Elvenborn

24

Kyrtian's nose tickled, and he rubbed it absently. Why is it that in spite of decades of practice, the Ancestors had handwriting that was uniformly atrocious? The tiny words not only looked as though they had been written with the aid of a lens, they conformed to no school of calligraphy he 'd ever seen.

Kyrtian labored his way through yet another personal journal, making notes on sheets of foolscap for later transcription in his own neat (and extremely legible) hand. This business of concocting a "personal" script-style must have been a common affectation among the bored. But why they should choose to also write as if paper was more valuable than gold was beyond his comprehension.

Here in Lady Moth's library, it was so quiet he could almost hear dust motes falling out of the air to add to the accumulation on the books. Lady Moth had brought back all the volumes that she had extracted during the time that the Young Lords were using the place as their headquarters. The situation was reversed now, and she commanded her late husband's estate and holdings as she should have done some time past. With no army to command and no war to fight, the Young Lords were hardly in need of a command-post, although they were still full of an impotent defiance.

Kyrtian reached for a glass of water and absently took a sip.

For the moment, the Young Lords were living on the grounds of the dowager-estate, Lady Moth's Tower, hiding in the one place where no one was likely to come looking for them. Wearing illusory disguises to make them look like human slaves, it was unlikely that even if a search was made there for them that they would be found.

As long as they can hold together, and not have someone get a change of heart and defect, they should do all right.

He'd talked to them all, and at the moment, he didn't think that likely. Not while they were safe and not having to suffer any serious hardships.

Not even Moth's own slaves knew who they were—the story was that they had been part of the Young Lord's army, and that Moth was sheltering them to keep them from being punished for having been conscripted in the first place.

It was a situation that made it hard for Kyrtian to keep a straight face whenever he thought about it. Living among the slaves was going to do them a world of good.

Already he'd seen signs of a change in attitude towards the humans from some of them. He had every confidence that if— or when—the Revolt started again, it would be on a very different footing.

If it happened, they already counted on it having a very different ending. Their plans called for him to either join them openly or permit the Great Lords to place him back in command of the army and proceed to actually do as little as possible. Then, at the right moment, he could turn the Council's army against the Great Lords themselves.

But I don't want to do that if I can help it. Such a war—because it would be a war, and not a revolt—would be bloody. Most of the casualties would be human; there was just no getting around that. And although—if the Young Lords had changed their attitude towards slave-owning by then—the humans on their side would have an active stake in the outcome, they would still be the ones taking the full force of the fighting. There were far more of them than there were Elves, and as physical fighters—well, the Young Lords were not very good.

Kyrtian's plan, which he hoped to talk the Young Lords into, was more subtle. He wanted them to creep back to their august fathers one at a time, in secret, and grovel. They would still have the iron jewelry that kept their fathers from working magic on them; that was key.

After they returned, and once they managed to regain some freedom of movement, he hoped they could work their own way back up through the hierarchy, and attrition among the Great Lords would eventually put them in the seats of power.

Such a plan, however, did have a number of drawbacks, not the least of" which was that there were plenty of the Great Lords who would quite readily slay their rebellious sons and underlings out of hand if they ever so much as showed their faces. And once back in a father's good graces, there was always the chance that someone would turn traitor. That would be ... awkward.

So for now, they were in hiding, and if they weren't accomplishing anything, at least they weren't getting into trouble either.

Meanwhile—as the Council debated the next use they were going to make of him, and his erstwhile enemies cooled their heels in circumstances he hoped would teach them some empathy, he was using his enforced leisure to get back to the search for his father.

The answer to his father's whereabouts was in this room, somewhere, he was sure. The trouble was that there was so much to wade through, and none of it had ever been properly cataloged. Personal journals were crammed in next to the sort of romantic novels considered appropriate for ladies to while away their hours with—books on flora and fauna were piled atop maps and volumes on magic.

His nose tickled again, and he unsuccessfully tried to suppress a sneeze. Moth or her friend Viridina were in here a dozen times a day, trying to clean out the dust magically, but every time he opened a volume more of it flew up into the air in clouds.

Moth's family had a mania of their own—for collecting. Most of this library had come to her from various family members. They were, however, indiscriminate in their mania. In the case of the ones who'd acquired books and manuscripts, the definition of a "book" seemed to be "any collection of paper with covers on it" and the definition of "manuscript" was "any collection of handwritten paper." As far as he could tell, there was no method in what they'd selected, no categories, no attempt to place a value on anything.

Perhaps, if he'd been in here before the Young Lords took residence, he'd have been able to find the things his father had studied that had given him his real clue. But they had simply shoveled everything they found to the side in heaps so that they could use the room for their own purposes, and Moth hadn't helped when she extracted the books that she thought were important. Moth, bless her, had been under the impression that she had kept some order and cleanliness to the library.

Yes, well, that was before we found the boxes in the storage-chamber. Moth's husband had maintained a "show" library, with things he thought worth keeping attractively shelved. The rest—which amounted to four or five times the volume of works on show—had gotten packed into boxes and stacked up in a storeroom behind the library itself. Moth had thought that the storeroom was empty until they'd opened the door. In their search for maps they could use to plan their campaign and the plans of manors and estate-houses, the Young Lords had rummaged through it all, bringing some things into the library and leaving them, removing other things to make room for what they brought in. Whatever order had once been here was gone completely. Now the storeroom had shelves, and so did the unused office next to it, and the unused reception-room next to that, and Kyrtian was trying to bring some order to the chaos.

Kyrtian, however, was fast becoming convinced that his answer lay, not in printed books or illuminated manuscripts, interesting as those might be, but in the personal journals kept often by elven ladies, and infrequently by their lords.

His father had almost certainly divined the location of the Portal from something in here. That location was lost, and what was more, there seemed to be evidence that the Ancestors who had built the thing had engaged in an active effort to hide that location from their descendants—and even from some of their own who had come through the Portal.

Why? That was a good question. Perhaps they feared a traitor in their midst who would re-open the Portal to their enemies. The Portal itself had cooperated in erasing memories; it was fairly clear that the Crossing was such a traumatic ordeal in and of itself that a substantial number of those who Crossed could not remember a great deal of what happened immediately thereafter.

And perhaps some of those folk were "helped" to forget.

None, not one, of the Great Lords that had created the Portal and survived the Crossing left any substantive records about it. That much was fact. Nor did any of the historians—another fact. So with no official records, he was left with only one other source, the unofficial ones—and of those, the best would be the records of those who were considered too insignificant to matter.

The ladies . .. ah yes, the ladies. And the eccentrics.

Some of those journals were attractively bound and might at one time have been shelved in the main room—and that might be where Kyrtian's father had gotten his information.

Or he might have found something in official records that Kyrtian had somehow completely overlooked.

Kyrtian ran a dusty hand through his hair in frustration, then told himself sternly not to get so impatient. After all, his father had been hunting for the Portal for decades before Kyrtian was born; by the time he found what he was looking for, he had probably gotten to the point that he was so familiar with the Ancestors and the way their minds worked that he was able to intuit things that weren't obvious.

So he was wading through everything handwritten that Moth had in this library, with the Great Book of Ancestors beside him. Before he could eliminate any manuscript or journal, he first had to figure out who wrote it, or at least who the author's contemporaries were, then discover whether or not the author lived far enough back to have made the Crossing.

Since it was almost a guarantee that most of the manuscripts he found would be from too late a period to mention the Crossing except in passing, he would then try to find every other manuscript that could be attributed to that person. Most people who were addicted to journal-writing had produced multiple volumes over the course of their very long lives. If the author was of too late a period, well, it helped to be able to weed out everything that could be attributed to her pen.

It was a painfully logical and methodical plan of dealing with the situation. It was also very tedious, very time-consuming, and very, very dusty.

Kyrtian had two helpers at least—Gel, and that little female concubine that Lady Triana had been so considerate in planting on him. He'd sent for her a-purpose once he'd turned over his commission to Lord Kyndreth while the Council debated. If Triana was so interested in what he was doing, he was inclined to allow her more information than she could comfortably digest. He had a notion that she was working with Aelmarkin, at least for the moment. Lady Moth had been very helpful in presenting him with a summary of her past behavior, and from that he'd formed the opinion that whatever game she played, whatever alliances she made, her ultimate goal would serve no one but herself.

Now, to his mind, the best possible way to handle her was to give her the information he wanted her to have. Gel had examined the girl himself, interrogating her to the point of exhaustion and even tears, and it was his opinion that Lydiell had succeeded in "turning" her. Whenever she reported to Triana— and Triana had been very interested to learn just where he was and what he was doing right now—Gel was there, making certain she stuck to the script they'd agreed on.

Nevertheless, she didn't know exactly what it was he was doing in Moth's library; what she didn't know, she couldn't be forced to reveal if Triana or Aelmarkin ever got their hands on her. She knew only what she saw—which was that he had ordered all the books down off the shelves to be sorted—that Moth's slaves had then reshelved and cataloged all of the printed material. While they worked, he examined the handwritten stuff, creating a second catalog, and she and Gel shelved what he was done with. She couldn't read elven hand-script; she didn't know what he was keeping and what he was rejecting. So although she now had a wealth of information about his movements, none of it was likely to do Triana any good.

He actually expected the infamous Triana to put in an appearance before too very much longer. He couldn't see how she could possibly resist trying to pry into his affairs in person. She would probably also try to seduce him; that was her pattern in the past. He had heard, even from Moth, that she was a great beauty, and not a passive, statuesque creature either, but lively, witty, aggressive, and not afraid to show her intelligence. Such a woman had learned how to turn her looks and fascination into a weapon long ago. She might even have approached Lord Kyndreth as well as Aelmarkin, prepared to use anyone and anything in her quest for personal power. If that was the case, she might well have met her match in Lord Kyndreth, who had been playing deep games for far longer than little Lady Triana.

Ancestors—I've turned into such a cynic—

There were times when he longed for what he had been— when the worst of his worries was working out little battle-plans and conspiring with Lydiell to keep Aelmarkin at a distance. To think that he had actually looked up to people like Lord Kyndreth!

Well, I know better now.

It hadn't just been his own experiences that had enlightened him, nor the night-long, acid-washed "frank talk" that Moth had had with him when he first arrived. It was the testament of these very manuscripts beneath his hands, that outlined the machinations and betrayals, the abuse of power and the use of it, from the point of view of those that the powerful considered too insignificant to monitor. Mind, some of them were no prizes, either, acting like chickens in the hen yard, turning, when pecked, to hammer on those beneath them. But it had been an enlightening, if distasteful education, wading through the pages they probably thought no one else would ever read.

Is it any better among the Wizards and free humans, I wonder? With most of his illusions gone, he had to guess that it was probably more a matter of degree. The Great Lords were so powerful and those who aspired to their power were so fixated on achieving it, that the very power they all held or craved corrupted them. It was inevitable unless, like Moth, they were acutely aware of just how dangerous that much power was. The fact that they lived such very long lives only meant that the corruption and selfishness was etched deeper than it could ever possibly go with a mere human.

But there are the others. Like Moth, Lydiell—and myself, I hope. Power didn't have to corrupt, if you knew just how dangerous it was, and were well aware that it came burdened with incredible responsibilities. He hoped that there were those among the Wizards and free humans who knew that.

Perhaps that was the key to those among the Elvenlords who did treat the humans who had come under their protection with the same consideration that they would have given an elven underling; and those elven underlings who treated humans as equals. They were the ones who had felt the boot of the Evelon overlords on their backs, and had learned from the experience— or who, at least, had determined never to treat one with less power as they themselves had been treated. And those Ancestors, in their turn, had passed their attitude down to their offspring.

Were there more such households as his.and Lady Moth's? Possibly—for a moment, he dared to hope that there were, hiding their nature just as he and his father and grandfather had. They were probably just like his family—remaining quietly, self-sufficiently in the background, permitting the Great Lords to believe that they were hopelessly provincial and not worth troubling with. Ancestors knew that if Aelmarkin hadn't been such a thorn in their side, their household would never have come under the scrutiny of Kyndreth, and he would never have been forced into the "open" to find himself recruited as a military expert.

He realized at that moment that he'd been staring at the same page for quite some time, and hadn't deciphered a word of it.

Gah. I'm a scholar, not a philosopher! He bent over the closely-written page again.

Whispers from the rear of the library intruded on his attention— because one of the whisperers was Gel, and there was a tone in the man's voice he'd never heard before.

He took a quick glance over the top of the manuscript. Sure enough, there wasn't a great deal of shelving going on, but Gel and the pretty little concubine certainly had their heads close together.

Well, well, well! The granite crag cracks at last!

He didn't know whether to laugh or be annoyed. Not that he wanted the girl; oh, she was attractive and talented enough, but so were the two other girls his mother had purchased for him. But of all the times for his tough-minded partner to pick to go soft over a woman, this had to be the worst!

On the other hand, this was Gel he was talking about. Gel, who had taught him the business of war and fighting, Gel who stuck by his side like a faithful dog, Gel who had never asked for anything for himself. How could he possibly be annoyed that Gel had finally found someone who touched his heart?

Oh, Ancestors.

Now how was he going to juggle all this? Hidden rebels, possible treachery from his superiors, the hunt for his father— and now Gel in love? What next?

As he stared at the not-so-young lover, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Lady Moth had come into the library without his noticing, and she wore her mask-face, the one that generally meant that she was—well, up to something.

"We have a visitor that I believe you will want to meet yourself," she whispered, after a glance at Gel and the girl who were completely oblivious to anything else going on around them.

Oh no—not Triana— "You may tell Lady Triana that—" he began.

But Moth's eyebrows shot up, and she interrupted him. "I don't know why you should be expecting her," Moth replied, "but it's not Lady Triana. And I do think you should put down that stupid journal written by an equally stupid blockhead and come with me. Now."

Seeing that she was not to be denied, Kyrtian sighed, marked the place where he was leaving off, and stood up.

The lovers never noticed that he was leaving. That in itself was an indication of just how hard Gel had fallen.

Oh, Ancestors, I only hope that Triana didn 't place that girl with me to get at Gel rather than me. . . .

With his thoughts flitting between amusement and concern, he wasn't paying a great deal of attention when Moth brought him into a tiny chamber kitted out as a sitting-room, where a young woman waited, pacing up and down in front of the windows, displaying no great patience herself. All he noticed at first was that she was red-haired and green-eyed, clothed in the same sort of tunic, boots, and trews as a common laborer, with the physique of someone who was athletic and very much used to taking care of herself in any and all circumstances. He couldn't imagine why Moth had insisted he meet this person— unless, perhaps, she was one of Moth's human servants and had information about the Young Lords?

"Lord Kyrtian," Moth said formally, "I believe that you have many things to discuss with Lashana." She tipped her head to the side as he sighed with exasperation, still wondering what she was getting at. She pursed her lips, but her green eyes held the ghost of amusement in them. "I believe you might know her by another name. Elvenbane."

WHAT?

He lost every vestige of exasperation, annoyance, impatience in that moment. He stared at the woman, who stood poised like a deer about to flee, trying to make his mind believe what his ears had just heard.

Red hair—but elven eyes. And the ears. Wizard blood, unless it's an illusion—

But Moth would never have been fooled by an illusion. Moth had met Wizards. Moth's friend Viridina—her son was a wizard.

"Lashana arrived bearing a letter from Viridina's halfblood son, verifying her identity," Moth said, as if divining his thoughts.

She probably is, the old schemer! She doesn 't need to read thoughts, she knows me like her favorite sonnet!

"I am—fascinated to meet you, Lashana," he said carefully. "Or should I call you 'Elvenbane?'"

"Please don't," the young woman said firmly. She was still tense and very ill-at-ease. "It's not a name I ever claimed for myself."

Both of them stood so awkwardly, so stiffly, that Moth began to chuckle. "Kyrtian, Lashana, for Ancestors' sake, sit down! You look like a pair of bad carvings, I do swear!"

Kyrtian relaxed marginally, and gestured to Lashana to take a seat on the cushioned bench nearest her. She did so, moving as if she was an old creature with frozen joints. He selected a slightly lower seat on a stool, to put his eyes a little lower than hers.

"I don't have much time," she said, finally. "And I'm not certain how to begin."

"I can tell you that," he offered, and tried a smile. "Begin with why you knew you could trust me not to kill you on sight."

As he had hoped, such a direct and blunt approach was precisely the right way to approach her, and she began telling him the most amazing story that he had ever heard in his life. He listened and had to work not to allow his mouth to fall open with shock more than once. To think that two of her people had gotten close enough to him to stand guard on his very tent so that they could spy on him! He would have to have a word with Gel about that, later.

At some point his capacity for sheer astonishment was exhausted, and he could only listen to her in a sort of trance. It was all too impossible to believe, and yet he had to believe in it. The things she told him fit too well with what he already knew.

Then, after talking until she was hoarse, she paused, and exchanged a significant look with Lady Moth. "So," she said. "Now you tell me to take myself off. Or—"

"Or I ask you if your Wizards would dare accept the Elven-lord Commander as an ally," he finished, having already come to the conclusion that this, and only this, could be the reason why she had come to him. Brilliant—audacious—and completely logical. And on the other hand, completely illogical that she should ever trust a fullblood.

She stared at him, and suddenly every bit of tension ran out of her, just like water running out of a cracked jar. "Fire and Rain!" she exclaimed weakly. "You're just as Keman claimed you are!"

He wondered if she had read his thoughts, using the same human magic that some of his own people had—and Moth's.

"Only the surface," she replied instantly. "I don't pry; none of us would. And if you want, I can teach you a method to keep even the surface thoughts private."

He looked deeply into her emerald eyes, so like and unlike a fullblood's, and saw only sincerity in them. He'd been around human mages too often to feel unnerved by her instant response to his thought. "I'd appreciate that," he replied. "But it can wait. So, now I assume you know about my own people?" A sudden, blinding idea occurred to him at that moment, the way that he could, finally, safeguard his own people and his mother no matter what happened to him, and he saw that she saw it in his thoughts by the surprise that flashed into her eyes.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Oh, indeed yes, Lord Kyrtian, we can, and we will, take your folk if they must be evacuated! Portals—the transportation magic—whatever is needed; between your people and mine we can do whatever it takes to get them to safety. And you needn't fear for your mother and the other Elves of your house, either—we have Lorryn's half-sister with us and she is as welcome now among us as he is!"

Now it was his turn to feel relief that made him sag. "Blessed Ancestors," he murmured, passing a hand over his brow. "If you knew what it meant to me to hear that—" Then he smiled weakly. "What am I saying? Of course you know."

But relief from one problem didn't help much with the others, and if this young woman did not have much time, they needed to make plans, urgently. "Bless you, Lashana. Now— let's decide between us what I can do for you and yours."

Gel was not happy with him.

"Next time—" Gel muttered under his breath. "The next time you go making hare-brained meetings without me, with women you've never seen and don't know anything about, I'll take you to the horse-trough and hold your head under till you come to your senses, I swear!"

Kyrtian sagged against the back of his chair, but was not going to back down this time. He didn't blame his old friend—but something had told him that Lashana and Gel shouldn't meet, yet. There wasn't enough time to negotiate all of Gel's suspicions, not and come to an understanding before she had to leave. Ancestors! The danger she had put herself in by coming to him directly! And the danger had increased with every moment that passed; there was no telling who could have discovered her there.

Gel's dinner sat uneaten in front of him; he had already stuffed his meal down his own throat as he'd explained the miracle that had happened in that incongruously ordinary room this afternoon. "Gel, Morthena was there the entire time—and what could one little wizard-girl possibly do to me?" he asked, reasonably.

Gel only growled. "I suppose you know she could have been talking things she's got no authority to promise?"

"Morthena says she has the authority, and that's good enough for me." His mind was too full of plans now to be put off by Gel's irritation. His old friend was mostly just annoyed that, for the first time, he had made plans and forged a pact without Gel's supervision. "I know what I'm doing, Gel," he said, with perfect conviction.

Gel looked at him with one eyebrow raised, then slowly and grudgingly nodded. And his expression changed completely. He went from anger—to defeat.

"I guess you do," he said slowly. "I guess you don't need me anymore."

Now it was his turn to feel exasperated, and he tossed his fork down on his plate. "Oh for—don't be ridiculous. I'd as soon cut off my right hand! Now, look—we need to try and think of all possible contingencies here, and have some sort of skeleton in place if—"

There was a tap on the door, and Lady Moth poked her head into the library. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were a wizard, or else you somehow conjured the baggage by saying her name," she said sourly. "I seem to be attracting all manner of visitors today."

This time, Kyrtian knew that the name that sprang into his mind was the right one. "Oh, no—" he said, grimacing. "Lady Triana. Just what we need."