Heart of the Exiled (35 page)

Shalár strode eagerly at the head of her army, legs protesting and breath laboring at the steepness of the climb as they headed into the Ebons. Tonight they would enter Fireshore.

The route they followed was disused but clear enough, a rocky trail leading into the foothills. To the north and south the peaks rose high and forbidding, but here a gap filled only by lesser mountains, mere hills by comparison, made a natural passage across the Ebons.

Shalár’s brows drew together as she thought of what lay beyond the pass. Westgard, where her people had been defeated by two ælven armies, one of which had come through this pass to surprise Clan Darkshore from behind. She had not fought in that battle, had then had no knowledge of fighting. She had been little more than a child.

Her father had fought at Westgard and died there along with many of his followers. Those who survived the battle had fled through the pass into the wilderness of the Westerlands, and the ælven soon drove the rest of her people after them, out of Fireshore. They had almost vanished in the unforgiving lands west of the mountains.

Would have vanished had Shalár not chosen to survive and make her people survive with her. They would return one day, she had promised them, to reclaim their home. Now the day had come.

Her flesh hummed with anticipation, and her mind was alive with speculation. What awaited them beyond the pass?

Ciris had been through it earlier in the year, had crossed into Fireshore and brought her much information about its people and the city of Ghlanhras. The city was walled now. She wondered why the ælven had done it. Ghlanhras had always sent its warriors forth to meet any threat of kobalen, preferring to keep them well away from the city. What else did they fear?

She glanced at Yaras, who walked just behind her on the trail. She might send him forward to learn more, but that would risk betraying their presence to the ælven. Better to keep hidden and fall upon Ghlanhras without giving them time to organize a defense. The city was a fair distance to the north of Westgard. Several nights’ march lay ahead of them yet.

Yaras lengthened his stride to come up with her and walked beside her in silence for a time. She knew this meant he wished to ask her a question, for he tended to avoid her company otherwise. She waited, leaving it to him to speak.

“Bright Lady, there is a small village at Westgard.”

Shalár nodded. The village had been there before the war, originally founded to watch the pass and give early warning of any kobalen crossing the mountains there. A large field had been cleared to enable the villagers to farm, and it was there that the battle had unfolded.

Afterward the villagers had left, unwilling to live so close to the battleground. For a time the ælven had used the village as an outpost to prevent her people from returning. It had fallen into disuse after a few centuries, the ælven having realized that no threatening masses were about to come through the pass.

Until now. Shalár permitted herself a wry smile.

“Ciris said it was still abandoned.”

“I thought we might scout it to make certain of that.”

Shalár looked at Yaras. “You wish to go?”

“If it is your will. I would take two or three others.”

“You will have to make haste to rejoin us by morning. I will not stop to wait for you.”

Yaras nodded. She found his placidity annoying.

“What do you expect to find there? I doubt they will have left swords lying about.”

“No, but there are other things they think little of that we might find useful.”

A flash of anger burned through Shalár. She felt her shoulders tightening and was tempted to say something sharp but resisted. Yaras was right. Many things the ælven took for granted were long lost to her people. Some of the simplest things—bright colors in cloth or paint, glass beads, certain herbs and ointments—would be precious treasures to her people.

“Go, then. Join the army again when we come through.”

“Thank you, Bright Lady.”

He fell back, and she heard him talking among the hunters, choosing three to go with him. Soon they passed Shalár, running at a slow jog up the trail. She watched them go and realized the source of her annoyance. It was because she wanted to go with them.

Always she had accepted the burden of leading her
people. She had not asked for it; she had merely assumed it, and Clan Darkshore was grateful. Without her they had been in danger of descending into savagery and ultimately scattering, dying in small skirmishes with kobalen or falling victim to the westerlands’ many dangers, or simply giving up. She had decided Clan Darkshore should survive, and so they had survived.

Why, then, was she suddenly weary of her role? Why now, when they were at last returning to reclaim Fireshore?

She strode on, listening to the footfalls of Yaras and his three hunters, following their khi ahead through the pass. She was lonely and wished for Dareth. She had always turned to him when she felt restless. He had understood that her anger was not directed against him, had been able to listen to it and let it pass him by. She had no one to do that for her now.

Dareth had disapproved of her intention to return to Fireshore.

Well, Dareth was not here. She presumed he was no longer concerned with such worldly matters.

Shalár brushed some small irritant from her eye and lengthened her stride, digging against the rising trail with the long muscles of her thighs. She did not urge her hunters to keep up. They would follow her soon enough. Across this pass lay Fireshore, and she wanted nothing now but to set foot in her homeland again.

Her thoughts flew ahead into the lush forest beyond. The trees there were taller, a mix of greenleaf and sable-boled darkwood trees with their broad leaves and pale blossoms.

Few darkwoods grew west of the Ebons, and Shalár’s people had few tools of the quality needed to
work that hardest of woods. She prized darkwood almost above all else, for it meant home to her.

Fireshore had vast forests of darkwood. In the north they spread all along the coast and marched right up onto the feet of Firethroat. Burned stumps of darkwood marked where the volcano’s wrath had spilled long ago.

The darkwood was her hope for remaining in Fireshore. The trees did not grow in any other part of the ælven lands. If she could take control of Fireshore’s forests and keep hold of them, the ælven would have to bargain with her or go without darkwood.

She lifted her head, seeking a glimpse of the familiar tree, but this high only greenleaf and a few stray pines grew. When the trail leveled and she knew she was at the crest of the pass, she eased her pace a little. Her breath burned in her chest from the effort of climbing, and though this pass was not extraordinarily high, she felt light-headed.

She paused to kneel beside a stream that trickled cold water from the mountain to the south. Gasping as she plunged her hands into the flow, she swallowed as much as she could and then splashed more on her face.

Standing, she turned to face eastward again. Though she could not see it from this pass, in her mind she saw the green eastern slopes slanting down to a field that was still barren after centuries. Questing forward with khi, she found Yaras and his three, more spent than she but pressing ahead toward the abandoned village at the edge of the great battleground.

Westgard. She had not been present at the battle, but she had heard of it. The vast destruction and waste of it had burned into her heart. She herself had fled
from Ghlanhras, which then had not been sheltered by a wall.

She mused, gazing at the star-strewn sky overhead. The way to defeat the wall was to take it from the city and make it her own. Eyes narrowing, she thought ahead to her arrival there. Her warriors would easily surround the city. The wall itself was not guarded, Ciris had reported. They need only scale it, weapons ready, to take possession of it.

How many hundreds now dwelt in Ghlanhras, though? More important, how many of them would resist?

She must take the wall, then she must take the governor’s hall. With Othanin in her control, the people of Ghlanhras would be hesitant to resist.

Shalár mused over the details as she began to walk again. The pass now sloped eastward, gradually at first, then with increasing steepness.

Footsteps on the path, well behind her but within range of her senses, told her the army had caught up with her. She halted them, then stepped forward to address those close enough to hear.

“We are nearing Westgard. Only memories dwell there now, but they are vivid memories. Guard yourselves and do not be distracted by the tauntings of shadows.”

A few of them had fought at Westgard, but only a very few. The flesh of the dead had long since gone to dust, but the echoes of their suffering would not fade so quickly.

Her hunters followed her down the lush eastern slopes of the Ebons. When the battlefield came into view, she pulled her thoughts close, curling awareness into herself. Far ahead, she saw Yaras and his hunters. All else was still, and a hushed silence lay like fog over
the field. She watched the four hunters, whose course wove strangely now and then as if they ran over ground still littered with bodies. She peered at them in bewilderment, then drew a sharp breath of realization.

There were conces all over the field, hundreds upon hundreds. Shadow-gray, so at first she had not seen them. She swallowed, anger tightening her throat. The ælven had set conces for their dead, but there would be none for her own people, no memorials for the fallen of Clan Darkshore.

Withdrawing her gaze from the conces, she raised it to the village of Westgard huddled on the far edge of the field, then beyond it to the forest. A small trail ran north from there to Ghlanhras and south to Bitterfield, the remains of a road that had been used by the village. She would lead her army along that path, for cutting through the dense and tangled darkwood forest would slow them. They had endured enough of that labor west of the Ebons. Few used the road now, by its appearance, so they should be safe from discovery.

The slope leveled again as the trail gave out onto the field and faded. Behind her the hunters walked in silence. She could feel their surprise even though she held herself close. They were not yet on the battleground, but its presence was already palpable, a pall of heaviness, of anger and grief and dark feelings. The stars overhead seemed dull, though no cloud interfered with the clear cold of night.

She walked on, though she could not keep her steps from slowing. Reluctance to pass among the conces rose in her heart. She denied it and forced her weary legs to lengthen their stride. The sooner she was across this field, the better.

At the field’s edge she stepped between two of the
gray pillars, waist-high and carved with the names of ælven warriors long dead. Bitterness filled her. Glancing up toward the village to mark the shortest path thither, she moved forward, not letting her eyes rest on any of the carven names.

She wondered now, as she had not had leisure to wonder when she had first crossed this field, on what part of it her father had fallen. If she were to set a conce for him, where should she put it?

Foolishness. Few of these conces could be on the actual ground where those they commemorated had fallen. Too much labor would have been needed to identify the dead and mark their places. No doubt just burning the bodies and caring for the survivors had required all the effort that could be given.

When Ghlanhras was hers, she would think of the wrongs that had occurred here and make up for the neglect of Darkshore’s dead. She would set a conce for her father when Fireshore was back in her hands. A conce of black marble, from the quarries near Ghlanhras, not this gray stone, which must have been taken from somewhere nearby.

She glanced back toward the mountains and spied the sharp lines of a quarry, a scar hollowed into the side of a hill just north of the pass. No effort had been made to conceal it. How unlike the ælven, but then, they would never wish to live here again, so what need for improving the view? The scar was appropriate to the mood of the place.

A figure rose up before her. Shock filled her even as her hands drew her sword. It could not be—an ælven warrior, face wrought with terror and rage, swinging a longsword in reckless unconcern for his own safety.

Shalár brought her sword up to block the blow, and the ælven’s blade came down, fading even as it passed
through hers. She was left shivering, braced against a phantom blow that would never ring in her flesh, her sword gleaming golden in the cold starlight.

A shade. Shalár struggled to calm her panicked breathing.

Behind her the hunters shouted in fright and warning. She knew without looking that more shades had awakened, disturbed by the feet of living warriors. She flung up a hand.

“Hold! Sheathe your weapons.”

She put away her sword. The shades held no physical danger, though those who tried to fight them could injure one another. The danger was in being caught up in the dark khi of these echoes, feeding them with fresh fear, losing hope among the shadows of hopelessness.

Shalár glanced over her shoulder at the army. Wisps of movement rose among the conces, and a few of the hunters swung at them. A sword rasped against the stone of a conce. The sound seemed to sober the army, who fell still, lowering weapons, turning their attention from the shades to Shalár.

“Onward. Do not start at shadows. They cannot touch you.”

She turned and moved forward again, hearing the footfalls of the army behind her. Another shade rose to one side, a black-haired female in Ælvanen colors, wielding her longsword one-handed while the stump of a severed shield arm still rose in a useless attempt at defense. Shalár looked away and lengthened her stride, keeping her eyes on the ruins of Westgard village.

There were tokens hanging on some of the conces—wreaths of withered flowers, ribbons, chains wrought
by loving hands—new things, left recently. Faint smells of sage and lavender, of rosemary and other herbs, reached her. Not every conce was so honored, but many were.