Chapter 29 - Apologies

Chapter 29: 29 - Apologies

"She’s a distant cousin of mine," Amelia said. "And the princess of the elven kingdom of Sylvamir."

Adrien had been ready for a lot of answers, and that one had not been anywhere near the list. He looked at the girl again, a child of maybe nine or ten standing between two adults who had not stopped moving with her all night, and after that he put two and two together and looked back at Amelia.

"So should I be calling you my lady?"

Amelia laughed, and it was the first entirely unguarded thing she had done since the cages opened. "No, no. We’re far enough apart on that family tree that nobody would call me royalty."

"Alright." Adrien nodded toward the girl. "Then explain something to me. How does the princess of an entire kingdom end up in a forest sitting inside Clairmont territory? And how does a girl that small end up wandering around it with nobody watching her?"

Amelia’s face did something complicated, and Adrien understood immediately that he had put his finger straight on the sore spot.

"It’s a long story."

"I’ve got a walk ahead of me."

"They came to visit my grandfather." Amelia looked at her own boots. "She went out for a look around on her own. She’s very good at that, and by the time anyone noticed she was gone she had a considerable head start, so we went after her."

Adrien waited, and when she did not add anything he did it for her.

"So you lost a child."

Amelia said nothing at all, and the colour came up her neck and into her face, and she kept her eyes exactly where they were.

"Right," Adrien said. "That’s going to sound wonderful in a report."

"Please stop talking."

Somebody arrived at Adrien’s shoulder without making any noise about it, which he was starting to accept as a thing elves did.

"You shouldn’t be talking to her."

Adrien turned his head. Lucien had his bow across his back for the first time all night and had chosen to stand a little closer to Amelia than the conversation required.

"Why not?"

"You’re human."

Adrien turned that over and found, annoyingly, that it made a certain amount of sense. Every elf in that camp had spent however long inside a cage because humans had put them there, and the men who did it had spent the evening discussing prices. He was about to say something reasonable about it when Amelia reached up and took hold of Lucien’s ear.

"Ow."

"He saved our lives," she said, pulling. "All of us. And you have not thanked him once."

"Amelia."

"Bow your head and do it properly."

Lucien did, after a fashion, which was to say he inclined about as far as a man can incline while making it clear he is doing so under duress.

"Thank you," he said. "For what you did."

"Don’t mention it." Adrien kept a very level face. "Really. Ever."

Amelia let go of the ear, and Lucien walked off rubbing it, and Adrien decided he liked the elf considerably more than he had two minutes ago.

They started getting ready to leave after that, and Adrien found his sister sitting on the edge of a wagon with one arm across her side, watching everyone else do the work.

"Lean on me," he said. "Or I can carry you on my back, if you’d rather."

"I’m fine." Ariane got herself down off the wagon and took the arm he offered, and that was as much as she gave him. "A bit of support and I’m fine."

She did not say anything after that, and Adrien walked her toward the trail and let her be quiet about it. He could see most of what was going on in her face anyway. Days in a cage that ate her mana. A knife across the ribs from a man who had come for her because she was the one holding the ground. And her mother’s order, which she had climbed out of a window to ignore.

And the other thing, which was worse, and which Ariane would rather have bled again than say out loud.

’Four years,’ she was thinking, with her arm through his and her eyes on the ground. ’Four years of getting up before the house did, and he’s a month in and he holds it for however long he feels like.’

’I have to work harder.’

None of which Adrien heard, because she had no intention of saying any of it out loud.

"Vikir. Are we set?"

"Everything’s secured, young master." Vikir came up the line with two packs across his back and a third under one arm, which was a great deal more than a man in his condition should have been carrying. "We can leave whenever you say."

"Then put the incense out. All of them."

Vikir stopped. "You’re sure?"

"Those burners are why Greymoor’s been getting hit." Adrien nodded up the slope. "Everything that lives up here got pushed out of its own ground, and the only place downhill of it is my house. Nine people are dead because of these cones of resin. Put them out and it stops."

Vikir’s face changed slowly.

"Greymoor," he said. "That old place off in the hills? The one the family used to go to for the summer?"

"That’s the one."

"You went to Greymoor?"

"We live at Greymoor." Adrien said it without any particular weight on it. "It’s the family seat now. Everything else went to other people while you were sitting in a cage."

Vikir was quiet for a moment, and after that he went to put out the fires.

They walked out through the northern edge of the empty ground, and Adrien fell in beside Amelia after the first mile, mostly because Ariane had been passed over to Lucien’s care and had objected to it loudly enough that leaving them to argue seemed the wiser choice.

"About what I said earlier," Adrien said. "I meant it. Come to Greymoor. I owe you for Garrick and I’d rather pay that in person than shout it across a forest."

"I’d like to." Amelia sounded like she meant that too. "I can’t right now, though. I have to get her home first, and there’ll be a distress signal out by this point. There will already be people looking."

"How many people, roughly?"

"Enough that we should probably be somewhere visible when they find us."

She turned out to be extremely conservative about it. They came around the shoulder of the hill and the trees opened onto a stretch of clear ground, and standing in it were more than a hundred elves in white armour.

They had spread across the whole width of the open ground and had done it without a sound. Swords, staves, bows, and along the second rank a line of rifles with the chambers already lit. Every one of them was pointed at the humans.

"Step away from them."

The voice came from the front, from a man with a white cloak over the armour and a manifested blade already in his hand.

Adrien raised both hands very slowly and did not move his feet.

"Say nothing," Lucien murmured beside him.

"Wasn’t planning on it."

Amelia walked out in front of both of them.

"Lower your weapons." She said it loudly enough to reach the second rank. "I am Amelia Edevane. Her Highness is unharmed and she is standing behind me, and you are currently aiming at the man who got us out."

The commander did not lower anything. "Lady Edevane, we have had no word for days. We were told the party was taken."

"We were taken."

"By whom?"

"Slavers. Forty of them, camped inside the forest with a monster-ward burning around it, and they had been there for months." Amelia let that land properly. "They are dead. All of them. He did that before any of you arrived."

The commander looked past her for the first time and took Adrien in properly. A young human with blood on his coat, an unfamiliar staff, and a girl on his arm who was clearly holding a wound.

"And who is he?"

"Adrien Clairmont," Adrien said. "Head of House Clairmont. That forest sits on my land, which is why I was in it."

Something went through the front rank at the name, and the commander’s sword came apart into specks of mana, and he brought his fist across to his chest and bowed from the waist, and behind him a hundred blades came down together.

"Lord Clairmont. My apologies. Had we known whose ground we were standing on, this would have gone differently." He straightened. "You have the apologies of the Kingdom of Sylvamir, and its thanks. The royal family will hear what House Clairmont has done here."

"That’s not necessary."

"It is entirely necessary, my lord."

Adrien let it go, because arguing with a man in front of a hundred of his own soldiers was not a fight anybody won.

"There is one more thing," the commander said. "Vael will want to speak with you."

"Vael?"

"My grandfather," Amelia said.

Adrien looked between the two of them and decided, on the balance of the evening, that he had used up everything he had.

"Tell him I’d be glad to. Not today." He nodded back down the slope. "I have a house that’s been attacked twice, a knight with holes in him, and a mother who doesn’t know either of us is alive. But I’ll remember."

"He will hold you to it."

"I’d be disappointed if he didn’t."

The elves opened a lane through the middle of their own line to let the humans through, which Adrien suspected was not something that happened often.

’Well. That’s probably going to become a problem somehow.’

Amelia stopped him before he had gone ten paces past her.

"Adrien."

He turned round, and she had her arms folded and her chin up.

"Greymoor," she said. "The far side of the mountain, past the burn line."

"That’s the one."

"Then I’ll see you at Greymoor."

She said it like somebody confirming an appointment rather than making a promise, and she was already walking back toward her cousin before he had worked out an answer.

...

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