The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Shalkan stepped daintily out onto the trail and regarded Kellen with narrowed eyes. The unicorn’s long equine face was not particularly well designed to convey emotion, but Kellen had never had any particular trouble sensing Shalkan’s moods, nor did he now.

  Shalkan was irritated.

  But at what? What had Kellen done to deserve that look?

  Finally the unicorn snorted. “No hat,” Shalkan said flatly, staring at Kellen’s head in disgust.

  Kellen reached up, slowly, and touched the brim. He’d forgotten he was wearing it, actually, but Shalkan seemed to have taken a complete and irrational dislike to it. To a hat?

  “It keeps the rain off,” Kellen said.

  Shalkan put his ears back and switched his long tufted tail. “It isn’t raining. And it is an abomination,” the unicorn said crossly. “Either get rid of it—or walk.”

  Kellen looked helplessly back at Idalia. She shrugged, and held out her hand for the hat; he could tell she was having a hard time keeping her face composed. Grumbling under his breath, Kellen unknotted the chinstring and walked back to pass the hat to Idalia, who tied it on the back of her saddle, her face carefully expressionless.

  What does he think he is, a fashion critic?

  Hatless, Kellen went back down the trail to “acquire his mount.”

  He was still without proper saddle or tack for the unicorn, and so was riding Shalkan bareback, but so long as they didn’t have to run for their lives, he ought to be able to manage not to fall off. The unicorn’s fur was still as slick and slippery as ever, but he did his best to balance carefully and not give Shalkan any further cause for complaint. After a moment though, he thought he could guess the real source of the unicorn’s bad temper. Shalkan was twitching under him as if he were being defiled by sting-flies. The hat had nothing to do with it.

  Shalkan might have agreed to travel with Idalia. He might agree there was a very good reason to do so. But the unicorn was a creature of magic, bound by magic’s laws. Just because something was necessary didn’t mean you had to like it.

  He began to have a bit more sympathy for his friend. Apparently the hat was only an excuse for an exercise of irritation, and a way to vent some of it.

  Poor Shalkan; Kellen wondered what it felt like. Was it like a rash you couldn’t scratch? Or a headache? Or that twitchy feeling he got in his legs when he’d been awake too long and couldn’t lie down yet? Or all of them?

  “You ride on ahead,” Kellen called. Idalia looked back, nodded with understanding, and nudged Coalwind with her heels, increasing the distance between them.

  Shalkan sighed, stretching his neck out very long and shaking his head. He also stopped twitching. Idalia was still in sight, and if anything attacked either of them, the other could get there quickly enough, but this arrangement was going to make it rather difficult to have a conversation, other than with Shalkan.

  “It really is a very stupid hat,” the unicorn said, in as much of an apology as Kellen was going to get.

  “Idalia thinks that if we look like Mountain Traders, we’ll blend in better,” Kellen offered meekly. Although how Kellen was going to blend in at all while riding a unicorn was another question altogether.

  Shalkan sighed again. “A good plan, as far as it goes. And the sooner we are over the border—where there is no need to blend in at all—the better for all of us.”

  Kellen made no comment. The unicorn followed after Idalia at a sedate walk.

  “I’ll—see if I can get used to her,” Shalkan said after a moment. “This isn’t safe.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Kellen agreed, and left it at that. But he did take one last look over his shoulder as they crested the tallest hill they’d passed so far. Their little cabin wasn’t visible, but in the farthest distance, dim and as tiny as a child’s toy, he could see the carved walls of Merryvale. No longer Merry, he thought with a sigh. He wondered if he’d ever see the place or any of the people in it again.

  It was a melancholy thought.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Into Elven Lands

  THEY KEPT NORTH and west, and by the end of the first sennight, Kellen and Idalia were able to ride side by side. If she noticed that Shalkan had early on had problems with her presence, or if it continued to bother Shalkan, neither ever commented except for Shalkan’s single, oblique remark at the beginning of the journey.

  On the rare occasions that they were able to find a roof to sleep beneath in village, croft, or smallholding—for Idalia’s Wildmage skills guaranteed them a welcome everywhere in the Western Hills—Shalkan would leave them an hour or so before they reached it, and if any of their hosts found it odd that their visitors should arrive one mounted and one on foot leading a pack mule, none of them said anything about that, either.

  By the end of their second sennight of travel, Idalia informed Kellen that they were unlikely to encounter any more dwelling-places, for though they were still far from the borders, they were close enough to them that no one was likely to settle there for fear of encountering Elvenkind.

  By this time, they were well into extremely steep hills—or small mountains, it didn’t matter which you called them. Heavily wooded, with nothing for a sign of civilization except the road itself, they had to choose their camping places carefully. Idalia did something subtle that warned dangerous wildlife off, but there were other dangers, including human rogues. By now, in the lands they had left behind, the City Lawspeakers were proclaiming the sovereignty of Armethalieh through every hamlet and village, the members of the Militia were moving in, and the Scouring Hunt was coursing in search of Wildmages and Otherfolk.

  Kellen wasn’t sure exactly how far the High Council had extended the borders, but one thing he did know for sure was: the one thing the Hunt wouldn’t find was him and Idalia. Kellen hoped that the discovery would send his father into a fit of apoplexy.

  In their third sennight of travel (as far as Kellen could tell; he was actually starting to lose track of how long they’d been on the road, he discovered), he started to wonder if maybe the smallholders had a good reason for not wanting to encounter Elves.

  Until now, the two of them had been traveling through lands fairly similar to those around the Wildwood: a landscape of high granite hills and deep river valleys filled with forests of hardwood and evergreen. They’d had no trouble finding good grazing for their animals to supplement the grain they’d brought, or water for drinking and cooking and washing.

  Now that began to change.

  It had been late summer when they left the Wildwood; now it was—maybe, if you stretched a point—the very beginning of autumn. The trees should just be starting to turn; the leaves yellowing. Later—the change of seasons was apparently similar to what he’d been used to in the City, only much more intense and extreme—would come the riot of autumnal color, then brown, then winter bareness.

  But here the leaves were already withered and brown—too soon. The grass was sere, and the horse and mule mouthed it without pleasure. Shalkan made no complaints, but Kellen had no difficulty in telling that the unicorn was deeply troubled.

  Worse followed the farther west they went. The smaller streams were muddy and low; the rivers that should have been swollen with late-season rain ran shallowly at the bottom of their beds. Sometimes they were forced to rely upon Shalkan to find water for them, which meant that Kellen walked while the unicorn roved along the periphery of their path, hunting for water.

  The closer they came toward the Elven borders, the worse it got. The grass now was parched and dry, hardly worth the effort of chewing for the animals, and the bushes were withered and skeletal.

  Shouldn’t it be raining? Somewhere? Where’s the water?

  But Kellen—no farmer—wasn’t quite sure that something was actually wrong, or if it was, how badly wrong. All his life he’d heard about the enchanting, green, misty beauty of the dangerous Elven lands, but so much of the old wondertales had been wrong. It was always possible that the stories had
gotten it all backward. And Idalia—whose face became more grim by the day—wasn’t saying.

  But he was sure of one thing. Idalia had not expected to find things in this condition. And neither had Shalkan.

  IT was midmorning, somewhere in their second fortnight of travel (Kellen was thinking hard, counting back and trying to remember exactly how many days they’d been on the road). They’d left open country behind, and were riding through woodland once more. The warmth of the early-autumn day contrasted oddly with the sere winter-bleakness of the barren trees. The forest floor beneath the animals’ hooves was thickly carpeted with fallen leaves, and the travelers made a faint, crackling, shuffling sound as they moved through the leaf-litter. The road they followed was now a bare little track, hardly a road at all; it wasn’t what Kellen had pictured to himself when he’d thought of a road through Elven lands.

  The forest seemed much too empty, even to Kellen’s untutored senses. Not only should there be deer and birds, rabbits and squirrels, but Otherfolk as well: sylphs and dryads, fauns, brownies, pixies, gnomes … the animals might flee from mounted strangers, but the Otherfolk should be drawn to both Shalkan and Idalia, and even if he couldn’t see them, Kellen ought to at least be able to sense their presence with his Wildmage senses. But these woods were silent and empty. It gave him a very creepy feeling. It felt as if they were riding through a graveyard.

  “Declare yourselves,” a hard voice said abruptly.

  Kellen blinked. A man had appeared out of nowhere, stepping in front of Idalia’s horse.

  No, not a man. An Elf.

  He wore clothing the same winter brown as the woods they rode through, his simple tunic and close-fitting leggings embroidered with a complicated pattern in grey that would make him impossible to see from even a few feet away, for the stitching mimicked the lines and shadows of the forest itself. He was holding a smooth-polished stave as tall as he was, and a bow and a quiver of arrows was slung over his shoulder. Over the tunic was a cowl and hood. The hood was pushed back now, and Kellen could clearly see the Elf’s pointed ears and shell-pale skin.

  Where had he come from? He hadn’t been anywhere in sight before.

  “Idalia, Wildmage, and her brother, Kellen Tavadon, also a Wildmage,” Idalia answered promptly. “Seeking sanctuary in Elven lands, swearing no harm to tree, root, and leaf. Llylance, I see you,” she added formally.

  The Elven guard sighed with relief and suddenly looked far less austere. He loosened his grip on his quarterstaff, leaning on it now instead of holding it ready to strike. “Idalia! By the First Leaf, you return in a good hour! We had word of your coming. An escort waits to accompany you down into the city.”

  “We thank you for your kindness and the honor that you do us,” Idalia said. Kellen had never heard her speak so ceremoniously before. He hoped this wasn’t going to be something they had to do all the time while they were here.

  A second Elf appeared at Kellen’s side, also seeming to sprout directly from the forest floor itself. He was dressed almost identically to Llylance, save that he held his bow ready to fire.

  Kellen felt his eyes go huge. The Elf hadn’t made a single sound. He’d just been … there.

  “Don’t be too impressed; they’re just very, very good at hiding,” Idalia muttered, so low that Kellen was sure only he could hear.

  “I see you, Canderil,” she said politely.

  “I see you, Idalia,” Canderil answered, with equal politeness. He released the tension on his bowstring and slung the bow over his shoulder, retrieving his own stave from … somewhere. Even though Kellen, mindful of Idalia’s words, was watching carefully, he couldn’t see how it was done. One moment Canderil’s hand was empty. The next, the stave was there.

  Canderil gestured for them to accompany him. Llylance simply vanished before Kellen’s eyes, and once more Kellen had no inkling as to how he did it, though he watched carefully.

  And now, it seemed, they were free to proceed. Canderil walked beside Idalia’s horse, having taken the lead-rope of the mule from her, and Shalkan and Kellen followed behind.

  At least things didn’t seem to be continuing on the same highly formal level as before. Idalia and Canderil spoke easily and companionably about people Kellen didn’t know, very much as if they’d last seen each other a sennight ago instead of after an absence on Idalia’s part of what must be several years.

  Kellen knew very little about Elves. According to what he’d read in the Great Library when he was searching for information about the lands outside Armethalieh, they still visited the City on rare occasions—hard though that was to imagine—but of course no one outside the High Council would have seen them then. And he knew very little about them from his studies with Anigrel, and trusted what Anigrel had told him even less.

  The Priests of the Light taught that the Elves were one of the Lesser Races, made by the Light in imitation of Man to serve as a lesson and a rebuke. From his own unsupervised studies in the Great Library, Kellen doubted that: the Elven race was immensely old and civilized, building great cities while humans were still gathering in tribes. Though people thought of Elves as living forever, in fact they were only very, very long-lived: the average Elven lifespan was on the order of a thousand years, and only at the very end of their lives did they show any signs of age at all. Canderil here might well have watched the first stones of the City being laid centuries ago, and wasn’t that a sobering thought?

  Kellen did welcome the chance to be able to get a good look at one of the Elvenkind without being caught staring, since Canderil seemed to be entirely caught up in his conversation with Idalia, paying no particular heed to either Kellen or Shalkan, as though he saw people riding unicorns every day.

  Of course, being an Elf, maybe he did.

  And despite his firm intention to disbelieve everything he’d read about Elves in the City histories, the more he watched Canderil, the more Kellen understood why the City-folk, and even the Light-Priests, wrote of Elvenkind as they did.

  Like his companion Llylance, whom he resembled as closely as a twin, Canderil was tall and slender. His silky black hair was elaborately braided, and despite that, still fell to his hips. His eyes were as black as midnight, his skin as pale as pearl, and it was clear that Elves never needed to shave (this was a matter for envy, as Kellen did need to shave, and both sharp razors and shaving mirrors were difficult to come by in the Wildwood). With his high cheekbones and faintly slanted eyes, Canderil possessed an oddly androgynous yet definitely male glamour, as exotic as it was unsettling.

  He was beautiful; there was no other appropriate word for it. And worse, thought Kellen, watching him with an increasing mixture of fascination and discomfort, he was perfect. Canderil never put a foot wrong, never made a clumsy gesture or an awkward one. Even just walking beside Coalwind, he looked as if he were dancing.

  Even his clothes were perfect. At first Kellen had been a little disappointed by the simple grey-and-brown costumes he and Llylance wore. They seemed too similar to what he and Idalia had worn in the Wildwood, albeit made of finer materials, and of cloth, not skins. But the longer he looked, the more Kellen realized that his first assessment had been too hasty.

  The dun-colored cloth was the finest weaving he’d ever seen, a wool as soft as Shalkan’s coat. It shimmered softly in the light, and against it the grey embroidery glowed, now silver, now dark, in an ever-shifting pattern that Kellen felt he could be content to gaze at for the rest of his life. And no matter how Canderil moved in it, nothing wrinkled, nothing pulled. He wore his garb like an extension of his own skin.

  Kellen had been the son of the most powerful man in Armethalieh. He had despised the luxuries that went with that high office, but he was familiar with them. He knew exactly how much time and skill it took to make clothing one-tenth as fine as this—and if these were such clothes as Canderil wore for hunting in the woods, what did formal Elven clothing look like?

  The Priests of the Light taught that Elves corrupted hu
mankind and caused them to despair, and so honest folk should shun their company, should they be offered it. And Kellen supposed that in a way that was true. If just watching Canderil walk through a forest made him feel grubby and inadequate, what would seeing a whole city of Elves dressed in their finest clothes do? But one of the oldest Histories he’d read had said it better, he thought: “The Elves have elevated mere living into a form of Art.”

  “When you live for a thousand years, you have a lot of time to get things right,” Shalkan said quietly.

  “Uh … yeah,” Kellen said. But he was comforted by Shalkan’s assurance—and the fact that the unicorn, as perfect in his way as any Elf, had been perceptive enough to give that assurance.

  “But I have been rude,” Canderil said, turning sideways to regard Kellen and Shalkan. “In my eagerness to hear Idalia’s news, I have neglected Sentarshadeen’s other guests. I hope you will not think me discourteous. Perhaps there are things you would know, and I would hear your news as well.”

  It would take Kellen a long time to realize that adult Elves simply didn’t ask direct questions—if an Elf wanted to know something, the polite method was to phrase it as a statement, which the hearer could—just as politely—choose to disregard. Kellen simply assumed he was being asked a question, and after glancing at Idalia to see if it was all right, launched into a slightly tangled and much edited tale of how he and Idalia had come to be traveling into Elven lands. If more than a touch of bitterness crept into his voice when he spoke about what had been done to him by Lycaelon, well, he hoped that Canderil would understand.

  As he spoke, the sere landscape was replaced by healthier woodland, and the empty air filled with the proper sounds of wildlife and wind-inthe-branches. They reached the edge of the trees, and Kellen got his first sight of Sentarshadeen.