this severe ensured a wet spring, which would certainly mean deep mud and hard travel. The rice crops would undoubtedly flourish, though the wheat would probably not do as well as in previous years, and it might well be a waste of time to plant rye at all.
By then the tea was ready. Kellen sipped it cautiously, and looked at Belepheriel in surprise.
It was Armethaliehan Black—his own favorite.
“You do me great honor, Belepheriel,” he said, setting down his cup.
“One should not stop learning,” Belepheriel said. “My master and yours said that, in the House of Sword and Shield. I fear I set aside that lesson.”
“We are all finding out things we did not wish to know,” Kellen replied, slowly, and only after a moment of thought.
“Yet we must learn them!” Belepheriel responded, with emphasis, as if it were he who must convince Kellen of this. “If I had not set my face against the Wild Magic…”
“All would have gone just as it did,” Kellen said quickly. “Your voice was not the only voice in Redhelwar’s tent. His was the decision, for he is the leader of us all.”
There was silence for a while.
“I do not know how to say this,” Kellen began hesitantly. “You know I am… uncivilized.” Before he’d come to live among the Elves, he’d certainly never thought of himself that way, and he still didn’t—not really. But considering the news he’d come to bring, he thought it best to give Belepheriel all the warning he could.
“You are not Elven, nor can you ever be,” Belepheriel said simply. “You do as much as a young human may to honor our ways. And you are more than that. You are a Knight-Mage, sent to us by Leaf and Star. Speak, if you would.”
“There is something I would tell you. It is a thing of ill hearing, and it will bring you grief.” Kellen sighed heavily. “There is no good, no
“I am warned,” Belepheriel said. “Wait.” He refilled both their cups.
“I did not know, that night in Redhelwar’s tent, that Imerteniel was one of the scouts. First, I am sorry for your loss. But there is more of this matter that I must speak on. After I had left the camp, when I rode out over the battlefield, I saw the bodies of the horses, but the bodies of the scouts were gone.” He licked lips gone dry, and clutched his cup so that his hands ached. “The Wild Magic lets me see how a battle has happened, and so I saw what had taken place. Imerteniel and the others died very quickly, fighting to the last. Afterward”—Kellen took a deep breath, told his muscles to relax, and went on—“a Shadowed Elf hunting party came to the spot where the bodies lay and took them away. They were looking for—food.”
Belepheriel got to his feet and turned away. “I thank you for bringing this news to me,” he said quietly.
Kellen sat silently. He didn’t think even Master Belesharon could have told him the proper thing to say to someone when you’d just told them their son’s body had been eaten by Shadowed Elves.
Belepheriel spoke without turning. “Once I mocked the warnings you brought to us. I wish you to understand: our land has been at peace since the city in which you were born was no more than grass and sand. My grandfather would go to the place where it now stands to swim and fish. The sea-folk found those waters a pleasant place as well. In those days, my family had a summer-season home on one of what you now call the Out Isles. The flowers there were very beautiful, and in the orchards there grew a kind of salt-plum that I do not think grows anywhere now since the great storms that came to scour the coast. The sea-folk prize fruit and flowers greatly. They would come to the shore and trade shells and pearls for fruit and flowers. We always traded fairly with them.” There was a sad smile on his lips that did not reach his eyes.
“Now that house is gone. My father and my grandfather are gone. My sons… Imerteniel was the last. I have no wife, and no daughters. I shall have no more children.” The ghost of a smile was gone. “There is no one left to carry on my line, no one left who will remember that pleasant summer home, or the scent of the wind in the sea- grass, or how the storm-light fell upon the sands.”
Kellen looked up at him mutely, unable to think of any way to respond.
“I thought the threat that we faced to be a small and simple thing, easily dealt with.” Belepheriel shook his head slowly. “Even when I saw proof that it was not, I refused to see. I wished things to be as they had always been. But the world does not go according to our desire, but after the patterning of Leaf and Star. And it is the Wildmages who help it to do so.”
Kellen was far out of his depth, and he knew it.
“It is not the Wildmages, Belepheriel,” he said, “but the Wild Magic that works through us. We are nothing but the hands, or the sword that those hands wield. I pay my Mageprices. I try to do what it asks of me. That’s all. Sometimes it moves through me in ways I do not understand, having me do things I do not yet know the meaning of. That night—in Redhelwar’s pavilion—”
