physical sensation that wasn’t cold or painful.
“It’s really you,” Pettyl said, pulling her hand away. Her face soured and she spat in his face. Daniel only barely recoiled and then felt Pettyl’s hands slapping at him. “How dare you? Are you here to torment me? To punish me some more? Is that why? Is it?”
Daniel dissolved and Pettyl’s hands passed through him and where he used to be. He hovered above the clearing.
“Why?” Pettyl called to the air. “We had so little! Why?” She fell to her knees and began weeping. Daniel just stayed where he was and watched. Emotions were softer and more distant in his cloud-like state. He watched Pettyl sob, finally still, and then pick herself up and move back into the hut.
Daniel concentrated on the clearing again and reappeared. He walked into the hut and saw Pettyl lying on one of the low wooden beds. There were bottles everywhere-elfish food.
“Pettyl?” he said. “I’m sorry, for. . whatever it is I’ve done.”
Pettyl did not move.
“What happened?”
She did not answer or move for a long time-it may have been hours. She may have been sleeping. Daniel just stood. He didn’t get tired or-after the horror of Night-grow bored. He was content just to wait.
Pettyl stirred and shifted off of the bed. She went to a box that stood by the entrance into the stable. She pulled out a tall, thin blue bottle, uncorked it, and took a long drink. She gave a cough, a sort of choking cough, and then laughed a lilting schoolgirl laugh.
“Pettyl? Where’s K?yle?”
She recorked the bottle and turned to look at him, smiling and swaying. “Ha ha. K?yle made a mistake and he paid for it.”
“What kind of mistake?”
Pettyl moved across the room with the long steps of a dancer. When she reached the centre of the room, she pirouetted and stood, her head tilted back. She swayed gently to a music that Daniel could not hear, a smile still on her face.
“He was working in the woods one day and a little bird fell down from the sky. It was lost and injured and weak.” She giggled. “K?yle picked it up and fed it, cared for it, and taught it to speak. And when it grew strong again, it took to the sky, and soaring among the treetops, the bird saw a bear and swooped down and pecked its eye out. The bear died, and that made the bear’s brothers very mad. Very mad, indeed. They talked to the wolves, and the wolves came and hounded K?yle away. That was the mistake that K?yle made-he was kind to a little bird. He was always so kind.”
“Who took him?” Daniel asked. “Pettyl, what really happened?”
“They did,” Pettyl said, giving a lurch and knocking over a few bottles with her feet. She spun around and around and then fell onto her bed. “The brothers. The ones you didn’t kill. They took him away-I don’t know where. They thought he had knowledge of the Elves in Exile.” She laughed awkwardly.
Daniel suddenly had an intuition. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
Pettyl guffawed.
“They took the wrong one, didn’t they?”
Pettyl became sombre suddenly.
“You know where they are-who they are. You were just coming back from them when I first arrived. You’re a resistance fighter.”
Pettyl frowned. “I was. I used to be. I still am, in a way. I’m a soldier, but I’m not allowed to fight. That was the plan. I joined in, K?yle didn’t, and so when they’d come, they’d take him and leave me. And now I can’t go back to them. I’m watched. So I stay here now. I drink.”
“Could you tell me where to find them?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know where they might be for certain. But they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Just follow the war.” This struck her as hilarious and she began laughing again.
“So they’re fighting openly now?”
“Yes,” said Pettyl, getting herself under control. “They have been for the last eight months. Perhaps they’re all dead. All of them dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “I think that they’re still alive, and that I’ve been sent here for a reason. I’m certain of it. First I’m going to find them. Then I’m going to rescue K?yle. Then I’m going to help them win this war. The Elves in Exile will return, and I will stand by the true prince as he takes his place on the throne.”
Pettyl giggled.
At length, Daniel managed to get some information from Pettyl that he thought would be useful-a direction and a few landmarks. Then he set about looking for the Elves in Exile. It had been a trick to actually move around, at first. He had previously only been able to transport himself to places he’d been before simply by picturing them. How could he picture a place he’d never been?
The answer came to him when he realised that he could, naturally, picture a place that he could see, and so move that way, hopping from place to place either in his cloud form or his bodied form. It was a rather arduous and disorienting way to travel, but then he found he could fly. Fly, in a certain fashion. All he had to do was to picture himself in the sky instead of on the ground, and there he would be. In his cloud-state he could travel very swiftly across the landscape.
It was beautiful, the landscape, even from a distance. A seemingly endless tableau of hills, forests, lakes, streams, rivers, plains, mountains, and valleys. Occasionally there would be a puckered scar of a dirt road or an unsightly growth of a town. When he saw these, he would move downward to investigate-see if there was anything that would let him know that he was on the right track. Pettyl’s descriptions had been vague-sometimes to the point of contradiction-but he had memorised them anyway and began his search eastward.
He didn’t know how much ground he had travelled. He didn’t know how fast he was going, the scale of the distances he was seeing, or even the size of the planet he was on.
At last he found the landmark he’d been looking for-a distant, pale spike on the horizon. He pictured it larger and larger and arrived at what Pettyl had called Ashkh’s Spindle.
It was a tower of rock that rose almost a mile into the air. From his approach, it seemed to jut perpendicularly from the horizon, but as he came nearer, he saw that it protruded at an angle away from him, only a couple degrees, but enough to make it look horribly unstable.
Around this landmark was devastation. What had once been a lightly wooded plain-based on Pettyl’s description-was now a smouldering field of cinders. Everything that could burn had been incinerated. Tree trunks still smouldered, houses lay in ruins. For perhaps a mile all around the tower the landscape was an enormous scorch mark, and at its centre the Spindle rose up and above.
With a feeling of dread, Daniel descended, wanting to take a closer look at the destruction, praying that he wasn’t too late but fearing that he already was.
As he neared, he realised that his depth perception was off-here, everything seemed compacted and yet expanded at the same time. What had seemed from the sky to be nearly a mile, was mile upon mile. Perhaps as much as twenty or thirty. He finally reached ground and materialised in the centre, surrounded by sooty blackness. He could walk for a day on ash and charred wood.
Daniel looked up at the finger of rock, larger than a skyscraper, and only bearing the black patina of soot on the lower quarter of its length. The flames had not even reached halfway. Had they survived?
Was the siege still in progress?
An odd sort of pattern caught his eye. Midway between him and the start of the rock spire was a sort of cobweb construction. It took him a little while to focus, since at first he thought it was a spider’s web, but it was far away, not small. He neared it.
Two large posts, several storeys in height, had been inserted, somehow, into the ground, and strung between them, in a concentric pattern, was a gruesome lattice work of elfin bodies. They were splayed, spread- eagled and tied hand to foot, where their arms and legs were still attached. Some of them were warriors, but not all of them-not most of them. There were women in hard-wearing elfin gowns and farmwives, as well as labourers,
