A/N: Upping the speed to I can get motivation to finish the thing before going on holidays the next week! We're almost done with the first part – go ahead, you can hate me for this chapter. I know I probably deserve it (grins) No, seriously, give me your honest opinion... I thought it was symbolic and necessary, but I might be wrong. Edits are the tonic of life, after all. Thanks for your support!

o O o

7. Arrogance of race

o O o

The visit to Reed Shallows was not strictly necessary but Khalia had felt the need to leave the cramped space of her cabin if only for a short while. It was not that she didn't love to keep company to the dokkar, quite the opposite. It was just that it was difficult to think straight when those enticing eyes were fixed on her, studying her every mundane move like it was mystifying.

And she needed to think straight. The previous evening had been like a dream, with the slow brogue of the dark fey walking her along a tale full of marvels the likes of which she had never dared to imagine. She had been thrilled when his descriptions had shed light upon the dark words of Grandma Ulra, helping her to understand the contradictory message and to understand him.

But there were things she still did not grasp. For example, the continuous references he had made to "the gods", as if there were several of them. Or the exact nature of the alir he belonged to. He had said fey were immortal, but that was just not possible, was it? Nothing was eternal except the god and the darkness, lurking forevermore.

She shook her head. That issue didn't matter. One or thousands, they weren't there. The fey was. And he was a dark fey, which meant he had already chosen to teach his magic to Man once. It was a magic he could not perform, he had said, but that didn't mean he could not show how it was done. The mere thought made Khalia smile. She would learn the forgotten art, she decided. She would master the skill that had broken the world and condemned a whole race to exile.

She would be someone important and no one would mind the fact that she was young and single and a woman. They would have to look at her in awe as she healed them without herbs.

Was this one the choice Grandma Ulra had warned her about? Would it be the correct one? But of course it would be! Then, why was Ulra so worried?

Part of her did not care. Another part was scared.

It was the small, scared part of her that guided her footsteps beyond the outskirts of town and towards the old shack where the elder woman lived.

The chill seeped her bones as she approached the ransacked house, whose shadow loomed over her even when she was still several yards away. What should she say? Walking into the old woman's room as she had last time would not help her. Should she share her secret?

Khalia wove her way between two other buildings, as if she had intended to circumvent the lonely hut from the beginning. She had held doubts about the wisdom of keeping the fey a secret, but every passing moment tempered her resolution like steel.

She had seen the look lurking in the fey's eyes as he talked of the way his kin had shared their gift with man. She had seen that because of that gift, he had suffered for longer than she could comprehend. She could not turn him in to the rest of the community and force him to revive the ordeal time and again. She could not expose him like that.

No, she would hide him until he chose to reveal himself. In the meantime, she thought with a smile, they would have plenty of time for him to give her his lost magic.

That was her choice and it was right. Grandma Ulra and her ominous words could be laid to rest in her mind.

Heaving a great sigh, Khalia grinned like a fool and walked faster. She should buy some supplies to justify her absence from her home, she guessed. It would feel weird to tell the dokkar that she had just been away pondering whether to hand him over to the whole village or keep him for herself.

She giggled at the idea.

And then she gasped as a man stumbled out of the village's small alehouse, his eyes wide and his hands clutching his bleeding stomach.

She watched in horror as the man collapsed against her and she could only stare at the bloody saliva falling from his lips. She knew this man, she realized. It was Gard, the one who kept a handful of sheep in his backyard and acted as butcher from time to time.

The light in his eyes went out as if he were one of the newborn lambs he used to kill.

Khalia never knelt by his side to help. She didn't have the time. A commotion came from the alehouse and another man ran out of the door, face pale and eyes wide in fear. He would have shoved her out of his way, she knew. She saw him prepare to push with his left shoulder and she braced herself, unable to jump aside.

But she never felt him crash against her.

Instead, he fell like a limp sack of grain to the floor at her feet, partly on top of Gard. It had been Reimund. And behind him stood a dark stranger with a bored look and a clean, silvery blade naked in his hand.

"Bah. If you didn't want to fight, you shouldn't have called it on," the man told the corpses as if they could hear him.

Khalia stared at him, trembling. She did not know him. His hair was dark as a raven's wing and his features were sharp, the cut too foreign to belong in Reed Shallows.

He did not even belong to the west of the Astror river, she realized with a sick feeling to her stomach. He had come from the lands of savages beyond the kingdom's natural frontier, and he had come seeking blood.

His eyes, as black as his hair, spared her a curious glance and that was all she needed to gather her courage and race back towards her home.

That man was a murderer, she told herself over the wild beating of her heart. He had come to their peaceful community to amuse himself with their suffering.

She had to stop him, and she knew just how to do it.

o O o

The man stared after the retreating Khalia for a long moment suspended in time. Though his relaxed and bored demeanor did no change in the slightest, a curious gleam glinted in his eyes as he shifted to sidestep yet another blindly charging peasant.

This one brandished a broken chair with the force of a man long used to manual labor, but the improvised weapon served little against the stranger. His hand moved in a flash of silver and the imbecile fell down without another sound.

Damn, but it was boring.

The man felt as if he were swatting flies in a hot summer day. The level of effort involved did not differ by much. After the bandit hole - Thornridge, wasn't it? - he had kept walking south and the harsh conditions of the Brookmoor had given him hope for the kind of people who made their living in such a deadly place.

But it had turned out that the villagers did not live in the Brookmoor at all. They toiled and labored like sheep in a small terrain they had stolen whoever knew how long ago from the fetid swamp and they avoided its depths like the plague. They were just another handful of impaired weaklings! And to make matters worse, they were a bunch of proud weaklings.

The stranger snorted and shot out his free hand, palm flat, to shatter the nose of the owner of the alehouse. The little man's eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor, dead.

All of them were dead. He was once more the one standing in a pool of blood, alone. Uncontested.

Damn the fuckers! He spat on the ground and sheathed his sword with more emphasis than needed. The screech of steel on steel helped to alleviate his frustration.

"What are you looking at?" he growled, not turning to look at the presence he had felt standing in a corner of the street turned battlefield from the beginning of the confrontation.

He heard a cackle, wild and untamed and dry as lightning, and turned towards the sound with a blank look.

"I make a point of never asking this, but I'll make an exception for the resident psycho. Who the fuck are you?"

"You are late, child," the woman replied with a devious look.

She was old, so old that her skin was translucent and her limbs seemed as frail as a bird's. And yet, when the man looked at her, he noted the piercing glare of her pale, pale blue eyes and the shrewd twist of her grin.

"I bet everyone else thinks I'm too early. A lifetime or so."

"Who cares about what they think? It does not matter! It will not make the truth any falser." She cackled again, with that glint in her gaze, and it gave the man pause.

"Do not give me that look, child," she added with a wink. "I know the truth and the truth is that Yashal is not blind."

If hearing his given name spilling out of her lips made him uncomfortable, he hid it well behind a snort.

"If you're trying to tell me something, you could get to the point. I have a bottle of booze waiting for me in the counter if these bastards have not wasted it."

"You are late, child. Yashal. Demon. Whichever your prefer. By the gods, you have more names than I have arthritis!"

Yashal smirked at the odd comparison. If it was true that the woman had arthritis, it did not make her any less dangerous. He could feel her, like a wolf who knew that another alpha male was near, and he was not fooled by the mad laughter or deteriorated body: this little wisp of a woman was stronger than the villagers he had killed.

"Good to have the conversation back on track. Late for what?"

"For the choice that must be made."

He arched an eyebrow and the little woman huffed.

"Do not make it worse! Go! You are not blind, child, I know. I know you saw her. Go to her, now!"

She was right, Yashal guessed. He had seen her. Out of the many faceless bodies who had thrown themselves at his blade, he had seen her wide eyes and a gut instinct - a curiosity he rarely felt piqued - had kept his gaze on her even as he dispatched more opponents.

But he did not take well to orders.

"Why would I?"

"Because you Should be there, recalcitrant child."

He sighed and stared back into the alehouse. The truth was that he was bored.

"Bah. This wretched idiots can't brew decent booze to save their hides anyway."

If they were able to, he'd not have made the comments that made them all jump him in a frenzy. The drink he had been served had tasted like an awful mixture of sweat and horse piss with a touch of rotten fish for good measure.

He hoped the girl would still be waiting for him because he did not feel like chasing her across the whole Brookmoor. She'd better be more interesting than the empty tavern, he thought, and started to follow her at a leisured pace.

Grandma Ulra laughed, her piercing blue eyes fixed on him even after he had disappeared behind the disorganized houses of Reed Shallows.

"Go, child. The choice awaits," she whispered before the strength left her limbs, voice and gaze.

o O o

Rhyl'lyn's head snapped up a few moments before the door to the cottage slammed open, letting through a panting, dishevelled Khalia and an onslaught of sun. His eyes watered and he felt his whole body tense, but this time the pain hit him with less viciousness and he could keep his wits.

"Something happened?"

Khalia exuded an intense feel of wrongness, of distress, but he did not move from the rickety chair he had claimed as his. Instead, he observed her shaking limbs and watery eyes, eyes that had seen what they were not ready for. Unfortunately, the list of what that something might be was long and he had to wait for her to regain her composure and answer his question.

She didn't.

"Hurry, help me!" She grabbed onto one end of the table he was sitting at and motioned for him to get up and grab the other one.

It was not in his nature, but he obeyed and noted that she was so beside herself that she even forgot to be amazed at the fact that today he could be moving, and shoving weight, even under indirect sun exposure.

"Something happened?" he asked again as a they settled the table out of the way.

Against the wall, in the vacated space, a wooden chest became visible and Khalia threw herself against it before offering a reply.

"These things belonged to my father," she explained once she had wrestled the lid open. "I still keep everything around: he had so little, it seemed wrong to throw it.

A pair of boots, a furred cloak and several wads of cloth that might have been clothes flew around the room but she kept digging. She had begun to ramble as well, Rhyl'lyn noted with amusement.

"I never thought I'd use any of this. I never learned how to! But now that man's here and…"

"What man?"

At last, Khalia seemed to find what she looked for. Her fingers clenched tight over a rancid old sheath, she sat back on her heels and swallowed until she calmed down enough.

"He was in the alehouse. I was just walking by, to buy more eggs from Maryoh, but then… there was a noise and a man fell almost on top of me. He was… dead. And then there was another man, and the stranger killed him right in front of me."

"Is that so extraordinary?"

He was no longer petrified at the thought of violence, he found. Khalia had told him the previous eve that war was commonplace, and after witnessing her reactions he found that he did not much care one way or the other. Man was as it was, selfish, foolish, untrustworthy. They were blind to the truth and so they did not hesitate to reach for what they wanted, when they wanted, it seemed.

More men were dead. What did it matter to him?

She did not seem to share his views, however.

"Of course it is extraordinary! It is wrong!" She wheeled on him, a short, curved blade clutched in her hands.

"How so? You told me there were many wars. Were wars not commonplace?"

"This is different!" She trusted the weapon to him, hilt first. "We have to help them and stop that murderer!"

He took the object, his right hand closing over the wooden hilt. It was not exactly a weapon. It was some kind of tool, used to butcher the carcasses of animals, and parts of the blade were covered in rust. But it could still kill. Rhyl'lyn knew that much just from touching it.

He looked up from the blade and into her anxious face.

"You have to stop him," she said. "I know you can, even without your magic. You're a fey and he's only a savage from outside the kingdom."

"Why?"

"Why…?"

"Did he attack you? Will he attack me? Why do I have to stop him?"

"No, he did not attack me but he killed people! Don't you understand? He's a monster! You must kill him!"

Rhyl'lyn turned the weapon over in his hand. He understood, better than she did. After exploiting the dokkar and damning them to oblivion and eternal darkness, Man found it convenient to rely on them once more. For Man, it seemed, the dark fey were no different from the tools they had gifted them in the dawn of time. Weapons to be used and discarded.

He narrowed his eyes. He had not escaped the Otherworld to fall prisoner to a lesser mortal race.

"I must, indeed, do something," he mused aloud.

He shifted his grip on the weapon, closing his blackened fingers over the hilt, feeling the old wood and the blunt edge and the blood that had once covered it. When he moved, he was swift like a flickering shadow - mortal eyes would not have been able to follow his hands. He was also as gentle as he could.

He lowered her to the ground, her stern self-righteous look masking her fear and slowly fading into peacefulness.

She didn't look surprised, but Rhyl'lyn knew that it was because she had had no time to comprehend what was happening. It had nothing to do with the inevitability of his actions.

Because she had not given him any other option. She knew who he was, what he was: she'd not have allowed him to go free. She had become his captor the moment she had rescued him and had tried to wield him for her own benefit.

There really had been no other option, he thought as he turned on his heel towards the door.

The damnable sun still shone bright and the villagers did not venture out to Khalia's hut but he knew she was the only healer in town and if someone was wounded her help might be required. He must be long gone before anyone chose to call on her or more jailors would present themselves.

Taking a deep breath and squinting his eyes, he stood and turned to the entrance.

"You've just ruined my fun, brat. You'd better make up for it."

He never saw the figure leaning against the doorjamb.

He never even felt his presence.