'Declare yourselves,' a hard voice said abruptly.
Kellen blinked. A man had appeared out of nowhere, stepping in front of Idalia's horse.
No, not a man. An Elf.
He wore clothing the same winter brown as the woods they rode through, his simple tunic and close-fitting leggings embroidered with a complicated pattern in grey that would make him impossible to see from even a few feet away, for the stitching mimicked the lines and shadows of the forest itself. He was holding a smooth-polished stave as tall as he was, and a bow and a quiver of arrows was slung over his shoulder. Over the tunic was a cowl and hood. The hood was pushed back now, and Kellen could clearly see the Elf's pointed ears and shell-pale skin.
Where had he come from? He hadn't been anywhere in sight before.
'Idalia, Wildmage, and her brother, Kellen Tavadon, also a Wildmage.'
Idalia answered promptly. 'Seeking sanctuary in Elven lands, swearing no harm to tree, root, and leaf. Llylance, I see you,' she added formally.
The Elven guard sighed with relief and suddenly looked far less austere. He loosened his grip on his quarterstaff, leaning on it now instead of holding it ready to strike. 'Idalia! By the First Leaf, you return in a good hour! We had word of your coming. An escort waits to accompany you down into the city.'
'We thank you for your kindness and the honor that you do us,' Idalia said. Kellen had never heard her speak so ceremoniously before. He hoped this wasn't going to be something they had to do all the time while they were here.
A second Elf appeared at Kellen's side, also seeming to sprout directly from the forest floor itself. He was dressed almost identically to Llylance, save that he held his bow ready to fire.
Kellen felt his eyes go huge. The Elf hadn't made a single sound. He'd just been… there.
'Don't be too impressed; they're just very, very good at hiding,' Idalia muttered, so low that Kellen was sure only he could hear.
'I see you, Canderil,' she said politely.
'I see you, Idalia,' Canderil answered, with equal politeness. He released the tension on his bowstring and slung the bow over his shoulder, retrieving his own stave from… somewhere. Even though Kellen, mindful of Idalia's words, was watching carefully, he couldn't see how it was done. One moment Canderil's hand was empty. The next, the stave was there.
Canderil gestured for them to accompany him. Llylance simply vanished before Kellen's eyes, and once more Kellen had no inkling as to how he did it, though he watched carefully.
And now, it seemed, they were free to proceed. Canderil walked beside Idalia's horse, having taken the lead-rope of the mule from her, and Shalkan and Kellen followed behind.
At least things didn't seem to be continuing on the same highly formal level as before. Idalia and Canderil spoke easily and companionably about people Kellen didn't know, very much as if they'd last seen each other a sennight ago instead of after an absence on Idalia's part of what must be several years.
Kellen knew very little about Elves. According to what he'd read in the Great Library when he was searching for information about the lands outside Armethalieh, they still visited the City on rare occasions—hard though that was to imagine—but of course no one outside the High Council would have seen them then. And he knew very little about them from his studies with Anigrel, and trusted what Anigrel had told him even less.
The Priests of the Light taught that the Elves were one of the Lesser Races, made by the Light in imitation of Man to serve as a lesson and a rebuke. From his own unsupervised studies in the Great Library, Kellen doubted that: the Elven race was immensely old and civilized, building great cities while humans were still gathering in tribes. Though people thought of Elves as living forever, in fact they were only very, very long-lived: the average Elven lifespan was on the order of a thousand years, and only at the very end of their lives did they show any signs of age at all. Canderil here might well have watched the first stones of the City being laid centuries ago, and wasn't that a sobering thought?
Kellen did welcome the chance to be able to get a good look at one of the Elvenkind without being caught staring, since Canderil seemed to be entirely caught up in his conversation with Idalia, paying no particular heed to either Kellen or Shalkan, as though he saw people riding unicorns every day.
Of course, being an Elf, maybe he did.
And despite his firm intention to disbelieve everything he'd read about Elves in the City histories, the more he watched Canderil, the more Kellen understood why the City-folk, and even the Light-Priests, wrote of Elvenkind as they did.
