As if dryads were real.
Demons were real. Maybe dryads were more than Illusory Creatures.
Cilarnen hesitated, then adjusted the placement of his knife, reaching far out along the branch and feeling the strain in his shoulder as he stretched. At last the length of wood he wanted eased free.
And Cilarnen, caught off-balance, fell sprawling into the snow.
He landed flat on his back, winded but unhurt—the snow was thick, and he hadn’t fallen all that far.
He staggered to his feet, brushing snow from his clothes. He’d dropped both the branch and the knife, of course, but the knife had made a deep hole in the snow crust where it had fallen, and the branch was sticking up out of the snow like an arrow. He picked them up.
“Now you must thank the tree, for giving so graciously of herself,” Kardus said.
“Is there really a dryad in there?” Cilarnen asked cautiously, turning toward the tree.
“I do not know. I do not have the magic to see her if she is there,” Kardus said, a little wistfully. “And this would be her season to sleep, in any event. But it is always proper to give thanks for the bounty of forest and field—and to the Otherfolk, even if you cannot see them.”
Cilarnen nodded. “Thank you, dryad,” he said to the tree. “I really need this.” He felt strange talking to a tree—but then, he’d felt equally strange talking to Centaurs not so very long ago.
“Good,” Kardus said approvingly.
Cilarnen looked down at the length of wood in his hands. It looked nothing like the polished, elegant tool he had used back in the City. “I need to trim this,” he muttered under his breath.
He found an outcropping of rock and used it to steady the branch while he trimmed the ends flat. He carefully cut away all the tiny twiglets sticking out from it, measured it against his arm, and trimmed again.
Not elegant. But a wand of living ashwood. If it wasn’t polished smooth with virgin beeswax and bound in fine silver, those things shouldn’t matter.
“Eleph. Vath. Kushon. Deeril. Ashan.”
The sigils every first-year student committed to memory. The building blocks of the High Magick. Cilarnen traced them in the winter air, whispering their names under his breath.
They hung before him, perfect shapes of colored fire.
Cilarnen let out his pent-up breath in a sigh of relief.
—«♦»—
THE difficulty with finding the next lair of the Shadow Elves was that it might, literally, be anywhere. Or nowhere. This might have been the only enclave of the creatures—or the Elven Lands might be riddled with them. No one knew— and they dared make no assumptions.
And Vestakia was the only one who could find them.
If the Elves knew that, then Shadow Mountain must know it as well. Her life was in constant danger, for without Vestakia, their only alternative was to seek out every cave in the Elven Lands—and even the Elves weren’t quite sure where they all were—and search them all blindly. And such a task could take an Elven lifetime to complete.
And that was time they did not have.
Not knowing where the next enclave of the Shadowed Elves might be, Redhelwar made the decision to regroup at Ondoladeshiron. The rest of the Elven Knights would have arrived by now, and the wounded could be better cared for there.
The army moved more slowly on its retreat, handicapped both by its burden of wounded and by the bitter winter weather. The only mercy was that none of the horses or unicorns had been hurt in the battle—Kellen didn’t think he could have borne that.
Idalia, Jermayan, and Atroist worked tirelessly among the injured—the sword cuts were bad enough, but these were things that the Elven Healers were used to dealing with, and they were masters of the healing arts. But the wounds caused by acid and poison were resistant to everything the Healers could do, and there the skills of the Wildmages made all the difference.
Here Kellen faced a great dilemma. It was not that he was unwilling to help his friends and companions in every way he could, though no Knight-Mage would ever be as good a Healer as a true Wildmage—but the Wild Magic exacted a price for every spell, in the form of a task the Wildmage must complete in payment. What if one of those tasks somehow ran counter to doing what needed to be done here?
“Don’t worry about it,” Idalia told him, when he brought the question to her.
“I don’t know of course, but I’m pretty sure the Gods of the Wild Magic want Shadow Mountain out of the way as much as we do. They aren’t likely to set you a Mageprice that will interfere with that. And you need the practice. Someday you might be the only Healer around, and what then?”
So at the end of each day, Kellen joined the others in the Healers’ tents, doing what he could. Some of the prices he incurred were small and relatively easy to discharge, like going to comfort one of the unicorns whose rider had been slain. Some of them he could not discharge for years to come, if ever—like the order to visit the homeland of the Selken Traders.
And some were simply odd, like being told to forgive one whom he thought of as an enemy.
That was puzzling. Kellen didn’t have any personal enemies. Armethalieh had banished him, but even he had to admit there was nothing personal about it. He was trying to exterminate the Shadowed Elves, but again, it was because they were Tainted, not because he hated them personally. He didn’t get along with every single Elf in the army, or in Sentarshadeen, but as far as he knew, he didn’t have any enemies in either place.
Still, if a personal enemy showed up, Kellen supposed he’d keep his Mageprice in mind and do his best to forgive whoever it was. Of course, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t kill that person, but he’d forgive them as well.
Between the long days of riding, and working half the night as a Healer, he was nearly always tired, and the icy conditions didn’t help. It was hard to get to sleep at night, shivering in his blankets, and harder to wake up sooner than he wanted. He learned to get by on less sleep than he would ever have imagined possible, to both eat and sleep in Shalkan’s saddle, and—somehow—stay alert for danger through it all.
—«♦»—
WHEN they reached the Gathering Plain, Kellen saw that the encampment had grown, even without the presence of most of the knights from Ondoladeshiron, Sentarshadeen, Windalorianan, Deskethomaynel, and Thultafoniseen. He recognized the banners of Lerkalpoldara, Valwendigorean, Realthataladon, and Ysterialpoerin: the four northernmost of the Nine Cities had arrived.
And there were other tents—non-Elven tents—besides.
“Mountain Traders,” Petariel said cheerfully. Though his leg was still stiff, the combination of Healer skill and Wildmagery had him back in the saddle once more. “I’m glad they’re here. We can use more Wildmages. Oh, not that you’re not very efficient, Kellen,” he added teasingly.
“I think you said at the time that you’d rather be healed by a snow-bear than let me anywhere near you,” Kellen reminded him with a grin. “And if Gesade hadn’t threatened to stand on you and hold you down, I might have gone and found a snow-bear.”
“I should have let you,” the unicorn said consideringly. “It would have been fun to watch. And we could have skinned it afterward, and the stubbornest Elf in the Flower Forest would have had a lovely new cloak.”
“Only if I could have left the bear in it to share it with him,” Kellen said.
Petariel’s injury—a spear through the knee—had looked bad enough at first, but it was only a day or two later that the Healers had realized how serious the Shadowed Elf poison could be. Nothing they’d been able to do had stopped the spread of the infection that ate the flesh from within. Not even the touch of Gesade’s horn had been able to purify it. Only a Healing Spell had been able to lift the Taint from the wound so that the Healer’s drugs could take effect. By the time Kellen had been called to Petariel’s side, the Unicorn Knight had been delirious with pain and poison… and a very bad patient.
—«♦»—
KELLEN unharnessed Shalkan before seeing to anything else, but by the time the wagons carrying the rest of their gear got to the Unicorn Knights’ encampment, a messenger had arrived as well. It was Dionan, a junior member of the General’s staff.
“I See you, Kellen Knight-Mage,” Dionan said, bowing.
“I See you, Dionan,” Kellen said. He returned the bow as best he could with his arms full of Shalkan’s armor.
“You’re wanted in Redhelwar’s pavilion in two hours,” Dionan said. “He’s gathering all the commanders, and everyone with special experience in fighting the Shadowed Ones.”
That would be me, Kellen thought with an inward pang. “Thank you. I’ll be there.”
Two hours would barely give him enough time to change into the cleanest clothes he had—and maybe, if he was lucky—get some tea. His stomach growled. Food, unfortunately, was going to have to wait.