Paul Thompson - Firstborn

“Why do you not do something yourself?” Hermathya demanded, crossing the room. Her scarlet gown showed off the milky paleness of her skin. Her eyes flashed as she spoke. “The entire nation would unite behind the one who would put down the insolent humans.”

“The ‘one’? Not the speaker?” asked Sithas blandly.

“The speaker is old,” she said, waving a dismissive hand. “Old people are beset with fears.”

Dropping the towel he’d used to dry his hands, Sithas caught Hermathya’s wrist and pulled her close. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink back. Sithas’s eyes bored into hers.

“What you say smacks of disloyalty,” he rumbled icily.

“You want what is best for the nation, don’t you?” she replied, leaning into him. “If these attacks continue, all the settlers to the west will flee back to the city, as did the elves of Trokali. The humans of Ergoth will settle our land with their own people. Is that good for Silvanesti?”

Sithas’s face hardened at the thought of humans encroaching on their ancient land. “No,” he said firmly.

Hermathya put her free hand on his arm. “How then is it disloyal to want to end these outrages?”

“I am not the Speaker of the Stars!”

Her eyes were the deep blue of the sky at dusk as Hermathya moved to kiss her husband. “Not yet,” she whispered, and her breath was sweet and warm on his face. “Not yet”

Mackeli had been gone three days when Anaya showed Kith-Kanan where she had secreted his sword and dagger. There could be no question now that something had happened to him and that they had to go to his rescue.

“There is your metal,” she said. “Take it up. You may have need of it.”

He brushed the dead leaves off the slim, straight blade of his sword and wiped it with an oily cloth. It slid home in its scabbard with only a faint hiss. Anaya kept back when he held the weapons. She regarded the iron blades with loathing, as if they were the stinking carcasses of long dead animals.

“Mackeli’s been gone so long, I hope we can pick up his trail,” Kith-Kanan said. His eyes searched the huge trees.

“As long as Mackeli lives, I will always be able to find him.” declared Anaya. “There is a bond between us. He is my brother.”

With this pronouncement she turned and went back to the hollow tree. Kith-Kanan followed her. What did she mean—brother? Were the two siblings? He’d wondered at their relationship, but certainly hadn’t noticed any family resemblance. Anaya was even less talkative on the subject than Mackeli had been.

He went to the door of the tree and looked in. Squatting before a piece of shiny mica, Anaya was painting her face. She had wiped her cheeks clean—relatively clean, anyway—with a wad of damp green leaves and now was applying paint made from berries and nut shells. Her brush was a new twig, the end of which she’d chewed to make it soft and pliable. Anaya went from one gourd full of pigment to another, painting zigzag lines on her face in red, brown, and yellow.

“What are you doing? Time is wasting,” Kith-Kanan said impatiently.

Anaya drew three converging lines on her chin, like an arrowhead in red. Her dark hazel eyes were hard as she said, “Go outside and wait for me.”

Kith-Kanan felt anger rising at her casual tone of command. She ordered him about like a servant, but there was nothing for him to do but stew. When Anaya finally emerged, they plunged into the deep shade of the woods. Kith-Kanan found his anger at her dissolving as he watched her move gracefully through the wood. She never disturbed a leaf or twig, moving, as Mackeli had said, like smoke.

They finally paused to rest, and Kith-Kanan sat on a log to catch his breath. He looked at Anaya as she stood poised, one foot atop the fallen log. She wasn’t even breathing heavily. She was a muscular, brown-skinned, painted Kagonesti—quite savage by Silvanesti standards—but she was also practical and wise in the ways of the forest. Their worlds were so different as to be hostile to each other, but he felt at that moment a sense of security. He was not so alone as he had believed.

“Why do you look at me that way?” Anaya asked, frowning.

“I was just thinking how much better it would be for us to be friends, instead of enemies,” said Kith-Kanan sincerely.

It was her turn to give him a strange look. He laughed and asked, “Now why are you looking at me like that?”

“I know the word, but I’ve never had a friend before,” Anaya said.

Kith-Kanan would not have believed it, but the place Anaya led him through was even thicker with trees than any part of the forest he’d seen so far. They were not the giants of the old forest where she lived, but of a size he was more accustomed to seeing. They grew so close together, however, that it soon became impossible for him to walk at all.

Anaya grasped an oak tree trunk with her bare hands and feet and started up it like a squirrel. Kith-Kanan gaped at the ease with which she scaled the tree. The leaves closed around her.

“Are you coming?” she called down,

“I can’t climb like that!” he protested.

“Wait then.” He saw a flash of her red leg paint as she sprang from an oak branch to a nearby elm. The gap between branches was more than six feet, yet Anaya launched herself without a moment’s hesitation. A few seconds later she was back, flitting from tree to tree with the ease of a bird. A twined strand of creeper, as thick as the prince’s two thumbs, fell from the oak leaves and landed at his feet. This was more to his liking. Kith-Kanan spat on his palms and hauled himself up, hand over hand. He braced his feet against the tree trunk and soon found himself perched on an oak limb thirty feet from the forest floor.

“Whew!” he said, grinning. “A good climb!” Anaya was patently not impressed. After all, she had made the same climb with no vine at all. Kith-Kanan hauled up the creeper, coiling it carefully around his waist.

“It will be faster to stay in the treetops from now on,” Anaya advised.

“How can you tell this is the way Mackeli went?”

She gathered herself to leap. “I smell him. This way.”

Anaya sprang across to the elm. Kith-Kanan went more slowly, slipping a good deal on the round surface of the tree limb. Anaya waited for him to catch up, which he did by grasping an overhead branch and swinging over the gap. A dizzy glimpse of the ground flashed beneath his feet, and then Kith-Kanan’s leg hooked around the elm. He let go of the oak branch, swung upside-down by one leg, and gradually worked his way onto the elm.

“This is going to take a long time,” he admitted, panting for breath.

They continued on high in the treetops for most of the day. Though his hands were by no means soft, accustomed as they were to swordplay and his griffon’s reins, Kith-Kanan’s palms became scraped and sore from grasping and swinging on the rough-barked branches. His feet slipped so often that he finally removed his thick-strapped sandals and went barefoot like Anaya. His feet were soon as tender as his hands, but he didn’t slip again.

Even at the slow pace Kith-Kanan set, they covered many miles on their lofty road. Well past noon, Anaya called for a rest. They wedged themselves high in a carpeen tree. She showed him how to find the elusive fruit of the carpeen, yellow and pearlike, hidden by a tightly growing roll of leaves. The soft white meat of the carpeen not only sated their hunger, it was thirst-quenching, too.

“Do you think Mackeli is all right?” Kith-Kanan asked, the worry clear in his voice.

Anaya finished her fruit and dropped the core to the ground. “He is alive.” she stated flatly.