The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (11 page)

Eventually the conversation turned to Trebor’s predicament.

“I don’t see why they’d kick you out,” Michael said. “There
aren’t any denarae paladins or trainees, and I should think they would keep you
if only to make an attempt at equality. This is the Prism we’re talking about,
after all.”

“Good in theory, poor in practice,” Danner said after
swallowing a mouthful of steak. “If you want real equality, you can’t accept or
deny someone based on their race. If Trebor was an absolutely horrible trainee
– sorry,
Treb
, just a for-instance – and they kept or
accepted him just because of his race, it would cheapen everyone else’s hard
work. I hate to agree with him, but Morningham had it right. The only fair way
to evaluate this is based on his character and training.

“Basing it off race either way is equally unjust.”

After dinner, they all dispersed throughout the house to
relax for the night. Garnet and Michael sat brooding over a game of castles,
while Flasch looked eagerly on and periodically repeated his challenge to play
the winner of their game. Trebor went to bed early, and Marc curled up by the
fire with a thick book in his hands. Faldergash and
Gabruella
went into the kitchen to do dishes, which left Danner to his own devices.

He stepped outside and shivered slightly. It was late
autumn, and the nights were turning from chilly to just plain cold. Danner
reached inside and grabbed a blanket from a nearby chair, then walked out to
sit on the steps. He was still confused and didn’t know what to think about…

Alicia. She was sitting on the steps where Danner was
heading. The creak of his feet on the boards of the porch had already revealed
his presence, so he could either walk past her, turn around and go back inside,
or else sit down and pretend everything was okay. Of the three choices, the
third one made him the most nervous, but the other two would be rude.

“Oh, what the Hell,” he murmured grumpily to himself.

Danner took the last few feet to the steps as calmly as he
could, then sat down as far away from Alicia as possible without falling off
the steps. He avoided seeming rude by leaning back against one of the support
poles for the roof, so his body was half-turned toward her.

She glanced over at him, then looked away toward whatever
she’d been staring at before he appeared. She was wearing a long-sleeved tunic,
but Danner didn’t think it was thick enough to ward off the oncoming chill of
the night. Unfortunately, the last time he’d tried to give her his jacket to
warm up, she’d slapped him for it. That was the last time he’d seen her before
she showed up in Nocka to accuse him of raping her.

“What’s going on inside?” she asked softly.

Danner was so surprised she’d spoken so calmly to him that
at first he was speechless. Finally he managed, “Oh, the usual. Marc’s got a
book, Flasch is looking to show people how clever he is, and Faldergash is
probably bickering with
Gabruella
in the kitchen.”
Danner smiled.

“And Danner goes off to be by himself and brood,” Alicia
said. Danner’s smile faded.

“Well, I like to think I’ve got a lot to worry about, what
with the world on the brink of war with Hell and all,” Danner said with forced
lightness. “One of my best friends may get kicked out of our training, my
uncle’s off hunting demons, a hostile country may be on the verge of invading,
and oh yeah, my
mo
…” Danner stopped, suddenly
remembering that they hadn’t told Alicia about Danner’s possible heritage. She
didn’t know about the incident with the demon, at least not all the details.
She knew Danner had killed it, but they’d glossed over the part about him
sprouting wings.

Fortunately, Alicia was too preoccupied to notice his slip.
After only a moment’s silence, she said, “And you still feel uncomfortable
being around your friend’s sister.”

Damn
, he thought. How did she manage to upset his
thoughts so much by saying so little?

“Well, a little, yeah,” he admitted, knowing it would be
better to say it outright than try to dance around the issue. “With good
reason, I think.”

Alicia’s mouth drooped into a wry smile.

“I guess I haven’t made it especially easy on you, have I?”

“It’s not your fault, Alicia,” Danner said softly. “I can
only imagine how you must feel, seeing me and remembering what happened. I just
wish there was some way past this awkwardness that I think we both feel.”

There, he’d said it. Now if only she’d talk to him about it.

She was silent. Just when Danner was about to say something
else, either to coax her to speak or else to say it was alright for her not to,
she took a deep breath and Danner snapped his jaw shut.

“It feels strange,” she said at last, “because my memory is
telling me one thing. I
know
what I saw, and I saw
you
. I saw
your face leering over me, and that’s not an easy thing to get out of my mind.
But I know the truth now, and I know it wasn’t you, it was the demon who r… who
raped me,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “One of the things that fueled
my anger was the unshakable feeling that you never would have done something
like that, even though I barely knew you. I couldn’t shake that surety, and I
hated you for making me so sure even though I thought I knew otherwise.”

Danner looked at her face and saw a sparkle of moonlight on
her cheek where a tear slid slowly down from her eye.

“Part of me sees you and wants to scream, and the rest of me
is telling it that no, it wasn’t you,” she said, then sniffed softly. “It gets
me so tangled up I don’t know what to do or say, because I’m afraid the wrong
thing will come out.”

She fell silent again.

“You’re saying it to me now, and I don’t hear anything wrong
coming out,” Danner said gently.

“I’m not looking at you,” she said. Danner could barely hear
her, she was so quiet.

“Then look at me, Alicia,” Danner said, and he leaned
forward off the post. They were just over an arm’s length apart now. Alicia
turned to look at Danner. On an impulse, Danner reached forward and, without
breaking eye contact, took her hand in his. Her fingers were cold, but she
didn’t resist.

Then her fingers twined about his and they sat quietly in
the night, holding hands, both reluctant to look away. Finally Danner blinked,
and they both looked down at their hands.

They fit pretty well
together,
he thought absently.

She shivered slightly, and her hand slipped from his as she
wrapped her arms around herself. Danner smiled.

“I’m giving you fair warning, I’m about to put this blanket
over your shoulder,” he said. “You’re not going to smack me, are you?”

“Try it and find out,” she said, her voice slightly
challenging.

Danner shrugged and draped one arm over her shoulder,
covering her with half the blanket he’d brought. He hesitated, then left his
arm where it was. Alicia’s left arm stole around his waist, pulling him
alongside her. When Danner looked down, he saw their free hands had somehow
already drifted together and were twined about each other, fingers interlocked.

In silence, they sat and watched the stars glimmering in the
sky.

Only light can banish darkness. Believing in light or disbelieving in
the darkness will shed no illumination, nor allow us to see any more clearly.

- King
Deirion
El’Eleisha
,

private journals (603 AM)

- 1 -

On Niday, a few days after their meeting and immediate
parting, Hoil’s ship pulled into the port at
El’antor’ma
.
Even from a distance, the city took Birch’s breath away. Up close, it was
dazzling to the mind.

The elves hadn’t so much built their city as they had
crafted it out of the living earth. Some homes were carved into miniature hills
of sparkling pink or white granite, and every available surface was sculpted
into various shapes and designs. One doorway was surmounted by a strand of
stone-white ivy leaves that looked so delicate Birch was surprised they didn’t
twitch in the wind. At first, Birch thought each of the stone buildings was
multi-storied, but after a moment’s study, he realized there were no
ground-floor entrances. Either the elves used the space where the ground floor
would be as a cellar, or else it went unused entirely.

When Birch asked Maran, he found that the latter was true.

“Elves build upwards, Birch,” Maran said in his soft voice.
“The ground is for walking on, not for living on. Most of my people believe
that to live on the ground is a curse from God given only to the lesser races.”

Birch quirked an eyebrow.

“A racial conceit,” Maran admitted blandly and without
embarrassment. “As a whole, your race believes itself superior to the
non-humans, mine believes itself superior to the non-elves. It seems they may
not be so unlike after all, yes?” Maran leaned closer to Birch and murmured, “I
once called Hoil a demi-elf, and I’m not sure he got the joke.”

Birch snorted and resumed his study of the elven city.

Those elves who didn’t live in the stone-carved homes had
also followed the racial tendency Maran had mentioned; they built upward… into
the trees. There were no buildings here as a human would think of them.
Instead, the elves used the trunks of the trees as their support beams and the
branches as their walls, floors, and ceilings.

The trees here were unlike any Birch had ever seen. The
branches seemed unnaturally thickly foliaged, and there were whole layers of
the forest where the branches grew at a uniform height, creating a largely
solid ground on which the light-footed elves could walk with ease.

“You see there, and there, the solid walls between those
trees?” Maran asked, pointing up into the forest. “Those are the walls of
homes. The branches are woven together carefully to create a solid wall, and
the size of the home is limited only by how many trees the owner wishes to
weave together without running into a neighbor or closing off a walkway. And of
course, they can’t build directly over another home, lest they be cast in
perpetual shadow.”

“It’s a forest, Maran,” Hoil objected. “The canopy casts
everything in shadow.”

The elf shook his head. “There is a difference between shade
provided by nature and a shadow cast by a fellow man. Light and life are
central to elven identity, perhaps to a fault.”

“These tree houses you mentioned,” Nuse said, frowning.
“Don’t you have to chop off a lot of branches to do that?”

Maran blinked, then shook his head.

“No, Blue paladin, we do not chop off anything,” he said
softly. “The branches woven together are grown straight out of the tree, one
atop the other. The floor is thickened so it not only
seems
solid, it
is
a solid mass of wood.”

He glanced at their uncomprehending faces and sighed. Danner
had understood this immediately. Maran had forgotten how wonderful it was
teaching his quick-witted
to’vala
.
[13]
Of course, Danner also had some
knowledge of elven “magic” and had seen some of Maran’s Weaving firsthand. Not
that he knew exactly what he was seeing, Maran had been careful about that.

“Here,” Maran said to Nuse, “hold out your hands into fists.
Now, this fist is a tree trunk and this fist is a tree trunk. Clear?”

Nuse nodded.

“Now, say these trees are twenty feet apart. Branches, in
this case your fingers, are grown out from the tree and interwoven, like so,”
Maran said, pulling
Nuse’s
fingers apart and
interlocking them one atop the other, so there were no gaps between his
fingers. “Imagine those branches interweaving so tightly there is no space at
all, and you see how we build our walls. They grow to form one solid whole.”

“But how do you do that?” Hoil asked.

“Elven magic,” Maran answered. “The magic of light and
nature.”

“There’s no such thing as magic,” Nuse said, a bit
dubiously. “That heretical absurdity was stamped out centuries ago.”

“Well, we certainly don’t build these walls by just asking
the trees nicely,” Maran said, his soft voice laced with sarcasm. “One might
consider your praying to God and healing wounds to be magic.”

“But that is a blessing from God and a holy miracle,”
Perklet said, speaking for the first time. “No one claims we’re doing magic.”

“That’s because you’re not, though the difference is
semantic,” Maran said. “What elves do
is
what you might call magic,
though we use the term Weaving. Weaving of any sort is a difficult task, and
only a small percentage of elves have the innate talent and the training
necessary. Minor
Woodweavers
make and maintain homes,
and the guild keeps its numbers high enough that making homes is relatively
easy, depending on what you want. Lightweaving… that’s something else
entirely.”

“So who does the stone work?” Nuse asked. “Or are all elves
just naturally gifted sculptors?”

Maran was silent a moment before answering.

“The four sects of the elven nation are based on the four branches
of Weaving. The Stoneweavers of the Li sect are the lowest of the Weavers, no
matter their skill,” Maran said. “They are as numerous as minor
Woodweavers
of the Si sect, but they are a lower class, as
befits those who work with lowly stone. The Lightweavers of El are the most
valued of Weavers, for theirs is the skill of luminescence and beauty. Their
training is most difficult and highly structured to prevent them from becoming
Shadowweavers.”

“Shadow…” Birch began.

“The Do sect,” Maran answered, pronouncing the word like
doe
.
“Weavers of illusion and deception. They have no social class, for they are
outcast.” He wasn’t looking at them, but was instead staring into the shadows
of the forest, his face an emotionless mask. “Understand that I tell you this
at great peril. Do not mention Shadowweavers to anyone if you value your life,
most especially to anyone in my family or in the palace at all. Shadowweavers,
and to a lesser extent the entire Do sect, are taboo among my people, and their
existence is not something most elves care to contemplate, much less admit.
They would rather fool themselves to believe the darkness doesn’t exist at all,
as though to deny it verbal utterance or credence could make it go away
entirely.