To Light A Candle

They are creatures of the Shadow. The Shadow fights a war of the spirit. What is the greatest blow it could strike against the Elves this night?

Suddenly he knew.

This is a feint. The Shadowed Elves mean to distract us from discovering their true target until it is too late.

And he knew—with a sudden awful certainty—what it was.

He ran toward his tent.

There were Shadowed Elves and coldwarg along the way that he could have killed. He did not stop.

He found Isinwen near his tent. The rest of his troop was scattered, attacking the attackers, but he sensed them nearby.

“Ciltesse?” Kellen demanded.

Isinwen shook his head.

Kellen had ordered Ciltesse to spread the alarm. He might be anywhere. There was no time to wait for him.

“Gather the troop. Get to the horses. We ride at once. Stop for nothing.”

“Alakomentai!” Isinwen said. He turned away, running toward the others to pass the word.

Kellen moved through the chaos of the camp, giving the same order over and over.

He blessed the Gods of the Wild Magic, blessed Leaf and Star, blessed all the trust he’d earned in the sennights passed—his men abandoned the camp and the battle and followed him. By the time he reached the horse-lines, Isinwen and the others who had gotten there first had retrieved their mounts and saddled them.

Kellen vaulted onto Mindaerel’s back and set her off as fast as he dared, away from the camp and back into the forest. Through deep snow, at night, in the woods… there were a thousand ways for a horse, even an Elven destrier, to break a leg on uncertain footing.

But some of them must get through. And that meant they all needed to know why.

“This attack is a trap to occupy us,” Kellen called back over his shoulder. “They strike at Ysterialpoerin! I think they mean to burn it.”

Unconsciously, he shifted Mindaerel’s path to the left, and realized he’d sensed an obstacle beneath the snow. “Behind me, and follow like my shadow!” he ordered, and shifted to battle-sight. By this time, he had learned to rely upon it as he did his muscles; it was less like shifting to a different way of seeing, and more like focusing on something you wanted to see clearly.

There. The path to take—the clear path, the safe path —burned a bright clear blue against the snow, often narrow, always twisting. He set Mindaerel upon it, urging the mare to her fastest speed. He felt the body beneath him gather, and her speed redouble.

An ordinary horse would not have run so for her rider. A horse’s night-sight was not good, and where a horse could not see, it would not go. But Mindaerel was an Elven destrier. She would answer her rider’s commands until her heart broke. She ran through what to her must be utter darkness, trusting absolutely to Kellen’s touch to guide her. Behind him, the Elven Knights in his command followed in a single file, all riding at breakneck speed in Mindaerel’s hoofprints.

Back in Armethalieh, Kellen had never believed in the Light. Idalia had called it “bloodless,” and it was—even more unconnected to the reality of daily life than the study of the High Magick. Jermayan and the other Elves swore by Leaf and Star—and Kellen had fallen into the same habit—but he wasn’t at all sure what that meant.

As for the Gods of the Wild Magic… well, Kellen believed in the Wild Magic, because he worked with it daily. He had no doubt that it had a purpose outside itself. Maybe that was what the Gods of the Wild Magic were, but they didn’t seem to be anything you could talk to directly.

Right now he wished they were. He’d ask anyone—the Gods of Leaf and Star, of the Wild Magic, the Great Herdsman of the Centaurs, the Huntsman of the Mountainfolk, Vestakia’s Good Goddess—for help in reaching the Shadowed Elves before they did whatever they intended to do. He was certain now that they’d left for Ysterialpoerin before the second group had struck at the camp, and if Sentarshadeen was the head and the crown of the Elven cities, Ysterialpoerin was surely its heart. To attack it, to burn it as the whole might of Andoreniel’s army stood by, oblivious…