Terry Brooks: Wards of Faerie

Her sister had already gone. She would be down in the Gardens of Life with the other Chosen, gathered to welcome the Ellcrys to a new day and anxious to begin their assigned tasks. Her sister might say she didn’t want to do the work of her order, but Aphenglow knew she took great pride in what she did. She was particularly suited to the position of Chosen, and was looked up to by the others for her skills and instincts as a Healer and caregiver. Yes, she wanted to be a Druid, and there were reasons to think that she would be a good one; she had talents that would lend themselves to the complicated and demanding work of the Druid order. But as impatient as her sister was to join her, Aphenglow knew she was better off where she was. Arling was still young, nine years Aphen’s junior, and she was not yet fully cognizant of what it would do to her life if she followed in her sister’s footsteps.

Aphen finished her fruit and bread, but stayed at the window and continued to watch the day brighten. Something was troubling her, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was.

After five minutes or so of staring at nothing much, she left the kitchen, walked to the front door, and stepped outside. No one in the nearby residences was in evidence, so she couldn’t ask if they had seen or heard anything last night. Instead she began walking around the little cottage, picking her way toward the window where she had seen the shadow pass. Her tracking skills were good enough that she soon found footprints—a man’s, by the size of them. She followed them a short distance. They stopped, backtracked a bit, and then, with an obvious change in the length of the stride, signaled that the man had begun running. She followed the prints to the end of the yard, where they disappeared out onto the pathway that led from her tiny neighborhood into the city.

She stood looking at the footprints, perplexed by what she was seeing.

And then she realized, all at once, what was troubling her.

How had her attacker passed by the window one moment and gotten behind her the next? The time frame was too short for that to have happened. Which meant there had to have been more than one—the first man, whose shadow had drawn her attention, and a second who had come in through the kitchen door and attacked her.

She stood looking down the pathway for a moment and then walked back to the window and around the house to the rear door. Sure enough, the clear depressions of a second set of prints, larger than the first, were outlined in the bare earth by the flower beds Arlingfant so carefully tended. The second man had lingered here, and then come through the door to attack her.

Or had he been inside already, waiting?

She felt a sudden chill. Her assailants had known what they were doing. One to distract her so that she wouldn’t sense the other—a way of making sure her normally reliable Druid senses did not warn her of the danger. Her instincts were good, but not infallible, and she was not always able to pick up on everything happening around her.

The other thing she realized was that her attacker had made it impossible to defend herself with magic. She hadn’t thought of that last night, still shaken by the attack, but she saw it clearly now. By cutting off her air he had throttled her voice and paralyzed her hands, preventing her from summoning any sort of magic. Her reaction had been instinctual—use physical force to get free. Perhaps subconsciously she had known that without her voice and hands she couldn’t conjure any sort of magic anyway.

Everyone knew she was a Druid and had the use of magic. Not everyone knew how that magic worked: that voice or hands or both were needed to evoke it. Her attackers must have, though. The first man, the one at the window, would have been the leader, the one who thought it all through. The second, her attacker, was a skilled fighter and likely a trained assassin.

So now she had two mysteries. Who knew all this and would want to hurt her, and who knew about the diary and wanted to steal it?

She opened the back door and walked into the kitchen again. In truth she had more than two mysteries that needed solving, if you considered all the questions surrounding the diary’s entries and the unknown history of their author. But only two that mattered regarding the attack.

A course of action that might help resolve all this eluded her at the moment, so she returned to her plan regarding the lineage charts of the Elven Kings and Queens. Picking up her backpack with its notes and stuffing the diary into a deep pocket in the trousers she was wearing, she departed the cottage and headed off to the palace for more research.

The walk was short and uneventful, but she found herself on edge the entire way. The attack had left her shaken, even if she wouldn’t admit it to Arlingfant, and she knew that for a while, at least, she would be looking over her shoulder everywhere she went.

Deep in the lower levels of the palace, alone once more, she pulled out the lineage charts and went to work. The charts went much farther back than the Elven histories, although nothing had survived that went all the way back to the beginning of things. She started at the place where the recordings of lineages began and worked her way forward, hoping that any reference to Pathke and Meresch would not be so long ago as to have escaped all mention.

It was tedious work. The charts were old and handwritten, and all sorts of smudges and discolorations marred the information. In addition, she had to translate the ancient Elfish language that was being used at that time in order to comprehend what she was reading. But most troubling of all was a tendency of the early Elven scribes to leave things out, not believing them important enough to mention—a deficiency that over time had become apparent to later chroniclers who had discovered such absences while reading other writings. If that had happened here, she might miss what she was looking for without even realizing it.

In any event, it was slow going, and she had been at work almost the entire morning before she found the entries for which she had been searching.

She was still far back in the early years of Elven history, back before the advent of Men and the other Races—back when the Elves and their allies were still at war with the Darklings and theirs—when she discovered a Pathke Omarosian who had been King with a Meresch his wife and Queen. Their reign had lasted for over forty years, and they had been together for eight or nine before that. Their daughter, Aleia, had been born after Pathke had been King for seven years, and she had died when she was only eighteen.

Aphenglow stopped reading. Only eighteen. That would have been about the time she met and lost the Darkling boy. Her voice in the diary and the impetuousness of her acts would be appropriate for that age.

So had her death been linked to that event?

Aphen couldn’t tell. There was nothing written anywhere on that page or any of the dozen that followed to reveal what had happened. Pathke had ruled for another seventeen years and then Meresch had succeeded him and ruled for twelve more. Aleia had been their only child.

Aphenglow set down the records and stared off into the shadows. It was too big a coincidence to think that Aleia’s death was not in some way connected with her affair, but it didn’t look as if there were any way to determine the connection. Still, she wasn’t ready to let go of the matter just yet.

Picking up the records anew, she began working her way forward through the lineages once more. She pressed on for the remainder of the afternoon and found multiple instances of other members of the Omarosian line who had become Kings and Queens. But oddly, all of them seemed to serve sporadically, with great intervals of time falling between periods of rule. Given that they were not in the direct line of succession, it was odd to see them appear so frequently—almost as if they were brought in as caretaker monarchs. It also appeared that they married and split off into other families; many of the lineages were interrelated.