The Elven Read online

  Mandred leaned against an outcrop of rock to catch his breath. He’d come halfway, and he cast his eyes back to the edge of the forest. The darkness of the woods had barely allowed the green faerylight to penetrate, but there on the mountainside, everything was as plain to see as on a cloudless night under a full moon.

  He had always loved nights like these, even though the ethereal light frightened most who lived in the Northlands. It looked like enormous webs of cloth woven from sparkling starlight being drawn across the sky.

  Some said the elves hid themselves in this light when they rode out to hunt on frost-clear nights. Mandred smiled. Such musings would have delighted Freya. She loved to sit by the fire on winter evenings and listen to stories. Stories of the trolls from the far-off mountains. Stories of the elves whose hearts were as cold as winter stars.

  Something moved at the edge of the woods, jolting Mandred from his thoughts. The manboar. So the beast had come in pursuit after all. And that was good. With every step Mandred took up the cliff, he lured the monster away from the village. He just had to hold on. It could rip open his chest and eat his heart if it wanted, if only he could kindle the signal fire first.

  Mandred pushed himself away from the rocky outcrop and immediately stumbled. His feet—they were still there, but he could no longer feel them at all. He should not have stopped. Was he going soft in the head? Even a child knew that stopping to rest in this kind of cold could spell death.

  Mandred looked down desperately at his feet. Frozen, with all feeling gone, they would not warn him if loose stones slipped underfoot. They had become traitors to him, had defected to the enemy that was trying to stop him from lighting the signal fire.

  The jarl laughed out loud, but it was a mirthless laugh. His feet had defected? Utter nonsense. He was slowly going crazy. His feet were simply dead flesh, as the man himself would be soon enough. In anger, he kicked at the rock outcrop. Nothing. As if his feet were not even there. But he could still walk. It was just a matter of will, and of being very careful where he stepped.

  He looked back fearfully. The manboar had moved out onto the snowfield. It seemed to be in no hurry. Did it know this was the only way to the cliff top? There was no way for Mandred to escape, but he had never intended to get away with his life anyway. If he could just light the fire, then nothing else would matter.

  A noise caused him to start. The beast emitted a deep growl. Mandred had the feeling that the manboar was looking him straight in the eye. At this distance, of course, that was impossible, but still . . . something brushed his heart like a chilly draft.

  The jarl hurried. He had to hold on to his lead. To light the fire, he would need time. His breath was whistling. When he exhaled, there was a light, tinkling noise, like icicles jangling against one another high in the tops of the fir trees, only more delicate. The kiss of the ice faery. A faery tale, one told to children, occurred to him in that moment. In the story, the ice faery was invisible and went wandering through the Fjordlands on nights when it was so cold that even the starlight froze. If she came close to you, your steaming breath disappeared, and a gentle tinkling lay in the air instead. If she came so near that her lips brushed your face, then her kiss was the kiss of death. Was that why the manboar came no closer?

  Again, Mandred looked back. The beast seemed to have no trouble moving through the heavy snow. It should have caught up with him by now. Why was it playing cat and mouse with him?

  Mandred slipped. His head banged hard against a rock, but he felt no pain. He ran his mitts across his forehead. Dark blood dripped from the leather. He grew dizzy. That should never have been allowed to happen. He looked back frantically. The manboar had stopped. It stood with its head tipped far back, gazing up at him.

  Mandred could no longer get to his feet. What kind of fool was he, looking back and moving forward?

  With all his strength, he tried to get to his feet. But his half-frozen legs refused to function as they should. He could have used a large rock now, something to pull himself up with, but around him, there was nothing. He began to crawl. What an indignity. He, Mandred Torgridson, the most renowned warrior along the entire fjord, was crawling from his enemy on his hands and knees. He had bested seven men in single combat in King Horsa’s campaign. For each defeated foe, he had proudly woven another braid in his hair. And now he was reduced to crawling away.

  This was another kind of fight, he admonished himself. This monster was not something you could beat with weapons. He had seen for himself how Asmund’s arrow had bounced off and how his own axe had left no mark. This was a fight with different rules. Victory did not lie in slaying the beast, but in kindling a fire on the cliff top.

  In desperation, Mandred crawled forward on his elbows. The strength was now ebbing from his arms as well as his legs. The summit was close, though. Mandred looked up to the standing stones. They were crowned with pale caps of snow, standing out against the green shimmer in the sky. Just behind the stones, he knew, the wood for the signal fire was stacked.

  With his eyes squeezed shut, he crawled on. The only thing in his thoughts was his wife. He had to rescue her. His strength could not fail him now. On. On!

  He opened his eyes to a squint. The snow was gone. He was lying on bare rock. In front of him rose one of the pillars of the stone circle. He pulled himself up the pillar until, swaying, he was on his feet again. His legs would not carry him much farther.

  The summit had been leveled and was as smooth as the bottom of a wooden bowl. Out of habit, he had moved around the outside of the circle. No one stepped between the standing stones. It was not a question of courage. Once, in summer, Mandred had spent an entire afternoon watching the summit. Not a single bird flew over the circle.

  A narrow path wound along the edge of the cliff, making it possible to get around the eerie stones, but on his numb legs, he was no longer sure-footed enough to risk it. The choice had been made for him: he had to go between them.

  As if expecting to be struck down without warning, Mandred ducked his head as he stepped into the circle. Ten steps, and he would make it to the other side. It was such a ridiculously short distance . . .

  Anxiously, he looked around. No snow lay here, none at all on the bedrock. Inside the circle, it seemed, winter held no sway. Strange patterns of curved lines were etched into the rock under him.

  The Hartungscliff dropped almost straight down to the fjord below. Seen from the village beneath, it looked as if someone had set a stony crown atop the cliff. The granite blocks loomed three times the height of a man, enclosing the rock plateau in a wide circle. It was said they had been standing there long before humans came to the Fjordlands. The stones were inscribed with patterns of intertwined lines, a web etched with such mastery that no human could match it. Looking at it too long made one feel drunk, as if from overindulgence in spicy winter mead.

  Years before, a wandering skald had come to Firnstayn and asserted that the standing stones were ancient elven warriors cursed by their own ancestors, the Alben. He said they had been damned to an endless, lonely vigil, until the land itself, one far-off day, cried out to them for help and broke the enchantment. Mandred, back then, had laughed at the skald. Every child knew that elves were delicate creatures and no taller than humans. The stones were far too massive to be elves.

  When Mandred had passed across the circle, an icy wind hit him from the front. He had all but done it. Nothing would stop him from . . . the woodpile? He had to be able to see it from here. It was on a rock ledge, stacked at the edge of the cliff, protected from the wind. Mandred dropped to his knees and crept forward. There was nothing.

  From where he kneeled, the cliff fell away vertically almost six hundred feet. Had there been a rock fall? Had the ledge broken away? Mandred had the feeling that his gods were mocking him. He had used every ounce of his strength to get this far, and now . . .

  Desperately, he looked out over th
e fjord. Far below, on the other side of the frozen strait, his village huddled in the snow. Firnstayn: four longhouses and a handful of huts, all ringed by a laughably weak palisade. The wooden wall, built from the trunks of fir trees, was meant to keep wolves at bay and to be an obstacle to plunderers. The palisade would never stop the manboar.

  Cautiously, the jarl edged a fraction closer to the lip of the abyss and peered down at the fjord. The faerylight in the sky conjured green shadows in the snowy landscape. Firnstayn had gone into hibernation. Neither man nor animal could be seen along the paths. White smoke rose from the chimneys below the ridgepoles and was shredded by the gusts of wind and blasted across the fjord. Freya would be there, sitting by the fire, listening for the signal horn to tell her they were on their way back from the hunt.

  But the horn had been destroyed. From his position, they would have heard its blast all the way down to the village. How cruel, this game the gods were playing with him and his family. Were they watching him now? Were they laughing at him?

  Something clicked softly, and Mandred, weary, turned to face it. The manboar was standing on the other side of the stone circle and began to move slowly around the outside of the ring. So even that creature dared not step between the standing stones?

  Mandred crawled away from the edge of the cliff. His life was over, he knew that much, but if he had the choice, then he would prefer the cold to kill him than to end as food for that beast.

  The clicking of hooves grew faster. One more heave, and Mandred had done it. He lay within the enchanted ring of stones.

  Leaden fatigue crept into his limbs. With every breath, the icy frost sliced into his throat. Utterly exhausted, he leaned against one of the stones. Gusting wind tore at his frost-stiffened clothes. The belt around his upper leg had loosened, and blood now seeped through the scraps of wool.

  Quietly, he prayed to his gods. To Firn, the god of winter; to Norgrimm, the god of war; to Naida the Cloud Rider, ruler of the twenty-three winds; and to Luth, the weaver, who wove the threads of human fate into a precious tapestry for the walls of the Golden Hall, where the gods feasted with the bravest of the dead warriors.

  Mandred’s eyes closed. He would sleep the long sleep. He had forfeited his place in the Hall of Heroes. He should have died with his companions. He was a coward. Gudleif, Ragnar, and Asmund, none of them had run. The fact that the wood had fallen from the cliff was punishment for his fear of having to face the gods.

  “You are right, Mandred Torgridson. The gods no longer protect the craven,” rang a voice inside his head.

  Was that Death? Mandred wondered. Is Death just a voice?

  “More than a voice. Look at me.”

  The jarl could barely raise his eyelids. Warm breath hit him in the face. He was looking into huge eyes, as blue as the sky on a late-summer day when the moon and the sun shared the heavens between them. It was the manboar’s eyes. The beast was beside him, just outside the stone circle, squatting low. Slaver dripped from its blood-crusted mouth. On one long tusk, fibrous scraps of flesh still hung.

  “The gods no longer protect the craven,” came the strange voice in Mandred’s head again. “Now the others can come for you.”

  The manboar rose to its full height. Its jowls twitched. It seemed almost to smile. Then it turned away. It moved back around the stone circle and was soon out of sight.

  Mandred tilted his head back. The ghostly faerylight was still dancing across the sky. The others? Darkness was already engulfing him. Had his eyelids fallen closed without his realizing it? Sleep . . . just for a little while. The darkness beckoned. It promised peace.

  The Courting

  Noroelle sat in the shade of the two linden trees and let the melody of Farodin’s flute and Nuramon’s voice caress her. It felt almost as if her two suitors were renewing her senses with their gentle airs. Wistfully, she watched the play of light and shadow in the canopy of leaves far above. Then she looked over to the spring bubbling up just beyond the shade in which she lay. Sunlight glittered on the stream that ran from the spring. Noroelle leaned forward and let her hand glide through the babbling water and felt the tingle of the magic that dwelled in it.

  Her eyes followed the water to where it spilled into the little lake. The sunlight filtered through the water to the bed of the lake and made the gemstones sparkle that Noroelle had once embedded there so carefully. The stones soaked up the magic of the spring, and what was not bound by them flowed out into the brook and was washed away. Out there, the fields thrived on the magic of the water. And at night, the little riverbank sprites came out of their flowers and swarmed in the starlight to rhapsodize about the beauty of Albenmark.

  The fields had dressed themselves in the blossoms of spring. A breeze carried the complicated scent of grasses and flowers to Noroelle. Beneath the trees, it mixed with the sweet odor of the linden blooms. Leaves rustled overhead and joined with the birdsong and the babbling spring water to form a backdrop to Farodin’s and Nuramon’s music.

  While Farodin created a tapestry of sounds from all the resonances of that place, Nuramon lifted his voice above them, weaving words that made Noroelle feel like one of the Alben herself. She looked over fondly at Nuramon, who was sitting on a flat stone by the water, then back at Farodin, who sat with his back against the trunk of the larger of the two linden trees.

  Farodin’s face was that of an elven prince from the old songs, with a countenance whose fine elegance was praised as the glory of the Alben. His linden-green eyes were like jewels, and his snow-blond hair formed a pale frame around his face. He wore the traditional costume of the minnesinger—the tunic, breeches, cloak, and scarf—all of it fashioned from the finest faery silk. Only his shoes were of gelgerok leather. Noroelle looked at his fingers, the way they danced over the flute. She could have watched him play like that the whole day long.

  While Farodin looked like the ideal of an elven man, no one would claim the same for Nuramon. The women at court openly derided his looks, only to gush about his unconventional handsomeness in private. Nuramon had pale-brown eyes and somewhat darker hair that tumbled in waves to his shoulders. In his sand-colored attire, he did not fit with the traditional image of a minnesinger, but he was no less handsome for that. In place of the silk of the faeries, he had chosen cloth woven from wool, far less precious, but so strong and soft that Noroelle, seeing his tunic and his forest-hued cloak, would have first chosen Nuramon’s breast as the place to lay her head. Even his low-heeled boots, made from earth-colored and unusually supple gelgerok leather, awoke in Noroelle an urge to simply touch them. Nuramon’s face was as mutable as his voice, which had mastered all forms of song and gave to every emotion a fitting sound. But while his voice embraced every shade of sentiment, his brown eyes only spoke of longing and melancholy.

  Farodin and Nuramon were different, but each in his own way was splendid. And each in his own way was perfect, as the light of day is as attractive as the darkness of night. They were summer and winter, spring and fall. Noroelle had no wish to forgo any of that, and comparing the appearance of the two men brought her no closer to deciding on one or the other.

  At court, some had advised her to look no further than her suitor’s lineage when making her choice. But was Farodin a better elf because his great-grandmother had been a true Alben woman? And was it Nuramon’s fault that his roots were in a clan that had branched from the Alben line many generations earlier? Noroelle did not want to make her decision dependent on her lovers’ ancestry, but on the men themselves.

  Farodin knew how one was supposed to court a highborn woman. He knew every rule and custom and always acted in such a measured and honorable way that one was compelled to admire him in every way. Noroelle was enchanted by the way he seemed to know what was deep inside her, to be able to reach down deep to what was innermost, always finding the right words, as if her thoughts and feelings were his to read. But this was also his flaw. Farodin
knew all the songs and the old stories. He always knew which sweet words to use, because he’d heard them all before. But which words were truly his, and which belonged to the old poets? Was this tune his, or was it something he’d heard somewhere else? It made Noroelle smile, because this seeming flaw in Farodin, she knew, reflected more on her. Wasn’t this beautiful place exactly the way the old singers had painted it? The sun, the linden trees, the shade, the spring, the magic? And didn’t those same singers of old compose their songs in harmony with this beautiful place? Could she then think worse of Farodin for doing exactly what was called for here, now? No, she could not. Farodin was perfect in every way, and any woman in the faery realm would be happy to have him woo her.

  But still she wondered who Farodin really was. He evaded her, as the Spring of Lyn evaded the eyes of the elves with its radiant light. She wished that he would lower his own mask, even just briefly, to let her see the wellspring underneath. She had often tried to get him to do just that, but he had not understood her overtures in that direction, and until now, she had not managed to see into his deepest self. Sometimes she feared that something dark might be lurking there, something that Farodin wanted to keep hidden at all costs. From time to time, he went away on long journeys, but never spoke about where he went or why. And when he returned, despite his clear joy at seeing her again, he seemed to Noroelle to be more closed than before he had left.

  By contrast, with Nuramon, Noroelle knew exactly who she was dealing with. She had been told often enough that Nuramon was not the right one for her, that he was not worthy of her. Not only did he come from a large clan, but he also came from a bloodline marked by disgrace. For Nuramon carried in him the soul of an elf that, through all of the lives he’d been born into, had not found the purpose of his existence and had therefore never entered the moonlight. For the ones for whom this path was blocked, it meant being born within the clan over and over again until one’s destiny was fulfilled. Nuramon, one of these unfortunates, was not able to remember his previous lives.