Ilse Witch Read online

  He walked into the reception room where the Wing Rider was waiting and immediately dismissed those who accompanied him. A member of the Home Guard would already be concealed within striking distance, although Allardon had never personally heard of a Wing Rider turned assassin.

  As the door closed behind his small entourage, he extended his hand to the Rider. “I’m sorry you had to wait. I was sitting with the High Council, and my aide didn’t want to disturb me.” He shook the other’s corded hand and scanned the weathered face. “I know you, don’t I? You’ve brought me a message once or maybe twice before.”

  “Once, only,” the other advised. “It was a long time ago. You wouldn’t have reason to remember me. My name is Hunter Predd.”

  The Elven King nodded, failing to recognize the other’s name, but smiling anyway. Wing Riders cared nothing for formalities, and he didn’t bother relying on them here. “What do you have for me, Hunter?”

  The Wing Rider reached inside his tunic and produced a short, slender length of metal chain and a scrap of hide. He held on to both as he spoke. “Three days ago, I was patrolling the waters north off the island of Mesca Rho, a Wing Hove outpost. I found a man floating on a ship spar. He was barely alive, suffering from exposure and dehydration. I don’t know how long he was out there, but it must have been some time. His eyes and his tongue had been cut out before he had been cast adrift. He was wearing this.”

  He held out the length of metal chain first, which turned out to be a bracelet. Allardon accepted it, studied it, and went pale. The bracelet bore the Elessedil crest, the spreading boughs of the sacred Ellcrys surrounded by a ring of Blood-fire. It had been more than thirty years since he had seen the bracelet, but he recognized it immediately.

  His gaze shifted from the bracelet to the Wing Rider. “The man you found wore this?” he asked quietly.

  “It was on his wrist.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “I recognized the bracelet’s crest, not the man.”

  “There was no other identification?”

  “Only this. I searched him carefully.”

  He handed the piece of softened hide to Allardon. It was frayed about the edges, water stained and worn. The Elf King opened it carefully. It was a map, its symbols and writing etched in faded ink and in places smudged. He studied it carefully, making sure of what he had. He recognized the Westland coast along the Blue Divide. A dotted line ran from island to island, traveling west and north and ending at a peculiar collection of blocky spikes. There were names beneath each of the islands and the cluster of spikes, but he did not recognize them. The writing in the margins of the map was indecipherable. The symbols that decorated and perhaps identified certain places on the map were of strange and frightening creatures he had never seen.

  “Do you recognize any of these markings?” he asked Hunter Predd.

  The Wing Rider shook his head. “Most of what the map shows is outside the territory we patrol. The islands are beyond the reach of our Rocs, and the names are not familiar.”

  Allardon walked to the tall, curtained windows that opened onto the garden, and stood looking out at the flower beds. “Where is the man you found, Hunter? Is he still alive?”

  “I left him with the Healer who serves Bracken Clell. He was alive when I left.”

  “Have you told anyone else of this bracelet and map?”

  “No one knows but you. Not even the Healer. He is a friend, but I know enough to keep silent when silence is called for.”

  Allardon nodded his approval. “You do, indeed.”

  He called for cold glasses of ale and a full pitcher from which to refill them. His mind raced as he waited with the Wing Rider for the beverage and containers to be brought. He was stunned by the salvaged articles and by what he had been told, and he wasn’t certain, even knowing what he did, what course of action to take. He recognized the bracelet and, thereby, he must assume, the identity of the man from whom it had been taken. He had not seen either in thirty years nor had he expected to see them ever again. He had never seen the map, but even without being able to decipher its language or read its symbols, he could guess at what it was meant to show.

  He thought suddenly of his mother, Aine, dead for twenty-five years, and the memory of her anguish during the last years of her life brought tears to his eyes.

  He fingered the bracelet absently, remembering.

  Thirty years earlier, his mother, as Queen, had authorized an Elven sailing expedition to undertake a search for a treasure of great value purported to have survived the Great Wars that had destroyed the Old World. The impetus for the expedition had been a dream visited on his mother’s seer, an Elven mystic of great power and widespread acclaim. The dream had foretold of a land of ice, of a ruined city within the land, and of a safehold in which a treasure of immeasurable worth lay protected and concealed. This treasure, if recovered, had the power to change the course of history and the lives of all who came in contact with it.

  The seer had been wary of the dream, for she understood the power of dreams to deceive. The nature of the treasure sought was unclear, and its source was vague and uncharted. The land in which the treasure could be found lay somewhere across the Blue Divide in territory that no one had ever seen. There were no directions for reaching it, no instructions for locating it, and little more than a series of images to describe it. Perhaps, the seer advised, it was a dream best left alone.

  But Allardon’s elder brother, Kael Elessedil, had been intrigued by the possibilities the dream suggested and by the challenge of searching for an unexplored land. He had embraced the dream as his destiny, and he had begged his mother to let him go. In the end, she had relented. Kael Elessedil had been granted his expedition, and with three sailing ships and their crews under his command, he had departed.

  Just before leaving, his mother had given him the famous blue Elfstones that had once belonged to Queen Wren. The Elfstones would guide them to their destination and protect them from harm. Their magic would bring the Elves safely back home again.

  When he left Arborlon to travel to the coast, where the ships his mother had commissioned were waiting, Kael Elessedil was wearing the bracelet his brother now held. It was the last time Allardon saw him. The expedition had never returned. The ships, their crews, his brother, everything and everyone, had simply vanished. Search parties had been dispatched, one after the other, but not a trace of the missing Elves had ever been found.

  Allardon exhaled softly. Until now. He stared at the bracelet in his hand. Until this.

  Kael’s disappearance had changed everything in the lives of his family. His mother had never recovered from her eldest son’s disappearance, and the last years of her life were spent in a slow wasting away of health and hope as one rescue effort after another failed and all were finally abandoned. When she died, Allardon became the King his brother was meant to be and he had never expected to become.

  He thought of the ruined man lying wasted, voiceless, and blind in the Healer’s rooms in Bracken Clell and wondered if his brother had come home at last.

  The ale arrived, and Allardon sat with Hunter Predd on a bench in the gardens and questioned the Wing Rider again and again, covering the same ground several times over, approaching the matter from different points of view, making certain he had learned everything there was to know. Perhaps understanding in part at least, the trauma he had visited upon the Elven King by his coming, Hunter was cooperative. He did not presume to ask questions of his own, for which Allardon was grateful, but simply responded to the questions he was asked, keeping company with the King for as long as it was required.

  When the interview was ended, Allardon asked the Wing Rider to stay the night so that the King could have time to consider what further need he might have of him. He did not make it a command, but a request. Food and lodging would be provided for rider and mount, and his staying would be a favor. Hunter Predd agreed.

  Alone again, in his study now, where he did
most of his thinking on matters that required a balancing of possibilities and choices, Allardon Elessedil considered what he must do. After thirty years and considerable damage, he might not be able to recognize his brother, even if it was Kael whom the Bracken Clell Healer attended. He had to assume that it was, for the bracelet was genuine. It was the map that was troubling. What was he to do with it? He could guess at its worth, but he could not read enough of it to measure the extent of its information. If he were to mount a new expedition, an event he was already seriously considering, he could not afford to do so without making every possible effort to discover what he was up against.

  He needed someone to translate the phrases on the map. He needed someone who could tell him what they said.

  There was only one person who could do that, he suspected. Certainly, only one of whom he knew.

  It was dark outside by now, the night settled comfortably down about the Westland forests, the walls and roofs of the city’s buildings faded away and replaced by clusters of lights that marked their continued presence. In the Elessedil family home, it was quiet. His wife was busy with their daughters, working on a quilt for his birthday that he was not supposed to know about. His eldest son, Kylen, commanded a regiment on the Prekkendorran front. His youngest, Ahren, hunted the forests north with Ard Patrinell, Captain of the Home Guard. Considering the size of his family and the scope of his authority as King, he felt surprisingly alone and helpless in the face of what he knew he must do.

  But how to do it? How, so that it would achieve what was needed?

  The dinner hour had come and gone, and he remained where he was, thinking the matter through. It was difficult even to consider doing what was needed, because the man he must deal with was in many ways anathema to him. But deal with him he must, putting aside his own reservations and their shared history of antagonism and spite. He could do that because that was part of what being a King required, and he had made similar concessions before in other situations. It was finding a way to persuade the other to do likewise that was difficult. It was conceiving of an approach that would not meet with instant rejection that was tricky.

  In the end, he found what he needed right under his nose. He would send Hunter Predd, the Wing Rider, as his emissary. The Wing Rider would go because he understood the importance and implications of his discovery and because Allardon would grant the Wing Hove a concession they coveted as a further enticement. The man whose services he required would respond favorably because he had no quarrel with the Wing Riders as he did with the Land Elves, and because Hunter Predd’s direct, no-nonsense approach would appeal to him.

  There were no guarantees, of course. His gambit might fail, and he might be forced to try again—perhaps even to go there himself. He would have to, he knew, if all else failed. But he was counting on his adversary’s inquisitive mind and curious nature to win him over; he would not be able to resist the challenge of the map’s puzzle. He would not be able to ignore the lure of its secrets. His life did not allow for that. Whatever else he might be, and he was many things, he was a scholar first.

  The Elf King brought out the scrap of map the Wing Rider had carried to him and placed it on his writing desk. He would have it copied, so that he might protect against its unforeseen loss. But copied accurately, with all symbols and words included, for any hint of treachery would sink the whole venture in a second. A scribe could accomplish what was needed without being told of the map’s origins or worth. Discretion was possible.

  Nevertheless, he would stay with the scribe until the job was completed. His decision made, he dispatched an aide to summon the one who was needed and sat back to await his arrival. Dinner would have to keep a little while longer.

  TWO

  On the same night Allardon Elessedil awaited the arrival of his scribe to make a copy of the map delivered by Hunter Predd, the spy in the household of the Bracken Clell Healer received a response to the message he had dispatched to his Mistress two days earlier. It was not the kind of response he had anticipated.

  She was waiting for him when he came to his rooms at nightfall, his day’s work finished, his mind on other things. Perhaps he was thinking of slipping out later to his cages to see if one of her winged couriers had arrived with a message. Perhaps he was thinking only of a hot meal and a warm bed. Whatever the case, he was not expecting to find her. Surprised and frightened by her appearance, he flinched and cried out when she detached herself from the shadows. She soothed him with a soft word, quieted him, and waited patiently for him to recover himself enough to acknowledge her properly.

  “Mistress,” he whispered, dropping to one knee and bowing deeply. She was pleased to discover he had not forgotten his manners. Although she had not come to him in many years, he remembered his place.

  She left him bowed and on his knee a moment longer, standing before him, her whisper of reassurance and subtle pressure soft and light upon the air. Gray robes cloaked her from head to foot, and a hood concealed her face. Her spy had never seen her in the light or caught even the barest glimpse of her features. She was an enigma, a shadow exuding presence rather than identity. She kept herself at one with the darkness, a creature to be felt rather than viewed, keeping watch even when not seen.

  “Mistress, I have important information,” her spy murmured without looking up, waiting to be told he might rise.

  The Ilse Witch left him where he was, considering. She knew more than he imagined, more than he could guess, for she possessed power that was beyond his understanding. From the message he had sent—his words, his handwriting, his scent upon the paper—she could measure the urgency he was feeling. From the way he presented himself now—his demeanor, his tone of voice, his carriage—she could decipher his need. It was her gift always to know more than those with whom she came in contact wished her to know. Her magic laid them bare and left them as transparent as still waters.

  The Ilse Witch stretched out her robed arm. “Rise,” she commanded.

  The spy did so, keeping his head lowered, his eyes cast down. “I did not think you would come …”

  “For you, for information of such importance, I could do no less.” She shifted her stance and bent forward slightly. “Speak, now, of what you know.”

  The spy shivered, excitement coursing through him, anxious to be of service. Within the shadows of her hood, she smiled.

  “A Wing Rider rescued an Elf from the sea and brought him to the Healer who serves this community,” the spy advised, daring now to lift his eyes as far as the hem of her robes. “The man’s eyes and tongue were removed, and the Healer says he is half-mad. I don’t doubt it, from the look of him. The Healer cannot determine his identity, and the Wing Rider claims not to know it either, but he suspects something. And the Wing Rider took something from the man before bringing him here. I caught a glimpse of it—a bracelet that bears the crest of the Elessedils.”

  The spy’s gaze lifted now to seek out her own. “The Wing Rider left for Arborlon two days ago. I heard him tell the Healer where he was going. He took the bracelet with him.”

  She regarded him in silence for a moment, her cloaked form as still as the shadows it mirrored. A bracelet bearing the crest of the Elessedils, she mused. The Wing Rider would have taken it to Allardon Elessedil to identify. Whose bracelet was it? What did it mean that it was found on this castaway Elf who was blind and voiceless and believed mad?

  The answers to her questions were locked inside the castaway’s head. He must be made to give them up.

  “Where is the man now?” she asked.

  The spy hunched forward eagerly, the fingers of his hands knotted together beneath his chin as if in prayer. “He lies in the Healer’s infirmary, cared for but kept isolated until the Wing Rider’s return. No one is allowed to speak with him.” He snorted softly. “As if anyone could. He has no tongue with which to answer, has he?”

  She gestured him away and to the side, and he moved as if a puppet in response. “Wait here for me,” she sa
id. “Wait, until I return.”

  She went out the door into the night, a spectral figure sliding effortlessly and soundlessly through the shadows. The Ilse Witch liked the darkness, found comfort in it she could never find in daylight. The darkness soothed and shaded, softening edges and points, reducing clarity. Vision lost importance because the eyes could be deceived. A shift of movement here changed the look of something there. What was certain in the light became suspect in the dark. It mirrored her life, a collage of images and voices, of memories that had shaped her growing, not all fitting tightly in sequence, not all linked together in ways that made sense. Like the shadows with which she so closely identified, her life was a patchwork of frayed ends and loose threads that invited refitting and mending. Her past was not carved of stone, but drawn on water. Reinvent yourself, she had been told by the Morgawr a long time ago. Reinvent yourself, and you will become more inscrutable to those who might try to unravel who you really are.

  In the night, in darkness and shadows, she could do so more easily. She could keep what she looked like to herself and conceal who she really was. She could let them imagine her, and by doing so keep them forever deceived.

  She moved through the village without challenge, encountering almost no one, those few she did unaware of her presence as they passed. It was late, the village mostly asleep, the ones who preferred the night busy in the ale houses and pleasure dens, caught up in their own wants and needs, uncaring of what transpired without. She could forgive them their weaknesses, these men and women, but she could never accept them as equals. Long since, she had abandoned any pretense that she believed their common origins linked them in any meaningful way. She was a creature of fire and iron. She was born to magic and power. It was her destiny to shape and alter the lives of others and never to be altered by them. It was her passion to rise above the fate that others had cast for her as a child and to visit revenge on them for daring to do so. She would be so much more than they, and they would be forever less.