Firstborn

8 — Late Spring, in the Forest

Mackeli had been gone three days when Anaya showed Kith-Kanan where she had secreted his sword and dagger. There could be no question now that something had happened to him and that they had to go to his rescue.

“There is your metal,” she said. “Take it up. You may have need of it.”

He brushed the dead leaves off the slim, straight blade of his sword and wiped it with an oily cloth. It slid home in its scabbard with only a faint hiss. Anaya kept back when he held the weapons. She regarded the iron blades with loathing, as if they were the stinking carcasses of long dead animals.

“Mackeli’s been gone so long, I hope we can pick up his trail,” Kith-Kanan said. His eyes searched the huge trees.

“As long as Mackeli lives, I will always be able to find him.” declared Anaya. “There is a bond between us. He is my brother.”

With this pronouncement she turned and went back to the hollow tree. Kith-Kanan followed her. What did she mean—brother? Were the two siblings? He’d wondered at their relationship, but certainly hadn’t noticed any family resemblance. Anaya was even less talkative on the subject than Mackeli had been.

He went to the door of the tree and looked in. Squatting before a piece of shiny mica, Anaya was painting her face. She had wiped her cheeks clean—relatively clean, anyway—with a wad of damp green leaves and now was applying paint made from berries and nut shells. Her brush was a new twig, the end of which she’d chewed to make it soft and pliable. Anaya went from one gourd full of pigment to another, painting zigzag lines on her face in red, brown, and yellow.

“What are you doing? Time is wasting,” Kith-Kanan said impatiently.

Anaya drew three converging lines on her chin, like an arrowhead in red. Her dark hazel eyes were hard as she said, “Go outside and wait for me.”

Kith-Kanan felt anger rising at her casual tone of command. She ordered him about like a servant, but there was nothing for him to do but stew. When Anaya finally emerged, they plunged into the deep shade of the woods. Kith-Kanan found his anger at her dissolving as he watched her move gracefully through the wood. She never disturbed a leaf or twig, moving, as Mackeli had said, like smoke.

They finally paused to rest, and Kith-Kanan sat on a log to catch his breath. He looked at Anaya as she stood poised, one foot atop the fallen log. She wasn’t even breathing heavily. She was a muscular, brown-skinned, painted Kagonesti—quite savage by Silvanesti standards—but she was also practical and wise in the ways of the forest. Their worlds were so different as to be hostile to each other, but he felt at that moment a sense of security. He was not so alone as he had believed.

“Why do you look at me that way?” Anaya asked, frowning.

“I was just thinking how much better it would be for us to be friends, instead of enemies,” said Kith-Kanan sincerely.

It was her turn to give him a strange look. He laughed and asked, “Now why are you looking at me like that?”

“I know the word, but I’ve never had a friend before,” Anaya said.

Kith-Kanan would not have believed it, but the place Anaya led him through was even thicker with trees than any part of the forest he’d seen so far. They were not the giants of the old forest where she lived, but of a size he was more accustomed to seeing. They grew so close together, however, that it soon became impossible for him to walk at all.

Anaya grasped an oak tree trunk with her bare hands and feet and started up it like a squirrel. Kith-Kanan gaped at the ease with which she scaled the tree. The leaves closed around her.

“Are you coming?” she called down,

“I can’t climb like that!” he protested.

“Wait then.” He saw a flash of her red leg paint as she sprang from an oak branch to a nearby elm. The gap between branches was more than six feet, yet Anaya launched herself without a moment’s hesitation. A few seconds later she was back, flitting from tree to tree with the ease of a bird. A twined strand of creeper, as thick as the prince’s two thumbs, fell from the oak leaves and landed at his feet. This was more to his liking. Kith-Kanan spat on his palms and hauled himself up, hand over hand. He braced his feet against the tree trunk and soon found himself perched on an oak limb thirty feet from the forest floor.

“Whew!” he said, grinning. “A good climb!” Anaya was patently not impressed. After all, she had made the same climb with no vine at all. Kith-Kanan hauled up the creeper, coiling it carefully around his waist.

“It will be faster to stay in the treetops from now on,” Anaya advised.

“How can you tell this is the way Mackeli went?”

She gathered herself to leap. “I smell him. This way.”

Anaya sprang across to the elm. Kith-Kanan went more slowly, slipping a good deal on the round surface of the tree limb. Anaya waited for him to catch up, which he did by grasping an overhead branch and swinging over the gap. A dizzy glimpse of the ground flashed beneath his feet, and then Kith-Kanan’s leg hooked around the elm. He let go of the oak branch, swung upside-down by one leg, and gradually worked his way onto the elm.

“This is going to take a long time,” he admitted, panting for breath.

They continued on high in the treetops for most of the day. Though his hands were by no means soft, accustomed as they were to swordplay and his griffon’s reins, Kith-Kanan’s palms became scraped and sore from grasping and swinging on the rough-barked branches. His feet slipped so often that he finally removed his thick-strapped sandals and went barefoot like Anaya. His feet were soon as tender as his hands, but he didn’t slip again.

Even at the slow pace Kith-Kanan set, they covered many miles on their lofty road. Well past noon, Anaya called for a rest. They wedged themselves high in a carpeen tree. She showed him how to find the elusive fruit of the carpeen, yellow and pearlike, hidden by a tightly growing roll of leaves. The soft white meat of the carpeen not only sated their hunger, it was thirst-quenching, too.

“Do you think Mackeli is all right?” Kith-Kanan asked, the worry clear in his voice.

Anaya finished her fruit and dropped the core to the ground. “He is alive.” she stated flatly.

Kith-Kanan dropped his own fruit core and asked, “How can you be certain?”

Shifting around the prince with careless ease, Anaya slid from her perch and came down astride the limb where he sat. She took his scraped hand and held his fingertips to her throat.

“Do you feel the beat of my heart?” she asked him.

“Yes.” It was strong and slow.

She pushed his hand away. “And now?”

“Of course not. I’m no longer touching you,” he replied.

“Yet you see me and hear me, without touching me.”

“That’s different.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Is it? If I tell you I can feel Mackeli’s heart beating from far off, do you believe me?”

“I do,” said Kith-Kanan. “I’ve seen that you have many wonderful talents.”

“No!” Anaya swept a hand through the empty air. “I am nothing but what the forest has made me. As I am, so you could be!”

She took his hand again, holding his fingertips against the softly pulsing vein in her neck. Anaya looked directly in his eyes. “Show me the rhythm of my heart,” she said.

Kith-Kanan tapped a finger of his other hand against his leg. “Yes,” she coaxed. “You have it. Continue.”

Her gaze held his. It was true—between them he felt a connection. Not a physical bond, like the grasp of a hand, but a more subtle connection—like the bond he knew stretched between himself and Sithas. Even when they were not touching and were many miles apart he could sense the life force of Sithas.

And now, between Anaya’s eyes and his, Kith-Kanan felt the steady surge of her pulse, beating, beating…

“Look at your hands,” urged Anaya.

His left was still tapping out the rhythm on his leg. His right lay palm up on the tree limb. He wasn’t touching her throat any longer.

“Do you still feel the pulse?” she asked.

He nodded. Even as he felt the surging of his own heart, he could feel hers, too. It was slower, steadier. Kith-Kanan looked with shock at his idle hand. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. No sooner had he said this than the sensation of her heartbeat left his fingertips.

Anaya shook her head. “You don’t want to learn,” she said in disgust. She stood up and stepped from the carpeen tree to the neighboring oak. “It’s time to move on. It will be dark before long, and you aren’t skilled enough to treewalk by night.”

This was certainly true, so Kith-Kanan did not protest. He watched the wiry Anaya wend her way through the web of branches, but the meaning of her lesson was still sinking in. What did it mean that he had been able to keep Anaya’s pulse? He still felt the pain of his separation from Hermathya, a hard, cold lump in his chest, but when he closed his eyes and thought of Hermathya for a moment—a tall, flame-haired elf woman with eyes of deepest blue—he only frowned in concentration, for there was nothing, no bond, however slight, that connected him with his lost love. He could not know if she was alive or dead. Sadness touched Kith-Kanan’s heart, but there was no time for self-pity now. He opened his eyes and moved quickly to where Anaya had stopped up ahead.

She was staring at a large crow perched on a limb near her head. When the crow spied Kith-Kanan, it abruptly flew away. Anaya’s shoulders drooped.

“The corvae have not seen Mackeli since four days past,” she explained. “But they have seen something else—humans.”

“Humans? In the wildwood?”

Anaya nodded. She lowered herself to a spindly limb and furrowed her brow in thought. “I did not smell them sooner because the metal you carry stinks in my nose too much. The corvae say there’s a small band of humans farther to the west. They’re cutting down the trees, and they have some sort of flying beast, of a kind the corvae have never seen.”

“Arcuballis! That’s my griffon! The humans must have captured it,” he said. In fact, he couldn’t imagine how; as far as he could determine they were miles from the spot where he’d first landed, and it would have been very difficult for strangers, especially humans, to handle the spirited Arcuballis.

“How many humans are there?” Kith-Kanan inquired.

Anaya gave him a disdainful look. “Corvae can’t count,” she stated contemptuously.

They started off again as twilight was falling. For a brief time it actually brightened in the trees, as the sinking sun lanced in from the side. Anaya found a particularly tall maple and climbed up. The majestic tree rose even above its neighbors, and its thick limbs grew in an easy step pattern around the massive trunk. Kith-Kanan had no trouble keeping up with the Kagonesti in the vertical climb.

At the top of the tree Anaya stopped, one arm hooked around the gnarled peak of the maple. Kith-Kanan worked his way around beside her. The maple’s pinnacle swayed under his additional weight, but the view was so breathtaking he didn’t mind the motion.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but the green tops of trees. The horizon to the west was darkening from pink to flame red. Kith-Kanan was enchanted. Though he had often seen great vistas from the back of Arcuballis, his appreciation for such sights had been increased by the weeks he’d spent in this forest, where a glimpse of sky was a rare treat.

Anaya was not enraptured. She narrowed her sharp eyes and said, “There they are.”

“Who?”

“The intruders. Do you not see the smoke?”

Kith-Kanan stared in the direction she pointed. To the north, a faint smudge of gray marred the sky’s royal blue. Even as he stared at it, Kith-Kanan wasn’t sure the smoke was really there. He blinked several times.

“They are burning the trees,” Anaya said grimly. “Savages!”

The prince refrained from saying that to most of the civilized people of Krynn, it was she who was the savage. Instead he asked, “Which way to Mackeli?”

“Toward the smoke,” she said. “The humans have taken him after all. I will see them bleed!”

Though Kith-Kanan was surprised at the depth of her feeling, he had no doubt she meant what she said.

They stayed in the treetops until the prince had begun to miss his handholds and then nearly fell forty feet to the ground. It was too dark to continue aloft, so Anaya and Kith-Kanan descended to the forest floor once more. They walked perhaps a mile in silence, Anaya gliding through the black tree trunks like a runaway shadow. Kith-Kanan felt the tension rising. He had never fought humans—he’d only met a few of them in Silvanost, and all of them were aristocrats. For that matter, he’d never fought anyone for real, in a fight where death was the likely outcome. He wondered if he could do it, actually thrust his sword through someone’s body, or use the edge to cut them…He reminded himself that these humans were holding Mackeli prisoner, and probably his royal griffon, too.

Anaya froze, silhouetted between two large trees. Her hand was out stiffly behind her, a signal for Kith-Kanan to halt. He did and heard what had stopped her. The tinny sound of a flute drifted through the forest, borne along by the smells of wood smoke and roasting meat.

When he looked toward Anaya she’d vanished. He waited. What was he supposed to do? Kith-Kanan shook himself mentally. You, a prince of House Royal, wanting directions from a Kagonesti savage! You are a warrior—do your duty!

He charged through the underbrush. At the first gleam of a campfire, Kith-Kanan drew his sword. Another twenty steps, and he burst into a clearing hewn from the primeval woodland. A large campfire, almost a bonfire, blazed in the center of the clearing. A dozen ruddy faces—thickly fleshed human faces, with their low foreheads, broad cheeks, and wide jaws—turned toward the elf prince. Some had hair growing on their faces. All stared at him in utter astonishment.

One of the humans, with pale brown hair on his face, stood up. “Terrible spirit, do not harm us!” he intoned. “Peace be with you!”

Kith-Kanan relaxed. These weren’t desperate brigands. They were ordinary men and, by the looks of their equipment, woodcutters. He dropped his sword point and stepped into the firelight.

“It’s one of them!” declared another human. “The Elder Folk!”

“Who are you?” demanded Kith-Kanan.

“Essric’s company of woodmen. I am Essric,” said the brown-haired human.

Kith-Kanan surveyed the clearing. Over thirty large trees had been felled in this one place, and he could see a path had been cut through the forest. The very biggest trees were trimmed of their branches and were being split into halves and quarters with wedges and mallets. Slightly smaller trees were being dragged away. Kith-Kanan saw a rough pen full of broad-backed oxen.

“This is Silvanesti land,” he said. “By whose grant do you cut down trees that belong to the Speaker of the Stars?”

Essric looked to his men, who had nothing to tell him. He scratched his brown beard ruefully. “My lord, we were brought hither and landed on the south coast of this country by ships commanded by Lord Ragnarius of Ergoth. It is Lord Ragnarius’s pleasure that we fell as many trees as his ships can carry home. We didn’t know anyone owned these trees!”

Just then, an eerie howl rippled across the fire-lit clearing. The humans all stood up, reaching for axes and staves. Kith-Kanan smiled to himself. Anaya was putting a scare into the men.

A clean-shaven man to Essric’s left, who held a broadaxe in his meaty hands, suddenly let out a cry and staggered backward, almost falling in the fire. Instead, he dropped into the arms of his comrades.

“Forest spirits are attacking!” Kith-Kanan shouted. His declaration was punctuated by a hair-raising screech from the black trees. He had to struggle to keep from laughing as the twelve humans were driven from their fire by a barrage of sooty stones. One connected with the back of one man’s head, stretching him out flat. Panic-stricken, the others didn’t stop to help him, but fled pell-mell past the ox pen. Without torches to light their way, they stumbled and fell over stumps and broken branches. Within minutes, no one was left in the clearing but Kith-Kanan and the prone woodcutter.

Anaya came striding into the circle of light. Kith-Kanan grinned at her and held up a hand in greeting. She stalked past him to where the human lay. The flint knife was in her hand.

She rolled the unconscious human over. He was fairly young and had a red mustache. A thick gold ring gleamed from one earlobe. That, and the cut of his pants, told Kith-Kanan that the man had been a sailor at one time.

Anaya put a knee on the man’s chest. The human opened his eyes and saw a wildly painted creature, serrated flint knife in hand, kneeling on him. The creature’s face stared down with a ferocious grimace twisting its painted designs. The man’s eyes widened in terror, showing much white.

He tried to raise an arm to ward off Anaya, but Kith-Kanan was holding his wrists.

“Shall I cut out your eyes?” Anaya said coldly. “They would make fine decorations for my home.”

“No! No! Spare me!” gibbered the man.

“No? Then tell us what we want to know,” Kith-Kanan warned. “There was a white-haired elf boy here, yes?”

“Yes, wonderful lord!”

“And a griffon—a flying beast with an eagle’s forepart and a lion’s hindquarters?”

“Yes, yes!”

“What happened to them?”

“They were taken away by Voltorno,” the man moaned.

“Who’s Voltorno?” asked Kith-Kanan.

“A soldier. A terrible, cruel man. Lord Ragnarius sent him with us.”

“Why isn’t he here now?” Anaya hissed, pushing the ragged edge of her knife against his throat.

“He—He decided to take the elf boy and the beast back to Lord Ragnarius’s ship.”

Anaya and Kith-Kanan exchange looks. “How long ago did this Voltorno leave?” persisted Kith-Kanan.

“This morning,” the unfortunate sailor gasped.

“And how many are there in his party?”

“Ten. S—Six men-at-arms and four archers.”

Kith-Kanan stood up, releasing the man’s hands. “Let him up.

“No,” disagreed Anaya. “He must die.”

“That is not the way! If you kill him, how will you be any different from the men who hold Mackeli captive? You cannot be the same as those you fight and have any honor. You must be better.”

“Better?” she hissed, looking up at the prince. “Anything is better than tree-killing scum!”

“He is not responsible,” Kith-Kanan insisted. “He was ordered.”

“Whose hand held the axe?” Anaya interrupted.

Taking advantage of their argument, the sailor shoved Anaya off and scrambled to his feet. He ran after his comrades, bleating for help.

“Now you see? You let him get away,” Anaya said. She gathered herself to give chase, but Kith-Kanan told her, “Forget those humans! Mackeli is more important. We’ll have to catch up with them before they reach the coast.” Anaya sullenly did not reply. “Listen to me! We’re going to need all your talents. Call the corvae, the Black Crawlers, everything. Have them find the humans and try to delay them long enough so that we can catch up.”

She pushed him aside and stepped away. The big fire was dying, and the hacked out clearing was sinking into darkness. Now and then an ox grunted from the makeshift pen.

Anaya moved to the felled trees. She put a gentle hand on the trunk of one huge oak. “Why do they do it?” she asked mournfully. “Why do they cut down the trees? Can’t they hear the fabric of the forest split open each time a tree falls?” Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “There are spirits in the wildwood, spirits in the trees. They have murdered them with their metal.” Her haunted eyes looked up at the prince.

Kith-Kanan put a hand on her shoulder. “There’s much to be done. We must go.” Anaya drew a shuddering breath. After giving the tree a last gentle touch, she stooped to gather up her throwing stones.