by Lee Dunning
“You’ve never seen anything like it,” Foxfire concluded.
“And I never will,” Kela replied, stabbing a piece of meat and shoveling it into her mouth. She chewed it to death and swallowed, pausing to wipe her mouth on her arm before attacking the next slice of meat. “We should have the sky overhead, not miles of stone.”
“A lot of our enemies frequently make their homes underground,” Foxfire pointed out.
“That’s why we have them,” Kela said, pointing her fork at W’rath and Raven. “By the way, I’ve decided I wish to have a child.”
“Uh … what?” Foxfire said, baffled. “Whatever does that have to do with what we’re discussing?”
“Nothing. I see no point in talking about something I’ll never see, and I want to have a child, so I thought I’d tell you.”
“Okay …”
“We can get started tonight.”
“I wasn’t aware you two had become mates,” Lady Swiftbrook said.
“Me neither,” Foxfire said, his face nearly as scarlet as his hair.
Kela looked up from her plate. “It makes sense. We’re the leaders of the Wood Elves, we should reproduce. I can overlook your prissiness.”
“That’s generous of you. Not particularly romantic …”
Kela made one of her now familiar snorts. “Romance belongs in those silly songs you sing. I’m strong and I fight well, you should be pleased that I’ve chosen you.”
Foxfire appeared anything but pleased. “Do we wait for bed, or do you prefer to simply rut right here on the table?”
Much to everyone but Foxfire’s amusement, Kela seemed to give that some serious thought. Then she flashed a wicked grin, betraying her intent to have some fun at Foxfire’s expense. “I guess it should wait until we’re alone,” she said.
“Thank the gods for that little bit of decency,” Foxfire sighed. “I probably shouldn’t ask this, but what if I don’t want to have anything to do with this?”
Kela blinked, genuinely surprised. “I’ve already made it plain I’m a superior choice for providing our people with offspring. How could you not want to be a part of that?”
“Well, there’s that bothersome romance thing you mentioned.”
“I thought males liked to fornicate. Wait a minute … you don’t prefer owl bears do you?”
“Owl bears?! Who the hell would screw an owl bear?!”
“I’ve heard rumors about my cousin G’odlin,” Kela said. “He’s definitely odd. Always goes about looking stunned and smelling funny.”
“Yeah, that’s suspicious all right. Gods … Can we discuss this tomorrow? I really need to take some time to wrap my head around the whole idea of doing my duty as opposed to giving a girl flowers and maybe reciting some poetry to her before jumping on top of her.”
Kela shrugged. “Do what you must. There will be no jumping on top of me, though. I won’t have your bones stabbing into me. We’ll do this civilized, with me on top.”
“Oh, of course! How thoughtless of me,” Foxfire said, standing. “If you folks will excuse me, I’ve quite lost my appetite.”
Without another word, Kela jumped up and followed after Foxfire, presumably to torture her male counterpart further with her views on Elven reproduction. With them gone, the remaining three exchanged looks of amusement. “I’m fairly certain there isn’t a single thing I can say this evening that will top what just went on here,” W’rath chuckled.
Raven laughed as well, and suddenly realized she felt better. A thoughtful expression settled onto her face. Surely, Kela hadn’t staged the whole exchange. Could she really be that perceptive? And that subtle?
“Has your appetite returned, lass?” W’rath suddenly asked.
“It has,” Raven said, amazed. She looked sheepishly in Lady Swiftbrook’s direction.
“I’ll see what I can manage,” the Sky Elf smiled.
Once they escaped the scrutiny of the others, Kela grabbed Foxfire’s arm and dragged him toward her room. “Kela, seriously, I’m not interested,” Foxfire said, trying to pull free from her iron grip.
“Quit being an idiot and come with me,” Kela snarled. All sign of her earlier lewd behavior had evaporated, and Foxfire realized her routine at the dinner table had been a ruse to get him to leave so she could speak with him in private. He stopped resisting and followed her into her bedroom.
Once inside, Kela proceeded to check all the windows and draw the blinds. She finished by moving about the room and whispering to each of the plants cluttering up the place. Greenery covered nearly every flat surface in the room, probably Lady Swiftbrook’s attempt to make the Wood Elves feel more at home. Each plant Kela spoke to started to glow. Foxfire recognized the magic. The plants would create a sort of interference and confound anyone trying to eavesdrop on their conversation.
“You think someone is spying on us?” he asked as she finished with the final plant.
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” Kela replied. “I don’t want to take any chances though. Little of what I saw today made me feel optimistic.”
Foxfire nodded. Kela’s speech patterns had changed now that she was confident of their privacy. When around non-Wood Elves she preferred to speak in the clipped, unsophisticated manner most outsiders expected of their people. She felt it gave her an advantage—that others would underestimate her. Foxfire wasn’t sure he agreed, but he couldn’t deny her skill as an actress. She’d fooled even him this evening and he knew about her dual persona.
“So what’s so important you couldn’t wait until after dinner to talk to me? You embarrassed the hells out of me,” Foxfire said. While he admired her acting skills, he wasn’t keen on being made a fool of.
“You tell me,” Kela said. “You’re the one who babbled non-stop about ebony castles and giant glowing fungus.”
“You were listening,” Foxfire said, unable to hide his surprise.
“Of course,” Kela replied, “but more importantly I heard what you weren’t saying. Something happened during your visit down there—something awful—and you skated all around it, trying to distract me with talk of shiny rocks. You may not share my bed, but remember, I’m the one who found you half dead all those years ago and brought you into my clan. I taught you how to survive here. I know you too well—you can’t distract me with pretty stories.”
She was right, of course, Foxfire knew. When she’d found him he’d been more dead than alive. Knowing he suffered from hypothermia hadn’t done him a bit of good. A fire, lots of furs and hot drink, all provided by a primitive of the forest, had been worth more than all his years of learning. He should have known she’d see right through his false cheerfulness during dinner.
“I planned to tell you after we said our good nights to our hostess,” he said. Even to his ears he sounded petulant. He flopped into a velvet upholstered chair and regretted it immediately. The carpenter had built it for someone much taller than a Wood Elf, and his legs dangled above the floor in a less than dignified manner.
Kela smirked at his discomfort, but didn’t let it distract her. “You know I have the patience of a human,” she said. “I wasn’t about to sit there for another two hours while you pretended nothing was bothering you.”
Foxfire sighed, resigned to the fact that he couldn’t postpone telling Kela about the probable fate of the previous Wood Elf councilors. There was no point in trying to work into it slowly. Kela wasn’t exaggerating about her lack of patience. “Lord W’rath thinks someone murdered Felfahl and T’yone, and then stowed their bodies somewhere down in the Shadow Elf cavern.”
Whatever Kela had been expecting, news about the disappearance of Felfahl and T’yone wasn’t it. She dropped down onto her bed as if her legs had been cut out from under her. “How does he know this? Can he see the past?” All of the cockiness had left Kela’s voice. She sounded much younger than her five hundred and sixty-three years.
Foxfire ran a hand through his spiky hair. He’d nearly been ill back in the cave. Betw
een his anger and his sense of helplessness he’d been nearly overcome. “No,” he said, watching the emotions flitting across Kela’s stricken face. “He deduced it based on how the timing of the Council’s decision to collar the Shadow Elves coincided with Felfahl and T’yone’s disappearance, and because of our surprise when our Rings of Unbinding didn’t work. He believes the change in the requirements for the ring’s usage came about because our kin defied the council and removed the collars.”
As much as he understood the emotions Kela felt, she still took him by surprise when she leapt from the bed and launched herself at him, dragging him from his chair by the front of his shirt. “Those bastards killed them for that?” She snarled into his face, shaking him as though she suspected his involvement.
“Their disappearance happened at the same time as the collars—it’s just too much of a coincidence,” he managed in between shakes. When Kela finally released him he collapsed onto the floor. He’d never been able to match Kela’s fire, he tended to approach controversy … well, how he had in the caves—lots of words and little action.
Kela turned away, shoulders, arms and fists tensed, ready for a fight. When she finally spoke again her voice had taken on almost an animal growl. “What are we going to do about it?”
Foxfire had to force himself to answer. W’rath’s words came back to him and he dreaded Kela’s reaction when she heard what the Shadow Elf had advocated. “Lord W’rath doesn’t believe any good can come of pursuing the matter. Since Reaper, T’sane and Solorn K’hul died at Second Home, making accusations at this point would only harm the living. He’s concerned the Shadow Elves would take the brunt of any conflict that erupts.”
The expected flurry of outrage didn’t manifest. Kela’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t say a word, but nodded, the only acknowledgement she gave indicating she’d heard and understood him. Slowly, her hands, no longer clenched, reached up to cover her face.
Foxfire came to his feet, more alarmed than he’d ever been when faced with Kela’s fiery passion. He drew up to her, but didn’t dare touch her. She sensed his closeness, though, and her entire body shuddered with her attempts to rein in her grief. “Kela,” he said, not at all sure what she needed from him.
“What has happened to us?” she said.
Foxfire shook his head, as much at a loss as she. She couldn’t see the gesture, but his silence provided all the answer she needed. She sucked in a big snuffling breath and composed herself. “You’re better at reading people than I,” she said. “Do you think we can trust this Lord W’rath?”
The bard’s mind tripped over the events of the past several hours. “Right now our agendas align, so for now I’d say, yes.”
“Damned wishy-washy answer,” Kela muttered, a trace of her normal self re-emerging. “I guess that’s as good as we can hope for right now.”
“He says he’ll help us with Oblund,” Foxfire said. Kela stood a little straighter upon hearing this news. Foxfire still wasn’t certain W’rath could provide them with the help they needed, but he needed to give Kela something positive to focus on.
Kela’s breathing returned to normal. “Tomorrow during the council meeting we need to make sure we tell them about the magi Oblund has hired on. It may help convince the rest of them to throw in their lot with us.”
“Only if they believe there’s a connection between the magi and what happened at Second Home,” Foxfire replied.
Kela turned back to face him. Damp streaks still stained her cheeks, but she had buried all other traces of her despair beneath a layer of determination. “You are the worst archer I’ve ever met,” she said, “and every time you use a knife I half expect you to cut your own hand off. But when it comes to jabbering, no one can do a better job of persuading people to side with us. You’ll make them see that aiding us will help the entire nation.”
“That was almost a compliment,” Foxfire said. As much as he wanted to protest Kela’s assessment of his fighting prowess, in truth he had even less faith in his abilities than she did.
“It’s the best you’re likely to get from me,” Kela replied. She had taken up his long-fingered hands in her root strong ones, and stood gazing intently at him with her chestnut brown eyes.
Foxfire realized he’d been too quick to assume Kela’s had dismissed her grief. It still radiated out at him from those bottomless eyes. Her pride would never allow her to openly admit to being vulnerable. “I know I was pretty adamant earlier,” he said, “but considering all we learned today, I don’t think we should sleep alone.”
Kela snorted and shoved him back into the uncomfortable chair. She turned away, but not before Foxfire caught a glimpse of the gratitude she tried so hard to hide.
It took an act of will for Raven to force herself to undress before collapsing into the great cloud of a bed dominating the guest room assigned to her. She needed to bathe again, but exhaustion chased away any serious thoughts on the matter. Raven didn’t even have enough energy to admire the soft, feminine decor, so different from the rustic tree house she’d called home these past three years. Instead, she carefully tucked her precious books from Lady Stormchaser under her pillow, and burrowed into the bed, pulling the down-filled covering over herself.
She still felt guilty about not telling the others about the books. But even the most recent entries in Lady Stormchaser’s journal were written in the ancestor of the modern Elven language, and she couldn’t divine its meaning. W’rath claimed he could read ancient Elvish, but until they found him some reading spectacles, that wasn’t going to happen. She decided she would bring it up to him in the morning and see if they couldn’t find out how to acquire a pair for him. She knew he’d insist on discretion, he couldn’t help himself, but she doubted they could keep something like this from getting around. An elf old enough to have eyes which had adapted to seeing only distances clearly would cause gossip. Most likely, the jeweler would have to create the spectacles completely from scratch, and because of the specialized nature of the enchantment for the lenses, they would have to bring in an additional party to help out. Raven and W’rath couldn’t hope to keep word from spreading.
The strangest part was that W’rath’s advanced age had proven such a novelty. She knew why the Exiles didn’t live for several thousand years. Treachery and danger filled the cities of the Exiles, and it took supreme skill and luck to live beyond four or five hundred years. But the people of First Home? Many elves as old as W’rath, if not older, should reside on the protected islands of First Home. She had fully expected to meet legends when she arrived, but instead it appeared there weren’t more than a handful of elves over three thousand. Not one of the original elves seemed to exist any longer. Raven had gotten the impression K’hul was no more than five or six hundred years old, and yet he would step into the High Council as the oldest living descendant of the First. How could that be?
In all the reading she’d done over the years, she’d never run across any mention of the fall of the First. He’d had many children by many females over the years, and yet, aside from Umbral little information could be found on them.
What had happened to them?
In his own room, W’rath sucked thoughtfully on one of the fragrant burning sticks Stench had given him, and pondered much the same thing as Raven. Cut off from the rest of the elves for thousands of years, he’d heard little about what took place after his exile. Until the moment he walked off the ship, and no one had said a word, W’rath had feared someone from his past would recognize him and reveal him to the masses. Instead, he found a people devoid of their past, their histories rewritten, their society completely changed, and none old enough to have marched with his father into battle.
From what he could gather, even information concerning him, the elves greatest pariah, stood completely at odds with reality. Not entirely surprising, of course. His father would have seen to it. But some of the things Raven had told him seemed very odd. His physical description, in many of the historical works
she’d studied, painted him as a grotesque, twisted creature, barely recognizable as an elf. In all his days, W’rath had never seen such a thing among his people. Other races suffered from birth defects as little to no magic flowed in their veins, but elves were magic incarnate. They weren’t born with club feet or cleft palates or any other flaw.
W’rath supposed that the descriptions of him could have originally been intended, not as a true depiction of his appearance, but rather as a metaphor for his inner self. The writer’s meaning, lost over time, could have inspired those who had not known him personally to portray him as a physical monstrosity.
W’rath shook his head and inhaled the aromatic smoke into his aching lungs. If any one of them had truly known his father, they’d realize that the First would never have tolerated a defective child. While other cultures left their unwanted babes on a rock to die of exposure or animals, the First would have feared the child might somehow survive. He would have seen personally to the child’s destruction. Even so, the First had looked with shame upon W’rath’s small size and less than impressive strength. He’d wanted a child who could stand toe-to-toe with the enormous orc and ogre clans they fought against; instead the fates had mocked him and given him a son who had to use trickery, guile and a powerful mind to subdue his opponents. It didn’t matter how many times the First ran into a foe he could not overwhelm with brawn or magic, he still loathed the boy who made victory possible through other means.
Hmmph, and now you’re gone, and here I am left to deal with another one of your messes, Father.
W’rath stretched out on the bed. In truth, he found it quite comfortable and he could understand how these young, soft elves had come to enjoy the embrace of sleep. He didn’t think it likely he’d manage to wean them from such dangerous behavior, but he had far more important issues to concern himself with at the moment.