his face. His voice remained the voice of an elf, but how many humans had ever heard an elf speak? No doubt they thought of him as a secretive wanderer from some faraway land, which, in a manner of speaking, he was.
As he traveled, he memorized the network of Albenpaths and soon knew so many of them in Angnos that he had taken the risk of jumping from one Albenstar to another without leaving the human world. He was amazed at how easily it came to him. The magic was the same. All he needed to do was choose a path that didn’t leave this world, and still, he had been unsuccessful.
Recently, he had passed through a region whose paths were new to him. He had not seen a human for days but had seen signs of Albenkin, changes that could only have been made by elven hands. In many places, the way the plants grew reminded him of Albenmark, and the unusual fertility of the area led him to suspect that a magical spring lay close by, similar to Noroelle’s spring. All of these signs came together in the sparse, rugged land, the stony soil of which was otherwise nearly barren.
When he thought of the desert, he wondered whether he was somehow doing this world an injustice. The ocean of sand had shown him that even in the human world, there were landscapes of great beauty.
The Albenpath, the power of which he now felt beneath his feet, climbed steadily, heading directly for a mountain ahead. But the path did not seem to lead to the summit, and it could be that it led straight through the rocks.
When Nuramon had ascended as far as he could and stood directly before the wall of rock where the Albenpath vanished, he thought of the possibility that the oracle he was seeking might live inside the mountain itself. He left the path and set off to walk around the mountain, with Felbion at his side. As he walked, he kept a lookout for a cave or a hidden entrance leading into the rocks. He crossed two more Albenpaths, both of which disappeared into the mountain. When he came across the fourth path, in which he could feel the familiar flow of power, he knew for certain that somewhere inside these rocks, the paths crossed to form a star.
Halfway around, Nuramon found a path that led away from the rocks. It had to be the same one that had led him to the mountain; it had crossed the Albenstar and now continued on its route through the world. He followed the Albenpath back up but was disappointed not to find the entrance to a cave. Again, he found himself facing solid rock.
Nuramon inspected the rock wall carefully. Something was glittering there in the sunlight. He turned toward the glittering, and after a few steps, he saw them: precious stones had been set into the rocks. He didn’t know what he found more amazing: that the stones were as large as apples or that no one had stolen them yet.
On the left, a diamond had been set deeply into the wall. On its right was a ruby, fractured, but still in its stone mounting. Next to that again was a crystal with dark threads running through it, coloring it black. It seemed to be some kind of quartz shot through with darker minerals. Beneath the ruby was the fourth precious stone, a sapphire.
The ruby formed the centerpiece of the composition and was connected with the other precious stones by finger-deep furrows. Because it was fractured, Nuramon at first suspected that someone had tried to pry the stone out of the rock, but failed. A moment later, though, he chided himself for the suspicion, because he sensed that seven Albenpaths crossed directly in front of him. The stone was cracked in seven places . . . the ruby itself was the Albenstar, and each of its sections represented one path.
To the left of the diamond and right of the quartz crystal, characters had been chiseled into the rock. He could read the characters beside the diamond, for they were written in Elvish: “Sing the song of Dareen, O Child of the Sun! Sing of her wisdom with your hand in the light! Sing the words that you once spoke, and enter side by side.”
The oracle. He had walked so many trails, searched for so long. And now . . . Nuramon considered what the message could mean, what the song of Dareen could be. Then he thought of the words that Master Reilif, the black-hooded keeper of knowledge, had said to him in Iskendria, the words of Yulivee.
He placed one hand on the diamond and sang, “You came to us. Your voice rang. You showed us the stars. They sparkled. We could see them.”
Suddenly, the diamond illuminated, and a glowing light flowed through the furrow in the rock to the ruby, penetrated it, and made it glow as well. From the ruby, a red light poured downward toward the sapphire, and the moment the light met the sapphire, the stone emitted a shower of brilliant sparks. But the red light was not able to penetrate into the stone.
When Nuramon released the diamond, the glowing stream of light between the diamond and the ruby vanished, and the red flow from ruby to sapphire also faded away.
The left half of the puzzle was solved.
Nuramon looked at the characters carved beside the quartz crystal. They were unfamiliar to him. He thought that he might know the language and believed it might even be one spoken in Albenmark, but the text in the rock consisted of only a few characters that were exceptionally complicated and harder to remember. This was the true puzzle.
He placed one hand on the quartz crystal and sang Yulivee’s words again, but nothing happened. He turned back to the Elvish words on the left. That was certainly addressed to him, but he was supposed to enter with someone else, side by side. The song, too, talked about us and we. Whoever this other was would be able to read the text that was so foreign to Nuramon and would have to touch the black stone and sing the words. Perhaps his song was so short because it was only part of a longer piece. He had to sing one part, his companion the other. But who was this about? Perhaps a human?
Nuramon stepped back and looked at the formation as a whole. The ruby was the Albenstar, and the sapphire was a stone of water and wellsprings. Here, no doubt, it stood for a source of knowledge and thus for Dareen, the oracle. The diamond was the sign for him or someone like him. It was the stone of light. “Child of the Sun,” it said on the wall in front of him. But if he was a child of the sun, then the other words might refer to a child of the night. Quartz
crystal was not normally seen as a stone of the night, but the black filaments in it might signify that.
An idea occurred to Nuramon. He was one of the Albenkin and was referred to here as a child of the sun. In the old days, the elves had also been called the children of the Lightalben. From his house in the oak, he was able to see far into the mountains, where the dark elves once lived. A child of the Darkalben. That was who he had to find, and that was who he had to persuade to pass through this gate with him.
The dark elves—the children of the Darkalben—had left Albenmark a very long time ago. They had gone to the Other World to find a new home for themselves. There were numerous stories about them, but these, in time, were slowly forgotten. The wise ones said that it made no sense to differentiate between the Lightalben and the Darkalben, and one should forget the distinction as one should forget the race referred to as the Darkalben. But it proved impossible to completely wipe out the memories of the dark elves and the rumors surrounding them. Some claimed that they were evil and that, in the early days, many battles had been fought with them. Or that they could not stand Albenmark’s brilliance and for that reason had come to this gloomy world. Others said they were harmless if left alone and that they had moved to the Other World to create something new for themselves. The oldest said nothing, although they alone knew the truth, and the dark elves remained a mystery.
Where was he supposed to look for this secretive race? Like the gate to reach Noroelle, the dark elves could be anywhere in this world. Nuramon sighed. He was none the wiser. There was just one way for him to continue his search: the elven way. He would search for both the vanished race and for Noroelle. At some point, he would find one or the other. And maybe there would be some new trail to follow, something he had not thought of before. Whatever happened, he would not go running back to Farodin to follow him along his trail of sand.
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