Arranha nodded. “Your reasoning is clear. But for that reason I suspect it’s faulty in dealing with the life of someone who could no more reason than a cow can fly. Gird felt his way along, knowing the right as a tree knows good soil, by how it flourishes. In all my life, I never knew another like him, someone so infallible in his perception of good and evil, whose taproot sought good invisibly, in the dark. I learned from watching him that those with none of Esea’s light—inspiration, intelligence, what you will—may have another way to seek and find goodness. Because Gird, as we know and can say with utmost respect, was not a man given to intelligent reasoning. Shrewd, yes, and practical as a hammer, but incapable of guile, which comes as naturally to intelligent men as frisking does to lambs.” He laughed, shaking his head. “And I have only to think of Gird to find myself mired in agricultural images: listen to me! Cows that can’t fly, tree roots feeling their way through the soil, frisking lambs—that’s Gird talking through me, or my memory of him.”
Luap could barely manage a smile in response to that. He felt colder than the raw early-spring day. He had not felt Gird’s memory come alive while he was working on the Life; he had not felt Gird’s presence at all, since the first days after his death. And if Arranha felt it, if others felt it, was that why they did not agree on his way of telling the story? Because they felt so close to Gird, they could not understand that distant ages would not have that feeling? He could not think what to say, how to ask the questions in his mind that troubled him without taking definite form. He waited a moment, one finger tracing the floral carving of the chair-arm, then reverted to his first topic.
“So you think I should ask the elves or dwarves where that pattern took us?”
Arranha’s brows rose. “Yes, I said that. I admit I’m surprised you haven’t already done so, though I suppose you’ve been too busy . . .”
“I felt—I wanted to finish Gird’s Life first. But now—it will take me as long to rework it, and even then they may not like it. I just thought—”
Arranha’s smile was sweet, understanding, without a hint of scorn; it pierced him just as painfully as Arranha’s disapproval. “You just thought of your secret realm, a place of refuge. Quite natural. Yes, by all means ask them. But think of this, Luap: what will you do if they claim it as their own realm, in which we are not welcome?”
That had occurred to him before; he knew that was the root of his reluctance to ask. What is never asked cannot be refused: an old saying all agreed on. “The day I took Gird,” he said, having thought long about it, “we saw at first only two arches, which I had seen before. But another appeared—”
“Gird saw this?”
“He saw three arches; I had seen but two, and saw two when we first arrived. You saw the third that is there now, with the High Lord’s sigil upon it. When I told him there had been but two, he felt—I think he felt, for I admit he did not say it thus—that our presence, or at least his human presence, had been accepted.” Luap had no idea himself what the appearance of that third arch meant, but trusted Gird’s interpretation.
“I wonder if they’ll see it that way. But better to find out now, before you take a troop out there and find you’re intruding and not welcome. Will you ask the elven ambassador first, or the dwarves?”
“I had thought the elven. The legends say they’re the Eldest of Elders.”
“They will ask,” Arranha said, “why you did not ask them before. Gird’s will could not have withheld you past his death, not in their eyes.”
Luap knew they would ask exactly that: another reason he had not asked.
The elven ambassador arrived a few days before the Evener. Luap had never been sure why the elves chose to recognize Gird or his successors; they had not, Lady Dorhaniya told him, ever come to the court in her lifetime. But from the first year of Gird’s rule, an elf or two had come at Midwinter, Midsummer, and the two Eveners, at first asking audience with Gird, and then with the Council of Marshals. Then the dwarves had begun to appear, on the same festivals, glaring across the Hall at the elves, who ignored them except to proffer an icily correct greeting. Some of Gird’s followers preferred elves, and some preferred dwarves—the dwarves, Luap had heard, made good gambling and drinking companions. He himself found elven songs too beautiful to ignore.
This elf he recognized: Varhiel, he had said, was the closest human tongues could come to his real name. He stood taller than Luap as most elves did, a being of indeterminate age whose silver-gray eyes showed no surprise at anything. He greeted Luap in his own tongue and Luap made shift to answer in the same. He had discovered a talent for languages, both human and other; he particularly enjoyed the graceful courtesies of the elves. When the preliminaries were over, Luap felt his heart begin to pound. He should ask now, before he changed his mind. . . .
“When Gird was alive,” he said, “I found a place which might have been elven once.”
Varhiel raised his brows. “Once? What made you think it is not still elven?”
“I found no elves there, or sign of recent habitation,” Luap said. His palms felt sweaty. Why was this so hard?
Varhiel shrugged. “Perhaps it is a place we do not frequent; perhaps you came between habitations . . . but I doubt a place once ours would be abandoned.” He picked a hazelnut from the bowl on Luap’s desk and cracked it neatly between his fingers. “Where did you say this was?”
“I’m not entirely sure.” Luap took a hazelnut himself, cracking it on his desk. He pushed across a basket for the shell fragments. “It’s a long story . . .”
“Time has no end,” the elf said He leaned back in his seat with the patience of one who will live forever, barring accidents.
Luap wondered what it would be like to feel no hurry, no pressure from mortality. He pushed that thought aside, and began his tale. Necessarily, since the elf could not be expected to take an interest in minor human affairs, he left out much of it. He told of his first visit to the cave, of his discovery of his mage powers, and of the later discovery that the cave and those powers transported him somewhere.
“Say that again!” The elf’s gray eyes shone. “You travelled—?”
“Somewhere,” Luap said, nodding. For a moment he felt he had been saying that word forever, telling one after another that he went somewhere, to meet the same incredulous response each time. “I don’t know where. That’s why I’m talking to you.”
“Say on.” The elf’s wave of hand was anything but casual.
Luap tried to read the elf’s expression as he described the great hall in which he had arrived, the arches out of it . . . and then Gird’s journey.
“You took another there before asking our permission?” Luap had never seen an elf angry, but he had no trouble interpreting that.
“Gird was my . . . lord,” he said. “He held my oath; all I learned went to him first.” Then he realized that “there” had been said with complete certainty. “You know where it is?”
“Of course I know. And it is not a place for you latecoming mortals. You must not go again.” The elf looked hard at him. “Or have you been more than those two times?”
“When Gird came,” Luap said, side-stepping the question, “another arch appeared. One with the High Lord’s sigil on it—”
“No!”
“—And thus Gird said our presence was accepted.”