To Light A Candle

you, they’ve got to see what you’re made of. Redhelwar is offering you a good place to start. Just don’t think he’s offering you an easy one.”

“I don’t,” Kellen said. He’d expected Shalkan to object—he realized now that part of him had been hoping that Shalkan would object. But Shalkan thought it was a good ideas as well. And that, Kellen knew, meant he was going to do it.

He’d ordered Jermayan around, on the way to the Black Cairn. He’d led the rescue party on the first expedition to the caverns. He knew he could do it… in the abstract. But this was all real and immediate and a little daunting. And much more formal than anything he’d ever done before. He wasn’t good at being formal: discussing tea and talking about the weather, the way the Elves seemed to expect their military leaders to do even when there was a war on. Give him something to hit with a sword, sure, he was fine, better than fine, but the rest of it…

He’d have to learn. That was all there was to it.

“All right. Then—since you think I should—I will,” Kellen said, taking a deep breath.

“And don’t think you’re going to be leaving me behind if you happen to get sent off on any interesting missions, either, because that isn’t going to happen,” Shalkan said firmly. “You’d only get into trouble if I let you go off by yourself.”

“Right,” Kellen said, feeling a bit better. So he wouldn’t be riding Shalkan, but the unicorn wasn’t going to let him go off into danger alone. “No interesting missions.”

Shalkan snorted eloquently, switching his tail. “Just be sure to tell the armorers, so they can change Mindaerel’s colors. Oh, you’ll be quite the dazzling sight. I can’t wait.”

“Do you want a faceful of snow?” Kellen demanded.

“Do you think you can manage it?” Shalkan drawled archly. Before Kellen could react, the unicorn bounded forward and kicked back, sending a thick shower of snow into Kellen’s face.

Kellen fell backward, coughing and sputtering—and quickly assembling several snowballs to hurl, with deadly accuracy, at his friend.

“Hah!” he cried gleefully as his missiles found their mark. For the moment, troubles were forgotten.

—«♦»—

“IF they’re going to fight the way the first ones did, there’s no point in risking Vestakia in the first assault wave,” Kellen said.

“We do not know that they will. Nevertheless, point taken,” Adaerion responded. “We should risk Vestakia as little as possible. We dare not lose her.”

There were days that Kellen almost felt as if he were back in the House of Sword and Shield. Mornings were spent in battlefield drill with his new command, afternoons at what seemed a never-ending series of convoluted strategy meetings that made Andoreniel’s Council look straightforward. Every time he tried to drop a hint that the Enemy wasn’t acting the way They had in the last war, the session turned into an excruciating analysis of what had and had not happened, not what the Elves were going to have to do in order to deal with it. It was enough to drive him mad.

At least they might have something real to fight soon. Jermayan had actually persuaded Vestakia to fly with him, and they spent their days covering an expanding ring of territory centered on Ondoladeshiron. The area that they’d “cleared” was marked on a large map suspended in a frame in Redhelwar’s tent, and each day a new segment was marked off—a tiny segment, in comparison to the vastness of the Elves Lands, but far better than nothing.

And much faster than if they’d had to do it on foot.

After almost a sennight of meetings, Kellen knew both the komentaiia and the alakomentaiia rather well, though Redhelwar still remained an enigma to him. Of the senior commanders, Padredor, who had gone down into the caverns and faced the Shadowed Elves sword to sword, tended to favor Kellen’s suggestions, and thankfully did understand that something had to be done to ready the fighters for an entirely new sort of warfare. Adaerion was conservative, but hated to lose troops or assets for any reason, and favored cautious plans that forced the enemy to commit its resources without forcing him to commit his own. Arambor preferred to draw the enemy out with a display of supposed weakness— Kellen suspected his tactics might work fine in theory, but in practice an enemy might take a pretended weakness and turn it into a real one.

And Belepheriel still preferred to believe that there might not be any more Shadowed Elves at all—and if there were, they could certainly be dealt with by the tactics that had served his ancestors in battle for the last several thousand years. His resistance was quiet, but firm.

Of his new fellows-in-rank—all of whom were old enough to be his grandfather, at the very least—several had been newly raised in rank following the Battle of the Caverns, and tended to be quieter than the others. Petariel— Captain of the Unicorn Knights—and Rulorwen—Master of the Engineers—tended to be the most outspoken of the rest.