246, Age of Newness, Early Spring
"All that I have been, all that I have done, all that I have believed, would be nothing without all the blood I have spilled."
-Attributed to Arbleron Turnlong, Killsworn and Silverflame.
"We must help her-"
Trying to go forward, the man met Dorren's arm and rebounded off it. He glared at Dorren. Dorren turned his head and looked back, quietly, unemotionally.
Whatever the Priest saw in Dorren's eyes was enough. He stumbled back, gasping out something that might have been a curse if he could have put the breath behind it. He didn't remove his gaze from Dorren's, though, as if he thought Dorren might attack the moment he looked away. He raised a shaking hand to touch the white owl that hung at his throat, and finally dared to lower his eyes.
"I only wanted to help," he said.
"You can best help by leaving her alone."
The Priest flinched at the sound of Dorren's voice, but still hesitated for a long moment. "If the Lady wants to speak to us, you will let her know where she can find us?"
Dorren took a step closer, lowering his voice. From any further than a few feet away, his tone would have sounded reassuring. Closer to, someone could have heard his words, and might well have blanched as the Priest blanched. "This is no time to assure the Lady of the infinite mercy and compassion of your goddess. Your goddess didn't stop what happened here. I can feel their death-impressions, just as the Lady can. They cried out to Suulta for help, and she did not answer them.
"No. I don't think the Lady will want to speak to you for some time."
The Priest opened his mouth, closed it, and finally turned his back and shuffled away. Dorren watched him go, one hand resting lightly on his sword-hilt.
"That was not decorous," said Eleriad softly from behind him.
Dorren glanced at her quickly. She was still crouched over the ground where the children had been slaughtered, her fingers tracing the grooves in the grass where their heels had dragged. Dorren narrowed his eyes, as much to study her more closely as to shut out the sight of the crying, screaming, pleading ghosts that still lingered. "No, my lady, it was not," he said. "But it needed to be done."
He couldn't be sure, since she crouched with her back to him and all he could see was battle-leathers stained by fighting and a fall of white hair, but he thought he heard a weary smile in her voice. "You always do what needs doing, don't you?"
Dorren didn't answer. The reply was too obvious.
Eleriad uttered a long sigh after a moment, and then jerked her head. Dorren walked over and crouched at her side, studying the grass in front of him obediently as she gestured.
"They killed a little girl here." Eleriad had dropped into the cold voice she prized so much, which was so necessary in looking on the aftermath of battle, and which she didn't do nearly as well as Dorren. "Five years, I think. Certainly what I can feel of her emotions seems no older than that. She didn't know what they were going to do. She was one of the first to die- or, at least, she died simultaneously with the rest of the first group, so she had no warning. They screamed at her. Kicked her, too. There was an intense pain in her side, which probably came from broken ribs. The kicks aggravated that further."
Dorren nodded, and closed his eyes, reaching out with the ability to feel emotions that all his kind possessed. Any violent slaughter like this would leave death-impressions that he could read.
And then he found the girl's.
No, not the girl's. Amadia's.
She stumbled as the man above her hauled on her arm, and screamed. The man on the other side turned to look at her, and Amadia cowered. She had never seen anything as furious as that face.
"Shut up," said the second man. "You're a corrupt little creature, aren't you? Scrabbling in magic like a worm in dirt. We'll soon purify that out of you. Blood can't do everything, but it can cleanse. Only by being bathed in blood can this land be clean again." He laughed again, and spat on her. "Elwen," he added over his shoulder as he strode in one direction and she was dragged in another.
Amadia curled her chin into her chest. She didn't understand. What had she done to the humans? Even if some other Elwen had done something to them, why were they hurting her?
They shouldn't be able to hurt her. It wasn't fair.
She bit into the arm of the man above her, and when he cried out and let her go, she flung what little magical fire she could summon with her rage in his face.
She turned to run, but the second man had come back again and caught her, and he was smiling at her, his eyes wide and very empty.
"Now," he called out. He spoke loudly, but it seemed to Amadia at the same time that he spoke very lowly, just for her ears, and that he stroked her hair as he tilted her head back.
There was a moment of pain-
Dorren blinked, and came back to himself. There was always the danger that sharing too deeply in a death-impression would cause the Elwen to die himself. Eleriad's hand clasped on his shoulder made that unlikely to happen. His long experience with this kind of thing-he had forgotten how many death impressions he had read in the last six thousand years-made it even more unlikely. But neither of those was the real reason that he had come back from Amadia's death at the last moment.
He looked up at his Lady. "There can be no doubt? They killed every one of the hostages they said they would give back?"
"Every one." Eleriad closed her eyes, her face harsh with pain. One hand rose and made a kind of useless smoothing gesture through her white hair. Dorren had seen her make that kind of gesture more and more often lately. He wondered what it meant. But then Eleriad took a deep breath, and her eyes, as silver as his own, opened again and looked at him steadily. "I withdrew from the captured territory as they demanded, and all they did was kill Elwen children on it." Her words were low and measured, and she stared very directly out over the expanse of grass, touched with trees at the very end.
Dorren spoke then. He had seen that kind of gaze before. It usually resulted in bright flames or bursts of explosions in the next few seconds. "My lady, this kind of evil requires one punishment."
Eleriad did not seem to be listening to him. "A good thing that Elwen bodies burn at death," she said distantly. "I do not know that I could have stood seeing all the small ones laid out in neat rows, their throats slit, staring at the sky, the echoes of their screams in my ears."
"That we have the echoes of those screams is more than enough."
Eleriad turned and met his eyes. Dorren held firm under her gaze.
He knew what needed to be done.
Eleriad was Lady of Rowan. She was Councilmaster. She had discovered how to send Elwens to the moons. She had guided their city through the High Ages, and all the poetry and art and wonder of those times. She had fought fiercely in the War, despite the loss of her husband to the humans, and sometimes humans would flee when they saw the Running Stag on a banner, before battle was even joined. She was adored, loved, revered, and served eagerly by more than a million Elwens.
Dorren was her lieutenant, a lord in his own right, but still only a shadow to her great light. He knew that very well. But about some things he was still wiser.
Eleriad's eyes narrowed as she felt that conviction from him, and her voice spoke sharply in his head. ^Why do you think that you can contradict me?^
^My lady. I was right once before, on a matter of great importance to both of us. Was I not?^
Eleriad lowered her head and looked away from him. She didn't like to remember that time. In truth, neither did Dorren, but he wasn't about to let something so important slip from her memory.
^You are a cold bastard.^
^Yes, my lady, I am.^
Eleriad turned to him, hands clenching, and a long hiss of breath escaping from her as if forced out of her lungs by a heavy weight. Her voice when she spoke was perfectly steady, however. "These humans come from a village called Agiri. We know that much. You have my permission to- to take some soldiers and do what you wish to their village."
Dorren bowed his head. He said nothing. She might be envisioning burning houses, or burning land, or sowing the earth with salt, or something else.
He was not.
But he kept that thought in the deepest part of his mind, where Eleriad could not simply pick it up from his emotions, and so he kept the thought that followed it.
Blood needed to be spilled for this. Someone's hands would have to be soaked in blood up to the elbows. But at the same time, and with equal urgency, Eleriad couldn't be the one to dip her hands into the blood. The heat of battle excused many things, but cold vengeance was not the same.
But it had to be done.
________________________________________________________________________
"We grieve for the lives that have been lost this day. We trust that the fire that burned in them is gone to be part of a higher light."
Dorren nodded to himself. Many in the audience were weeping as they listened to Eleriad, and still others radiated intense sorrow from behind masks of stone. This was the kind of thing that his Lady was best at, and the only part she could be allowed to play in this situation.
"And vengeance does demand some recompense for their deaths," Eleriad went on. She paced back and forth on the makeshift stage in front of her audience, her voice sounding artificially loud thanks to the mages who had been asked to channel her voice on the wind currents. It was quite a large army, after all, and it was important to make sure that everyone could hear her words. "But the humans move fast and receive assistance from those who hate Rowan. Trying to bring them to battle has failed. Therefore, I will send the Lord Dorren and a group of no more than fifty volunteers to the village of Agiri, in order to claim our vengeance there."
A roar of approval went up. Dorren nodded a little. He had thought of resisting her command and riding out alone, but that wasn't enough, in the same way that sowing the humans' ground with salt wouldn't be enough. He must spill blood, and he must have witnesses.
"Who will ride with him?" asked Eleriad.
Shouts arose. All of them looked at Eleriad, not Dorren. Dorren nodded again. That was as it should be. Rowan looked to the Lady, and Rowan looked to justice, and mercy, and dreams, and honor. All of that was just as it should be.
Sometimes, the justice had to be supported by vengeance, the mercy by harshness, the dreams with nightmares, the honor with horror. But she who was the source of all the brilliant things should not be the source of the dark. That would confuse the minds of their people too much, and what they needed just now was to soothe troubled emotions to sleep, as well as to insure that the humans did not pass without punishment.
It occurred to Dorren, briefly, that he might earn hatred for this, and that Eleriad might be forced to dismiss him as her second-in-command.
He blinked, then smiled in amusement. When had that ever mattered? Loyalty to Rowan and love for his city, yes, of course those mattered. But status?
Why did that matter?
_____________________________________________________________________
Dorren was still amusing himself with the thought when he rode out to Agiri, on a sorrel mare he had been riding for the last century. She still danced as if she had only seen her first twenty years, though, and Dorren patted her neck as he rejected yet again the thought of getting another horse. Why would he need one? What would he do with it?
Just as, what would he do if he continued to remain second-in-command?
"I never understood why some Elwens wanted power, or why the humans want it," he remarked to the Guard Eleriad had assigned him. He didn't really need one, but the Lady thought he did, so the Guard was along. "What's the point? What are you going to do with it when you have it?"
The Guardswoman had been watching the trees that flanked their path suspiciously, but now she turned startled green eyes on him. "My lord, I don't understand what you mean."
"Well," said Dorren, tapping his heels so that his mare moved just a little way ahead, "I heard a story once about the Elfworld War, or the cause of it. The elves wanted to rule, they said. They said Elwens had ruled too long. They told tales of our outrageous cruelty to them."
The Guardswoman--Kaenya was her name, wasn't it?--listened politely. Dorren permitted himself another smile. The Elfworld War had been over for longer than this woman had been alive, but she was listening.
"But what would they have done if they had managed to win the last battle of the war?" asked Dorren, his voice softening as he looked out at the trees. He had been this way once before, not long before the battle that finally ended the elves' ambitions. The trees weren't the same, of course. The ancestors of these trees he had seen, yes, but they had fallen and decayed and rotted since then. But the new ones sparkled as proudly in the sunlight as the old ones had done. "They probably would have tried to prevent cruelty, as they termed it, from ever happening again. But they couldn't have used all their power just for that. What else would they do with it? And what would the humans do with it if they won this war?" He reflected for a moment, then shook his head. "I simply don't understand."
Kaenya was frowning. One hand tapped her sword-hilt. "I don't think they've thought about that," she said at last. "I think they just want to win the war."
"You have to think about afterward," said Dorren. "What would be the point if they didn't?"
Kaenya sighed. "I truly don't know, my lord. The philosophy of the humans is beyond me." She grinned suddenly at him. "None of the prisoners I ever questioned lasted that long."
Dorren nodded, and wondered what she would think when they came to Agiri.
________________________________________________________________________
It was a simple village, really. Just a score of small stone houses, thatched as though the roofs had been last-minute ideas. A single path led in, and none led out. Dorren supposed that the humans simply went into the forest between the houses themselves.
Doors banged open at the sight of the Elwens, of course. Shouting ensued. Men who had been left behind to guard the women and children rushed out, clutching swords, spears, and a variety of other weapons. The women followed them, most of them bundling smaller children onto their backs, some of them herding along girls who might have been ten or twelve. Dorren nodded a little. Any boys that age would have been in training to become soldiers already.
The people of Agiri looked dirty, scared, and desperate. Their clothes were ragged in spite of the houses. Some of the older girls beginning to flee into the forest had limbs no thicker than birch branches. Dorren might have been moved to pity, if he had decided that he was going to allow himself to feel any.
Kaenya screamed, a shout of exultation, and hurled herself forward as the first man came to meet them, sword held high.
"No."
The Guardswoman stopped in mid-gallop and glanced back at him. Her horse whinnied and pawed the air at the abrupt halt, but Kaenya paid no attention. "We have to stop them, my lord."
"I will stop them."
Kaenya hesitated, but Dorren knew what his face looked like. It was the same face that had made the Priest flinch. Kaenya backed her horse out of the way, and Dorren looked at the charging human, a stony calm settling over him.
Strangely, visions of the dead children didn't fill his head as he had thought they would. There was no anger in this. There was no bloody, screaming ariltoceta, the blood-rage that humans thought all land Elwens flew into when something they loved was destroyed.
This was just vengeance.
Dorren called to his magic. It roared up in him at once, a full and golden fire, the power of a healer's gift. Dorren held it so for a moment, then twisted it, and reversed it, and set it upon the children who were just starting to flee into the forest.
They screamed. They cried out in racking pain. Their limbs shook with invisible tremors. They fell to the ground, and writhed. Dorren raised an eyebrow, and one girl began jerking in regular, spasmodic motions. A moment later, her belly burst open and small, blood-soaked creatures hurtled out and onto the adults who had begun running to rescue the girls. The child they had come from screamed once more, the shrill sound of someone with no sanity left, and then died.
Dorren ignored the man in front of him, who had just begun to realize that something was wrong, and looked out over their women. Humans didn't allow their women to fight, for some reason that Dorren understood no better than he did their philosophy of power, and so they grew especially upset whenever harm came to a woman. Dorren was looking for a particular target, however.
Ah, yes.
There she was.
Dorren gestured, and the woman fell to her knees, screaming, as the child she obviously carried from the size of her stomach began to claw its way out of her. Blood spread in a deep stain over her abdomen. Dorren reached out, touched more tiny minds, and called on them.
Two other women fell as well, and blood splashed and ran and rilled over the ground as they miscarried almost at once. Dorren spun his horse and faced the men who had begun to crowd towards him, their faces etched with hatred that he could feel almost as strongly as he did land Elwen emotions.
He called again, and the bodies of the women still living behind those men jerked once, then exploded in flames. The smell of roasting human flesh wasn't that much different from that of goat, Dorren noted distantly. His mind was like crystal now, everything that had crowded it no more than light under the surface. He trotted the sorrel mare towards the men, and they hesitated once, then spun from him and into the forest, still crying out as though they thought screaming could somehow bring those they had loved back to life.
That did leave some of the children. Dorren lifted a hand. Diamond shards sprang into being around him, as though the air had suddenly decided to stiffen and glint. Another gesture sent them flying forward, and they ripped out throats and bellies, groins and thighs.
Dorren sat his horse in the middle of the carnage, looked about him with open eyes, and dropped his shields.
If he was going to cause such pain, then it was right that he share in it.
He winced, then jerked, then fell off his horse, screaming. As though some part of him had been left behind, he could feel the brush of the mare's nose on his shoulder, and hear her low, concerned whinny. But most of him was involved in feeling the emotions of the dying humans all around him.
This is what it feels like to be ripped to death.
This is what it feels like to lose all hope in moments, as the child he had carried for months in dreams of the future suddenly died, irrevocably.
This is what it feels like to burn, to be consumed from the inside, to be torn, to lose all in moments.
It continued. And when he thought that the suffering should be almost over, it continued.
________________________________________________________________________
Dorren opened his eyes, then blinked hard to clear them. They seemed to be gummed with something that wasn't sleep.
Of course, if the smell on him was right, then he wasn't just soaked in sleep sweat, either. Feces, and urine, and vomit, and bile, also seemed to be involved.
"Drink this."
"Where are the others?"
"Returned to the Lady, my lord." Kaenya spoke without looking at him, but her hands clenched as if to say that she would have joined them, too, if not for duty. "They didn't feel-they didn't feel there was anything left for them to do."
Of course there wasn't, thought Dorren, and sipped at the water.
"My lord, why did you do it?"
Dorren looked up. "You may not understand humans, my lady, but I thought you understood Elwens. This needed vengeance. Will you complain now that the humans who killed those children the Lady negotiated so hard to get back went unpunished, even if we never catch them?"
"Of course not!"
"Good." Dorren turned back to look into the fire.
"But it was a crime."
"Yes, it was."
"Then why do it?"
Dorren looked up at her in some surprise. "Because it needed to be done. What other reason did you think I would have?"
Kaenya said nothing, just staring at him- or past him, as if she didn't think that she could stand to look directly at him. Then she stood and retreated into the darkness.
Dorren went back to gazing at the fire.
