Chapter 21 #2
They readied themselves as quickly as they could, while Boden and Alvara decided through silent looks that Pyry would ride in the sleigh so neither of them had to converse with him on the journey back to Malva’s capital.
“So, you’re a bear,” Alvara said when they had established the fastest pace their horses could manage.
Boden cast her a long look. “I’m not a literal bear, Alvara. I just have the ability to shift.”
She coughed and wiped a hand over her own cheek, and he did the same, frowning at the ghastly remnants of the attack slathered over the back of his hand. “You looked like a bear to me. You were there. And you didn’t tell me.”
“You’re not willing to leave this alone, are you?”
“I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
He rolled his neck side to side, grimacing. “When I’m able to, I do my best to travel to the Grove of Souls to honor the ones we’ve lost. I also tend to travel through there in my bear form as a quicker way to move between kingdoms.”
Traveling through the Grove of Souls? Alvara’s superstitious father would have faded just at the very thought.
She, on the other hand, had taken the dare like every other youngling to visit the elven offshoot of Lojarem near the center of the Grove.
It had turned out to be rather unimpressive and disappointing for the supposed offspring of the large life tree rooted in Vitharen’s corpse—just a small tree that held leaves year round.
Each of the five races had a tree in their realm born from Lojarem, and she had always assumed theirs were just as boring.
But being able to become an animal whenever you wanted?
That was the furthest thing from boring, unlike some of the other rarer elven powers.
Healing and illusions at least seemed more useful than absorbing magic or freezing time, but they were nothing compared to transforming into an entirely different being on a whim.
“What is shifting like?”
“It’s freedom,” Boden said. “For me, at least. Leaving my elf form behind, all of those memories, even for a little while.”
“Do you choose your shifting form?”
“No, it chooses you. Your form finds a common thread with your soul.”
What would it be like to leave herself, every worry and fear, behind and become someone different? Even for a few hours? “What do you think mine would be?”
Boden hummed to himself as if thinking long and hard about her question. “A goose.”
“A goose?”
“What’s wrong with geese? They’re fierce and loyal creatures, and they were Delmis’s favorite animal. She even had a magical cloak made out of their feathers.”
“Delmis, Boden? Really?” The ancient and now extinct goddess of love and fertility, of all people.
He glanced sideways at her. “What?”
“No elf in the history of our kind wants to be associated with her! She’s the whole reason our seasons, magic, and immortality fractured.” Alvara held up a finger for each offense. “All because she lost her lovesick mind when Vitharen faded.”
“I hardly see how that’s the geese’s fault. And Delmis is revered by shifters. She was the first to ever exist. She could shift into a goose at will because of her cloak, and she clearly didn’t deem them offensive.”
“Well, geese smell. And they bite.”
He tilted his head and grinned. “You biting someone would hardly be a surprise at this point. And the smell…” A clump of snow burst over his face, and he sputtered.
“I’m only joking.” Boden shook his hair, flinging moisture onto his horse, who grumbled.
His eyes snagged on her wrists. “Are you all right?”
A few dribbles of dried blood ran down her arm where the thorns had pricked her. “It’s nothing.”
“Surviving an attack like that isn’t nothing.”
“Have you seen yourself? You look like a madman, covered in blood.” If she didn’t know him, the mere sight would send her running the other direction.
Boden lifted his makeshift bandage and peered underneath. “There are no clean ways to fight as a bear. Trust me, I’ve tried.”
His words bore the weight of something unspoken, some history that Alvara hadn’t earned the right to know, so she kept quiet. The horses’ pants and whinnies filled the space between them, carrying them all safely to Ilmanir by the time the sun bid its farewell that day.
As soon as they passed through the gates of Ilmanir, they went their separate ways without a word: Alvara begrudgingly walked Pyry to a healer, Boden headed likely to wherever his family stayed, and Kat? Gods knew what Kat was doing.
A quick introduction to the same female who had tended to Kat, and Alvara intended to flee, but Pyry’s voice stopped her at the door.
“Alva…”
Her arms tensed at her sides, but she forced herself to look at him. “Yes, Pyrymar?” His full name, the name she only used when she was deeply upset with him.
His face was still unnaturally pale; it had been since the attack in the woods. Like the shock had leached all the color from his body. “You saved me.”
And you didn’t, she wanted to say. Not when her mother and sister had passed. “Again.”
“Again,” he repeated, quieter. “And brought me to a healer.”
“If all you’re going to do is state facts, I have other things that need my attention.”
Pyry didn’t flinch at her venom. He had seen this side of her after her mother and sister’s funeral. It was nothing new. “I wanted to say—”
It was her turn to cut him off, for once.
“You utterly humiliated me, Pyry. Demanding payment from Jalomir just to spend a few days with me? I…” She shook her head.
If she freed every sharp word, every sour thought that she had locked up over the years, she would never stop.
“You’re safe here, and I need time to process this. ”
And it was more than just the dagger. Pyry was the single reminder of her city that would soon be lost.
“Alva, please—”
“It’s Alvara. Especially to you.” She turned on her heel and left, her veins humming with frustrated energy, the kind she could never ignore and only destroy through physical movement.
The forge would be closed at this hour, and practicing her forms held no charm after the skirmish they had just survived. That left only one other place.
The tables in the food hall stood mostly empty, save for a few elves scattered throughout the room, engaged in hushed conversations between bites of food. She should eat too, but her stomach still simmered with nausea from the violence she had both engaged in and witnessed.
Alvara spied Isathir, the head cook, scrubbing a pot in the washbasin, while a few others scurried about and cleaned up the remnants of dinner. “Need any help?”
“Between the two of you, I’m going to be out of a job soon. Dishes,” he said, tipping his head toward the mountain on the counter.
After cleaning the grime off her hands, she took his place, settling the coarse cloth into her hand and beating it into the dish.
“Take it easy. I have no interest in replacing that pot anytime soon.”
Alvara lightened her pressure and let the repetitive motion of her hand grind down her residual fear and anger, shaving them bit by bit.
Vorianta would be, or already was, under attack.
Kat and Boden had forced her out, against her will.
And, on top of that, had made Pyry her responsibility—Pyry, who required an absurdly high payment just to spend a few days with her.
The most infuriating fact was that she may have been the main reason King Einar’s elves had been able to track them down.
Boden had probably been right about the need to cut her hair.
“Stealing my ideas now, are we?” Boden leaned against the wall, his hair and body clean of any sign of battle.
“I was invited to come anytime, isn’t that right?” Alvara looked to Isathir, who shook his head.
“Don’t drag me into this.”
Boden gently dislodged the handles of a pot from her cramping fingers and slid it onto the counter. “Working through something?”
“Something like that.” Alvara dangled a towel in front of him, and he accepted it, drying each dish she handed him. They both needed a distraction, anything other than a reminder of what they had endured. “How did you end up here?”
He pointed to himself. “In the kitchen?”
She tossed a handful of water at him. “In Malva. Ilmanir. Helping the humans and demi-elves.”
His movements slowed as he rubbed the towel over a plate. “I’m a demi-elf.”
The mug Alvara held slipped from her fingers and tumbled back into the washbasin.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. Boden was a demi-elf?
He looked undeniably elven with pointed ears and all.
Though his features held little imperfections here and there, a dimple on one side and not the other, a subtle crookedness to the bridge of his nose.
They were minute enough changes from the smooth and severe beauty of most elves that many might not notice.
Yet Alvara had noticed. She dove into her task with renewed vigor.
“You don’t need to apologize. It’s nothing I haven’t experienced before.”
His mother was clearly an elf so… “Your birth father is human.”
“He was.”
Was. That one word told her enough about how their story ended.
“What happened?” Alvara asked quietly.
Boden stared down at the counter as he spoke.
“My mother traveled to the human realm when she was younger, perhaps just to see what was different there. I’m not sure even she knows why.
She met my birth father, they fell in love, and eventually she became pregnant.
She preferred for me to be born in her birthplace in Nyr, so she brought him with her, a few months before I was due to arrive.
” He squeezed the towel until his knuckles turned white.
“Her father, my grandfather, refused to allow his daughter to have anything to do with a human man and knew she would never willingly leave, so…he killed him.”