Looking out over the mass of hobgoblins and tieflings, Biri-Daar said, “So should we be. The shadowravens do not follow, the sorrowsworn retreat to their lair. The rest come only halfway. Why?”
Lucan was looking at the road that stretched ahead of them, from the lip of the gorge into a misty and forested middle distance. “I have a guess,” he said.
Behind them, the tieflings sang. Biri-Daar looked at them with hate plain on her face. When they had caught their breath, though, she led them away and would say no more about their passage across the Bridge of Iban Ja.
Not even when Kithri tried to provoke her. “You weren’t quite yourself out there, paladin,” she said lightly after they had walked a few hours into the woods. “Shouting, demonstrating…”
“It got those tieflings into a frenzy, that’s certain,” Lucan added.
Biri-Daar raised a hand, palm out toward them. “Do not try to bait me. If Iriani’s death is on my head, I will know it. I will repent of it. Keverel, I would speak with you a moment.”
The cleric followed her a little way apart from the group. The rest of them walked in a loose group. They had no horses, no packs; they would be living from what they could forage until the next settlement, and none of them knew where that settlement might be. “When I passed through here some years ago,” Lucan said, “there was a trading post near where the Crow Road emerged from these woods.”
“Bring on the dancing girls,” Kithri said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
“Your tongue is somewhat dulled of late,” Lucan said. “I fear for your health.”
“I fear for yours if you don’t hold your tongue,” she snapped.
Remy saw the stresses pulling at the group. He said nothing. It was not yet his role to have something to say. He walked. They all walked, in small groups that shifted and broke and reformed as they rose away from the Gorge of Noon into the highland forest on its eastern rim. None of them had much to say because each of them had much to think. Iriani, dying, weighed on their minds.
“These woods are touched,” Lucan said sometime later, when dusk was nearly total and they had resigned themselves to a night of sleeping rough.
“Feywild?” Keverel said softly.
Lucan nodded, looking around. “They will show themselves when they wish to,” he said.
Which was just at the moment of full dark, when Remy could no longer see a trace of color in the woods around him or on his own clothes. “Travelers,” came a voice from the trees to their left. “It is forbidden to traverse this part of the road without the permission of the Lord of the Wood.”
Lucan answered first. “I can see you, elf. And you can see me. Come out and let us talk like civilized beings.”
“You know you don’t belong here,” the elf said, appearing at the side of the road. “The stink of the city is in your clothes.”
“I belong where I choose to go,” Lucan said.
“No. You may choose to go anywhere. But you may not choose whether the people already there decide you belong.” The elf winked at them, sporting cruelty in his smile. “Same for your half-breed who didn’t make it this far. It’s the curse of mixed blood, I’m afraid.”
There might have been blows exchanged then. On both sides hands fell to sword hilts and eyes locked, gauging defenses and reflexes and-most importantly-intent. More elves appeared from the trees.
Then another figure on horseback spoke, and everyone else present realized that he had been there for the entire exchange even though none of them had heard him approach. “Easy, Leini. They’ve lost a friend,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to endure your baiting after that.”
“This is none of your business, Paelias,” the elf Leini said.
“I believe it is. These travelers, who have spent their day fighting the tieflings and killing off the cambion magus of the old bridge, deserve better than your hostility.” Paelias turned to Biri-Daar. “You may stay until your companions have healed enough to go on. But we want no traffic with the wars of the outside, or the hatreds of this world. You survived the bridge; for that we offer you respect, and a meal, and a dry place to spend the night. Please don’t ask for more. Even if,” he finished, glancing at the sharp-tongued Leini, “he provokes you.”
He dropped from his horse to the ground, executing a bow and flourish in the same motion. “Paelias is my name, as perhaps you have overheard,” he said. “This is Leini and these are his associates. They live in these woods and I have traveled, which means that my manners are superior to theirs and that I am more handsome, despite our common heritage. Leini and his kin live in these woods and dispose of the tieflings who stray within its boundaries, but-as your elf companion noted back down the road-there is a bit of the Fey in this forest as well. It is my home, at least when I am not somewhere else… and you would not be shocked, I think, to know that other eladrin reside here.”
Greetings were exchanged. Leini and his companions were barely civil, but they did not challenge Paelias directly. “Follow us,” said Paelias. “Even elves with Leini’s manners would not refuse hospitality to tiefling-killing strangers.”
“And cambion magus-killing,” Kithri said.
“Very good,” Paelias said. He winked and even Remy could see that in his eyes was something of the color of starlight. “For that we might even be able to find some wine.”
Eladrin, Remy thought. If he had always thought of orcs as creatures of story more than life, he had been certain that eladrin were figments of storytelling imagination. They were said to be celestial knights, walkers of the planes, emissaries of divine powers, kin to the elves though not entirely elf. Yet here was one, tall and magnificent, pouring him a goblet of wine around a fire that warded off the chill of the highland woods. “One needs these wood-dweller elves to kill off the demonic riffraff,” Paelias was saying. “They aren’t much for company, though. I watched part of your engagement at the bridge today. You might be much better company.”
“You watched…” Biri-Daar broke off and nodded to herself.
“That’s why they didn’t follow us,” Kithri said.
“Well, it wasn’t just me. The tieflings know that any elf in these woods will hunt them down and send them back across the bridge without their skins.” Paelias drank. “But enough about these woods. What’s the news from across the gorge?”
He looked at Remy. “You’re a young one. Where do you come from and how did you get tangled up with this motley band?”
Remy told the story, leaving out the details of what he carried and who had sent him. Paelias watched him as he spoke, and listened carefully, and by the time he had told the story Remy was sure that Paelias knew not just that Remy had lied but what he had lied about and why. There was something in the demeanor of an eladrin-or this eladrin, anyway. The star elves, as they were called in Remy’s childhood fables, were mighty figures, passing where they wished among different planes and able to see through the deceits of mortal and immortal alike.
“A fine tale,” Paelias said. “And you, paladin. What has Karga Kul for you-except a homecoming?”
Biri-Daar frowned. “How would you know where I was hatched?”
“All dragonborn wear a bit of their birth shell somewhere on their bodies,” Paelias answered. He drank again. “But as far as I have heard, it is only the dragonborn of Karga Kul-the descendants of the mighty Knights of Kul-who dangle their bits of shell in the air as a remembrance of the Bridge of Iban Ja.”
Remy saw the dangling earring in Biri-Daar’s right ear. He had never paid attention to it before, but now Paelias’s words had opened up an entirely new understanding of the dragonborn paladin and her demeanor out on the bridge.
“You have heard accurately,” Biri-Daar said. “Many stray bits of lore have stuck to the inside of your head, Paelias.”
“Not all of it is stray,” the star elf answered. “I practice the magical arts, and as you can see, I am eladrin and therefore not entirely welcome among these elves.” Paelias walked a coin across his fingers and back before flipping it into the air, where it disappeared. “The Feywild is a little too much of sameness for me. Here, in the mortal world… I find the change exciting, the living and dying, the way that every being here knows of its mortality. Karga Kul…” Paelias mused. “I have never seen the cities of the Dragondown Coast, although there are cities across the ocean where my name might still be remembered.