A Thief in the Night

chapter Eighty-two

The elfin children were as beautiful as their parents, and they laughed even more. Aethil led the three of them through the nursery, pausing frequently to coo over the babies where they slept in narrow cribs made out of beetle shells. “They’re so adorable. I envy the mothers so. Sometimes I come down here and just watch them sleep, when I’m feeling sorrowful.”

“You have no heir as of yet, Aethil?” Cythera asked.

“What? No, of course not, I—ah . . . But you can’t know. We queens of the elves are different from others. When the time comes to produce an heir, I will find my proper mate and for the first time I will know real joy.” She glanced at Slag as if sizing him up as a candidate for that position. The dwarf was chewing on his fingernails. He seemed to have no interest at all in elf babies. “I will conceive immediately, and bear a single child, a daughter, who will become queen as soon as she is born.”

“You don’t get to finish your reign?” Malden asked.

“I . . . cannot. You see, I will die in childbirth. Just as my mother did.”

Cythera made a sound of utter pity, a kind of deep, heartfelt moan. Aethil favored them with a bright smile that had little warmth in it.

“Enough—we need not speak of that. Let me show you the rest of the nursery.” She led them out into a larger cavern full of noise, where children were playing elaborate games. Malden recognized most of the games at once, as he’d played them—or something very like them—as a child himself: seek-the-hidden-one, catch-the-ogre, even knights-and-elves, where pairs of boys sparred with flimsy swords of scrap wood. He wondered if they called it by the same name.

“Until they are seven years old,” Aethil said, raising her voice over the noise, “they are schooled here. We make sure they’re educated in their history, in the vital arts, and given a smattering of arcane knowledge. Not enough to let them do any serious mischief, of course.”

Malden saw one little boy being chased by dragons of smoke, long ribbony illusions cast by a girl who laughed to see him run. Such a spell, he knew, would take a human sorcerer decades to master, and the sorcerer would pay a terrible price for the knowledge. Here it was a commonplace.

“What source of power does your magic draw on?” Cythera asked, in awe of even this small magic. “Surely they don’t summon demons to teach them these spells, and no child that young could ever master even the basics of witchcraft.”

Aethil laughed at the idea. “Our ancestors provide all the magical power we could ever require. Demons! Such foolishness! No one would ever be so foolish as to summon one of those.”

Malden and Slag shared a knowing look. Someone had to have summoned the demon that Mörget came to slay. It was impossible for demons to come into the world unbidden—that was the pact the Bloodgod had made with humanity, that he would keep his terrible creatures walled away in the pit of souls. A sorcerer had to release them, and hopefully control them. So who had summoned the amorphous demon if not an elf? Malden suspected it must be the Hieromagus. The wizard-priest would certainly have enough power to do it, and his forgetfulness might explain why the demon seemed to be loose to prey upon men and animals at its leisure.

Aethil wouldn’t know about that, it seemed, and there was no point questioning her on the point, but Malden filed it away as another mystery of the elves.

The elf queen led them farther into a library, where older children were taking a lesson. While the very young had been dressed all alike in simple smocks, those of six and seven years were variegated in their garb. Half of them wore patchwork shifts, old and tattered and ill-fitting. The other half wore sumptuous robes and gowns. These must be the children of the noble class, Malden surmised—though he was confused as to why the poorer children were receiving the same education. “In human lands, only the very rich teach their children to read,” he said.

“But then how are the laboring classes expected to learn anything?” Aethil asked, quite scandalized.

“Mostly, they aren’t,” Malden told her. “They either learn a trade, through apprenticing to a master, or they work as unskilled labor all their lives.” And that was only in the Free City, he thought. Outside of Ness, nine of every ten humans spent their lives on a farm, and never learned more than how to hold a sickle properly or how to plant seed. In the whole kingdom of Skrae perhaps only one man in twenty knew how to read and form letters.

“Why—that’s—barbarous,” Aethil said. She made the word sound obscene. “You keep your people ignorant? They can’t even read? I thought you humans were nothing like the old stories, but this—”

Cythera stepped in hurriedly to change the subject. “All this talk of education has made me remember something I wanted to ask you.”

“All right,” Aethil said. She had a new look on her face, a kind of guarded doubt that Malden didn’t like at all.

Cythera spoke quickly, though, and soon Aethil was nodding along. “When we first encountered your soldiers,” she said, “I was surprised to find that they spoke Skraeling—the language of my people. The accent is different, and the pronunciation of some words radically so, but we seem to be able to understand each other just fine.”

Malden had wondered about that himself. In the course of subsequent events—their capture, their imprisonment, the threat of immediate death, and being forced to act as if he were Slag’s servant—he supposed he’d put it out of mind. Yet it was wondrously strange. Not even all humans spoke the same tongue. He’d met sailors from Skilfing and the Rifnlatt and the other Northern Kingdoms, and was unable to understand a word of their speech—much less the courtly and decadent language of the Old Empire, with its myriad tenses and declensions. The dwarves had their own language as well, and even used a different alphabet. Yet the elfin and Skraeling tongues sounded almost identical.

“Your soldier told me that I was speaking elfin,” Cythera said with a little laugh. “I was hoping you might shed some light on this puzzle.”

The doubt on Aethil’s face had turned to pity by the time Cythera finished. “You poor creatures. You don’t know your own history, do you?”

“I beg your pardon?” Cythera asked.

“But of course, your lives are short, and you have no ancestors to teach you.” Aethil placed a delicate hand on Cythera’s arm. “You speak our language and we speak yours because they are the same language.”

“But—how?” Malden asked.

Aethil tilted her head to one side. “What do you know of your past? Do they teach you even that your people came from the Old Empire, exiled by decree? That you landed on the shores of this continent with nothing but what you could carry away? It sounds as if they don’t teach you at all about the age of brotherhood our people shared.”

“No, they never mentioned that,” Malden agreed. “Because there was no such age.” He looked at Cythera. “Was there? We fought the elves, and we won. That’s what I learned.”

Aethil laughed. “Oh, perhaps. But not until later. When you landed here, it’s true there were a few skirmishes, as we didn’t know what you wanted. Soon, though, we realized you couldn’t even feed yourselves. You didn’t know what plants were edible and which were poisonous. You had never seen snow, and you weren’t ready for the first winter. You would have died out if we didn’t take pity on you.”

Cythera shook her head. “You’re saying that our forebears relied on the elves for survival? That we weren’t matched in constant warfare for the land?”

“Hardly. The continent is enormous! There was plenty of room for both our nations. We took you under our wing. Taught you how to survive here, and more. We taught you our language and even how to work magic. For centuries we lived amongst each other—even intermarrying, though, sadly, our unions never bore fruit.” This with a longing glance at Slag. “Oh, you humans. We loved you, as Elders should love their juniors.”

“But something happened,” Malden said. “Something changed. There was a war. There was a war that lasted what, twenty years?” He looked to Cythera and she nodded.

“Oh, yes,” Aethil agreed. “And it only ended when we came here.”

“But—why? If we were so happy together?”

Aethil blinked her eyes. “You don’t even know about the Prophetess? How one of our own—an Elder, one of our Hieromagi—betrayed her own people? How she taught your people religion and turned them against us? She demanded that the humans worship her, and they did. Then she went too far, and demanded we worship her as well, that we renounce the ancestors and take her as our only goddess. When we refused, she set you at our destruction.”

“We— She— Who— But what . . . ?” Malden was so confused he couldn’t speak. He’d never heard any of this.

“You rose up against us, and we were caught unawares,” Aethil went on. “It was all done with great stealth and cunning. In one night you slaughtered nine of every ten Elders in their beds. Those few who survived held out for twenty years, but in the end we retreated here.”

“That’s not the story we tell at all,” Cythera said.

It damned well wasn’t. Malden felt the blood rush out of his face at the thought. If all this was true . . . He’d never been particularly proud of his country, or his people. They were far too base and hypocritical to allow that. But he’d never thought their history was one of mass murder and deceit.

It seemed his people had good reason to want the elves locked away and forgotten. Suddenly he understood why nobody had broken open the Vincularium in so many centuries—because they didn’t want to learn the secrets it held.