Analindë (The Chronicles of Lóresse) (12 page)

The Ninth Chapter

At the Glacier Lake

I
t was the hunger pains
that roused her. Not because they were the worst, but because there was something she could do about them.

She’d hidden from the rest of the pain for who knew how long, until it had become a dull throbbing. It was easier that way to float, drift, and move away from its sharpness. But now she was hungry.

She opened her eyes and slowly focused on her surroundings. “Ah, still at the lake,” she muttered. She moaned as she pushed herself up from the unforgiving ground, focusing intently on the rock in front of her as the world spun.

“What happened? . . . ” then she remembered, “Oh, the shield.” She closed her eyes, shifting to magesight, and willed the spinning to stop. As she searched for injuries inside, she gasped. Her mage pathways and connections were a horrific mess. Everyplace she looked shrieked an angry hurt.

“Why didn’t I notice before?” she whispered, then realized that she’d felt
nothing
while using the flat shield and that she hadn’t thought to look. Because of the pain she felt and the game she’d played while centering, she now knew where and how to look.

Traces of raw blackness tinged with red covered ninety percent of what she saw. As she scanned the mage pathways woven throughout her body, she caught sight of several tendrils of crisp clear blue weaving in, out, and across her network of connections. “What’s this?”

Curious, she followed the blue threads through her body, noticing that they gently strengthened many of her hurts with a cool soothing balm. Around and around she followed the blue threads as they coalesced together and was out of her body and halfway to the lake before she realized it. Analindë pulled her magesight back to a wider view and saw a small stream of Energy flowing from the lake to herself.

The lake had answered her cry for help.

She didn’t know what to think.

Still in shock, she simply sat and watched the steady flow of cool Energy from the lake continue to flow around and through her injuries. She wasn’t sure how many minutes passed before her mind began to pick up on the patterns it wove as it soothed her hurts. But the patterns were pretty. Restful. Comforting.

She felt crippled. Incapable of cataloging all the things wrong inside of her, she decided to simply ignore them and think of other things as the glacier lake continued to do whatever it was doing.

She didn’t know how or why it had responded, only that it had and that she was very grateful.

She didn’t sense any malicious or aggressive feelings from the lake. Only crisp blessed coolness. So she sat back and watched the blue energies soothe her blackened hurts, mind blank and senses open.

Sharp stomach cramping and acidy pains broke through her thoughts. She opened her eyes, grabbed her pack and rummaged through it. Withdrawing a handful of dried fruit and nuts, she pulled her knees up against herself, leaned forward, propping her arms on them and ate.

“I wonder how much time has passed.” She counted the remaining days of travel ahead of her and tallied her wounds. “I hurt, but I’ll live.”

She repacked her belongings and pulled herself to her feet as her strained muscles ached in agony. “Too much time on the cold hard ground I think,” she said to herself as she dusted dirt from her clothes, then strapped her scout pack to her body. She ignored the places on her shoulders where the pack weighed heavily and instead focused on remaining upright.

Analindë hobbled down to the lake, stiffness working its way out of her muscles as she moved. She drank from her cupped hand until her stomach ached from the cold, then refilled her water sack. “Thank you,” she whispered to the lake as she disconnected herself from the thick cord of blue which still fed Energy to her mage network. She ran her fingertips along the surface of the too-still lake, reluctant to leave. Eventually she rose, turned toward the mountain pass that would take her out of the valley, and started walking. A dull throb deep within her chest and constant pain remained her only companions.

As she neared the tallest peak of the journey, Analindë wished she had gloves. She was, however, grateful for the warming spell that was woven into her clothing. The spell was the only thing that prevented her from becoming a block of ice, since she couldn’t spare the Energy to create a constant warming weave of her own.

Her stops to refill her reservoir had become briefer and briefer over the past day or so. Her body was still drawing heavily upon her reserves, probably in an effort to self-heal, but either she was getting quicker at drawing Energy in or she was using less of it. Either way, she was making better progress.

The trail along this peak was steep, and loose shale was a problem. She had slipped a few times earlier this morning and barely caught herself from plummeting over the edge and down into a ravine. She periodically wondered about altitudes and oxygen deprivation, but pushed those thoughts aside. There was nothing she could do about such a thing. The cold made her clumsy, slowing her down, making her hands and feet a little sluggish and unresponsive. Picking her way along, she rounded the face of the mountain and looked out over the valley below without enthusiasm.

The mountain track she followed had wound itself around, up and through the mountain peaks and valleys of the high mountains. And she wasn’t close enough to being finished. She thought back to the summer in which her mother had curbed her over-exuberance for being outside by making her study maps. Maps of their surrounding area, maps of different types of terrain, maps of the entire Realm. Analindë could be considered a master cartographer in her own right, but now she was only thankful, not proud. She thought back to the maps she had studied and her knowledge of the terrain. If she remembered correctly, several more mountain peaks lay between her and Mirëdell. She estimated that if she could manage to travel quickly, she would reach Mirëdell in three days. And if she
wasn’t
very quick, five.

Wondering if she’d ever feel warm again in her life, she lumbered down the mountain’s north face. It probably would have been a better idea to travel to Mirëtasarë. That way was smoother.

Analindë glanced down at her feet as she clambered over a small stream and was grateful for the thousandth time that she had been working in the forest that day the Humans had come. If she’d been at home, not only would she be dead like the rest of her family, but she would undoubtedly have been wearing a dress or the flowing at-home trousers she usually wore with nice soft slippers. Not her sturdy scout’s clothes and boots. Thoughts of soft slippers brought other unwelcome thoughts with them, which she quickly pushed away, focusing on the beautiful pine trees below her instead.

Not using the flat shield brought a clarity to her mind that was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because she’d never felt so alive before. Each flap of a wing, be it bird or insect, and movement of animals came to her sharply and clearly, along with fleeting impressions of their associated energies. The scent of pine was overpowering, as was the cold sharpness of the wind. Sounds, smells, sights, Energy flows . . . they all pushed in at her, clamoring for attention. The curse of her mental clarity came because her mind—free from immobilizing numbness—wandered where she did not want it to go. Her mood vacillated between contentment and inexpressible sorrow. Contentment came when she sensed the beautiful energies swirling about her, and sorrow from the agony of things best left un-thought.

Analindë considered the Humans and wondered, again, how they’d found the Valley of Lindënolwë let alone been able to see the village in order to search it. Most elven cities and villages had been built with stealth in mind. Lindënolwë had been one such village. The road to the valley would not have appeared like a road at all, but a small track through the woods, and when reaching the glen where the village was nestled, the Humans should not have been able to see the buildings tucked up at the foot of one of the mountains. And if one had enough Energy to dissolve the spell hiding the village, they would have been able to see only some of the buildings, not all, because there were layers upon layers of spells.

Stories were told of whole houses appearing when they were needed or an extra wing of a home suddenly appearing where none had stood before. Such was the extent of generations of elven mages improving upon the last.

However, when only family or friends keyed to her home should have been able to see it, the Humans had not only entered the village but had seen her home
and
blown it up. Images of smoking rubble and charred earth flashed through her mind. She shuddered, then hoped that Master Therin would be able to explain how the Humans had done what they’d done. This way she’d be able to protect against Humans in the future. She realized that she had no one to guide her and nowhere else to go. She thought of the professor again and wondered if he’d allow her to petition early for a place in his tower.

The next day Analindë found herself in a densely wooded forest, so she scavenged for edible items to supplement her meager supplies. Earlier that morning her trail through the mountains had joined another approaching from the east. She was nearing the school and was back on a nice, smooth, slightly rounded road. Dry brown leaves rustled under foot as she strode along. Only half of the leaves had fallen from the trees. The rest clung to branches in a beautiful wash of orange and red.

She found late raspberries as she traveled and ate so many they made her stomach ache. At the end of the day she stopped to sleep under a crabapple tree. The apples were small, about the size of a large pebble, but they were tart and fresh. She ate a handful of them and settled down for the night. As she struggled for sleep, thoughts kept at bay broke through and she wept.