Authors: R.A. Salvatore
“I
WATCHED YOU
,” A
YDRIAN ANNOUNCED BLUNTLY AND BOLDLY WHEN HE AND THE
older ranger-in-training found some time alone out in the forest beyond the elven homeland of Caer’alfar.
Brynn looked at him with a hint of curiosity but with no outward sign that the bravado in his tone, the subtle insinuation that he somehow had something over her, was bothering her—or could bother her—in the least.
“When you were riding and shooting the arrows,” Aydrian explained.
There came a slight and swift flash of an angry sparkle in Brynn’s dark eyes. “I practice my
jhona’chuk klee
, my
tü’equest-martial
every day for hours and hours,” she said, mustering complete calm and using first the To-gai phrase, then the elven one for battling from horseback. “And most of that warrior training in To-gai fashion involves the use of my horse and my bow. The sessions are not secret, as far as I have been told.” She seemed almost bored as she finished—indeed, she yawned and looked away.
But Aydrian could read her, could read anyone, better than that; and he saw Brynn’s nonchalance for the dodge that it was. “I saw you on the field with the elves,” he needled her, taking great pleasure in watching her fighting to maintain that sense of confidence and calm. “Only eight arrows for six targets, and that with an unfair call against the value of one of your hits.”
Brynn kept her expression calm and content for a few moments longer, but then a hint of a shadow crossed her brown-skinned face, and that flash in her dark eyes revealed itself once more. “Do the Touel’alfar know that you witnessed the challenge?” she asked quietly.
Aydrian shrugged as if it did not matter, but then Brynn turned the tables on him, put him into an uncomfortable position, by remarking matter-of-factly, “Well, they likely know now, since you spoke it aloud in Andur’Blough Inninness, and we both realize that little we say or do in this elven valley can escape the notice of the Touel’alfar. Likely, your every word was heard clearly, and the message is well on its way to Lady Dasslerond.”
Aydrian’s smug smile changed into a grimace and then a frown. “They did not tell me that I could not watch the challenge,” he vehemently protested.
Brynn only smiled in reply, marveling at the great paradox that she recognized within young Aydrian. He was unparalleled in his skills, the humble Brynn readily admitted, exceeding the limits of every previous ranger, his own legendary father included. He could beat her in sparring almost every time—and it had been that way for several years. Furthermore, though he was not yet fourteen, he could beat many of the elves, which flustered them profoundly. Many times, rangers preparing
to depart Andur’Blough Inninness could defeat most or all of the elven warriors, but always before, that had been because of the greater size and strength possessed by humans. Not so with Aydrian. He was bigger than any of the Touel’alfar, but his muscles were still young. For the first time, the Touel’alfar were losing to a human, time and again, because he was quicker with the blade and more cunning in his attacks. Brynn could outride him and could shoot a bow as well as Aydrian. In tracking and handling animals, she was certainly as good as any, but in every other aspect of ranger training—from fighting to fire building to running to climbing—this young man, five years her junior, knew no equal.
In so many ways, Aydrian was as polished as any of the warriors the Touel’alfar had loosed upon the world—more polished—yet every now and then, something would happen, some comment or situation, that revealed the vulnerability and the youth of the ranger-in-training. His protest that he hadn’t been forbidden to watch the challenge had been exactly that type of revealing remark, Brynn knew. It was not the protest against an injustice of an adult but the whine over a technicality so common from a child. Brynn enjoyed these moments when Aydrian reminded her that he was human—and she enjoyed them more for his sake than for the sake of her pride.
“You are almost done,” Aydrian stated then, quickly changing his tone to one more melancholy.
“Done?”
“Your training,” the young man explained. “If Lady Dasslerond brought everyone out to watch your exhibition, then it seems likely that you are nearing the end of your training. In fact, I think that you might have already finished the training. I know not what is left for you, but you are almost done and will be leaving Andur’Blough Inninness soon.”
“You cannot know that for certain,” said Brynn, but she didn’t really disagree, for she had suspected the same thing. Belli’mar Juraviel had spoken to her concerning something called a “naming,” but as usual the elf had been elusive when she had tried to press him for details. Brynn suspected that that ceremony, whatever it was, would mark the end of her days in the elven valley.
Aydrian just smirked at her.
Brynn flashed a smile at him. “You are likely right,” she admitted. “There is great turmoil in my homeland, and I suspect that Lady Dasslerond would like to send me back there in time to make a difference.”
Aydrian’s expression was one of curiosity and even confusion.
“Many years ago, my people, the To-gai-ru, were conquered by the Behrenese,” Brynn explained. “It is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue.”
“I know the tale,” Aydrian reminded her, and his tone also reminded her that she had told him of the Behrenese conquest of To-gai countless times over the last few years—ever since Lady Dasslerond had started allowing the two some time together.
“You are to be a ranger in To-gai, then,” Aydrian remarked.
“That is the land I know,” said Brynn. “I understand the ways of the great oxen and the high tundra lions, of the black-diamond serpent and the wild horses. Never did I doubt that my tenure with the Touel’alfar would end with my return to To-gai, my land, my home, my love.”
Aydrian nodded, but then put on a curious expression that Brynn did not miss. Nor did his perplexed look confuse her. Aydrian was wondering where he might go at the end of his training, she knew, for he had no home to return to. He didn’t even know where he had been born: what kingdom, what city. Nor did Brynn. Lady Dasslerond had made Brynn’s ultimate mission quite clear to her early in her days in Andur’Blough Inninness, and Brynn suspected they had a plan for Aydrian as well, though it seemed less obvious to her and, apparently, to the boy.
“You will go back and patrol the tundra about a To-gai village,” Aydrian reasoned, “protecting the folk from dangerous animals and monsters … Are there any monsters in To-gai? Goblins or giants?” he added. His eyes sparkled, for the young warrior always liked to hear stories about the many monsters of the world and of the heroes, particularly the rangers, who dealt with them.
“Many monsters,” Brynn replied, getting that faraway look that always came over her when she started talking about her beloved homeland. “Great mountain yetis and many goblins. Tundra giants with skin the color of the brown turf, who hide in covered holes and spring out upon unwary travelers!” She said the last quickly and excitedly, leaping at Aydrian; and the younger warrior jumped in surprise, though not very high, just enough to put himself into a defensive posture.
Yes, he is a warrior
, Brynn thought;
calm and confident
.
“Many monsters,” she went on a moment later, “but none as plentiful or as dangerous as the Behrenese.”
“The desert dwellers,” remarked Aydrian, who was not unversed in the religions and peoples of the human kingdoms. “The men who follow the yatol priests.”
“The demons who call the Chezru chieftain their god-king,” Brynn clarified. “Far too long has their smell infected the clean air of To-gai!”
Aydrian looked around nervously. “Beware that those same elven ears you say have heard my words now hear your own,” he said.
“Beware?” Brynn asked with a chuckle. “Lady Dasslerond understands my intent completely. I have been trained to lead the revolution against the Behrenese, and that is my first and foremost duty.”
Aydrian wore that confused expression once again. “In all that I have learned in Andur’Blough Inninness, I have come to know that the affairs of men and the affairs of the Touel’alfar are not usually one and the same,” he said. “You will be named, you say, and so you will become a full ranger. You will have been given a great gift by Lady Dasslerond, in her eyes. How, then, will the lady allow you to use that gift in the affairs of men? Does that not go against the very precepts of the Touel’alfar? I do not—”
Brynn interrupted him with an upraised hand and a smile. “Most rangers are trained as guardians against the encroachment of the wilderness,” she agreed.
“That was the way of your father, Nightbird, though his path led him to one of the greatest conflicts between the men of Honce-the-Bear in the history of the world. But my adoption by the Touel’alfar was not an ordinary thing; I was not taken to become a typical ranger. Lady Dasslerond rescued me from my captors, those devil yatols who murdered my parents and all my village, with the intent that one day I would return not only to avenge those deaths but also to lead my people from the slavery they have known since the cursed Behrenese came to us.”
Aydrian leaned forward as he listened to every word, obviously engrossed in this twist in the tale. He knew some of Brynn’s history, but not until this very moment had he garnered any idea at all that Brynn Dharielle had some special purpose in life beyond becoming a typical ranger. She went on, then, speaking of the yatols and the former chieftains of the To-gai-ru, the proud men and women who led the nomadic steppe people in ways, spiritual and physical, older than either the yatol or the Abellican religions. She talked of the To-gai-ru spiritual rituals, and many sounded to Aydrian similar to the prayers that the Touel’alfar had been teaching him and Brynn. Indeed, the young man came to understand, as Brynn already understood, that much of To-gai culture bore a striking resemblance to the ways of the Touel’alfar.
Brynn’s voice changed noticeably as she recounted again to Aydrian those horrible last days of her village, when she had witnessed the beheading of her father and the rape and murder of her mother. She came through that difficult recounting well, as she always did. The scars were lasting, but under the tutelage of the Touel’alfar, Brynn Dharielle explained, she had learned to channel her emotions into optimistic plans for the future.
And what a future she envisioned and now described to Aydrian! Nothing less than a revolution to expel the Behrenese from the steppes of To-gai, to drive the invaders back to the desert sands of their own homeland, and to rid To-gai of the ever-deepening ties to the yatol religion.
“Freeing my own people from the trap of lies that is yatol will perhaps prove my most difficult task,” Brynn explained, her tone somber and melancholy. “Many of my people have grown up knowing only the yatol prayers—they do not remember the old ways.”
“But your parents held to those ways long after the Behrenese conquered the country,” Aydrian reasoned.
“As did all of my tribe,” said Brynn, “and many other tribes, scattered throughout the steppes, praying in secret and meeting, all of us, at the ancient religious shrines to celebrate our holiest days. Someone told the Behrenese of my parents and their friends, I am sure. Someone told the yatol priests of our sacrilege, and so they came down upon us with a great force.” Despite all her disciplined training, despite channeling all that anger into grand plans, Brynn Dharielle betrayed her seething rage at that moment. Aydrian understood that if she ever learned the identity of the traitor, that man would be better off if he was already dead!
The moment of anger passed quickly, as Brynn began talking again of restoring
To-gai to what it once was, a place of many tribes, united in spirit and living in peace. How wonderful might that first To-gai winter festival be when all the peoples of the steppes gathered in the ancient city of
Yoshun Magyek
to join hands and sing the
“Ber’quek Jheroic Suund,”
the “Song of the Cold Night”!
Aydrian’s interest grew as Brynn spoke of the revolution, of the great heights her people would ascend to overthrow their oppressors. It occurred to the young warrior that if she succeeded Brynn Dharielle’s name would live on in the history of the To-gai-ru for centuries to come. It occurred to Aydrian that Brynn Dharielle’s name would live on beyond the end of Lady Dasslerond’s days.…
He didn’t know it then, but that thought, that notion of immortality through glory, sank very deeply into the heart of young Aydrian Wyndon.
When Brynn finished, she sat perfectly still and quiet, staring ahead, though it was obvious to Aydrian that she was not seeing anything in front of her, that she was looking far away and far back in time and into the future all at once.
“I still do not understand,” Aydrian remarked a short while later. “Always I hear Lady Dasslerond proclaim that the affairs of men are not the affairs of the Touel’alfar, and always she makes it obvious that you and I, as humans, are far below the Touel’alfar. Why would she care for To-gai and the To-gai-ru? Why are the problems of your people the problems of the Touel’alfar; and if they are not, then why would she want you to return and begin such a war?”
“She fears the yatols,” Brynn answered. “Or rather, she considers the potential problems they might one day cause. Lady Dasslerond has had her eyes turned southward to the great mountain range known as the Belt-and-Buckle for many years now, though I know not why, and she would greatly prefer that the To-gai-ru—whose tales of the
Jyok ton’Kutos
, the Touel’alfar, speak of them whimsically or as beneficent spirits—ruled the southern slopes of the mountains. Always, my mother would tell me tales of the
Jyok ton’Kutos
or the
Jynek ton’Kutos
, the light elves and the dark elves, and she told those tales with a warm smile. We, of all the humans, are the most akin to the elven peoples. So my mother would always say; and now that I have come to know the
Jyok ton’Kutos
intimately, I believe that she was correct. Certainly the To-gai-ru are more akin to Lady Dasslerond’s people than are the Behrenese or the white-skinned folk of Honce-the-Bear. Your people, like the Behrenese, try to shape the land to fit their needs, while the To-gai-ru find pleasure in the land that is.”