6
DATHOR’S MOTHER JANHIL had not been pleased when she found out that she was getting married.
Aerhril remembered the argument, the woman’s voice, shrill, filtering out from around the cracks in the closed door to her brother’s study. The noise came under the door, through the keyhole, around the hinges.
“This is my home. No one goes about selling you to someone else and making you pack your things,” was one of the things she said.
Another thing was, “I am too old to have a passel of that brute’s children.”
The steward’s voice had been low, calm, harder to hear. “…your fertility is proven… has ideas for that…”
“So, he is going to breed me somehow, is he? Then pass the babe off as if it is his? And he thinks I shall not protest because of my history?” She was in shock. She was horrified. “What about Dathor? I’m not going anywhere without my little boy!”
Aerhril didn’t understand then. She was only ten years old. She only knew that Dathor was being taken away, and he was her favorite thing in the whole of Foxglove Peak, and she did not wish to let him go.
Now, she realized the way of it. The man that Janhil was married off to had been blighted with the vrel disease, which had rendered him infertile, possibly also impotent, for that was the effect sometimes of it. He was desperate for an heir, however, for he had no brothers, only distant relatives.
Dathor told her that when they arrived there, he had a young man he treated like a son, and the two of them would get drunk and summon his mother to them, and Dathor didn’t know what happened, but his mother came out bruised and angry and pregnant.
She lost three babes before carrying the one to term that killed her when it came out of her.
Dathor was fifteen by then. His mother was not really too old to have children, but she had passed her prime childbearing years.
The baby lived, a little boy, Dathor’s brother, though Dathor never seemed even a little sentimental over the child. But his stepfather and the stepfather’s favorite, they both drowned accidentally, out on a boat whilst drinking too much.
And Dathor came back, then, and he was different.
Before he left, she sobbed—not to anyone else, only alone with Dathor, up in the loft of the barn, sitting on the straw with him.
She said she would not let him go, that she would never countenance it, that she would write letters to the high elf council themselves and demand that they both be taken from this awful place.
“I cannot bear it here without you,” she moaned to him. “You are the only person who is ever nice to me.”
He had looked at her, his face twisting. “You’re not really nice to me, though, are you?”
She had continued to sob. “Don’t be stupid, yes, I am. We are friends, Dathor. You are my very closest friend.”
“I only mean, I stand up for you when Celedin tries to hurt you, but you don’t stand up for me.”
“I couldn’t! What good could I do against Celedin? You are bigger than he is.”
“I mean, I sleep on the floor when you have nightmares, but you don’t offer to do that for me.”
“Sometimes I do sleep on the floor,” she said. “You are simply trying to make me think it won’t be so bad when you leave, but it will be. You are trying to make me think I won’t miss you more than anything in the land or the sea, but I will miss you, and my heart is breaking!”
He smiled at her. “Your heart is breaking, is that so?”
“Can you doubt it?” She wiped furiously at her tears.
“Will you miss me, little fair elf?” He seemed amused. “Will you really?”
“If there was a way to keep you here, I would do it,” she said. “I would do anything.”
She remembered he had pitched his head forward, letting his forehead rest against hers, his eyes closed. He had swallowed, very hard, and his voice had come out affected. “We are friends, you say? You swear it?”
“Of course we are friends.”
“Would you say we were friends in front of anyone?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
He pulled away and looked into her eyes. “Swear it,” he said.
“I swear,” she said.