Chapter Seventeen
Elvia ~ Navahele
Three bells after sunset, the last of the dinner dishes were finally cleared away and the hauntingly beautiful strains of Elvish night music filled the meadows of Navahele.
Fanor pushed away from the table and rose to his feet. “Come, my friends. It is time. Lord Galad will see you now.”
He led the Fey off the terrace and across delicate bridges that spanned the silvery pools ringing the island at the city’s heart.
There, rising in splendor from a wide, mossy knoll, stood the centermost tree of Navahele, a giant king among Sentinels, with a trunk easily twice the width of any other.
“This is Grandfather,” Fanor said. “The ancient I told you about, who was a sapling in the Time Before Memory.”
“He is magnificent,” Ellysetta breathed.
She tilted her head back. Grandfather was so tall she could not see his upper branches.
Beside it—him—she felt dwarfed. An ant standing at the foot of a giant.
Grandfather’s bark was smooth and ageless, shining a silvery gold that shifted color in the glow of the butterflies hanging from the Sentinel’s vines and branches.
“Aiyah, he is that,” a low, musical voice agreed.
Rain put a hand on Ellysetta’s shoulder, and together they turned to face the stranger who seemed to materialize from the forest itself. One moment, the stretch of mossy ground to their left was empty; the next, the Elf king stood there.
Galad Hawksheart, a man who’d been a legend before Gaelen was born, needed no introduction.
Tall, broad shouldered, and lean hipped, the Elf king was even more breathtakingly beautiful than most of his kind, with strong, masculine features framed by a fall of burnished gold hair threaded with shining beads, aromatic leaves, and fluttering hawk feathers.
Except for the golden cast to his skin and his tapered ears, he was almost Fey in appearance.
Until you looked into his eyes.
Hawksheart’s eyes were a fathomless emerald, swirling with infinite sparkling lights, as if all the stars in the sky had been cast down a bottomless green well.
Those eyes looked so ancient, Ellysetta wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they had witnessed the birth and death of worlds or gazed upon the faces of the gods.
Hawksheart studied her with those too-intent eyes, and she could feel him in her mind, probing her thoughts.
The tairen shifted inside her, sensing a threat.
It gave a warning growl and began to rise.
Afraid of what it might do, Ellysetta lowered her lashes to break the Elf king’s gaze and bowed her head in greeting.
“My Lord Hawksheart,” she murmured. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“Ellysetta Erimea.” The Elf king had a voice like a song, low and musical and enchanting. The accented Feyan rolled off his tongue like water tumbling over the stones in a brook. “Long have I waited for the day you would stand here among the ancients of Navahele.”
She raised her eyes in surprise. “Y-you have?”
“Bayas. I have lived ten thousand years, Ellysetta Erimea, and I have been waiting for your arrival since I saw my first glimpse of the Dance as a boy.” His eyes bored into hers once more. Despite herself, she flinched, and her tairen growled and roared.
“Parei,” Rain commanded curtly. “Ellysetta is not used to your Elvish ways. You are unsettling her.”
The Elf turned his piercing gaze on Rain, but Rain just narrowed his eyes and stood his ground.
Galad Hawksheart smiled. “We meet again, Worldscorcher.” The Elf turned back to Ellysetta.
“Your truemate and I met many years ago in Tehlas when I went there to visit kin of mine.” He paused briefly, almost expectantly, before adding, “Though perhaps he does not remember it. He had only just returned from his Soul Quest and was still absorbing the wonder of being a fledgling Tairen Soul.”
“I remember,” Rain said. “You were there for the bonding ceremony of your cousin Hollen Stagleaper to the niece of Shanisorran v’En Celay.
You told my father the next Song of the Dance had begun, and that I was the one who called it.
I didn’t understand why that left my father so troubled, until I learned that the ones who call the Song always suffer for it.
You can imagine my concern when I learned that Ellysetta calls a Song, too. ”
“Is that why you stayed away? Did you think that by ignoring my summons, you could stop her Song?”
“My only concern was to get her to safety behind the Faering Mists.”
“And yet here you stand, and she is less safe now than she was then. The Dance will not be denied, Worldscorcher. Of all people, you should know that.”
Rain reached out with Spirit to probe Galad Hawksheart’s mind, intending to discover exactly what Hawksheart’s intentions were and what he knew of Ellysetta’s role in the Elvish prophecy.
Galad brushed aside Rain’s weave with a careless wave. “Fey weaves could never hope to enter an Elvian mind, Worldscorcher; nor is there need. I mean your mate no harm. Look to others for that and guard her well. She will need all the protection those of the Light can give her.”
“Hundreds have already sworn to guard her, in this life and the death that follows,” Tajik growled before Rain could reply.
“Kinsman.” Galad turned to Tajik. “So you have returned to Elvia after all.”
“As you Saw I would,” Tajik said.
“Bayas.” The Elf king held out an arm, which, after a brief hesitation, Tajik clasped in greeting. “I am pleased indeed to see your Light shining bright once more.”
Tajik dipped his head in Ellysetta’s direction. “That is the Feyreisa’s doing, cousin, which surely you must already have Seen as well.”
“I did, but that does not make me any less glad to know that what I Saw came to pass.”
Ellysetta glanced between them. “You and Lord Galad are related, Tajik?”
Tajik shrugged. “His father’s sister wed one of my ancestors fifteen thousand years ago, but Elves never forget their family lines. Once Elf blood joins your own, you and your descendants will always be Elf-kin.”
“Great Lord Barrial of Celieria is another of your kinsmen, is he not?” Rain asked.
Hawksheart nodded. “Descended from a different cousin. Our line comes directly from the first Elf king, who founded Navahele in the Time Before Memory.”
“How many kinsmen do you have?” Ellysetta asked.
Galad turned to her and his mouth curved in a smile that surprised Rain with its warmth. Elves were notoriously aloof with those not of their kind. They lived too long and Saw too much for them to easily form attachments with others.
“Since the dawn of the First Age,” Hawksheart said, “this world has greeted nine hundred eighty-nine thousand, two hundred seventy-three of my kin, but fewer than one hundred of us still live.”
“How many of those that remain are your direct descendants?”
The Elf king’s smile turned pensive. “I have no young; nor does my sister, Ilona. We two are the last Elves born to the direct royal line of the first king. Our remaining kin are cousins.”
“The family history lesson is all well and good,” Gaelen interrupted, “but surely that is not the reason you summoned Rain and Ellysetta to Navahele.”
Now Hawksheart’s expression went cool again. He regarded vel Serranis with an unblinking gaze. “Anio, it was not. Feyreisen, you and your mate please follow me.” He hesitated and gave each Fey a measuring look before adding, “The rest of you must remain here.”
“Ellysetta goes nowhere without her quintet.” Rain’s tone was as hard as stone. “whatever you have to say to us, you can say before them as well.”
“I assure you, your mate is in no danger here.”
“All the same, we all go, or none of us do,” Rain insisted.
Their gazes battled for a several moments before Hawksheart sighed and conceded. “Very well. You may all come. But none of you will reveal what you see to another—not through any method of communication, spoken or unspoken—and I will have your sworn Fey oaths on that.”
“Agreed,” Rain said. “I do so swear.”
After the others gave their own oaths of secrecy, Hawksheart led them though an archway into the center of the enormous Sentinel tree called Grandfather.
The trunk opened up to a soaring, cathedral-like hollow.
Stairs twined up the interior of the hollow in helix patterns and joined together the numerous levels of graceful balconies that ringed the throne room.
“Rain,” Ellysetta whispered, “look.” She pointed to the ceiling high overhead, where glowing lights formed a shifting pattern that looked like clouds moving across a blue sky.
As they watched, the lights left the ceiling and flew about in a complex aerial dance.
“They’re butterflies!” Ellysetta exclaimed.
When the butterflies resettled, their pattern had changed to a sun shining over a forest meadow blooming with flowers. “How beautiful.”
“The damia enjoy your admiration, Ellysetta Erimea,” Hawksheart said with a smile as the scene on the ceiling changed again into an image of two tairen flying across blue skies.
At the center of the chamber, the Elf king’s throne rose up on a large mound shaped like an exquisitely detailed forest. Aquilines, Shadars, and countless other creatures peeked out between the trunks and leaves of the trees.
The entire thing was a solid piece of smooth golden wood that looked as if it had grown in place from the heart of the Sentinel tree.
Expressionless Elvian guards stood at attention at the four corners of the throne, and another two stood beside a small, rune-etched door set into the rear of the throne. The door opened as Hawksheart approached to reveal a long, winding stair that led down below the throne.