Stealing the Elf-King's Roses: The Author's Cut (40 page)

Ahead of them, the Elf-King paused, looked westward, nodded. “Changing the world doesn’t look to you the way it does to me, does it,” he said. He sounded most unnerved. “I never thought you would find this so easy. As if you think it’s something you should be doing all the time.”

“For the better, yes!” Lee said.

“But the worse still happens—”

To a small extent Lee’s Sight was already upon her, unsummoned, and she knew better than to reject such insights as came to her now. “Laurin, listen to me. Alfheim’s going to use you as it can to keep things the way they are. It’s self-preservation, for a universe, the same way it is for a mind: to keep itself the way it is, to keep things running the way they are… even when that way is the 
wrong
 way—toxic, or doomed. Your world wants you to be the Devil it knows! You can’t let it do that. You have to make a choice; who’s running this place, really? Who’s King here: the Elf, or Alfheim?”

He looked at her as if she’d struck him across the face—white, staggered. “So long we’ve believed, we’ve been taught, they were the same…”

“So long things have been going to Hell in a handbasket,” Lee said. “We may have a few minutes yet to change that. But no more.”

Laurin looked at Lee rather narrowly. “I hadn’t seen your role in this as being quite so—proactive.”

“You hadn’t seen yourself as being quite so out of control, you mean,” Lee said. “Sorry about that. But the moment’s on us, and we don’t have a lot of time now to argue roles. I See the way through. You have the power to implement the solution I See. So let’s get busy. What do you need to do?”

He turned toward the hillside. From the far side of the gates, a faint hubbub of voices could be heard.

The Elf-King turned away from them, looked up the hill. “First,” he said. “I’ll have one more look at these before I die, no matter what they do.”

Lee watched him, uncomprehending.

There on the hillside, the sunset began to spread. Or rather, it was a light like a sunset’s, for to the west the sky was all leaden, except where it was beginning to be lashed with lurid fire. On the hillside, though, the spaces between the paths now darkened as if with coast fog or cloud—an indistinct gloaming at first, then something more solid; and in that darkness, which started to gather itself slowly together in shadowy leaf and branch like growing things, light began to flower, coming out gradually, like stars. Mostly it was a red light, growing thicker in every shrub of shadow, glowing like coals breathed on, brighter where the Elf-King turned to look. But the coals burned peach and yellow and white as well, brighter every moment. Farther up, the effect was more like a blanket of light against the hill, a mist-veiled rosy brilliance massed and clustered. But here the points of radiance were close enough to be individual:  red stars and golden ones and white ones, fierce-burning and distinct.

They drew Lee. They would have drawn any living thing. Lee stepped close to the nearest rosebush and held out her hand to one of the roses, felt the heat of it—the power of desire bound into the bloom, like blood blazing in the heart. Then she turned to another and leaned down, with tears in her eyes from the scent and the blinding light, to bathe her face in the cool white fire of innocence. She stood upright again, looking around her, rubbing the pain out of her eyes to take it all in—this vast chorus of virtues, large and small, preserved here for how long?—but all hidden in plain sight, burning in the hills above where her home would have been were it in this world. And the existence of this garden had never once been suspected by the Alfen here—or by her own world, when sometimes, at twilight, the power of the roses burst the barriers between the worlds and shone briefly through.

Laurin was watching her, and the pain was in his eyes, too. “All the things that were worth keeping of what we were,” the Elf-King said, “all the things I would have preserved, if I could, through the change; in symbolic form, preserved in essence, they’re all here.” He looked around him. “It was wrong of me to do this. But I couldn’t help it.”

“And to think they told me it wasn’t real,” Lee said.

“They always wished it wasn’t,” Laurin said. “But they couldn’t stop my ancestor from making that first garden, either. He insisted on reminding them of what they were… and of where his power lay, in defining them as he defined himself. Nor could they stop him from manifesting that power just as he pleased.”

He saw her shocked look. “Yes, of course it was real once,” he said. “Here and there, versions of the story persist, though they tried to wipe them out. Once upon a time, very long ago, some of us thought we might be able to coexist with humans. It was my direct ancestor, the one who first made that garden, who let humans into it; that place where my people’s uniquenesses were cultivated, revealed, as these are. And the humans didn’t care for what they saw. They destroyed that place.” He looked around him in sorrow. “His successor, another of my ancestors, took the lesson and started the work of closing Alfheim off to mortals. It took a long while. Partly they used the rings, the ‘made gates,’ to reverse-engineer our space and stop every place from becoming a door to every other place. Partly they used men’s own mortality against them, as a tool to forgetfulness. Even in the space of one lifetime, humans forget things so quickly…”

He looked around at the roses. “But our own memory of those first disasters, where our species met and wounded one another most intimately, wouldn’t go away; and what the Elf-Kings remember, their world can’t forget. The light of that first old garden still seeps through the gates of twilight and dawn, which my latter forefathers forgot to include in the curse.” He shook his head, laughing helplessly. “Alfheim’s memory is so powerful that sometimes the light seeps right through into other worlds. I’ve even seen it in Ellay. Plan how you may, every spell has loopholes— But the stricture against planting another such garden in that place remains. The story says that should it happen, the humans would destroy not just that, but our whole world.”

“But you made this one anyway,” Lee said, looking around her in wonder.

“One has to put one’s love, one’s power, somewhere,” Laurin said. “Or it dies.” The sorrow in his voice tore her. “That old Elf-King, who loved his people’s virtues so, and the flowers he made of them—the King who was so sure of the virtues of humans—he was my direct ancestor, as I said. Most Alfen think he was a fool; deluded by too much kindliness, too much confidence in the good intentions of mere mortals. But I would always think about him, when I was younger. I would think, ‘Maybe he wasn’t so far wrong. How can it be bad to put your love somewhere that people can see it? How can it be bad to preserve what you love?’ And when I became Elf-King, and took possession of the house here, I couldn’t resist. These hills were so like the country around Aien Mhariseth—what I always longed for when I was young, and couldn’t have. I thought, ‘Just a small garden, in exile… in his memory, remembering how he tried to make it work between my people and the humans of the other worlds. How could that hurt?’”

He looked around him like a man who’s been denying a fatal disease for a long time, but now is brought face to face with it. “I discovered how my ancestor had made the roses first. I made them again. My will kept them secret, even from my own people, for a long time. But they found out, and began to plot my overthrow. I never thought that recreating the garden 
here
 would bring Alfheim’s doom…”

Lee reached out to another of the flowers, felt the heat of it, and felt the blossom shivering with Laurin’s fear. “What’s happening to your people isn’t because of you,” she said. “It’s their nature.”

“The two are the same thing,” the Elf-King said, “close enough. What I am, they become. That’s what they’ve made of me, what our world has made of me—what I was bred to be, over all this time. As I go, they go. And I can’t go where they need to go if they’re going to survive…”

He looked at her. And Lee Saw his thought, the thing he couldn’t say: 
Not by myself, at least.

The sound of something being smashed against the gates started to racket around in the space below the hillside. “Not much time, Lee,” Gelert said: and his voice was shaking. The sound of it shocked her—not from its unfamiliarity, but because she felt the same way; as if everything was shifting under her feet, as if time was running out not just for them, but for everything else as well. This was what she had felt coming ever since she and Gelert turned poor dil’Sorden’s casework in—the sense of something massive, catastrophic, coming closer and closer, ready to roll over them all like the clouds piling up out over the sea, leaden, towering, full of final threat. 
We’re going to die
, she thought. 
They’ll take their King and
 
kill him; they’ll kill us, too.

But there was more to it than that. 
Can a whole world be afraid?
 Lee thought. 
Can a universe have a
 
soul, and feel terror? Or desire? Even if the world all around us isn’t strictly his universe—
 this 
part of it is. All the parts are parts of all the whole; every spot is every other spot, no matter how
 
they may have reverse-engineered this space…

The congruencies made her mind whirl as she stood there among the roses that burned fierce in the growing darkness, defying the ban against their visibility this one last time, while the being who had planted and nurtured them with his will, and hidden them, and held them dear, stood there gazing into the darkness, waiting for the end.

Not just the fear of one universe
, Lee thought. 
They all touch, here. It’s the fear of
all
of them. If
 
this place is part of the most central of universes—because he’s here—then where better for a
 
universe’s soul to be, its heart? And now it’s afraid, they’re all afraid, of what’s about to happen.

If he dies, then his people and his world die. As his people and world go…sooner or later, we go
 
too, and our worlds with us. How can the rest of the worlds not react to something like that—feel
 
the fear as he feels it, as we feel it?

But there Lee stopped. It wasn’t just feeling that was required of her: not just sharing that desperate desire for self-preservation. To do Laurin any good, she would have to see through the appearance to the reality—even here at the heart of things, at the center of the universe most devoted to hiding its heart, to keep it from being hurt as it was hurt once before. She would have to see through the Elves, right down to the individual realities; see not just through the Elves, but through the Elf.

She looked down at her shaking hands, and saw something that shocked her; some of their wrinkles were fading. They looked younger than they had.

Lee put one hand to her face, felt the difference between yesterday and today, and froze.
This is what this world offers you
 
if you’ll just back off now
, Lee thought. 
The bribe. The same one it offered the Elves. And they
 
took it, and got so used to taking it that the thought of giving it up looks like death to
 
them. It’s not this world’s fault; it’s too malleable to human desires. Who
 wouldn’t 
want to be
 
young and beautiful forever? You’d have to be crazy to walk away from something like that. And
 
the Alfen didn’t. So the world keeps them that way… and they keep the world keeping them that
 
way.

It would keep me that way too, if I stayed here…

But Lee pushed the thought away, with the help of the crashing noise coming from the gates down below. “Laurin,” she said. “Will you give it up? All of it?”

“To save all this?” he said, almost too low to be heard. “To save everything? You know I’d die to do that.”

“It may take more.”

He looked at Lee, shocked, uncomprehending. “Dying is easy,” she said. “Living, and being completely known, that’s hard. That’s what has to happen.” She swallowed hard; she wasn’t sure what was going to happen next “The beauty,” she said, “the immortality. They’re what’s going to kill your people. And what they’d rather die than lose.”

“Yes,” he said.

“But if you lose them—If you throw them away—”

“
How can I do that?
 I don’t know how—”

“It’s not just my Sight you need,” Lee said, “You have to see 
yourself
 as mortal, too. That’s how it goes in court. I See… then you accept it as the truth. It’s not something that’s done to you. 
You
 choose.”

He stared at her. Was it hope, or anger, starting now to rise in his eyes? In this light, as the roses dimmed with his fear, Lee couldn’t clearly see. 
But that’s the problem. I can’t rely on them for illumination
 
now. It’s my own Sight that’s going to have to show me the way.
“Well?” Lee said.

Standing there in the dimming fire of the roses, for just a moment he looked at her, and without warning Lee Saw him, Saw right to the heart of him—the heart of a man alone, afraid, and uncertain what to do; just a man, and mortal—the uncanny Alfen beauty at last irrelevant. Suddenly she realized that for him, at least, mortality lay not in death or the lack of it, but in not knowing what to do, not knowing what was going to happen afterward, when “afterward” was forever: the loss of control, not just for a lifetime, but for eternity. The concept of the surrender of that certainty was there, too. But could he manage it? As she looked at him, he actually covered his face with one hand, hiding his eyes. Part of him was resisting, even now. 
He can’t help it
, Lee thought. 
This world has its own ideas about self-preservation, even if they’re erroneous. It’ll keep him the way it’s kept him all these centuries, even though he
 
dies of it; even though
it
dies of it.