“I could have done nothing had you not saved me first,” she insisted. “You have been the means to save all here, and to remove an evil from this world.”
Okay, I’m not one to brag on myself but I think I had a right to feel pretty good about that, so I didn’t feel too embarrassed by Kari’s praise. Plus, we had one of the objects now. I held it up to Kari. “Everything was frozen in that mirror. The watch tells time. Frozen time. One down, one to go.”
She grinned and held up both arms in the same triumphant gesture I had used.
Lady Amelia, who seemed pretty cool, wanted to hold a celebration right then and there, but we begged off on the grounds that we had to save the world before sunset and time was flying. I thought the newly freed people took the news that the universe might end after sunset rather calmly, but they were probably still a little out of it from their long sleep. They escorted us to the gate, cheering as we left the castle. This time we could feel the breeze blowing through the stone structure, and see it whipping around the pennants on the towers. Birds were tentatively swooping in, warbling when they saw Kari, as we walked out through the gate and across the drawbridge. Kari and I turned to wave to the people on the battlements as we headed away from the castle. What do you know? Instead of a horror movie ending, we had a happy ending. Funny what you can do if you don’t let the bad movies you’ve seen spook you. “Not a bad day’s work,” I remarked.
“Our work this day is not done,” Kari reminded me. She had started walking fast again, angling out over the fields slightly inland from the coast. “The well of fire we seek must lie in this direction from what the Archimaede said.” She pointed, swinging her arm across the horizon. “The coast curves inward up ahead, so we shall tend more to the north.”
I looked outward across the fields and woods and felt my heart sinking and my feet starting to hurt. Between our walk through the Forest of Doom and the trip from the Archimaede to the castle, we had already done quite a bit of hiking today. “How do we know the well of fire isn’t in the water? Some island or underwater volcano?” Not that I wanted to swim long distances, but maybe there would be an enchanted boat or something we could ride in.
Kari shook her head. “There are no islands within the gulf. I know of no underwater volcano, but if we go so far as to near the coast again we can watch for signs of such and see if any mer-people respond to a hail for information.”
“Mer-people?” I perked up a little at that. “Like, mermaids?”
“Yes, there are females, of course.” She frowned at me. “Why does it matter?”
“Well, mermaids, they’re like, you know.”
“I do not know.”
“They’re…beautiful,” I said, feeling lame. “Really hot babes.”
Kari’s eyebrow rose, then she suddenly laughed. “Do you think they are fair? Liam, they are fish creatures.” She mimed having huge eyes and bulging cheeks with gills at the back. “If you find that so attractive, perhaps they will like you, too, you being of marriageable age,” she added with a grin.
“Hey, I never expressed interest in that.” Though I wished I could have seen Lady Amelia’s daughter that I had turned down. Just, you know, out of curiosity. “Believe me, Mom wouldn’t have been happy if I had come home with a bride. She was freaked out enough when I came home with a sister. Lady Amelia was serious?”
“In offering you the hand of her daughter? And all the rest of her besides, which I know a man would count of greater interest,” Kari added with a laugh. “Of course, Lady Amelia was serious. But do not be overmuch impressed by her generosity. For her daughter to be wed to my brother would cause Lady Amelia to be linked by family ties to White Lady and her realm. You may be sure that Lady Amelia had that outcome foremost in her mind.”
“You mean it was just politics? She didn’t care what kind of guy I was? She would have made her daughter marry any guy who was related to White Lady if the guy agreed?”
“Just so,” Kari said.
I had read about that kind of thing a lot in fantasies and histories, and I’ve heard that there are still places in my world where girls are forced to marry guys, but I had never had it shoved in my face before. “That sucks.”
Kari canted her head as she gave me a questioning look. “Like the mirror? You think it is evil?”
“Of course I do! Girls should decide for themselves who they marry!”
“What if this girl had been beautiful, Liam? Young and lovely, and the man who married her would become heir to Lady Amelia’s keep?”
That made me hesitate, which I don’t like admitting to, but it did. I mean, some really hot babe who would be mine for the asking? Teenage boys, of which I happen to be one, dream about that kind of thing.
But then I thought of that girl, of her not being mine because she wanted it but because she was being forced to, and that just felt so rotten. I couldn’t do that, even if she had looked like some manga babe. At least, I hoped I could never do that.
And, honestly, it felt kind of good to know I felt that way. “No. I still wouldn’t be part of a deal like that.”
Kari smiled and punched my shoulder again, which kind of hurt since I was still sore there. “I knew my brother would be a worthy man.”
I felt my face getting warm from embarrassment, but Kari pretended like she hadn’t noticed anything and instead pointed inland. “I think it unlikely the place we seek is surrounded by water. The Archimaede said the other object will be in the well of fire. He gave no indication water was also a feature.”
“So you pretty much know what the well of the fire means?” I asked.
“Not for certain. No.”
“Couldn’t the Archimaede just tell us stuff instead of giving us vague riddles?”
“I do not think so. His knowledge often can only point toward truth, not lay it out cleanly. That is often the way of it, do you not think? We always want someone to tell us the answers, but often the only way important answers can be found is by our own seeking.”
We were climbing a ridge now, my legs wishing we were already heading downhill again. “You know, you’re really pretty smart,” I admitted.
“Thank you, dearest brother!” My opinion seemed to mean a lot to Kari, who seemed bashful at what I had said.
“Are you some kind of special person?”
“What?”
“That Lady Amelia kneeled before you, and you didn’t seem to think that was unusual,” I pointed out.
“Oh.” Kari waved one hand as if it didn’t matter. “I am Spirit Daughter of White Lady, which makes me nobility among the unicorns. White Lady is…in human terms she would be called the queen, though that is not an exact comparison. The unicorns respect her and those such as I linked to her, but men and women take it very seriously in other ways. It is a little embarrassing, really.”
“White Lady is the queen?” I said. “So you’re actually a unicorn princess? A real unicorn princess? There are a lot of little girls back home who would kill to be able to call themselves that.”
Kari gave me a worried look. “Little girls would be a danger to me in your world?”
“No. It’s just a saying. It means they’d love to be able to call themselves that.”
“What we call ourselves, and what others call us, does not change who we are. That is what matters, is it not? Not what we are, but who we are?” She took a final look back at the keep as we crested the ridge. “I believe that Lady Amelia’s Keep might settle down, now, and stay in the same place. It is in a good place, is it not?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It is. When I build my castle, I’ll look for a view like that.”
“There you are jesting again! I can tell this time.”
I’ll admit it. It was getting to be kind of fun bantering with Kari at times. Besides, I was still on a natural high from us surviving the mirror. Which reminded me of something else I had been meaning to ask her. “Hey, Kari. Seriously, weren’t you worried about breaking that jewel on your sword h
ilt when you hammered that mirror with it?”
Kari glanced down at her sword. “No. This is the Sword of Fate.”
“Which means what?”
“Well, it means the sword and I are tied. My fate to its fate.” She used one finger to tap the blue jewel on the hilt. “The sapphire is linked to my spirit. Through it, my spirit destroyed the spell matrix in the mirror.”
I waited a minute, but she had apparently finished speaking. “So why does that mean you didn’t have to worry about the jewel breaking?”
Kari laughed in a way that started birds singing. “Because I have been raised by unicorns. Like them, my spirit cannot be broken, Liam!”
“Really?” I stared at her for a minute, then down at the grass we were walking through. “That must be amazing.”
“How so? It is just who I am.”
Yeah. Just who she was, the unicorn princess with the magic sword who didn’t think she was a big deal. What would I have been like if I had been some prince and people actually knelt when they saw me? If I had an enchanted weapon and people thought I was special? I didn’t have to guess too much. A kid who my mom and my best friend agreed thought the world revolved around him would’ve been a lot worse if he had been a unicorn prince. Or a lion prince or something that would be a bit more guy-like. I would have sucked up everything nice anyone said to me and taken any gifts they offered, just like that mirror had sucked up everything that mattered.
And yet, while I walked along feeling totally disgusted with myself, I remembered Kari calling me a “worthy man.” At the moment I didn’t feel like I was either worthy of anything or a man, but if somebody like Kari could say that, maybe I wasn’t hopeless.
“Is something wrong?” she asked me.
“No. Yes. I guess I’d like to know that my spirit could be anything like as strong as that.”
“I will show you what I can of how to be so strong in spirit,” Kari promised, and I knew it was a promise even though she didn’t say the word promise. So that’s how it worked. “If we and our worlds survive, that is,” Kari added.
We didn’t talk for quite a while after that as Kari pushed our pace again. I had a lot of thinking to do and had to concentrate on breathing, and even she seemed to be feeling a bit worn by how fast we were going. After slogging through knee-high grass for a long time it was a relief when our path merged with a dirt track heading the direction we wanted to go. Then the dirt path crossed a wider dirt road which curved off to our left, heading into a large wooded area. A wooden signpost adorned with strange symbols stood at the crossroad. Kari paused a moment to examine it, while I pretended not to be grateful for the chance to stop.
Kari shook her head. “It would be quicker, perhaps, but we cannot risk that way,” she declared, pointing down the larger road.
“Why not?”
“It is elven,” she replied shortly, proceeding down the smaller dirt track again.
I hastened to catch up. “That’s bad?”
“Chancy at best,” Kari advised. “Our odds of leaving that forest alive would be very small.” Our own path converged with the same woods the bigger road had entered, running just outside the trees. I stared into the shadows, feeling the afternoon sun beating down on me and wishing we were in the shade.
I realized someone was staring back.
“Keep moving,” Kari hissed at me.
I discovered that I had slowed down a lot and tried to match her pace again. “I think there’s somebody in those woods watching us.”
Kari didn’t look toward the woods, but she nodded. “Unfortunately, there is. Some of the elves have noticed us, but do not think of them as somebody. You cannot consider elves in the same light as you would humans such as us.”
I gazed into the woods again, their edge not more than maybe twenty feet from us now, and finally saw pairs of eyes scattered under the trees. The eyes were bigger than a human’s should be, but even though they weren’t that far away I couldn’t read any emotion in them. I could see only the vaguest impressions of the bodies attached to the eyes, so whatever was watching us was really well camouflaged. But what Kari had said worried me because it sounded kind of mean. “What, they’re not as good as us or something?”
She gave me a baffled look. “Elves? They are different in ways which make them dangerous.”
That didn’t really clarify things. “So I should be worried?”
“Yes.” Kari loosened her sword in its sheath with exaggerated motions, which I guess were supposed to make them obvious to the elves watching us. “And no.”
“That helps. Look, could you tell me what elves are like?”
She looked at me, her face hard. “They are elves. They are different from humans. Not smarter or less smart, not better or worse, not wiser or less wise. They are different, and do not think and feel as we do. They are not hostile, because they do not care enough about us to consider us enemies. But that does not mean some of them might not decide to strike us.”
I tore my eyes away from the woods. “Why are they watching us if they don’t care about us?”
“Have you never watched an insect scuttle across the grass, Liam?” That wasn’t a very comforting comparison. “Have you ever seen someone decide to step on that insect, just because they can? Or to tear the wings from a fly because they consider its suffering cause for amusement?” That was a worse one. “So it is between elven-kind and human.”
“They think they’re that much better than humans?” I asked, thinking that these elves didn’t sound much like the ones I had read about.
“No! It is not that the elves think themselves better, but that they are so different that they regard us as we do ants.” Kari tapped her sword. “But they can see I carry a sting and that should dissuade them from attacking. That and what I wear.” This time she stroked one hand along the circlet she wore over her hair. “Few humans wear items woven from hair gathered from the manes of unicorns. It will tell the elves who I am, and that an attack on me will be as an attack on White Lady from the unicorns’ point of view. That may discourage the elves.”
“If they know who you are then—” My mind finally engaged and I stopped talking.
But Kari knew what I had been going to say. “That means nothing to them, Liam. If I were to meet the elven lady who birthed me she would still regard me as beneath notice.” She blew out a long breath. “They are not evil, and among themselves there is love I am told, but they cannot see us as their equals, or even worthy of compassion or empathy.”
I swallowed and nodded. “I’ve met some adults who’re kind of like that. As far as they’re concerned, kids don’t even exist. Our opinions don’t matter. Nothing about us matters.”
“It is odd, is it not, how hatred can feel preferable to indifference?” Kari asked.
“Yeah, odd.” I took another look at those cold eyes watching us without real interest from the shadows of the forest, remembering some old fantasies that I had read. “You know, modern fantasy in my world tends to portray elves and stuff like that as beautiful and romantic and neat. But the old stories from my world were all about elves being dangerous and cold, like they’d use humans like pets until they got bored and then they’d cast them aside.”
“The old stories of your world seem to have had much truth to them. Perhaps your world once had elven-kind as well.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Or maybe Kari and I weren’t the first humans to have ever crossed between her world and mine.
With those eyes watching us, I forgot for a while how tired my legs were getting and just concentrated on keeping up with Kari. If her sword and her hair-circlet made her look like a hornet to the elves, then Liam the ant wanted to stick close to her. I strained my ears for any sounds the elves might be making, but all I could hear was the unending tramp of our feet, the occasional sighing of the wind through the nearby trees, and the constant background music of bird song.
Unfortunately, the landscape still rolled a bit, with small elevations an
d small depressions alternating as the path we were on headed across them. That meant there were times when we couldn’t see very far ahead.
As we approached one of the rises, two elves suddenly appeared from the other side, moving with such speed that they just sort of popped into position right ahead of us. Kari and I came to a halt while I stared.
One of the two elves was male, I think, and the other a female, I think, though both were very tall and slim, with long, skinny legs and arms that still looked real strong. They had those big eyes and pale hair on their heads which stood up in punk spikes that seemed natural rather than some hair style. Both had on some sort of lightweight, dark upper body armor that gleamed in the sun, and both wore swords with slender blades and sharp points. They just stood there, not looking directly at us.
Kari nudged me to the right. “Do not meet their eyes. Go around them,” she whispered in a very low voice.
I started going that way, Kari right beside me, but stumbled to a stop again when a third elf appeared on that side. Kari pulled my upper arm to the left and we started edging in that direction, only to have a fourth elf appear blocking us there.
“Why do I think I know what I’ll see if I look behind us?” I asked Kari.
“There are two more there,” she answered.
Six elves against two of us. There didn’t seem any reason not to meet their eyes now, so I did.
And regretted it.
You know how on TV or in movies aliens are pretty much humans with funny ears or funny foreheads or lots of fur? They look a bit different, or a whole lot different, but inside the aliens are all basically people in the way they think and feel. It’s the same for different races in fantasy, who are all people in different ways. In stories, even computers that gain intelligence act just like human beings. And you know how you can look into the eyes of, say, a cat or a dog and know they aren’t thinking quite like a human, but still you can sense some common ground, some shared emotions in those animals?
The elves weren’t like any of that. I looked into their eyes and saw…nothing. Nothing I could recognize. Like Kari had said, different. Combined with their long, lean arms and legs it conjured up an image of really big insects, something that really didn’t think like humans at all, something that was intelligent but not in the same way we were.