They had to learn the whereabouts of the orb of Air.
Chap looked over to see whether Leanâlhâm had followed them in, but only Brot’an stood in the doorway. Magiere suddenly appeared to realize the same.
“Where’s Leanâlhâm?” she asked.
If Chap hadn’t known better, he’d have thought Brot’an looked strained.
“She is looking over books in the front room below,” he answered. “As she seemed settled, I did not force her away.”
Magiere nodded and started for the door. “I’ll go check on her.”
—No— ... —Let me—
Magiere stopped and glanced his way. When Chap met her gaze, she didn’t argue. He slipped out as Brot’an stepped aside.
He heard Magiere say behind him, “Chap is—”
“Yes, I see,” Brot’an cut in.
“Don’t worry—he’d never force her away from a book.”
Wondering about this unexpected interest of Leanâlhâm’s regarding sages and books, Chap made his way downstairs. Thankfully, he discovered that any sages about had left her alone—as he peeked in through the open archway and found the girl peering about at the patched, overstuffed chairs and the old, worn bookcases.
Leanâlhâm slowly approached a case at the far wall nearer the front window and traced the bookbindings with her slender fingers.
Chap remained half-hidden beyond the archway and simply watched her. Deceptive as it was, he would not miss a chance to dip into her memories while she was unaware of him.
The girl everyone called Leanâlhâm relished quiet and solitude in the strange and alien little room filled with books. Even while she hid herself away in the ship’s cabin, Brot’ân’duivé could always return there at any moment. Here in this very human place filled with old furnishings and so quiet for the moment, she could breathe.
Books were not unknown among the an’Cróan, though they were rarely made with hide coverings. Rolled sheaves and scrolls in cylindrical cases of seamless wood were more familiar to her. She could not make out most of the words on the outer side of the books, for though written mostly with Numanese letters, the languages were often ones she did not know, had never seen, let alone heard. When she stumbled upon a spine with one poorly, incorrectly rendered word in what she thought was her own language, she pulled out that book.
It was not just oddly formed Elvish, but a word she had heard only since coming to Wynn Hygeorht’s land.
“... Lhoin’na ...”
At best it meant something like “of the glade,” in reference to the elves of this continent that, until recently, she had not even known existed. She could not make out the other words in the title, and upon opening it, she could follow only about every third word.
Even those were so oddly—badly—written for what humans called Elvish, or the language of the an’Cróan. There were many hand-drawn illustrations, some tinted with faded colors, depicting vases, bowls, cups, and such things. The more she worked out this poor Elvish, the more she saw the “mistakes” happening over and over. The text began to make a little sense.
This was not some human who could not speak the tongue well enough to write it. It was, as Wynn had once said, another “dialect.” Why would “elves,” no matter what they called themselves, speak some other language or form of it?
The more she picked at the words, she realized the book was a history of pottery ... the craft work of a people like her own but so very different from them. It was hard to imagine a whole people like but not like the an’Cróan—“[those] of the Blood.” She had grown up believing that her people were the people that humans called elves.
She sank into a faded embroidered chair and turned page after page, finally stumbling upon what seemed part of a story about a beloved set of five finely crafted urns once stolen from this continent’s elven....
She stopped, peering more closely at the next two words. They did not make sense at all.
The vases had been stolen from the elven ... the Lhoin’na ... “guild branch” by human thieves.
Leanâlhâm looked up at all the books. There was a sages’ guild—or branch—for elves rather than humans?
She looked back to the story, working it out. Apparently a group of the Lhoin’na’s guardians, called “Shé’ith,” went after the thieves to retrieve the vases. That one term was halfway familiar.
In her tongue, true Elvish, the root word séthiv meant “tranquility,” or perhaps “serenity,” or at least by what she knew of Wynn’s Numanese and Leanâlhâm’s more fluent Belaskian, which her uncle had taught her. If so, that word for the Lhoin’na’s guardians was strange compared to “anmaglâhk,” which meant “the stealers of life.” That was what those guardians did: they took back from any who would steal the people’s way of life.
She turned another page and paused at a strange illustration.
Three elves in foreign attire were riding horses like humans did. Smaller still, in the image’s background, was what had to be the band of thieves fleeing from pursuit. The riders must be Shé’ith, and their leader looked impressive though disturbing. He carried a sword—again, like a human.
How could any of her people have fallen so far from their ways?
Anmaglâhk did not ride horses or carry openly exposed weapons. They were as swift as a breath but as silent as a shadow. These Shé’ith appeared to be anything but that. Lifting the book nearer to her face, she studied the illustration more closely.
Compared against the rider’s grip on the sword’s handle, the blade was as broad as three of his fingers. It was nearly straight, until the last third swept back in a shallow arc that she guessed was sharp on the back edge as well. But two-thirds down the blade’s back, a forward-leaning barb protruded slightly.
The narrow hilt was twice as long as the width of the hand that gripped it, and it curved slightly forward and then downward at its end. The wedged crossguard appeared to have a design on it, but she could not make that out. The crossguard’s upward protrusion arced forward to match the back barb’s lean, while the bottom one swept slightly back toward the hilt.
Like the lead male elf in the illustration, the sword seemed larger than life. It was almost unbelievable that one of her kind would carry such a strange, human thing.
Suddenly more lost than ever, she closed the book. Even so far from the land that had rejected her, even in learning there were others like her beyond the borders of her home ... she was alone, cast adrift. Those others, the Lhoin’na and their Shé’ith, were as foreign to her as any human.
No an’Cróan would put a creature of the wild into forced servitude. None of her people would carry a heavy tool ... a weapon ... made purely for war. The knife, the staff, perhaps a spear, and the bow were all they needed. She closed the book, staring at its cover and thinking of a lost home and her own people ... and the anmaglâhk. No one would write stories about them.
Well, no elves would write stories about them. She had seen a book once in which Wynn had written of Osha and Sgäilsheilleache.
That book had caused nothing but grief and sorrow.
Closing her eyes, Leanâlhâm fingered the book’s spine and thought back to the day, the terrible day, when she had first seen Wynn’s journal....
Leanâlhâm hummed softly as she pulled a loaf of wild grain bread from the communal ovens in the Coilehkrotall clan’s central enclave—her home. She enjoyed baking bread for her grandfather Gleannéohkân’thva, and at least in the early morning, there was no one else about.