To Light A Candle

“It saw me,” he put in, hoping he didn’t sound as ineffectual as he felt. “I don’t know why it was there, either, but at first it thought I was Kellen Tavadon. It looked like a human, and it spoke to me, telling me I couldn’t go back to—to Armethalieh. When it realized I wasn’t him, it attacked me. I fended it off, and it decided to destroy the village first before coming back to kill me.”

He stopped, wondering if he’d said the wrong thing. Linyesin was staring at him intently.

“It would be good to know—and it would please me greatly,” the Elf said, “if you would say further how you fended off the attack of one of Them and survived.”

“It was Mageshield,” Cilarnen said. Thinking back, he wasn’t sure his shield had been all that effective. It was more as if the Demon, seeing he was a Mage, had simply decided to kill him last.

“It must have meant to take you captive when it discovered that you were a Mage,” Linyesin said, echoing Cilarnen’s thoughts. “Or to take a very long time over your death. Fortunate indeed that matters occurred otherwise.”

Cilarnen shivered. From all he’d seen at Stonehearth, “fortunate” was an understatement.

By now they were within sight of the Centaurs. There were a couple of hundred of them, and with them were more Mountainfolk and several more Elves, all in armor. Each suit of armor was a different color; they looked like a handful of spring flowers somehow transported to the midst of winter.

And there were supply carts, like the one Cilarnen had seen just inside the Elven border, but these were much larger, drawn by six draft mules instead of by a pair of horses. He wondered how they’d gotten them over the passes.

Comild gave a grunt of satisfaction at the sight of the carts. “Decent meals at last.”

Linyesin laughed. Cilarnen would hardly have been less surprised if the Elf had dismounted from his mare and turned cartwheels in the snow. “Oh, yes, Comild, ‘proper food.’ Nemermet brought you to join us as fast as he could, and the food the scouts travel on can be less-than-satisfying, but we don’t mean to starve you before we reach Ysterialpoerin.”

—«♦»—

HE would hardly have called it “luxury” a moonturn before, but fresh meat, pancakes, hot cider, and a warm place to sleep—even if it was a tent he shared with three of the Mountainfolk—made Cilarnen feel more confident than he had since he’d left Stonehearth. The Centaurs had been eager to exchange news as they marched, and apparently their new guides—Elven Knights—were freer with information than any of the Elves Comild’s party had dealt with up till now. In the few hours Cilarnen had ridden with the army, he and Kardus had learned more about what was going on than they had in all their time riding with Nemermet.

All Nemermet had told them was that their eventual destination was a place called Ysterialpoerin. Now they knew that, weather permitting, they would reach it in two sennights. Three at the most—assuming nothing attacked them along the way.

And attack was possible at any moment, though so far they’d been lucky— another reason Nemermet had hurried them along so swiftly. The Elven Lands were already under assault. Not by the Demons directly—apparently they couldn’t come here—but it seemed that they had found a way to slip their creatures past the land-wards. The Centaurs had been warned to be on the watch for a kind of wolf the size of a pony, bats as large as small ships, and (apparently worst of all) things called “Shadowed Elves,” which had to be destroyed at all costs. Though nobody said anything directly, Cilarnen got the impression that the Demons meant to destroy the Elves and the Elven Lands first.

These Demons—nobody called them anything but Them—were nothing like the Armethaliehan nursery’tales he’d been terrified by as a child. He managed to figure that out, though nobody wanted to talk about them much. Cilarnen doubted that the Centaurs he’d talked to knew much more than they’d said; and he wasn’t quite ready to try questioning any of the Elves.

He suspected that Kardus knew more, but the Centaur Wildmage would not answer any of his questions. “This is neither the time nor the place,” was all Kardus would say. “Wait for better.”

Remembering the sight of the Demon at Stonehearth, Cilarnen reluctantly decided to take his advice.

—«♦»—

THEY were two days away from Ysterialpoerin when the blizzard struck.

The Wildmages traveling with the army had been warning of truly bad weather to come—in a day, perhaps two. Cilarnen knew that Linyesin was hoping that they would at least reach the edge of the forest before it began, so that they would have some shelter and protection from the storm. The Centaurs had rejoiced when the Wildmages told them that weather magic had been done by the Wildmages with the Elven army, pushing back the storm and giving them an extra day’s grace.

But then the storm struck without warning, and far too early.