The Young Elf

Rishi looked from Aestra to Maeril’s hand, still closed around her wrist, then back again.

“We will not give you back,” he said.

Aestra’s shoulders dropped a fraction.

Enough.

She let out a breath she had been holding too long.

Maeril released her wrist.

Aestra did not run.

Good.

“Now,” Maeril said, “can we have at least honest half-truths?”

Aestra turned her face toward Maeril’s voice. The movement was careful. Too careful for someone who had just been a boy with ordinary eyes.

For a moment, she said nothing.

Not refusing this time.

Trying to find where to begin.

Maeril softened her tone by one degree.

“You said you were sick. Start there.”

Aestra’s fingers tightened on the edge of the workbench.

“I am,” she said. “But not like them.”

“The townsfolk.”

“Yes.”

Rishi moved half a step closer, angling to the side rather than straight toward her.

“How?” he asked.

Aestra’s pale eyes shifted toward the sound.

“I lost my sight first.”

Maeril stilled.

Aestra swallowed.

“Not all at once,” Aestra said. “At first there was light, but no edges. Then edges, but no distance. Then faces stopped being faces unless someone spoke.”

Her mouth tightened. “Then there was nothing. And after that, the rest of me began to fail too.”

Rishi knelt without touching her.

“I get dizzy,” Aestra said. “Weak. Not like the townsfolk. Not in the hands first. It starts behind my eyes, though they do not work anymore.”

Maeril glanced toward the shutter.

“The birds,” she said.

Aestra nodded.

“When I borrow their sight for too long, I lose myself.” Her fingers dragged once over the workbench. “Sometimes I do not know which eyes are mine.”

Maeril could picture them again, and now she understood the wrongness. They had not been hungry, startled, or curious. They had been looking for Aestra, keeping pieces of the world where her own eyes could no longer reach.

“Definitely not what we have seen in Mosstone,” she said.

“No,” Aestra said. “The humans weaken. Elves do not.”

“We heard that,” Rishi said.

Aestra’s face tightened.

“Only I do.”

The words came out small and bitter.

Maeril leaned back against Toman’s workbench and folded her arms.

“So it is something else.”

Aestra shook her head, stopped, then did it again, less sure.

“No. Yes. No.”

“Wonderful,” Maeril said. “My favorite kind of answer.”

Aestra flinched.

Maeril regretted it at once—not because the answer had not been irritating, but because the girl had been bracing for anger before Maeril gave her any.

Maeril drew in a slow breath through her nose.

“Not like them,” she said. “But not separate either.”

Aestra nodded, then seemed to regret how quickly she had done it.

“No. I mean—yes. It is not the same sickness.” Her fingers tightened on the workbench again. “But it comes from the same hurt.”

Maeril went still.

“Hurt.”

Aestra turned her face toward the shutter.

“Deep in the forest,” she said. “Something is wrong.”

Rishi’s gaze sharpened slightly.

“With the sickness?”

“With the forest.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

Aestra’s mouth opened, then closed.

There it was again: the place where truth reached her mouth and stopped.

Neither Maeril nor Rishi spoke.

Aestra’s fingers dragged once through the sawdust on the bench.

“I am bound to it.”

The words landed hard enough that no one answered at once.

“Bound,” Rishi said.

Aestra nodded.

“Not like the Suldusk. They live with the forest. They listen to it. They guard the old paths.” Her face tightened. “They think that means they understand everything it touches.”

“And you?”

“I am Elmanesse.”

Maeril waited.

Aestra’s mouth tightened, as if even that much truth had hooks in it.

“Not Suldusk,” she said. “Not theirs.”

“The huntress disagrees.”

“The huntress thinks everything touched by the deep forest becomes hers to judge.”

Maeril’s eyes narrowed.

“And your own people?”

Aestra’s hand tightened on the workbench.

“My own people cannot agree on what to do with me.”

Maeril had the unpleasant feeling of another map unfolding under the one she already disliked.

“A city elf bound to a forest,” she said. “That sounds inconvenient for everyone.”

Aestra’s mouth almost moved.

“It was a gift,” she said.

Maeril heard the shape around the word: not entirely false, not entirely safe.

“What kind of gift?”

Aestra turned her face toward the shutter again.

Outside, something fluttered once beneath the eaves.

“The forest lends me eyes,” she said. “Birds, mostly. Small things. Quick things. Sometimes deer, if they let me. Sometimes foxes, but foxes lie.”

Maeril blinked.

“Foxes lie.”

“They look where they want me to look, not where I ask.”

“That is the most useful warning anyone has given me all tenday.”

Aestra’s mouth almost found a smile.

Then it broke.

A cough tore out of her.

Not loud.

Wrong.

It folded her at the ribs and scraped through her throat dry enough to make Rishi move before Maeril finished hearing it.

He was beside her in the next breath, one hand hovering near her shoulder, not touching until she failed to catch herself against the bench.

Then he steadied her.

Aestra tried to turn away from the help and could not.

The cough came again. And again. Her body shook under it, thin and furious, as if whatever had hold of her had found another way to remind the room it was there.

“Since when?” Rishi asked.

Aestra dragged air in.

Failed to answer.

He reached into the leather roll at his belt and drew out a small packet of crushed herbs wrapped in cloth.

Sharp scent opened in the workshop: mint, bitter leaf, something resinous. He held it near her, close enough to breathe, not close enough to force.

“Slowly,” he said. “Do not chase the full breath.”

Aestra tried.

The next cough caught anyway.

Maeril found a folded cloth near Toman’s tools, decided clean enough would have to survive her standards, and wet it in the water bucket. She pressed it into Aestra’s hand.

Aestra took it.

Her fingers were cold.

A thread of red marked the cloth when she lowered it.

Maeril’s stomach tightened.

Rishi saw it too. His face did not change, which meant he had very carefully decided not to let it.

“Months,” Aestra whispered.

“Since the blindness?” Rishi asked.

“Since all of it.”

Maeril crouched before her.

Aestra’s eyes did not find her, but her face turned toward the motion.

“For how long have you been alone with this?” Maeril asked.

Aestra’s lips pressed together.

Too long, then.

Of course.

The answer sat in the coat hanging from her shoulders, in the careful disguise, in the way she had chosen a stranger in a market over the people who knew her name.

Maeril felt an old door open inside herself and tried to shut it. It did not.

She knew something about being the wrong shape in a room before she had spoken. About people deciding what kind of danger she was before they decided what kind of help she deserved.

Aestra was not Maeril. That mattered, but not enough.

“Please,” Aestra said.

The word came apart on the edge of another cough.

She held the cloth to her mouth and bent forward, shoulders tight, pride losing ground one breath at a time.

“Please help me. I am so afraid.”

Maeril looked at Rishi.

Rishi nodded once.

“We will,” he said.

Aestra’s hand tightened around the cloth.

“For now,” Rishi added, “breathe slowly.”

Aestra closed her eyes. Her breathing came raggedly at first, then eased. Rishi matched it with his own, slow and low, until she found the shape of it and followed.

When the worst of the coughing passed, Aestra leaned against the bench like it had become the only reliable thing in the world.

Maeril waited until her hands stopped shaking quite so hard.

Then she said, “Tell us what you know.”

Aestra opened her pale eyes.

For a moment, she looked as if she might try to make the answer smaller.

Then she swallowed.

“It feels like rot without deadwood. Like hunger under roots. Like something drinking through places that should not be open.”

Maeril did not like that at all.

“And there is a place?” Rishi asked.

Aestra nodded.

“An Elmanesse camp. Not close to Mosstone. Deeper. Near the old border paths.”

“Can you take us there?” Maeril asked.

“No.”

“Who can?”

“Vaelos Sylrien.”

She said the name carefully, but not warmly.

Maeril noticed.

“Who is he?”

“An Elmanesse envoy,” Aestra said. “Watcher. Speaker when he must be. He keeps his hair bound in silver rings and dresses like he wants the forest to know he has read every treaty ever written about it.”

Maeril stared at her.

“That,” she said, “was almost a personality.”

Aestra’s mouth tightened. “He is not cruel.”

“That sounded rehearsed.”

“No,” Aestra said. “Not rehearsed.”

Rishi heard it.

Maeril saw that he heard it.

Rishi rose. “For now, you should rest.”

“No,” Maeril said.

Aestra’s head turned toward her.

Rishi did too.

Maeril went to the side door and listened. The lane beyond it gave back only damp quiet. No boots. No breath. No Suldusk huntress.

She eased the door open by a finger’s width.

Outside, the back lane lay empty except for mud, timber, and the wet green smell of moss on stone.

Then she saw the bird.

A sparrow sat on the fence post beyond a woodpile.

Not watching the door.

Watching her.

Maeril narrowed her eyes.

The sparrow tilted its head.

“I am going to develop opinions about birds,” Maeril muttered.

She shut the door and turned back.

“She cannot stay,” she said. “She is hunted, and by now half the market is inventing stories about invisible ghosts and wood elf hunters.”

Aestra’s face changed by the smallest degree. Guilt, perhaps.

“Can you walk?” Rishi asked.

Aestra nodded.

Then ruined the lie by putting too much weight on the bench.

Rishi crossed to her and touched the back of her hand with two fingers.

Not taking.

Offering.

“Hold here.”

Aestra hesitated.

Then her fingers found his.

Rishi stood slowly, giving her body time to understand the change before he asked anything more of it. She rose beside him, unsteady but upright.

Maeril took her staff.

The arcane sigils along its length brightened, green-white and brief under her palm. She spoke the word low, and the air around Aestra softened at the edges.

Aestra vanished.

The coat went last, an empty brown shape folding into nothing.

Rishi still held her invisible hand.

Maeril looked at the space where Aestra had been.

“At least for you, this may be less confusing than it is for everyone else.”

Aestra’s voice came from the empty air.

“It is.”

“Well. Good. At last, a comfort I am qualified to provide.”

Rishi’s mouth moved.

Not a smile.

Enough.

Maeril pointed her staff toward the side door.

“Go before I become sensible.”

Rishi inclined his head.

Then he led Aestra out.

Maeril stayed.

The side door closed behind them with a small scrape.

Maeril stood where she was, listening to the empty lane and the badly fixed shutter and the notes stirring on Toman’s wall.

She wanted to follow. Instead, she counted three breaths and let Rishi do what he was better at.

Outside the workshop, Rishi moved through Mosstone with Aestra’s hand in his.

The town had become familiar in pieces over the last tenday: which windows opened at morning, which stayed closed until afternoon, and which guard favored the west gate because the wall there caught sun.

He did not hurry.

Hurry asked to be seen.

Aestra’s fingers trembled in his grip. Her steps were careful but uneven, catching now and then where dried mud ridged beneath the lane.

At the west gate, two guards stood under the lintel where moss had thickened between stones.

One was older, with a gray beard cut close to the jaw. The other had a scarf wrapped twice around his neck despite the mild day and the pale, tired look of a man standing still for too long.

Before leaving the workshop, Aestra had described a disused track west of the road and a sheltered hollow she had used before. It was close enough to reach before Maeril’s spell failed. Her birds would guide her there, and one would return to Toman’s roof when she reached it.

Rishi had made her repeat the plan twice.

Rishi released Aestra’s hand three paces before the gate.

Her fingers vanished from his.

He kept walking.

“Morning,” the older guard said, then corrected himself. “Afternoon, nearly.”

“Nearly,” Rishi agreed.

The younger guard looked him over. “You been at Haren’s mother’s place?”

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“Breathing better. Still weak.”

The guard’s jaw tightened.

“My cousin’s been weak.”

Rishi stopped where stopping made sense. Not in the gate. Not away from it. Just beside the guards, close enough to hold their attention and leave the empty space behind him uninteresting.

“Hands shaking?” he asked.

The younger guard looked startled.

“Some.”

“Before or after the fatigue?”

“After, I think.” He glanced toward the older guard, as if shame required a witness. “He says it’s nothing.”

“I will see him tomorrow.”

“Appreciated,” the younger guard said.

Behind Rishi, no footstep sounded.

No breath.

No visible body crossed the gate.

But on the roof beyond the wall, a sparrow lifted from the moss and flew toward the trees.

Then another.

Then three more from the far ditch, rising in a loose, ordinary scatter that was not ordinary at all.

Rishi bowed to the guards.

“If the weakness worsens before dusk, send for me.”

“Aye,” the older guard said. “And monk?”

Rishi paused.

“Thank you.”

Rishi accepted that with another bow and walked back through Mosstone alone.

By the time Rishi reached Toman’s workshop, voices waited inside.

Not Maeril’s alone.

He slowed before the door.

A man was speaking in a tone too courteous to be harmless.

Rishi entered.

Maeril stood near the table, one hand resting beside the notes, not on them. Her face had the stillness she wore when every honest answer in the room had become inconvenient.

A guard stood near the wall, helmet tucked under one arm, posture careful rather than threatening.

Beside him was Mosstone’s reeve.

He was a compact man with a neat beard, a dark wool coat, and the careful look of someone who had spent too many years asking frightened people to lower their voices. His eyes were tired. Almost everyone’s were, in Mosstone.

His, however, were sharp.

He turned when Rishi entered.

“Ah,” he said. “The monk.”

Rishi bowed.

The reeve returned the courtesy with a small inclination of his head.

“Folk are grateful for your rounds,” he said. “I am as well.”

Rishi said nothing.

The reeve looked around the workshop. At the notes on Toman’s wall. At the chalk marks near the floor. At the opened medical roll, the cloths, the herbs, the water bucket, the bench where someone had recently leaned too hard.

“No healer we have called has solved the weakness,” he said. “But this place makes it clear you are treating the matter seriously.”

“We do what we can,” Rishi said.

“So I hear.”

The reeve’s gaze moved to Maeril.

“You both do. And I say this plainly: others have brought remedies, fear, or reasons to wait. You have stayed and done the work.”

Maeril’s expression did not change.

Rishi knew her well enough to see the suspicion arrive anyway.

The reeve folded his hands in front of him.

“Which is why it would trouble me deeply to learn that you might have harbored someone the Suldusk are searching for.”

The room tightened.

Maeril went very still.

Not guilty.

Worse.

Thinking.

The guard near the wall looked at Rishi, then away again. He did not reach for a weapon. That mattered.

The reeve continued gently, “One person reports seeing a green tiefling in the market this morning with a young boy, acting, I believe the phrase was, very strangely.”

Maeril blinked once.

“I went to the market for onions.”

“Yes,” the reeve said.

“For stew.”

“Yes.”

“Children in markets are strange as a profession.”

The reeve’s mouth moved.

Not a smile.

Enough to prove he had heard the attempt.

“A shopping basket filled with vegetables was later found in the mud,” he said. “At the very market.”

Maeril swallowed.

Only once.

Rishi stepped closer.

The guard shifted slightly, just enough to remind the room he was there.

The reeve raised one hand, palm low.

“Please,” he said. “I did not come here to make a scene.”

“Then why did you come?” Maeril asked.

“To prevent one.”

That landed cleanly enough that even Maeril had no immediate answer.

The reeve looked between them.

“We are on the edge of Suldusk sacred forest. The last decades have been complicated diplomatically, and that is the pleasant word. Mosstone survives by trading where it can, keeping quiet where it must, and not giving old grudges a fresh street to bleed in.”

He let the sentence settle.

“Today, the Suldusk are looking for a young elf with blank eyes.”

Maeril felt the blood leave her face.

Rishi saw it.

So did the reeve.

“I am asking,” the reeve said, and there was weight under the courtesy now, “that if you see such a girl, you tell me.”

“I am asking because folk here trust you. Because I would prefer to trust you. Because dragging truth out of people who have been helping my sick would be an ugly thing, and Mosstone has had enough ugly things in its streets.”

The guard looked down at the floor.

The reeve’s eyes stayed on Maeril.

“I trust,” he said, “that you both respect this town enough to bring me what I need before someone else brings it to me with accusations attached.”

Silence.

Maeril could argue with monsters, merchants, priests, scholars, and at least three kinds of tax official when sufficiently irritated.

Lying to a tired reeve who was politely asking her not to set his town on fire was proving much harder.

Rishi bowed his head once.

The reeve seemed to understand that it was not agreement.

For the moment, he accepted it.

“I will be in my office,” he said. “Should anything come to mind.”

He turned toward the door. The guard followed. At the threshold, the reeve looked back once, then left.

The door closed behind him.

Maeril stared at it.

For three breaths, she did not move.

Then all the air went out of her at once.

Not a sob. Not a laugh.

A pressure escaping before it broke something.

Rishi crossed to her.

She lifted one hand before he could ask.

“No. Absolutely not. Do not ask me anything.”

“I was not going to.”

She looked at him.

He looked back.

“You were.”

“Yes.”

“Terrible habit.”

His gaze dropped to the muddy hem of her skirt.

“You still smell of fish.”

Maeril’s mouth opened, then closed. She laughed once—small, unsteady, real enough.

It helped less than it should have.

Her gaze returned to the door through which the reeve had gone.

The laugh died.

“We have to tell him.”

Rishi was quiet for a moment.

“Yes.”

“Not all of it.”

“Enough.”

Maeril closed her eyes.

“I hate enough.”

“So do I.”

Outside, one of Aestra’s birds called from the roofline.

Maeril opened her eyes again.

The notes on Toman’s wall stirred faintly in the draft from the badly fixed shutter. Names. Symptoms. Tremors. Breaths. No answer that deserved the name.

She picked up her staff.

“Fine,” she said. “Let us go make this worse properly.”