101. Everything You Seek
Chapter 101
Everything You Seek
27 th Day of the Blood Moon
Tahír un Ilyien?, Aravell – Winter, Year 3081 After Doom
A strange sense of peace seemed to hold the Tahír un Ilyien? in its grasp. It was more than a physical thing. Ella could feel the change in the air from the city beyond. That tree, with its glowing purple leaves, was an anchor between worlds, its heartbeat resounding within Ella’s soul. She’d been sitting there, perched on the stone terraces with Faenir at her feet, since the sun had first risen.
Sennik and Balmyras sat a few rows back, while Luteir and Aneera lurked about somewhere.
Ella drew a sharp breath, staring down at the elves and Rakina who stood on the central platform at the tree’s base. Hundreds came each day, thousands possibly. All to be closer to the ones they loved – the ones they’d lost.
A hand rested on Ella’s shoulder, firm yet gentle.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Tanner said, stepping down from the higher terrace to sit beside Ella. She had smelled him as soon as he’d entered the garden, the wolf within her pricking at his scent.
Ella gave him a half-smile, then turned back to staring at the Ilyien? tree.
“You’ve come here every day since returning. Sat in this same spot.”
“Are you following me?”
“No,” Tanner said with a weak shrug. “Yana is.” He pointed a few terraces down to where Yana sat with her back to them, pretending she hadn’t heard anything. “She thinks she’s like some shapeshifting shadow or something.”
“I’ve not seen her.” Ella looked down at the woman, allowing a smile to touch her lips, the wolf within her grumbling gently, Faenir nuzzling against her leg. She had of course seen Yana follow her every morning without saying a word, but Tanner didn’t need to know that.
“She’s worried about you.” Tanner leaned forwards, resting his elbows on his legs. “ We’re worried about you.”
Ella laughed, shaking her head. “Nothing to be worried about.” She leaned forwards, mimicking Tanner’s stance, then looked down at Faenir, who gave her nose a lick with a wet tongue. She laughed, tilting her head to the side. The laughter died when her thoughts drifted. “Lasch and Elia’s son…”
“What about him?”
“He’s alive.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s alive,” Ella repeated with a sigh, sitting back up straight and staring down at the central yard, her gaze passing over the statues of the human and the Fenryr Angan.
“That’s…” The man paused for a moment. “Not good news?”
“He fights for the empire. He almost killed Calen at Tarhelm. He’s a mage.”
Tanner puffed out his cheeks, nodding slowly. “That’s a lot.”
“It is. I need to tell them he’s alive… but every time I try, I just… I can’t. Elia is recovering so well, but she’s so fragile. How do I tell her what Rist is? What he’s become? It could break her.”
“It could,” Tanner agreed.
“That’s not exactly what I’d hoped you’d say.”
Tanner shrugged. “Few things in this life are simple or easy, Ella. That is just the way of it. Everything has a cost, and it all just depends on whether or not you’re willing to pay it. What would you give for the truth, and is the truth worth it?”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that right now, Elia is… she’s in a good place, as good as can be. Perhaps it’s worth waiting, allowing her to heal. How much do you know of Rist? Of the hows and the whys? Did you speak to him?”
“I… No. We didn’t get a chance to speak while he was trying to murder my brother.”
Tanner nodded. “What’s the outcome if you tell her?”
“She’ll know the truth.”
“And what will that give her? Solace? Closure? Peace?”
“It will give her the truth. What more is there?”
“The truth for truth’s sake is not always what a person needs.”
“The truth is always what a person needs,” Ella snapped, the wolf rising within her.
“It’s your decision, Ella,” Tanner said calmly. “Just make sure that you don’t make it based on your own anger. Make it based on what Elia and Lasch need right now. The truth is important, but the timing of the truth can be just as much so.”
Ella only grunted in response.
They sat there in silence for a while longer until Tanner spoke again. “Every time I come to this place, my mind drifts to Rhett…”
“Mine too.” Just the mention of Rhett’s name felt like a knife had been plunged into her heart. Faenir whimpered at her feet.
“I’m sorry.” Tanner looked up at her from his hunched over position, his eyes already wet with tears. “I didn’t mean to?—”
“It’s fine.” Ella’s throat clenched, that empty feeling she knew so well flooding her veins and filling her chest. “It’s… I can go days, sometimes even a week, without thinking about him, as though he had never existed. And then, it just crashes down on me and breaks me all over again. And the guilt at forgetting him is like hot coals on my heart. It just… it rips at me. I could be sitting on a chair, staring into the fireplace, and thoughts of Rhett just consume me.”
“That sounds about right.” Tanner sat up straight. “I lost my mother almost twenty summers ago. Yesterday, I walked into the kitchen as Elia brought a fresh loaf of bread from the oven. She’d put rosemary in this one, like my mother used to. I had to walk straight out the door. Ended up drinking elven mead on my own in the middle of the city. Gods, I can’t even remember the amount of people I’ve seen die, the number of friends and family I’ve lost. The last letter I got from my brother was over a year ago, telling me that an old friend, Forn Blackwell, was found dead in his own inn, throat slit. That was the same letter where he told me that Rhett had disappeared. I never responded. I was too busy… Rahlin could be dead, but it’s Forn that hurts me. Explain that?”
“I remember him,” Ella said, thinking back to the old innkeeper she and Rhett had met in The Twisted Oak. “We met him in Camylin at your suggestion. He was a lovely man.”
“That would have been right before he died.” Tanner shook his head, then let out a long regretful sigh. “I’ll tell you one thing, Ella. The older you get, the more you appreciate what you have left.” He squeezed Ella’s knee and stood. “I’ll leave you to it. The ones we lose, Ella, they’re never really gone, just waiting.”
Ella watched as Tanner climbed down the terraces and tapped Yana’s left shoulder, promptly jumping to her right and receiving a light slap on the back of the head for his efforts. Yana looked up at Ella, smiling, as they made their way down and left.
The sight of it only made Ella miss Rhett more. Perhaps, if he’d lived, they might have grown apart, or argued, or screamed and roared at each other, and that would have been fine. Because that was human. They would have gotten through it; they would have gotten through anything. But he’d had to go and leave her alone, and so now all she had were memories of a man who loved her, who was kind and gentle, and selfless, and perfect. And that made her hate him a little bit, because no one else could ever live up to that.
Then, as she leaned back and stared at the Ilyien?, Ella could see Rhett’s smiling face in her mind, those wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes, that smile that was always so full.
“Fuck you, Rhett,” she whispered, leaning her head back to stop herself from crying. “Fuck you.”
When the threat of tears had diminished, Ella looked down at the Ilyien? tree and saw possibly the last person she’d expected to see: Farda. She’d completely avoided the man since returning to the city – since Calen had agreed to pardon him.
At her feet, Faenir sat upright, his hackles raised, lips pulling back in a snarl. She stood and walked down the stone stairs towards the central yard, crossing the bridge between the Jotnar and elf statues.
Farda stood with his eyes closed and one hand at his side, the other pressed to the trunk of the great tree, several elves around him.
Ella moved so she stood only a few feet to his left. She didn’t know what she wanted to say, only that the wolf in her blood wanted to rip the man’s throat out and that small pieces of her just wanted to know why. Why he had done all the things he’d done, why he’d stayed with her so long, why he’d brought her all the way to Aravell, knowing what would await him.
“Were you going to speak?” Farda said without opening his eyes. “Or just stand there staring at me? I can taste the smell of wet wolfpine.”
Just the sound of his voice made her furious. “What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as all the others.” Farda opened his eyes and stared up at the glowing canopy above. “Ella?—”
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t even try.”
Farda turned to face her, keeping his palm flat against the tree. “Why are you here? You approached me, and yet you won’t let me speak. You want to kill me, but you won’t let me die. Why are you here?”
“I don’t know!”
Whispers sounded around Ella as she roared, elves staring at her and walking away to the other side of the tree.
“My nieces,” Farda said, turning back to look up at the leaves overhead.
“What?”
“You wanted to know why I’m here – my nieces.” Farda bit at his lip. “I’m going to talk. You can stay or you can go. But I would prefer if you stayed.”
Ella wanted to leave, but her feet remained planted, the wolf within her growling.
“Hana and Valyianne.” Farda paused for a moment, his throat tightening. “My brother’s girls. My brother and his wife were killed by bandits on the road from Caelduin to Anthír. Apparently, the bandits had some kind of moral code, because they left the girls sitting at the side of the road. That’s where I found them. I was late. I promised him I’d bring Shinyara and let the girls fly with me. But I was late. And… Torlan died because of it. The bandits took everything, stripped them of their clothes, coin, jewels, whatever was worth anything. But they left the girls.”
Ella could smell the pain on Farda, hear the falter in his heartbeat. The moment of sympathy in her heart only served to light a rage at herself for allowing it to exist.
“I took them in, raised them. Taught them to hold swords, to hunt, taught them to sew and knit, how to cook. Hana couldn’t tell a tomato from an apple, but Valyianne had a gift for it. You should have seen the smile on her face when she baked her first pie. It was godsawful, but I ate it. The second one was better. By the fifth, I was asking her to make pie every day. Hana might not have been a good cook, but by Elyara could she sing. They were the sweetest two girls in the world.”
Farda ran his fingers down the bark of the tree. “They were everything. I’d always told myself I didn’t want children. What if they were born without the Spark? There was something dark about that – about the chance that you might live to watch your children be born, to raise them, to bring them up in the world, and then watch them slowly grow old and wither, and then, eventually, lay them into the earth. But the girls, they made me see. To care for a child is a different kind of love… On the darkest days, just one smile from Hana or one laugh from Valyianne, and everything was better. They were joy, and love, and beauty. They were my girls.”
Ella couldn’t help but notice Farda’s use of the word ‘were’. She wanted to keep her rage flowing, to not let him in, but the smell of pain and loss filled her nostrils. “What happened to them?”
“They had only seen twelve summers when they died.” Farda clenched his hand into a fist, the bark of the tree scraping away skin from his knuckles. “I’d left them with their grandparents – Sahira’s mother and father – in the city of Orinhale. The city was burned to the ground the next night.”
“Farda, I…”
“The Order knew about it before it happened. Orinhale and Aerilon were at war. The prince of Orinhale had taken the king of Aerilon’s daughter and married her in secret. That daughter had a husband already. And The Order’s spies had reported that the husband planned to set sail with an army and raze the city to the ground, his wife inside. We could have stopped it, but the council voted that Aerilon’s support was too valuable.” Farda drew a deep, trembling breath. “Alvira didn’t tell me that we knew until a year after. She said that she ‘didn’t know Valyianne and Hana were in the city’… as though that made it better.”
Farda leaned forwards and rested his forehead against the tree. “We let an entire city burn because the ones who burned it had a kingdom built atop a sapphire mine. I lost my girls that day, but hundreds of thousands of others died… and we just stood by.”
Ella took a step closer, Faenir at her side. “Why are you telling me this?”
Farda drew a deep breath and pulled his hand away from the tree. He turned to look Ella in the eyes, the scars on his face catching the purple glow from above. “I know you hate me – rightly. But I needed to thank you.”
“Thank me? For what?”
“For listening… and for giving me back my pain.”
“I didn’t give you anything.”
“I’ve taken so much from you…” Farda’s voice trembled. “I’d not thought of Hana and Valyianne since the day Shinyara died. It’s like they were wiped from my heart. I’d forgotten the reason I was even fighting. I didn’t care– I couldn’t care. Shinyara took everything. But you gave me back my pain. You returned it to me.”
“Farda, I didn’t?—”
“You did. I didn’t understand it at first. But I see it now. You remind me of them. You remind me of Hana’s fire, of Valyianne’s heart. Watching over you gave me purpose again. I can’t feel the cuts on my flesh, but I can feel the ones within.” Farda’s eyes glistened. “You let me remember the day my heart broke, and I’m so sorry that I’m the one who broke yours. But… I remember who I was now, and that is your doing whether you knew it or not. You gave me back my pain, Ella Fjorn, and that is a debt I can never repay.”
Without another word, Farda stepped past Ella and walked across the bridge, and all Ella could do was stare after him.
Her legs felt weak, as though Farda’s words had taken their strength. Faenir pressed his side against Ella’s and held her upright, a low rumble in his chest. He tilted his head up and licked her chin.
Ella rested one hand on the wolfpine’s head, scratching at his fur, then placed the other on the trunk of the Ilyien? tree.
Thump .
A heartbeat pulsed beneath the wood. The tree’s heartbeat, rippling not through the mortal plane but through Níthianelle, through Ella’s soul.
“Ella…”
A shiver ran across Ella’s skin at the sound of her mother’s voice.
“Mam?” Ella pressed her second hand to the tree. “Mam?”
Every bone in Ella’s body told her to reach out, to step into Níthianelle, but fear cut into her heart. What if she fragmented again?
At the thought, the strangest of words came to her mind. Words from a long time ago. Erdhardt’s words before The Proving.
“Everything you seek lies on the other side of fear,” she whispered.
Beside Ella, Faenir growled, his hackles rising, and he stood to face away from her. Images and emotions flooded from the wolfpine to Ella, and she knew the meaning of his heart: he would protect her. He would keep her safe. He was her keeper.
The wolf within Ella howled, demanding she cross between the planes. Something inside it yearned to stand in the Sea of Spirits, and so Ella made her decision, whispering the words her mam had said to her before Tamzin had pulled her away. “Trust in the blood.”
Ella called to the wolf in her blood, acquiescing. It howled in answer, and the world shifted.