“I thought Ari had been killed; I’d been forced far enough away that I saw one sword go in—so I ran for the rockface. That way I had something at my back.”
The elf leader nodded. “Wise—and this is your first real battle?”
“Yes . . . in the war, we were too young to do more than camp chores.”
More raised brows. “You were too young to do camp chores, unless I read your age wrongly. But didn’t you know your—Aris?—could heal his wounds?”
Seri shook her head. Her braid had come completely undone, and her hair looked like a wavering dark cloud. “No—he’d never healed himself before. We thought it worked only on others. When I saw him get up, I was as surprised as the iynisin. More, because they hadn’t seen him; he came up behind them.”
“I know why we didn’t know I could,” Aris said. His mind had caught hold of its familiar net of thought. They all turned to look at him. “It hurts—and the one time I tried it, that time I cut my hand on the sickle—”
“I remember,” Seri said. “He was cutting wild grass for Gird’s army,” she said to the elves.
“—I thought to try it and it hurt a lot. So I quit.”
“But it didn’t hurt me,” Seri said. “Or any of the others.”
“No, and I think I understand that, too. You see—”
“Not now, Ari.” Seri smiled to take the sting out of that. “You’re not all the way awake yet.” He was, but he wouldn’t argue with her. If she wanted him to think it out somewhere else than with elves, he would. He sipped the bitter brew again, and wondered where her light had gone, and even more where it had come from. She shouldn’t have been able to do that.
“What do you, young mortal, think of your friend’s light?” That was the elf leader, pointing to him. Aris, in the midst of another sip, almost choked, and put the mug down.
“I don’t know. I didn’t know she could do it—I never heard of anyone coming alight but mageborn, and not all of them. And as you saw, her light was not the same color as mine.”
“And you, she says, did not call light before: why this night, and not others? Did you never before need to see your way in the dark?” The sarcasm of the second question almost confused his answer to the first; perhaps Seri was right, and his wits lay more scattered than he thought. He hesitated, trying to gather them, before he answered, but the elves did not seem impatient. Only interested.
“We needed to see,” he said finally. “Other times—it might have been useful, but I didn’t really need it. Here—we felt the evil coming—”
“Did you call on the gods for aid?”
Had they? He could not quite remember. There had been a voice in his head—“Father Gird,” he said. His voice chimed with Seri’s, saying the same thing.
The elf leader frowned. “You’re Gird’s children? I thought only one of his children lived, a grown woman.”
“Not really his children,” Seri said, trying without success to smooth her hair. “But we called him Father Gird. Not to his face, it wouldn’t have been respectful, but with each other.”
“How old were you, when you left your homes?”
Aris tried to think. He wasn’t entirely sure; the mageborn and the peasants reckoned age differently. “I had lost my front teeth,” he said slowly. “I suppose we were—” He held up his hand. “—about this tall.”
“Children!” the elf said. The elves spoke softly in their own language, a murmuring ripple, then the leader said, “So you called Gird your father?”
“Lots of people called him Father Gird,” Seri said. “Or Gran’ther Gird.”
“And you believe he spoke to you in your peril? How do you explain that?” Aris could not explain that, or the recurrent dreams he and Seri had had since Gird died. He shook his head. The elves spoke again to one another, and he tried to make sense of the beautiful sounds. He wished they would sing; he had heard elves sing at Gird’s funeral.
He woke just at dawn, to find the elves standing in a circle around the two of them. Their elflight had drawn in around them, leaving Aris and Seri to the dawnlight. Seri looked as sleepy as he felt; in the cold predawn light, the dried blood on her clothes looked like smears of black mud. Aris scrambled up, uncertain of many things. The elven leader neither smiled nor frowned.
“We have no memory of any such as you,” he said. “The blending of your lights last night . . . this is new. In all our memory, none of this lady’s race has ever called such light, and we know no other living person with the magery among the mageborn.” He looked at the cluster of trees, motionless now in their posture of anguish, blackened as if burnt, leafless, the ground beneath them ash-gray. “And there is the work of the iynisin, the un-singers, those who hate the living trees for the One Tree’s choice. We found their blood on your blades . . . and I say we do not understand. We knew Gird, but we do not know you.” The elves came together; their light brightened so that Aris could hardly see their faces. “We do not condemn you, for the iynisin blood you shed. But we do not commend you, for those trees which the iynisin blasted, and the creatures dead with them, and the spring now tainted. Heal that, if you can—if not, you have a long journey afoot, and the gods will deal with you.”
The elves vanished, withdrawing their light with them; where they went, Aris could not see in the glare of the risen sun. He blinked; Seri came to him and put an arm around his shoulders. She was shivering; they both were. Around them, the new grass sprang, somewhat trampled but green and healthy; it stretched to the edge of the hollow. But the trees, and under the trees—all that was dead, not only dead but a death that held no promise of rebirth. Aris felt his mouth dry with fear as much as thirst. How could he heal that?
Gingerly, they moved into the twisted shadows of those twisted trees. The earth beneath felt dead, as if they walked on salt or iron filings. When they came to the horses—what had been the horses—Seri gave a choked cry and ran forward. Whatever magery the iynisin used had killed them as well, drawing them into strange unhorselike shapes as it worked, leaving the dead bodies hardly recognizable, the very hairs of mane and tail stiff as thorns. Aris moved past the horses to the spring, which the evening before they could have heard bubbling from here.
In its hollow, a plug of dirty wet earth like mucus, and a thin black stain along the line of the beck. It stank of death and decay, as disgusting a smell as the shambles in the lower market. Aris prodded the sodden earth with a stick that shattered in his hand. He was going to have to dig it out with his fingers. He shuddered; he did not want to touch the oozing slime. Behind him, he could hear Seri’s boots scuffing the dead earth, the shriveled leaves. She was probably trying to do something about the horses, but he knew he had to clear the spring first. That was the earth’s lifeblood.
He laid his hand just above the lowest part of the spring’s hollow, trying not to smell it, and tried to feel his way into it. Nothing. Grimacing, Aris plunged his fingers into the cold, slimy mess and tugged. It felt worse than anything he’d ever touched. Gobs of cold stinking goo came off; he wiped the stuff from his hands on the ground beside the spring and reached in again. It’s cursed, he thought to himself. There’s nothing healthy in there at all; it’s all gone wrong. Something warmer than the rest wriggled against his fingers and he almost cried out; when he yanked his hand free this time, he saw a dank tendril pull itself back into the muck.
Seri’s hand on his shoulder felt as hot as a firebrand. “I hope Father Gird knows what he’s doing,” she said.
“He didn’t do this,” Aris said, wiping his hand on the dry earth again, and wishing he didn’t have to put it back in there with whatever that was. “The iynisin did this.” And us, he thought, because we came out here not knowing what we were doing.