15
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The snakes. They think they can trick me like this, tie a spy to my ankle. Even before I was devoured by Darkness, I knew what chemas were. Sly, deceitful, cunning. But the trap they’ve set is real—I do not know what to do with these children, and their fates have been given to me, unfortunate as that may be. So I will play the game for now and allow this woman to come if it means care for the girl and boy. But I will be watching her for I know that sometime, eventually, she will make her move…
The warm air was so wet that it felt like you could have scooped up a dollop with a spoon. Tryss was used to such atmosphere, but she could see how it lagged the progress of her companions. There was nothing for it though. Slow or not, she led their path through vine-woven drapes, buggy bogs, and vivid, green gardens.
The curiosity of the children delighted her, and she answered all their questions with a smile. What was the name of the bulbous fungus on the trees? What was that brilliant blue bird that flashed across the way? Almost every extraordinary thing had a personal story attached to it, and her wild tales sent them into fits of laughter.
But through it all, Errance said nothing.
He might have walked and breathed in another world and on another journey for all the distance he set between them. If silence was a virtue, then he was indeed very righteous and rather too good to look their way. Not even the birds or the chimp ducking down from a branch could deter his concentration.
The light dwindled as the day wore on, and the children’s energy dwindled long before that. As the shadows began to settle, Tryss called for the end of their march, and both Tellie and Kelm collapsed on fallen logs.
“We must start a fire,” Tryss said, dropping her pack from her shoulder, “if we are to keep off the wild beasts of the night.”
“What sort of wild beasts?” Kelm asked, voice catching, but he quickly cleared his throat, and added, “Tellie’s scared of bears.”
“No bears,” Tryss said, smiling at Tellie’s insulted face. “Wild cats, yes, but there aren’t many large ones.”
In a matter of moments, she’d built the frame for a strong fire and struck a flame between flint under its shelter. The flame fed on the fresh sap, sparking and crackling as it spread to the rest of the wood.
“Watch the fire, I’ll be back.” She headed out a short distance into the jungle, found the sort of tree she was looking for and scrambled up into its depths. Soon she came crawling back down, branches of clustered fruit hung over her shoulders.
When she stepped back into the firelight, she found that the children were trying to sponge the sweat off their faces, and Errance was sitting on the opposite side of the fire on the far edge of a log. She handed the fruit off to Kelm and continued observing the elf prince. His gaze had not strayed from a specific spot on the ground nor had his braced posture changed. From a brief appraisal, he seemed to be handling these changes well…but…as she studied him longer, she wondered if he stared at that spot because he couldn't handle anything more. Her study wandered to his hands, almost always an accurate telling of hidden emotion, but she noticed instead the dark, yellow skin spreading from under his bandages.
“Errance, would you let me change the dressing on your wounds?”
“No.” If his mouth moved, she missed it, but his response had the force of a door slamming in place.
Taking a deep breath, she searched for another way in. There were always a few patients who feared nursing, but a calm smile and a sure hand could guide them into trust. This was more than that. He reminded her of a feral animal, still at the moment, but ready to lash, claw, and bite at the slightest provocation. “Please…those wounds will get infected.”
“They will heal.” He said it with complete certainty.
“That’s impressive.” She touched her healer's satchel and drifted a few steps closer. “But you needn't heal on your own anymore. I’m here to help.”
His eyes snapped from their exiled corner and met hers, ablaze with warning. She stopped in her tracks, resisting the urge to hide the satchel behind her back like a naughty child. Very well then. It wasn't as if she could force him.
“Oh come on, Errance.” Tellie piped up from across the fire. “You’ve got to recover your strength.”
“That’s right,” Tryss said softly. “I’m not going to hurt you. I mean I’ll try not to, but I imagine you're in pain already. If you want me to stop, I will. Or you can walk away.” As she spoke, she moved forward again and sat down on the log next to him. “May I?”
His focus had returned to his selected prison, and he didn’t answer. But neither did he refuse her outright again, so she decided to take the risk. Carefully, she slipped her hand under his arm and guided it out into the open light. A shudder passed through him, but he showed no other resistance. With experienced hands, she began unwrapping the bandages, smearing oil where the cloth met skin to better loosen it. As it pulled free from his ravaged flesh, he let out a sharp breath and yanked his arm back to his side.
“Easy,” she soothed. “Let me apply this balm. It’s very gentle, and I won’t apply it directly on your injuries. It’s just going to numb your arm. So I can wash it.”
“No,” he whispered.
She should have stopped, she knew she should have, but she already had the balm on her fingers and was already reaching.
His arm whirred towards her, meeting her wrist with a sharp crack, and he nearly fell off the log in his haste to get away. “I SAID NO!” He scrambled to his feet, whirling around to face her as if he was about to fend off an attack.
She stared, clutching her smarting wrist to her chest. The children stared, frozen in the middle of their meal.
Then Errance closed his eyes, spun on his heel, and vanished into the darkness, snapping aside branches.
They finished eating in troubled silence, Tellie and Kelm casting anxious glances into the darkness where the prince had disappeared.
“You should sleep now,” Tryss murmured, wrapping up the rest of the fruit for the morning. “We have a long day tomorrow.” She was glad her voice stayed steady and that the shadows hid the trembling of her hands.
When the first light of morning lifted the night’s shroud, Tellie groaned to find her clothes soaked with dew. In the jungle, the night barely cooled and so she still felt as hot and sticky as if she’d stepped into a bathhouse. As she stood and rubbed her aching back, she looked across the snoring body of Kelm and saw the figure leaning against a tree in the dim shadows. For a moment, her heart stilled in fear. The next, it leapt in relief, for it was Errance.
He did not look her way, in fact he was pointedly not looking at anyone. Just as pointedly, Tryss was not looking at him, sitting some distance away and peeling fruit for the morning fare.
Tellie gave an inward groan of frustration, but some of it must have slipped out because Tryss’s attention jerked to her.
“Ah, was just about to wake you,” Tryss said. “Wake Kelm, we can eat on the way. We need to keep up the pace if we want to reach the border by tonight. Walking to Oolum will only be bearable in the morning hours.”
When all was made ready, they started out again into the thick wild. The birdsong had not ceased even during the night, different kinds just exchanged shifts, and they all trilled, squawked, and hooted till Tellie’s head began to ache. No, more than her head. Every part of her was sore from sleeping on the ground and the long trek yesterday. There was very little time to pause and smell the roses, as it were. There was little time to pause at all. When there was chance of being caught by pursuing villains, one had to simply push on and on and on. Today, adventure was miserable and somebody else could have it!
To make things worse, the whole mood of the company was tense. Tryss led the way as if only she and the children existed, and Errance walked his own path even further from them than before.
Tellie kept casting him sidelong glances, biting her lip in frustration. Here, surrounded by greenery, birdsong, and
fresh air, he looked more the prisoner than in the dungeons. What had happened to the man who had defied his captors so fearlessly, who had trod the path to freedom with such determination? He couldn’t be this slump-shouldered, heavy-footed creature across from her.
Setting her jaw, she gradually tilted her steps to the side till she walked alongside him. “Did you want your necklace now?” she asked, fishing the medallion out from under her blouse and holding it up.
His eyes startled to hers, like he’d just noticed her, like he hadn’t known anyone else still existed. Then the medallion claimed his attention, pulling his gaze left and right with its swing. His eyes shut; he looked back to the ground and shook his head.
Sighing, she let it drop. “Just as well.” She noticed he’d unbound his broken arm and that it now swung stiffly by his side. The sleeves rolled halfway up his forearm, and she could see the fading bruises and scars on his wrists and hands.
As they trekked on, there was little else to do beside imagine stories or guess what Aselvia would be like once they reached it. Even now, that thought sent a flutter through her stomach. In her favorite dream, Leoren and Casara swept her into their fold with joy and showered her with every kind of adoring act she could think of.
“Errance,” she began hesitantly, “You knew Leoren and Casara, right?”
He gave a short nod.
“Do they have children?” She wasn’t against the idea if the siblings were older and also doting, but she rather hoped to be the center of attention no matter how dreadfully selfish that sounded.
“What?” He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at her with a stung expression.
“Um. Do they have children?”
“Are they married?”
“Er. Yes. Didn’t you know?”
“No!” he said, and for once, he sounded young and unsure of himself. “He finally asked her? Everyone always encouraged him, but he’d somehow set it in his mind that he wasn’t good enough to marry a princess!”
“Princess!” Tellie’s heart dropped, then surged up on wings, then dropped again. Oh, why had they not told her! She’d almost been adopted by a princess. The dream just couldn’t get any more surreal. “What do you mean she’s the princess? She can’t be Rendar’s sister!”
“My mother’s sister.”
Tellie mulled this over. If poor Leoren did not think himself of worth to marry a princess, how on earth did she presume she’d be adopted by one? “Well, Leoren’s the ambassador and now the steward,” she said, unsure of where exactly elves drew the lines for castes. “Isn’t that rather good enough?”
He delayed in answer, and when he spoke, the life in his voice had died away. “Ambassador. I see. I suppose…I suppose the position…needed to be filled…”
She remembered then the other elves who had died the night Errance was taken and winced at her lack of sensitivity. She plunged ahead to a better topic, hoping to cheer him, to fill his heart with dreams and longings as beautiful as hers. “What stories can you tell me about Aselvia?”
He did not answer for a moment. “Shall I tell you about the time its rivers ran red with blood and bodies lay hewn upon the white tile?”
“Wait, what?”
“Then do not ask me to discern memory from illusion,” he said coldly.
She stopped walking, but he did not and so he was soon far ahead. Instead, Tryss came alongside her, having drawn gradually nearer with graceful subtlety. “Probably better to leave him alone,” she said quietly.
“I was only trying to lift his spirits,” Tellie said, voice a little thick with frustration.
“Sweet of you, but he’s a dangerous man.”
“Well, he might be, but we’re friends—”
“From your point of view.”
Hurt, Tellie tried to speak again, but Tryss continued. “The fact is, you don’t know what he’s gone through. None of us do. He’s under a terrible strain, and it is unwise to bait him.” She cast an uneasy look after Errance’s distant figure, her mouth drawing in a thin line.
Then she held up her arm. For the first time, Tellie noticed intricate scarring on the underside of her forearm.
“Once,” Tryss said, “I had a pet monkey whose side had been torn open by a wildcat. I was only a little girl who thought I could save him. But when I picked him up, he attacked me. It’s what animals and people do when they’re frightened and in pain—they can’t think straight.”
“But Errance wouldn’t hurt me. Why, he’s saved me three times already!”
“He seems to care for you,” she said, voice tiptoeing on the edge of doubt. “And that should make you all the more cautious, because in his condition, he is likelier to snap if he feels that someone he cares for is being cruel to him.”
“I wasn’t—”
“I know you weren’t trying to be. But if he wants to leave the past in the past, it is better to let it stay there.”
Tellie remained silent a while longer as they struggled through a dense tangle of the jungle, then asked. “What happened to the monkey?”
Tryss sighed. “It ran away. It ran away and died.”
After considering that for a few sober moments, Tellie spoke again, her voice soft and sweet. “There used to be this window up in the orphanage attic. It could hardly let in any light because it was so covered in mold and dirt. I was afraid to play up there because it was so dark, so I determined to clean the glass. It took me days and days, but when I did, I discovered that the glass was every color of the rainbow. It showed a design of a mother holding a child. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I’d have never known if I hadn’t tried so hard to look underneath the grime.”
Tryss listened, her mouth pursing in thought. She gave Tellie a fond look, the sort a mother gives when she is proud, but also ready to amend a slight error. “A window is not the best comparison to a man,” she said.
“No,” Tellie agreed. “But it’s a pretty good comparison to a soul, don’t you think?”
And Tryss had nothing to say to that, nothing at all.
As hoped, they reached the edge of the jungle by evening, but heavy rain clouds were beginning to gather in the sky, so when Errance showed signs of continuing onward, Tryss convinced him that it was best to spend the night under the lingering trees. Tellie and Kelm were sent to gather kindling for the fire, and when they returned Errance was nowhere in sight. Only Tryss remained, cutting up the remnants of the jungle grouse she’d shot earlier that afternoon and impaling the pieces on sticks to roast over the fire.
“Where’s Errance?” Kelm asked.
Tryss brushed a tendril of hair from her eyes and replied, “I don’t know. He just left. I don’t think he went far.”
All three flinched at the sound of an enormous splash in the nearby stream. “Yes,” Tryss said. “I’m almost sure of it.”
“What is he doing?” Tellie asked with a frown, starting off in the direction of the noise.
“Oh, for goodness sake, Tellie,” Tryss gasped. “Give him some privacy. He might be bathing. Just leave him alone.”
“Well, he could have told us not to bother him,” Tellie retorted. Her frown deepened as there was another splash followed by a heavy thunk. “It sounds like he’s waging a war.”
“Maybe he’s fighting off river sharks,” Kelm suggested.
“Yes, Kelm, I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s doing,” Tryss said, rolling her eyes.
The mysterious sounds continued, with fewer splashes but more thunks. With maddening calm, Tryss continued preparing dinner while the youths fidgeted, but after an especially large splash, she sat bolt upright and snapped, “All right, Kelm, go see what he’s up to.”
The boy crept off, and Tellie paced, forgetting such trivial things as helping Tryss with supper, until he came creeping back.
“Well?”
Kelm’s brow was furrowed, and he sat down on a nearby log. “He’s just in the middle of the stream building a dam out of the rocks.”
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br /> “What on earth for?” Tellie yelped.
Instead of answering, Kelm pulled out the small knife given to him by the chemas and began chipping at a block of wood. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “Well, I suppose it’s just his way of keeping busy. My pa always did say it was good for a man to keep his hands and mind busy with work. And I suppose he’s used to labor anyway.”
Tryss bent back over the meat. “Leave him to it then. Kelm, could you build a shelter to protect us from the rain?”
“Sure,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “But I don’t know how good it will be at keeping the rain out.”
Sighing, she stood. “Tellie, watch the food to be sure nothing steals it.” She joined Kelm and they disappeared into the forest, their voices blending into the harmony of insect humming.
Tellie sat with a sigh and began building a miniature hut out of twigs to pass the time. The crash of falling river rocks rattled in her ears. She glanced back into the trees where the others had vanished. Then she quickly covered the meat with broad leaves and dashed off to find Errance.
The stream was not far. She climbed a steep ridge in the trees behind the camp with the help of exposed roots, and when she reached the top, she had a full view of the stream below, winding through a crumble of large rocks and fallen trees. Errance stood knee-deep in a large pool, stacking rocks upon each other, drenched clothes and hair sticking to his skin. He had not noticed her yet so she crept along the trees till she reached a moss-covered boulder and peeked over it, her chin and palms resting on the top.
For a while she did nothing but watch him as he continued to bend, pick up a rock, and place it upon another. Tellie doubted she could wrap her arms around some of the boulders he wrestled into place. He seemed to work tirelessly, but when the wall had become quite large, he finally faltered. He caught himself on a log when he stumbled, and his arm shook with fatigue.
She decided it was time for a distraction. She pulled herself fully up on the rock, crossing her legs beneath her. “Aren’t you a little old to be playing in a stream?” she asked with a grin.
Moonscript (Kings of Aselvia Book 1) Page 18