Paul Thompson - Firstborn

Kith-Kanan dropped his own fruit core and asked, “How can you be certain?”

Shifting around the prince with careless ease, Anaya slid from her perch and came down astride the limb where he sat. She took his scraped hand and held his fingertips to her throat.

“Do you feel the beat of my heart?” she asked him.

“Yes.” It was strong and slow.

She pushed his hand away. “And now?”

“Of course not. I’m no longer touching you,” he replied.

“Yet you see me and hear me, without touching me.”

“That’s different.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Is it? If I tell you I can feel Mackeli’s heart beating from far off, do you believe me?”

“I do,” said Kith-Kanan. “I’ve seen that you have many wonderful talents.”

“No!” Anaya swept a hand through the empty air. “I am nothing but what the forest has made me. As I am, so you could be!”

She took his hand again, holding his fingertips against the softly pulsing vein in her neck. Anaya looked directly in his eyes. “Show me the rhythm of my heart,” she said.

Kith-Kanan tapped a finger of his other hand against his leg. “Yes,” she coaxed. “You have it. Continue.”

Her gaze held his. It was true—between them he felt a connection. Not a physical bond, like the grasp of a hand, but a more subtle connection—like the bond he knew stretched between himself and Sithas. Even when they were not touching and were many miles apart he could sense the life force of Sithas.

And now, between Anaya’s eyes and his, Kith-Kanan felt the steady surge of her pulse, beating, beating…

“Look at your hands,” urged Anaya.

His left was still tapping out the rhythm on his leg. His right lay palm up on the tree limb. He wasn’t touching her throat any longer.

“Do you still feel the pulse?” she asked.

He nodded. Even as he felt the surging of his own heart, he could feel hers, too. It was slower, steadier. Kith-Kanan looked with shock at his idle hand. “That’s impossible!” he exclaimed. No sooner had he said this than the sensation of her heartbeat left his fingertips.

Anaya shook her head. “You don’t want to learn,” she said in disgust. She stood up and stepped from the carpeen tree to the neighboring oak. “It’s time to move on. It will be dark before long, and you aren’t skilled enough to treewalk by night.”

This was certainly true, so Kith-Kanan did not protest. He watched the wiry Anaya wend her way through the web of branches, but the meaning of her lesson was still sinking in. What did it mean that he had been able to keep Anaya’s pulse? He still felt the pain of his separation from Hermathya, a hard, cold lump in his chest, but when he closed his eyes and thought of Hermathya for a moment—a tall, flame-haired elf woman with eyes of deepest blue—he only frowned in concentration, for there was nothing, no bond, however slight, that connected him with his lost love. He could not know if she was alive or dead. Sadness touched Kith-Kanan’s heart, but there was no time for self-pity now. He opened his eyes and moved quickly to where Anaya had stopped up ahead.

She was staring at a large crow perched on a limb near her head. When the crow spied Kith-Kanan, it abruptly flew away. Anaya’s shoulders drooped.

“The corvae have not seen Mackeli since four days past,” she explained. “But they have seen something else—humans.”

“Humans? In the wildwood?”

Anaya nodded. She lowered herself to a spindly limb and furrowed her brow in thought. “I did not smell them sooner because the metal you carry stinks in my nose too much. The corvae say there’s a small band of humans farther to the west. They’re cutting down the trees, and they have some sort of flying beast, of a kind the corvae have never seen.”

“Arcuballis! That’s my griffon! The humans must have captured it,” he said. In fact, he couldn’t imagine how; as far as he could determine they were miles from the spot where he’d first landed, and it would have been very difficult for strangers, especially humans, to handle the spirited Arcuballis.

“How many humans are there?” Kith-Kanan inquired.

Anaya gave him a disdainful look. “Corvae can’t count,” she stated contemptuously.

They started off again as twilight was falling. For a brief time it actually brightened in the trees, as the sinking sun lanced in from the side. Anaya found a particularly tall maple and climbed up. The majestic tree rose even above its neighbors, and its thick limbs grew in an easy step pattern around the massive trunk. Kith-Kanan had no trouble keeping up with the Kagonesti in the vertical climb.

At the top of the tree Anaya stopped, one arm hooked around the gnarled peak of the maple. Kith-Kanan worked his way around beside her. The maple’s pinnacle swayed under his additional weight, but the view was so breathtaking he didn’t mind the motion.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but the green tops of trees. The horizon to the west was darkening from pink to flame red. Kith-Kanan was enchanted. Though he had often seen great vistas from the back of Arcuballis, his appreciation for such sights had been increased by the weeks he’d spent in this forest, where a glimpse of sky was a rare treat.

Anaya was not enraptured. She narrowed her sharp eyes and said, “There they are.”

“Who?”

“The intruders. Do you not see the smoke?”

Kith-Kanan stared in the direction she pointed. To the north, a faint smudge of gray marred the sky’s royal blue. Even as he stared at it, Kith-Kanan wasn’t sure the smoke was really there. He blinked several times.

“They are burning the trees,” Anaya said grimly. “Savages!”

The prince refrained from saying that to most of the civilized people of Krynn, it was she who was the savage. Instead he asked, “Which way to Mackeli?”

“Toward the smoke,” she said. “The humans have taken him after all. I will see them bleed!”

Though Kith-Kanan was surprised at the depth of her feeling, he had no doubt she meant what she said.

They stayed in the treetops until the prince had begun to miss his handholds and then nearly fell forty feet to the ground. It was too dark to continue aloft, so Anaya and Kith-Kanan descended to the forest floor once more. They walked perhaps a mile in silence, Anaya gliding through the black tree trunks like a runaway shadow. Kith-Kanan felt the tension rising. He had never fought humans—he’d only met a few of them in Silvanost, and all of them were aristocrats. For that matter, he’d never fought anyone for real, in a fight where death was the likely outcome. He wondered if he could do it, actually thrust his sword through someone’s body, or use the edge to cut them…He reminded himself that these humans were holding Mackeli prisoner, and probably his royal griffon, too.

Anaya froze, silhouetted between two large trees. Her hand was out stiffly behind her, a signal for Kith-Kanan to halt. He did and heard what had stopped her. The tinny sound of a flute drifted through the forest, borne along by the smells of wood smoke and roasting meat.

When he looked toward Anaya she’d vanished. He waited. What was he supposed to do? Kith-Kanan shook himself mentally. You, a prince of House Royal, wanting directions from a Kagonesti savage! You are a warrior—do your duty!

He charged through the underbrush. At the first gleam of a campfire, Kith-Kanan drew his sword. Another twenty steps, and he burst into a clearing hewn from the primeval woodland. A large campfire, almost a bonfire, blazed in the center of the clearing. A dozen ruddy faces—thickly fleshed human faces, with their low foreheads, broad cheeks, and wide jaws—turned toward the elf prince. Some had hair growing on their faces. All stared at him in utter astonishment.