He was small as a youth, scrawny, shriveled, and wrinkled like an unfledged bird. His head bobbed on his neck as his hand lifted to pluck at Solostaran’s sleeve, and the Speaker whispered something to the trail one.
Who is it, Kethrenan wondered, that my brother says has come home?
The man's face shone white against the emerald silk cushions of the chair. He turned-perhaps Kethrenan had made some sound at the door-and the prince knew him. Cold to the heart, he knew him, and he saw that he was maimed, the side of his head naked where his ear should have been.
"Gods," he whispered, crossing the room in swift long strides. "Demlin! Gods, what's happened to you?"
Solostaran looked up and gestured sharply. In his eyes was the sudden flicker of annoyance Kethrenan had known all his life.
"Easy, Keth," he said, his hand on Demlin’s shoulder. "The man is not strong."
Demlin, greatly reduced, looked up at his lord, the man he had served all his life. Tears stood in his eyes, and Kethrenan shuddered with prescient chill. The pain of his maiming would never have wrung tears from Demlin. Something worse did.
Dull, gray light from skies the color of unloved iron crept into the room, and it seemed to Kethrenan that candles and torches could not stand before it.
"My lord," Demlin whispered, "I-"
"Where is Elansa?" Kethrenan’s voice sounded like stone. "Where is my wife?"
"My lord…"
Gently, the Speaker of the Sun put his hand on the servant’s arm. Demlin looked up and took the cup of wine his king offered. He merely wet his lips, not having the strength to drink that liquid fire, but even the small taste seemed to hearten him.
"My lord, Princess Elansa has been stolen."
In the far shadows, the two strangers, the elves who were kin, moved closer to each other. One sobbed, the woman. The other put his sheltering arm around her shoulders.
Demlin took a breath and said, "She is being held for ransom, and there are but two days for you to go and fetch her home before"-he tasted the wine again- "before she is killed."
Killed.
Solostaran glanced at his brother.
In Kethrenan’s belly, coldness turned to fire. The fire raced to his heart and changed into fury. He was a man of battlegrounds, a warrior who knew what happened to women who fell into the hands of men unbound from the rules of law-soldiers in battle-lust, outlaws cast out from all society and virtue.
Solostaran knew it, too. "What is wanted, Demlin?" he asked. "However much gold, however many jewels, we will find them."
Demlin shook his head. "It isn't jewels they want, my king. They want… they want two wagons piled high with weapons. They want these taken to the borderland, that place known as the Notch. They want no one to go but the ones who drive the wagons. They will kill her, otherwise."
The outlaws wanted treasure, indeed, the one prize no sane man would ever grant them. Arm us, they demanded. Put your best swords into the hands of your enemies.
And yet, how could they withhold?
"Go," Solostaran said, and though his brother's cheeks shone pale with anger and underlying dread, Kethrenan heard the voice of a king speaking to his warlord. "Go, brother. Spare no man or woman. Spare no weapon. Go and bring home our princess."
Standing in the iron light of the hard day, Lindenlea watched as Kethrenan slipped on the shining shirt, the ring mail chiming as he settled it on his shoulders. He poured back the metal cowl as though it were a hood. He felt her regard, and her unvoiced question, as he reached for the tooled leather scabbard and slid it onto the broad black belt he wore slung low on his hips.
She wanted to say, "Cousin, how are you?" She said nothing, knowing he wouldn't answer. Everything he was, Kethrenan kept locked away in the coffer of his heart, doling out little pieces when it seemed fitting. It did not seem fitting for him to display what his heart felt now, the fear and the rage. No warrior should see that in her commander. She should never be given the chance to wonder whether he was truly in command of himself, lest she begin to worry that he could not command his army.
Kethrenan’s hand loved the fit of the sword’s grip. He loved the weight of the weapon on his hip. He was no archer; he was a bladesman, yet he'd become used to feeling the weight of his weapon low, as archers feel their quiver. Low he liked it, right where his hand fell naturally to grasp. The sword he fitted into the sheath, its sliding releasing the pungent smell of the lanolin from the lamb’s wool lining.
Lindenlea eyed the sword and the gleaming grip. Diamonds winked on that grip. Sapphires shone on the hilt, and one baleful ruby eye. She leaned against the doorway of her cousin's bedchamber and said, "With the oldest sword you own, you go after her?"
"Yes," he said. "The oldest and the best."
He jerked his head at her, a silent command.
"Three troops," she said, her words clipped. Now she was a warrior reporting to her prince. "Sixty warriors, armed, mailed, angry as fire-and at your command, my lord."
Sixty. It would do. They would depart before nightfall, running out to the border and keeping themselves secret in the woods. No clanking army of dwarves, no trampling herd of humans, sixty elves, even geared for war, would go silent as the falling snow, slipping like wind through the forest until they found their hiding places. From shadows, in darkness, gray-cloaked, they would watch as two wagons of weapons rumbled into the Notch, as delivery of the ransom was made, and the princess was returned to her people.
Then they would fall upon those outlaws like terror. They would harry and slaughter, and they would leave nothing but corpses for the ravens.
Lindenlea would drive one of those wagons. Kethrenan himself would take the other. Gray-cloaked as the others, their shining mail hidden and their weapons at their feet, they would seem nothing more than drivers of the wagons.
Kethrenan looked around. His bedchamber was as much like a warrior’s barracks as anything else. Spare bed, small chest for his clothing, his favorite weapons hung upon the wall to gleam and glare. When he was Lord of the Guard, he dressed here. When he was a prince in his brother's court, he would have Demlin fetch him glittering gear from the coffers in his wife's rooms.
Demlin. Another vengeance needed working. Kethrenan grinned a feral grin. It was as if he tasted blood in the back of his mouth.
He turned his head a little and looked out the window to where the curving wall of another chamber put a broad window eye-to-eye with his. A courtyard lay between, paved with sandy-colored brick in a pattern of Elansa’s design. "We can meet," she had said, "here in the courtyard and no one will see us, so private will we be." So private-for the walls were high and draped in summer with wisteria, in winter with jasmine. There were other ways to meet of course, and one was in the bed of one or the other of them, access gained for a knock at the door which stood, never locked, between their many-roomed chambers.