DemonWars Saga Volume 1 (17 page)

He paused and very carefully turned a circuit, listening intently, trying to focus on the sound. His direction chosen, he started off, determined to find the singer.

Many times that night, Elbryan believed that he was close Many times, he rushed around a bend in the trail or jumped out from behind a tree, expecting to catch an elf at song, and once he thought he glimpsed the light of a distant torch.

The song was strong, though not loud, with many voices joining in, but Elbryan never caught a glimpse of any of the singers, saw no elf nor any other creature the rest of that night.

Juraviel found him at dawn, curled in a hollow at the base of a wide oak.

It was time to begin.

Elbryan rolled his breeches up over his knees — not that the worn and ragged pants would stay that way for long! — and touched the dark water with his toe.

Cold. It was always cold; the boy didn't know why he even bothered testing it each morning before plunging in.

From somewhere in the thick brush behind him, he heard a call, "Be quick about it!" The words were not spoken in the common tongue of Honce-the-Bear but in the singsong, melodious language of the elves, a language Elbryan was already beginning to comprehend.

Elbryan glared over his shoulder in the general direction of the voice, though he knew he would not see one of the Touel'alfar. He had been in Andur'Blough Inninness for three months, had watched winter settle over the land just outside the elven valley and in a few places within the enchanted vale.

Elbryan didn't know exactly where Andur'Blough Inninness was located, but he suspected they were somewhere in the northern latitudes of Corona, beyond the Wilderlands border of Honce-the-Bear. By his reckoning, the winter solstice had passed, and he knew Dundalis, or what was left of the village, was likely under several feel of snow. He remembered well the hardships, and the excitement, of Dundalis in the winter, the gusting wind throwing icy particles against the side of the cabin, the piles of blowing snow, sometimes so deep that he and his father had to break through a drift just to get outside!

It wasn't like that in Andur'Blough Inninness. Some magic. probably the same enchantment that brought the daily blanket of fog, kept the winter season much warmer and more gentle. The northern end of the valley was carpeted by snow, but only a few inches, and the small pond up there was frozen solid —
Elbryan had once seen a handful of elves dancing and playing on the ice. But many of the hardier plants had kept their summer hue, many flowers still bloomed, and this reedy bog, the one place in all the valley that Elbryan had truly come to hate, had not frozen. The water was chilly, but not more so than it had been on the first day Elbryan had been told to go in, back when the season was still autumn.

The boy took a deep breath and plunged one foot in, held the pose for a moment until the numbness took away the sting, then dipped in his second foot.

He picked up his basket, cursed when one pant leg slipped down into the water, then waded out through the reeds. The cold mud squishing through his toes felt good, at least.

"Be quick about it!" came the predictable call again from the brush, and it was repeated several times, sometimes in elven and sometimes in the common human tongue, by different voices in different places. The elves were taunting him, the boy knew. They were always taunting, always complaining, always pointing out his all too numerous shortcomings.

To his credit, Elbryan had pretty much learned to ignore them.

Parting one patch of reeds, the boy found his first stone of the day, bobbing low in the water. He scooped it out and dropped it into his basket, then moved along to a group of nearly a dozen bobbing stones. He recognized which ones were too high in the water, and plunged them under, trying to saturate the spongelike rocks a bit more before taking them out. When he squeezed them, extracting the now-flavored liquid, the elves would inevitably complain about how little he had collected.

It was yet another part of this unchanging daily ritual.

Soon the basket was full, so Elbryan hauled it back to the bank and collected another one. Thus it went for the bulk of the morning, for the bulk of every morning: the boy moving carefully about the chilly bog, collecting ten baskets of milk-stones.

That was the easy part of Elbryan's day, for then he had to haul the heavy baskets, one at a rime, nearly half a mile to the collecting trough. He had to be fast, for he could lose precious time at this point and then would have to suffer almost continual insult from the unseen elves. "Five miles laden, five miles empty," was the way Belli'mar Juraviel had described this part of his work. Ironically, the laden section of each trip seemed the easiest to Elbryan, for the elves often set traps for him on the journey back to the bog. These weren't particularly nasty traps, designed more to embarrass than to injure. A trip line here, a disguised patch of slick mud on a corner there. The worst part of falling victim to one of the snares was hearing the laughter as he tried to extract himself from whatever had hold of him, be it a thorny bush or some of
those silken elven strands, which, Elbryan found out soon enough, could be made as sticky and clingy as a spiderweb.

He got his reward for his morning's toils when he returned to the bog to collect the tenth loaded basket. There, every day, he would eat his midday meal
— though at first, it was usually halfway through the afternoon before Elbryan got a chance to taste it. The elves would set out a grand table, steaming stew and venison, sometimes roasted game fowl, and piping hot tea that warmed the boy from his head to his cold toes. Always it was a hot meal they set, and Elbryan soon understood why. The elves would put the food out at exactly the same time every day, but if he was not fast enough, "tolque ne 'pesil siq'el palouviel, "
or, "the steam would be off the stew," as one particularly nasty elf, a deceivingly delicate maiden named Tuntun, had often chided him.

So Elbryan ran, stumbling with his ninth basket, knowing that any stone he dropped into the dirt would be useless for that day. Carefully placing the basket at last at the trough, the boy then sprinted full out the half mile back to the bog. He ate a cold lunch every day at first, but gradually, as the terrain became more familiar and his legs became stronger, as he grew to recognize and thus avoid many of the devilish elven traps, he graduated to warm food.

This day, Elbryan resolved, that tea would burn his tongue!

He put the ninth basket down by the trough right on schedule, took one deep breath, clearing his thoughts and remembering the last layout of the elvish obstacle course. For only the third time in all these weeks, the lunch had not yet been set out when Elbryan had collected the ninth basket. On those first two occasions, the hopeful lad had fallen victim to ever more cunning elvish traps.

"Not this time," he said quietly, determinedly; and he started his sprint.

He spotted mud at one sharp bend; without slowing, Elbryan leaped atop a stone at the elbow of the trail and skipped off it, landing beyond the slick area. With the aid of a slanting sunbeam poking down through a break in the leafy boughs, he then spotted a series of nearly translucent trip lines, of height ranging from ankle to knee, blocking one long straight section of the trail. Elbryan considered veering off the trail, crashing through the brush, then slowed, thinking he should just walk past this obvious trap.

"Not today," Elbryan growled, and he put his head down and ran on, full speed. He found his visual focus quickly, locking his eyes upon a point just one step ahead, and high-stepped his way through the region, getting his feet up over every single trip line.

Laughter trailed him as he sped away, and Elbryan sensed that there was some measure of admiration in it.

Within a couple of minutes, his goal — the bog, the basket, the meal —
was in sight; down the last stretch of path. Here, high stones lined both sides of the trail, making passage off the path nearly impossible unless Elbryan took a circuitous route quite deep into the underbrush.

He slowed to a near walk, opting for caution and understanding that an extra few seconds would make no difference in the quality of his meal.

They had dug a pit — how could they have done that so quickly? — and had cleverly covered it with a layer of dirt and fallen leaves, supported by a trellis of woven sticks. Despite the addition of the pit, the path appeared almost exactly the same as it had on all of his previous returns.

Almost exactly.

Elbryan crouched and tamped down his feet, thinking to take a few running strides and then leap the trap. He stopped before he had really begun, though, catching the sound of a soft titter on the breeze.

A smile widened on the boy's face. He wagged his finger at the underbrush.

"Well done," he congratulated, then he moved to the edge of the apparent pit and pulled aside the phony trellis.

The real pit, he discovered was several feet beyond the apparent pit. He would have leaped clear of the phony, only to drop heavily into the real one.

Now it was Elbryan's turn to laugh, as he discerned the dimensions of the true trap, then easily leaped it, leaving the last few feet of the path, the last expanse to the food, open to him.