“Well we’re certainly not the first to be here, Crowndan. This fort was built on old ruins, and as you’ve seen I’ve explored many others.”
“It’s ours, now.”
“As you say.” The argument mattered not to me.
We trudged back up to the Fort, the elves and Crowndan’s men outpacing us. Crowndan rested a hand on the small of my back at every incline in the road. I moved away as carefully as I could, but there was not much room to avoid him with all the foot and cart traffic.
We arrived in my father’s office. Whatever type of meeting had been requested, it didn’t seem to have been a matter of state for the elves. My father was standing behind his desk, the elves nearer to his fire, their snowshoes and walking sticks set a very orderly line against the wall. Aerik was there as well, looking much better than he had yesterday.
“Eva,” my father said. “This is Prince Dalandaras, a special emissary from the Dagnar Queen.”
The man who had glanced up at me earlier stepped forward. Dalandaras, not Dalandaras, the emphasis on the second syllable and not the third as we humans often butchered their pronunciation. The name had a familiar intonation to it. I had seen something akin to it in my ruins, I was sure. But there wasn’t a full connection, and I couldn’t place a meaning to it. Every time I blinked, something about the elves shifted. At first it was their clothes—underneath their cloaks I could see embroidery on their tunic, but the colors seemed to shift between faint silver and gold. The sheen to their skin that I had seen earlier seemed to rise and fade with every flicker of the flames in the hearth.
I remembered myself and managed a bow. “Sir.”
My father moved out from behind his desk. “We have been ordered to give Prince Dalandaras our full cooperation in anything he requires.”
I turned to the elf. “And what exactly do your require from me?”
“To see your ruins.”
Zarah had been right. Maybe Father had told the elves in an effort to keep me from exploring them. “That is, unfortunate, my lord. I’m afraid that one of them has become extremely inaccessible.”
“It is more important to learn how you deciphered the writing.”
Father must have told them that. It served me right for sharing that with him.
“Why?”
“Lady Eva,” my father warned.
Dalandaras ignored my father. “There are things there that should not be known. How did you do it? Did you find some odd bit of translation tucked away somewhere, something scribbled by the odd explorer who managed to make it out of the ruins alive?”
“I did it. No one else.”
“You deciphered the writing?” It was a deep voice, with a cutting edge underneath that rankled.
I felt my back straighten. “Yes, I deciphered the writing.”
“How?”
“That is my concern, not yours. If you are worried about others discovering what is written, you needn’t worry.”
“You have made considerable advances into the mountain, farther than any man, elf or human, has dared go before, so I have reason to worry.”
I tried to restrain my pride, and failed. “Do you doubt that I am capable of it because I am human, because I am a woman, or because I am young?”
“All three. The last two—woman and young—count against you because you are human, and your kind does not seem to treat its women or young very wisely.”
“Perhaps because I am young, human, and a woman, I had the courage to dare where men have given up.”
“Lady Eva,” my father warned once again.
The lady elf turned towards her prince. “Zi an lirren.”
The words weren’t quite the same, but they were close to the ruins’ language. She is…something. I couldn’t quite make it out. It wasn’t quite elvish either, not with the ‘z’ sound.
Dalandaras shifted. “Le.” That was yes.
“Li anwe din.”
The corner of the Prince’s mouth twitched upward in what I thought was his way of smiling, but it was gone so quickly I wasn’t sure. “Li aun.”
I caught my father looking at me with a raised brow; he discreetly held up an index finger and circled it around. It was a House Carrin battle signal. My mother had not been remiss in my education and made sure that I learned it. Whether my father knew that I knew it or whether he did it out of habit, I wasn’t sure. It meant, do you understand?
But in return I placed my fists together, and then touched a finger to my lips: I think it is their own battle tongue. Father circled his finger again. I simply held up my own: wait a moment.
Dalandaras and his companion stopped talking.
“I suspect something interesting just happened,” Dalandaras’ last companion said in our tongue. “”And I don’t think it had anything to do with their incomprehension of our language.”
I looked to the lady elf. “I like you, too.” I looked to Dalandaras. “As for you, I haven’t decided yet.”
For the first time in these proceedings, Dalandaras appeared as if he had been knocked off his sure footing. I was a little smug.
I took a step forward. “I have heard a bit of your elven language, and that was not quite it. Did you know that what you were speaking has its origins not only in your native tongue, but also in the language that I found in my ruins? I may be wrong in the specific nuances of what you said, but I have a general understanding.”” I looked to the lady elf and placed a hand over my heart. “Eva.”
She reciprocated. “Eliawen, ambassador to your Northern territories.”
I looked to the other companion. “Eva.”
He repeated the gesture. “Lorandal.”
“Since you seem to comprehend us,” Dalandaras said, his composure returned. “Would you care to enlighten us as to what you and your father communicated just then?”
I looked to Father, who nodded. “Father asked if I understood what you were saying. I replied that I thought you were using your own battle language.”
Dalandaras stepped towards me until he could have touched me had he reached out. He examined me for what seemed like hours, but it could not have been more than a few seconds. Finally, he nodded. “Felif, du al.” Perhaps, you will do.
“Li al.” I will do. I struggled to find the bridge between his battle tongue and my ruins’ language. Under my words I could feel the dark undertow of what I had spoken to the apparition. “Du?”
He grunted. “You do not quite have the accent.”
“What exactly are you looking for, Prince?”
“This does not leave this room.”
My father answered. “It does not.”
“We are looking for a door.” Dalandaras gestured, and Eliawen produced a parchment, unfolding it over my father’s desk. We huddled around, Dalandaras coming next to me as he revealed a drawing. “This door. It must remain sealed. If it has been opened, I am tasked with sealing it again. It is imperative that it remained sealed, for everyone’s safety.”
“Save your breath,” I replied, turning the drawing towards myself. It was accurate in height and detail, though the sketch of the seal was smudged and faint. The dark undertow seemed to tug harder at me. “I know it. Have you have seen this door personally?”
“My grandfather has. He drew this. But he was very young when that occurred, and the others who knew its location are dead. His memory is very fragmented. The only other details he has given are of the hall outside the door. It was arched high and carved entirely of pale stone, and the floor was carved with—”
“Circles.” Aerik said.
“Seals,” I corrected. “Protective wards. Like the one on the door. Only their purpose is to protect those standing in them.”
“You didn’t mention magic,” my father admonished.
“So that’s what those were,” Aerik murmured, his eyes on me.
“You’ve been there,” Dalandaras said.
“Worse,” my father said.
“Your door’s been opened,”
Aerik said. “There were looters looking for treasures to sell off, and they broke the ward. Eva tried to stop them, but they didn’t listen.”
“Tell us,” Dalandaras said.
I did; I told them about the apparition, as much as I told my father yesterday. While Lorandal and Eliawen seemed shocked by my tale, Dalandaras didn’t. Whatever his grandfather had told him, Lorandal and Eliawen were not privy to it.
“A crowned apparition?” Eliawen asked. “I do not know of this. Eshal?”
Their word for prince, or close to it. But Dalandaras gave the smallest shake of his head in reply. Those sharp blue eyes met mine. “You were very certain that opening the door would be a bad occurrence.”
I was suddenly aware of how stiffly my father was standing. His eyes rested on the paper, almost determinedly so, and even in the pause he didn’t look at me. “I am not a fool,” I said slowly. “Nor disrespectful to some other beliefs. If the door was sealed, it was sealed for a reason, whether because I believed the warning or because I did not want to desecrate what seemed to be a holy site.”
“You tried to stop the looters.”
“I believed it was sealed for a reason,” I repeated. “I was in no hurry to find out why.”
“Unfortunately you have found out why. This is a bit of a difficult situation,” Dalandaras said.
“I’d imagine.” I replied.
“There was something else,” Aerik said, looking at me. “After they were pulling me up, you didn’t immediately follow. I saw the apparition near you.”
“I was standing in a ward.”
“You spoke to it, I thought, though I didn’t hear any voice in reply.”
“It spoke to me.” And I spoke to my mother. How could I tell them about her? No, I couldn’t tell them. My mother was mine and mine alone—I was not going to share her, not with some strange elves, not with Aerik, and most certainly not with my father.
“Eva,” Aerik said quietly. “Tell us.”
With their eyes on me, I would have to give them something. But what? Then I remembered its words to me. “It said my name. My Northern name.”
“You are a Northern woman, are you not?” Dalandaras asked.
“Only half,” my father interjected. His gaze was still firmly on the drawing on the door. He ran a finger around the smudged seal. “Eva has spent most of her life in the South. She does not answer to her Northern name.”
My face flushed again, but this time it felt uncomfortably like guilt. Father had tried to call me by my Northern name when I first arrived, but I had simply ignored him. But why should I feel guilt for a father content to forget I existed, a father who seemed to know something more about this than I did? “The apparition also welcomed me home,” I said, and my father finally looked up. When he met my eyes, I added: “It seemed pleased.”
He said nothing, but the flush left his face.
“We must see these ruins. Today,” Dalandaras said. “As soon as possible.”
My father nodded. “So must I.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The ill-omened sense that I had as we left the Fort only increased when we turned off the trade road and into the mountains. The trails that I, Aerik, and the others had carved out were still faintly visible after the snowfall, as were our uneven, hurried tracks from when we had fled the collapsing caves. I hadn’t brought many people to the ruins because I didn’t want a horde of people destroying the place with their clumsy feet and greedy hands. Now, I was practically leading my own army through the narrow mountain pass. Aerik, Dalandaras, and my father followed me closely. Crowndan, Eliawen, and Lorandal were not far behind, along with Tunir and Iasul. Zarah stayed with her father Sir Aros, and he had insisted on bringing four strong men to help Tunir and Iasul with the ropes.
I didn’t like it.
I had not looked back as we had fled to the Fort. I expected to see some sort of devastation, a half-collapsed mountain and a huge mound of rubble. But there seemed to be little disturbance at all. The mountains’ slopes looked gradual even from the short distance of the Fort, but here the rocks were sharp and angular, thrusting upward in large spikes, the snow that covered them taking on the same honed shape. The path eventually became narrower and the rock walls steeper, until we could walk only two abreast. Dalandaras won the unspoken war between him, Aerik, and my father, and I found him walking next to me.
The elves’ snowshoes were longer and narrower than ours, though as far as I could tell made of the same wood and rawhide binding. Dalandaras glided with ease across the snow, moving as if it each step was some small part of a dance; I thudded along ungracefully. I caught him looking at me frequently, or I thought I did, as I used my labored movements as an excuse to look at him and I caught his eye several times for the briefest of moments.
But as an hour passed, and the entrance to the ruins drew uncomfortably close, I finally had to ask a question. “You are certain that this must be done today?”
“It has already consumed four souls, and I have means to imprison the thing,” he replied. His voice was flat, but even so there was a strange intonation to it. It felt as if, had he tried, he could hypnotize with his words. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Perhaps it was an elven trait, or perhaps it was Dalandaras himself.
“How is it possible to imprison a ghost?”
“Why do you call it a ghost?”
“I could hardly consider it a living person. What would you call it?”
“I can call it nothing, as I have not seen it. My grandfather has a word for it, but it does not translate well into your language.”
“Try.”
“There is no good word. ‘Ghost’ is not it, nor is ‘undead’. It is best to explain it as living, yet not living. Dead, and yet not dead. A ghost, yes, but still of flesh to an extent.”
“That is not very helpful.”
“The apparition, as you call it, is not as resistant to a good blade as you think. It does not like fire, as you’ve discovered. My grandfather has instructed me what to do with it.”
“Why isn’t your grandfather here, as he is the one who seems to know the most about this thing?”
“He could not come,” Dalandaras replied. His tone was hard.
What had been a gentle slope grew steeper, and it was always a path that was a labor for me. We crested the highest point, and the steep walls of the canyon suddenly disappeared. Before us was a wide, open courtyard. It was cut into the mountains themselves, its walls rising straight upward until they suddenly angled off into the mountains’ steep slopes. They curved away from us in a half circle, unbroken but for a few other paths like the one we had climbed up. The ground was covered in dark gray flagstones. No snow rested upon it, even though it must have fallen during the storm.
Directly opposite us the wall rose sharply into a spear point, almost touching the faint cloud cover. At its base was a set of large stone doors similar to those deep in the ruins. They had been easy to open, but now they were off their strong metal hinges and twisted inward. In the shadows behind them I could just barely see some stone rubble, and there was a scattering of smaller stones across the entrance. A great crack ran from the stone frame upward. In our haste to leave, we had not seen the damage done.
“This was not the place we searched,” Sir Aros said as he passed by with his men. Crowndan was close at his heels, but my father and Aerik lingered near. I found it hard to step any closer.
“Where did you search, then?” Zarah asked her father as she, Tunir, and Iasul caught up with them.
I didn’t listen for an answer as we bent down to undo our show shoes. Eliawen and Lorandal passed us, following Sir Aros to make their own inspection of the damage.
“I am not certain how urgent it is to enter the ruins,” my father said to Dalandaras. “Because while I am ordered to offer assistance, I am as reluctant to bring more men here as you are.”
“More will not be necessary.” Dalandaras said, and I found myself meeting his eyes again.
&
nbsp; “My lord!” Sir Aros called from the door.
“Excuse me.” My father left at Aros’ beckoning.
“Aerik,” Dalandaras said, the name sounding like Ehrik on his lips. “Could you excuse us for a moment?”
Aerik waited for my nod before moving on. He was rubbing his splinted arm absentmindedly. I felt a pang of guilt for it.
“What do you see?” Dalandaras asked.
I frowned, and glanced around the courtyard. Nothing unusual—other than what I had already noticed, stood out to me. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”
He looked at me, his blue eyes sharp and hard. “You found this when no one else did. What do you see when you look at it? Did you feel anything when you first found this place?”
“I felt free.” The words just came out. When I realized what I said, I closed my mouth. Father had already moved ahead of us, and seemed occupied along with Sir Aros as they examined the collapse. “Do not repeat that to anyone,” I said as quietly as possible. “Please.”
“If you wish,” he replied. “But I must ask, how did you find this place when no one else did?”
“It was an easy enough path to find. We’re only a few miles from the Fort. You’re the ambassador – why did you allow our mining operations to come so close?”
“It was not meant to be found.”
“It was inevitable it would be.”
“There were precautions.”
“Then how did I and the looters find this place?”
“I hope to discover the answers to that.”
“When we find a way inside, you will have to explain some of these things.”
“Yes, but no more than I must. How strong was the feeling?”
“Is it really so important what I felt?”
“It could be.”
Strong enough that it tugged at me even now, when everything else in me told me not to return. “It was strong enough that I kept coming back.”
Zarah came running back to us. “Tunir’s managed to crawl through, along with Crowndan,” she said. “”There is not as much damage as it seems.”
“And the fracture?”
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