The Elves of Cintra (38 page)

She could chart her discontent like a map. She had gone from the East LA barrio and its residents to the magically enhanced Cintra forest and its Elves in a matter of only days. She had gone with almost no warning or preparation. Everything with which she was familiar had been stripped from her. She had never been anywhere but the neighborhood and city in which she was born until now. She had never believed in even the possibility of the existence of Elves. Since losing Johnny and finding O’olish Amaneh, she had fought a battle that involved helping children.

What battle was she fighting now? A battle to find a magic Stone that would help save a magic tree? Just thinking the words seemed to point out the obvious. She didn’t understand them, didn’t really know what obeying them was meant to accomplish. She was here because the Lady had sent her but, as Kirisin feared, that didn’t mean she was emotionally committed to what she was doing. Commitment for her did not come easily and was not given without strong reason. Helping children from the compounds and on the streets of LA was something she understood. She had been one of those children. But these were Elves she had come to serve—Elves, who were a people of which she knew practically nothing. A people, she added quickly, who in large part did not like or trust humans. They looked and acted like humans, but their thinking was formed by centuries of life and experience that preceded human existence.

She was doing what she had been sent to do, but was she doing the right thing?

Her misgivings haunted her in a dull, repetitive sort of way, always present to remind her of her blind and possibly foolish trust in the words of a dead tatterdemalion.

She could not get past it.

T
HEY WALKED
on into the second week, coming down off the slopes of the northernmost peaks in the Cintra Mountain chain and within clear sight of the river that separated the states of Oregon and Washington. Humans called it the Columbia, Elves the Redonnelin Deep. Ahead, across the river and hidden by haze and distance, Syrring Rise waited.

As they stopped to assess the lay of the land they must travel through, Angel found herself thinking of the children she had left in the care of Helen Rice and the others, the children rescued from the Southern California compounds. Helen would be bringing them north to the Columbia as Angel had asked her to do and would wait there for help. What sort of help and from whom remained a mystery. It should have been her, but Ailie had left that particular issue in doubt. Angel felt consumed by helplessness. Had they gotten this far? Had they even gotten out of the state? Or had the demons and the once-men tracked them down? Those children were her responsibility and her charge to herself, and she had let herself be persuaded to give up on both.

“Not so far now,” Simralin said quietly, passing Angel her waterskin.

“Far enough,” Angel murmured, thinking of something else entirely.

The Elven girl glanced over. “We’ve done well, Angel. A lot that could have happened hasn’t. We could have been caught and attacked by those demons, but we’ve managed to stay one step ahead of them.”

“You don’t think they’ve given up, do you?” Kirisin asked hopefully.

His face was haggard and worn, and his eyes had a haunted look to them. Angel did not like what she was seeing. The boy’s physical condition had deteriorated since they had set out, and there was no way of knowing how he was doing emotionally. He looked worn to the bone.

Simralin was shaking her head. “No, I don’t think they’ve given up. I don’t expect them ever to give up. All we can do is make it as hard as we can to find us. Now that we’re coming up on Redonnelin Deep, I have a chance to make it almost impossible.”

Angel glanced over, her brow knitting. “What do you mean?”

Simralin stopped and pointed ahead to the broad stretch of the river. “I mean that if we can get across before they catch up to us, we can hide from them where we come ashore. It could take them days, maybe weeks to find the right spot. If they can’t track us to where we land, they won’t know where we are going.”

Angel shook her head. “I think they already know.”

Simralin and her brother stared. “How could they?” the Tracker asked. “We didn’t know ourselves until Kirisin used the Elfstones.”

“Just a hunch.” Angel handed back the waterskin. “Ever since this business started, they’ve been one step ahead of us. One of them tracked me all the way north from LA. It shouldn’t have been able to do that, but it did. The other seems to have known what Kirisin and Erisha were trying to do almost from the moment they did. I just have a feeling they know this time, too.”

Kirisin gave her an exasperated look. “Well, what should we do, Angel?”

She smiled unexpectedly. “We do what we are here to do. When the demons surface, they become my problem. Yours—yours and Simralin’s—is to find the Loden and use it in the way it is meant to be used and save your people.”

They traveled through the rest of that day and into the next, a long, torturous slog through hot, dry, open country denuded of plant life and filled with the bleached bones of humans and animals alike. It was a graveyard of indeterminate origin, a grim memorial to the presence of the dead and the absence of the living. Finally, when they were within a mile of Redonnelin Deep, Simralin turned them sharply northeast.

“We’re going to need help getting across,” she announced. “We require a boat.”

“Aren’t there bridges?” Angel asked. She was hot and tired and still sick at heart about the children she felt she had abandoned. She constantly found herself looking for some sign of them along the riverbank, even when she knew there wouldn’t be any, that there hadn’t been time for them to get this far. “A river this size, there must be one or two that would take us across on foot.”

“More than that, actually. But the bridges are in the hands of militias and some others that are even worse. We don’t want to fight that battle if we don’t have to.” She gestured ahead. “Better to use a boat. I know someone who can help us. An old friend.”

“No one who sees us looking like this will want to help,” Kirisin declared.

They were dust-covered and dirt-streaked from head to foot. They hadn’t bathed in almost two weeks, traversing the high desert and lava fields with only the water they carried for drinking and nothing with which to wash. Angel looked at the other two and could only imagine how bad she must look.

But Simralin simply shrugged. “Don’t worry, Little K. This particular friend couldn’t care less.”

They trudged across the flats approaching the river through the heat of the afternoon and by nightfall’s approach had reached it. There were houses along the lower banks, dilapidated and empty, docks to which boats had once been moored and now were crumbling, and weedy paths that meandered in between. There was no sign of life anywhere.

The river itself was swift and wide, the open waters churning with whitecaps and the inlets thick with debris and deadwood collected and jammed together by deep rapids. In the fading light, the waters were gray and silt-clogged, and from its depths emanated a thick and unpleasant odor that suggested secrets hidden below the surface of other creatures’ failed attempts at crossing.

“Are you sure about this?” Kirisin asked uneasily. “Maybe a bridge would be safer, after all.”

Simralin only grinned and put a reassuring arm around him before setting off anew. Angel wasn’t sure, either, but the Tracker had gotten them this far without incident. She thought briefly of the children whom Helen Rice and the other protectors were guiding north and wished she could do the same for them. She glanced up and down the banks, and then looked behind her for what she knew she wouldn’t see.

I can’t seem to help myself,
she thought.

Afraid, as she thought it, that she would never see any of them again.

TWENTY-THREE

D
ARKNESS CLOSED ABOUT
the three weary travelers as they entered a stand of skeletal trees as bare and lifeless as the bones of the dying earth, bleached white and worn smooth. The woods seemed sparse at first, but the trunks stood so close together that two dozen feet in, it became impossible to tell which way led out. Simralin looked unfazed, picking their path without hesitating, taking them deeper in. After a time, they reached an inlet that had cut away into a ring of surrounding cliffs. Piles of jagged rocks broken off by time and upheaval lay all along the shoreline, their sharp-edged outlines suggesting the ridged backs of sleeping dragons. The travelers angled right along the shoreline, skirting the rocks when they could, climbing over them when they couldn’t. In the dark it was hot, arduous work, and Angel kept feeling that both time and opportunity were slipping away.

Finally, several hours after they had begun their inlet trek, they caught sight of a pinprick of light ahead, dim and hazy in a thick stand of ruined trees, burning out of the window of a small cottage.

“We’re here,” Simralin advised, giving them a quick smile.

They climbed over a tangled mound of fallen trees, forded a stream that branched off the inlet, and arrived outside the cottage with its solitary light. The sheltering harbor was so draped with shadows from the cliffs and trees that the gloom was all but impenetrable. Angel, who had excellent eyesight, could barely make out the details of the cottage and the surrounding landscape.

“Larkin?” Simralin called into the darkness. “Are you home?”

“Right behind you, Simralin Belloruus,” was the immediate response.

The answering voice was so close that Angel jumped despite herself. She wheeled about to find a solitary figure standing not three feet away. The nature of the speaker was not immediately identifiable. Male and grown, but the rest was a mystery. The face and body both were concealed by a long cloak and hood wrapped tightly about. A hand that was definitely human emerged from one sleeve and gestured.

“Heard you coming half a mile away.” The hand withdrew. “You made a lot of noise for a Tracker.”

“Hiding our approach wasn’t my intention,” Simralin declared. “If I didn’t want you to know I was coming, you wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?” A small laugh drifted through the dark. “Well, now that you’ve arrived, would you and your companions like to come inside and have something to eat?” There was a pause. “Traveled a long way to get here, didn’t you. Through the high desert, maybe? Not your usual route, Sim.” Another pause. “Um, a bath might be a good idea before you eat. Then straight to sleep. You all seem a bit used up.”

The speaker stepped around them carefully, started toward the cottage, and suddenly stopped short. “Oh, here’s something I almost missed!” The hand gestured toward Angel. “A human! Making friends with the enemy now, are we, Sim? Or is she something special?”

“This is Angel Perez,” Simralin replied, giving Angel a wink. “And she is something special. She is a Knight of the Word.”

“Ah, a bearer of the black staff. Pleased to meet you.” The hand extended, and Angel took it in her own. It was lean and hard. “And the boy? Is this your brother?”

“The very one. Kirisin.”

The hand extended again, and Kirisin gave it a quick shake. “Larkin Quill. Now we all know who we are. Come inside.”

He took them through the shadows and gloom and the door of the cottage. The solitary light they had seen earlier burned from a smokeless lamp set on a table, but there were no other lights in evidence, and the little house was buried in darkness. Angel had to look carefully before moving so as not to bump into things. Kirisin wasn’t so fortunate and promptly ran into a chair.

“Put on some lights, Sim,” their host ordered. “Not everyone can see in the dark as well as I can.”

Simralin moved comfortably about the cottage, obviously familiar with its interior, lighting lamps with only a touch of her hand. Angel could see no power source and smell no fuel burning. She had never seen anything quite like it. She was also surprised by the deep, rich, loamy smell of the cottage, as if it were as much a part of the forest as the trees. She had even caught a strong whiff of that smell on Larkin.

But these were only small surprises compared with what followed. As the light chased back the dark, Larkin removed his hooded cloak and turned to face them. He was a lean Elf of indeterminate age with strong, sharp features and a shock of wild black hair. He looked strong and fit beneath his loose, well-worn clothing, and his slightly crooked smile was warm and welcoming. But his eyes, flat and milky and fixed, caused Angel to take a quick breath.

Larkin Quill was blind.

“I can always tell when someone first notices,” he said to her. “There is a kind of momentary hush that is unmistakable. Isn’t that how it was with you, Sim?”

“That was how it was,” she agreed.

Angel was stunned. How could this man find his way about in the tangle of the forest so easily when he was blind? How had he been able to tell who they were or of what sex without being able to see them? How had he known they were dirty or had traveled far?

Simralin gave her a knowing smile. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? He takes great pleasure in showing off his skills. He went blind about five years ago, but his other senses have compensated for it in an extraordinary way. He can see much better than you or I over short distances. Sometimes I wonder about the long distances, as well. He sees things that I don’t think sighted people even notice. That’s how he manages to live out here all by himself.”