‘I do ask you.’
‘He’s vain, arrogant, spoiled–’
‘A typical elven noble then…’
‘Wait until you meet him. He is a veritable paragon of elven flaws. If I wanted to pick one elf to exemplify all that is bad in our people, it would be him.’
‘I am starting to suspect you don’t like him.’
‘And to think people call you slow of mind. Such perceptiveness, Prince Tyrion…’
‘Most people assume that no one so beautiful could be so clever,’ said Tyrion.
‘I see you are ramping up your egotism to compete with Prince Perian,’ said Atharis. ‘A bold strategy.’
‘I am going to have to, aren’t I? It’s going to be like rutting deer competing to see who leads the herd, isn’t it?’
‘Not the metaphor I would have chosen, but yes. We really should get our tame poet working on your verses.’
‘Is there anyone else I should know about?’ Tyrion asked.
‘At least a dozen, if you can stand being bored with the details. And I am sure there will be those I have missed. There’s always some dark horse who enters these tournaments.’
‘You’d better get started then…’
Tyrion and Atharis sat inside his tent, lounging on pillows and sleeping mats and drinking fine old wine from filigreed silver goblets. Tyrion could smell food being cooked and hear his bodyguard sitting around gossiping outside. They had spent most of the afternoon discussing Tyrion’s potential opponents. There were no shortage of them.
‘Well, we are here,’ said Atharis, raising his goblet in a toast.
‘Yes. Our epic quest has been accomplished,’ said Tyrion. ‘After many hardships we have finally reached our goal. I wonder how we managed to survive days of riding through these deadly forests. I think I saw some particularly savage-looking sheep at one point that filled my heart with dread.’
‘There is no need to sound so satirical, my prince. We
are
a long way from civilisation now.’
‘How will we endure life among these rustics? Missing Lothern already, Atharis?’
‘I would not speak too loudly about the rustic charms of our present neighbourhood. Those Maiden Guard look as if they might carve you up for it. So do many of the yokels.’
Tyrion wondered whether his friend really felt that way, or whether he just felt out of his depth away from the city he knew and loved, and surrounded by the great woods and their inhabitants.
‘This is a lovely place,’ Tyrion said.
‘It might be lovelier if it were not so crowded. I swear there are more people here than in the streets of the Foreigners’ Quarter.’
‘There are certainly more elves. So this is where our people have been hiding all this time. I was wondering.’
‘This is probably the largest gathering these woods have seen in centuries. Warriors have come here from all over Ulthuan for the tournament. There are probably many still here from the coronation. They just can’t be bothered to set off home yet. The lazy bastards.’
‘I can understand that. There is something in the air here that encourages lingering.’
‘I trust you, too, are not going to go all rustic on us? I think that would be just too much.’
‘I meant it literally. I think there is some magic in the air here that clouds people’s minds. Can’t you feel it? There is a pulse of tranquillity about us.’
‘I thought that was just all the dreamsmoke in the air. I wonder where I might get some. It may make our stay here more endurable.’
‘I shall leave you in charge of that. I am going to take a look around.’
‘Don’t get lost, and try not to fall in with any of the local enchantresses. You may find that you never want to leave.’
‘I don’t think there is much danger of that,’ Tyrion said, rising to his feet and striding towards the doorway.
‘If you find any dreamsmoke vendors, bring me back some,’ said Atharis.
‘Find your own,’ said Tyrion.
Tyrion wandered through the vast city of tents, feeling very much a stranger. In some ways it reminded him of the jungles of Lustria. All around were trees, some of the gigantic ancient things thousands of years old.
It did not feel as close or threatening as the jungle had and there were no poisonous snakes or biting insects that he could detect. Instead there were lots of elves. They had come from every corner of Ulthuan to attend the court of the Everqueen.
He wondered how many of these people danced constant attendance on the Everqueen and how many of them were here for the tournament.
As always, people stared at him. He was used to that and he paid it no more mind than he would have in the streets of Lothern. He rather enjoyed it as a matter of fact, particularly when the onlookers were women. He smiled at anyone who caught his eye and did his best to look amiable.
Teclis would hate this place. His brother did not like being the centre of attention or being surrounded by crowds of people. He would doubtless have something sarcastic to say about all of these happy, thoughtless revellers. He wondered how much of what he was seeing was the product of magic. Teclis would’ve known, of course. He lacked his brother’s sensitivity to the flows of the winds of magic.
Even he suspected that some spell was at work here. The people look too happy, too energetic, too thrilled, even for elves in the mood for merrymaking. An atmosphere of almost complacent contentment hovered over this place. Every single person that he saw really wanted to be here and was really happy with the fact that they were. He could not think of any other place he had ever been in his life where that was true. Over the city of Lothern, for all its thrilling commercial energy, a certain melancholy brooded, shadowing even the happiest festival days.
This place reminded him, in an odd elliptic sort of way, of the atmosphere in the Shrine of Asuryan. There was the same sense of some ancient power touching the world. A girl danced by, flowers in her hair and a smile upon her lips. She blew him a kiss as she passed and, smiling, he answered in kind. She skipped back over to him and looked at him closely, examining him frankly and with considerable appreciation. He looked back at her in the same way, unembarrassed. He had heard tales of the way people behaved at the court of the Everqueen and he was determined to fit in as well here as he did everywhere else.
‘You’re here for the tournament?’ The girl asked.
‘I am indeed,’ Tyrion replied.
‘You hope to become her champion?’
‘I am unsure about that,’ he replied.
She laughed. The sound was like the tinkling of silver bells. ‘You’re unsure? How is that possible?’
‘It is a very long story,’ Tyrion said.
‘We are elves. If we do not have time for long stories, who does? My name is Lyla’
‘Mine is Tyrion.’
‘Like the hero of the Shrine of Asuryan?’
‘Exactly the same.’
‘I had heard he was as good looking as you.’
‘That is quite possible.’
‘You are he, are you not?’
‘I was at the Shrine when it was attacked. I do not think I was all that heroic. I was hiding in it at the time the daemon came.’
‘Do you have a twin brother who is a great sorcerer?’
‘I have a twin who is studying at Hoeth. Although I am not sure he is all that great a sorcerer. He would probably tell you he was.’
‘Let us drink wine. I am curious about you now.’
‘Lead on,’ said Tyrion. Ten minutes later they were naked in her tent. There was something to be said for the festival atmosphere of this place, he thought.
Tyrion took leave of Lyla and continued on his way.
As he walked through the cool shadows of Avelorn, Tyrion studied the people around him in a more leisurely fashion. This was a place utterly unlike Lothern. It moved to a different rhythm. Its people had a different attitude to time. They seemed more relaxed.
He watched a circle of elves gathered round a poet declaiming the ancient epic of Caledor the Conqueror. They knew the words, mouthing them silently as the poet spoke.
Tyrion watched them watching the poet. He knew the work and knew the reciter had been about his business for hours and most likely would still be speaking at sunset. These people had the time and the interest to do this, to watch the performance while other elves, selected by lot or from the family retainers, brought them food and wine. It was the sort of reading that you only saw in abbreviated form among the busy money-making elves of Lothern. It was like stepping back into the past, into the golden age of the first Everqueen, and he knew it was deliberately so.
He looked for notes of falseness and because he was looking, he found some. Here and there, some of the audience were asleep. Others paid no attention and inspected their nails, but this had probably been so during the golden age as well. Perhaps this was part of a different golden age, but a golden age nonetheless. These elves were keeping the old ways alive. They saw themselves as guardians of a certain sort of elfness, and he did not doubt that they were correct to do so.
Lothern was the future, if the elves were to have a future. It was commercial, home of an outward looking, sophisticated, mercantile Phoenix King. It was a city of trade, a hybrid cosmopolitan place where the elves mingled with other peoples and learned from them and adapted to the new and altered world.
In Avelorn, the elves were behaving as they had before the age of Aenarion. It was beautiful and moving and rather sad. Sad because all of this took an effort to maintain and it was dying away. It was an enclave frozen in amber.
No, he told himself. That was not fair. This place still lived. It was the beating heart of asur society. It was where artists and poets and dancers came, to compete, to find an appreciative audience, to seek fame and a certain kind of glory. It was not the sort of glory that he himself was interested in, but he could understand why some elves were.
He moved into another glade. Elves in green raiment practised archery, drawing and firing at targets hundreds of paces away. These were not competitors in the tournament he realised. These were just ordinary citizens of Avelorn, training with their weapons as was their right and duty. The practice made them the finest archers in the world, and the backbone of the elven citizen-armies.
He inspected them, as a general might inspect his troops. Each of them was an elf in his or her prime. All of them must have handled bows for decades, if not centuries. All of them were hale and hearty and would remain so for hundreds of years.
No other troops would or could have their skill or their discipline or their experience. Simply by virtue of still being alive for so long, they would have fought in dozens of skirmishes and battles. They would have survived encounters with numerous foes.
Like the poets he had just witnessed, they too were part of an older Ulthuan, one that dated from the age of Morvael, of the first great citizen-soldier levies. They were part of the culture. They too moved to a different beat than the elves of Lothern.
It came to Tyrion that elves like these could be found all over the island-continent. In aggregate, they must far outnumber the elves of Lothern although they had no single town or city that was even a fraction of the size of the city-state. Probably they were much more representative of the people as a whole. And they looked at least as much to the Everqueen as to the Phoenix King for leadership.
Perhaps for the first time in his life, in this place, he started to get a sense of what his own people were like, all of the folk beyond the city in which he lived and the mountains he had called home from his earliest youth.
For these people here, the folk of Lothern were something new and strange. The people here were the ones who represented the mainstream of life. Looking at them, he saw the majority of the elves as they wanted to see themselves and he realised that he was not at all like them.
He passed on, entering a vast clearing in the forest filled with silk pavilions and corrals for proud elven steeds. The symbol of the Everqueen was on everything and he realised that this must be the place in which she currently dwelled. Maiden Guards strolled everywhere, but no one looked at him suspiciously. It was inconceivable that anyone would want to harm the ruler of Avelorn.
Magic shimmered in the air, the sort of powerful conspicuous magic his brother could work. Beneath it he sensed the presence of another type of magic. The air was thick with it, a constant stream of something living, beneficial, potent. He remembered again the atmosphere of the Shrine of Asuryan, and the feeling here was of the same kind, although not produced by the same being.
In Asuryan’s Shrine the being had been of fire, powerful, destructive, mercurial, somewhat akin to Chaos. Here, whatever was present was slower, more placid, enduring, fertile. It was a spirit of earth and forest, and its locus of power was in this place. Or perhaps in the person of the Everqueen.
A thought struck him. Perhaps Lothern was a place of water. If the old magical schemata of the elemental universe was to be believed, then there must be a place of air as well. He wondered where that could be, and it struck him that perhaps the place was in the north, a place of cold and storm winds, perhaps where Malekith was.
He amused himself with such idle fantasies as he passed through the shadow of pavilions and onto the grounds where scores of elven artisans were at work creating the tournament fields.
A pulse of excitement started to beat in him. There was going to be a great contest here and he was going to take part in it. It was a ritual that had been enacted only a dozen times during the course of history, and it was one that had a significance that was embedded deeply in the nature of his people.
He understood that perhaps he was seeing things at an unusual time, during a change in reigns. The old queen was dead. The new queen was just that – new. The tone of her reign had yet to be set. Her likes and dislikes were as yet unknown. There were those who had known her as a child, and who thought they knew her as a woman, but they could not know what she was going to be like as the Everqueen. She was a butterfly newly emerged from that particular chrysalis and she might be changed as utterly as her relationships with those around her were going to be.