Nancy Berberick - The Inheritance

She nodded. She wanted nothing else.

"Then we'll go through the tunnels again," he said. "Just you and me, we'll get back to Hammer Rock and see what we can think of after that."

Again, Elansa nodded. She heard his words, she understood, but she couldn't think about that now. Neither could she take her eyes from the dead, her husband and the man who had been her kidnapper, who had, by some mysterious alchemy of events and emotion, become, almost, her lover.

Slowly, with great care, she took the sapphire phoenix from her breast, slipping the chain over her head. Here was the inheritance of ages, a treasure she was obliged to pass from her own hand into that of her daughter. She did not think, kneeling beside the body of a man who had seen in her the kind of courage she herself had not known existed, she did not think of unborn daughters. She thought of him and how in the courtyard he had harried creatures of darkness into the light so that she might kill them. She remembered how he had looked at her upon the wall, his eyes shining to see her. He had seen a thing about her that her own husband could not see, and he had valued it to the cost of his own life.

With great gentleness, she slipped the chain over Brand's head and settled the phoenix upon his bloody breast. She bent, kissed his cold lips, and felt all the coldness of winter and stone settle in her heart.

"Char," she said, "we cannot let him lie here like this."

Him, the outlaw. She didn't think about the prince.

But Char said there was no time. Out in the courtyard the voices of elves had taken on the tenor of those who are wondering: Where is the prince? Where is the princess?

"We have to leave him," the dwarf said. "Let him lie here in this his stone fastness." His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. "It’s all the reason he took you, princess. Just to find a high place, a fortress in the mountains where he could harry goblins and fight feuds you in your golden city never knew existed. And here he died. Leave him. Let it be his tomb till time makes his bones into dust and all the tale is forgotten. It’s time to go now, if you mean to leave."

She went. Her hand in his because he would not let go, she followed Char out of the ancient chamber that had once hosted elf kings and dwarven thanes, the chamber that now hosted only the dead.

Elansa looked down the road, the long road leading out of the stonelands and into the forest and all the way to Qualinesti. She had not seen the place through all the winter. It seemed as though years had passed. As she had left the city, so would she enter, on horseback. Char had bought a good mare for her in one of the hamlets between Pax Tharkas and the forest-a little roan with white spots on her shoulders like sun-dapple. On this mare she'd ridden the hard road, and though the dwarf never left her, he did not ride. He led her mare, walking. At first he did so because she was too bowed down with grief to guide the mare. The deaths, the run through the tunnels and back to Hammer Rock, these things were like measures of stone upon her heart. She did not rouse from that grief until the night she knew she was with child.

"How can you know?" Char had asked, for he thought that not enough time had passed for her to know in the usual way. "How can you be sure?"

She'd smiled, but sadly. "You are a man," she said. "You don't know what it is to feel your body talking to you. I am a woman. I know."

He took a long drink of dwarf spirits, for he had some again, a fine fat skin of it-bought, bartered, or stolen one day when he'd gone out of the tunnels to hunt. Drinking, he considered what she said. In the end, he simply shrugged, unable to argue.

"But what's to do?" he asked. "What will happen to an elven princess who comes home carrying a human's child?"

She would be cast out. She would become as Leyerlain Starwing had become. She would be named dark elf. No one would speak to her. Her name would be as a curse. This, not because she had lain with a human. It happened. It was tolerated, though barely. She would be cast out because she had betrayed a prince by failing to erase with her own blood the shame of having forsaken her lord husband to be with a human.

Char heard all this in sorrow, drinking. He thought about it long and hard. For days he said nothing as they went through the weary tunnels, and then in the cave below Hammer Rock, he told her he had an idea.

"Tell them you were raped," he said.

She looked at him long. "No. Brand never raped me," she said at last. "He gave me a choice between him and-"

"Between him and rape," Char said. "He did that for complicated reasons, but you're right. One was because he wouldn't see you raped. It’s no matter now, though. That was then. Now you have to do for yourself, princess. Tell them in Qualinost that you were raped. Tell them that, and tell them your prince died bravely defending you against your rapist." He took another drink, enjoying the fire of it. "And tell them you've known for a time you got a child from Brand. That should take care of the matter of you not having the decency to kill yourself."

Elansa considered, but she said nothing.

"Tell them," he said, "for the sake of the child."

If she said she'd been raped, her child would have a home. It would be able to live among its mother's people, and that might not be a perfect life, but it would be better than the life of an exile. Whoever this child would be, maid or man, it would have the strength of its mother and its father. Whoever this child was, it would endure and thrive.

The sun lay on the road, fighting the way home. Elansa sighed and leaned down from the mare's back to touch Char’s shoulder.

"Will you come with me?" she asked.

"All the way. Don't worry, princess. I'll tell them your tale and make it stick You don't have to do more than nod to it."

Elansa pressed her hand to her heart, and then, shyly, to her belly. There lay her child. As greatly as she had grieved an unknown child lost, a long time ago in winter, that greatly did she love this known child now. These lives, she thought, the lost one and this one found, started with men, but they always came to her to keep or lose. She must keep this one safe. She must see this child to the light.

Char took the reins, leading the mare along the road into the forest. The chill shade closed around them after the hot sun of the stoneland; green embraced. They went in silence, and now and then, they stopped to look back out to the borderland between the kingdom of the elves and the far kingdom of dwarves.

The last time they stopped, they looked a long while. Hammer Rock was the tallest thing they could see. Then Char took the reins, and softly he said, "Come on, princess. Let me take you home."