The Inheritance

Chapter 18

Elansa looked down the road, the long road leading out of the stonelands and into the forest and all the way to Qualinesti. She had not seen the place through all the winter. It seemed as though years had passed. As she had left the city, so would she enter, on horseback. Char had bought a good mare for her in one of the hamlets between Pax Tharkas and the forest-a little roan with white spots on her shoulders like sun-dapple. On this mare she'd ridden the hard road, and though the dwarf never left her, he did not ride. He led her mare, walking. At first he did so because she was too bowed down with grief to guide the mare. The deaths, the run through the tunnels and back to Hammer Rock, these things were like measures of stone upon her heart. She did not rouse from that grief until the night she knew she was with child.

"How can you know?" Char had asked, for he thought that not enough time had passed for her to know in the usual way. "How can you be sure?"

She'd smiled, but sadly. "You are a man," she said. "You don't know what it is to feel your body talking to you. I am a woman. I know."

He took a long drink of dwarf spirits, for he had some again, a fine fat skin of it-bought, bartered, or stolen one day when he'd gone out of the tunnels to hunt. Drinking, he considered what she said. In the end, he simply shrugged, unable to argue.

"But what's to do?" he asked. "What will happen to an elven princess who comes home carrying a human's child?"

She would be cast out. She would become as Leyerlain Starwing had become. She would be named dark elf. No one would speak to her. Her name would be as a curse. This, not because she had lain with a human. It happened. It was tolerated, though barely. She would be cast out because she had betrayed a prince by failing to erase with her own blood the shame of having forsaken her lord husband to be with a human.

Char heard all this in sorrow, drinking. He thought about it long and hard. For days he said nothing as they went through the weary tunnels, and then in the cave below Hammer Rock, he told her he had an idea.

"Tell them you were raped," he said.

She looked at him long. "No. Brand never raped me," she said at last. "He gave me a choice between him and-"

"Between him and rape," Char said. "He did that for complicated reasons, but you're right. One was because he wouldn't see you raped. It’s no matter now, though. That was then. Now you have to do for yourself, princess. Tell them in Qualinost that you were raped. Tell them that, and tell them your prince died bravely defending you against your rapist." He took another drink, enjoying the fire of it. "And tell them you've known for a time you got a child from Brand. That should take care of the matter of you not having the decency to kill yourself."

Elansa considered, but she said nothing.

"Tell them," he said, "for the sake of the child."

If she said she'd been raped, her child would have a home. It would be able to live among its mother's people, and that might not be a perfect life, but it would be better than the life of an exile. Whoever this child would be, maid or man, it would have the strength of its mother and its father. Whoever this child was, it would endure and thrive.

The sun lay on the road, fighting the way home. Elansa sighed and leaned down from the mare's back to touch Char’s shoulder.

"Will you come with me?" she asked.

"All the way. Don't worry, princess. I'll tell them your tale and make it stick You don't have to do more than nod to it."

Elansa pressed her hand to her heart, and then, shyly, to her belly. There lay her child. As greatly as she had grieved an unknown child lost, a long time ago in winter, that greatly did she love this known child now. These lives, she thought, the lost one and this one found, started with men, but they always came to her to keep or lose. She must keep this one safe. She must see this child to the light.

Char took the reins, leading the mare along the road into the forest. The chill shade closed around them after the hot sun of the stoneland; green embraced. They went in silence, and now and then, they stopped to look back out to the borderland between the kingdom of the elves and the far kingdom of dwarves.

The last time they stopped, they looked a long while. Hammer Rock was the tallest thing they could see. Then Char took the reins, and softly he said, "Come on, princess. Let me take you home."