To Light A Candle

might have done something wrong by Elven standards. “I hope I did the right thing by accepting them.”

“If he hadn’t wanted you to have them, he wouldn’t have given them to you,” Shalkan said inarguably. “The way the Elves see things, you honored him by taking them. And if I do say so, you managed your way out of the whole mess fairly gracefully, all things considered.”

“I’m still… well, no. I do know how I got into that mess. And I think I know ‘why,’ too.” He started to rub his eyebrow with his gauntleted hand, then realized what he was doing, and shrugged instead. “The Wild Magic needed to change Belepheriel’s mind about the way he was seeing things before he made some bad decisions. But it wasn’t very comfortable.”

“Magic often isn’t,” Shalkan said shrewdly. “At least today you’ll be dealing with simple straightforward actions with no worry about Elven manners: riding places and killing things.”

“That isn’t exactly straightforward either,” Kellen muttered. Oh, the battles themselves were. But they were brief, compared to the time spent preparing for them and recovering from them. That was filled with complications.

“I brought you some honey-cakes. And I have a question.”

“Honey-cakes first,” Shalkan said firmly. Even though the cold had made them rock-hard, the unicorn enjoyed them thoroughly. “And the question?” he asked, when he’d finished the last crumb.

“Is there supposed to be a pattern on my spurs?” Kellen asked.

From the look on Shalkan’s face, this wasn’t the question he’d been expecting. “Lift your foot,” the unicorn finally said.

A reasonable request; both Kellen’s boots were buried in snow up to the calves. Kellen lifted his foot and brushed the instep-plate and rowel of the spur clear of snow. Shalkan inspected both closely.

“It’s seashells in ocean foam,” he finally reported, in the kindly tones of someone describing a sunset to a blind man.

“Oh.” Kellen put his foot down again. “He told me his grandfather used to go to Armethalieh, that they had a home on one of the Out Islands.”

“If you can call ‘going to Armethalieh’ visiting a place before it exists, then… yes,” Shalkan agreed blandly. “The Elves once ruled the seas as well as the forests. But that was a long time ago, even as Elves think of time.”

Kellen took a deep breath, and regretted it immediately as the cold air seared his throat and lungs. “Are you going to be—” he began.

Shalkan interrupted him. “I’m fine. I will be fine. Now stop worrying about me. As Riasen says, those of us at Ysterialpoerin should probably have brought xaqiue and gan to keep from getting bored. You’re the ones who will be facing moments of unusual interest tonight.”

“That’s one way to think of it,” Kellen said.

But when he had trudged back to his own pavilion again, Kellen somehow felt a little better, though he could not have said why.

—«♦»—

IN fact, he and his thirty spent much of the afternoon being as cold and bored as any of Ysterialpoerin’s nearer defenders. Despite knowing Redhelwar’s plan, Kellen felt very much like a xaqiue piece himself—over and over, it seemed they’d no more than settle into one position than the order would come to shift to another. At least the constant shifts in position kept the horses from freezing solid—if the Shadowed Elves did come out as Athan hoped, there’d be a good deal of mounted combat tonight, and none of them could afford to be stiff.

The farther cavern was in a more elevated area than the nearer one. The only entrance the scouting parties had been able to locate was at the end of a twisting path halfway up the mountainside. Kellen knew that there were troops actually on the mountain—the men of the High Reaches, and most of the Knights of Ysterialpoerin, who were most familiar with the local terrain. Kellen certainly didn’t envy them their posts. If it was cold down here—and it was—he could only imagine how much colder it must be farther up the mountain.

One thing a day spent emulating a xaqiue-piece did was give everyone a good idea of the ground they’d be fighting over later. Jermayan had set Coldfire spells over all of them that would trigger with a single word of command, but until that moment, Redhelwar had given orders that there was to be no light at all.

—«♦»—

THEY moved through the dark to their final position. It was almost half a league away from the mouth of the