“You’ll see. Just go on in, Kestrel,” the woman at the desk gently urged.
He stepped forward and turned the door handle, then looked at Belinda momentarily before he pushed the door open and stepped into the spacious room. The curtains were closed, dimming the space as he closed the door behind him, and for a moment he could barely make out the outline of a figure standing nearby, devoid of details. Then his eyes adjusted, and he instantly recognized that the messenger waiting for him, grinning at him, was Vinetia, the guard from Center Trunk who had been his partner for one day in the great archery tournament during the festival in the city.
Kestrel held his arms open and rushed to the girl, embracing her tightly, with more emotion than he would have expected from himself. The isolation he had experienced during his time in Firheng overwhelmed him, as he stood still with Vinetia in his arms.
“It’s good to see you too!” the girl told him at length, moving him to release his grip and step back. She was smiling broadly, but there was fatigue beneath the smile, shadowing her face. It was a face that had grown thin, and her uniform hung loosely from a figure that was much more slender than Kestrel remembered, he realized as he hugged her.
“Why are you all the way up here?” Kestrel asked her, as they took the two chairs that were placed side-by-side.
“Orders, of course,” she said brashly. “Your spy folks ‘offered’ me the privilege of delivering a message to you, and I decided to take it. I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again otherwise,” she reached into a satchel and pulled out a sturdy message tube, one without the official blue tape seal across the end, which she handed to him.
He looked at her inquiringly.
“I don’t know anything about what it says,” Vinetia replied. “I was as surprised as you are that they assigned me to bring the message to you. I thought I was going to ship out with the rest of the squad to Elmheng.”
“Why would you go to Elmheng?” he asked as he began to open the tube.
“Because,” Vinetia said. She looked at him, “You know,” she added, then studied his face. “You don’t know, do you?
“We lost a huge battle with the humans on the western edge of the forest, right about where your fire was. They brought some weapon that threw the fire far into the forest, behind the guards who were there to protect the fringe,” Vinetia explained. “There was a huge fire; it wiped out miles of forest. And virtually all our guards who were there to fight got trapped by the fire, cut off from escape.
“We lost hundreds of people,” she said softly. “We lost Lucretia,” she added after a pause, with tears in her eyes.
“How, how was Lucretia there?” Kestrel asked in horror, his own eyes watering.
“She volunteered to go on an exercise to Elmheng. She said it would be something different – you know how she was about wanting to try new things,” Vinetia told him. “And while she was there the humans approached the forest with their army, so all the guards in Elmheng and all the militia in the western forest were sent to face them.
“We don’t really know much else. There weren’t many survivors, so we don’t know the whole story. The humans burned a huge portion of the fire, they killed off virtually every defender we had in the west, and then they just withdrew. It doesn’t make much sense,” Vinetia told him.
“How did Lucretia die?” Kestrel asked, not really wanting to know gory details, but wanting, hoping, to learn that she died gloriously in battle, without pain.
“I don’t think they actually found her body. A lot of guards were burned to death, a lot were killed in battle, hacked to pieces, and some were taken prisoner and taken away,” the messenger answered.
Kestrel’s eyes wandered about the room, then came to rest on the paper in his hand. He looked down and started to read.
He looked up again just seconds later. “It says that I’m supposed to return to Center Trunk with you immediately and report to Colonel Silvan,” he told her, holding up the short, succinct report.
“That’s all? Report to Silvan? I came all the way up here just to bring you back?” she asked.
“My training isn’t finished,” Kestrel said.
“That must not matter,” Vinetia answered. “Maybe this war with the humans is involved. They may have some plan for you.
“Do you want to start this afternoon, or wait until tomorrow?” she asked him.
“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.
“Cent
er 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, th
en 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.”
The Inner Seas Kingdoms: 01 - The Healing Spring Page 13