Ilse Witch

2

On the same night Allardon Elessedil awaited the arrival of his scribe to make a copy of the map delivered by Hunter Predd, the spy in the household of the Bracken Clell Healer received a response to the message he had dispatched to his Mistress two days earlier. It was not the kind of response he had anticipated.

She was waiting for him when he came to his rooms at nightfall, his day’s work finished, his mind on other things. Perhaps he was thinking of slipping out later to his cages to see if one of her winged couriers had arrived with a message. Perhaps he was thinking only of a hot meal and a warm bed. Whatever the case, he was not expecting to find her. Surprised and frightened by her appearance, he flinched and cried out when she detached herself from the shadows. She soothed him with a soft word, quieted him, and waited patiently for him to recover himself enough to acknowledge her properly.

“Mistress,” he whispered, dropping to one knee and bowing deeply. She was pleased to discover he had not forgotten his manners. Although she had not come to him in many years, he remembered his place.

She left him bowed and on his knee a moment longer, standing before him, her whisper of reassurance and subtle pressure soft and light upon the air. Gray robes cloaked her from head to foot, and a hood concealed her face. Her spy had never seen her in the light or caught even the barest glimpse of her features. She was an enigma, a shadow exuding presence rather than identity. She kept herself at one with the darkness, a creature to be felt rather than viewed, keeping watch even when not seen.

“Mistress, I have important information,” her spy murmured without looking up, waiting to be told he might rise.

The Ilse Witch left him where he was, considering. She knew more than he imagined, more than he could guess, for she possessed power that was beyond his understanding. From the message he had sent—his words, his handwriting, his scent upon the paper—she could measure the urgency he was feeling. From the way he presented himself now—his demeanor, his tone of voice, his carriage—she could decipher his need. It was her gift always to know more than those with whom she came in contact wished her to know. Her magic laid them bare and left them as transparent as still waters.

The Ilse Witch stretched out her robed arm. “Rise,” she commanded.

The spy did so, keeping his head lowered, his eyes cast down. “I did not think you would come …”

“For you, for information of such importance, I could do no less.” She shifted her stance and bent forward slightly. “Speak, now, of what you know.”

The spy shivered, excitement coursing through him, anxious to be of service. Within the shadows of her hood, she smiled.

“A Wing Rider rescued an Elf from the sea and brought him to the Healer who serves this community,” the spy advised, daring now to lift his eyes as far as the hem of her robes. “The man’s eyes and tongue were removed, and the Healer says he is half-mad. I don’t doubt it, from the look of him. The Healer cannot determine his identity, and the Wing Rider claims not to know it either, but he suspects something. And the Wing Rider took something from the man before bringing him here. I caught a glimpse of it—a bracelet that bears the crest of the Elessedils.”

The spy’s gaze lifted now to seek out her own. “The Wing Rider left for Arborlon two days ago. I heard him tell the Healer where he was going. He took the bracelet with him.”

She regarded him in silence for a moment, her cloaked form as still as the shadows it mirrored. A bracelet bearing the crest of the Elessedils, she mused. The Wing Rider would have taken it to Allardon Elessedil to identify. Whose bracelet was it? What did it mean that it was found on this castaway Elf who was blind and voiceless and believed mad?

The answers to her questions were locked inside the castaway’s head. He must be made to give them up.

“Where is the man now?” she asked.

The spy hunched forward eagerly, the fingers of his hands knotted together beneath his chin as if in prayer. “He lies in the Healer’s infirmary, cared for but kept isolated until the Wing Rider’s return. No one is allowed to speak with him.” He snorted softly. “As if anyone could. He has no tongue with which to answer, has he?”

She gestured him away and to the side, and he moved as if a puppet in response. “Wait here for me,” she said. “Wait, until I return.”

She went out the door into the night, a spectral figure sliding effortlessly and soundlessly through the shadows. The Ilse Witch liked the darkness, found comfort in it she could never find in daylight. The darkness soothed and shaded, softening edges and points, reducing clarity. Vision lost importance because the eyes could be deceived. A shift of movement here changed the look of something there. What was certain in the light became suspect in the dark. It mirrored her life, a collage of images and voices, of memories that had shaped her growing, not all fitting tightly in sequence, not all linked together in ways that made sense. Like the shadows with which she so closely identified, her life was a patchwork of frayed ends and loose threads that invited refitting and mending. Her past was not carved of stone, but drawn on water. Reinvent yourself, she had been told by the Morgawr a long time ago. Reinvent yourself, and you will become more inscrutable to those who might try to unravel who you really are.

In the night, in darkness and shadows, she could do so more easily. She could keep what she looked like to herself and conceal who she really was. She could let them imagine her, and by doing so keep them forever deceived.

She moved through the village without challenge, encountering almost no one, those few she did unaware of her presence as they passed. It was late, the village mostly asleep, the ones who preferred the night busy in the ale houses and pleasure dens, caught up in their own wants and needs, uncaring of what transpired without. She could forgive them their weaknesses, these men and women, but she could never accept them as equals. Long since, she had abandoned any pretense that she believed their common origins linked them in any meaningful way. She was a creature of fire and iron. She was born to magic and power. It was her destiny to shape and alter the lives of others and never to be altered by them. It was her passion to rise above the fate that others had cast for her as a child and to visit revenge on them for daring to do so. She would be so much more than they, and they would be forever less.

When she let them speak her name again, when she chose to speak it herself, it would be remembered. It would not be buried in the ashes of her childhood, as it had once been. It would not be cast aside, a fragment of her lost past. It would soar with a hawk’s smooth glide and shine with the milky brightness of the moon. It would linger on the minds of the people of her world forever.

The Healer’s house lay ahead, close by the trees of the surrounding forest. She had flown in from the Wilderun late that afternoon, come out of her safehold in response to the spy’s message, sensing its importance, wanting to discover for herself what secrets it held. She had left her War Shrike in the old growth below the bluffs, its fierce head hooded and its taloned feet hobbled. It would bolt otherwise, so wild that even her magic could not hold it when she was absent. But as a fighting bird, it was without equal. Even the giant Rocs were wary of it, for the Shrike fought to the death with little thought to protecting itself. No one would see it, for she had cast a spell of forbidding about it to keep the unwanted away. By sunrise, she would have returned. By sunrise, she would be gone again, even given the dictates of what she must do now.

She slipped through the door of the Healer’s home on cat’s paws, moving through the central rooms to the sick bays, humming softly as she passed the attendants on duty, turning their minds inward and eyes elsewhere as she passed so they would not see her. The ones who kept watch outside the castaway’s curtained entry, she put to sleep. They sank into their chairs and leaned against walls and tables, eyes going closed, breathing slowing and deepening. It was quiet and peaceful in the Healer’s home, and her song fit snugly into place. She layered the air with her music, a tender blanket tucking in around the cautions and uneasiness that might otherwise have been triggered. Soon, she was all alone and free to work.

In his bay, with a light covering over his feverish body and the window curtains drawn close to keep out the light, the castaway lay dozing on the pallet that had been provided for him. His skin was blistered and raw, and the mending salve the Healer had applied glistened in a damp sheen. His body was wasted from lack of nourishment, his heart beat weakly in his chest, and his bruised and ravaged face was skeletal, the eyelids sunken in where the eyes themselves had been gouged out, the mouth a scarred red wound behind cracked lips.

The Ilse Witch studied him carefully for a time, letting her eyes tell her as much as they could, noting the man’s distinctly Elven features, the graying hair that marked him as no longer young, and the rigid crook of fingers and neck that screamed silently of tortures endured. She did not like the feel of the man; he had been made to suffer purposely and used for things she did not care to guess at. She did not like the scent he gave off or the small sounds he made. He was living in another place and time, unable to forget what he had suffered, and it was not pleasant.

When she touched him, ever so softly on his chest with her slim, cool fingers, he convulsed as if struck. Quickly, she employed her magic, singing softly to calm him, lending peace and reassurance. The arched back relaxed slowly, and the clawed fingers released their death grip on the bed covering. A sigh escaped the cracked lips. Relief in any form was welcome to this one, she thought, continuing to sing, to work her way past his defenses and into his mind.

When he was at rest again, given over to her ministrations and become her dependent, she placed her hands upon his fevered body so that she might draw from him his thoughts and feelings. She must unlock what lay hidden in his mind—his experiences, his travails, his secrets. She must do so through his senses, but primarily through his voice. He could no longer speak as ordinary men, but he could still communicate. It required only that she find a way to make him want to do so.

In the end, it was not all that hard. She bound him to her through her singing, probing gently as she did so, and he began to make what small and unintelligible sounds he could. She drew him out one grunt, one murmur, one gasp at a time. From each sound, she gained an image of what he knew, stored it away, and made it her own. The sounds were inhuman and rife with pain, but she absorbed them without flinching, bathing him in a wash of compassion, of reassurance and pity, of gentleness and the promise of healing.

Speak to me. Live again through me. Give me everything you hide, and I will give you peace.

He did so, and the images were brightly colored and stunning. There was an ocean, vast and blue and uncharted. There were islands, one after the other, some green and lush, some barren and rocky, each of a different feel, each hiding something monstrous. There were frantic, desperate battles in which weapons clashed and men died. There were feelings of such intensity, such raw power, that they eclipsed the events that triggered them and revealed the scars they had left on their bearer.

Finally, there were pillars of ice that reached to the misted, cool skies, their massive forms shifting and grinding like giant’s teeth as a thin beam of blue fire born of Elfstone magic shone through to something that lay beyond. There was a city, all in ruins, ancient and alive with monstrous protectors. And there was a keep, buried in the earth, warded by smooth metal and bright red eyes, containing magic …

The Ilse Witch gasped in spite of herself as the last image registered, an image of the magic the castaway had found within the buried keep. It was a magic of spells invoked by words—but so many! The number seemed endless, stretching away into shadows from soft pools of light, their power poised to rise into the air in a canopy so vast it might cover the whole of the earth!

The castaway was writhing beneath her, and the hold she kept on him slipped away momentarily as she lost focus. She brought her song to bear again, layering it over him, embedding herself more deeply within his mind to keep him under control.

Who are you? Speak your name!

His body lurched and the sounds he made were terrifying.

Tell me!

He answered her, and when he did, she understood at once the importance of the bracelet.

What else were you carrying? What else, that speaks to this?

He fought her, not realizing what it was he was fighting, only knowing that he must. She sensed it was not entirely his idea to fight her, that either someone had implanted within his mind the need to do so or something had happened to persuade him it was necessary. But she was strong and certain in her magic, and he lacked the defenses necessary to resist her.

A map, she saw. Drawn on an old skin, inked in his own hand. A map, she surmised at once, that was no longer his, but was on its way to Arborlon and the Elven King.

She tried to determine what was on the map, and for a moment she was able to reconstruct a vague image from his grunts and moans. She caught a glimpse of names written and symbols drawn here and there, saw a dotted line connecting islands off the coast of the Westland and out into the Blue Divide. She traced the line to the pillars of ice and to the land in which the safehold lay. But the writings and drawings were lost to her when he convulsed a final time and lay back, his voice spent, his mind emptied, and his body limp and unmoving beneath her touch.

She stilled her song and stepped away from him. She had all she was going to get, but what she had was enough to tell her what was needed. She listened to the silence for a moment, making sure her presence had not yet been detected. The castaway Elf lay motionless on his raised pallet, gone so deeply inside himself he would never come out again. He would live perhaps, but he would never recover.

She shook her head. It was pointless to leave him so.

Kael Elessedil, son of Queen Aine, once destined to be King of the Elves. It was before her time, but she knew the story. Lost for thirty years, and this was his sorry fate.

The Ilse Witch stepped close and drew back her hood to reveal the face that few ever saw. Within her concealing garments, she was nothing of what she seemed. She was very young, barely a grown woman, her hair long and dark, her eyes a startling blue, and her features smooth and lovely. As a child, when she had the name she no longer spoke, she would look at herself in the mirror of the waters of a little cove that pooled off the stream that ran not far from her home and try to imagine how she would look when grown. She had not thought herself pretty then, when it mattered to her. She did not think herself pretty now, when it did not.

There was warmth and tenderness in her face and eyes as she bent to kiss the ruined man on his lips. She held the kiss long enough to draw the breath from his lungs, and then he died.

“Be at peace, Kael Elessedil,” she whispered in his ear.

She went from the Healer’s home as she had come, hooded once more, a shadowy presence that drew no notice by its passing. The attendants would come awake after she was gone, unaware that anything had transpired, not sensing they had slept or that time had passed.

The Ilse Witch was already sifting through the images she had culled, weighing her options. The magic Kael Elessedil had discovered was priceless. Even without knowing exactly what it was, she could sense that much. It must be hers, of course. She must do what he had failed to do—find it, claim it, and retrieve it. It was protected in some way, as such magic necessarily would be, but there were no defenses she could not overcome. Her course of action was already decided, and only a settling of the particulars remained.

What she coveted, even if she did not require it in order to succeed, was the map.

Sliding through the darkness of Bracken Clell, she gave consideration to how she might gain possession of it. The Wing Rider had taken it to Allardon Elessedil in Arborlon, along with Kael Elessedil’s bracelet. The Elven King would recognize the importance of both, but he would not be able to translate the writings on the map. Nor would he have the benefit of his now dead brother’s thoughts, as she did. He would seek help from another in deciphering the mysterious symbols to determine what his brother had found.

Who would he turn to?

She knew the answer to her question almost before she had finished asking it. There was only one he could ask. One, who would be sure to know. Her enemy, one-armed and dark-browed, crippled of body and soul. Her nemesis, but her equal in the nuanced wielding of magic’s raw power.

Her thinking changed instantly with recognition of what this meant. Now there would be competition in her quest, and time would become precious. She would not have the luxuries of long deliberation and careful planning to sustain her effort. She would be faced with a challenge that would test her as nothing else could.

Even the Morgawr might choose to involve himself in a struggle of this magnitude.

She had slowed perceptibly, but now she picked up her pace once more. She was getting ahead of herself. Before she could return to the Wilderun with her news, she must conclude matters here. She must tie up loose ends. Her spy was still waiting to learn the value of his information. He would expect to be complimented on his diligence and well paid for his efforts. She must see to both.

Still, as she moved silently through the village and nearer to her spy’s rooms, her thoughts kept returning to the confrontation that lay ahead, in a time too distant yet to fix upon, in a place perhaps far removed from the lands she traveled now—a confrontation of wills, of magics, and of destinies. She and her adversary, locked in a final struggle for supremacy, just as she had dreamed they would one day be—the image burned in her thoughts like a hot coal and fired her imagination.

Her spy was waiting for her when she entered his rooms. “Mistress,” he acknowledged, dropping obediently to one knee.

“Rise,” she told him.

He did so, keeping his gaze lowered, his head bent.

“You have done well. What you told me has opened doors that I had only dreamed about.”

She watched him beam with pride and clasp his hands in anticipation of the reward she would bestow upon him. “Thank you, Mistress.”

“It is for me to thank you,” she replied. She reached into her robes and withdrew a leather pouch that clinked enticingly. “Open it when I am gone,” she said quietly. “Be at peace.”

She left without delay, her business almost finished. She went from the village to the decaying cottage that belonged to her spy, uncaged her birds, and sent them winging back into the Wilderun. She would find them waiting within her safehold when she returned. The spy would have no further use for them. Within the bag of gold she had given him nested a tiny snake whose bite was so lethal that even the smallest nick from a single fang was fatal. Her spy would not wait until morning to count his coins; he would do so tonight. He would be found, of course, but by then the snake would be gone. She guessed that the money would be gone almost as fast. In quarters of the sort where her spy lived, it was well known that dead men had no need for gold.

She gave the matter little thought as she made her way back to where she had hobbled and hooded her War Shrike. Although they were many and were positioned in large numbers throughout the Four Lands, she did not give up her spies easily. She was fiercely protective of them when they were as useful and reliable as this one had been.

But even the best spy could be found out and made to betray her, and she could not chance that happening here. Better to cut her losses than to take such an obvious risk. A life was a small price to pay for an edge on her greatest enemy.

But how was she to gain possession of that map? She thought momentarily of going after it herself. But to steal it from Allardon Elessedil, who would have it by now, in the heart of Elven country, was too dangerous a task for her to undertake without careful planning. She could try to intercept it on its inevitable way to her enemy, but how was she to determine the means by which it would be conveyed? Besides, she might already be too late, even for that.

No, she must bide her time. She must consider. She must find a more subtle way to get what she wanted.

She reached her mount, removed the stays and hood while keeping him in check with her magic, then mounted him behind his thick, feathered neck and above the place where his wings joined to his body, and together they lifted away. Time and cunning would reward her best, she thought contentedly, the wind rushing past her face, the smells of the forest giving way to the pure cold of the high night air that swept the clouds and circled the stars.

Time and cunning, and the power of the magic she was born to, would yield her a world.