Mark Anthony - Kindred Spirits

A. C. (After the Cataclysm) 258

The infant’s cry was not the cry of an elvan child.

Eld Ailea, ancient even in the eyes of the long-lived elves, cast a sympathetic eye on the infant as she wrapped him in swaddling clothes of silvery linen. The firelight reflected off the rose quartz walls of the midwife’s Qualinost home, bathing the angry newborn in a peach-colored glow as he wailed, small chest shuddering as he drew in gulps of air. A breeze entered from a window overlooking a Qualinost lane, freshening air redolent with sweat, blood, and sorrow.

“Such passion,” Eld Ailea whispered. “Even with your first breaths, you reveal your parentage.” As if to give lie to her murmuring, the baby, arms swaddled against his chest, ceased his cries, yawned, and fell asleep. His ruddy face eased into repose.

The midwife gathered the tiny bundle to her and stepped to a rocking chair placed before the fire. The chair, nearly as old as Eld Ailea herself, contrasted with the living rock walls much as a well-worn pair of slippers offset a new-sewn robe. The chair, its wood burnished with centuries of use, creaked comfortably as Eld Ailea settled into it, lay the infant on her green skirt, and traced a finger around one baby ear.

“Not so pointy as a full elf’s ear, yet clearly no round human ear, either,” Eld Ailea told the infant, who opened one eye, squinted in the firelight, and shut it again. Her words were like music, the song of a wooden flute that had been polished a thousand thousand times. She bent toward the infant and, like a ritual, breathed in the smell of a newly bathed infant; she never tired of this moment.

The human blood in his veins warmed his sluggish elven heart with its fire, she thought. “Oh, yes, small one,” she whispered fiercely, eyes glowing like hazel agates. “You will need that passion. The life of a half-elf is not easy in these times, in Qualinost.”

Beyond her pleasure that the boy waxed robust, the moment held little joy for the elderly midwife. Slowing her rocking, she glanced at the bed nested in an alcove, out of the firelight. She’d extinguished the lamp that had burned for seemingly countless hours at the foot of that pallet; upon the bed lay a figure shrouded in dimness, the face peaceful after hours of exhausting fight.

Eld Ailea was tiny for an elf and displayed the round hazel eyes so rare in Qualinesti, the eyes that showed that she herself carried human blood from generations back. Nonetheless, she also displayed the pointed ears, slender build, and long fingers of her own elven mother.

She’d lived so long among the Qualinesti elves that they could not remember a time when Eld Ailea had not dwelt among them, delivering their few, precious children. She was a familiar sight, striding among the treelike, rose-hued dwellings of the city of Qualinost with her midwife’s satchel swinging at her side; most of the city’s inhabitants-certainly every elven woman who’d had a difficult pregnancy-overlooked the old nurse’s mixed elven-human blood. She was experienced in herbal lore that had soothed the way of many a laboring mother, and, while no mage, she knew enough of magic to ease all but the deepest pains.

Nevertheless, she had lacked the skill to save Elansa.

Unconsciously, Eld Ailea’s arms tightened around the orphaned baby until he awakened and squawked. She quickened the pace of the rocker and stroked his tiny forehead, his cheeks, the bridge of his nose until his eyelids drooped and he slept again.

Suddenly, faint music reached her ears-the sound of bells tied to the harness of a horse, or several horses, by the sound of it. Soon, she heard the alto tones of her servant in the anteroom below, followed by footsteps on the stone stairs that wound to the second level of her towerlike home. She nestled the infant against her shoulder as the wooden door, detailed with etchings of aspen leaves, swung open.

The Speaker of the Sun, Lord of Qualinesti, stood in the doorway, his face lined with concern. Firelight glittered off one side of his golden-threaded robe; the other side was bathed in the light of the silver moon, Solinari, which streamed through a window to one side of the door. Red tinged the beams where they struck the floor, like a few drops of blood; Lunitari, Krynn’s crimson moon, was on the rise as well.

Eld Ailea’s gaze shifted to the figure on the bed. The Speaker’s eyes followed. “She sleeps?” he asked softly. Another breeze wafted through the open window, and the sound of laughter drifted up from the street below. Eld Ailea shook her head once and swung her wrinkled face toward the sleeping baby, watching out of the corner of her eye as the Speaker walked slowly to the woman’s body. His hand trembled as he reached out to touch Elansa, the widow of his dead brother, but then his arm halted and the hand fell limply to his side.

He swallowed. “You, Ailea, with all your skill… If you could not save her, no one could.”

The midwife shook her head gently. “She was too weak, Solostaran. She stayed until the babe was born, and she nursed him once, but then she let herself go.”

The Speaker of the Sun stared at her. He seemed unaware that she had used his true name and not the title he had taken when he ascended the rostrum in the Tower of the Sun to rule the elves of Qualinesti more than a century ago. A flicker of pain shuddered across his hawklike face. “She let herself go…,” he repeated softly. To elves, life was sacred, and the willful ending of it, blasphemy.

“The child…?” he asked.

The midwife’s lips parted in an odd smile, neither joyful nor sorrowful; briefly, she remembered the night Solostaran himself was born, so long ago. How different the surroundings then, how opulent the chambers, blazing bright with torchlight. How reverent the retainers who crouched in the shadows beyond the birthing suite. It was all a far cry from the quarters of a mixed-blood midwife, even the best midwife in Qualinesti. Elansa could have borne her baby at the court, but she had chosen to come to Eld Ailea’s rooms instead.

Eld Ailea held the baby so the Speaker could see him. Solostaran kneeled and examined the child for barely a moment and then dipped his head. “So,” he said coolly. “It is as we feared.”

No, Eld Ailea almost said, it is as you feared. But she held her tongue. Kethrenan, the Speaker’s younger brother, had been slain when ambushed by a band of rogue humans upon the road to the fortress of Pax Tharkas, to the south of Qualinesti. Although the elven and human races had once-thousands of years ago-been close, such human raiding bands had become all too common since the destruction of the Cataclysm. The band had raped Kethrenan’s wife, Elansa, and left her for dead, lying in the mud of the road. For the last months, she had lived much as one who was dead, her eyes empty. She had eaten only enough to sustain the life growing within her; quith-pa, nutritious elven bread, and clear wine formed the basis of her diet. The infant could have been Kethrenan’s or the human rapist’s, and Elansa had waited to confirm the answer she had already suspected.

“The child is half-man,” Solostaran said, still kneeling, his hand on the arm of the rocker.

“He is half-elf as well.”

Solostaran said nothing for a time, but then Eld Ailea saw the proud mask crumble, and the Speaker shook his head. The baby still slept. Gently the Speaker touched one of the tiny hands; reflexively, like a sensitive blossom, the hand opened and closed, clasping the Speaker’s finger. Eld Ailea heard Solostaran catch his breath, saw kindness grow in his eyes. “What sort of life can there be for one who is half of two things and all of nothing?” the Speaker asked. But Eld Ailea had no answer for him, and the silence that followed stretched long. The gaze of the midwife stayed steady.