Dockalfar (9 page)

“You’re not a Bakatu.”

“No,” Victoria agreed.

“You’re much too pretty. Almost normal,” Aloe declared, as if she had been certain all the time. “What are you then?”

Victoria shrugged, rubbing the chill of her arms.

“Just a girl. I’m not from here.”

“Where then?”

“Home. Far away I think. Earth.”

Aloe looked at her blankly. “So what are you?”

“Human.”

The girl blinked and stopped. Her brows drew low over her eyes.

“Well, that is a far place then. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a human.”

“What are you?” Victoria only thought it fair to return the question.

Aloe smiled, as if the answer were only too obvious. “Sidhe.”

Victoria tested the word on her tongue. She looked critically at Aloe.

Sidhe. Fairies dancing in a circle. It smacked of wives’ tales and legends. Of things too familiar in myths out of her own world. It made her uncomfortable, those familiarities. They walked in silence for a while, listening to the sound of the forest.

The music was faint and far away.

“The fairies were kind. I’d like to go back to them,” she said carefully.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Aloe contradicted her. “They’re basically harmless, but they feed on the weak and the unwary. You’re both of those. I think.”

Victoria found herself bristling. Aloe plunged on heedlessly.

“They’ll suck the life right out of you. The music, if you want to call it that. They’re all right, I suppose, for a moment’s dalliance, but you have to be careful. Their dances don’t end. They liked you a bit too much. Your music must be potent.”

Victoria did not comment. She watched a emerald green toad leisurely hop behind a concealing fern. Phoebe pounced on the hiding place with a kittenish growl. Came up with nothing but a mouthful of fern and a disgruntled expression. Victoria smiled.

“I’ve never seen a gulun take to anyone before,” Aloe declared. “It makes me wonder what kind of magic you have.”

“I don’t have any magic.”

The sidhe shrugged. “How did you get here from the human place then? It takes great magic to do that nowadays.”

“I was taken. I and my… fiancée. By an ogre and goblins and a spriggan.” She giggled at the way that sounded. Taken by an ogre. “Oh, and the assassin.”

“Ciagenii,” Aloe corrected her. “It’s not just any old assassin we’re talking about. The fairies for all their foolishness would know the difference. There aren’t many Ciagenii. Not many at all. Only a very great lord would have one. What great lord wanted you?”

Helplessly Victoria shrugged. “I don’t know. They were not very talkative.”

“No, they wouldn’t be.” She clutched her hands behind her back again, which seemed a tendency when she was deep in thought. Her skin was ochre in the light filtering down through the leaves. Victoria was vaguely jealous of the smooth perfection of it.

“I think,” Aloe finally said, “that I should take you to someone who knows more of your world than I.”

“They still have him,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“Alex. How will I find him?”

“If it matters, you will. The Four know. The Four are lenient to lovers.”

Victoria blinked at her. Aloe smiled. “The world spirits. Mother Earth, Father Sky. Their children, Water and Flame. They look after as all.”

“Oh.”

“Who looks after you?” Aloe looked genuinely interested.

“God.” A whisper. A prayer.

“Just God? No name?”

“Just God,” Victoria agreed.

“I don’t think he has influence here,”

Aloe stated dubiously.

Victoria hoped desperately that he did.

They slept in the bowl of a great tree, high among the branches in a bed layered with moss and dried leaves. Victoria curled with the cub, secure and lonely, while the sidhe took a higher perch.

Victoria missed the warmth of Alex’s arms. She missed him lying to her and telling her that things would be all right.

He was so rooted in his desire to shield her from the world. It was endearing and comforting and sometimes, just a little stifling. He tried so hard to protect her and be her rock of Gibraltar. He would die if he knew she stayed awake some nights listening to him whimper in his sleep.

Reliving horrors of a war that so many young men had felt it their duty to participate in.

Foolish. Women knew. Women knew the hopelessness of war. Women knew the scars their men tried to hide. And said nothing, because men were men and stubborn, and women were women and pliable. That was the difference, she thought, between the sexes. Women bent and changed under stress. They had to.

Men stood rigid and either conquered it or broke from trying.

She had a strange dream. One that should have warmed her, but instead left her uncertain and cold. She dreamed she was standing in a high place. A wonderful place that towered with the trees. She was crying. Out of love, out of relief. Alex stood before her, looking as if he were on the verge of doing the same. He embraced her. He loved her, he said. More than anything. He gave her a gift. A small bit of nothing that she could not exactly put a form to. He closed her fingers over it, holding her hand closed with his own. She felt joy, elation, for she wanted this gift more than she had ever wanted of anything and Alex had given it to her. He looked sad. He turned away from her and she cried out, clutching him, her cheek to his back. And he faded from her. She was alone. She opened her hand and looked….

….and woke up with Phoebe licking her face. Phoebe smelled of blood and fresh meat and looked suspiciously content. Victoria sat up and stretched. Her joints cracked. Her hair was matted with moss and leaves. Her belly complained for lack of food. Aloe was gone.

She frowned and debated whether to stay in the tree or dare the ground. Her legs were so stiff and cramped, she decided on the ground. She climbed down and made a circuit of the tree, stepping over gnarled, upthrust roots. She picked debris from her hair as she did, watching with amusement as Phoebe made her way clumsily down to earth. Aloe appeared not long after, bearing an armful of fruit. She handed a few to Victoria. They were sweet, and juicy and entirely wonderful.

She devoured them. Aloe laughed at her hunger.

“You’re a very strange human woman,” the sidhe commented.

Wiping her mouth on the back of her arm, Victoria arched a brow. “Why is that?”

“You just are.” And that was that.

The day passed. The forest thinned, and by evening it was less a jungle they walked through than a fine grove of spaced pines and grass covered ground. A fern occasionally popped its head up, but all in all the undergrowth was sparse. It made travel considerably easier. The sprites danced around them as evening fell. Aloe ignored them. Victoria grinned at their antics.

They slept in a bed of ferns under a towering pine. There was just a hint of stars in the sky. It was very nice to know the sky was still up there. After so many days under a ceiling of leaves. Aloe sat with her back against the tree and teased the two sprites that had appeared to pester them. Victoria watched her in amazement.

A point of light appeared at her finger tip.

She sent it roving out to chase first one sprite then the other. The soft greenish glow of it made her face seem even less human. The impish smile did not help.

Victoria stared at the sidhe-constructed point of light. It was every bit as deft as the sprites. Aloe controlled it with twitches of the finger it had been born of.

Victoria watched the finger, then the sidhe in wonderment for the capacity of magic.

Faintly she saw a glowing nimbus that surrounded the girl. A spark of inner light so much more complex and wonderful than those of the fairies to be almost a different thing entirely. But it was not. It was the same. Just so much more. Victoria wondered if it were Aloe herself or sidhe in general who shined so much more brightly.

Aloe turned and caught her staring.

Her brows drew a bit, then narrowed and the glow of inner light was cut off as if a door had slammed shut. The sidhe glared at Victoria accusingly.

“How dare you intrude?”

Victoria gaped, wondering what blunder she had made. “Intrude? How?”

Aloe pouted, as if she thought Victoria were feigning ignorance. She said with stiff correctness, “It’s not polite to stare at another’s soul.”

“I wasn’t staring…well I was, but I didn’t know…. I couldn’t help. I’m so sorry I intruded.”

Aloe sniffed, mollified by the apology. “Well, since you didn’t know, I forgive you. Only blood kin and lovers and the closest of friends have the right to look on another’s soul. It is very private.”

“The fairies…they were so open. I could see right through them. They didn’t seem to mind.”

“They’re tramps, the lot of them,”

Aloe informed her. “And mindless. None of them could put up a shield if they tried.”

“They were really fairly shallow compared to your – uh – soul.”

“I should think so.” Aloe eyed her warily for a moment, then sank back down against the tree. “I wonder what a human soul looks like?”

“Can’t you see?”

“As I said, it is impolite to pry.”

“I never saw souls before,” Victoria murmured drowsily. “This place is fantastical.”

“Who says it is the place?”

The forest ended all together the next day. One moment, they were walking in the shade of tall, graceful trees and the next, the vast expanse of a rolling, grass covered land stared back at them. As far as the eye could see the hills roamed.

Gentle, perfect mounds that were like nothing so much as a desert of green covered dunes. The forest was like an unbroken line at the boarder. Amazingly straight and clear cut. Victoria stared in awe. Her abused bare feet took delight in the soft grass. Phoebe curled about her ankles, emitting an air of uncertainty. A gulun knew very well where it belonged and it was not in the unbroken land of a plain. Victoria crouched down to scratch behind her ears. Aloe hardly hesitated at all.

“Hollow Hills,” she said matter-of-factly.

Victoria blinked up at her owlishly.

Another name out of myth. “And I suppose that elves live under those hills, celebrating endlessly.”

“Elves? I should hope not. Any decent folk would move away were that the case. Who wants an elf for a neighbor? There are sidhe here. Lesser sidhe of course. High sidhe don’t live under the earth.”

Victoria gave her a quizzical look.

Aloe was beginning to sound distinctly prejudiced.

“You are, I take it, high sidhe.”

Aloe sniffed. “Of course.”

“Are there any in this land that are quite your equal?”

Aloe returned her gaze for a long moment. Very slowly she smiled.

“Not many.”

“I thought not.” Victoria hid a grin of her own and strode out onto the plain.

Aloe followed. After a long, uncertain moment, so did the gulun. Its plaintive mewing let them know just how unhappy it was to be leaving the sheltering arms of the forest.

The hills took more energy than the forest. To avoid walking up one, you had to travel twice as far to go around. And the ground was not quite so smooth and pleasant as it looked from a distance.

There were shallow stream beds that snaked through the region, some dry and littered with sharp rocks, others deep enough to wade through up to the waist.

There were deep valleys with steep sided walls, where shadow lurked forebodingly and Aloe cautioned against venturing into.

There was a never-ending chorus of insects. Phoebe ate her fill of hopping cricket-like things.

The moon came out and with it a spattering of stars. This sky at least was not so very different from her own. Aloe pointed to a distant hill.

“We can rest there.”

Victoria nodded, thinking of grass under her cheek and cool air on her skin. It was a nice prospect. But it was too simple. Nothing here was so mundane.

Aloe walked to the foot of the hill and stopped. She placed hands on her hips and leaned back.

“Ware, cousins, are you home?” she cried out to the night. Victoria looked to her, startled. Somewhere out of the air a thin voice called.

“Who wants to know?”

“Aloe Eberillan et Liosalfar.”

There was a longer pause, then a man-high square of the hill caved in upon itself and warm light poured out into the night. Aloe grinned and strode forward.

After a moment’s hesitation, Victoria followed. And found herself in air that was warm and sweet, filled with voices and laughter. A dozen or two faces gazed at them raptly. That many again were too busy engaged in eating or drinking to notice. The little man that stood at the door waved them in impatiently and pushed the panel of earth back into place.

Victoria looked up and about. One would never guess one was under a hill. The ceiling was tall and though domed, not of raw earth. The floor was wide and flat and covered with long tables. There was a large space in the middle for dancing. No one used it at the moment. Around the far wall, there seemed to be stairs leading down. Where the light was coming from, she had no guess. There were no candles or torches.

The man at the door stood about even with Victoria’s eyes. He was not as old appearing as she had first thought. He was just small and fine-boned, with hair that was steel colored rather than gray. Most of the people here stood of similar height, though complexion and coloring varied.

They were all striking. Some beautiful. All talkative and lively.

The doorkeeper kept a keen eye on Aloe, a keener eye on the cub at Victoria’s feet. “Keeping strange company, Liosalfar,” he commented.

Aloe shrugged. “I’ve kept stranger. I quest for shelter this night. Will you grant it?”

“Ask it of the Father.”

Aloe inclined her head, signaled Victoria with a flick of her eyes and moved through the press of lesser sidhe.

Victoria followed, sliding past bodies and faces that gawked at her. Perhaps they stared at Phoebe, who laid back her ears very fiercely and looked absolutely forbidding. They stopped at the head of the largest table and Aloe bowed from the waist to the man that sat there. His skin was smooth, and his limbs straight, yet there was an air of antiquity about him.