“Here,” he said. “Lie down and sleep for awhile. I will watch.”
Paks looked to see if he mocked her, but his smile was almost friendly. “You have walked as far,” she said.
“I have my own way of resting. If you know elves, you know we rarely sleep soundly. And you are recovering, the Kuakgan said, from serious wounds. Go on, now, and sleep. We have a long way to go.”
Paks stretched out on the cloak after removing her boots. Her feet were hot and swollen; she took her socks off and rubbed the soreness out of her calves and feet. When she looked up, the elf was looking at her scars.
“Were those truly given by the dark cousins?” he asked.
“Not by them,” said Paks. “At their command, by orcs.” The elf tensed, frowning, and looked away.
“We had heard that they dealt with the thriband, but I had never believed it. I would think even iynisin would call them enemy.”
Paks shook her head, surprised that she was able to talk about it without distress. “Where I was, the kuaknom—iynisin, I mean—commanded orcs as their servants and common warriors. When I was captured, in a night raid on our camp, the iynisin made their orcs and other captives fight with me. Unarmed. I mean, I was unarmed, at first.”
The elf looked at her with a strange expression. “You fought unarmed against the thriband?”
“At first. Then they gave me the weapon of one I killed, to fight the next battle with. Only then there were more of them. And the next—”
“How many times?” he interrupted. “How many battles did you fight?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember that. If you count by scars, it must have been many.”
“And you lived.” The elf sat down abruptly, and met her gaze. “I would not have thought any human could live through their captivity, and such injuries, and still be sane. Perhaps I should admit I have more to learn of humans. Who cleansed the poison from your wounds?”
“The Kuakgan. Others had tried healing spells, but though that eased the pain for awhile, the wounds never fully healed. He knew another way.”
“Hmm. Well, take your rest. I think you will do well enough in Lyonya.”
Paks lay for a few minutes watching the leaves overhead take shape and color as the dawnlight brightened, then she slept. When she woke, it was warm afternoon, and sunlight had slanted under the tree to strike her face. The elf had disappeared. She looked around, shrugged, and made her way to the brook to drink and wash her face and feet. She felt stiff and unwieldy, but after stretching and drinking again she could think of the night’s march without dismay. When she came up from the brook, the elf was standing under the tree, watching the way they had come.
“Trouble?” asked Paks. She could see nothing but trees and grass, and the flicker of wings as a bird passed from tree to tree.
“No. I merely look to see. It is beautiful here, where no building mars the shapes. We will not be disturbed on this journey. I have—I don’t think you will understand this—I have cast a glamour on us. No mortal eye could see us, although other elves might.”
“Oh.” Paks looked around for some revealing sign—flickering light, or something odd. But everything looked normal.
“Are you hungry? We should leave in a few hours. It’s easier to blur our passage when we cast no sharp shadows.”
Paks was hungry indeed; her stomach seemed to be clenched to her backbone. She nodded, and the elf rummaged in the small pack he wore. He pulled out a flat packet and unwrapped it.
“It’s our waybread. Try it.”
Paks took a piece; it looked much like the flat hard bread the Duke’s Company carried on long marches. She bit into it, expected that toughness, and her teeth clashed: this bread was crisp and light. It tasted like nothing else she had eaten, but was good. One piece filled her, and she could feel its virtue in her body.
That night they crossed into Lyonya. The trees loomed taller as they went on, and by dawn they were walking through deep forest, following a narrow trail through heavy undergrowth. When they stopped, the elf pointed out berries she could eat. “It’s a good time for travelers in the forest,” the elf said. “From now until late summer it would be hard to starve in the deepest wood, did you know one plant from another.”
“I know little of forests,” said Paks. “Where I grew up we had few trees. They called the town Three Firs because it had them.”
“Ah, yes, the northwest marches. I was near Three Firs once, but that was long ago for you. I had been to the Kingsforest, far west of there, and coming back found an incursion of thriband—orcs as you call them. The farmers there had fought them off, but with heavy losses.”
“There were orcs in my grandfather’s time. Or maybe it was my greatgrandfather.”
“And no war since, that I’ve heard of. What made you think of becoming a soldier?”
“Oh—tales and songs, I suppose. I had a cousin who ran away and joined a mercenary company. When he came home and told us all about it, I knew I had to go.”
“And did you like it?”
Paks found herself grinning. “Yes. Even as a recruit, though we none of us liked some of the work. But the day I first held a sword—I can remember the joy of it. Of course there were things, later—I didn’t like the wars in the south—”
“Were you in the campaign against Siniava?” Paks nodded. The elf sighed. “Bitter trouble returned to a bitter land. When we lived in the south—”
“Elves lived there?” Paks remembered being told that elves lived only in the north.
“Long ago, yes. Some of the southern humans think that the humans from Aare drove us out. They have their dates wrong; we had left long before.”
Paks wanted to ask why, but didn’t. After they had walked another long while, and the sun was well up, he went on.
“Elves are not always wise, or always good. We made mistakes there, in Aarenis as you call it, and brought great evil into the land. Many were killed, and the rest fled.” He began to sing in a form of elvish that Paks could not follow, long rhythmic lines that expressed doom and sorrow. At last the music changed, and lightened, and he finished with a phrase Paks had heard Ardhiel sing. “It is time to rest again,” he said quietly after that. “You have said nothing, but your feet have lost their rhythm.” They had come without Paks noticing it to a little clearing in the undergrowth; a spring gurgled out of the rocks to one side.
“Tell me about Lyonya,” said Paks after drinking deeply from the cold spring. “All I know of it is that Aliam Halveric has a steading in it somewhere. And the King is half-elven, isn’t he?”
His voice shifted again to the rhythms of song and legend, his eyes fixed on something far away. “In days long past the elves moved north, long before humans came to Aarenis, when the towers of Aare still overlooked the deserts of the south. All was forest from the mountains to the Honnorgat, and beyond, to the edge of the great seas of grass, the land of horses. In Dzordanya the forest goes all the way north to the Cold Lands, where nothing grows but moss on the ground. We settled the forests between the mountains and the great river, rarely venturing north of it. The forest was different, over there, alien to us.” He paused, looked at her, and looked away. “Are you by any chance that Paksenarrion who was involved with the elfane taig?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm. You may know that elves do not live, for the most part, in buildings of stone. We have ceremonial places. That—where you were—was one such, a very great one. It centered a whole region of elves; the elfane taig was both powerful and beautiful. But old trouble out of Aarenis came there, and the most powerful of our mages could only delay it long enough for the rest to escape. He paid the price for that delay with the centuries of his enslavement.”