2 To Light A Candle.13 (8 page)

"So do you," Idalia said. She slid a pair of ebony and Elvensilver combs into her hair—her only jewelry—and turned to regard Kellen critically.

He'd been relieved to find that he hadn't needed help dressing after all. His costume (he really couldn't think of it any other way) was not very much more elaborate than Idalia's—and fortunately, the sheer, body-hugging styles that the Elves favored for themselves were nowhere in evidence in Kellen's own garb.

There were a few notes of the same sea-green that was the accent color for his armor—he guessed he'd better get used to the idea that the Elves thought of it as his official color now—in the very plain heavy silk trousers and long-sleeved tunic that were the bottom layer of his outfit. But over those went a long sleeveless vest that fell to mid-thigh, closed all the way to its high neck by a double row of tiny silver buttons that had taken him ages to do up. It was made of a sheered velvet in a leaf-pattern—parts were sheer, and parts were thick velvet, and Kellen couldn't quite decide what the color was. Silver? Gold? Brown? All of them?

Eventually he gave up. It looked okay over the green, anyway, making the silk undertunic (where it showed through) shimmer in a silvery—definitely silvery—way.

Over that came a long full-sleeved robe that fell to mid-calf, in a green so dark it was almost black. It was a kind of cloth he'd never seen before, soft like wool, and smooth, but faintly iridescent. It was lined in dull gold satin, and belted with a wide—and very long—sash in a slightly brighter shade of green than the overrobe. That had nearly been his undoing, until Idalia had taken pity on him and showed him how to wrap and tie the sash properly.

Low boots, of a reassuringly normal-looking pale gold calfskin, completed his outfit.

"I don't look bad," Kellen agreed. And I don't feel silly, he realized with relief. Nobody was asking him to wear earrings, braid jewels into his hair, paint his face, or do any of the other things the Elves did when they got themselves done up for some festive occasion. Now, just as long as nobody asked him to make a speech…

"Except for your hair," Idalia agreed. "Come over here."

A few minutes with a comb, and Idalia had pulled Kellen's mop of light-brown curls back into a short twisted braid at the nape of his neck. It felt reassuringly normal—it was the way he wore his hair under his helmet, after all.

"There. Presentable." She craned around and kissed him lightly on the forehead. "You'll definitely do. I'll just get our raincapes and rainshades, and we can be off. Don't worry—they're bespelled to keep the rain off—and I actually think it's slackening a bit this evening. Not stopping, of course, which is just as well," Idalia said.

"Where are we going?" Kellen asked, thinking to ask for the first time.

"The gardens at the House of Leaf and Star. There's no other place large enough to accommodate the guest list—and the unicorns will want to be able to listen—from a distance, of course."

"Outside? In the rain?"

Idalia snickered at Kellen's expression.

"Under canvas—or silk, actually. Relax. Everything that should be dry, will be dry. You look like you're being sent to an execution, not to a banquet."

All things considered, Kellen would rather have gone to an execution.

THE formal gardens of the House of Leaf and Star were subtly beautiful, like all the creations of the Elves: the natural world raised to an impossible pitch of perfection.

He'd never seen the gardens, but then, he hadn't been in Sentarshadeen long, and had gotten most of his tour of it courtesy of Sandalon, who'd shown him the things that Sandalon thought would interest a human stranger… which had not, obviously, included his parents' gardens.

Kellen looked down, realizing that at some point, without noticing, he and Idalia had gone from the streets of Sentarshadeen to a wide-slatted wooden path laid across the meadow to a path of white gravel.

This must be the garden, then.

Tonight it was filled with more lanterns than Kellen would once have been willing to bet were in the entire city of Sentarshadeen. Before the rains came, it had been necessary to keep the lights of evening from starting any accidental fires in a city made tinder-dry by drought. Now it was only necessary to keep the flames from being drowned by the rain. But the Elves—who accomplished far more through clever engineering than humans had ever done through magic— made it look effortless.

Some of the lanterns shone through tall gauzy windbreaks set up to blunt the force of the blustering, rain-heavy winds, turning them into tall, softly-gleaming rectangles of color. Though they seemed as insubstantial as kites, Kellen doubted they'd fall if the wind blew ten times as hard, though they quivered when the wind struck them. Kellen suspected they were meant to.

Inside the curving walls of windbreaks, the air was nearly still, and the flames inside the artfully-scattered lanterns—some suspended on tall posts, some nearer the ground—burned steadily. But the towering windbreaks were walls only, not roofs, and Kellen was still glad to have his rainshade and cloak for protection. He'd gotten his fill of being wet on his return from the Barrier.

But the other purpose for the windbreaks, besides sheltering the lanterns, was obviously to protect the dining pavilions.

Unlike the place in which he, Jermayan, and Vestakia had first been received—if not entirely welcomed—these were little more than canopies suspended on poles. Even in the rain, the entire garden was lit as brightly as the common room of Kellen's house, and very little of it was really open to the falling rain. Their cloaks were taken from them as they arrived at the edge of the garden, leaving them their light and elegant rainshades. The garden was already filled with Elves, their rainshades making them look like fabulous flowers.

"Like it?" Idalia said, gesturing around.

"Everyone's already here," Kellen said uneasily. "Are we late?"

"No. The honored guests arrive last. And of course, having spent all day putting this together, they certainly expect you to take some time to admire it before the banquet begins. Let's look around."

Idalia put her free hand on his arm and led Kellen forward. He didn't see much of the garden as it normally was—but he did see a lot of dining pavilions, and oiled-paper lanterns, and people he knew. All of Sentarshadeen was here tonight indeed, and he and Idalia stopped several times to speak politely to people that Kellen knew from the time he'd spent on the work crews watering the forest, and to several of Idalia's friends as well.

All the time his sense of dread grew. Everything seemed so quiet, so… formal. He wouldn't be able to get through this evening without making some terrible error. He knew it.

"We'll be sitting over there, under that green awning," Idalia said, when their slow meander finally brought them within range of the canopies.

In the back of his mind, Kellen had been wondering where everyone was going to sit. Under the tents, obviously, but surely there weren't enough tables and chairs—not to mention plates and cups—in the city to host a banquet for its entire populace? Unless the Elves had built them all—but in two days? He sort of thought that would take greater magic than they claimed to possess.

He glanced around.

He was surprised to see that what was under the awnings wasn't large, long banquet tables—such as he would have seen in Armethalieh—but instead an assortment of tables in various shapes, sizes, and woods. All harmonious, of course, in the Elven fashion, but certainly not giving the impression they'd all been built for the occasion. In fact…

He was sure he recognized some of the furnishings. Surely that table under the rose-colored canopy was from the House of Leaf and Star? Yes, he was sure of it. He'd eaten dinner at it his first night in Sentarshadeen, alone with Ashaniel, Lairamo, and Sandalon.

Suddenly Kellen realized why the tables and chairs—and the tableware as well—were a harmonious assortment instead of an harmonious whole. It might be held in the gardens of the House of Leaf and Star, but the tables and chairs were from nearly every home in Sentarshadeen.

Andoreniel and Ashaniel weren't giving this banquet. The entire city was.

Kellen felt himself relax at last. He realized he'd been thinking of tonight in Armethaliehan terms—of this banquet as an event meant to crush spectators and participants with its magnificence and to inspire them with thoughts of their own unworthiness to attend it. But if Elves thought that way, the House of Leaf and Star would be a cold and forbidding palace, terrible in its majesty.

No.

When the Elves said that this was a welcoming banquet, that was exactly what it was. Their ways might be strange, and their code of etiquette difficult for a human to understand or to follow, but that was what they meant. For all the garden's daunting and ethereal beauty, tonight had far more in common with the party the Centaurs and farmers had held back in the Wildwood to bid him and Idalia farewell than it did with anything that might ever occur in the Golden City!

"The Elves are like no other people in the world," Idalia said quietly, watch-ing his face. "You read the Histories, back in the City? Where they talk about the Other Races? Do you remember what they say about the Elves?"

"That they make living into Art?" Kellen asked.

"Oh, there's that," Idalia said, shrugging. "But it also says they lie."

Kellen turned to face her, outraged.

"I was surprised," Idalia said, "so I went to an older, unexpurgated version— the one in the locked case in Father's library. There, it says that Elves never lie— and never tell the truth."

"Not much better," Kellen muttered, but then he thought about it. "Never lied"—he couldn't remember Jermayan, or any of the other Elves he'd met ever lying to him. But told him the truth? The whole truth, the way he thought he wanted it, as fast as he wanted it?

He had to admit he hadn't gotten that, either. And maybe still didn't have it, even from Jermayan, who was his friend and teacher.

"Maybe fairer," Kellen said grudgingly. Not much though.

"Elves are different from humans," Idalia said. "Very different. They live much longer, they have a different way of looking at the world than humans do. I am not saying you shouldn't trust them—you'd say I'd gone crazy, and you'd be right. But don't expect them to think like humans, because they just won't." She stared off into nothing for a moment. "When you live as long as they do, you take your time about everything, and you wait for everything to come in its proper time. So, for instance, an Elf will never tell you the whole truth all at once; he'll wait for the right time to tell you bits of it, until, in the end, you've come to see the shape of it for yourself. Which is the point, for them—that you should come to see and understand a truth for yourself, and not have to be told what it is. Now, give that a lot of thought, and you'll begin to see how they live their entire lives."

"Why didn't you tell me all this when we first came here?" Kellen asked curiously. Surely all this good advice would have been a lot more useful then?

Idalia smiled crookedly. "You wouldn't have listened. We weren't going to a formal banquet then. And you weren't meeting the entire city population on more-or-less equal terms. Oh, there's Jermayan and Vestakia."

She pointed.

Kellen turned, spotting Jermayan and Vestakia coming up behind them.

Jermayan was dressed pretty much as Kellen was—the long belted robe seemed to be a standard sort of evening fashion—though Jermayan's robe was practically transparent, and so were both undertunics. Kellen felt his face get a little flushed. Not that Jermayan didn't have the body for such an audacious outfit, but still!

But Vestakia… !

There was no possible way to conceal the fact that she looked like a Demon, so Tengitir had obviously decided to make a virtue of what could not be ignored.

Her gown left her neck and shoulders bare, and her deep rose skin sparkled as if it had been dusted with gold. It probably had been, in fact, because there had been subtle patterns painted on her forehead in gold, in imitation of some of the filigree diadems worn by some of the Elven ladies. Her eyes had been accentuated with lines of black and gold on the lids, making them look bigger and somehow more innocent.

A wide band of gold and red embroidery held her cherry-black hair away from her pointed ears, exposing both them and her tiny golden horns, and a band of the same material decorated the neckline—if you could call it a neckline—of her long-sleeved dress, holding in the folds of shimmering gold brocade that were gathered into a tightly-pleated waist before sweeping out into a full skirt that was gathered up at the sides to reveal an underskirt the exact shade of her skin.

"You look amazing," Kellen said.

Vestakia smiled shyly, ducking her head.

"Come on," Idalia said, looking at him oddly. "I'll escort Vestakia around. You and Jermayan… mingle."

"IS she—I mean, it would please me to know that Vestakia is going to be all right," Kellen said, catching himself just in time. He barely avoided hitting Jermayan with his rainshade, but Jermayan handled his own with as much grace as if it were a sword.

"Idalia will see to her comfort," Jermayan said. "And certainly no harm nor insult has come to her yet."

"Good," Kellen said. About then, his brain caught up with the rest of him and he realized why Idalia and Jermayan had gotten him away from Vestakia so quickly.

He'd been so stunned at the sight of her in that dress that he'd just stared, but now, thinking back…

No. No thinking. Not about that, or anything like that. Not for a year.

He'd sworn a vow of chastity and celibacy to Shalkan in exchange for the unicorn's help in getting away from Armethalieh and the Outlaw Hunt. And it didn't matter whether or not Shalkan was his friend. If Kellen broke that vow, Shalkan would have no choice but to exact the penalty for breaking it.

And Kellen didn't want to break his vow.

But Vestakia—

No.

Kellen tipped back his rainshade—Jermayan ducked gracefully out of the way—and took a deep breath of the cool moist air. It had been easier when he'd been sick and drugged. A lot easier.