With an elegant ivory letter opener, Riliana broke seal after seal on the letters in the tray. Each was full of the usual platitudes and the empty rhetoric of regret. After three in a row that essentially said the same thing, she set the rest aside unopened. One letter remained.
"My dearest love," it began. Who wrote this? She turned the page over and saw Edgur's copper-engraved signet. A flush came to her face. "This will be a difficult day for you-"
"Whoa," called the coachman, drawing hard on the reins. The carriage stopped. The crowd was very large and surprisingly orderly. They couldn't drive any closer than the edge of the square. The coachman stood on his seat, trying to see the infamous man-killing bear.
"I see something hanging from the gibbet," he said, shading his eyes, "but it doesn't look like a bear. "
"It's not a bear, " said an old woman at the edge of the crowd. "Haven't you heard? When the sun came up this morning, the watch found a dead man hanging in place of the bear. He has all the wounds the bear had, they say. "
"A man?" Riliana said. She stepped down from the coach. Overnight she had accepted the verdict that her fiance had been slain by a wild animal. There was talk the bear had come ashore from the harbor, searching for fish. Grizzlies were powerful swimmers. Now they were telling her a man killed Joren?
"Let her through!" said the coachman as Riliana walked forward like a somnambulist. "Her husband-to-be was killed last night by the bear!"
Murmuring, the crowd slowly parted for the mourning girl. She was aware of a blur of faces beyond her veil, of softly expressed condolences and bluntly curious stares. Riliana walked on, indifferent to the closely packed people around her.
The timber frame erected to display the dead bear was a good seven feet tall. Stout ropes were looped over the top timber, and the grizzly had been hoisted up to a standing position by ropes tied under its front legs. Riliana drew off her heavy veil. The old lady was correct- the bear was gone. In its place was the naked corpse of a man, a man she knew welclass="underline" Edgur the coppersmith. A Song Out of Darkness Loren L. Coleman
Already muted by cloud cover, little direct light penetrated the bayou's thick canopy. It fell in thin, lackluster beams that threw shadows and gleamed dully off black and brackish waters. Tendrils of land reached into the darkness, thin bridges that connected small hillocks and some larger spans of wet ground. The mournful cry of a marsh ibis caught in a caster's web rolled through the bayou.
Temken paused, feeling eyes upon him, and rested his leather satchel on the marshy ground next to his feet. His sharp eyes penetrated the bayou's gloom, nostrils tested the cool, dank air, searching. No movement, but for a chill draft stirring among the tall grasses and the gray moss that cascaded from overhead limbs into stagnant pools of water. No tree shapings or signs of organized care for the land. No scent of cookfires or the flower-scented paths commonly marked out by warriors and scouts.
No sign of other elves.
Still, the land called to him. Beneath its own pain and suffering it whispered a promise that he walked the right path. Here, close by, he would find others-Survivors- those he had come to gather. The corrupt pallor draping this land cloaked them from view. Temken reached out as the dreams had instructed, feeling for the power inherent in the lands, and seized that which nurtured life, drawing it, channeling it, to reveal what the darkness hid from his normal senses. Though not the uplifting experience of nature's pure strength, the bayou provided enough mana for his purposes.
Temken was surprised by how close she sat, resting against the wide bole of the very cypress that stretched its limbs over him. The shadows retreated, leeched away by his summoning of the bayou's limited life-force, just enough to reveal her outline. For a brief moment he imagined a darker shadow hovering behind her, the sinister essence of darkness itself trying to summon the strength to oppose him. Then it too was lost, fled back into the bayou. The other elf shifted only slightly in the realization that her cover had been stripped. She moved, not to flee or to embrace her clanfolk, but with the simple resignation of a minor concern.
"Yes, I am here," she said, voice weary, slurring the usual melodic speech of the elves. "What words do you have for me?"
A touch of despair over the cold greeting trailed through Temken's heart, but he quickly banished it because of the importance of his quest. He stepped forward, deeper into the tree's embrace, and knelt into the marshy soil in front of her, ignoring the clammy wetness that soaked at his knee. Shocked by what he saw, he fought to keep concern from ruling his face or voice. He knew her vaguely. That was to say that he remembered her from Before-he a juvenile, scout apprentice, and she barely an adult but already a sentry. A century had brought them both into the long twilight of middle age enjoyed by most elven races, but while Temken had finally found a purpose in the After, bringing together the Survivors, it was clear that she had allowed a sense of despair to invade even her personal life. No need for magic; it was written in her appearance. Fatigue etched hollows beneath her opaline eyes and the sunken cheeks of malnourishment left her with a haunted expression. Her dark hair was wild and tangled with bits of moss and mud-the detritus of bayou living. The ceremonious words with which he had opened scores of previous reunions fled him. She obviously saw no cause for celebration in his arrival, and so Temken opted for a simple offering of warmth and hope until his mission could be explained better.
"I've come to bring you home, Gwenna."
Her gaze burned into Temken, eyes reflecting the pain still wrapped up in her memories.
"Argoth is destroyed," she said, immediately putting into so few words what most Survivors could not stand to even think. "We have no home."
Skirting the edge of the wetter portion of the bayou, Gwenna led Temken from the sentry post where she had awaited his coming to the village she and the others had settled. The shadow flitted at the edges of her vision and consciousness, always a presence lurking in the darker recesses of her mind. Gwenna chose paths most times at random, rarely by memory. Trails could change with the latest rainfall, wiped away or made treacherous to the point of mortal danger, and the ever-changing territories of the local predators always made it prudent to vary one's attendance to the trails. At one point the pair found their way blocked by a large web, easily twice the height of the elves. The remains of a few unfortunate creatures were spun into preserving wraps for later feeding. A spicy scent, lure for the less intelligent creatures, rose in the air about them.
"We've lost two young ones to the webs over the years, " she said in a monotone as they backed away from the site. "Be careful. Those strands are hard to cut, even with the sharpest blade. "
Temken was visibly startled. "That's the circle of life, " he said. "Still, I grieve for our loss. "
Our loss. Gwenna did not miss the way Temken automatically included himself. She remembered the courtesies and social law of Argoth-what affects one affects all. But instead of feeling appreciative for his consideration, she knew pain for the memory.
"We are no longer protected, " she said quietly. Stronger, she added, "We never really were. "
Certainly they had thought so. That was the lie to it all-the great lie that Gwenna had seen exposed in so short a span of years that she still reeled from the shock of its memory. Argoth, island paradise tended by the elves and ruled by Titania, avatar of Gaea. The law governed them, and Titania protected them. So thoroughly had Gwenna believed in that protection that she helped a human, cast down with his flying machine onto Argoth's beach, certain that even if he could escape the storms, Argoth would remain secure.