Page 442 of Of Empires and Dust
“That sounds about right.” Tanner sat up straight. “I lost my mother almost twenty summers ago. Yesterday, I walked into the kitchen as Elia brought a fresh loaf of bread from the oven. She’d put rosemary in this one, like my mother used to. I had to walk straight out the door. Ended up drinking elven mead on my own in the middle of the city. Gods, I can’t even remember the amount of people I’ve seen die, the number of friends and family I’ve lost. The last letter I got from my brother was over a year ago, telling me that an old friend, Forn Blackwell, was found dead in his own inn, throat slit. That was the same letter where he told me that Rhett had disappeared. I never responded. I was too busy… Rahlin could be dead, but it’s Forn that hurts me. Explain that?”
“I remember him,” Ella said, thinking back to the old innkeeper she and Rhett had met in The Twisted Oak. “We met him in Camylin at your suggestion. He was a lovely man.”
“That would have been right before he died.” Tanner shook his head, then let out a long regretful sigh. “I’ll tell you one thing,Ella. The older you get, the more you appreciate what you have left.” He squeezed Ella’s knee and stood. “I’ll leave you to it. The ones we lose, Ella, they’re never really gone, just waiting.”
Ella watched as Tanner climbed down the terraces and tapped Yana’s left shoulder, promptly jumping to her right and receiving a light slap on the back of the head for his efforts. Yana looked up at Ella, smiling, as they made their way down and left.
The sight of it only made Ella miss Rhett more. Perhaps, if he’d lived, they might have grown apart, or argued, or screamed and roared at each other, and that would have been fine. Because that was human. They would have gotten through it; they would have gotten through anything. But he’d had to go and leave her alone, and so now all she had were memories of a man who loved her, who was kind and gentle, and selfless, and perfect. And that made her hate him a little bit, because no one else could ever live up to that.
Then, as she leaned back and stared at the Ilyienë, Ella could see Rhett’s smiling face in her mind, those wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes, that smile that was always so full.
“Fuck you, Rhett,” she whispered, leaning her head back to stop herself from crying. “Fuck you.”
When the threat of tears had diminished, Ella looked down at the Ilyienë tree and saw possibly the last person she’d expected to see: Farda. She’d completely avoided the man since returning to the city – since Calen had agreed to pardon him.
At her feet, Faenir sat upright, his hackles raised, lips pulling back in a snarl. She stood and walked down the stone stairs towards the central yard, crossing the bridge between the Jotnar and elf statues.
Farda stood with his eyes closed and one hand at his side, the other pressed to the trunk of the great tree, several elves around him.
Ella moved so she stood only a few feet to his left. She didn’t know what she wanted to say, only that the wolf in her blood wanted to rip the man’s throat out and that small pieces of her just wanted to know why. Why he had done all the things he’d done, why he’d stayed with her so long, why he’d brought her all the way to Aravell, knowing what would await him.
“Were you going to speak?” Farda said without opening his eyes. “Or just stand there staring at me? I can taste the smell of wet wolfpine.”
Just the sound of his voice made her furious. “What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as all the others.” Farda opened his eyes and stared up at the glowing canopy above. “Ella?—”
“No,” she snapped. “Don’t even try.”
Farda turned to face her, keeping his palm flat against the tree. “Why areyouhere? You approached me, and yet you won’t let me speak. You want to kill me, but you won’t let me die. Why are you here?”
“I don’t know!”
Whispers sounded around Ella as she roared, elves staring at her and walking away to the other side of the tree.
“My nieces,” Farda said, turning back to look up at the leaves overhead.
“What?”
“You wanted to know why I’m here – my nieces.” Farda bit at his lip. “I’m going to talk. You can stay or you can go. But I would prefer if you stayed.”
Ella wanted to leave, but her feet remained planted, the wolf within her growling.
“Hana and Valyianne.” Farda paused for a moment, his throat tightening. “My brother’s girls. My brother and his wife were killed by bandits on the road from Caelduin to Anthír. Apparently, the bandits had some kind of moral code, becausethey left the girls sitting at the side of the road. That’s where I found them. I was late. I promised him I’d bring Shinyara and let the girls fly with me. But I was late. And… Torlan died because of it. The bandits took everything, stripped them of their clothes, coin, jewels, whatever was worth anything. But they left the girls.”
Ella could smell the pain on Farda, hear the falter in his heartbeat. The moment of sympathy in her heart only served to light a rage at herself for allowing it to exist.
“I took them in, raised them. Taught them to hold swords, to hunt, taught them to sew and knit, how to cook. Hana couldn’t tell a tomato from an apple, but Valyianne had a gift for it. You should have seen the smile on her face when she baked her first pie. It was godsawful, but I ate it. The second one was better. By the fifth, I was asking her to make pie every day. Hana might not have been a good cook, but by Elyara could she sing. They were the sweetest two girls in the world.”
Farda ran his fingers down the bark of the tree. “They were everything. I’d always told myself I didn’t want children. What if they were born without the Spark? There was something dark about that – about the chance that you might live to watch your children be born, to raise them, to bring them up in the world, and then watch them slowly grow old and wither, and then, eventually, lay them into the earth. But the girls, they made me see. To care for a child is a different kind of love… On the darkest days, just one smile from Hana or one laugh from Valyianne, and everything was better. They were joy, and love, and beauty. They were my girls.”
Ella couldn’t help but notice Farda’s use of the word ‘were’. She wanted to keep her rage flowing, to not let him in, but the smell of pain and loss filled her nostrils. “What happened to them?”
“They had only seen twelve summers when they died.” Farda clenched his hand into a fist, the bark of the tree scraping away skin from his knuckles. “I’d left them with their grandparents – Sahira’s mother and father – in the city of Orinhale. The city was burned to the ground the next night.”
“Farda, I…”
“The Order knew about it before it happened. Orinhale and Aerilon were at war. The prince of Orinhale had taken the king of Aerilon’s daughter and married her in secret. That daughter had a husband already. And The Order’s spies had reported that the husband planned to set sail with an army and raze the city to the ground, his wife inside. We could have stopped it, but the council voted that Aerilon’s support was too valuable.” Farda drew a deep, trembling breath. “Alvira didn’t tell me that we knew until a year after. She said that she ‘didn’t know Valyianne and Hana were in the city’… as though that made it better.”
