Elf at the Gate

The arrow took me in the shoulder.

Not the clean punch I'd trained for at the Academy, where the instructors shot blunted shafts and called it live fire. This was a rusted iron head, and it tore through the leather of my jerkin like the leather was wet paper. I felt the barb scrape bone. My bow clattered off the ridge and down into the ravine, and I went down after it, half sliding, half falling, my good hand clawing at roots that tore loose from the dirt.

Above me, boots on stone. Three sets, maybe four. I'd counted six riders when I spotted them at the ford, which meant two were still circling the long way around the bluff. Professional. Patient. Not bandits.

I came to rest against a birch, the trunk cold through my shirt, and got my knife out of my boot. The blade was short and the blood running down my arm made the handle slick. I switched hands. Breathed. The wound was singing now, a bright high note that made my vision swim at the edges.

"You're bleeding on my land," said a voice behind me.

I turned too fast and the world tilted. A woman stood at the top of the ravine with a longbow in her hands and no arrow on the string. She was tall and barefoot and her hair was the color of wheat left out in weather, and her ears came to points through it, which told me everything I needed to know about whose land I had, in fact, been bleeding on.

"I'll move," I said.

"You'll fall over." She came down the slope without hurrying, which is a thing you can do when you're not the one with an arrow hole in your shoulder. "Who's chasing you?"

"Men who want me dead."

"That's most men." She crouched in front of me and looked at the wound the way a smith looks at a cracked blade. "This is iron. Elf-shot is silver. You're not from the border, so you're either a liar or a fool."

"Both," I said. "Usually."

She almost smiled. Almost. Then she stood and looked up the ravine, where the boots had stopped at the ridge, and I heard one of the riders call down, his voice flat and carrying.

"Elf. Send the man up. He's a deserter from the King's guard and he's ours to hang."

Her ears moved. Just a flick, like a horse hearing a fly. She didn't look at me. "Is that true?"

"I left," I said. "I wouldn't call it desertion."

"You wouldn't."

"They hanged my brother for stealing bread. I objected."

Now she looked at me. Her eyes were the green of deep water, and there was nothing soft in them. "You objected how?"

"With a sword."

She was quiet for a moment. Above us the rider shifted his weight, and I heard the creak of a crossbow being wound, which meant they'd stopped being patient. The elf looked at my knife, then at my face, then up at the ridge.

"Stay down," she said, and put an arrow on her string.

I want to be clear about what happened next, because I've told this story a few times since and people always want it to be clean. It wasn't clean. She drew and loosed and the crossbowman went over backward off the ridge without a sound, and then the other two came down the ravine at a run, and I was on my feet somehow with my knife in my good hand, and the first one came at me with a spear and I got inside it and put the blade in his throat. His weight took me down. I remember his breath on my cheek, warm and smelling of onions. I remember the second one's sword going past my head close enough to lift my hair, and then the elf's arrow taking him in the side of the neck, and the way he sat down against the birch like a man who'd decided to rest.

Then it was quiet. The birch leaves turned over in the wind. My shoulder had stopped hurting, which I knew was a bad sign.

The elf walked among the bodies and pulled her arrows out one by one, wiping each on the grass. She didn't look at me. When she was done she stood over the last man, the crossbowman, who was still breathing in a shallow way, and she watched him until he wasn't.

"You killed three men for a stranger," I said.

"I killed three men on my land." She slung the bow across her back. "There's a difference, and you're not owed the explanation."

Fair enough. I sat down against the birch because standing had stopped being an option. The blood was warm down my whole side now, and the light through the leaves had gone thin and gold, the way it does in the last hour. Somewhere down the valley a dog was barking at nothing.

She came back and knelt in front of me and cut my shirt away from the wound with a knife of her own, and I got a good look at her hands. Scarred. Calloused. She'd pulled a bow for a long time. There was a ring on her thumb, plain iron, worn thin.

"This has to come out," she said. "The barb's hooked. I'll have to push it through."

"Do it."

"You'll scream."

"I've screamed before."

She looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind her face, some calculation I wasn't part of. Then she put her knee against my chest to hold me still, and she pushed, and the world went white and then red and then nothing, and I heard myself make a sound that wasn't a word.

When I came back, the light had gone. She'd built a small fire and she was sitting across it with her bow across her knees, and my shoulder was packed with something that smelled like crushed leaves and tasted like copper when I breathed. I tried to sit up. She didn't help.

"You'll live," she said. "Probably."

"Thank you."

"Don't." She fed a stick into the fire. "You're a problem. The men you killed had a captain, and that captain has a lord, and that lord has a king, and now I've put arrows in three of his soldiers on land he claims. So you're not a guest. You're a debt I haven't decided how to collect."

I looked at the fire. It was a small, mean fire, the kind you build when you don't want to be seen. She'd done this before. She'd done it a lot.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"None of your business yet." She lay back against a root and closed her eyes, but her hand stayed on the bow. "Sleep. In the morning you can tell me why the King's guard wants you badly enough to chase you into the deep wood, and I'll decide whether to turn you in or bury you."

"And if I run in the night?"

"Then you'll bleed out before you reach the ford, and I'll have one less problem." She didn't open her eyes. "But you won't run."

She was right. I didn't. I lay there in the dark with my shoulder on fire and my brother's face in my head, and I listened to her breathe, and I understood that I'd walked into something I couldn't see the shape of yet. She'd saved me for a reason. I just didn't know what it cost.

The fire cracked. The wind turned. And somewhere up the valley, a horn sounded once, low and long, calling the hunt back together.