Larajin ran on through the forest, angling north to parallel the road, all the while casting nervous glances over her shoulder. It sounded as though the elves were sacking the caravan-would that keep them so busy they would forget about pursuing her?
Out of the corner of her eye, Larajin saw something whipping up off the forest floor toward her-a rope? It coiled around her leg. Jerked to a sudden halt, she crashed to the ground, the wind knocked from her. A snare! The elves must have set a trap.
Her dagger lay beside her, where she’d dropped it. Head still spinning from her fall, Larajin groped for it, but as her fingers closed around the hilt, another snare whipped around her forearm, preventing her from using the dagger to cut herself free.
No-not a snare, she realized, looking down. That wasn’t a rope around her arm; it was a leaf-covered vine. It looked like ivy, but it moved with a sinuous grace, and a purposefulness that suggested sentience. She realized that it must be the choke creeper the caravan drivers had spoken of it. This infestation was the reason the wizard was clearing the road.
She watched in horror as the loose ends of the vine coiled their way up her arm and leg like constricting snakes. Struggle as she might, she could not pull herself free. The vines were as strong as braided steel. More of them were questing blindly toward her, drawn by her frantic motions. She had blundered onto a wide patch of the creeper. The entire floor of the forest seemed to have come to life, to be reaching for her. Under that tangle of greenery, she could see the white of bones. She was not the first creature to have been caught in this trap.
Something tickled the back of her neck. Larajin jerked away, throwing herself violently to the side, but to no avail. One of the vines was around her neck. Larajin forced the fingers of her free hand under the vine, struggling to prevent it from crushing her throat, but this gave only momentary relief. Unable to rise, to flee, she wished now that an arrow had found her, instead. Knowing that she was about to die, she began choking out the words of a prayer.
As if in answer, an angry howl came from somewhere above. An instant later Larajin heard the fluttering of wings and saw the tressym swooping down through the trees.
“No,” she choked out, as a strand of the vine rose into the air, questing for the tressym. “Don’t…”
The vine around her neck tightened, forcing her fingers into her throat. Unable to speak, Larajin could only weep, certain that the tressym would be lashed from the sky.
But the tressym proved more agile than the questing vine. A leafy tendril caught and bent one of the feathers at the tressym’s wingtip-but then she was swooping back up into the sky with powerful beats of her wings. She repeated the action, and with each dive and ascent more and more of the vines followed her-and Larajin found that her hand, which still held the dagger, was free.
She sat up, slashing at the vine around her throat. The sudden movement triggered the rest of the tangled mass, which rippled toward her, but the tressym had bought her the time she needed. With a single swift stroke of her dagger-whose magical blade parted the vine as easily as rotted twine-Larajin was free.
Scrambling to her feet, she leaped back from the tangle of vines, onto a clear patch of ground. Sobbing with relief, she glanced up and saw the tressym perched safely on a branch, watching her with large, round eyes.
“Thank you, my little friend,” Larajin said. “You and I are balanced now-one rescue for another. If that’s why you’ve been following me all this time, consider your debt to me paid. You are free to go, but if you do decide to follow me farther, I think you should have a name. Certainly you’ve displayed a heart of gold today-and so, I grant you the name Goldheart.”
She pointed the blade of her dagger at the tressym, like a king bestowing honors on a knight, then she bowed.
When she rose, Goldheart was gone. A single bent feather, fallen from her wing, drifted down through the branches. Larajin ran and caught it-then jumped back in alarm as a wild elf stepped out from behind the trunk of the tree in which Goldheart had been perched, bow at full draw and arrow nocked. Larajin thought about raising her dagger, then realized what a futile gesture that would be. If the elf had intended to shoot her, Larajin would be dead by now. Instead the archer just stared.
Larajin stared breathlessly back, incredulous to finally meet a wild elf, face-to-face. The woman’s almond-shaped eyes were every bit as feral as the picture in Master Thamalon’s book, and the black band tattooed across her nose and cheeks made her look fiercer still. Her long, blonde hair was drawn back in a ponytail, exposing the rest of the tattoo, which completed its circle of her scalp over her pointed ears. Her skin was a dusky brown-the same color as the tanned leather of her clothes. She wore rough breeches and a vest decorated with animal teeth that had been sewn onto it like buttons. Muscles bunched in her bare arms as she held her bow at full draw.
The irony of this meeting was not lost on Larajin. Rather than having to go looking for the wild elves of the Tangled Trees, they had come to her. Now, instead of introducing herself to them as kin, Larajin would be pleading her case as a captured enemy.
“I … elf-friend,” she stuttered, using the few words of the wild elf tongue she had been able to glean from the books in the master’s library. “I look … forest-mother from … trees-woven-into-trees…”
Wings fluttered above. The elf woman glanced up at Goldheart, but her arrow remained unwavering in its aim. The tressym circled once overhead, then turned and winged her way to the east.
“You must be blessed of the goddess, to have one of her favorites come to your aid,” the elf said.
Startled, Larajin realized the woman had spoken in the common tongue. The words were heavily accented-and overlaid with the distinctive inflections of a Sembian. Larajin wondered who had taught her the language.
Larajin blurted out her explanation. “I pay homage to Hanali Celanil,” she said, holding up her wrist to show the gilded heart that dangled there. “I am part elf myself. My mother was-”
A brief peal of laughter cut Larajin short. The elf had a skeptical, almost scornful expression on her face. Her eyes darted from Larajin’s ears, to her hair, to her fair skin. She was believing none of it.
Behind the woman, from the direction of the road, came the sound of lilting voices. The elves had obviously completed their prédation upon the caravan and now were breaking the eerie silence they had maintained throughout their attack. Larajin wondered if Dray had survived. She prayed that the elves had shown him mercy-and that they would extend that mercy to her. She decided to try a different approach.
Slowly, not wanting her movements to be misinterpreted, Larajin turned her dagger to show the elf its hilt. If this elf spoke Sembian-flavored Common, perhaps she knew a little of Sembia’s geography-and politics. A member of a noble household might be deemed one worth keeping alive, worth ransoming.
“I am a member of a noble Sembian house,” Larajin began. “My …” She hesitated, then decided there was no harm in telling the truth, so far from home. “My father is Thamalon Uskevren. This is his dagger. It bears our family crest.”
Recognition flickered in the elf’s eyes. She knew the master’s name!
Larajin took a deep breath, hoping the elf would listen, this time.
“Twenty-six years ago, Thamalon Uskevren journeyed north to the Tangled Trees. He met an elf woman-a wild elf of the forest-and … lay with her. A year later he returned, and found that she had given birth to his child. She died during the birthing, and so I was given to my father. I was raised in his house, in Sembia, but now I have returned. I am looking for …” She paused, unsure for a moment how to continue. “For my roots. My … family.”