Andira Runehand
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
The trees grew taller, broader, prouder in the dark green crowns that they wore. Light became a rarer sighting, something smuggled on a gust whenever a breeze distracted their kingly gatekeepers and then taken away just as swiftly. Even the game trails left in the forest floor became narrower the deeper into the forest they went, crowded out by gnarled roots and deep drifts of ancient leaves. The rabbits and small deer that had made the trails showed themselves occasionally, utterly unwary of the spears and arrows of armed men, eyes twinkling in the gloom, before vanishing back into the dense undergrowth. Such trails however, though Andira’s pilgrim-soldiers were neither as light as rabbits nor as nimble as roe, were all that there was to follow. As such they walked in single file, slowly, miserably, every whipping branch drawing blood and every stinging plant finding bare skin.
The Greyfox went first, Sibhard after, then a long snaking file of pilgrim-soldiers, with Andira trailing a few paces behind.
The battle with the Greyfox and her warband had tested her. The night-long pursuit that had ended with the former bandit queen their supposed captive had exhausted them all. But Andira had looked to the sky then and judged it nearly dawn, and insisted they march on until dusk came again. If the Uthuk Y’llan had chosen to move on Kell, now of all times and after so many hundreds of years, then she could only imagine that Baelziffar would soon be readying his own final move.
There had been two nights since then. All of her people were as weary as she was now. Unlike the Greyfox herself.
The elf skipped along the narrow trail, in spite of the rope tying her hands behind her back and the occasional angry tug from Sibhard, leaping over roots, dancing over spider webs, maintaining a constant flow of chatter in at least three languages, as though this was a lark that she had come up with for her own amusement. Her vigor seemed boundless, and certainly not a thing that trifling inconveniences like mistreatment, exertion, or denial of sleep could dampen. Sibhard followed behind her with the attitude of an old man holding onto the lead of an exuberant hound. Too tired to pay as much attention to his own feet as he paid to the elf’s he suffered every cut and sting that the forest meted out to the other pilgrims twice over. With every furtive glimpse of the forest’s wildlife the Greyfox would straighten and pull, startling Sibhard out of whatever brief waking doze he had slipped into, to point and bemoan for the thousandth occasion the cruel destruction of her weapon.
It had been, she would colorfully declaim, a gift from her mother, a rare heirloom of the mysterious Latari no less, and each reprise of the same old back and forth between them brought with it an ever more grandiose and outlandish set of promises for some kind of replacement being offered to her in return.
Her horse was a baroness’ gift and could be Sibhard’s in exchange for one of the pilgrims’ shortbows and a single arrow. Or there was the hidden glade in which she swore to have found buried the crown jewels of Prince Farrenghast, the lost portrait of the infamous Penacor beauty Gissele of Greenbridge, and a cache of enchanted bodkins handcrafted by a huntress of the fae.
All she wanted for it was one minute with a bow.
“I have had enough oatcakes and pickled onions to last me to next winter,” she said.
“Then stop eating,” Sibhard snapped.
“Tell me you wouldn’t rather have a nice piece of venison to look forward to when we stop tonight. If we stop. On my word you can have first pick of the cut.”
“You could promise to take me to where King Daqan rests and I’d not untie your hands. Much less put a bow in them.”
The Greyfox pondered for a long while before finally shrugging, as though deciding to keep that particular treasure to herself, for now, and skipped lightly on. Sibhard gritted his teeth and followed. At the outset of this northward leg of their quest, the boy had drawn some satisfaction from kicking the elf in the calves and watching her stumble when she refused to take a hint and be silent. But the hours became days, the party encroached ever further onto paths made by and for the forest alone, and he grew too weary of it even for that small amusement and feigned to ignore her.
And so the elf smiled, and chattered on, unchallenged, on every inconsequential thing that caught her magpie eye. The monsters that dwelled in the deeper fastnesses of the wood and their natures; how to evade them and how to hunt them. A pink flower that smelled of honey in autumn. The languages of yew and elm. And always the tidings of flight and war, brought to her by the birds and animals of the north beyond the wood; none of which grew any more believable with repetition.
“Enough,” Andira sighed, unable to find peace even further down the line. “If you cannot spend a moment in quiet and you cannot truly offer the boy a runebound shard or the keys to Icegate Prison then tell us something we have not yet heard from you. Tell us your real name and where you come from. You say that you were born in Kell, is this true?”
In all her days of blather, the one thing the Greyfox had not yet spoken of was herself. Even Andira had noted that and had wondered. Despite remembering little of her own past and nothing at all of her early years, even she spoke of them occasionally.
She had expected the question to quieten the elf, but instead the Greyfox sighed and said: “Yes, it is true. I grew up with Kell’s legends and its stories, all the folk myths my father would share, and all those that a sharp-eared elf girl could overhear. He was a drover, you know, and a seller of horses before he became a thief of them, and an occasional soldier of the old baron for a time, if you would believe that.” She smiled in memory and Andira felt a twinge of envy. “He travelled all over Kell, from Hernfar Isle to Kellar, and knew all the old tales, most of them designed specifically, I think, to terrify young children. My mother’s people had their own stories of the forest, of course. She called it the Yarhelin.” Here, she peered into the forest, as if to the truth of things, her thin, pale face striped alternately with the light and shade of the wood. “Have you ever wondered at how two people who are otherwise so similar can look on the same thing and see it so differently? One person’s hero is another’s monster. My mother’s sylvan grove, a place of wisdom and old power, was my father’s cursed wood.”
“I have never thought about it that way,” Andira shrugged. “The thing is.”
“You have never doubted yourself at all, have you?”
“Have you?”
The Greyfox thought for a moment. A smile spread slowly across her face. “If I only had the powers you had. I would never doubt myself again.”
Andira held her hand to her face. The rune set into her palm glowed in the forest gloam like a dim torch burning its last embers. It ached, as though the bone were being slowly, slowly squeezed. “It is not about power.”
“It is always about power,” the Greyfox argued. “Unless you’re the one that has it.”
“You made much of your abilities in the Downs before my arrival, enough to impress the locals and make yourself a queen. But the world is vast and very old. There will always be someone mightier lying in some near land, or waiting in the wings of history. As it was for Llovar and Timmoran so it was for you.”
“And will be for you?”
Andira clenched her hand into a fist, fingers curling over the rune. Light trickled through the gaps and turned the fingers gold. “Inevitably. I have spent every day that I can remember seeking out the one with the power to destroy me.”
“Why?”
Andira regarded the elf quizzically. “I do not understand.”
“Why go deliberately looking for the one creature in Mennara who could beat you? Aren’t there enough kobolds and outlaws for you in Terrinoth?”
“What would be the point of this power otherwise?”
The elf laughed. “Ahh, now I see.”
“See what?”
The Greyfox shrugged the question off. “So, are you Timmoran in this story? Or Llovar?”
Andira frowned, perturbed by the questions, and after that gave herself to thought and did not attempt to silence the Greyfox again.
Night in the Whispering Forest came on slowly but arrived suddenly.
The westering sun made little play over the scampering of light and shade over the forest floor, not until it sank completely under the horizon and that which before had been merely gloomy became, almost in the blinking of an eye, oppressively dark. The wan silvery glow of Andira’s rune made the trees look even mightier than they had by day, the forest thicker and older by far. The light, almost like moonlight but not quite, glinted across the shiny carapaces of previously unseen insects and the floating specks of seeds and tree pollen that the day had not shown. As though the rune scratched away at the familiar and revealed the layer that existed beneath. The Empyrean, perhaps. It had an eerie beauty that reminded her of the Ailatar and the spires of the elven city of Lithelin. Several of the pilgrim-soldiers signed themselves and muttered prayers when the hour came, believing, or wishing to, that Andira here displayed some new power that waxed greater by night. And perhaps she did. She knew little of her powers, of their origins or their limits, of if they had limits at all beyond those set by her, her own mortal weaknesses and frailties.
Whatever the light’s origins or nature, it proved as good as daylight for the Greyfox to lead them on their trail, and so they continued, stopping only briefly to nap and eat, although Andira herself partook of neither before waking them again before dawn. She was weary. Desperately so. But the elusiveness of her demonic rival within this wood worried at her, far more than her growing sense of him ever had.
There would be no rest for her in sleep.
And so she would not sleep. The rune would provide.
“You can’t keep this up all the way to Kellar,” the Greyfox snapped, just as the dawn of the third day was beginning to trickle through to the forest floor. Her enthusiasm was almost boundless, but Sibhard was not nearly so rested, and his constant tugging on her rope was beginning to rile even her. “What is the point of getting there at all if we are all going to need to sleep for three days afterwards?”
“What’s… the matter… elf?” Sibhard panted. “Can’t take a little… real… work?”
“Castle Kellar is two days ahead of us yet. See how keen you feel then.”
Sibhard scowled but said nothing.
“I am serious, Lady Runehand,” she went on, never able to say Lady without a condescending smile and a mock courtly flourish. “What does it matter if we kill ourselves to cross the forest in a day and a half or if we take a proper rest now and do it in two?”
“It may matter little or it may matter greatly,” said Andira. “Unless you have some foreknowledge of what passes beyond the forest’s borders that you have not yet shared?”
The Greyfox considered for a time, perhaps considering another lie in exchange for an hour or two’s genuine rest, and then shrugged. Which was wise of her. Andira could not be lied to.
“Why don’t you… ask… one of your… trees?” said Sibhard.
“Why don’t you go bang your head against one?”
“You’re a charlatan,” said Sibhard. “Either that or just mad and I… I don’t know which is more… pathetic. It makes me sick… to think that we feared you so much.”
“Then untie me,” she said sweetly. “And give me my knife and a bow. Show me how much braver you’ve become.”
For the first time, Sibhard almost looked as though he might.
The Greyfox grinned.
“There is wisdom after a fashion in these trees,” said Andira, looking up into the brooding canopy, breaking the dangerous moment. “And power still in the old places. It speaks to me as well although not in so many words. It is great enough to crowd out my own sight, and my sense of the world beyond. Our ancestors came to places like these for protection and guidance. Long before there were universities and runemasters, or even gods as we know them now.”
“You think… she… actually… speaks to trees?”
“I think our forebears weathered many trials. They cannot have been wrong about everything.”
“I wish… Yorin… were here. I’d feel better for having more than this… trickster’s word for the fact that we’re headed… north at all.”
“If you don’t like the path then you are more than welcome to take another,” the Greyfox said. “I for one would not mind giving Tomlin over there a go on the leash.” With her head she gestured to an aged pilgrim with papery skin and a cassock robe, all thin muscle and sinew, faded rune tattoos and a grimace made of broken teeth. Andira was not sure how the elf had come to know all of their names. She had not yet learned all of their names herself, although she had always made a point of remembering those who fell in the cause.
“But should you decide to stay on please tell me this: you have already promised to kill me, what do I possibly get out of leading you astray now?”
“I don’t… know. Treachery doesn’t come as… naturally to me as it does… to you.”
The elf tilted her head back and groaned. “Your going on is giving me a headache.”
“My going on is giving you a headache?”
“I left them all better off, you know. The people I robbed. Their land, their things, none of it was really theirs. It was what made them slaves, cattle that the baron could milk for tax whenever the neighbors across the river got uppity or his foreign wife needed another castle.”
“I hope… that I’m wrong,” Sibhard said, his voice dropping dangerously low. “I hope you take us to Kellar. I’d hate to… rob the baron of the chance to… hang you.”
The Greyfox rolled her eyes. “Blah, blah, burned my favorite auntie’s farm, blah.”
Sibhard gawped, too dumbstruck to answer.
Gods help her, Andira felt herself smile.
“Enough,” was all she said.
After that, Andira thought it wisest to permit them one night’s proper rest.
That night, their third under the Whispering Forest’s roof, Andira kept a restless watch, neither asleep nor fully awake, while the Greyfox sat back against a tree trunk and slept with open eyes in the fashion of the elves. Sibhard, though as weary as anyone with the exception of Andira herself, seemed to have been stung by her taking the Greyfox’s side over his and organized the night’s watches. Andira listened to him from across an imagined distance as her thoughts grew separate and slow, her other senses diminishing in order to dwell upon them and their import.
She came to with a start, as a scream rang through the dell. It was still dark, the night lit only by the wraith-glow of her hand. The trees were close and high, mocking her, it seemed, in the hour of their greatest strength.
Andira looked around her.
She had no memory of having fallen asleep and the unaccounted-for passage of time now confused her.
Pilgrim-soldiers rushed around her, crashing through the near forest with weapons drawn and waving torches that bobbed like will-o’-the-wisps between the crowding trees. Two lay still nearby. One had clearly been on watch. His club was still tied at his hip and his throat had been slit from behind. The other had fallen with a javelin in her back. Andira picked up her poleaxe. It seemed to weigh as much as a horse, but at the same time trifling in comparison to the weight of the rune in the opposite hand. She ignored the burden as she had accustomed herself to ignoring the other, and struck out in the direction of the commotion.
She saw no sign of any enemy, beyond the occasional javelin left lying in a fern or sticking from the trunk of a tree. Every so often she would hear a rustle from further off amidst the trees or the chirrup of what sounded like laughter. If she stopped long enough then she might catch the glitter of eyes in the light of her rune, the faint scent of dried skin and saltpeter, but the only signs of battle otherwise were coming from her own bewildered warband.
“Do not be drawn into the forest,” she said, speaking calmly, carrying her light with her like a beacon. “Stand together and defy them, as your ancestors once defied the Yarhelin of old and confined it to this final remnant of its old strength.” As she passed amongst her people, they rallied to her, the clicking and rustling receding into the forest, and the strange burnt odor that had come with it.
She found the Greyfox fetched up against a hummock of leaves. Sibhard was scowling over her, almost as though the intervening hours had not taken place at all.
“Get up,” he said.
“I think you’ve sprained it,” the elf replied.
“It’s not so bad as all that.”
“What is it?” said Andira.
Sibhard started at her approach.
The Greyfox looked up from the ground. “I turned my ankle in the fight.”
“Trying to escape, she means,” said Sibhard.
“I was saving your life, thank you very much.” The bandit gestured towards the javelin piercing the bark at about head height on the tree behind them.
Sibhard muttered under his breath. “Taking the chance to get the slip on me, most likely. I thought elves were meant to be lighter on their feet.”
“Half-elf,” she grumbled.
Andira closed her eyes and appealed to herself for inner strength. As if the ambush itself were not enough.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
The elf propped herself onto her elbows, stuck her foot out and eased a portion of her almost nonexistent weight onto it. She hissed in pain and sat back down. “I could ride.”
Sibhard snorted. “Nice try.”
Ignoring him, Andira crouched down beside the Greyfox. She placed her hand over the elf’s ankle. The elf winced in pain and pulled back, but Andira squeezed tight. Whatever else she had lied about since their paths had crossed, she was not faking this. “Do not wriggle,” Andira said. “It will hurt less if you are still.”
The Greyfox set her jaw and turned her face away as healing light rinsed across her, bathing and cleansing her in a watery yellow light that pushed the darkness a little further into the wood. The elf gasped, and Andira withdrew her hand, drawing the light back in and the shadows a little closer than they had been before. Her hand throbbed, as though she had taken on a portion of the elf’s pain and added it to her own. Which she had. Andira’s existence was one of numerous aches and constant pains, and there came a point when a little more was an inconsequential thing.
She offered her hand. The elf regarded the glowing palm as one might a dragon’s mouth or a swollen sea, then hesitantly took it, albeit with her gaze well averted until she was satisfied that Andira was not about to brand the rune into her hand as she had once done to Hamma Brodun’s face.
Andira pulled her to her feet.
The elf put weight onto the twisted ankle with an expression of wonder.
“What is that?” said Andira.
The elf lowered her voice even further. “My name.”
Andira smiled.
“You healed her,” Sibhard spluttered. The boy went without thinking to the bandage that one of the pilgrims had applied around his wounded armpit, the days-old dressing dark with sweat and blood.
“I need to save my strength where I can,” said Andira. “Hamma understood that and it cost him his life. You can serve me with one arm, but I cannot have a scout who can’t walk.”
The Greyfox gave an uncertain grin. “Can I have a bow too?”
Sibhard shoved her.
“What was it that attacked us?” Andira asked.
“I don’t know,” the Greyfox admitted. “There are many creatures who call the forest home. Not all of them are consciously evil, and not all of them wholly a part of the mortal plane. It would be a task beyond the lifetime of a pure-blood Eolam elf to know them all.” She turned west, what the elf assured them was west, studying it for a long time. “My guess would be that they are fleeing before the Uthuk, just as the human folk of Kell will be by now. We just had the bad luck of being in their way.”
“Because I allowed us to rest,” said Andira.
“My lady, no–” Sibhard began.
Andira closed her runehand into a fist and covered it with the other, shrouding the majority of its light, and looked upwards. “You are right,” she said. “What is done is done.”
Meanwhile, one of the pilgrims approached Sibhard and whispered something in his ear. “My lady,” the boy began again. “We lost three in the attack. Another is injured, but not seriously. Two are still unaccounted for. There’s a chance they’ve been taken by…” He glanced at the Greyfox. “By whatever it was.” He waited a while for an answer. “My lady? Shouldn’t we go after them?”
“It is nearly dawn,” Andira decided at length. She hefted her poleaxe and oriented herself north again. “It is time we continued on.”