“The Silvanesti return the favor. They do not go far north, where there are no trees but only scorching hot rocks, our mounts let us move ten paces to their one, and the sun flays their pale hides in a matter of hours.”
Pirvan had heard of such long-standing wars, hardly more than amusement for either side, save for the few who were killed or maimed. When the gnomes fought, among one another or with anybody else, it was much like that. Dwarves sometimes seemed to fight simply for an excuse to wander outside their mountains. Kender hardly ever took anything seriously, unless their whole race was in danger, which might become the case if the kingpriests grew more ambitious. The morning was growing warm, but within, Pirvan was chilled at the thought of the whole kender race united to fight for their very existence, with all the skill and ingenuity at their command.
Hawkbrother seemed reluctant to say more about Free Riders and Silvanesti, but Pirvan had learned enough, both for his own use and for the archives of the knights. Both peoples seemed likely to chose freely; their minds had not been shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel by centuries of bloodshed.
With that thought, Pirvan realized he could hope for sleep today, in spite of stiff muscles, saddle sores, and the near-exhaustion of the soothing oil that Haimya used as skillfully as she used her hands.
Krythis, called half-elven only by those who wished to insult him, put both hands on the sun-warmed boulder and vaulted out of the pool. He shook himself like a wet dog, so that his long black hair flew about his shoulders.
From the pool came silvery laughter. A head with near-ivory hair rose from the water, with green eyes and a smile below the hair.
“You look like a dwarfsfoot hedge after a heavy rain.”
Krythis gripped his hair and began wringing the water from it. “Speak for yourself, wife. You sometimes make me think of a snowpod too long without water.”
“You’ll pay for that, Krithot.” The affectionate form of his name took the bite from his wife’s words. Krythis continued to dry his hair until he looked up and saw that Tulia’s head had disappeared. Not even a ripple marked the pool’s surface where she had been.
Krythis’s mouth went dry. It would take magic to bring danger into this pool, where they had been swimming and taking other pleasures since they had made their abode in Belkuthas. But there was more magic abroad than there had been, much of it aimed against nonhumans. Even if none such was directed their way, the Silvanesti rivaled the kingpriests in their distaste for half-elves.
He bent over the pool-and two slim, muscular arms darted from the water and wrapped around his neck. His balance vanished before he even knew he was losing it, and he plunged headfirst into the water.
A man’s height below the surface, he saw Tulia grinning, and felt her tighten her embrace, adding the grip of her long legs to that of her arms. When this happened, he knew from long and agreeable experience what she had in mind. So he did not resist her drawing him toward their private trysting place between two rocks.
A little beach lay there, soft with moss and fallen leaves, but Krythis could have lain down on sharp stones as long as his wife was in his arms. She drove all the world but herself beyond the reach of Krythis’s senses-and she said that he did the same for her.
At last, they slept in each other’s arms, briefly but long enough that the pool was more sunlit than shadowed when they awoke. Tulia was the first to sit up and begin finger-combing leaves and bits of moss from her hair. Krythis decided to lie still. He felt too peaceful, and Tulia was too beautiful.
“Consider, my love, whether we grow too old for this,” Tulia said at last, when her hair at last flowed untangled over her lightly freckled shoulders.
“Does the water pain you?” Krythis asked. “Are you old enough for stiffened joints?”
“I should hope not!” Tulia said. “If one is going to be slow and pain-ridden barely into one’s second century, one might as well be human!” She leaned back against a sun-warmed rock face, looking rather more like a human woman barely past her thirtieth year.
“Then what do you mean?” Krythis said. He could, at least on most days, bandy riddles with Tulia for hours on end. But today was a special day, their daughter Rynthala’s coming-of-age celebration. There was so much to be done that he had doubted the wisdom of slipping away for this morning swim.
“Perhaps Rynthi wants a trifle of dignity in her parents,” Tulia said.
Krythis knew he had been tricked again. “You almost said that with a straight face and an even voice,” he replied. “If she wants dignity from us, let her ask it to our faces.”
“Though not, please Paladine, with a dozen pairs of ears in hearing,” Tulia said.
“Ah, yes, you remember.”
“It was not easy to forget,” Tulia said almost sharply.
Krythis saw that she seemed genuinely ill at ease, more so than could be blamed on the party. Rynthi was doing half the work for that, and Sirbones and the dwarves were doing most of the rest.
“I would wager my manhood that our daughter is a clean maid. Not for want of men who would make her otherwise, but because it is her own wish.
“We have given her a blessing that few children of half-elves receive,” he went on. “Both of her parents were conceived in love, and knew it from the day of their births.”
Tulia looked less uneasy than thoughtful at those words. Far too often, the half-elven were the result of a human father raping an elven mother. Not so Krythis or Tulia.
Krythis was the child of two ranger. His elven father, with Kagonesti as well as Qualinesti blood, had conceived him joyfully in a bed of ferns under the pine-framed sky. Tulia was the child of a Silvanesti mother who had fled an unhappy betrothal and found herself working at an inn patronized about equally by dwarves and humans.
One of the dwarves had spirited her away, when it became plain that the innkeeper wanted her adding to his profits on her back. But it was a human, a footloose but honorable trader, who had bedded her, held her hand while she bore a daughter, then died within months at the claws and teeth of a wounded bear.
Both had been raised more by dwarves than by any other of Krynn’s races, and it was their inheritances from two wealthy dwarven clans that allowed them to make a home of the old citadel of Belkuthas. In the foothills where Thoradin, Silvanesti, and Istar all came together, the citadel was not one that any of the three realms would gladly have ceded to one of the others.
But two half-elves, equally agreeable to their human and dwarven neighbors, offended nobody. Or at least they had not in the sixty years they had lived there.
Now the quarrels of the outer world threatened the peace of Belkuthas. Meanwhile, Rynthala had grown into a woman in both law and fact, while seeing her parents proud of each other and of their love for each other. That had to give her strength that she might not otherwise have had, and that she would need in the years to come.
“If you feel we need Rynthi’s thoughts on this,” Krythis said gently, “we can ask her. But not today, nor for some days after. This is her moment of glory, and I will not let an old man’s fretting disturb a young girl’s joy.”
“Old man, my-!” Tulia said, mentioning an intimate part of her anatomy. Then she gripped her husband by both hands and drew him down to her.
The last time Pirvan’s band and their Free Rider companions made camp, they were within half a day’s ride of the Gryphon’s encampment. Hawkbrother proposed that they rest briefly and finish the journey by daylight.
“There is ample water, between here and the camp,” he said. “The wind will raise no sandstorms.” He was silent briefly, then added, “There is also more risk of ambushes.”