1376 – Eleint
Flames licked at the base of the trunks in the little orchard she had once helped Shandra plant. The windows of the Phoenix Tail has been smashed. Here and there bodies were lying around, half-in half-out of their armour.
There had been no difficulty in getting into the bailey. She'd thought she might have to transform back into a thrush, and fly over the walls. But the gate had still been hanging askew on its hinges, the portcullis was still a space surrounded by jagged pieces of metal, and no guards watched from the walls or peered through arrow slits in the gatehouse.
She didn't need her spell of camouflage, but cast it anyway. It looked as if there had been a second, overwhelming attack after she and her associates had departed for the Mere. She crouched beside one of the corpses, and gave it a prod. The corpse groaned and clutched its head.
"Urgh…lea' m'alone…"
Straightening, she wrinkled her nose. The man's clothes stank of urine. Another soldier was lying slumped in a pool of his own vomit. Despite having lived in a tavern in the Neverwinter docks, she hadn't been used to seeing that kind of total dissipation. Sal or Duncan had generally arranged for their troublesome customers to be taken home or put to bed before they reached that level of abandon.
What surprised her most was that no one was doing anything about them. No sergeants were having them ducked in the horse trough, or carried back to barracks. Everything was as quiet as if it was the hour before dawn in midwinter.
But none of this was her concern. She needed Ivarr.
The door of the temple was locked. She was about to knock when a murmuring from the far side of the building caught her ears. She followed the sound, careful to stay close to the wall where her camouflage would be more powerful.
The temporary mortuary and infirmary had been set up in the remotest corner of the bailey. Two days ago, she'd spent a tortuous night racing between the troops on the walls and grey-faced soldiers stretched out on pallets in closely-packed rows, their feet nearly touching the feet of their dead comrades.
It was there, underneath an awning added since the battle, that she found Ivarr. His hands were folded in prayer over a line of stretchers. Sheets and blankets covered the long forms laid out on them. As his soft prayer came to an end, a group of soldiers – garrison soldiers, unlike the drunks in the forecourt – lifted the stretchers, and fell into a slow procession, walking with measured steps towards the postern gate. Ivarr followed them.
Could she draw him away before he went beyond the walls to oversee the cremations? Casavir had been his friend. Surely a friend would take precedence over these empty ceremonials.
But Casavir wouldn't have wanted them interrupted, she knew. He would say that as long as they brought comfort to the funeral train, to the Keep's Greycloaks in their freshly-burnished armour, they were important. That the observance of the rituals around death was another means of affirming the value of life.
So she waited till the postern gate closed behind the last of the sad little group before making her way into the castle itself. Even within, there were clear signs of the riotous celebrations that had apparently taken place. Several more soldiers were slumped unconscious in corners; she noted that most wore the crescent moon of Waterdeep on their tunics. Tapestries had been torn down, the old throne in the main hall had been hacked until one half was only splinters, primitive drawings and scrawls covered the walls.
By the time she reached her bedroom on the first floor, she was prepared for the scene that awaited her. The door had been forced. Inside, her books lay scattered across the floor, and her chest of possessions had been opened and rifled through. Most strikingly, a male human was lying on her bed, asleep, naked, and snoring. An empty bottle lay next to his hand.
She was revolted. A few days ago, it would have felt worse: it would have been a violation. A defilement. This morning, she had no capacity left for more emotion. She would be cool and resolute, as she needed to be. If only she could have felt so calm in the last battle…
Her control briefly slipping, she clenched her hands behind her back into fists. She willed herself away from those thoughts; they couldn't help her, and wouldn't change anything.
Her bedroom in the Keep was no longer a place of retreat and safety. She shouldn't have gone there, anyway. It was instinct and habit that had brought her back to its threshold. Who else might help her while Ivarr was occupied? Startear had jumped through a portal the moment an undead horde arrived at the gate. If he lived, then Sand was a possibility; Zhjaeve too.
Elanee brightened at the thought of speaking to the githzerai again. The priestess's understanding seemed to reach much greater depths than that of anyone else she'd met. She saw without walls, freely, as Elanee wished she could do. With such profound knowledge of the workings of the planes, and life, and death, surely Zhjaeve could direct her to the road that had Casavir at its end?
She wandered back through the castle, letting her camouflage spell slip. Her fear of immediate arrest and execution was fading; in fact, was starting to seem absurd. Almost. She'd heard about what had happened to Fenthick Moss.
At the door of the library, she stopped. It was shut tight. Within, she was sure, there was a person, or people. The space beyond the wooden boards was not only occupied by paper and dried ink. Who would it be? Aldanon?
She knocked quietly. Another soldier was lying in a drunken stupor at the far end of the corridor; it would be preferable for them both if he continued sleeping.
No one answered her knock. There was no shout of acknowledgement, no scrape of a chair being pushed back across stone tiles. She raised her hand, about to knock harder, when the door was pulled wide open.
"Another survivor! One more and we'll have enough alumni of the Merdelain for a game of Tura."
Sand was sitting at the table behind a chessboard and a glass of something that looked golden and alcoholic. His face was strained.
"Or a gnomish triadic dance," said Harcourt, as he closed the door behind Elanee and bolted it. Aldanon's secretary scratched his unshaven chin, observing her through dark eyes that were bloodshot with sleeplessness.
"Did you say triadic or tribadic, dear boy?"
"I wouldn't really know, Sand. It's not my area of expertise, you understand." Harcourt answered the alchemist in an ironic drawl. When he turned back to her, he spoke in the tone she recognised from his clean-cut daytime manners. "I'm sorry, Elanee. I should have asked – do you want a drink? I would offer you food, but Sand ate it all."
"I object to your unconscionable defamation of my character. I will see you in court, young man!" Sand was examining an ebony rook as if it could tell him the secrets of the existence.
"Still true though," said Harcourt with a grin. She thought that Sand was really very drunk; she had never seen him the worse for alcohol before. It was both unnerving and inconvenient. The chaos beyond the library must have infected him too.
She didn't reply to Harcourt's offer. Going straight to Sand, she took the chair opposite him. The abundance of white pieces on her side of the board suggested that he was not winning his match.
"A feint," said Sand. "I assure you, I am only pretending to lose." If he'd noticed the direction of her gaze, perhaps he wasn't that inebriated after all. Good.
"What happened to Casavir?" The question burst out, simple and unprettified by words of concern for the rodentine mage, or anyone else.
Sand leant back in his chair, his fingers still playing with the ebony rook. She was afraid that he was going to withhold his knowledge from her. The kind of mean power-play she knew he was capable of.
"I don't know, Elaníae," he said, using an elven form of her name. "You see, you were not the only guest to leave the dinner early. Let us say that while you sated your appetite on the plates of olives and lukewarm soup, I stayed until dessert. At that point, I felt obliged to throw down my napkin, and depart the banqueting hall."
One thin hand snaked towards the glass of gold liqueur. She captured the glass, and held it hostage. "What was he doing when you last saw him? Was he well?"
Sand widened his eyes, as if hurt. "Really," he said plaintively, "there is no need to cross-examine me. I have no wish nor possible motive to hide the truth from you."
He lunged towards the glass. She held it further away, and he only succeeded in sending some of his own chess pieces flying.
"That's three games in a row to me," observed Harcourt.
"The fourth will answer them all." Sand slumped back in his chair. All of a sudden, he looked more tired than she'd ever seen him. "Casavir was in good health before I teleported out of the chamber. He had climbed into the portal to attack it from the inside. Jerro followed him.
"My last view of the scene was of Khelgar and Neeshka, both as demented as ever, keeping the avatar distracted while Lila tried to sever the connection between it and the portal. Zhjaeve was staying back, providing her particular kind of support. Since we do not appear to be a pair of little shadows paddling round your malodorous homeland, we must assume that one or other of our friends was successful."
"Indeed we must," said Harcourt. With a nimbleness she hadn't known he possessed, he plucked the glass from her hand, and returned it to its owner. Then he positioned himself behind Sand's chair, the casualness of his stance failing to disguise a certain protectiveness. The look that he shot at her was admonitory.
She stayed completely still for a few moments, gathering her thoughts. Sand and Harcourt each looked lost in their own.
The oil lamp on Aldanon's desk guttered and died.
"Scry for him," she said. Sand blanched.
"Now?"
"Yes. Scry for him now," she repeated, "and I will leave you alone to distract yourself with games and drink yourself into oblivion. Until then, I'm not moving."
"In that case, I will simply return to my bedroom."
"Please do. Brambles and a few poisonous spiders will improve the decoration, won't they? Did you know, the deadliest spiders are often the smallest? You don't even know they're there until it's too late."
Sand eyed her sourly. A nervous tic began in his cheek. Previously, it had only manifested itself when Qara was speaking. She felt no guilt. Her behaviour was so far from her usual reserve that she felt almost a foreigner to herself. But she did not doubt for a heartbeat that the change was necessary.
"I'll do it," said Harcourt. "I have before."
"Dear boy, I had no idea you could – it's a subtle skill." Sand's tone for once implied no slight. There was real pleasure in it.
The secretary ran a hand through his hair, and gave a boyish grin. "How else d'you think I keep track of Aldanon's spectacles?"
His eyes were much less glazed than Sand's. Even if he couldn't match his companion's powers, that he was sober and willing to aid her without being bullied into it was all the recommendation she needed.
"Good. Do it." She paused. "Please. Casavir fought to save everyone. He deserves our help now."
She ignored the scepticism of Sand's raised eyebrow, and focused on Harcourt. The young man nodded in a business-like way, and set about gathering the materials he needed from around the room.
First, he removed a large-framed scroll depicting the continents of Abeir-Toril from the only expanse of wall not covered by bookcases.
"Clear the table, please." To her surprise, Sand began obediently dropping chess pieces into a bag after folding the board in two. He missed the bag a few times, but persevered. She couldn't wait for him to finish. She snatched up the stray pawns and bishops from the floor, and added them to the bag, then dropped both it and the board on the dusty shelf they'd come from. No one had been much in the mood for the game over the last few months; meaning, she supposed, that Grobnar would never be displaced as the Keep's reigning champion.
Harcourt deposited the heavy map on the table, leaving her sitting at the Utter South, and Sand north of the Great Glacier. All the lands of the world spread out before her. She thought that she despised them all, yet was prepared to love any one of them with a patriotic fervour if it was shown to contain Casavir, alive and well.
The preparations continued. Harcourt quickly retrieved two beeswax candles, lighting them and giving one to Sand, and the other to her. Around the western and eastern edges of the map, he placed a collection of seemingly random objects: a quill pen, a stick of charcoal, Sand's glass of gold liqueur, another candle, an oil lamp, a knot of tangled string, and an astrolabe. After rifling around in Aldanon's desk, he returned with a piece of chalk, and marked eight lines on the north-east section of the table, and eight lines on the south-west. Finally, he broke the chalk in two, and with each half he scrawled a line in a rough semi-circle over the polished wood.
"The Zakharan system," remarked Sand. "How full of surprises you are!"
"I never learned to scry the conventional way. Regardless, this should work better for our purposes."
Reaching to the nape of his neck, he unhooked a fine chain that she hadn't realised he'd been wearing. Something glinted as it slid free of the chain. Harcourt twirled it between his fingers, then brought it to his mouth.
It was a large silver coin with a hole bored through its centre.
The spell was beginning. Harcourt pressed the coin against his lips, and muttered a string of breathy, guttural syllables. He was not a showy magician; sparks didn't shoot from his hands; the air didn't sizzle with power. He went about his casting as an engineer would, methodical and precise.
He touched each of the objects on the table in turn, murmuring each time a few words; each time she heard the sound hefoch preceding everything else. An unknown word for an unknown ritual. She shivered. Her stomach lurched in dull anticipation.
Harcourt rested the edge of the coin at the centre of the map, on the north-west corner of Kara-Tur.
He shot a sideways look at her. "We'll do a test first."
As he flicked his wrist, and set the coin spinning on the spot, he said in a clear voice, "Akir Sand."
"If you really must…" the alchemist murmured.
The spinning coin drew her eyes to it like a spindle winding yarn. The speed of the revolutions slowed, and slowed. She waited for them to fail, and for the coin to fall flat. Just at the last moment, as all the energy Harcourt's twist had created dissipated, it stayed standing on its edge and shuddered. A line of green the colour of old bronze traced wild contours over the metallic surface. As if it had come to a decision, the trembling stopped, and the line faded. The coin, solid, slow and inexorable, rolled over the map; travelling north-west, it crossed the Sea of Fallen Stars, and continued over the High Forest and the Sword Mountains, until it came to a decisive stop a short way from the western coast of Faerun.
"North of the Merdelain, and south of Neverwinter Wood." Sand already seemed to be emerging from his alcoholic haze. He was reading the map upside-down with ease, and restored alertness. "Perfect."
Harcourt lowered his dark lashes in modest acknowledgement of the praise. Deep inside her, Elanee felt a twinge of something that was neither pain nor grief, and certainly not desire. If she gave it a shape, it would be a fallen tree, rotting from within, and with deathcaps letting their mycelia twine through the damp timber.
The faint smile of a craftsman pleased with his work faded on the secretary's face as he picked up the coin once more. Again, he set it down in the centre of the map.
"Akir Casavir."
Sand jerked forward in his chair, making the flame of his candle sputter. She shot him the most venomous look she could muster; his eyes were set on the spinning coin, and he paid her no mind. She willed herself to look too, feeling sick.
The spinning of the coin slowed. Soon it rotated enough for her to see the pattern of vine-leaves embossed around its border. It had been years since she'd felt discomfort from being in a room instead of the wild, but right then, the walled pressed in on her as much as they had when she'd spent her first night in the Flagon. She couldn't breathe.
"Does that mean…?" Sand began. The coin was still standing on its edge. It was completely inert.
She watched Harcourt's mouth move. She heard the words, but their meaning escaped her. They were like his incantations, sound without significance.
When she was able to focus again, Sand was speaking.
"Try Shandra. Use her as a control."
"Dead too long. Souls forget quickly in most circumstances. Especially the happier ones." Harcourt pursed his lips. Coming to a sudden decision, he flicked the coin into another spin. "Akir Grobnar."
This time, the coin rolled in a double figure of eight around the map, touching every sea and continent as if on a tour of the world, before departing to settle on one of the chalk marks on the table.
"Bytopia, I believe," said Sand.
"One of the better places to be," said Harcourt, "if one cannot live in Neverwinter, of course." He paused, and added, "I hope there are golems where he is."
"Let us not neglect to mention Wendersnaven, and globes full of powerful explosives." The two men exchanged a confiding smile, sharing a deeper joke that she didn't understand.
"So what does it mean?" she said, interrupting whatever was going on between them. "He's not in the planes, and he's not here either?"
Harcourt shook his head. "I don't know." His voice was gentle. She didn't want the sympathy she heard there.
She sat numbly as they scryed for Lila Farlong. The coin rolled between the astrolabe and a land far to the east of Neverwinter. It seemed unable to settle; if anything, its speed increased as it travelled backwards and forwards in ever more frenzied laps. Harcourt was forced to capture it between finger and thumb, and lift it away.
"The Astral Plane and…Rashemen, I think." Sand frowned. "What trouble has our peerless captain got herself into now? To be in two planes of existence at once is simply too much, even for her."
"I'm glad you're not in the middle of it," said Harcourt. He took a sip of Sand's liqueur, and made a face. "Blegh."
"Is that not supposed to be the Plane of Water?"
Harcourt shrugged, and took a swig. "Well, it was. That's enough scrying for the present. I once blacked out after looking for Gith with the same technique. I think it worked too, except that I knocked the coin away as I fell over…"
Elanee breathed in, and drew herself up in her chair. "No. Find Jerro. He followed Casavir into the portal. I want to know where he is."
Harcourt drained the last of the liqueur, and set the glass back on the table with a firm chink. "Your wish is my command. For my part, I hope he's burning in the hells."
He returned the coin to its starting position, and raised his wrist. The muscles in his hand tensed.
"Wait – stop!" Sand snapped, his eyes wide as he reached out to snatch the coin away. Too late. The coin span once. That was enough. The map burst into flames.
Harcourt cried out in horror, and made as if to reach into the fire to retrieve his coin from the hottest part of the blaze, where the reds and yellows shaded into blue.
Sand jumped up, and knocked Harcourt's arm away. "Elanee! Ice!" he hissed at her.
She stared back, not comprehending or caring much. The mage shook his head in disgust.
"Harcourt, please be still. I can put out the fire, or stop you from incinerating yourself, but not both."
The secretary nodded. Sand turned and, with a wave of his hand, spread a sheet of ice over the flames. They died down, occasionally giving a scornful flicker as if to say that they were going of their own volition, and not perforce through hostile magic.
Harcourt used the nib of a pen to scratch a layer of soot from a round disc in the centre of the scorched table. Silver glinted from under a crust of blackened ash.
"I think it's intact," said Harcourt in relief. "Mystra be praised. I'd have been sorry to lose it."
"So is he dead then?" Elanee asked, ignoring his attempts to slide the coin away from the debris without burning himself on the hot metal.
"Unfortunately not," said Harcourt.
"He's a man well-versed in enchantments to repel divination," Sand explained. "I should have recalled that at once. We should consider ourselves fortunate that a map was the only casualty."
"A valuable map, as well as part of an antique oak table."
"Indeed. Happily, I think Kana will be ready to blame the damage on the Waterdhavians…"
"We were never here, is what you're saying?"
She heard the grin in Harcourt's voice. She didn't see it, being already occupied with drawing the bolt back on the door, and slipping out into the corridor. The mage and secretary could be of no more help. Next she needed to speak to Ivarr. Then…the idea of where she had to go was already a looming shadow at the back of her mind. The more she became attuned to it, the more certain her path felt.
In the main hall, a couple of Greycloaks were dragging away one of the prone soldiers. One of them she vaguely recognised as belonging to the Arvahn party; she kept her head down and hurried past so that he wouldn't notice her, and demand to know what she was doing and what had happened to the others.
More Greycloaks were upright and moving about in the bailey. Three were standing by the fruit trees, watching glumly as they burned into black stumps. She drew her camouflage back around her, and slipped past them all. The temple door was open. She entered; after wandering around the central chamber, and brushing her fingers against the bench where Casavir had sometimes sat in order to contemplate a painted allegory, she found the side-door that led to a plain vestry, and the accommodation of Ivarr.
The blonde dwarf was sitting at his desk, a cup of liquorice tea nursed in both hands. He was reading a page from a large tome that lay open before him. He was one of the few dwarves she knew that she also liked. There was something undemanding about his presence, as if he felt she was good enough just as she was. And he'd been friends with Casavir. That meant she could trust him.
Ivarr took off his reading glass, and put them on the desk. The movement was calm, unhurried; still, she could feel the tension behind the mildness. Today was no regular day. This morning was no common morning.
"Elanee, my dear. You had better sit down."
She followed his suggestion, perching on the edge of a padded stool. Without waiting for the imminent questions, she sketched out what she knew of events in the Merdelain, using her experience, and Sand's report. She didn't hide that she had fled; she had no wish to deceive someone so kind and wise.
When she had finished, the dwarf cleric closed his eyes.
"I am sorry, Elanee. Such terrible victories are hard to bear. Cruelly hard."
"I – yes -" Her throat was tight; invisible claws were pressing against her neck. She bit her lip till the feeling receded.
"He was a remarkable man; you know that more than anyone else. An ideal, in many ways, though I am sure he would have been the first to protest the contrary."
"Yes…" she wiped a few stray tears from her cheeks. "But, Brother," she said, addressing him as a Tyrran would, though she was not of his faith, "don't you think he could have survived? He may have been caught in the Cusgáva when the roof fell…" She used the druids' word for the Shadow Plane, knowing that Ivarr would understand it without explanation. Ivarr paused before answering. He rested his right palm on the pages of his book, as if drawing strength from it.
"It is possible…still, the shadowland is an awful place. Especially for a man of Casavir's fine nature. I would almost wish him dead rather than trapped there."
"Is there no way to discover where he is? Where his soul resides? When a druid in the Circle dies, we pray, and Silvanus leaves us a sign so that we know their fate…"
After Kaleil's bloody end, she had prayed and prayed. For a whole week, she thought she'd received no answer, till walking round the side of the Flagon one morning, she'd found the wall overgrown with lichen. The lichen had picked out a hybrid face, half-bear, half-man. In both animal and man, she'd recognised her friend's most marked qualities: his strength, his bravery, and his capacity for hare-brained impulsiveness. And the deeper message written into the picture, which only she could understand, was that now Silvanus knew him too, just as she once had.
"I can pray – but in what fashion and when, or if, my god chooses to answer – I do not know." He rose from his chair. He was tall by the standards of his kind, and quite slender. "Wait a little, my dear. By tradition, the division between this land and the godsheim are at their thinnest around the inner sanctum. I will make my petition there."
Elanee nodded. She sat up straight on the edge of the stool, hands folded in her lap, legs crossed underneath her. Bookshelves lined the opposite wall. Some of the titles were religious; some were related to Ivarr's vocation, and had titles like Fifty Homilies for Busy Clerics. A large quantity seemed to be completely secular. She even saw one of the dragon-and-sorceress romances she'd read in Neverwinter.
That seemed a long time ago. Why was it that life in the Circle had passed so quickly that she'd been able to look back through decades as if they'd all been her yesterdays, and the three years since leaving seemed best measured in the age of rocks? Did that mean that she'd been happiest in the fogs of the Mere, shielded from the tumult of this new frenzied and fraught existence?
But there had been pools of calm in it. The early morning watch near the Duskwood when Casavir had joined her, saying he couldn't sleep. He'd talked about his family; there was a sister, nieces and nephews, parents who were the directors of a mercantile company, other relatives in the Church of Tyr.
It was unexpected. She'd always imagined that he was an orphan like her, a foundling given up to the charge of a religious order as an infant. Viewing him as an off-shoot of a successful clan of merchants, administrators and divines, the back-bone of Neverwinter, didn't change her impression of his nature. Casavir was who he was; the purity of his temperament was the same, whether he was a penniless nobody or a beloved son. But the new knowledge had made him seem more different…more alien again.
In return for his family, she'd been able to give him little. There were no relations she could tell him about. She didn't want to speak of the Circle. How Kaleil was dead. How when Vashne had joined, brought by Naevan from the south, her mentor had advised her never to be left alone with him. In the end, she'd told him about Naloch.
"I found him as cub, eating rotten cabbage from a midden in West Harbour. Someone had hurt him – he couldn't use one of his hind legs at all. I nursed him back to health, and he stayed with me then."
Casavir had fed bits of bread and cheese to the adult badger.
"He likes you," she'd said. "He won't let others come near him, not even for food."
"Abused creatures are often so. They unlearn trust when their trust has been broken. It is very hard to repair such damage."
He had made a point of feeding Naloch regularly after that. In the last weeks of the badger's life, he'd even been able to pet him. His care for her friend had surprised her; she'd thought all Tyrrans viewed the natural world as an inconvenience at best, and a moral threat at worst.
Ivarr reappeared. He moved as quietly as a wolf in the woods. She watched every step as he returned to his seat. Although not needing them for reading, he picked his glasses up, wedged them onto the bridge of his nose, then took them off again.
"Brother?"
Ivarr sighed. "My dear." He turned his glasses over and over without looking at them. His gaze was on her.
"Did you receive an answer?"
"I…believe so." He looked very solemn.
"Please – tell me. I need to know."
He lowered his eyes. "I began with a general prayer for the dead. Then another for the soldiers who fell here.
"There are always candles alight in the sanctum, and fire in the brazier. I'm sure you've noticed. When I began the prayer for Casavir, as soon as I uttered his name, the fire sank down into the coals, and the candle-flames all died."
She stared at him, then sprang up and ran to the open gate of the inner sanctum. All was as Ivarr had said. The candles smoked; the coals glowed with heat, but no fire danced among them. The priest joined her.
"What does it mean?" Her plea echoed round the temple. She hadn't meant to raise her voice.
"I do not know with any certainty. I have heard of such a thing happening twice before. In the first instance, a colleague of mine prayed for the rest of Aribeth the Betrayer. The second occurrence I heard about from an army cleric.
"A young squire took his own life after experiencing some kind of crisis of faith on the frontier. Naturally, the cleric prayed for the poor boy's soul, but the only answer he ever received was…this. His fear was that the boy had been condemned along with those of the Faithless."
"Casavir was not faithless!" The horror of the notion – that fate striking him of all men – it was too much for her. It couldn't be true. "He was very near to his god when I last saw him. Shadows fled at a look from him. He scarcely had to raise his symbol. He had not lost his faith. He was illuminated by it."
Ivarr clasped his hands around hers. They were rough, despite his scholarliness. "I believe you, Elanee." He smiled, though only with the lips. "It does me good to think of him so. Driving back the slaves of a malignant, corrupting force with the grace of the Just God."
She pulled her hands free, and walked up to the brazier in the sanctum. There was a prohibition on all save senior members of the Church from entering the holiest place in their temples. Nevertheless, Ivarr did not try to stop her.
"The coals are glowing," she called back to him. "That must be a sign. It has to be a sign."
"I wish it were, Elanee," the dwarf responded unhappily. "But I'm afraid that the Lord of Justice would be loathe to extinguish his own everlasting flame. Even a representation of it."
She glared down into the brazier. Of the coals, some were black, and others whitened with heat; several were orange and flaking at the edges. Two near the centre drew her attention. They had turned a pure amber; no fleck of black remained on them. From the shape, and the way they rested a little apart from each other amidst the rest of the embers, they reminded her of eyes. Large, reptilian ones. As she leaned closer, letting the heat scorch her skin, the centre of each coal seemed to peel back, revealing a dark, smouldering line, like a vent in the side of a volcano.
Smoke made her blink, and cough. The lines vanished. There were no otherworldly eyes to be seen. She was just looking at a basket of heated coals.
Her skin feeling as if it was being spit-roasted, she retreated from the brazier, and from the inner sanctum.
"Did you see something there, Elanee?"
"Only charcoal and ash."
"I'm so sorry."
"It wasn't you that left him. You have nothing to regret." Her legs felt feeble again. She hit her thigh hard with her fist, not caring that Ivarr could see what she was doing. She needed her body to obey her mind, not her heart.
"We all have regrets. Terrible ones, in some cases. But we cannot let them consume us. Contrary to popular opinion, Tyr has little use for hairshirts."
"I am not a Tyrran." She understood what Ivarr was trying to say; it was too early for it. Much too early.
"No…but the man you loved was." She couldn't bear the pity in his voice, still less the awful word was. She raised her chin; her anger flared. "Thank you for your help, Brother. Pray for him." At the door of the temple, she hesitated. "I'm going to find him."
"I hope you do with all my heart. May Tyr watch over your path."
She left the temple, leaving the door open behind her, and went to the stables. She passed Casavir's destrier and Zhjaeve's bay gelding to reach the corner where her pony had its stall. Poor Hevin had been left without hay or fresh water. Quickly, she remedied both lacks.
After drinking his fill, the chestnut pony sniffed her hands with his soft, whiskery nose. She patted his neck. Then, although she knew the gesture meant nothing to his species, she laid her arms around his neck. "Ahanich wela'i nai vider, caré," she muttered into his ear. "Be happy, friend."
She hurried away while she could still bear to. Who would look after Hevin now? Should she have turned him loose? But the proud little horse had never lived in the wild. His only herd was here. He was captive born and bred.
Outside the gates, a couple of Greycloaks had taken up position. The castle was once again guarded.
"Look after the horses," she told them. "They need feeding and exercising."
The younger of the two saluted. "Right away, ma'am."
As she walked away on the rutted track, which was still covered by pieces of exploded siege tower from the battle, she registered the muttered conversation taking place behind her. Humans always underestimated elven hearing.
"Who in the hells was that?" said the older voice.
"Oh, that was Farlong's tame druid. She lives here, or used to."
"Pretty little thing."
"Sure, but away with the fairies most of the time. Aloof, you know?"
"Ah, like that."
It didn't matter what they thought. She had a task to complete.
As she passed the charred ruins of a farmhouse, she spread her wings again. The air currents were favourable. After rising straight up so that she was level with the top of the nearest tree, and then higher still, until the towers of Crossroad Keep shrank to the size of mud huts, she began her long journey east, to Rashemen.
