The Coming Storm (102 page)

How could she say it with Elon watching, with his dark, stern eyes on her?

She swallowed hard, her throat dry and her heart aching.

A whisper, “Yes.”

Behind her a rush of voices swept across the square, that word echoed, passed from one to another. From those that had heard to those who hadn’t or needed to hear it again.

Those sharp crow’s eyes were fixed on her.

Daran, High King.

There was triumph in his look but she cared little. His concerns weren’t hers, save where the Alliance was concerned. He had been right in that. The fractures showed. If this didn’t end, and soon, the Alliance would break. The enemy they’d fought so hard to defeat, the one who had ensorcelled her father and taken her mother’s life, would win and he had laughed that day on the plain.

Mornith wasn’t truly gone, only the most foolish believed he was. He would return.

Without the Alliance, the next time they would fall.

There was, always and also, Elon. He would recover from this, they would see his defense of her as brave, perhaps, an example of his integrity and strong sense of justice.

Not, however, if this continued.

He hadn’t made enemies yet but he was very close to it.

Goras had touched on fears no Elf would want to chance. If Elon – his sense of rightness and fairness violated – continued as he did, he would alienate many and offend others of his own race. Perhaps forever. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow them to use her to destroy him. Never.

Even so, the look on Avila’s face shocked her. She hadn’t wanted this defense. Hadn’t expected it. Furious disappointment and a searing glance of dislike swept over Jareth and Elon. The intensity of that look told Ailith far more than the Master would have wished if she’d known what Ailith saw. She knew now who had begun the whispers.

Ailith was quick to move her eyes away but she understood now.

A glimmering of foresight came to her.

Jareth, standing where Avila was, his face and form tenuous – this moment was the key.

Avila had her own agenda. She wanted a seat on the Council. Jareth had said so. By preference, she wanted a place on the dais. Not a triumvirate but a quartet. She longed to put wizards on equal footing with the three races, although wizards came from all.

An equal.

To accomplish that goal, she had to remove two obstacles. Elon and Jareth. Both were well regarded.

Jareth might be haphazard in dress and demeanor but not in his compassion, wisdom or skills. There were some who spoke of him as the next Master. Which made him a threat to her.

As for Elon, his integrity had never been questioned.

He, however, made no secret of his determination to keep that from happening, his dislike for Avila, for her scheming or ambitions clear. Avila was too arbitrary, too harsh and too quick to take offense and retaliate. There was something else as well, something in her very nature that disturbed him in some way Ailith couldn’t define.

Avila used this and would continue to use this to their detriment. She manipulated it all to achieve her own ends. To accomplish them, she would sacrifice anyone, destroy anyone, Elon, Jareth or anyone else who stood in her way, no matter the consequence to any or all.

Elon was the most vulnerable.

That bond between them, the one that was and the greater one that might someday be, hummed.

Her heart ached. Elves smiled so rarely and Elon more rarely still but she’d seen it. She’d even made him smile a time or two. She had hoped to do it more, and forever. It wasn’t to be.

Soul-bond
.

Even without it, she loved him with a fierceness and intensity she nearly couldn’t bear. Although she hadn’t known it then, she’d loved him from the first moment she’d come to him in desperate need and he hadn’t turned her away.

Even after he had discovered what she was.

Elon, I’m so sorry
, she thought. Would that she could tell him the truth and end the pain and the loneliness he’d borne so long.

The pain was so great, so great.

But she couldn’t, not without condemning him to an even worse fate.

A different tie joined her to Jareth.

She’d guarded his back and he hers, raised her sword alongside his. They were friends and more than friends. Shield-mates.

To lose the homely wizard she loved was to lose another friend nearly as true as Colath.

Behind her, the crowd murmured as Goras rose to his feet to roar in protest and denial, “No!”

Among those of the Council, a dozen voices spoke in a babble of comment, concern and outrage.

Over that and the murmuring of the crowd no one could hear what was said between her, Elon and Jareth.

Most especially what she said to Elon.

“Please forgive me, please. They meant for this to happen as it has. Avila will use me to destroy you, Elon, to hurt you and harm you and I swore I wouldn’t do that. Remember? I can’t do that, I can’t. They’ll use this to destroy you and Jareth both. The Alliance will fall. Because of me. Everything you struggled to build, all we fought for these long months. I fought for this Alliance, fought for all of it. I won’t be the means of  destroying it,” she said. “This can’t go on. It will destroy everything.”

Looking into her eyes, Elon saw what she knew and accepted, as his own Foresight laid it on him.

It was true, he couldn’t deny it.

Her anguish was shattering. There was so much pain, so much fear. For him. For the Alliance.

And so much courage, to face this alone. Her heart broke not for herself but for him.

Talesin had been right, they would destroy her for what she wasn’t, not what she was.

Leaning across, Daran grabbed Goras’s arm in as tight a grip as he could manage on that massive, heavily muscled limb.

It was like grasping an oak branch. He couldn’t close his fingers around it.

“Listen to me,” he said, furiously, urgently.

Angry eyes turned to him.

“Listen to me. Exile. She offers it freely. To the borderlands. Where all manner of fell creature that fled the battle now lives. She won’t be a martyr to plague us as others take up her banner. And they will. The Hunters, Woodsmen, common soldiers, those who fought besides her will rise up. Elon and Jareth will make certain of it. Not all fear her, even among your own people. It’s a gift, Goras, a gift. We’ll appear merciful rather than fearful and vengeful.”

The black eyes beneath thick, overhanging brows sharpened as they looked at him.

“Yes. You see it, don’t you? If she goes mad out there, what can she harm? Thieves, bandits, drows and such. Look at her. She may be Otherling but in all other aspect she’s of my race. Short-lived. She’s High-born, her father a lesser King. What does she know of living in such wilderness?”

Goras turned his great head and for the first time, really looked upon the thing.

Otherling.

Small. Fragile. She didn’t look even as strong as a Dwarven child.

Abomination.

He remembered Amarok. Vividly. And the bodies, both of those who had and hadn’t died in the collapse. The shock and the horror of it. It stoked his rage but he choked it back.

There was something here. There was that about Daran, he was clever in the way his people were clever, with his schemes and his plots. Goras would give him his chance to explain.

Or take his axe and end this madness and this Alliance with it.

He looked at Daran.

“She’ll likely die,” Daran said, “or go mad from the isolation. Many of them do. Especially in the barren and unforgiving lands of the Escarpment, with no solace or companionship, alone among drows, goblins, drakes. If she doesn’t, one of those fell creatures will take her, magic or no. It won’t be of our doing.”

Grinding his teeth, Goras looked upon her again.

Just her presence affronted him.

Exile. Into the borderlands. Exile wasn’t a concept he recognized.

The mountains, caves, caverns and tunnels in which you were born were your place. You went nowhere else. Among his people, one left only to join the clan of one’s wife and then you became part of that. There was no concept of exile. It didn’t exist. If you killed another Dwarf, through mischance or accident – in a rage, perhaps, Dwarves being a hot-tempered Race – then you joined the clan you’d damaged, as its lowest member. It happened now and again.

You didn’t leave.

You were Dwarf, a member of your clan. You and everything in it belonged to that clan. If not there, where would you go? He couldn’t imagine it. It was inconceivable.

When Amarok had gone mad, he’d taken most of his family with him. Those that survived had submitted themselves to other clans and the name of that clan was no longer spoken.

Exile.

To not belong to a clan.

To be cast out beneath the vast sky into the borderlands where only fell things lived. Drows, goblins, things such as had boiled up out of the darkness of the deep earth to slaughter his people, such creatures as he’d seen in battle.

“Avila has crafted the pledge carefully. I’ve seen it. Trust me in this and you’ll be satisfied, I promise. Your people will be satisfied. Will you agree?”

After a moment, Goras drew a deep breath through his nostrils.

Exile.

Not of a clan. Cast out beneath the sky. To die or go mad. It wasn’t the axe and the blood. It would still be death and a miserable one.

He nodded. “It’s acceptable.”

With a sharp nod, Daran rose.

In an instant, silence fell.

Whatever was being said among the three on the landing was lost.

One look when Daran stood and Elon knew which way this would fall. He saw it in the satisfaction on Daran’s face. It had been foreordained. Daran had made sure of it. Had secured it, weaving his schemes behind the scenes.

In an odd way, Elon felt betrayed. By what he wasn’t sure. Daran? He knew that scheming King, knew how much he’d wanted Elon brought to heel.

By his hope in justice, in reason?

Among his own people there might have been a chance.

Among men, Dwarves? Or were there too many to know?

Not by Ailith. Never her. No.

He saw in her look a sure knowledge and a piercing resignation.

He swept a glance across the dais, taking in the expression on Daran’s face, the gratification and ferocity in Goras’s. Eliade had returned to her seat, her face still. One Elf could read another, however, and he saw the relief in her.

It was justice that had betrayed him. He’d wanted it, had counted on reason.

Reason had failed him, too.

Looking at the faces of those above him he knew then that Ailith’s assessment had been correct. Her fate had been decreed, no words of his could change have changed it or saved her, loath though he was to admit it.

She was merely a pawn in this game, a piece on a game-board to be sacrificed to strategy of the players.

The taste of that knowledge was like bitter herbs in his mouth.

In Avila’s glance he saw calculation.

She had no love for him as he had none for her. Where the source of the rumors?

There.

There was a fierce resolve behind her look, a determination. She wanted wizards on the Council. A Council of Four, not three, with the wizards on equal footing. He would never accept that. First, he would never again bequeath such power to wizards. Second, the Council, especially the Three, represented the people, all of the people, and Avila had little care for the common folk. Be they Elf, Dwarf, or Man. And last? Her craving for power concerned him as well but not nearly as much as her tendency to take everything as if it were a personal affront.

This was only more proof of that, it was nothing other than petty revenge. With Ailith’s life at stake.