Nimbolk’s gaze swept the clearing, looking for anything that might explain his extreme unease.
All seemed to be in order. Elves clad in ritual robes of nightfall blue stood about in small groups, talking softly as they awaited the queen’s call to order. New snow blanketed the Starsingers Grove, and a jeweled night sky bore silent witness. Tonight the tribunal would learn who among them had triggered the Thorn’s silent warnings, and they would pass judgment on the traitor they’d sought for many years.
A slim hand rested on his sword arm. He looked down into the serene white face of the Forest Queen.
“You are as restless as caged cats,” she said. “Are you uneasy without a sword at hand, or are you contemplating your reunion with my sister?”
“The two are not unrelated,” he said in a dry tone.
Asteria, Lady of Mistheim and queen of the forest folk, responded with a surprisingly inelegant snort. Her amusement quickly faded, and with it, her resemblance to the warrior who was her twin-born sister.
Most elves would say Asteria and Ziharah were as alike as two raindrops. Nimbolk, who from his boyhood had worshipped the future queen, saw no resemblance beyond a similar shape of face and feature.
Asteria dressed in fine robes and wore her hair long and loose, as befitted a queen. The snow-colored waves fell nearly to the ground, the strands more lustrous than the fine white fur of her cloak. She had delicate hands and the wise, deep gaze of one who heard the echo of ancient voices in the starsong they all shared.
Grace. That was Asteria’s shadow-name, the word that, in all its meanings, best described her essence. Asteria embodied elegance, beauty, charm, and divine favor.
Her twin possessed a sterner nature. A warrior to her bones, she’d been named Queen’s Champion at an age when most elves were still learning runes and forest lore. She’d earned that honor. Nimbolk couldn’t deny this, even though he’d come out the loser in that competition. And he had to admit the role suited her, as did her shadow-name:
Honor.
Parchment whispered as Asteria drew a tiny, well-worn scroll from her sleeve. She unrolled it and smoothed her fingers over the runes with the reverent care usually afforded ancient treasures and newborn elves.
“The first word I’ve had from her in nearly ten years,” she said. “Ten years, Nimbolk!”
“Ten years is long time for a Champion to leave her queen.”
“She traveled at my command,” Asteria reminded him. Her face turned wistful. “Though she might have written sooner.”
“And less cryptically.” He shook his head. “Longest night, reddest rose. What sort of field report is that?”
Asteria didn’t deign to respond, but then, his question did not merit discussion. The message was clear enough. Midwinter night was the traditional time for elven tribunals, the appropriate time for a traitor to stand beneath the stars and be judged. Many elves had sought this traitor, but the Queen’s Champion had won again, and she was bringing her prize to the Starsingers Grove to be judged by the Thorn.
The queen drew a crystal dagger from the sheath on her belt. The rose within had folded its pedals at dusk to a tightly furled bud.
She glanced up at Nimbolk. “Do you remember when the rose appeared?”
“As if it were yesterday.”
A rose blooming in the heart of a crystal blade—just the sort of lovely, whimsical touch expected of elves. Only the old races would read the warning in it, and see portents of magic that had been twisted into strange and treacherous shapes.
Nimbolk had been among the first to bare his sword arm and demand that the Thorn taste his blood. Every elf in Mistheim had followed. Not once had the crystal rose bloomed red.
If Ziharah was right—and she had that annoying habit—it would bloom tonight.
A murmur rippled through the clearing, and the tribunal members near the western border of the grove fell back to reveal a new-come elf.
For a moment Nimbolk did not recognize her, though he knew her face as well as his own. Her warrior’s frame had grown thin and frail, and deep shadows gathered beneath her eyes and in the hollows of her face. The winter Fading was slow to come upon her; her eyes had turned winter-gray, but small dark streaks lingered in the white of her hair so that it resembled the bark of a birch tree. She walked slowly, and with the aid of a roughly carved wooden staff. Elfin runes ran the length of the staff, all but hidden by the rude texture. Nimbolk could only make out one word: Honor.
The queen’s eyes lit up and she started forward with a glad cry.
Nimbolk leaped into her path and seized her shoulders. “That isn’t Ziharah.”
“Of course it is!”
He moved aside. “See how she moves, slow and heavy. Ziharah moved like a cat, like the wind. Look at her eyes. Ziharah doesn’t live in them. They are empty. Haunted.”
Guilty.
“She has been wounded,” Asteria said, but she sounded less certain.
Look at her staff,” he said. “Look at it! She’s warning us that her she is no longer what she
was. Honor is what remains when everything else has been stripped away.”
“Honor,” she murmured, nodding. ”And more runes below…”
The queen’s eyes narrowed as she studied the staff, then widened in alarm. “Ambush. Flee!”
She repeated the warning in high, ringing tones.
The elves whirled toward the trees, poised for flight.
Too late.
The crash and clatter of heavy footsteps rattled the forest in a sudden, thunderous rush. Armed humans, far too many of them, burst into the sacred grove.
Throughout the clearing, elfin hands instinctively reached for non-existent weapons.
Crimson rain spattered the snow as the first elves fell. The humans trampled them and came on in a ragged rush, jostling each other in their frenzy to kill.
Nimbolk backed Asteria against a giant fir and placed himself between the queen and the invaders. Once this scant protection was in place, he looked to the trees, to the hidden places where archers kept guard.
No arrows answered the attack. None of the guards who kept watch in the forest around the grove ran to protect the queen and the tribunal. The humans could not possibly have destroyed them all, unless…
His gaze found Honor. Elves were falling all around her, but she did not fight. She walked steadily toward Asteria, every step so heavy she might have been slogging through knee-high mud.
A surge of power swept past him. He felt the edge of it, as if he’d been brushed by the fletching of a titanic arrow.
Honor stopped. Her eyes cleared and filled with anguish.
“Together,” Asteria urged. “Join me, sister! We’ll fight their magic together.”
A tall, bearded human ran past Honor. Her staff made a quick, subtle arc, and suddenly the man was pitching face-first into the snow. His sword flew from his hand.
She caught it by the hilt, never taking her eyes from Asteria’s face, and flipped the weapon toward Nimbolk.
The sword felt strange in his hand, heavy and graceless. But when he tested it against a human’s thick neck, he could find no fault with its edge.
One of the humans shouted a curse and pointed with his sword toward the newly armed Nimbolk. He sheathed his blade and reached over his shoulder for a bow. Two other men
joined him, thrusting handfuls of arrows into the snow.
Honor whirled to face the archers. Her staff twisted and danced as she turned the arrows aside.
More fighters rushed forward with raised blades; those she left to Asteria’s other defenderNimbolk understood. Some dark magic kept Honor from attacking her captors, but the spellcasting fool who held her in thrall had apparently neglected to specify that she could not defend.
It was something, but he would have been glad of her sword. In years past, the two of them, standing back to back, could hold off a dozen of the Mistheim’s best swords.
At least he had Asteria’s help. Starsong magic hummed through him, speeding his sword arm, slowing the blood flowing from his wounds, dulling the pain.
Suddenly the swordsmen were gone, and a swarm of arrows sped toward the elfin trio. This was not, in Nimbolk’s opinion, an improvement.
A black-shafted arrow pierced Honor’s sword arm. She hardly seemed to notice. But Nimbolk felt the arrow that grazed his shoulder, the arrow that drove deep into this thigh, the arrow that thrust a fiery lance of pain into his side.And the next, and the next.
He did not remember falling, but he must have done so, for why else would he be lying in the snow?
Honor kicked him aside and took his place. One of the men lunged at her, slashing at the knee she’d been favoring. Nimbolk heard the sword’s impact, the chilling scrape of metal against bone.
She swayed and did not fall. “Go, Asteria. Go now.”
Nimbolk could see the reluctance on the queen’s face, despite the mist that gathered on the edges of his vision. In a voice weighted by duty and dulled with sorrow, she spoke the words that molded starsong into a softly glowing portal.
A dull thud sounded behind her. Asteria slumped to the ground. In the light from the fading portal, blood bloomed red against the shining snowfall of her hair.
The humans closed in, wolves surrounding a fallen doe.
Even now, Honor did not attack them, but twin fires of rage and frustration burned in her eyes.
The man she’d tripped bent down to reclaim the sword Nimbolk had wielded. “Bring the queen and the dagger,” he commanded. A cruel light slid into his pale blue eyes. “Better yet, bring her body.”
Honor’s shoulders sagged in defeat, and if not for her staff she probably would have fallen into the snow beside her sister. She pushed away from the staff and started to reach for the queen, then stopped as she noticed the arrow impaling her forearm. She grasped it just below the barbed point and yanked it free, not even flinching as shaft and fletching slid through the wound.
Honor dragged the queen to her feet and scooped her limp body into her arms. “Minue take you!” she snarled as she hurled her twin-born sister at the massive fir.
To the humans, the words would sound like a curse, an invocation to some dark god or demon. They would see only an elf forced into treachery, cursing them as she dashed her queen’s head against an ancient pine.
But Nimbolk’s elfin eyes saw the bark of the tree turn to dark mist, as insubstantial as a rainbow.
The queen disappeared. Minue, the tree’s guardian dryad, had taken her.
Honor pushed away from the solid trunk and rose. Her leggings had been torn from thigh to calf, exposing her wounded knee. For a fleeting moment Nimbolk could have sworn that metal, not bone, gleamed through the blood.
She ran one hand over the new circle of runes on the bark and turned to face down the invaders, triumph written on her battered face. “You lose, Volgo.”
The bearded man reached down into the bloody snow and came up with the Thorn in his hand. “No, drone. You do.”
He made a sharp gesture with the dagger. Behind Honor, the man who’d clubbed Asteria raised his weapon high.
Nimbolk tried to shout a warning, but no breath remained to him. Even if he could warn her, even if he had starsong left to send her, she could not move quickly enough to avoid her fate.
In helpless silence, he steeled himself to witness the death of the elf whom he loved nearly as much as he hated.
* * *
Honor surged to her feet, gasping as she felt anew the impact of the club—the moment of bright, sharp light, the sound of her own shattering skull and the sense of crystal shards slicing deep into mind and memory.
The pain faded quickly, but for the burning agony in her sword arm. The memory of battle remained, vivid as a fairy’s illusion. But it also felt . . . familiar, like opening a book and reading a well-known tale.
She pulled up the skirts of her gown and studied her knee. Yes, there were faint silver lines round the knee, and when she twisted her leg she found deeper scars in the crease behind.
More metal, more gears.
She took a moment to absorb this. In the depths of her heart, despair thundered like winter surf. She listened and acknowledged it, but she did not let the waves overwhelm her.
Instead, she unwrapped the bandage on her sword arm and regarded the new stitches with grim satisfaction. The broken gears were gone. Tomorrow, Rhendish would remove the rest, and at her insistence he would replace one of the metal rods with crystal grown from her own shattered bones.
The next day, he would do more. And the next. She would bear it for as long as the task required.
“It is decided,” she said softly, and turned her mind to other things.
She walked over to her chamber window and gazed out over Rhendish’s courtyard as she pondered the meaning of this vision. Though she welcomed the return of memory, even one so painful as this, why had this memory come to her through Nimbolk’s eyes.?
The connections among elfin warriors traced deep and complex paths, but it seldom included a sharing of memories and it did not transcend death.
That could only mean that Nimbolk was alive. And unless the warrior had become a priest or mystic in the last decade—a notion too incongruous for her to entertain for even a moment—a connection strong enough to share memory meant that no open seas separated them.
Nimbolk had come to the islands of Sevrin. And knowing Nimbolk, he’d come for the Thorn.
Honor reached under her mattress and drew out several battered items of clothing. The shadow-colored garments she’d worn during the battle in Muldonny’s fortress had not been improved by her long fall into the sea, but where she was going, they’d be less conspicuous than Rhendish’s silk and gems.
She had to warn Fox, whether he would listen or not.
END OF CHAPTER TWO
