She took his hands and led him over to the bench where they liked to sit during their visits. He wrapped one arm about her shoulders and cradled her against him. “Thanks for doing this.”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything.
He sensed something. “It went okay, didn’t it?”
“I might have been seen.”
He felt himself grow cold inside, and for a moment he didn’t say anything in response. “Seen by whom?” he managed finally.
She sighed and lifted her head from his shoulder. “There was another girl working in the medical supply room. She caught me in the refrigeration cabinet where they store the pleneten. I made up a story about doing an inventory, but everyone knows that inventories are only done by assignment and at certain times.”
“Do you think she might tell someone?”
“She might.”
“Then you shouldn’t go back.” Because you know what will happen if you do and they find out you’ve been stealing medical supplies, he wanted to add, but didn’t. “You should come with me.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I know you think you can’t.”
She drew back from him. “Why must we always have this argument, Hawk? Every time I see you! Why can’t we be together without talking about the future?” She squeezed his hands sharply. “Why can’t we just be in the present?”
He had thought he would be able to lead into this more gradually, but that wasn’t the way things were working out. He bent close, so that their faces were almost touching.
“Because,” he whispered. “Because of everything.” He took a deep breath. “Listen to me, Tessa. I told you last night that you had to be careful about going out of the compound, that the Weatherman had found an entire nest of dead Croaks down on the waterfront. But there’s more. We came across a Lizard two days ago that was just all ripped apart. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know anything that could have done it. Then, earlier today, we were down in a warehouse basement and Candle’s voices warned her to get out of there. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel it. There was something there, something big and dangerous, hiding on the other side of a collapsed wall.”
She started to speak, but he put his fingers to her lips. “Wait, there’s more. Last night, after I came back from seeing you, Candle was waiting up for me. She was shaking, she was so afraid. She’d had one of her visions, a bad one. It was of something huge coming to the city, something that was going to kill us all.”
He touched her cheek, then stroked her hair. “Candle doesn’t make these things up. The voices are real, and they have never been wrong. I don’t think they’re wrong this time. But I don’t know what to do about it. I haven’t told anyone but you. Do you know why that is? Because I can’t do anything without you. I have to get the Ghosts out of the city to someplace safe. But I won’t go without you. I can’t leave you. I won’t ever leave you.”
She nodded, biting her lip and reaching up with her hands to hold his head steady as she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth. There were tears in her eyes. “What am I supposed to do about my mother? You can’t ask me to leave her!”
His gaze was fierce. “You’re all grown up, Tessa; you’re not a child. We belong together—you and me. We’re ready to start our own life. To do that, you have to leave her. That’s just the way of things. She has your father; he can look after her. You would be leaving her, in any case, if we were to marry. Isn’t that what you want for us?”
She shook her head. “I’ve told you before! You could come live in the compound! You could be with me there!”
He lost control and shook her hard. “What are you talking about? That’s nonsense! When they caught us together outside the compound—what was it, six months ago—your father forbid you from ever seeing me again. He told us both that it wasn’t something that he would allow, his daughter with a street kid, the member of a tribe. He said that! Others in the compound were even worse. Some wanted you cast out on the spot. They worried you might have picked up diseases that could be transmitted to them. Some would have thrown you from the walls. Do you think that if we tell them we want to get married, it will change any of that?”
He put his hand on her mouth as she tried to speak. “Wait, don’t say anything. Let me finish. Let me get it all out. I didn’t argue about it at the time. I didn’t know what to say. I just knew I didn’t want to lose you. So we’ve been meeting like this ever since, you sneaking out at night, me sneaking down here through the ruins. But we both know how it’s going to end. Sooner or later we’re going to get caught—unless we find another way to live our lives.”
He exhaled sharply, his energy exhausted. “We’re right on the edge of something. I can feel it. Step the wrong way, and we are lost. Step the right way, and we will never lose each other. But you have to leave the compound. You have to leave and come with me to wherever it is that we have to go to be safe and together. Your parents won’t understand. Nothing you can say will make them understand. We could offer to take them with us, but you know as well as I do that they wouldn’t come. What will happen is that they will make sure you don’t leave, either.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. I know it as surely as I know how I feel about you.”
Tessa stared silently at him, then wiped the tears from her eyes. “I have to think about this. I have to give it some time.”
Time is something you don’t have, he wanted to say, but he managed to keep himself from doing so. “I know,” he said instead. “I know.”
They sat together on the bench, holding each other and not speaking, looking off into the dark. Hawk kept wondering if there was something else he should say, something that would better persuade her. But he couldn’t think of what it would be. So he settled for keeping her close for the time they had, soaking in her warmth and her softness, giving himself some small measure of comfort before she was gone again.
“A foraging party went out early last week,” she said suddenly, not looking at him, her face buried in his shoulder. She didn’t continue right away, but then said very quickly, “There were eleven of them, all experienced, all heavily armed. They went south toward the warehouses twenty or thirty miles outside the city, looking for fresh medical supplies and packaged goods to bring back to the compound. It was a five-day expedition.” She paused, as if waiting on him, and then said, “It’s been a week, and they haven’t come back. One of them is my father.”
He could hear the fear in her voice now, could sense the deep abiding terror she was feeling. His warnings about Candle’s vision and the strange things happening in the city had done that. He wished he had saved it for another time. But it was too late to take it back.
“There are eleven of them carrying weapons,” he said, trying to reassure her. “They know what they are doing. They can protect themselves.”
He could feel her head shake in disagreement. “The Croaks and that Lizard you told me about would have known what they were doing, too. They should have been able to protect themselves, too, but look what happened.”
“It isn’t the same. Eleven armed men can stand up to anything. Your father will be all right.”
He wished he believed it. He wished he could think of something more reassuring. He knew how she felt about her father and mother and what it would do to her to lose either of them.
You’re so stupid, he told himself angrily.
“I have to get back,” she said suddenly, breaking away. She rose and went over to the door, then looked back at him. “Will you come again soon?”
He rose. “If you promise to be careful, I will. In two nights, okay?”
She came back to him quickly and pressed herself against him. “You’re the one on the streets.”
“Sometimes the streets are safer.”
“Doesn’t sound like it to me.”
“I love you.”
“I love you more.” She kis
sed him hard, then broke away, her black eyes shining, her face radiant with her feelings. “I want you. I want everything from you. I want to be with you forever.”
She kissed him again, and then turned and bolted back through the tunnel door and was gone. He stood listening to the locks fasten and then to the silence. He was flushed with excitement and riven by fear. He could barely contain his feelings. Two words played themselves over and over in his mind.
Don’t go.
K IRISIN,” BIAT WHISPERED to him through the crack in the open door. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
The Elven boy looked over his shoulder at his friend and caught a glimpse of his thin, pinched face in the pale haze of the candlelight. “Just finishing,” he said.
“Do you know what time it is?”
Kirisin shook his head. “It’s not dawn, I know that.”
There was a despairing sigh as Biat’s face disappeared and the door closed. Kirisin went right back to writing.
He was sitting on the tiny veranda of the home that the six of them shared—Biat, Erisha, Raya, Jarn, Giln, and himself. Four were from the Cintra and two had traveled from other places to participate in the choosing. The greater portion of the Elven nation resided in the Cintra, but other, smaller communities were scattered around the world in similar forests. The Ellcrys could have settled on using only Elves who lived close for her Chosen. But something made it pleasing to her that they should come from all over, and so it had been for as long as anyone could remember. She was who she was, after all, so she could have what she wanted.
When Kirisin saw her for the first time, it took his breath away. There were trees of great magnificence and beauty, and then there was the Ellcrys. She was tall and willowy and had a presence that transcended majesty or grace. Silvery bark and crimson leaves formed an aura about her canopy so that the shimmer of her foliage suggested feathers and silk. She was magic, of course; what tree that looked like this could be otherwise? She was the only one of her kind, created centuries ago to maintain the Forbidding, the barrier behind which the demonkind had been shut away in the time of Faerie. So long as she lived, they could never break free. The Chosen were her servants, selected to safeguard her. It was an honor of immense proportions, but one that did not include questioning her motives or reasons. Service to the Ellcrys required a devotion and obedience that did not allow for satisfying personal curiosity.
Still, Kirisin wished he understood her better. So little was known, and most of that was what had been gleaned from years of service and passed down through generations of Chosen. The Ellcrys had been alive for thousands of years, but almost all of what had been written about her at the time of her creation was lost. Like so much of everything else that was Elven, he reminded himself. Like the magic, in particular. Once the world had been full of magic, and the Elves had commanded the greater part of it. But the Elves had lost their magic, just as they had lost their way of life. In the beginning, they had been the dominant species. Now they were little more than rumor. Humans populated the world now, and they had no understanding of magic. All they understood was how to savage the land, how to take what they wanted and not care about the harm it caused.
Humans, he thought suddenly, were destroyers.
He brushed aside his mop of blond hair and wrote it down, adding it to his other thoughts. He wrote in his journal each night before going to sleep, putting down his musings and his discoveries so that he would have a record of them when his term of service was done. Maybe if others had done the same centuries earlier, there wouldn’t be so much no one knew anything about now. Particularly where the Ellcrys was concerned.
The Chosen were the logical scribes to make those recordings, of course, but few did. Their period of service was brief. Selected during the summer solstice from among the boys and girls who had just passed into their first year of adulthood, they served for a single year and then relinquished the duty to a new group. The tree never chose more than eight or fewer than six. Just enough to perform the required duties of tending to her needs and caring for the gardens in which she was rooted.
The choosing itself was ritual. All of the candidates passed beneath the branches of the tree at dawn on the day of the solstice. Those who would become the new Chosen were touched lightly on the shoulder by one of the tree’s slender branches, the only time she would ever communicate with them. How she made her choices, how she decided who would serve her for the next twelve months, was a mystery no one had ever solved. That she was a sentient being was not open to dispute. The lore made it clear that she had been created so, and that the nature of her creation, though vague in the histories that described it, required she experience a constant human connection. Thus the presence of the Elves who looked after her daily, and the ongoing protection of the community that relied on her.
He wrote the last few lines of his entry, put his writing materials aside, and rose to stretch. The sun would be coming up in a little more than an hour, and the Chosen would walk down into the gardens to greet the Ellcrys and welcome her to a new day. It was a formality, really. They did it because the Chosen had been doing it for as long as anyone could remember. It was a custom rooted in a need to maintain a connection with the tree.
Odd, really. The Ellcrys was beholden to them, yet for the most part she did not even seem aware of their presence. That didn’t seem right. He thought about it and then shook his head in self-admonishment. He was being unfair. She was a tree, and what tree had ever enjoyed a warm relationship with any two-legged creature who might on a whim decide to cut it down for firewood?
“What are you doing, Kirisin?” a familiar voice asked.
Erisha was standing right behind him. He hadn’t heard her approach, which irritated him. She was good at sneaking around. She stood with her hands on her hips, a challenging tone in her voice. She was the oldest by five months and the designated leader of the Chosen. She was also the daughter of the King. Kirisin didn’t mind this, but he wished she were a little less impressed with herself.
“Just finishing up on my journal,” he answered, smiling cheerfully.
She didn’t smile back. That was the trouble with Erisha. She didn’t smile enough. She took everything so seriously, as if what they were doing transcended anything else they would ever do in their lives. It was a mistake to take anything so seriously. It aged you too quickly and drained you of energy and hope. He had seen it happen with his parents, who had fought so hard to persuade the King to establish a second enclave on the mountain slopes of Paradise, where there was cleaner air and water. But leaving the Cintra meant leaving the Ellcrys as well, a prospect few felt comfortable embracing. Most had never lived anywhere but close to her and couldn’t conceive of doing so now. It didn’t matter that only the Chosen were actually needed to care for her. Life outside the Cintra was for other Elves; the Cintra Elves belonged where they were.
His parents had wasted themselves in a futile effort to persuade the King to their cause. The King, after all, was his father’s cousin and should have been willing to listen. But Arissen Belloruus had been unreceptive to the idea and instead had made it clear that while he was King and his family rulers of the Cintra Elves, no second enclave would ever be established. Whatever problems the Elves might encounter, they would solve them here.
Not that the Elves were solving any of the problems confronting them, of course. They had made no progress toward stopping the poisoning of the earth’s resources. They had done nothing about the wars and plagues devastating the human population. Worst of all, they were ignoring the most dangerous threat of all—the new demons and their once-men soldiers. It hadn’t been enough that the Elves had shut away the demonkind of Faerie; a new demonkind, one born of the human race, had taken their place. By absenting themselves from the world’s affairs, the Elves had allowed this to happen. These new demons hadn’t bothered with the Elves yet; maybe they didn’t even realize Elves existed. But sooner or later they would find out, and when that happened
the Elves would discover what burying your head in the sand got you.
It made him angry to think about it. It made him angrier still that Erisha wasted her serious attitude on small matters rather than on something that might make a real difference.
That was what daughters of Kings were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Turn their attention to important matters?
But, then, cousins of Kings were supposed to be of a responsible disposition, too, so he could hardly complain.
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked him.
He sighed. “Close to dawn. I couldn’t sleep.”
“If you don’t sleep, you aren’t rested. If you aren’t rested, you can’t perform adequately your duties as a Chosen. Have you thought of that? You are distracted all the time, Kirisin. Lack of sleep could explain the problem.”
They looked very much the same, these two—slender and Elven-featured, with slanted eyes and brows, narrow faces, ears that were slightly pointed at their tips, and a way of walking that suggested they might take flight on a moment’s notice. They had the look of cousins, though Kirisin thought that facial resemblance aside they were nothing alike.
“You’re probably right, Erisha,” he agreed, still smiling. “I will try to do better starting tonight. But I’m awake now, so I think I will just stay awake until dawn.”
“Kirisin…”
But he was already down off the veranda and walking away. He gave her a short wave as he disappeared into the trees, just to let her know that there were no hard feelings. But he didn’t slow.
The Elves were the old people of the world. Some believed they were the prototype of humans, although Kirisin had always thought that nonsense. Elves, he told himself, were nothing like humans.
Yet they coexisted in a world on which both species had made an impact, for better and worse. At the moment, the impact was mostly human-generated and all bad. The humans had lost control of their world. It had happened over time, and it had happened to a degree that no Elf could comprehend. They had systematically destroyed the resources, poisoning everything, at first locally and eventually globally. They had begun warring with each other with such ferocious determination that after a century of violence more were dead than alive. Nature had responded, of course. Plagues and storms and upheavals had finished off what humans had begun. At first, the Elves had told themselves that much of what was happening was a part of nature’s cycle, that things would eventually be set right. They weren’t telling themselves that anymore. In fact, it had gotten bad enough that some were advocating that the Elves come out of hiding to try to set things right.