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"I beg your pardon?"
He had been looking out the window as he spoke, but focused back on her. "Over two thousand years.
We lived in the north of the land they now call Portugal, in a land we then called The Heights of Maia,
devoted to the sweet human Goddess of Spring." He grinned, unexpectedly, and looked very much like a
man remembering childhood. "It was a gentle land, and we shared it with several Celtic villages with
whom we lived in great harmony, man and elf."
Elf?
"Every spring there was a Bardic festival in the Goddess's honor." He looked at her, and his features
darkened. His lower lip poked out, in a petulant pout and his hair flowed forward, showing the tip of a
pointy ear beneath.
Pointy ear?
"But then the Romans came. They put all to fire and blood. We heard of their coming and we readied
our magic to protect the village nearby." A small wrinkle formed on his forehead between his eyes.
"Three times the warriors of the village went out to meet the fabled legion on equal terms. Three times
they came back bearing the heads of their enemies as trophies. But the fourth time, the Romans
ambushed them in a low bog, in foggy weather. Every man's dagger against the other, and the Romans
with better armor. And we, the elves of the nearby hill, who were supposed to protect our allies, we too
were met by ambush. The Romans sent their magicians against us. And they used great, illegal, dark
magics, learned from renegade elves."
He shook his head and tears showed, flowing down his cheeks. "Our best warrior-mages, who went to
the battle, were turned to stone . . . encased . . . in stone. Granite. We thought them dead. And we, who
stayed behind, the ones with lesser magic or the young ones, we were persecuted by the Romans who
settled there. One by one they massacred us, with Cold Iron or evil spells, in the dark of night, till the
very memory of elves was erased from the minds of locals and the few survivors, myself among them,
went to the isles what you call Ireland to start anew.
"Many centuries later, we came to this land, for a new start, but all this time I was half an elf, and I
thought my other half dead. And then three days ago I heard him. I heard him shout my name. Begging
for help. Lady, will you help me free my brother?"
He stopped and crossed his hands on the table, as if he had said all he meant to say and could speak no
more. He looked at her with earnest blue eyes. So much like the eyes of the man in the stone. His
brother. Ilar.
* * *
It was all too fantastic, and yet, what else could Dissy believe? Once she'd seen the man in the stone,
there were only two explanations that she was insane or that the man was truly there.
And now insanity would require her to have created this man out of the whole cloth of her mind as well.
It seemed like too much. It seemed more likely that he exist.
Once you've discarded the impossible, the improbable, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth.
But elves? In Colorado?
She was close enough that she should be able to see the faint lines of contact lenses in his eyes and she
couldn't see them. People just weren't born with eyes like that, were they?
She looked at the man's ear. "More than two thousand years . . ." He looked no more than twenty.
He shrugged and smiled a little and looked past her head, at the wall. "We live long lives, as humans
reckon them. It could be said we don't feel time in the same way. It is a sleep and a wakening, a winking
and nodding. It passes. We don't count days nor do we hoard the years as brief humans do."
"But . . . The stone was brought here thirty years ago. How could you not have sensed it all these years
and only now . . ."
"I was the twin with the lesser Mage gift," Bruide said. "And then I felt something but I wasn't sure what
it was, just a twinge of something coming from this direction. But our Elfhame has had its troubles, as
well. We were encircled with Cold Iron and we fell into Dreaming. It's a state like a trance in which we
feel nothing. It was only a great battle and a great war that freed us from that Dreaming. Yet even then I
could hear nothing. Till three days ago. When you touched the stone."
 "How do you "
"I could feel it in Ilar's call, I could feel your touch. You have great magic, Lady Eurydice, and your
magic has given Ilar the strength to call me."
"Great magic? I?" This was like all those psychic shows on television, when every caller was told how
they had great gifts. On this, Dissy almost found the strength to walk away from it all. But there was that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]