Seylin gasped, wincing. “She did that to herself? Why?”
“Because she’s a coward,” snapped Thorn. “Because she wanted to stay a child. She took the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and she destroyed it just to spite me. She killed my wife. I’m a widower, with a dead wife. But she eats more than most dead wives do. How I hate to see my good food disappear into that ugly face!”
Irina sat before Thorn on the floor, finishing her supper, her back turned to him, and her whole attention on the remaining food she had. His gray eyes bright with malice, Thorn reached out and tugged on a lock of her dirty hair.
“But puppy here’s no coward, are you?” he said. “Six months from now is your marriage moon. That’s when pretty elf girls find a husband, but I don’t know about clumsy puppies. What do you think, puppy? Will there be a husband out there for you?”
Irina shrugged, not particularly interested. Husbands weren’t something she knew much about, and she still had a little bread left. But Seylin saw Thorn watching his dead wife over Irina’s shoulder, and he saw the scarred woman raise her blue eyes to stare at Thorn. The look that passed between them was pure, poisonous hatred. Thorn glared at her in malicious triumph, still tugging on the girl’s hair.
“Ow, Thorn!” said Irina irritably. “You’re hurting me!” She jerked away, completely unaware of the drama surrounding her.
“I’m going to sleep,” muttered Seylin. “I’m tired.” And he jumped up and headed for his tent before anyone could stop him with a question. But he needn’t have worried. No one bothered to say anything. They didn’t even look up.
He hid in his tent and listened to the elves preparing for sleep. No one bid the others good morning or pleasant dreams. Seylin lay there for a long time, thinking of home and what he had hoped to find. He hadn’t found it here, and he was sure he never would. Grown men and members of the King’s Guard weren’t supposed to cry. He didn’t, but he wished that he could.
Sable lay in her tent, next to the sleeping Irina, worrying about the new elf. Fine clothes, soft hands, well-made boots, and he claimed to be the last of his band. He didn’t even eat with them. He’d never seen a single hungry night. Why didn’t Thorn make him tell the truth? Her father would have dealt with that new elf. But, then, he’d have dealt with her, too.
Sable had never known her mother. For years, she hadn’t even known that elves had mothers. Her father ran their camp. He was the handsomest man in it, and he had a hard pride because of the name that the two of them shared.
“Never forget, Sable,” he would tell her firmly, “we aren’t like these common idiots.”
Sable was six when she saw and heard the first elf woman die. Rose moaned and screamed for two days in her tent. At the end of it, Sable and her friend Laurel held the tiny Irina, and the cold ground held Rose’s bloody body. That was how babies were born, her father told her. The women had to die. Her mother lay under the ground, too, and so did countless other women. After that, Sable was sure she saw the dead women crawling through the camp looking for their babies. She woke up screaming from nightmare after nightmare, but when she told her father, he beat her. “Never tell those dreams to anyone,” he ordered, and Sable never did.
Animals and birds raised their children together, but an elf woman had one happy year of marriage, and then she had to die. An elf man had to face the long years without her, raising their baby and finding food. But not all the men lived up to their part of the bargain. The night May died bearing Willow, her husband walked out of camp and never came back, and Rowan’s father killed himself before his wife was even dead.
Sable’s father kept on, strong and relentless. He drove himself unceasingly to make up for those cowardly fathers, to care for the children and teach them what they needed to know. He had buried two wives of his own, but he couldn’t afford the luxury of dying. Not until Rowan and Thorn could hunt. Not until the camp could keep on. The long nights of work were hard, and they wore him down at last, but Father knew life wasn’t for the weak.
Father had taught Sable about the goblins who trapped and enslaved elves, about the magical tortures they devised for their victims. They had rounded up the elves who weren’t brave enough to stand against them and had bred them into a race of monsters. That was a fitting end for a coward, Father had always said. Sable knew she was a coward.
Father had lived his difficult life and had met his responsibilities, but when her turn came, Sable had refused to die. She didn’t want to lie cold and stiff while her baby cried. Sable wanted to live. She didn’t mind what Thorn said about her, and she didn’t mind what he fed her. She had made her choice, and she was grateful for her life. There were worse things than going hungry and eating dirty bread, and Sable knew what they were. Hideous tortures in caves underground. Gruesome spells. Goblins.
That night, Marak went to study Seylin’s map on the wall of his workroom. It had been quite interesting of late: a fast, straight journey of several days, and then slow, deliberate sweeps back and forth in a small area. The goblin King frowned at the map, combing his fingers through his striped hair. At this point, Seylin was only about two nights’ journey away. He was near human villages, but maybe there was enough cover to keep some elves happy. And he was on the border of the elf King’s forest that was farthest away from the goblin kingdom. An elf band fleeing the harrowing might have stopped there and found life good.
Almost time, thought Marak. We’ll see what he does tonight. If he’s still there tomorrow, then I’ll know what to do.
Chapter Seven
Seylin woke up to screams, but before he could spring from his tent to help, the screams stifled themselves and fell silent. A loud voice began to curse nearby.
“Useless piece of trash!” it called. “Why didn’t you cut your tongue out, too, and give us all a rest? Why didn’t you cut your worthless throat?” The scarred Sable had apparently had a nightmare, and her leader was responding as he thought best. Seylin climbed out of his tent, his spirits sinking. That’s right, he remembered glumly. I’ve found elves.
“I spotted a burrow of hares near the three dead oaks,” Rowan remarked to Thorn as they waited for the evening meal. “And I think I have an idea where a doe might be sheltering. What do you say to Willow’s going out with me to kill the hares and help track the deer?”
“A doe,” said Thorn, pleased. “That’s a good plan. Willow, you go with Rowan, and if you find the doe, you won’t have to hunt on your next night.”
Seylin had walked over to the primitive hearth to watch Sable build the evening fire. The scarred woman had covered the embers with ashes to keep them alive throughout the day, but they had died down to almost nothing. Now she was carefully bringing the tiny coals back with dry needles, trying to rescue the fire without smothering it. Seylin felt a little impatient at the slow process. It was cold in the damp, drafty cave.
“You’re going to be here all night doing that,” he observed, taking a large log and laying it behind the fragile embers. “Here.” He reached out in the spell that normally heated the cooking stones. The log burst into a dramatic sheet of flame. Sable winced at the bright light and then began to pile on the rest of the logs. The room warmed up perceptibly.
“That’s a handy spell to know,” said Seylin as the other elves came over to look at his accomplishment. “Do you want to learn it?”
“No,” grunted Thorn, turning away. “That’s the ugly woman’s job. I don’t care if she spends all night puffing out her ugly cheeks to blow on a handful of twigs.” Rowan had looked interested, but he declined to speak after that.
“What about you, Sable?” persisted Seylin. “Wouldn’t you like to learn it?” The other elves burst out laughing.
“That’s a good one!” chortled Rowan, walking away. “Wouldn’t she love it! Sure, teach her!”
“And while you’re at it,” said Thorn with a laugh, “teach her how to track and hunt, and not look like a fright.”
“Yeah, ugly woman,??
? jeered Willow. “Show us your magic. Show us all the spells you can do.”
Sable continued to build her fire, her back to the other elves. She didn’t even look as if she’d heard. But she glanced up at Seylin for the barest of instants, and he saw the hurt reproach in her eyes. He walked away, depressed and confused. Why couldn’t she learn spells? Was it some strange flaw in her character, the same one that had led her to the mutilation? Maybe she was truly insane and was normal or mad by turns. Elves didn’t suffer delusions, but their sensitive natures could give way under strain.
Once again, Thorn gave Irina her food.
“It’s all right,” she told him, nonplussed. “I can get it for myself.”
“No, you can’t,” he said, walking back to sit down with his own bowl. It began to dawn on Irina that something must be going on.
“Why do you keep giving me my food?” she demanded.
“Go ask your father,” answered the blond elf, busy eating.
Irina considered this carefully.
“How can I do that?” she wanted to know. “Father isn’t buried at this camp.”
Rowan and Thorn laughed at this, but Sable didn’t laugh. Neither did Willow, who, intent on his food, hadn’t been listening. And neither did Seylin. He was having a hard time making it through his food. The dried deer meat was tough and slightly moldy, and the unevenly cooked round of bread had no salt in it at all. This was something that Lore-Master Webfoot had stressed. The elf diet was very monotonous. The food changed seasonally, depending on which fruits and vegetables were available, but the basic structure of the meals hadn’t changed for thousands of years. Seylin bit into the lumpy bread and tried not to grimace. This was just one more aspect of elf culture he had failed to take into account.
He became aware that the scarred woman wasn’t eating like the rest. She was quietly stitching something made of rabbit skins.
“Isn’t Sable going to eat?” he demanded.
“No,” said Thorn, tearing apart a piece of meat with his fingers. “If she wants food, she can keep her mouth shut the next time we’re trying to get some sleep.”
Sable kept stitching as if she hadn’t heard, trying to ignore her hunger. Her mind kept drifting to the deer meat in the little shed outside. The last time Thorn had caught her stealing from the winter stores, he had made her eat frozen, raw meat for days. It hadn’t tasted bad, but it had made her terribly cold.
The night was clear and frosty. Rowan and Willow wrapped their patched cloaks around themselves and headed out into the icy forest. Sable, Thorn, and Irina settled down to work, and Seylin felt left out. He wondered how this band had survived the harrowing and had then gone on to lose its language. They seemed to know something about magic, but he hadn’t seen them work a single spell.
“Do you know anything about your band’s history?” he asked the three busy elves. Thorn glanced up from his deer hide.
“You mean when elves were born and died, that kind of thing? The ugly woman’s got a book about it. If you want, she can show it to you.”
Sable rose and went back to her tent to get the book.
“We can look at it here,” she said very quietly, crouching down with it by the tents. Her voice was clear and sweet, an odd contrast to her ghastly face. Seylin noticed that she was as far from Thorn as she could be. They were also as far from the firelight as they could be, and Seylin’s unelvish eyes had trouble making out the writing on the cover. He snapped his fingers absently, and a little gibbous moon appeared over his shoulder, shedding its faint light. Sable stared at it in wonder for a few distracted seconds while Seylin examined the front of the book. Top Shield Star Camp, Volume 42, read the cover.
“Sable!” he exclaimed in excitement. “It’s a camp chronicle!”
“Yes,” agreed the elf woman, misunderstanding him, “it tells all about what happened in our camp. It was my father’s book, and he wrote in it whenever someone was born or died. My father knew how to write,” she added with wistful pride. “I wanted to learn, but he taught Thorn instead. He said it wasn’t for women.”
She glanced at Seylin for confirmation of this, but Seylin just looked confused. It was true that the nomadic elf society, based on the male hunter, was more rigid in its gender differences than goblin society was, but he knew that elf girls normally learned to write because certain kinds of chronicling and magic belonged exclusively to the women.
“Anyway,” she continued in a low voice, “Thorn hasn’t kept it up. He should have written in it when Laurel died, but he said he didn’t need to waste the time. We all knew she was dead, he said, so why write it down?”
Sable held the camp chronicle in her lap. The book was her only treasure. Even Thorn wouldn’t have damaged her father’s book, although she took care not to let him see how much she loved it. She ran her fingers affectionately over the old cover. She even liked the smell of it.
“Nine different people have written in the book,” she told Seylin. “I know by the way they write. See, this one’s so beautiful,” she said, running her finger over the writing on the first page. The eager Seylin wished she would get her hand out of the way. “…in the sixteenth year of the reign of Aganir U-Sakar…” caught his eye. The elf King named New Moon. That was the last elf King. This chronicle began over two hundred years ago.
“And look,” she said, turning the page before he could make out anything else, “here’s my name.” She put her finger on it. Seylin looked at the page.
…waxed strong and bold now that our King is dead, and they came on this the third night from the second full moon of spring. But because their evil King was not with them, I led my warriors against them and rescued fourteen of the maidens they had taken. And when dawn came, we gathered the living and found that we had, besides the forty-two married women and widows, still twenty-seven warriors, twenty-two boys not yet of age, the fourteen maidens, and eight girl children, down to the youngest baby. And, perceiving that we could not sustain another attack, but that we would next time fail, I, Lord Sabul, have led my people away this night. But yet is our flight desperate, for we have not the proper stores, nor books of spells, nor dare we risk contacting the other camps, which may no longer be, for all we know….
“See?” said the scarred woman, looking up. “That’s my name, Sable. Father showed me once. Doesn’t it look pretty? I know how to write it, I’ve practiced with a stick in the ashes.”
Seylin tore himself away from the grim tale of the elf harrowing to look at her. She was the direct descendant of Lord Sabul, noble leader of one of the elf King’s eighteen camps, and she couldn’t even read her own family history.
“Your name is pretty,” he confirmed solemnly. “Did you know your ancestors ruled a camp?” He meant that they were lords under the elf King, but again Sable misunderstood.
“Oh, yes,” she assured him. “A Sable has always run this camp until now. My father ran it until he died when I was twelve. He always told me that we weren’t like the rest of these”—she hesitated—“common idiots.”
Seylin thought of the last Lord Sabul ruling a camp of five or six elves. He looked at Sable’s filthy, bloodstained clothes, her mutilated face, the wary look in her eyes. What an end to this proud line.
“And over here,” she added, turning the pages before he could read anything at all, “here’s my name again, in the middle of a story. Something bad happened, I know, maybe a battle because after that the handwriting’s never so nice again.”
“Let me see, Sable,” he said. “I’ll tell you what happened.” He studied the page.
…and because the men were hauling flour and the children were gathering nuts with the young maidens, the women were alone in the caves with only two guards. Having lost all but one cooking stone, and being cold, the women made a fire with logs for warmth, but although it did not burn their bodies, yet this evil force, this goblin thing, reached out in some hideous way to strangle the breath out of them. And when we returned for the morning meal, h
ere were my wife and thirty other women besides, dead within the inner caves. And the worst is not yet told, and I, Lord Sabul, am to blame, for with these women has died also the women’s craft and art, for those who survived because they were out gathering, these did not know what the other women knew, and I had never seen to it that these things be written down. And I stood at the grave with my elves and watched the little girls crying for their mothers, and better would it be for these children if I slit their throats this night. But now we must seek human women to enslave for the sake of these children and the children who will come after. No worse calamity has visited us in the last one hundred years, and this night has died my camp with the women, though that dying will take long.
Seylin paused in his reading. What had died with the women? Spells, perhaps. Certainly they would have lost the making of elf clothes then. He wished he could show the book to Marak. The goblin King would know.
“It wasn’t a battle, Sable,” he said, “but you’re right that it was bad.” He stopped at the look on her face.
“You know how to read,” she whispered. Her father knew how to write, but she had never seen him look at his own book this way, as if he were talking with the writers who were dead. This strange young elf who knew so much magic was the master of her book. He looked offended and perplexed at her comment and the serious, frightened look that went with it.
“Well, yes, I know how to read. It’s not so hard, really, or at least it wouldn’t be if you knew how to speak elvish. This is all written in elvish, you know.” She continued to study him fearfully, so he sighed and turned the page.