Shadows on the Stars (32 page)

“She left you, didn’t she?” Elli raised her voice, driving her point home. “She just couldn’t take what you’ve become.”

Llynia’s wrathful glare returned. “Gnomes,” she barked. “Take them away. Right now!”

30
•
Hidden Blood

Thud.

The heavy bar that blocked the entrance to the underground chamber slammed down. Seconds before, Elli had turned away from the door—just as the last three-fingered hands had pushed Shim through. The little fellow had stumbled and fallen against one of the granite walls. Right now, he was rubbing his sore shoulder, muttering to himself, Brionna, who looked equally glum, sat beside him, leaning against the wall.

A dungeon,
Elli thought as she gazed around the cold, dank room. It felt like the inside of someone’s grave.
Maybe whoever built this place used it to keep people about to be sacrificed. Or people, like me, who just couldn’t stay out of trouble.

She slapped her thigh as she paced across the room, still holding Nuic. How foolish she’d been to have veered from her quest! She’d only managed to make everything worse.

And yet now, at least, she knew some valuable information about the coming battle—thanks to that sorry excuse for a priestess. But what good was information if she and her friends were just going to rot here in this dungeon?

Indeed, as she could see, there could be no escape from this place. It had no other entrance and no apparent weaknesses, just four stone walls and a stone floor, with no cracks in any of the slabs. A small air vent, set with granite bars, opened in the ceiling, which allowed a single shaft of light to drift down from the temple above. A little more light came from the circular window that had been bored through the door. Just outside, two savage-looking gnomes sat on a stone bench, drinking something that smelled like rancid beer.

Elli grumbled aloud, “How could Llynia not listen to me? Why can’t she see that she’s just being used by White Hands and Rhita Gawr?”

“Arrogance,” answered Lleu, who was leaning against a wall, arms folded across his chest. “That age-old human trait.”

Elli just nodded, feeling heavier than just Nuic’s weight could explain. With a groan, she flopped down beside Brionna. Her head tilted back, resting against the stone wall—her pillow, she knew, at least for a while.

Maybe a very, very long while.

“Hmmmpff. Don’t expect me to say anything helpful or encouraging,” grumbled Nuic from her lap. “It’s just not my nature.”

Despite her dark mood, Elli chuckled. “I like your nature the way it is, old friend.”

“That’s good, Elliryanna, since you haven’t any choice.”

Brionna lifted her braid, then threw it over her shoulder. It smacked against the wall, loud enough that one of the gnomes shambled over and put his face to the circular window. He peered inside, growling, then went back to drinking with his cohort.

“Come join our party,” Lleu called merrily after him. “We’ve got lots of good food.”

Catha screeched as she paced across his shoulder, clearly scolding him for making light of their situation.

But Lleu persisted. He turned to the jester, who was seated apart from the others, in the far corner of the room. “Well now, master Seth. How about showing us some entertainment? We’re truly a captive audience, you know!”

The fellow didn’t seem to appreciate Lleu’s joke. Instead, he shot the priest a look that could have curdled milk.

“I wish Scree were here,” muttered the elf maiden. “He’s always so good in a fight.”

“That’s because you give him so much practice,” observed Nuic dryly.

Brionna didn’t laugh.

Elli reached over and put a hand on her knee. “I miss someone, too. Remember what you told me about candle wax? Well, right then I didn’t understand, or want to admit it. But now, well, I do.”

Brionna nodded somberly. “It’s not just Scree I miss, whatever sort of friend he might have been. Mostly, I wish I still had . . .” She straightened her back, rubbing the scar from the slave master’s whip into the wall. “Some family.”

Elli sighed, then said, “You know, in all those years the gnomes made me their slave, working in their smoky tunnels, there was one thing I wanted even more than my freedom.”

The elf turned toward her. “What?”

“My family.” She nodded, making her abundant curls bounce. “To see them again, just for a day—that’s what I wished for most of all.”

She paused, drumming her fingers on her flask of water from the Secret Spring. “Which makes it even more absurd that I wasted some of this water to heal that filthy gnome who attacked Tamwyn and me. What stupidity!”

“Maybe,” said Brionna, “or maybe not. Granda had a favorite rhyme that he picked up somewhere in his travels:

“
See the creatures great and small,
Made so diff’rent, each from all:
Amble, slither, fly, or swim—
Yet still in each, so deep within,
Runs the hidden blood of kin
”

“Kin?” repeated Elli doubtfully. “Not the gnomes.”

“Hard to see, maybe, but it’s true. After all, isn’t that what you said to Llynia?
They’re our fellow journeyers, our sisters and brothers
”

Elli said nothing.

The elf nudged her teasingly. “Look here, even Shim and I are related.” She leaned over and asked into his ear, “Aren’t we, dear uncle?”

But the old fellow just looked at her blankly. “Don’t tries to be funnily, Rowanna. I knows you don’t really means it.”

He squeezed his fists tightly. “If only I was still a bigly lad! Then I’d just stand up and lift off this whole ceililing.”

Across the room, Lleu leaned his direction. “How
did
you get small again, Shim?” he asked, practically shouting in order to be heard.

The little giant rubbed his wrinkled cheeks. “I don’t knows! It justly happened, leaving me forever shrunkelled.”

“Maybe not forever,” said Brionna into his ear.

“For many years, at leastly!” He scrunched his bulbous nose at her. “If only I did understand, then mabily I could reversify things. But I don’t, so of coursedly I can’t.”

“When did you first notice?” shouted the priest.

Shim’s white head nodded. “Oh, that much I knows exactly! It was back in the War of Storms, in the Yearly of Avalon 498.”

“The year,” Brionna recalled, “of the Battle of the Withered Spring. That was the last time,” she added with a glance at Elli, “the Drumadians’ compound was ever attacked.”

“Yes, Rowanna. That’s rightly.” Shim cocked his head, remembering. “It was a fightly battle, much too bloodsy for me. But I still fought, because without us giants, those flamelonly types would have surely winned. And in that battle, our giantly leader was Jubolda.”

He opened his arms wide. “Bigly as a hillside she was, justly like her daughters.” He chortled. “In factually, I
saved
one of her daughters, I did. By being so clumsily! When they had her all tied up in knotly ropes, I came running over to help. But I tripped and fell with a crashly big bang. Lucksily, though, I fell right on tops of the flamelons.”

He clapped his hands for emphasis. “That was the end for them! A smooshily end.”

Brionna nodded. “Very smooshily.”

“But when did you start getting small?” shouted Lleu.

“Rightly after that.”

“Are you sure?” demanded the elf maiden. “Did anything else happen to you?”

Shim shrugged his small shoulders. “Wellsy now, justly one thing.” He blushed. “But it’s surely not important.”

“We’ll decide that,” Lleu bellowed. “Tell us.”

His blush deepened. “Well, allsy right. Jubolda’s daughter was named Bonlog Mountain-Mouth.” He paused, glancing around the room. “For a goodly reason, too. And after I saved her, she tried to thanks me with a kiss!” He shivered from head to toe. “All too slobberly, let me tell you.”

Trying to stifle her laughter, Brionna asked, “So what happened?”

“I runs away. And fast, lassie! As fast as I could, up into the mountains. The lastly thing I remember was hearing Bonlog’s rumbumbily voice behind me, shouting some nastily things. She was, methinks, a little upset.”

“Sounds that way,” muttered Nuic, from his seat in Elli’s lap.

“To keep away from her slobberly self,” Shim went on, “I hides in the mountains for a longly time.” A frown came over his face. “That’s when the shrunkelling started. And got worsely and worsely.”

“Hmmmpff.” The sprite waved a tiny hand. “That’s because she cursed you, idiot.”

“Whatly?”

“Cursed you!” he roared. “Set a spell on you for humiliating her.”

Shim’s pink eyes widened. It was as if he’d just witnessed, for the very first time, the wondrous flash of golden light at starset. “A curse,” he muttered. “You mabily be right! Now I justly needs to undo it.”

Nuic shook his head. “I knew Jubolda’s daughters. And you were right to run! But they had giantess sorcery thick in their blood. A curse from one of them can’t ever be undone, except perhaps by Merlin himself. And I doubt even he would succeed.”

While Shim may not have caught all Nuic’s words, he didn’t miss the meaning. He scowled, and his head drooped. “So I is stuckly, then. Shrunkelled forever.”

Brionna wrapped her arm around his shoulders, yet he didn’t seem to notice.

A renewed sense of gloom settled over the companions. Elli sighed bitterly, watching Nuic’s color swiftly darken. Lleu turned to the shadows, as Catha fluttered her wings restlessly. Brionna, like the jester in the corner, just stared at the granite floor.

“We’re lost,” said Elli despairingly. “Our quest is over. I’ve failed the Lady, and now Avalon is doomed. And we’re stuck here in this dungeon until we die.”

No one replied. Her words seemed to hover in the dank room like some thick, noxious fume. Slowly, it seeped into their skin, their lungs, and their minds, poisoning them by degrees.

An hour or more passed. None of them so much as stirred. The light from the air vent dimmed to nearly nothing, as nightfall came to the jungles outside the temple.

Without warning, there was a heavy grating sound just outside the entrance. Then a thud—and the heavy bar that blocked the door fell to the floor. A three-fingered hand reached inside, shoving the door open with a savage grunt.

“Merlin’s beard,” exclaimed Lleu. “They’ve come to kill us!”

Brionna leaped to her feet with elvish speed. Elli stood as well, cradling Nuic, and Lleu stepped over to them. The jester, too, rose swiftly and silently, brandishing his cane.

The gnome, however, did something unexpected. Something that made the companions freeze in place. Instead of rushing inside, he merely stood in the doorway and threw some objects into the darkened room. They clattered on the stone floor by Brionna’s feet.

“My longbow,” she said, awestruck. “And my arrows.”

The gnome watched her as, in one swift motion, she grabbed them up and slung the quiver over her shoulder. Then he turned to Elli, his dark, bulging eyes peering deep into hers. Even before he raised his hand to touch the three jagged scars in the middle of his chest, she recognized him.

Her throat tightened. Yet she didn’t need to speak. The look they exchanged said enough.

The gnome grunted urgently, then waved for them to follow. Stealthily, he led them past the other guard at the door, now slumped on the stone bench in a drunken stupor. Back up the stairs they crept, past more sleeping captors. The jester, who came last, took the opportunity to make sure that one of them—the guard who had rudely poked him in the back—would not wake up in the morning.

Down a narrow corridor they stole, avoiding the temple’s central chamber. Ever so quietly, the gnome slid through a hole in the wall, where a palm tree had fallen against one of the slabs of quartz. He waited outside, until the last of them had passed through and the whole group stood beneath the trees in back of the temple. Then, with a final glance at Elli, he grunted and slipped off into the jungle, his squat form disappearing into the dark mesh of vines.

For a few heartbeats, the companions watched him disappear. Elli then looked skyward and found some stars shining through gaps in the trees. She paused for an instant, remembering the night with Tamwyn on the Stargazing Stone, but there wasn’t time to think about that now. She pointed to the east, then plunged into the forest, following an animal trail that wound its way through the moist ferns and fruit-heavy branches.

All through the night they trekked. Monkeys chattered overhead, while a few nocturnal birds whistled eerily. Often, in thicker growth, it was only Brionna’s superb vision that enabled them to keep moving. Even that failed once, when they found themselves in the midst of a dark and trackless swamp. Then they turned for help to Catha, who flew ahead and picked out a route from the air. Mostly, however, they kept moving. And mostly in silence—although Shim couldn’t seem to stop falling over toppled trees, cracking sticks underfoot, and scaring unseen creatures into angry growls or hisses.

As dawn arrived, and the stars overhead began to brighten, the companions finally left the jungle behind. Wearily, they scaled a steep hill sprinkled with stubby brown grass. At the top, they all plopped down to rest. They were exhausted, and still hungry, despite the tangy fruits they’d eaten during the night. But they were free.

Scanning the rows upon rows of undulating brown hills that faded into the distant clouds, Elli smiled in satisfaction. “The Mud Hills. And over there,” she said with a wave at the horizon, “is the Misty Bridge.”

Brionna, too, gazed at the vista, but her own expression was far more glum. “And our route to the corrupted crystal.”

Something about her voice made Elli turn toward her. “What’s troubling you, Brionna?”

“Nothing,” her friend replied crisply.

But Elli’s instincts told her otherwise. “Something’s on your mind. Now, what is it?”

Brionna’s deep green eyes gazed at her. “Well, if you must know, I’ve been thinking about what Llynia told us. About the battle, and the elves from my homeland.” She drew a slow, unsteady breath. “It made me feel . . . well, that for the first time on this journey, I’d like to be in two places at once.”