Spellbreakers (22 page)

“Oh,
I
didn’t, but the Elders in Elverhjem did.
They sent out a few scouts in case you showed up. The Shining Ones warned them
apparently.”

He studied them with that questioning frown again.

“Oh, don’t look at me,” said Daria quickly. “Leal has
the all the lofty friends. I am a mere commoner’s daughter.”

Leal gave her a
look
but did not waste time
commenting on it. “Yes, I did talk with them. I didn’t dare to hope they would
keep their promise to help me, however.”

“Oh,
they
don’t usually do much helping, to be
quite honest. But they are everywhere, they travel faster than any bird, and
they know an awful lot of things, so it’s always good to have them on your
side, as far as they bother to take sides. But I am impressed. It is not every
day that the Elders would send a guide out for human travelers. And it is not
often that human girls comes this way, let alone a princess and ... her good
friend.” He said the last bit with a little bow to Daria. Obviously he had paid
attention to her little biting remark, although he, too, made no comment. “I
must say I am curious. Why are you here? What are you looking for on the Ice
Waste?”

Leal and Daria exchanged a look. It was odd to tell
their story to a stranger after all their secrecy. But it was made slightly
easier by
his own
peculiarity. He was not so different
from a human, Leal thought, and yet different enough to make him belong to a
more magical, legendary world where her story fitted better than among the
familiar things back home. She wished Dee was here. He would have liked to meet
an elver. It would have been like walking in one of his precious books of lore.

“Kjetil Alversen Hawkeneye,” said Ljung when their
tale was told. “Well, I never thought to hear that name again. We call him
Haukka-Silma’a, in the high elvren tongue. Hawkeneye is the name that they gave
him in Nevraan, where he’s little more than a legend by now. We thought he had
died in the north a long, long time ago.”

“Tell me about him,” said Leal. “My uncle, who sent us
on this quest, is accounted the wisest man of our kingdom, yet he knew very
little about him.”

“The wisest man of your kingdom set you on this
quest?” asked Ljung laughing. “Well, ahem. I am sure he knows what he’s doing.
I can’t say
I
know much about Haukka-Silma’a except what all elvers
know. He was the last Warlord of the Elverlaen. It was more than one hundred
years ago, when the icy winter came. Not just an ordinary icy winter, we get
one every year, but a winter so grim and long that they thought the spring
would never come again. There was no respite from the cold. There were no
spring greens shooting. The lambs were born in snow pens and died in the cold.
Game had gone, and provisions were dwindling. All of Kaleva and the Elverlaen
were under snow at midsummer. They say that Nevraan’s ships were still ice
bound in June. And then the snow trolls came howling out of the north. These
are wild shaggy trolls of a race as old as the oldest glacier. They sleep
through the summers, but they have cunning and enormous strength in the cold
time of the year.

“Kaleva had no defenses in the north, because it had
been a long, long time since the snow trolls last came south. They had
withdrawn to the north with the last ice age. And the elvers of the Elverlaen
were too few to fight them alone, even then. So an alliance was formed. Kaleva
sent many men, and all the elvren hunters that could be assembled joined them.
Hawkeneye, with a small band of picked bowmen, had been harrying the
troll-herds all the time as they marched south, and he was deemed the best
choice to lead this combined force. He knew the ground; he knew the enemy; he
was a good leader. So they went north and fought great battles among the snows.
Things were uncertain to the very end. Many men and elvers were slain. Then
Hawkeneye shot the last chieftain of the trolls through the eye from two
hundred paces, during the last terrible fray, and that stopped the advancing
trolls before they reached the fertile lands of Kaleva, and the home woods of
Elverhjem. The weather changed at last, bringing warm winds from the Narrows,
and that scattered the last trolls. But just as the armies of men and elvers
were on their way back home Hawkeneye and his guard all went missing during a
last freak snowstorm. The fresh snow covered their tracks, and nobody knew
where they went. This happened close to the lake Saima’a, which is an ancient
place of power of the Shining Ones. So it was thought that, having won the last
battle and saved his people, he had felt the Call, and gone off to the other
side. But that was frankly no more than a wishful hope, something that people
told themselves in times of grief to keep their spirits up and make a good song
out of loss and death. I am surprised the rumor stuck long enough to reach you
in the south. He was not a man to give up on the sunlight of this world, and
mostly it was thought that he had been slain by some broken troll running from
the battles.

“And now you tell me that the Shining Ones know
better. That is news indeed for us, or at least for me, although the Elders
might know better. They don’t always share all they know until they see the
need for it.”

Chapter Twelve

The next day the traveled north and west, walking into
ever deeper and darker woods.
They
went slowly. They were following tracks and paths too narrow for Daria to ride,
and in places the forest was so intricate that even leading the mare through
was nearly impossible. Occasionally they still crossed the old road, and even
walked on it for a few miles, but Ljung was not fond of using it. He preferred
to travel as much as possible unseen. Leal and Daria were not sure of what he
feared, and they’d rather not ask.

As they traveled together Daria started to notice a
number of small things about Ljung Leuksen Sinkka’a-Reissu.

One was that he moved with deceiving elegance, like a
cat. He never appeared to hurry, and every step he took had a sort of
deliberate yet effortless poise. Yet he moved fast, even in the most tangled
parts of the forest. Every movement he made had this quality, as if he was
quietly rehearsing a subtle dance all the time, but dancing to music he alone
could hear.

Another thing was that sometimes stray locks of his
long dark hair fell in front of his eyes, something Daria could never have
borne, but he was not bothered by it, like a surefooted mountain pony is not
bothered by its long thick forelock. It was as if sight was just one of the
many senses he used for making his way around, and perhaps not even the most
important.

His strange features looked less odd after a while, and
actually quite alluring. With such high, wide cheekbones and prominent brows
his very deep-set, almond-shaped, dark green eyes were as it were underlined,
gleaming between bars of sharp light and deep shadow. They were at times
disconcertingly intense. He could be looking at something far off, or down at
the ground, appearing quite lost in thought, and then he would turn suddenly.
His eyes would focus on you, wide open and glowing with strangely reflected
light, and that focus was absolute, his attention undivided, disconcerting.

When he grinned the smile was charming, yet equally
alarming because he had the teeth of a carnivore. Not quite fangs, but strong,
sharp, conspicuous canine teeth, and since the lateral incisors were also
pointy and sharp, he appeared to have four canines on his upper row, which gave
Daria a shock, until she got used to it and stopped noticing.

Daria thought he must have broken his nose at some
point in his life, because it was a little crooked and had a small scar across
it, but she never worked up the courage to ask him.

Also, it was impossible to tell his age. It was not
just that his hair had a grizzled streak, in contrast with his agile physique.
Also other things did not add up. He knew so many things about the forest, the northern
kingdoms, hawks, and archery.
Too much knowledge for a young
man.
He reminded Daria of Castel Argell’s hawk-master, with his
encyclopedic understanding of birds and the mews, but Ljung had nothing of an
old man’s gravity, superciliousness, or self-importance. He could joke and
tease like a wayward boy when he was in the mood, although he never seemed to
really open up. There was something guarded and reserved about him.

All these things she discussed with Leal in hurried
whispered snatches of conversation when he was away hunting, scouting, or just
using a convenient bush, and they were quite certain of not being overheard.

They both wondered again and again if these oddities
were features of his whole race or his alone, his own personal qualities.

She could not talk so much about him, however, because
the trip had never been so demanding, physically. According to Ljung it was
less than fifty leagues between the fords of the Venta’a and Elverhjem, a
distance that in Hassia, along the canals, they might have covered in three
days. But the ground was totally different here, and they were not riding.

Daria had never fully realized before what hard work
walking is. They were not even carrying a pack, unlike Ljung, and yet it was
hard for both her and Leal to keep up with the elver. He might have been born
walking, with good boots at his feet and a straight path in front of him,
starting right between his mother’s legs. He walked on and on, untiring. Daria,
bruised as she was, barely kept up out of sheer pride. Her feet were aching
like they would fall off, but she said nothing. She marched on doggedly,
sometimes leading the mare, sometimes on her own, putting one foot in front of
the other, always knowing for a fact that the next step would kill her, always
amazed that in fact it did not.

The first day they walked less than twenty miles.
Ljung didn’t comment. He left them at the spot he had chosen for camping and
went off with Tuula. They had roasted grouse for dinner. Leal and Ljung chatted
about customs and traditions in Kaleva and the Elverlaen. Daria nodded over her
dinner, and went to sleep early, nursing her bruises as best she could over the
hard ground.
 

The second day they walked even less, because although
she didn’t say a thing she was walking too slowly to keep up. They camped
early. Leal looked worried. Ljung went hunting alone again, and Leal insisted
on checking on her bruises, but there was nothing much to do about them. Her
neck and right shoulders were stiff and ached monstrously, and her right knee
was one swollen bruise. She might have a couple of sprained ribs, but nothing
broken. She just needed rest, so she slept until dinner time. After their
blessed warm meal, Ljung made her drink a gritty tea made of some bitter tree
bark. It was considerately sweetened with bridewort, but it still tasted
horrible. However, the next day Daria felt better. She had the same infusion at
breakfast, and after a good twenty miles walk, at dinner again.

****

Ljung was a fascinating mystery also for Leal.

She was immensely relieved to have found a guide
across this impossible forest, and she trusted him implicitly because nobody
else but the
Faded
people could have warned the elvers
of her quest, and she was sure that the Faded were friends. Leal was grateful
for how he cared. He was a quiet companion, but he obviously kept an eye on
Daria. He never commented on her miserable state, as if he knew instinctively
that she would resent it, but made tea, hunted, and led them in short stages
until Daria felt stronger. He never commented. He just did the right things.

Nonetheless, he was unsettling.

Even if he knew perfectly well who she was, he never
addressed her with any particular courtesies. Leal had never fully realized how
special her status in Castel Argell had been. Even if she had always been the
rebellious princess, still she had always been treated like a princess
nonetheless. Elvers didn’t have royalty however, so she just had to get used to
the fact that she was just a person like any other, up here.

On the other hand, being a person like any other was
what she had always wanted. She had always found the court terribly stifling,
and her royal birth had often felt like a burden, putting an unnatural distance
between her and many people she loved, first of all Daria. Daria was able to
get past that in her own way, most of the time, especially when they were
alone. Especially when they were in bed together, and Leal relinquished all
control to her. Leal knew that Daria’s masterful way in bed was in part an expression
of Daria’s need to affirm herself beyond and despite her irregular status, a
way to show that she was not cowed by Leal’s noble birth. Leal had always
accepted and embraced that. And it was wonderful out here on the road, to be
rid of her royalty and be just Daria’s mate.

Nonetheless it was strange to be treated so informally
by a man.

Men, on the whole, were a puzzle. Of course there was
her father, who had always favored her, and let her have her way in almost
everything, often, almost always, against her mother’s will. Sometimes she had
gone too far even for him, and he had scolded her like the wrath of the heavens
above. Almost all other men she had known had been bound by the rules of court
and caste to treat her with exaggerated respect, so that she had never been
able to understand their true feelings and opinions. Ljung’s unaffected, even
slightly caustic behavior was as refreshing as it was startling. The only other
man who had ever treated her with such directness was her uncle Dee, but he was
almost like a second father for her, so it hardly counted.