Honor Bound (2 page)

Honor.

Parchment whispered as Asteria drew
a tiny, well-worn scroll from her sleeve. She unrolled it and
smoothed her fingers over the runes with the reverence usually
afforded ancient treasures and newborn elves.

"The first word I've had from her in
nearly ten years," she said. "Ten years, Nimbolk!"

"Ten years is a long time for a
Champion to leave her queen."

"She traveled at my command,"
Asteria reminded him. Her face turned wistful. "Though she might
have written sooner."

"And less cryptically." He shook his
head. "
Longest night, reddest
rose
. What sort of field report is
that?"

Asteria didn't respond, but then,
his question didn't merit discussion. The message was clear enough.
Midwinter night was the traditional time for elven tribunals, the
appropriate time to bring a traitor to justice. Many elves had
sought this traitor, but the Queen's Champion had won again, and
she was bringing her prize to the Starsingers Grove to be judged by
the Thorn.

The queen drew the crystal dagger
from a sheath on her belt. The rose within had folded its pedals at
dusk to a tightly furled bud.

She glanced up at Nimbolk. "Do you
remember when the rose appeared?"

"As if it were
yesterday."

A rose blooming in the heart of a
crystal blade—just the sort of whimsical touch expected of elves.
Only the old races would read the warning in it, portents of magic
twisted into unnatural shapes for treacherous means.

Nimbolk had been among the first to
bare his sword arm and demand that the Thorn taste his blood. Every
elf in Mistheim had followed. Not once had the crystal rose bloomed
red.

If Ziharah was right—and she had
that annoying habit—it would bloom tonight.

A murmur rippled through the
clearing, and the tribunal members near the western border of the
grove fell back to reveal a new-come elf.

For a moment Nimbolk did not
recognize her, though he knew her face as well as he knew his own.
Her warrior's frame had grown thin and frail, and deep shadows
gathered beneath her eyes and in the hollows of her face. The
winter Fading was slow to come upon her; her eyes had changed from
the hazel green of summer to winter gray, but small dark streaks
lingered in the white of her hair so that it resembled the bark of
a birch tree. She walked slowly, and with the aid of a rudely
carved wooden staff. Elfin runes ran the length of the staff, all
but hidden by the rough texture. Nimbolk could only make out one
word:
Honor.

The queen's eyes lit up and she
started forward with a glad cry.

Nimbolk leaped into her path and
seized her shoulders. "That isn't Ziharah."

"Of course it is!"

He moved aside. "See how she moves,
slow and heavy. Ziharah moved like a cat, like the wind. Look at
her eyes. Ziharah doesn't live in them. They are empty.
Haunted."

Guilty
, he
added silently.

"She has been wounded," Asteria
said, but she sounded less certain.

"Look at her staff," he said.
"
Look
at it! She's
warning us that she is no longer what she was. Honor is what
remains when everything else has been stripped away."

"
Honor
," she murmured. "And more runes
below..."

The queen's eyes narrowed as she
studied the staff, then widened in alarm. "
Ambush. Flee!
"

She repeated the warning in high,
ringing tones.

The elves whirled toward the trees,
poised for flight.

Too late.

The crash and clatter of heavy
footsteps rattled the forest in a sudden, thunderous rush. Armed
humans, far too many of them, burst into the sacred
grove.

Throughout the clearing, elfin hands
reached instinctively for the weapons they usually wore.

Crimson rain spattered the snow as
the first elves fell. The humans came on in a wild rush, jostling
each other in their frenzy to kill.

Nimbolk backed Asteria against a
giant fir and placed himself between the queen and the invaders. He
looked to the trees, to the hidden places where archers kept
guard.

No arrows answered the attack. None
of the guards who kept watch in the forest around the grove ran to
protect the queen and the tribunal. The humans could not possibly
have destroyed them all, unless...

His gaze found Honor. Elves were
falling all around her, but she did not fight. She walked steadily
toward Asteria, every step so heavy she might have been slogging
through knee-high mud.

A surge of power swept past him. He
felt the edge of it, as if he'd been brushed by the fletching of a
giant's arrow.

Honor stopped. Her eyes cleared and
filled with anguish.

"Together," Asteria urged. "Join me,
sister! We'll fight their magic together."

A tall, bearded human ran past
Honor. Her staff made a quick, subtle arc, and suddenly the man was
pitching face-first into the snow. His sword flew from his
hand.

She caught it by the hilt, never
taking her eyes from Asteria's face, and flipped the weapon toward
Nimbolk.

The sword felt strange in his hand,
heavy and graceless, and the notched grip of the aurak-tusk hilt
had been carved for a larger hand. But when he tested it against a
human's throat, he could find no fault with its edge.

Two more of the invaders fell to his
borrowed blade before an alarm went up. One of the humans shouted a
curse and pointed at Nimbolk with a bloody sword. The man sheathed
his blade and reached over his shoulder for a bow. Two other men
joined him, stringing their bows and thrusting handfuls of arrows
into the snow. Moving as one, the men drew and released.

Honor's staff twisted and danced as
she turned the first three arrows aside. More fighters flanked them
with raised blades; those she left to Asteria's other
defender.

Nimbolk understood. Some dark magic
kept Honor from attacking her captors, but the fool who held her in
thrall had apparently neglected to specify that she could
not
defend.

It was something, but he would have
been glad of her sword. When they were not fighting each other,
they made a formidable team. In years past, the two of them,
standing back to back, could hold off a dozen of the Mistheim's
best warriors.

At least he had Asteria's help.
Starsong magic hummed through him, speeding his sword arm, slowing
the blood flowing from his wounds, dulling the pain.

One of the humans barked a command.
The swordsmen scrambled out of the way as a swarm of arrows sped
toward the elfin trio.

A black-shafted arrow pierced
Honor's sword arm. She hardly seemed to notice. But Nimbolk felt
the arrow that grazed his shoulder, the arrow that drove deep into
his thigh, the arrow that thrust a fiery lance of pain into his
side. And the next arrow, and the next.

He did not remember falling, but he
must have done so, for why else would he be lying in the
snow?

Honor kicked him aside and took his
place. One of the men lunged at her, slashing at the knee she'd
been favoring. Nimbolk heard the sword's impact, the chilling
scrape of metal against bone.

She swayed but did not fall. "Go,
Asteria. Go
now
."

Nimbolk could read the reluctance on
the queen's face despite the mist that gathered on the edges of his
vision. In a voice weighted by duty and dull with sorrow, Asteria
spoke words that molded starsong into a softly glowing
portal.

A dull thud sounded behind her.
Asteria slumped to the ground. In the light from the fading portal,
blood bloomed against the shining snowfall of her hair.

The humans closed in, wolves
surrounding a fallen doe.

Even now, Honor did not attack them,
but twin fires of rage and frustration burned in her
eyes.

The man she'd tripped bent down to
reclaim the sword Nimbolk had wielded. "Bring the queen and the
dagger," he commanded. A cruel light slid into his pale blue eyes.
"Better yet, bring her corpse."

Honor's shoulders sagged in defeat,
and if not for her staff she probably would have fallen into the
snow beside her sister. She pushed away from the staff and started
to reach for Asteria, stopping as she noticed the arrow impaling
her forearm. She grasped it just below the barbed point and yanked
it free, not even flinching as shaft and fletching slid through the
wound.

Honor dragged the queen to her feet
and scooped her limp body into her arms. "Minue take you!" she
snarled as she hurled her twin-born sister at the massive
fir.

To the humans, the words would sound
like a curse, an invocation to some dark god or demon. They would
see only an elf forced into treachery, cursing them as she dashed
her queen's head against an ancient pine.

But Nimbolk's elfin eyes had seen
the bark of the tree turn to mist, as insubstantial as a
rainbow.

The queen disappeared.

Minue, the tree's guardian dryad,
had taken her.

Honor pushed herself away from the
solid trunk. Her leggings had been torn from thigh to calf,
exposing her wounded knee. For a fleeting moment Nimbolk could have
sworn that metal, not bone, gleamed through the blood.

She ran one hand over a new circle
of runes on the bark and then turned to face the invaders, triumph
written on her face.

"You lose, Volgo."

"There's a first time for
everything." The bearded man reached down into the bloody snow and
came up with the Thorn in his hand. "Unfortunately for you, this
isn't it."

He made a sharp gesture with the
dagger. Behind Honor, the man who'd clubbed Asteria raised his
weapon high.

Nimbolk tried to shout a warning,
but no breath remained to him. Even if he could warn her, even if
he had starsong left to send her, she could not move quickly enough
to avoid her fate.

In helpless silence, he steeled
himself to witness the death of the elf he loved nearly as much as
he hated.

* * *

Honor surged to her feet, gasping as
she felt anew the impact of the club—the moment of bright, sharp
light, the sound of her own shattering skull and the sense of
crystal shards slicing deep into mind and memory.

The pain faded quickly, leaving only
the burning agony in her sword arm. The memory of battle remained,
vivid as a fairy's illusion. It felt familiar, like opening a book
and reading a well-known tale.

She pulled up the skirts of the gown
Rhendish had given her and propped one foot against the wall so she
could study her knee. Yes, there were faint silver lines round the
knee, and when she twisted her leg she found deeper scars in the
crease behind.

More metal, more
gears
.

Less elf.

She took a moment to absorb this. In
the depths of her heart, despair thundered like winter surf. She
acknowledged it, but she did not let the waves overwhelm
her.

Instead, she unwrapped the bandage
on her sword arm and regarded the neat row of new stitches where
Rhendish had removed a few broken gears. Tomorrow, he would replace
one of the metal rods with crystal grown from her own shattered
bones. The next day, he would do more. And the next. She would bear
it for as long as the task required.

And when it was done, she owed
Rhendish the strength of her sword arm for a year and a day. That
was the pledge she'd made, the price of the Thorn's
safety.

"It is decided," she said, turning
her mind to other things.

She walked over to her chamber
window and gazed out over Rhendish's courtyard as she pondered the
meaning of this vision.

Though she welcomed the return of
memory, even one so painful as this, she could not understand why
this memory had come to her through Nimbolk's eyes.

The connection among elfin warriors
ran along deep and complex paths, but it seldom included a sharing
of memories, and it did not transcend death.

That could only mean Nimbolk was
alive. And unless the warrior had become a priest or mystic in the
last decade—a notion too incongruous for her to entertain for even
a moment—a connection strong enough for shared memory meant that no
great distance or open seas separated them.

Nimbolk had come to the islands of
Sevrin. Knowing Nimbolk, she had no doubt that he'd come for the
Thorn, and she knew all too well how he'd deal with anyone who
stood between him and his duty.

Honor reached under her mattress and
drew out several battered items of clothing. The shadow-colored
garments she'd worn during the battle in Muldonny's fortress had
not been improved by her long fall into the sea, but where she was
going, they'd be less conspicuous than Rhendish's silk and
gems.