"Damn it, mother, you're as stubborn as a full-blooded elf!"
Finally, his words had effect. A look of consternation crossed her face, quickly controlled. "You should choose your words with more care. There are those in this city who might read too much into your comment."
A terrible, impossible suspicion snaked into his mind. Perhaps Lilly was murdered because she was a child of a noble house who clearly carried more than a little elven blood. Arilyn had been attacked. Elaith. Perhaps someone was determined to separate the Thann family from any contact with elves.
Perhaps Cassandra's desire to deny her heritage was so strong that she struck out against anything that reminded her of it.
Quickly he thrust this thought aside. He could not believe that of his own mother—he could barely fathom how he himself could have imagined it.
"You may hear that Elaith Craulnober had a hand in Lilly's death," he said as soon as he could trust himself to speak. "I do not deny it is possible, but I will find the truth of the matter. Until then, do not support any efforts against him." He paused, then added with difficulty. "Or any others of elven blood."
His mother was dumbfounded, speechless for the first time in Danilo's recollection. "You presume to instruct me?" she said at last.
"In a manner of speaking. Our elven heritage might be a faint and distant thing, but I want you to understand that I am proud to own it."
She shook her head in disgust. "Khelben!" she muttered, turning the archmage's name into a curse. "You must have gotten this notion from him. I must say, he picked a fine time to stop being close-mouthed and enigmatic!"
"Then it's true. Why did you never say anything?"
"Why should I? It has been forgotten for generations! There is no need to open the closets and let the skeletons cavort about."
"The Thann family fortune was built on the slave trade," he reminded her. "Are you saying that it is acceptable to have slavers as ancestors, but not elves?"
"Watch your tone," she said in a voice that simmered with anger, "and watch your step! Elaith Craulnober has overstepped, and he will pay for his presumption. Take care that you do not go down with him."
She stalked out, leaving Danilo standing alone amid the ruins of his long-held illusions.
* * * * *
Arilyn waited at the agreed-upon tavern until the moon rose and the fire burned low. Danilo came in, looking as windblown as a sailor and more desolate than she had ever seen him. He threw himself onto the bench and dashed his damp hair off his face. "I'm sorry. I was walking the Sea Wall."
She knew the spot. It was a good place of solitude. A sharp wind, laden with salt and spray and secrets, blew in from the sea on the mildest of days. Nothing provided shelter from the buffeting wind or offered much of a barrier between the path and the long, sheer drop to the icy water below. It was not a stroll for the fainthearted or those too fond of comfort. A person could walk the length of the wall at nearly any hour and not meet another soul.
"Looks to me as if you came in too soon," she commented. She tossed some coins on the table and rose. "Let's go."
He did not argue. They headed north and climbed the stairs carved into the stone wall. For a long time, they walked along the rim. The setting moon glittered on the restless waves. The receding tide exposed the expanse of barnacles desperately clinging to the wall. There was no sound but the crash and murmur of the waves. It occurred to Arilyn that she had seldom seen a more lonely, desolate place.
"I come here from time to time," Dan said suddenly. "The sound of the sea often serves to wash clean my thoughts, allows me to start anew and think with greater clarity. Tonight, it does not avail."
He related his conversation with Lady Cassandra, his terrible suspicions. "I have always felt somewhat apart from my family, but I never realized how little I knew them. I never conceived of the possibility that they could turn on their own."
"It happens," she said shortly, for Danilo's tale was too like her own early life for comfort. After a moment's hesitation, it occurred to her that he might find, if not comfort, then at least community in her story.
"My mother died when I was barely fifteen," she said. "A half-elf of that age is little more than a child. Her moonblade came into my keeping. She had always intended that it pass to me, and she had begun training me with an eye toward its demands, but as you know her time was cut short before she could tell me all I needed to know. My mother's family came to Evereska for the funeral. They were robed and hooded in traditional elven mourning. I never saw their faces, but I heard them argue about the sword and its fate. None of them thought I should have it, but they left it in my keeping. Much later, I realized why. No one thought that a half-elf could claim a moonblade. They fully expected I would die in the attempt and that the family could then reclaim Amnestria's sword. But they gave me no word of warning or explanation."
Danilo's lips thinned in anger. "I never knew that."
"It's not something I like to talk about. It took me a long time to realize that my mother's family are not evil or even thoughtless. Far from it. I was simply not a part of their world. Half-elves are not people to them and so do not merit consideration. That sounds harsh, but they have reasons for their way of thinking."
"Even so, you were left alone, and at a very young age. I think I have some understanding of how difficult that must have been."
Arilyn halted him with a hand on his arm. They moved without speaking into an embrace, two figures silhouetted against the night sky.
"You are not alone," she said softly. "Never that."
As they stood together a small tendril slipped into her mind, a presence that she had always sensed, but never so vividly. She recognized Dan's merry, blithe spirit, but behind it was a darkness that she had never glimpsed. She accepted them both, understanding what this meant. They were connected by elven rapport, a deep psychic and spiritual bond. It was far from complete—the soul-deep union of the feyfolk was beyond either of them—but still infinitely more than a meeting of flesh or even of hearts.
"There is that, too," he said softly, answering her unspoken thoughts. By that, Arilyn knew the elven bond encompassed them both. The joining was made, the circle complete.
Suddenly, he swept her up into his arms, as if she were a silk-clad maiden rather than a warrior. To her surprise, she found she did not mind. Danilo had his own patterns, and at this moment the alien urgency of a human's desire seemed as natural to her as the coming of spring.
She circled her arms around his neck. Magic engulfed them, and the roar of the sea was lost in the sweeping tide of the travel spell.
They emerged from the white whirl of the magical transport into a world that, to Arilyn's heightened senses, seemed just as enchanted. Apple logs crackled on the hearth fire, and lamps fueled by scented oil burned low. Globes of blue glass filtered the lamplight and cast an azure glow over the room. Arilyn glanced down, half expecting to find herself clad in the deep blue silk and gems of Danilo's preference.
"Not tonight," he said aloud as he set her gently on the floor. "As you are."
She reached for the buckle of her swordbelt and cast the elven weapon aside. It was an instinctively protective gesture, for even a casual touch from the moonblade could burn the careless. She let it fall without care or concern. The sword was her elven destiny, but tonight, she had another pledge to fulfill, just as sacred.
Danilo put her hands aside and tended her himself. He gently smoothed away the indentations on her forearm where the bracer and knife sheath pressed against her. Her skin fascinated him, and he explored it with exquisite, torturous delicacy.
"Moonlight on pearl," he murmured in a reverent tone, easing her shirt away from her shoulders.
Arilyn began to experience a very human level of impatience. Had she possessed any magic, she would have dissolved all impediments. She began to tug at the laces that bound the side of her leathers.
He caught her mood, and moved to help her, but urgency made them both fumble-fingered. Finally she pushed him away and bent, pulling a knife from a sheath hidden in her boot.
This she handed to Danilo. He deftly cut the laces, and she kicked the ruined garment aside. She kicked her boots off so emphatically that one of them hit an oil lamp. The blue globe rocked wildly, and the flame guttered, then disappeared.
The darkness suited her. Moonlight was all that was needed. It filled her, in a very tangible sense. Its silvery light began to gather, burning ever brighter as it rose. Her mind washed clear. There was nothing but this, no time but now. Elven rapport melded with very human urgency, but there was no discordance, only completion, and a shared sense of homecoming so poignant and sweet that she knew the memory would stay with her long after her life essence melded with the moonblade.
Later, they curled together before the fire and watched the patterns in the flames. There was no need for words, for those served to bridge a gap, and the communion they had shared made this unnecessary. Whatever came, Arilyn felt that neither of them would ever truly be alone again.
* * * * *
The morning came in slowly, for the sun was curtained with clouds and a faint rain whispered over the roofs and rustled the falling leaves.
Danilo turned to the sleeping woman beside him and woke her with a kiss. "As much as I hate to say this, we should rise. We have business outside this room."
She stretched, looking as smug and languorous as a cat. "Had I known what was awaiting me, I would not have waited so long."
He caught up her hand and kissed it. "My fault entirely," he said ruefully. Four years ago, when they had declared their love, he had been determined that all would be done as tradition demanded. Their union would be blessed by clerics of Hannah Celanil, the elven goddess of love. There would be a splendid ceremony, a lavish celebration. Theirs was no trivial fancy to enter into lightly.
"You just wanted to do things right," she consoled him.
"I picked a damnably foolish time to start," he said with a wry grin. After the depth and shattering communion of their joining, ceremony and tradition seemed paltry things. They were bound for life and had been for a very long time.