To Light a Candle Read online

  “What about Vestakia?” Kellen asked. He’d just as soon avoid the attention, but he didn’t want to abandon Vestakia on her first day in Sentarshadeen.

  “Vestakia,” Idalia had answered with a wicked smirk, “will be spending the morning—the entire morning, and possibly most of the afternoon—receiving a new wardrobe from Tengitir, who announced that she has waited her entire life for such a challenge as Vestakia represents. You know, I do believe that if the Prince of Shadow Mountain were to appear before her, Tengitir would demand that he take off his clothes and step into the light so that she could best determine what colors and fabrics suited his skin,” Idalia added bemusedly.

  Kellen laughed. Having been dressed by the Elven seamstress himself—Tengitir’s specialty was in designing clothing for the non-Elven—he thought that was almost possible.

  “Afterward—if there’s time before the banquet—Jermayan and I will take her around Sentarshadeen a little. To show her the city—and to show her to the city as well, of course. The sooner everyone sees that there is nothing to fear from her, the better,” Idalia added.

  “And if there is anything wrong in the city, she’ll find it,” Kellen said.

  “Yes,” Idalia said. “I’d thought of that, as well.”

  So with one thing and another, Kellen spent the day at home, mostly by himself. Idalia seemed to have a great many errands to run, going in and out all day, returning more often than not with mysterious parcels which she wouldn’t let him unwrap.

  “Time enough for that later, little brother,” was all she would say. She seemed cheerful enough, and Kellen was glad of that. When they’d first arrived in Sentarshadeen, she’d seemed so … grave. He preferred this Idalia better. It made it easier to pretend that in destroying the Barrier they’d solved all their problems, though Kellen knew they hadn’t. They’d only bought themselves and the Elves some time—though how much time, and what form the next attack would take, was something he doubted even Idalia could guess.

  To distract himself from the unavoidable banquet—though the son of the Arch-Mage of Armethalieh had a certain amount of experience with formal banquets, this would be the first such event Kellen had attended among the Elves—Kellen spent the day cleaning and polishing his sword and armor, having found that his gear had been delivered to the house the previous day. Not that it really needed doing—someone had obviously been at it before him—but it gave his hands something to do, and settled his mind.

  When he’d finished that, he got out his Books, and turned to The Book of Stars.

  The Book of Stars was the most esoteric and puzzling of the three books. The Book of Moon was the simplest, containing basic cantrips and the building blocks of spells. A budding Wildmage could begin working Wildmagery within minutes of opening The Book of Moon.

  The Book of Sun contained some information about spells as well, but was more occupied with why spells should be cast than how, and often with whether they should be cast at all, since the Wild Magic was a magic of Balance, and often things tended to slip back into balance without the Wildmage’s help.

  The Book of Stars seemed to be about the underlying principles of the Wild Magic. Idalia had once told Kellen that studying it helped the Wildmage become a better Wildmage, although Kellen had never been able to see how, as nothing he’d read in it had ever really made a lot of sense to him. She’d said he should study it anyway, so Kellen had.

  It seemed to make a lot more sense now that Kellen knew he was a Knight-Mage instead of a regular Wildmage.

  The Book of Stars said that “The Knight-Mage is the active agent of the principle of the Wild Magic, the Wildmage who chooses to become a warrior or who is born with the instinct for the Way of the Sword, who acts in battle without mindful thought and thus brings primary causative forces into manifestation by direct action.”

  When they had discovered that this was what Kellen was, Jermayan had told him that a Wildmage and a Knight-Mage’s gifts lay in opposite directions; that while a Wildmage reached out to all the world, a Knight-Mage’s gifts turned inward, so that he could not be turned away from his course once he had chosen it. Because of that, Kellen’s abilities in Wildmagery would never be as strong as Idalia’s, but Jermayan also said that a Knight-Mage could withstand forces that would destroy a regular Wildmage, for the Knight-Mage’s true power lay in endurance and the alliance of his knightly skills with his Wildmagery.

  It all sounded very fine, but kind of unsettling, and while Kellen had a lot more confidence in his Wildmage skills—especially now that he wasn’t measuring them against Idalia’s—he knew he still had a lot to learn about this knight business. And he’d better learn fast.

  Fortunately, he had Jermayan to teach him.

  He wasn’t surprised to find that The Book of Stars seemed . to make a lot more sense now that he knew what he really was. For the first time, the words in the tiny handwritten book seemed to be speaking directly to him, as if the long-gone Wildmage who had copied it out from his or her own Books—why? Kellen still sometimes wondered, and as part of what Mageprice?—were here, and speaking directly to him.

  “Only when you cease to try, will you achieve. Only when you cease to seek, will you find. Only when you are emptied, will you be filled.”

  If that wasn’t exactly what finding the Way of the Knight-Mage was like, he’d eat his boots. It gave him a kind of comfort, to know that whatever might come to pass, it was somehow within the sphere of the Wild Magic.

  And for the first time, he wondered if all copies of the three Books were the same. Oh, probably The Book of Moon was, and maybe The Book of Sun—but what about The Book of Stars? Because what was in his Book certainly wouldn’t apply to Idalia, would it? Was every copy of The Book of Stars suited only to the Wildmage who was supposed to. read it?

  “Kellen? Come back to the world, little brother.”

  Kellen startled at the sound of Idalia’s voice, disturbing Greymalkin, who had insinuated herself into his lap as he read. The cat yawned and stretched, stalking slowly from his lap.

  Kellen blinked up at his sister, surprised to see how far the light had failed. He’d been sure he was still reading, but now he saw that it was too dark to make out the words on the page.

  “Which Book?” she asked.

  Kellen closed the worn leather volume and brandished it in explanation. The small gold star glinted faintly on the spine. Idalia raised an eyebrow and smiled, saying nothing.

  “Time to have a bath and get dressed. It’s going to take you a while to climb into all your finery,” she said teasingly.

  Kellen sighed, getting reluctantly to his feet. His experiences with formal dress when he had lived in his father’s house had not been pleasant ones, and he doubted he’d show to advantage in a roomful of costume-obsessed Elves. One of the oldest Histories in Armethalieh said that “the Elves have elevated mere living into a form of Art,” and that included clothing, of course. Even if his own outfit for tonight had been designed to take into account the shortcomings of clumsy short-lived humans—and since Tengitir had certainly made it, it undoubtedly had—among the Elves, he’d look like a turnip in a rose garden.

  Just as out of place as he had back in Armethalieh.

  “Bath,” Idalia said firmly, taking him by the shoulders and turning him in that direction. “I’ll lay out your clothes while you do that. And hurry up, because I still have to wash and change myself.”

  Kellen headed for the bathroom—he could get his robe while the tub filled. He felt a little better, knowing that Idalia was going to be there, and just as overdressed as he was. He could hardly imagine what she’d look like in high Elven finery.

  AND by dusk, he knew.

  Idalia was wearing a dress—Kellen’s first reaction was to laugh, but he didn’t; she would have slain him on the spot—whose main color was the same violet as her eyes.

  On second look, there was no reason to laugh. He’d never seen Idalia in a dress before. In fact, after what little
she’d told him about her childhood, he’d thought she wouldn’t be caught dead in one, but somehow, it didn’t look … unsuitable. There was nothing ornate or frivolous about it, just clean simple practical lines, as businesslike as a good sword.

  But it wasn’t plain, any more than an Elvenware bowl was plain. The shimmering violet silk glowed like glass, as if it were somehow lit from within, and was accented by insets of dark bark-brown velvet almost the color of her hair, velvet that somehow had a furtive, iridescent glimmer of the same violet rippling along the surface of it wherever the light struck it. There were insets along the collar, at the shoulders, and inside the full outer sleeves. She looked—elegant. He hadn’t known she could look elegant.

  “I’ll be tripping over my skirts all night,” Idalia muttered, stalking across the room to glare into a mirror, but Kellen knew she wouldn’t. They only seemed to touch the floor, but that was a clever illusion. The hem was actually uneven; it didn’t touch the floor at all, and was several inches shorter in front than in back.

  “You’ll be fine,” Kellen said soothingly. “And you look”—he sought for a word that would convey what he thought—“dignified. Amazing, actually.”

  “So do you,” Idalia said. She slid a pair of ebony and Elvensilver combs into her hair—her only jewelry—and turned to regard Kellen critically.

  He’d been relieved to find that he hadn’t needed help dressing after all. His costume (he really couldn’t think of it any other way) was not very much more elaborate than Idalia’s—and fortunately, the sheer, body-hugging styles that the Elves favored for themselves were nowhere in evidence in Kellen’s own garb.

  There were a few notes of the same sea-green that was the accent color for his armor—he guessed he’d better get used to the idea that the Elves thought of it as his official color now—in the very plain heavy silk trousers and long-sleeved tunic that were the bottom layer of his outfit. But over those went a long sleeveless vest that fell to mid-thigh, closed all the way to its high neck by a double row of tiny silver buttons that had taken him ages to do up. It was made of a sheered velvet in a leaf-pattern—parts were sheer, and parts were thick velvet, and Kellen couldn’t quite decide what the color was. Silver? Gold? Brown? All of them?

  Eventually he gave up. It looked okay over the green, anyway, making the silk undertunic (where it showed through) shimmer in a silvery—definitely silvery—way.

  Over that came a long full-sleeved robe that fell to midcalf, in a green so dark it was almost black. It was a kind of cloth he’d never seen before, soft like wool, and smooth, but faintly iridescent. It was lined in dull gold satin, and belted with a wide—and very long—sash in a slightly brighter shade of green than the overrobe. That had nearly been his undoing, until Idalia had taken pity on him and showed him how to wrap and tie the sash properly.

  Low boots, of a reassuringly normal-looking pale gold calfskin, completed his outfit.

  “I don’t look bad,” Kellen agreed. And I don’t feel silly, he realized with relief. Nobody was asking him to wear earrings, braid jewels into his hair, paint his face, or do any of the other things the Elves did when they got themselves done up for some festive occasion. Now, just as long as nobody asked him to make a speech …

  “Except for your hair,” Idalia agreed. “Come over here.”

  A few minutes with a comb, and Idalia had pulled Kellen’s mop of light-brown curls back into a short twisted braid at the nape of his neck. It felt reassuringly normal—it was the way he wore his hair under his helmet, after all.

  “There. Presentable.” She craned around and kissed him lightly on the forehead. “You’ll definitely do. I’ll just get our raincapes and rainshades, and we can be off. Don’t worry—they’re bespelled to keep the rain off—and I actually think it’s slackening a bit this evening. Not stopping, of course, which is just as well,” Idalia said.

  “Where are we going?” Kellen asked, thinking to ask for the first time.

  “The gardens at the House of Leaf and Star. There’s no other place large enough to accommodate the guest list—and the unicorns will want to be able to listen—from a distance, of course.”

  “Outside? In the rain?”

  Idalia snickered at Kellen’s expression.

  “Under canvas—or silk, actually. Relax. Everything that should be dry, will be dry. You look like you’re being sent to an execution, not to a banquet.”

  All things considered, Kellen would rather have gone to an execution.

  THE formal gardens of the House of Leaf and Star were subtly beautiful, like all the creations of the Elves: the natural world raised to an impossible pitch of perfection.

  He’d never seen the gardens, but then, he hadn’t been in Sentarshadeen long, and had gotten most of his tour of it courtesy of Sandalon, who’d shown him the things that Sandalon thought would interest a human stranger … which had not, obviously, included his parents’ gardens.

  Kellen looked down, realizing that at some point, without noticing, he and Idalia had gone from the streets of Sentarshadeen to a wide-slatted wooden path laid across the meadow to a path of white gravel.

  This must be the garden, then.

  Tonight it was filled with more lanterns than Kellen would once have been willing to bet were in the entire city of Sentarshadeen. Before the rains came, it had been necessary to keep the lights of evening from starting any accidental fires in a city made tinder-dry by drought. Now it was only necessary to keep the flames from being drowned by the rain. But the Elves—who accomplished far more through clever engineering than humans had ever done through magic—made it look effortless.

  Some of the lanterns shone through tall gauzy windbreaks set up to blunt the force of the blustering, rain-heavy winds, turning them into tall, softly-gleaming rectangles of color. Though they seemed as insubstantial as kites, Kellen doubted they’d fall if the wind blew ten times as hard, though they quivered when the wind struck them. Kellen suspected they were meant to.

  Inside the curving walls of windbreaks, the air was nearly still, and the flames inside the artfully-scattered lanterns—some suspended on tall posts, some nearer the ground—burned steadily. But the towering windbreaks were walls only, not roofs, and Kellen was still glad to have his rainshade and cloak for protection. He’d gotten his fill of being wet on his return from the Barrier.

  But the other purpose for the windbreaks, besides sheltering the lanterns, was obviously to protect the dining pavilions.

  Unlike the place in which he, Jermayan, and Vestakia had first been received—if not entirely welcomed—these were little more than canopies suspended on poles. Even in the rain, the entire garden was lit as brightly as the common room of Kellen’s house, and very little of it was really open to the falling rain. Their cloaks were taken from them as they arrived at the edge of the garden, leaving them their light and elegant rainshades. The garden was already filled with Elves, their rainshades making them look like fabulous flowers.

  “Like it?” Idalia said, gesturing around.

  “Everyone’s already here,” Kellen said uneasily. “Are we late?”

  “No. The honored guests arrive last. And of course, having spent all day putting this together, they certainly expect you to take some time to admire it before the banquet begins. Let’s look around.”

  Idalia put her free hand on his arm and led Kellen forward. He didn’t see much of the garden as it normally was—but he did see a lot of dining pavilions, and oiled-paper lanterns, and people he knew. All of Sentarshadeen was here tonight indeed, and he and Idalia stopped several times to speak politely to people that Kellen knew from the time he’d spent on the work crews watering the forest, and to several of Idalia’s friends as well.

  All the time his sense of dread grew. Everything seemed so quiet, so … formal. He wouldn’t be able to get through this evening without making some terrible error. He knew it.

  “We’ll be sitting over there, under that green awning,” Idalia said, when their slow
meander finally brought them within range of the canopies.

  In the back of his mind, Kellen had been wondering where everyone was going to sit. Under the tents, obviously, but surely there weren’t enough tables and chairs—not to mention plates and cups—in the city to host a banquet for its entire populace? Unless the Elves had built them all—but in two days? He sort of thought that would take greater magic than they claimed to possess.

  He glanced around.

  He was surprised to see that what was under the awnings wasn’t large, long banquet tables—such as he would have seen in Armethalieh—but instead an assortment of tables in various shapes, sizes, and woods. All harmonious, of course, in the Elven fashion, but certainly not giving the impression they’d all been built for the occasion. In fact …

  He was sure he recognized some of the furnishings. Surely that table under the rose-colored canopy was from the House of Leaf and Star? Yes, he was sure of it. He’d eaten dinner at it his first night in Sentarshadeen, alone with Ashaniel, Lairamo, and Sandalon.

  Suddenly Kellen realized why the tables and chairs—and the tableware as well—were a harmonious assortment instead of an harmonious whole. It might be held in the gardens of the House of Leaf and Star, but the tables and chairs were from nearly every home in Sentarshadeen.

  Andoreniel and Ashaniel weren’t giving this banquet. The entire city was.

  Kellen felt himself relax at last. He realized he’d been thinking of tonight in Armethaliehan terms—of this banquet as an event meant to crush spectators and participants with its magnificence and to inspire them with thoughts of their own unworthiness to attend it. But if Elves thought that way, the House of Leaf and Star would be a cold and forbidding palace, terrible in its majesty.

  No.

  When the Elves said that this was a welcoming banquet, that was exactly what it was. Their ways might be strange, and their code of etiquette difficult for a human to understand or to follow, but that was what they meant. For all the garden’s daunting and ethereal beauty, tonight had far more in common with the party the Centaurs and farmers had held back in the Wildwood to bid him and Idalia farewell than it did with anything that might ever occur in the Golden City!