Arc 2: Chapter 5: They Who Deal Death
I grabbed a bucket and started down the hill, moving a ways off from the path. I could see easily through the shadowed woods, even in those places where the trees grew too dense for the moons to peek through. The stream shone like molten silver to my Alder-blessed eyes, the horned hares and night crows easy to spot amid the trees. The darkness gathered deeper beyond the bounds of the shrine, thick with restless shades, but I wouldn’t need to go that far. I could see the Fane’s barrier, where the huge webs had been woven dense through the canopy.
I took my time filling the bucket. Gentle music filled the woods, deep and resonant, like a giant strumming at a lyre. I closed my eyes and drank it in, drank in the starlight too, feeling both more at ease than I had in months and aching terribly. I studied my reflection in the water, seeing my own long, morose face staring back at me. My copper hair, touched lightly with gold, had grown very long during my frequent travels. My amber eyes, bright with aura, sat in rings of shadow disturbingly alike to the old man in the cottage. My gaze lingered on the four long, fever-red scars running from my left temple to just above my mouth. I touched them lightly, and the ever-present burn itched along the marks.
Only when I realized ten minutes or more had passed, me wasting that time staring into my scarred reflection in the water, did I know consciously I stalled.
“It is always painful to see the old lose themselves,” a gentle voice said.
I glanced to the speaker. She sat against a large stone along the stream’s edge, and like Oraeke she was an elf. However, unlike the Fane’s guardian, she looked more akin to the classical idea of the Sidhe. Slender and young, standing at perhaps five and a half feet tall, her pale skin shining brightly even though she sat beneath the shadow of a tree and no moonlight touched her. She wore a short dress of pale green silk clasped at one shoulder, the style ancient, leaving her legs bare.
“Lady Rysanthe.” I stood hastily to my full height and turned to face her, dipping into a bow much more formal than I’d given the bridge troll or even the master smith. “I didn’t realize you’d returned.”
The she-elf laughed softly, the motion causing the plates of silver around her neck to jingle softly. She had similar plates belted around her slim waist, with smaller disks like large coins draped over her chest and shoulders. Sandals laced up to mid-calf wrapped her small feet, and bands weighed down her arms, each fashioned from silver or ivory. A thin silver circlet, depicting a sleepy-eyed skull, bound bluntly cut bangs, the rest of her white-blond hair secured in a tight braid bound at each link with what looked like shards of pale bone.
“Always so gallant," she teased. "Am I to proffer my hand for a kiss, like one of your noble ladies?”
When I blushed, she laughed again, though there was no mockery in it. “It heartens me that you can still be teased, dear Alken. Our work is fell, my friend, and it is good not to lose yourself to it. Still, just call me Rys. We are friends and comrades in Their service, are we not?”
I opened my mouth, words failing me. The idea of referring to the closest thing our strange order had to a leader so informally went against my low birth and all my training. “You’re my captain,” I said at last. “It wouldn’t be proper.”
Rysanthe scoffed. “We have no captains, and we are only an order in the most informal of senses. Let us not stand on ceremony, you and I.” Relenting, the elf leaned forward and clasped her hands together. “I have been back a few days. You only just arrived?”