"Boar?" Merith suggested.
"The problem with elves," the Witch-Queen of Aglarond observed from behind him, "is how easily their clever senses of humor rule them."
Storm Silverhand turned in her kitchen doorway, eyes dark and twinkling, and said, "Ah, no, sister, there you have matters wrong. That's not the problem with elves. That's their glory."
THE BLADESINGERS LESSON
Daried Selsherryn prowled through the warm green shadows of the ruined palace. Cold hate gleamed in his perfect eyes. He was attired for battle in a long shirt of golden mail so fine that it might have been made of snakeskin, and in his hand he carried a deadly elven thinblade imbued with potent magic. He was strikingly handsome, even by the high standards of the sun elves, but in his wrath his fine features darkened into the image of an angel wronged.
He measured the damage he could see-the black scars of an old fire, the ruined courtyard, the broken windows and holed roof-and slammed his sword back into his sheath without a flourish. He simply could not see the reason for it, and that angered him until his head swam with bright rage.
"They have made a ruin of my home!" he snarled, then he took a deep breath to compose himself.
Seventy summers ago he had left the old manor of his mother's family warded by strong spells against weather, time, and thieves. But it seemed that his careful labor had been for nothing. His spells had been broken, and strong young trees stood in the overgrown courts and halls amid thick undergrowth and the damp smell of rotten wood.
Root and rain had wreaked their damage on the old manor, but that was the way of growing things and fleeting seasons. What was the point of finding fault with nature's work? No, he would be wiser to save his anger for the plunderers and looters who had battered down the ancient doors his grandfather had made, dispelling the enchantments woven to preserve the Morvaeril palace for the day when once again an elf s foot might tread its marble-floored halls.
Daried turned in a slow circle, studying the manor's empty rooms. Nothing to do now but learn the extent of the damage and try to piece together what happened in the long years the house had stood silent and empty in the forest. The tale of the front hall was easy enough to descry. The strong old doors had been battered down. The beautiful carvings of his grandfather's hand had been bludgeoned and dented by the impact of a rough-hewn timber that still lay just outside the entranceway. Nothing remained of the improvised battering-ram except for a ten-foot long outline of rotted wood, but the splintered doors were just inside the hall.
"How long for a fresh-hewn tree to molder so?" he wondered aloud. "Forty years? Fifty?"
Evidently, the thieves had come not very long after he and his family had Retreated, abandoning Cormanthor for the green haven of Evermeet. He would have hoped that a few generations might pass before the humans set about despoiling the old places of the People. But patience had never been a human virtue, had it?
Daried followed the old signs into the house. The front hall itself had been turned into someone's stable, at least for a time. Low heaps of rich black compost showed where straw bedding and animal dung had been allowed to fall. Thick greasy soot streaked the wall above a haphazard circle of fist-sized stones, telling of campfires long ago. Daried poked around in the old ashes, and found charred bits of bone, the remains of a leather jack, a wooden spoon carelessly discarded. Human work, all of it.
He straightened and brushed off his hands. Then he followed the trail of damage deeper into the house. Each room showed more of the same. Not a single furnishing remained in the old elven manor; everything had been carried away.
He came to the steep stone stair that led to the vaults below the house, and there Daried smiled for the first time in an hour. One of the old invaders had fallen afoul of the house's magical guardians. The chamber had been warded by a living statue, a warrior of stone animated by elven spells. The statue itself lay broken into pieces nearby, but against one wall a human skeleton slumped, blank eye-sockets gazing up at the holed roof overhead. One side of the skull had been staved in-the work of the stone guardian, Daried supposed.
"At least one of you paid for your greed," he told the yellowing bones. "But it seems your comrades didn't think enough of you to bury or burn you. You had poor luck in choosing your friends, didn't you?"
He knelt beside the skeleton and examined it closely. A rusty shirt of mail hung loosely over the bones. Beneath the mail a glint of metal caught his eye, and he carefully drew out a small pendant of tarnished silver from the dead man's tunic. A running horse of dark, tarnished silver raced across the faded green enamel of the charm.
I've seen that emblem before, Daried realized. Some of the Riders of Mistledale wore such a device. In the fly-speck human village not far off from the Morvaeril manor, there stood a rough and grimy taphouse with that symbol hanging above its door.
"Dalesfolk pillaged my house?" he muttered. He tore the pendant from the skeleton's neck and stood with the tarnished charm clenched in his fist.
The sheer ingratitude of the thing simply stunned him. Daried Selsherryn had returned to the forests of Cormanthor with the army of Seiveril Miritar, in order to destroy the daemonfey who had attacked Evermeet. The wretched hellspawn hid themselves in ruined Myth Drannor, threatening all the surrounding human lands with their conjured demons and fell sorceries. Daried and all who marched in the Crusade hazarded their lives to oppose that evil. Elf blood and valor stood as the only shield between those same Dalesfolk and a nightmare of hellfire and ancient wrath. Not five miles from where he stood twenty more elf warriors in the service of Lord Miritar's Crusade guarded that miserable human village. Yet he could see all around him how the wretched human thieves and squatters who'd inherited stewardship over Cormanthor had treated the things Daried's People had left behind.
Did they forget us in less than a hundred years? he fumed silently. Why should a single elf warrior risk harm in order to protect such creatures? What sort of fool was Seiveril Miritar, to waste even one hour in seeking out the goodwill and aid of the Dalesfolk, or any humans for that matter?
Grimacing in distaste, Daried wrapped the dead thief s pendant in a small cloth and dropped it into a pouch at his belt. He meant to ask hard questions about that emblem, and soon. Then he ducked his head beneath the low stone lintel of the stairs leading below the manor-house, and descended into the chambers below.
The air grew cool and musty, a striking change from the humid warmth of the summer woodland above. He didn't bother to strike a light; enough of the bright midday sun above glimmered down the stair for his elf eyes to make out the state of the vault below.
It, too, had been despoiled.
Jagged pock-marks of bubbled stone showed where some fierce and crude battle-magic had been unleashed. The old summoning-traps that would have confronted the intruders with noble celestial beasts, loyal and true, had been scoured from the walls.
Five pointed archways led away from the room at the foot of the stair, and the adamantine doors that had sealed each one were simply gone. Destroyed by acid, disintegrated by magic, perhaps carried away as loot-it didn't matter, did it? What mattered was that the old vaults stood open, unguarded.
Daried's clan had not left any secret hoards of treasure behind in a manor they abandoned, of course. But they had certainly thought that the long-buried dead of the family would be safe behind walls of powerful magic and elven stonework. One by one Daried glanced into each vault, and found dozens of his mother's ancestors and kin stripped of any funereal jewelry they might once have possessed. Their bones lay strewn about in thoughtless disorder, rummaged through and discarded like trash.