It was two days after Kith-Kanan had flown them all safely home. He had come to the pool daily since then to bathe his wounded arm. Though tender, it was a clean wound and showed every sign of healing well.
Despite her own injury, Anaya would not let Kith-Kanan carry her to the pool. Instead, she directed Mackeli to bring her certain roots and leaves, from which she made a poultice. As Kith-Kanan watched her chew the medicinal leaves herself, he listened for the fourth time to Mackeli’s tale of capture and captivity.
“And then Voltorno told the woodcutters there were no evil spirits in the forest, and they believed him, until they came running back down the trail, screaming and falling on their hairy faces.”
“Do you suppose we could give him back?” Anaya interrupted with a bored expression.
“I think so,” offered Kith-Kanan. “The ship may not have sailed yet.”
Mackeli looked at the two of them open-mouthed. “Give me back!” he said, horrified. Slowly the boy smiled. “You’re teasing me!”
“I’m not,” said Anaya, wincing as she applied the chewed leaves and root paste to her wound. Mackeli’s face fell until Kith-Kanan winked at him.
“Come with me to the spring,” the prince said. It was better to leave Anaya alone. Her wound had made her testy.
Kith-Kanan led Arcuballis through the woods by its reins. Mackeli walked beside him.
“There is one thing I’m not clear about,” Kith-Kanan said after a time. “Was it Voltorno who cast the spell on me that first night, the night he stole Arcuballis from me?”
“It must have been,” Mackeli guessed. “His men were starved for meat, so Voltorno worked up a spell to enthrall any warmblooded creatures in the area. The deer, rabbits, boar, and other animals had long since fled, warned of the humans by the corvae. All he got for his trouble was your griffon, which he knew was rare and valuable.”
As Arcuballis drank its fill, the elf prince and the Kagonesti boy sat on a bluestone boulder and listened to the water cascading from the pool.
“I’m glad you and Ny are getting along,” Mackeli noted. “She is not easy to live with.”
“That I know.”
The Kagonesti tossed a twig into the water and watched as it was drawn down the miniature falls.
“Mackeli, what do you remember about your parents? Your mother and father—what were they like?”
Mackeli’s forehead wrinkled with deep thought. “I don’t know. I must have been a baby when they left.”
“Left? Do you mean died?”
“No. Ny always said our parents left us and meant to come back some day,” he said.
She and Mackeli looked so completely different, it was hard for Kith-Kanan to believe they were blood relatives.
“You know, Kith, I watched you fight with Voltorno. It was really something! The way you moved, swish, clang, swish!” Mackeli waved his hand in the air, holding an imaginary sword. “I wish I could fight like that.”
“I could teach you,” said Kith-Kanan. “If Anaya doesn’t mind.”
Mackeli wrinkled his nose, as if he smelled something bad. “I know what she’ll say: ‘Get out of this tree! You stink like metal!’ ”
“Maybe she wouldn’t notice.” The boy and the prince looked at each other and then shook their heads in unison. “She’d notice,” Kith-Kanan said. “We’ll just have to ask her.”
They walked back to the clearing. Anaya had limped, no doubt painfully, out of the tree into the one sunny spot in the clearing. An ugly smear of greenish paste covered her wound.
“Ny, uh, Kith has something to ask you,” Mackeli said quickly.
She opened her eyes. “What is it?”
Kith-Kanan tied Arcuballis to a tree in the shaded end of the clearing. He came to where Anaya was reclining and squatted down beside her.
“Mackeli wants to learn the use of arms, and I’m willing to teach him. Is that agreeable to you?”
“You wish to take up metal?” she said sharply to the boy. Mackeli nodded as his sister sat up, moving stiffly. “A long time ago, I made a bargain with the spirits of the forest. In return for their allowing me to hear and speak with the animals and trees, I was to be their guardian against outsiders, and those who would despoil the forest are my enemies. And the forest told me that the worst of these intruders carried metal, which is soulless and dead, torn from the deep underground, burned in fire, and used only to kill and destroy. In time the very smell of metal came to offend my nose.”
“You find it acceptable for me to carry a sword and dagger,” noted Kith-Kanan.
“The Forestmaster chose you for a task, and I cannot fault her judgment. You drove the intruders out, saving my brother and the forest.” She looked at Mackeli. “The choice is yours, but if you take up metal, the beasts will no longer speak to you. I may even have to send you away.”
Mackeli’s face showed shock. “Send me away?” he whispered. He looked around. The hollow oak, the shaded clearing, and Anaya were all he had ever known of home and family. “Is there no other way?”
“No,” Anaya said flatly, and tears sprang up in Mackeli’s eyes.
Kith-Kanan couldn’t understand the elf woman’s hardness. “Don’t despair, Mackeli,” he said consolingly. “I can teach swordsmanship using wooden staves in place of iron blades.” He looked at Anaya and added a bit sarcastically, “Is that allowed?”
She waved one hand dismissively. Kith-Kanan put a hand on Mackeli’s shoulder. “What do you say, do you still want to learn?” he asked. Mackeli blotted his eyes on his sleeve and sniffed, “Yes.”
As summer lay down like a tired hound and autumn rose up to take its place, Kith-Kanan and Mackeli sparred with wooden swords in the clearing. It was not harmless fun, and many bruises and black eyes resulted from unguarded blows landed on unprotected flesh. But there was no anger in it, and the boy and the prince developed more than fighting skill on those sunny afternoons. They developed a friendship. Bereft of home and family, with no real plans for the future, Kith-Kanan was glad to have something to fill his days.
Early on, Anaya watched them dance and dodge, shouting and laughing as the wooden “blades” hit home. Her side healed quickly, more quickly than Kith-Kanan thought natural, and before long Anaya retreated to the woods. She came and went according to her own whims, often returning with a dressed out hart or a snare line of rabbits. Kith-Kanan believed she had finally come to accept his presence in her home, but she did not join in the easy camaraderie that grew between him and her brother.
One day, as the first leaves were changing from green to gold, Kith-Kanan went down to the spring. Mackeli was off collecting from a rich harvest of fall nuts, and Anaya had been gone for several days. He patted Arcuballis’s flank in passing, then plunged into the cool shade along the path to the pool.
His newly sharpened senses caught the sound of splashing in the water halfway down the path. Curious, he slipped into the underbrush. Kith-Kanan crept along soundlessly—for his walking and breathing were much improved, also—until he came to the high ground overlooking the pool.
Treading water in the center of the pool was a dark-haired elf woman. Her raven-black tresses floated on the surface around her like a cloud of dense smoke. It took Kith-Kanan a moment to realize he was looking at Anaya. Her hair was free of its long braid, and all her skin paint was washed off; he nearly didn’t recognize her clean-scrubbed features. Smiling, he sat down by the trunk of a lichen-encrusted oak to watch her swim.
For all her stealth on land, Anaya was not a graceful swimmer. She paddled back and forth, using a primitive stroke. The fishers of the Thon-Thalas could teach her a thing or two, Kith-Kanan decided.
When she climbed out of the water onto a ledge of granite, Kith-Kanan saw that she was naked. Accustomed though he was to the highly prized pallor of city-dwellers, he found her sun-browned body oddly beautiful. It was lithe and firmly muscled. Her legs were strong, and there was an unconscious, easy grace in her movements. She was like a forest spirit, wild and free. And as Anaya ran her hands through her hair and hummed to herself, Kith-Kanan felt the stirrings of emotions he had thought dead months ago, when he’d fled Silvanost.