Authors: R.A. Salvatore
Aydrian looked at her as if he did not understand—which he did not, of course, since he had little idea of what “his” people of Honce-the-Bear might be like. The Touel’alfar had told him some of the history, of course, and had described the great cities to him—and how Aydrian wanted to go and see those cities! But the only tales he knew of “his” people were those his elven teachers had told him, and Aydrian was developing a pretty good sense now that not everything the Touel’alfar told him was necessarily true.
“If Lady Dasslerond has any ideas of traveling to that southern mountain range,” Brynn went on, “then better for her, or for any she chooses to send, that the
yatols were long gone from the area.”
“You know this?” Aydrian asked, his eyes narrowing with curiosity. “She will leave Andur’Blough Inninness? Or will send others to the south?”
Brynn shrugged. “I merely assume it,” she admitted. “For why else would the leader of the Touel’alfar care for the plight of the To-gai-ru?”
“Perhaps Lady Dasslerond would simply prefer that there were fewer humans in her world,” Aydrian replied bluntly. “What better way to bring about that than to start a war?”
Brynn glanced around nervously, her horrified expression showing that she believed Aydrian had just stepped way over the bounds of propriety.
He shrugged in response, somewhat nonchalantly. “I do not pretend to understand the desires of the Touel’alfar,” he said. “You do, it seems, but have you learned that much more of them in your few extra years of training?”
Brynn looked at him hard.
“Or do you just need to think the best of them?” Aydrian asked.
“They are my family,” the young woman replied.
“Your masters,” Aydrian was quick to correct. “And while you might consider them your family, they certainly do not think the same of you. Or of me, or of any other humans. Even my father, Nightbird. Yes, they speak of him reverently and say what a great ranger he was. But even his heroic deeds cannot elevate him to the status of the Touel’alfar—not in the eyes of the Touel’alfar, at least.”
Brynn’s lips grew very thin—for she knew he was right, Aydrian realized, and it pleased him to be right.
“They are the only family I have,” said Brynn again. “And the only family you have.”
“Then I have no family,” said Aydrian. The words coming out of his mouth proved as much an epiphany for Aydrian as for Brynn.
“How can you speak ill of those who saved your life?” Brynn scolded. “Of those who gave you life in every way except birth? Of those who are giving you skills that will elevate you above the masses of our race?”
“But will never lift me to the very bottom ranks of their race,” Aydrian was quick to point out. “If I consider Lady Dasslerond my family, then it is a false hope for me, since she will never consider me the same.”
“The Touel’alfar have great fondness for the rangers,” said Brynn.
“As you have for Diredusk,” Aydrian countered.
Brynn started to respond, but gave a great sigh and let it go. She couldn’t hope to convince Aydrian. From his perspective, his words were true enough. Brynn knew the reality of being a human among the Touel’alfar as surely as did her young counterpart. Indeed, the elves did consider themselves superior to humans or any other race. Even the words of Belli’mar Juraviel, Brynn’s mentor and the elf the Touel’alfar considered the friendliest toward humans, held an inescapable edge of racism, an inadvertent condescension.
But Brynn still did not see things as Aydrian did. The Touel’alfar, for all their
failings, were giving her something special, a great gift that she could use to better the lives of her people and to realize her ultimate potential.
“Once I might have seen them as you do,” she said, though her words were a lie, for she had never viewed the Touel’alfar as anything other than first her saviors and then her friends. “But when you return …” Brynn paused at that word, for perhaps that was the key to the difference between her feelings and Aydrian’s toward Lady Dasslerond and her people. She would return to her own people, but Aydrian had never been among his own people! How strange that must be for the boy!
“You will come to appreciate the gifts of the Touel’alfar,” she said instead, quietly with all respect. “You will change your heart concerning Lady Dasslerond and her haughty kin.”
Now it was Aydrian’s turn to merely shrug as if it did not matter; and Brynn sat staring at him for a long time, wondering, fearing, how deep his anger toward their mentors ran. Aydrian wouldn’t even admit to that anger, she recognized. He was speaking words that he thought simply pragmatic and honest, but Brynn was perceptive enough to understand that there was some buried resentment behind his remarks.
She wondered whether Lady Dasslerond had noted it as well, and she could not believe that the venerable lady of Caer’alfar and her sharp-eared kin had not. What ill might that bode for poor Aydrian?
She left him then, with a pat on the shoulder as he sat staring into the boughs of the beautiful forest. She wished that there was some way she might mention this conversation to Lady Dasslerond, though of course she could not without getting Aydrian into terrible trouble. She wished that there was some way that she could show Aydrian the error of his thinking.
Aydrian sat there for a long while after Brynn had gone, going over the conversation, particularly his own words, those last few comments that had revealed to him a deep and simmering anger. It was all starting to fall together for him, he believed, all the pieces of this great puzzle known as life lining up in orderly fashion.
Aydrian didn’t like the picture those pieces formed at all. The unfairness of his situation upset him profoundly. Not only was he destined forever to be a lesser being in the eyes of the only group he could call a family but every member of that family, barring unforeseen circumstance, would outlive him by many of his life spans! Where was the justice in this miserable existence? To’el Dallia might train a dozen or more rangers after him, and would she even remember the one named Aydrian? Would his “family” recall his name even a century hence?
But that was also the spark of hope that Aydrian had found this night in talking to Brynn Dharielle, the ranger destined to lead a revolution, the ranger whose name, it seemed to Aydrian, might be long imprinted on the memory of the world.
Yes, he thought, perhaps there was a way for a mere human to garner a piece of elvenlike immortality.…
I
t was another calm and quiet night—too quiet, Aydrian recognized, and he knew instinctively that something was afoot, some new test for Brynn, perhaps. With even To’el Dallia nowhere to be found, the young ranger-in-training made his way to the same field where Brynn had passed her previous test.
The place was empty and quiet, not a night bird stirring, not a torch burning.
Aydrian walked along the forest paths, rubbing his chin, trying to figure out where the elves might have brought Brynn. He didn’t know how many elves lived in Caer’alfar, but he knew that the number was over a hundred. Aydrian understood that if they were out in the forest, all of them together and with Brynn besides, he would never find them unless he happened upon them by chance. Aydrian had spent his entire life in Andur’Blough Inninness, had trained extensively in the ways of the elves, and all that experience and all that training only let him know better than anyone else in the world how stealthy the elven people could be in the forest night.
He wandered the paths, making wider and wider circuits of Caer’alfar, the homeland proper, and growing angrier and angrier with each passing step because he would again be excluded from … from whatever the Touel’alfar were doing with Brynn this night.
His frustration continued to mount but then washed away all of a sudden when Aydrian heard fair elven voices carried on the evening breeze. Immediately Aydrian went on the alert, crouching and slowly turning his head to get some direction from the sound. He knew, too, that the elves could hide their voices or could throw them to misdirect. He wondered as he at last located the heading and swiftly but quietly started in that direction whether the elves would have him running futilely through the night. Soon enough, though, the lights of torches came into view, lining another field, this one as wide as it was long and bordered on all four sides by beautiful pine trees. The young ranger-in-training stopped and took a long while to consider where he was, to recall all that he could of the region about that field. He started off again a few minutes later, but not heading directly toward the field. Rather, he ran off down to the north, making his way to a dry, sunken streambed that ran along the field’s border.
When he was even with the field, the elven song filling all the air about him, Aydrian crept up the bank, his belly low to the ground. He paused again just before he reached the crest, taking in the elf song, trying to discern the mood of the Touel’alfar.
From that sound, the beautiful and reverent melody, it didn’t seem to him that this was another test, and certainly not one of Brynn’s warrior prowess. No, this seemed more solemn somehow, more ancient.
With a deep and steadying breath, Aydrian crept up a bit more and peeked over the ridge, under the interlocking boughs of pines.
There stood the Touel’alfar—all of them, it seemed—standing in ranks upon the field to Aydrian’s right, facing Lady Dasslerond. The boy lay there for a long, long time, not even realizing that he was breathing.
At last the elven song stopped, though the last notes seemed to hang in the air. Not a bird, not a cricket, chirped in the quiet night.
“Belli’mar Juraviel,” Lady Dasslerond said a moment later. “For the second time in a short span, you deliver to us a ranger prepared to go out into the wider world. Is she ready?”
“She is, my lady,” said Juraviel, striding past the quiet elven ranks. “I give you Brynn Dharielle!” He stopped and turned, holding his arm out the way he had come, and in his wake walked Brynn.
Aydrian could hardly breathe, or could not breathe, and didn’t care whether he did or not. Brynn walked with a grace and a pride befitting the evening. She was naked, except for a couple of large feathers that had been braided into her dark hair. Aydrian had seen her naked before many times, for he had often sneaked into the brush beside the small field where the young woman did her morning
bi’nelle dasada
routines, and always the sight of her smooth brown flesh had excited feelings in Aydrian that he could not quite comprehend.
But this went beyond any of that. This night, Brynn Dharielle seemed to him something far greater than the woman he watched at sword dance, something supernaturally and spiritually beautiful, something that transcended the lustful feelings of the flesh. She was naked and undeniably enticing, but Aydrian could not take his gaze from her serene face and her sparkling dark eyes. It seemed to him as if she was wearing her soul as her clothing tonight.
Suddenly Aydrian felt as if he didn’t belong in that place, as if he was violating Brynn’s privacy far more now than during his spying on her morning sword dances. Then, he had measured her training, her focus, had admired her physical skills and physical charms, but now …
Now he was peeking at her very soul.
The elven song began again as soon as Brynn walked over to take her place directly before Lady Dasslerond. But then it stopped suddenly, or perhaps it did not—perhaps, Aydrian thought, the elves had simply enacted one of their sound walls, a barrier through which their voices would not pass. Lady Dasslerond was talking to Brynn then, as Belli’mar Juraviel walked to the far end of the field, disappeared into the pine boughs, then emerged a moment later leading a large brown and white pinto pony, magnificently muscled, whose two eyes were so blue that Aydrian could make out their color even from this distance in the torchlight. The pony had a white mane with a single black tuft of hair and a black tail similarly adorned with a single white tuft. It seemed skittish at first, or at least too full of spirit, and tossed its head with sharp jerking motions that kept Juraviel working hard not to be thrown from his feet.
But then the pony was near Brynn, and the chemistry between the two was immediately obvious. The young stallion’s ears perked up, and though its eyes continued to take in all the scene before it warily, the pony allowed Brynn to stroke its face and strong neck without a single flip of its head.
The pony stood calmly by Brynn’s side then, to Aydrian’s amazement, while
Lady Dasslerond began to speak again. Then all the elves began their song anew—though Aydrian still could hear none of the elvish voices, just the occasional nicker or whinny from the pony.
It took a long while for Aydrian even to notice that Belli’mar Juraviel had left the field once more, and when that realization at last came to him, it was too late for him to react.
He felt a strong hand grab the back of his hair even as he started to turn over. A sudden jerk by Juraviel pulled Aydrian back from the bank and to his feet.
“What are you doing here?” the elf demanded.
Aydrian snarled and reached back to grab Juraviel’s wrist, but the elf anticipated the move and sharply jerked his hand down, pulling hard enough to take Aydrian from his feet.
The boy hit the ground hard, but twisted quickly and started to scramble to his feet, growling with rage, intent only on pummeling Juraviel.
He got kicked in the face before he ever got near to vertical, and in the fog that followed that kick, he felt a sudden, sharp rain of blows that soon had him curled defensively on his side.
“In everything you do of late, you tempt the limits of Lady Dasslerond’s patience,” Juraviel said.
Aydrian slowly uncurled and rolled to his knees, then slowly and unthreateningly stood up. “I was not told to stay away from this place this evening,” he protested.
Juraviel’s steely-eyed gaze did not soften. “The answer to your protest lies within your own heart,” the elf said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “Did you not recognize that you were violating the privacy of Brynn Dharielle?”
“No one told me—” Aydrian started to argue again.