Tanis threw back his head and laughed. Her words struck him with such ironic force that he couldn't help himself. "I'm unreal?" he said, choking on his words, taking a few steps away from Brandella and then turning back and facing her. He threw aside both hands. "I'm an apparition? Oh, how I wish Scowarr could hear this," he added with a broad grin. "He thinks I lack a sense of humor. If only he knew!"
"Only knew what?" Brandella asked, confused by Tanis's strange behavior.
"That I'm the only one here who is actually real. You, Yeblidod, Kishpa, Scowarr, Ankatavaka, the humans outside the barricades-you're all only images living in the memory of a dying old mage. When he dies, you all will disappear. This isn't your life the way you lived it; it's the life you lived as he remembers it. I'm real flesh and blood. I'm the living being walking among the ghosts of one man's past. He cast a spell and sent me here."
"You're madl"
"You don't believe that," Tanis said. "You know that Scowarr was telling the truth. You know I've come here for a reason."
Her confusion seemed to be turning to anger. A pink spot appeared on each high cheekbone. "You can't just stand there and tell me I don't exist," she protested. In her annoyance, she let go of the shawl and it fell back from her glorious hair. Tanis caught his breath.
"You do exist-in memory," he said. "You are real-in memory. You do live and breathe-but it's not your own life. I've come to change that."
A sob suddenly rose in her throat, and Tanis felt a pang for what he was putting her through. "No," she cried, turning away from him and becoming nearly lost in the mist. Like the ethereal figure she was, she called out to him from the enshrouding fog, her words a painful cry: "I've dreamed of you-but with fear!"
Tanis moved quickly through the mist and reached out. He snared Brandella by the arm and pulled her in close to him. "Don't fear me," he pleaded. "The old mage sent me here for you, Brandella. To free you."
She stood her ground, curls flying free in anger. "Free me from what7" she demanded. "From my happy life? From the man I love? This is not possible. I refuse to gol"
Tanis shook his head. "You don't understand. This is Kishpa's dying wish."
She straightened defensively and flounced back a step. "He's not dying. You said so yourself. You said he would live to a ripe old age."
"So I did. And so he has. Listen to me. Where I come from, ninety-eight years have passed since you cared for Kishpa here in Reehsha's shack. Where I come from, he is old now, dying in a burnt-out glade, lying against the side of a blackened tree, imagining you, remembering you in your glorious youth. And it is he-the old mage, the old Kishpa-who has sent me here to take you from his memory before you cease to be."
'It's a lie!" Brandella cried, eyes aflame. "It's a trick. Kishpa suspected that you were not to be trusted. He told me so. And now I see that you have come to destroy us. I won't let you!"
To Tanis's utter astonishment, Brandella drew a short- bladed knife from a hiding place inside her shawl. She was fast, and Tanis was too dumbfounded to move. But she stumbled as she jabbed the blade at Tanis's side, drawing blood with a cut above the hip.
Before she could stab him again, he grabbed her wrist and squeezed it until she let go of the blade's handle.
"You're hurting me," she protested.
"I could say the same of you." As he spoke, he picked up the knife and threw it into the rocks at the edge of the beach.
A small but steady stream of blood oozed from what was luckily a minor wound. He stanched the flow with his thumb, jamming it over the cut.
"You do me an injustice," he said with more calm than she might have imagined possible from someone who had just been attacked. "I mean you no harm. I only wish to do what Kishpa has asked of me. And I'm afraid there isn't much time. He could die at any moment, and that would be the end of all of us."
She started to turn her back but appeared to think better of it. "Your brain must be addled," she objected.
"Please," he begged. "Think a moment. Imagine yourself in his place. You are part elven. You have lived another ninety-eight years, and the human you once loved has long since died. But you remember her well, thinking of her always. And now you lie near death. Except she, in your memory, is still young and full of life, just as you always pictured her, no matter how the years might have changed her. Wouldn't you, if you could, want that image to exist even if the mind that remembered it no longer lived? Wouldn't that, in your moment of passing, be a gift of love beyond anything you could ever imagine?" Brandella did not answer at once. Tears filled her eyes. "Yes," she finally said. "It would be a great act of love." Then she wiped her eyes and composed herself, saying, "It's a lovely thought, but it doesn't mean that what you're saying is true. You're asking me to leave the man I cherish for a string of pretty words." "Not for a string of pretty words," Tanis countered. "For love. Brandella," he whispered, finding it hard to say these words, "I yearn for the ideal that Kishpa has found. All my life I have craved what he once had with you. He grieves for its loss. I never had it, and I grieve even more that I may never know it." Brandella stared at him with luminescent eyes. Tanis drew from the inner pocket of his tunic a piece of once-colorful cloth that still held faded shades of red, yellow, and purple. He held it out to her. Brandella slowly took it from him and examined it. "It's my weave," she said shakily. Tanis nodded. She turned it over, hands unsteady face ashen. "It's a remnant of the same scarf I've been weaving for Kishpa these past few days. How can it be home, unfinished, and here, ancient and tattered7" One hand went to her mouth, lips trembling. Tanis only watched her closely. His heart went out to her in her confusion. "Kishpa gave this to you?" she asked, looking up. "As a token of his love." Tanis saw her eyes shift, and he knew. She believed.
18
Bnandella broke away from Tanis and ran back toward the shack. The half-elf didn't know what to make of her reaction. Was she reeling with joy or despair7 Inside the cabin, Brandella stood with her longbow in hand and a quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder. "As soon as Reehsha returns, I am going to the barricades," she announced quietly but firmly. Yeblidod stirred in her bed at the sound but did not awaken. "But what of Kishpa's wish?" Tanis demanded from from the doorway. "Don't you understand? He may die any moment."
"I do understand," she fiercely countered. "But I will not go with you. Not now. It is this Kishpa that I love: the one on the barricades, fighting for his village. It is this Kishpa who made me, a human, feel at home in an elven village that I now love."
Sadness and anger vied for dominance on the weaver's face. Brandella had changed to an outfit more suitable for battle than the previous night's skirt and woven blouse-brown leggings the color of a doe's eyes, with an overshirt of deepest green. The costume added to her air of calm assurance. Once again, her self-confidence reminded Tanis of Kitiara.
"Understand me, Tanis," Brandella said firmly. "I was a mere girl floating in the wreckage of a slaveship that foundered in the Straits. The chains were still on my feet, their weight destined to pull me off the piece of hull that I clung to for life. If Kishpa had not had a vision of me during the storm, I would have perished. On rough seas, he sailed out to find me. To save me."
She looked away from Tanis, visibly embarrassed at what she was about to say. "At first I loved him out of gratitude. He treated me with kindness, taking pains to make sure his elven friends-and dwarves like Mertwig and Yeblidod-did not snub me because of my race. Then," she said boldly, gazing once again directly into Tanis's eyes, "he taught me how to learn so that I could teach myself. I learned to weave, to paint, to use a longbow… and finally, when I grew up, I learned to love him. And he loved me back.