Those were two who could choose. Elansa was the third who could not. Upon her, men's eyes glanced in the day, at night they watched more closely, and she felt their dangerous hunger, their eyes like the glowing eyes of wolves circling beyond the campfire. More, she often woke feeling a hand out of the dark, the breath of a man leaning near, hot on her neck, wondering why he could not have what Brand had, what Arawn did. When this became distracting to Brand, he called them off as if they were dogs, saying there was but one of her and he wasn't going to lose another man fighting over her.
"No one gets her," he said. "Not now, anyway."
Arawn, for Dell was not near to hear, gave Elansa a long look, and his eyes narrowed in a way that made her shiver. He closed his hand around the hilt of the sword, the long elven weapon never far from his hands. This was Keth’s sword.
"A prince's blade," he liked to say when he was in the mood to boast. "Whatcha gonna do with 'er, Brand? She's no use to us for ransom any more. We got that." He looked around at the outlaws, grinning. "Any other use she might be, you say no to."
Brand lifted his head, glancing from Elansa to the outlaws, who listened with various pretensions to noninterest.
"There's a use for everything, Arawn."
He didn't say more, but he told Char to see to it that no one fought over the captive woman. Char took his usual choice. The hound Fang kept near her in the day and slept near her in the night.
Yet, hound or no, Brand's command notwithstanding, the outlaws looked-young Chaser, Swain the old man, and Ballu, of indeterminate age and skinny as a scarecrow. She could hear Pragol breathing in the darkness, the firelight on his bald pate as he turned in his blankets to stare at her. She heard red-haired Loris whispering that Brand didn't have a right to say yea or nay to this.
"Spoils is spoils, an’ ain't we each got a right?"
There were others-a man named Bruin, one named Kerin, who had hardly any teeth in his head even though he wasn't an old man. They watched too, with hungry looks. Only Ley didn't, and Char kept his distance.
She was not safe, no matter what Brand thought. She knew it, as women know.
In this season of lost things, Elansa lost sight of the sky. She lost the feel of the wind on her face, and she couldn't remember what birdsong sounded like. She forgot how to taste anything but food either burned black or not cooked enough. In the first weeks, she dreamed of scented baths and wisteria-hung gardens, and she woke forgetting those perfumes. Soon, she lost even the dreams.
Having lost sight of the sky, she lost track of days. Having lost the two moons, bright Solinari and red Lunitari, she didn't know how to track the nights, but she was, after all, a woman, and her body knew how to track the tides of time. One day, in the deepest part of winter, in a cave that might have been north of Qualinesti or south of it, she realized that a month had passed without its usual tidings. And then another did, and the news she got of her body made her weep. In quiet corners, far away from the outlaws with only Fang to watch, she wept to know that she was with child. In her womb had quickened to life the son or daughter of the Qualinesti royal house, Kethrenan’s child.
She prayed, weeping, and she called upon the gods for strength, for courage. When she didn't know how she would find those things or accept them if granted, she begged for mercy. How would she carry a child, she a prisoner? How would she nourish herself and so nourish the life growing within? When she dared consider it, she wondered: I-low will I bear this child if ever it is brought to term?
And then, because this was the season of lost things, on a trek through the dark underground, in the womb of the world, she lost what she had lately found. In pain, with blood and weeping, her body cast out the child, the prince or princess. Then it was no hound who saw her sorrow. Then it was the half-elf, Tianna. She was not gentle or solicitous, but there was that about the look in her eyes, those almost-elven eyes, that suggested she understood.
One after another, they passed her. Dell, not looking to see what the prisoner and the half-elf were doing. She was a woman; she knew. The hounds went by, smelling loss, and the men went by, though most didn't look at her, not even out the corner of an eye. They knew, too. Only one stopped, just a moment hanging on his heel. Brand jerked his head at Tianna. She nodded. Some communication had passed between them that Elansa hadn't the wit or will to decipher.
Tianna put her hand on Elansa’s shoulder, just a small touch. "You and I," she said, watching the others go by, "we can stay here a while. Until you can walk again."
Elansa nodded, and she crouched in the darkness, no more able to rejoice for the loss than she'd been able to rejoice in the quickening. When she finished her weeping, she cleaned herself as best she could and walked into the darkness, into the echoing womb of the world.
In the season of lost things, the elves of Qualinesti fared as the rest of the western part of the continent did. Their forest did not preen, their beasts did not warn, and the winds blew like rage-filled phantoms through the naked branches of oak and elm, maple and apple, and pear and aspen. It snapped the boughs from heavy branched pine trees so that the land closest to the stony reaches between the kingdom of the elves and that of the dwarves looked beaten. The forest had burned there at the end of autumn, set alight by a hobgoblin’s magic, and while the fire had not jumped the gullies and glens and gulches that acted as a firebreak, it had done enough damage to make woodshapers mourn.
All mourned in the forest of the elves. They sorrowed for the trees burned in battle and the boughs stripped by winter, and most of all for a princess lost. Her story ran round the kingdom in low whispers. Someone made a song of it by autumn’s end, and that song went with the bitter wind through the kingdom. In the villages and the cities they prayed for the princess who had gone out from her home to succor the ailing trees in Bianost, lovely Elansa Sungold stolen from her merciful mission and taken away by thieves.
Round the golden towers of Qualinost the sighs of the ladies and the maidens who had attended her made a gentler sound than the sobbing of the wind across the Plains of Dust, but no less a sad one. If some in Tarsis went mad from the wind, the folk of Qualinesti did not go mad with grief. They were elves, and elves have a way of feeling that isn't much like the way quick-hearted races do, or even dour dwarves (who are no less quick to kindle than any one else.) The fire of feeling runs in the elves, burns the heart, sizzles in the blood, kindles the soul. Those who think that isn't the case are mistaken. Sometimes they are mistaken fatally. It is with elves, though, that they don't much like to unfurl the feeling as though it were a banner to snap and sing and flourish in the wind.
And yet, there wasn't an elf in Qualinost, from the lowliest servitor in the humblest shop to the Speaker of the Sun himself who didn't think that their stalking Prince Kethrenan, who prowled the stonelands when the weather let him, who filled up the city with his own restlessness when even the mad would not brave the wild winds in that treeless land-there wasn't a one who didn't feel what the prince felt.
"He is as cold as winter," said one of the serving girls in the Tower of the Sun. This she whispered to her lover who had brought wine from the cellar one evening when the sky had been three days changed to lead, filled up with dark clouds that would lower but not release.