Close Kin (14 page)

"Ow,
Thorn!" said Irina irritably. "You're hurting me!" She
jerked
away, completely unaware of the drama surrounding her.

"I'm going
to sleep," muttered Seylin. "I'm tired." And he
jumped
up and headed for his tent before anyone could stop him
with a question. But he needn't have worried. No one bothered to
say
anything. They didn't even look up.

He hid in his
tent and listened to the elves preparing for sleep. No one bid the others good
morning or pleasant dreams. Seylin lay there
for a long time, thinking of home and what he had hoped
to find.
He hadn't found it here, and he was sure he
never would. Grown men and members of the King's Guard weren't supposed to cry.
He didn't, but he wished that he could.

Sable lay in her tent, next to the
sleeping Irina, worrying about
the new elf.
Fine clothes, soft hands, well made boots, and he claimed
to be the last
of his band. He didn't even eat with them. He'd never
seen a single hungry night. Why didn't Thorn make him tell the
truth? Her father would have dealt with that new
elf. But, then, he'd
have dealt with her, too.

Sable had never known her mother. For
years, she hadn't even
known that elves had
mothers. Her father ran their camp. He was
the handsomest man in it, and
he had a hard pride because of the name that the two of them shared.

"Never forget, Sable," he
would tell her firmly, "we aren't like these common idiots."

Sable was six when
she saw and heard the first elf woman die.
Rose
moaned and screamed for two days in her tent. At the end of it,
Sable
and her friend Laurel held the tiny Irina, and the cold ground
held Rose's bloody body. That was how babies were
born, her father
told her. The women had to die. Her mother lay under
the ground, too, and so did countless other women. After that, Sable was sure
she saw the dead women crawling through the camp looking for their babies. She
woke up screaming from nightmare after might, mare, but when she told her
father, he beat her. "Never tell those dreams to anyone," he ordered,
and Sable never did.

Animals and birds
raised their children together, but an elf
woman
had one happy year of marriage, and then she had to die.
An elf man had to face the long years without her,
raising their baby
and finding food. But not all the men lived up to
their part of the bargain. The night May died bearing Willow, her husband
walked
out of camp and never came back, and
Rowan's father killed himself
before his wife was even dead.

Sable's father kept on, strong and
relentless. He drove himself unceasingly to make up for those cowardly fathers,
to care for the children and teach them what they needed to know. He had buried
two wives of his own, but he couldn't afford the luxury of dying. Not until
Rowan and Thorn could hunt. Not until the camp could keep on. The long nights
of work were hard, and they wore him down at last, but Father knew life wasn't
for the weak.

Father had taught Sable about the
goblins who trapped and
enslaved elves,
about the magical tortures they devised for their victim
s. They had
rounded up the elves who weren't brave enough to stand against them and had
bred them into a race of monsters. That was a fitting end for a coward, Father
had always said. Sable knew she was a coward.

Father had
lived his difficult life and had met his responsibilities,
but when her turn came, Sable had refused to die. She
didn't want to
lie cold and stiff
while her baby cried. Sable wanted to live. She
didn't mind what Thorn said about her, and she didn't mind what
he fed her. She had made her choice, and she was
grateful for her life.
There were worse things than going hungry and
eating dirty bread, and Sable knew what they were. Hideous tortures in caves
under, ground. Gruesome spells. Goblins.

∗ ∗ ∗

That night, Marak went to study
Seylin's map on the wall of his
workroom.
It had been quite interesting of late: a fast, straight jour
ney of several days, and then slow, deliberate
sweeps back and forth
in a small area. The goblin King frowned at the
map, combing his
fingers through his
striped hair. At this point, Seylin was only about
two nights' journey
away. He was near human villages, but maybe
there
was enough cover to keep some elves happy. And he was on the
border of the elf King's forest that was farthest
away from the goblin
kingdom. An elf band fleeing the harrowing might
have stopped there and found life good.

Almost time, thought Marak. We'll see
what he does tonight. If he's still there tomorrow, then I'll know what to do.

Seylin woke up to
screams, but before he could spring from his tent
to help, the screams stifled themselves and fell silent.
A loud voice
began to curse nearby.

"Useless piece of trash!"
it called. "Why didn't you cut your
tongue
out, too, and give us all a rest? Why didn't you cut your worth
less throat?" The scarred Sable had
apparently had a nightmare, and
her
leader was responding as he thought best. Seylin climbed out of
his tent, his spirits sinking. That's right, he
remembered glumly. I've
found elves.

"I spotted a burrow of hares
near the three dead oaks," Rowan
remarked
to Thorn as they waited for the evening meal. "And I think
I have an idea where a doe might be sheltering.
What do you say to
Willow's going
out with me to kill the hares and help track the deer?"

"A doe," said Thorn,
pleased. "That's a good plan. Willow, you go with Rowan, and if you find
the doe, you won't have to hunt on your next night."

Seylin had walked over to the
primitive hearth to watch Sable
build the
evening fire. The scarred woman had covered the embers
with ashes to keep them alive throughout the day,
but they had died
down to almost nothing. Now she was carefully bringing
the tiny
coals back with dry needles, trying
to rescue the fire without smoth
ering
it. Seylin felt a little impatient at the slow process. It was cold in
the
damp, drafty cave.

"You're
going to be here all night doing that," he observed, tak
ing
a large log and laying it behind the fragile embers. "Here." He
reached out in the spell that normally heated the
cooking stones. The
log burst into a dramatic sheet of flame. Sable
winced at the bright
light and then began
to pile on the rest of the logs. The room warmed
up perceptibly.

"That's a handy spell to
know," said Seylin as the other elves
came
over to look at his accomplishment. "Do you want to learn it?"

"No," grunted Thorn,
turning away. "That's the ugly woman's
job.
I don't care if she spends all night puffing out her ugly cheeks to
blow
on a handful of twigs." Rowan had looked interested, but he declined to
speak after that.

"What about you, Sable?"
persisted Seylin. "Wouldn't you like to learn it?" The other elves
burst out laughing.

"That's a
good one!" chortled Rowan, walking away. "Wouldn't
she
love it! Sure, teach her!"

"And while
you're at it," said Thorn with a laugh, "teach her
how
to track and hunt, and not look like a fright."

"Yeah, ugly woman," jeered
Willow. "Show us your magic. Show us all the spells you can do."

Sable continued
to build her fire, her back to the other elves. She
didn't
even look as if she'd heard. But she glanced up at Seylin for the barest of
instants, and he saw the hurt reproach in her eyes. He
walked away, depressed and confused. Why couldn't she learn
spells? Was it some strange flaw in her character,
the same one that
had led her to the mutilation? Maybe she was truly
insane and was
normal or mad by turns.
Elves didn't suffer delusions, but their sensiti
ve natures could give
way under strain.

Once again, Thorn
gave Irina her food.

"It's
all right," she told him, nonplussed. "I can get it for myself."

"No, you
can't," he said, walking back to sit down with his own
bowl. It began to dawn on Irina that something
must be going on.
"Why do you keep giving me my food?" she
demanded.

"Go
ask your father," answered the blond elf, busy eating.
Irina considered
this carefully.

"How can I
do that?" she wanted to know. "Father isn't buried at
this
camp."

Rowan and Thorn laughed at this, but
Sable didn't laugh. Neither
did Willow, who,
intent on his food, hadn't been listening. And
neither did Seylin. He was having a hard time making it through his
food.
The dried deer meat was tough and slightly moldy, and the unevenly cooked round
of bread had no salt in it at all. This was
something
that Lore-Master Webfoot had stressed. The elf diet was
very monotonous. The food changed seasonally,
depending on which
fruits and vegetables were available, but the basic
structure of the
meals hadn't changed for
thousands of years. Seylin bit into the lumpy
bread and tried not to
grimace. This was just one more aspect of elf culture he had failed to take
into account.

He became aware that
the scarred woman wasn't eating like the
rest.
She was quietly stitching something made of rabbit skins.
"Isn't
Sable going to eat?" he demanded.

"No,"
said Thorn, tearing apart a piece of meat with his fingers. "If she wants
food, she can keep her mouth shut the next time we're
trying
to get some sleep."

Sable kept stitching as if she hadn't
heard, trying to ignore her
hunger. Her mind
kept drifting to the deer meat in the little shed out,
side. The last
time Thorn had caught her stealing from the winter
stores, he had made her eat frozen, raw meat for days. It hadn't tasted
bad, but it had made her terribly cold.

The night was
clear and frosty. Rowan and Willow wrapped
their
patched cloaks around themselves and headed out into the icy
forest. Sable, Thorn, and Irina settled down to
work, and Seylin
felt left out. He wondered how this band had survived
the harrowing and had then gone on to lose its language. They seemed to
know
something about magic, but he hadn't seen them work a single
spell.

"Do you
know anything about your band's history?" he asked
the
three busy elves. Thorn glanced up from his deer hide.

"You mean when elves were born
and died, that kind of thing? The ugly woman's got a book about it. If you
want, she can show it to you."

Sable rose and went
back to her tent to get the book.

"We can look at it here,"
she said very quietly, crouching down
with
it by the tents. Her voice was clear and sweet, an odd contrast to her ghastly
face. Seylin noticed that she was as far from Thorn as she
could be. They were also as far from the
firelight as they could be, and Seylin's unelvish eyes had trouble making out
the writing on the cover.
He snapped
his fingers absently, and a little gibbous moon appeared
over his shoulder, shedding its faint light.
Sable stared at it in wonder
for a few distracted seconds while Seylin
examined the front of the book.
Top Shield Star Camp, Volume 42,
read
the cover.

"Sable!"
he exclaimed in excitement. "It's a camp chronicle!"

"Yes,"
agreed the elf woman, misunderstanding him, "it tells all
about
what happened in our camp. It was my father's book, and he wrote in it whenever
someone was born or died. My father knew how to write," she added with
wistful pride. "I wanted to learn, but he taught Thorn instead. He said it
wasn't for women."

She glanced at Seylin for
confirmation of this, but Seylin just looked confused. It was true that the
nomadic elf society, based on
the male
hunter, was more rigid in its gender differences than goblin
society was, but he
knew that elf girls normally learned to write
because
certain kinds of chronicling and magic belonged exclus
ively to the
women.