2
AERHRIL DIDN’T REMEMBER meeting Dathor.
He was just there, all the time, on the periphery, in the shadows, skulking on the stairs, peering down from the loft in the barn, taking plates of food from the kitchen because he wasn’t permitted to eat with them.
She supposed someone must have pointed him out to her and explained to her who he was, but for the life of her, she couldn’t even remember that part now. Those first few weeks here at Foxglove Peak, she had been having trouble adjusting to it all.
She was the ward of the keep, sent here by the government, by the parliament of Lothnehil, sent to live with the low elves—well, they didn’t like to be called that, she knew. They liked to be called silvan, on account of their affinity with the trees.
She was a high elf, Valaedor, one of the fair ones, and she came here from the south, from the Vale, all the way to the top of the country, to the mountains, to the Silvarenna, which translated as, “the wooded hills.” These elves were called Cirdan.
Her people had conquered their people some fifty years ago in the wars. Back then, oddly, the orcs had been the allies of the silvans, but now it was the one thing the elves could agree upon, the one thing they could come together in, their hatred of the orcs.
Ward was what it was called, but she was really a hostage. She and other children were traded—the silvans to the south and nae Oir (literally translated “of gold”) to the north, in order to ensure peace. The elf lords would not go killing each other if they knew their children were with the enemy.
It had been negotiated at the end of the wars, part of the treaty.
It was required. She had been chosen by lottery, and her mother had sobbed and begged and her father had been gruff and said that they had no choice.
And that was that. The night before she left, they made all her favorite foods, and her mother tried to be cheerful and say that it would be an adventure, but her mother sobbed the whole time. Aerhril sobbed, too.
Her father said they would write letters, and she must write every day and tell them everything.
After she was supposed to be asleep that night, she heard her father telling her mother they must have another child, that he had always said they should not stop with just one.
They did it. They replaced her. She went back sometimes, never for long.
Even after she was older, when she was no longer required to be a ward, when she could have come home, they were all happy to have her marry Celedin, because her father’s fortune had been eaten up when trade grew difficult and there was nothing for dowries for her or for her younger sister Raclahad.
Her younger sister did seem soft to her after all her time in the north.
Raclahad always seemed as if she whined too much.
Perhaps Aerhril had whined a lot when she first arrived at Foxglove Peak.
Celedin used to sneer that at her often. “Stop whining, you weakling. All the nae Oir have milk in their veins.”
It was dirtier here in the north, in the stewardship of Lathien.
She had come from the city, from her family’s townhouse with its clean lines and marble floors and servants going through and dusting everything—and most of the servants were silvan elves, if it came to that.
Here, the floors were filthy and the servants put their hands on their hips and yelled at their masters for bringing the dogs in. Here the mountains rose high against the sky and the sun seemed brighter and the air seemed harsher and the whole place was somehow jagged, a threat.
It was beautiful, though, the fields, the flowers, the way the sun looked as it set over the cliffs in the distance.
She remembered being struck by that beauty.
But she had been young, only eight years old, and the little orc boy had been about the same, and he had hidden from her at first.
She was here as the ward of the elf lord Steward Arathano nae Lathien. He had once had a wife, for she had borne Celedin, but she had not survived that, so now he only had a sister, and the sister joined them for meals and drank quite a bit of wine, and Dathor was her son.
Aerhril did not know how that had come about.
She was too young to ask questions. She knew that Dathor’s mother, Janhil was her name, was not married to an orc, which would have been the most natural way for it all to have made sense, Aerhril supposed, but then elves didn’t marry orcs, and she had known this in the way that a person knew that the sun rose in the east. It just was.
She didn’t remember meeting the little orc boy, didn’t remember ever exchanging names or anything like that.
But they were all turned out into the out of doors in the afternoons, the children.
The tutors would be taking their break and the servants would shoo them out, uncharacteristic behavior for the kinds of servants that Aerhril knew, telling them not to come back until dinner.
It would not just be her and Celedin and Dathor.
There were a few servant children as well.
It was expected they would all play together.
This was odd to her, too. She had never been expected to interact with servant children back in the city.
In the capital city of Renegahan, far to the south of the country of Lothnehil, where the sea lapped at the city’s walls and the marble towers gleamed in the warmth of the sun, servants kept to themselves.
Celedin always taunted her. “She thinks she’s too good for us, then?”
She would deny it, hands on her hips, shaking her golden curls at him. “I’m not too good for you. I just don’t like your games.”
“She’s a weakling. Can’t handle the northern air,” Celedin would say. “It’s what everyone says, that it’ll turn her soft hands callused, that it’ll chap her delicate lips, that she’ll be running off and begging to go home.”
She did wish to go home, of course. But she was silent because of those taunts. She never asked once. She would not lower herself.
Celedin would pinch her. “Can you bear that, yellow pale thing? How many of these will it take until you cry?”
She would try very hard not to cry, but usually she would. She would do it as quietly as possible, but the tears would spill out over her cheeks.
Dathor would intervene then. He was taller than Celedin even then, a child but a hulking child, his skin green-gray unlike his cousin’s, which—for all his taunting—was as pale as Aerhril’s, though the silvan elves tended to have darker hair—black and silver and brown and deep purple.
The nae Oir’s locks were like the sun—shades of yellow and orange with highlights of bright white.
Dathor’s hair was shorn then, cut dark against his skull. He had fine, elvish features but he was huge. He would simply put himself between Celedin and Aerhril. He would put himself there and he would say nothing, but Celedin would stop.
Eventually, though, Dathor went away.
She must have been ten when that happened. His mother got married, and the orc boy went along with his mother, and he was gone.
When he came back, four years later, he was different. His mother had died in childbirth. He was strange and tall and muscled and so defiant, so angry, and the steward, his uncle, had him whipped again and again every time Dathor did anything that the steward did not like.
She could remember stand-offs in the courtyard in front of the keep, Steward Arathano’s face a mask of anger, demanding that the boy apologize or submit or bow his head or cut his hair or any number of things.
And Dathor would glare at him, and his hair was black and glistening in the sun, growing longer by the day, waving and curling around his ears, and he would say nothing.
So, the whippings, so many whippings.
“I took you back because I promised my sister,” the steward would snap. “You can’t even be bothered to thank me for the kindness of feeding you!”
The steward told Dathor he had to work in the barn, and she remembered watching him with his shirt off, lifting bales of hay, and his back was this criss-cross of wounds, and he was lifting things and his muscles were moving against those scabbed-over wounds, and she felt some strange stirring within her.
Pity and desire mingled in a way that felt practically intoxicating.
He’d catch her watching him sometimes. He’d look away to his work and look back to see her there, still watching him. They’d do that, sometimes, for a long time.