Author: jceberdt

Disclaimer: This is not the final version as it will be available from the usual e-book sellers and eventually, bookstores. Rather, it should be seen as an (almost) final draft. If you are interested in becoming a beta reader, or you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts that you feel I should consider before publishing please drop me a line using the contact form.

Keeping Count

She had been in Thetwick for more than forty years since the day she had decided it would be a good idea to start keeping count. It was then that she had started keeping track of dates too and she made it a point to remember that that year had been 855 by the way the humans of Iurrak customarily counted them. She’d since learned that in Selinus they sometimes used the years of a monarch’s reign, or the elven calendar that she’d heard went back far further. She didn’t really know how either of those worked though. She wasn’t certain how long she had been in Thetwick before 855, but it couldn’t have been more than a decade or two, she thought. She remembered that the village had been little more than a hamlet when she first came to it, it had grown a lot since. She also still didn’t know how old she was, but it was much, much older than the ten human years or so that she now looked. Too many people lived in Thetwick now, but she didn’t think there were more than a handful who were older than her and they were the most ancient people in the town.

She still only had vague memories of the time before her adoptive mother, Palady, had taken her in. They were partial and dreamlike, all of beautiful, tall and slender people, musical voices and white stone cities among enormous trees. The city or cities she remembered had been filled with enormous, airy buildings and magnificent towers reaching into the sky, with the wind making nice strange noises as it found its way around the tall structures. There were figures in her memories who she thought might be her mother and father, but she hardly had more than shards of images. She remembered that there had been plants, coaxed to grow around white stone and the sound of many birds. She also remembered strange and beautiful creatures in a magnificent forest somewhere. There might have been less buildings there, but she wasn’t sure. It had smelt of spring and life. The only other thing she was really certain of was that she must have come to Thetwick after she learned to talk, since she could speak and even read, elvish, a skill which no else in Thetwick seemed to possess.

A fair number of people in Thetwick could read, which they usually learned at school. Her command of elvish puzzled her a little though. She assumed that learning to read elven must have been with her elven parent, though she didn’t even know if it was her mother or father who had been an elf. The way she learned wasn’t exactly like human children. She realised it was very uncommon for a human child who was the same size as she had been when she’d arrived in Thetwick to have already learned to read. She guessed she must have been the size of a four or five year old human child, then but she thought she might have already even been decades old, even then.

She thought that simply having more time was what made the difference, rather than learning to read being too difficult for a four or five year old human child. It was just that humans were a few years older when they mastered it, just because it took a few years to master. Even if Ala had learned when she was even smaller and it had taken her five years, she would still have looked like a four or a five year old human child by the team she’d spent far more hours learning than a human child had by the time they were eight. It seemed logical to her that she could have learned to read elvish even though she still would have looked quite a lot younger than even the youngest of literate human children.

She didn’t know how old she had been when she arrived and even Palady had never really dared to make a proper guess. Palady described it as if she had been about the size of a human four or five year old as well, anyway. What that meant in half-elf years she simply didn’t know, but she decided it must have been decades. Of course she wasn’t actually sure her rate of ageing was constant. It was quite difficult to make any guesses without anyone knowledgeable to ask.

When Palady was already very old, she had sat Ala down and explained to her in more detail about the group of the Duke’s soldiers that had left Alagariel in Thetwick. They had rescued Ala somewhere, Palady didn’t know exactly where, but she thought it might have been near a small fief to the West, named Seraphim. She told her again about the senior guardsman with the patrol, William the Bull. Mostly, Ala knew the story and even thought she remembered shards of those days which were filled with terror. Palady also told her how she had chosen the name ‘Alagariel’ for her. As a little girl she had only referred to herself as ‘Ala’. It was one of the few things she had ever said during the first few years in Thetwick. Palady thought it was probably part of a longer name, shortened to make it easier for a child to say. Trying to imagine a longer form of Ala, the name Alagariel, who was an elf queen in a popular faery tale, had seemed fitting. Her name was usually followed by her saying things in elven that Palady obviously couldn’t understand. There had been improvement though and eventually, Ala had started speaking the common tongue too.

The name Palady had chosen, was very well known name among the people of the Westmarch owing to the popular tale. It wasn’t customary to name girls ‘Alagariel’, but everyone knew it well nonetheless. Children all across Taldyr learned the nursery rhyme. It had been Palady’s favourite story when she was a girl herself. It was about an elven queen and her dragon friends who had driven the demons from the world together at the beginning of time. Palady had learned the story from her grandmother. Alagariel knew it was a common story that was always told to awe young children. The Alagariel in the story was strong and smart, a warrior, a fire sorceress and a stern though fair Queen. She was presented as someone who would come to save you if you were good. Ala loved stories, though if she was honest her favourite was a different tale, one about a Northern shieldmaiden named Kára. Still, she understood that Palady had chosen the name for her because she was a half-elf and she had found it fitting for a child who called herself ‘Ala’.

Ala was sure she had had a different name before she came to Thetwick… she was sure it hadn’t been Alagariel but she just couldn’t remember it. Once she realised that her new name was different she had spent a lot of time trying to remember what the old one was. Sometimes she thought she had it but eventually she realised she just couldn’t be sure. It was a lot longer than ‘Ala’, that was the only thing she was certain about.

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Disclaimer: This is not the final version as it will be available from the usual e-book sellers and eventually, bookstores. Rather, it should be seen as an (almost) final draft. If you are interested in becoming a beta reader, or you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts that you feel I should consider before publishing please drop me a line using the contact form.

Palady Explains

Once, when she had been in Thetwick for some time, Palady had sat her down and explained things to her.

“Now Ala, I think you’re old enough that we should have a little talk about you and where you come from.”

“Old enough?”

“Well, I admit that I don’t know how old you are, but you certainly look like you’re around six years old or so.”

“We have to talk about me because I look like I’m six…?”

“Like a six year old human, yes. You get older very slowly, I’ve explained before that that’s because you’re a half-elf, right?”

“I know, Palady. You’ve told me many times. You tell me… most days.”

“Good. What I haven’t told you about is how you came to be in Thetwick. At least not in any detail.”

“I think… I was brought… by soldiers?” Ala said, feeling a stirring of memories.

“That’s right. About twenty years ago now, when my Jack was still alive and Emma was still with us.”

Ala grew quiet. It always made her sad when she thought of Emma. Emma was… or had been one of her two human sisters, the younger of the two. The girl had been abducted by raiders from Selinus, she knew. She’d really loved Emma. She didn’t know where Selinus was, but she knew Emma hadn’t been the only one taken that day. Other villages had also been dragged away by the Selinan men. Palady had explained that it was something terrible that sometimes happened in the Westmarch. It was very rare that they ever dared to ride all the way to Thetwick itself. The last time, before the day Emma had been taken, had been years before Ala arrived in the village. Some of the hamlets further north had to contend with raids more often, Palady had told her. The Selinans came to steal cattle, horses and sometimes, like on that day, even people.

“I still miss Emma too,” Palady comforted her, stroking her hair. “As well as Jack. It’s quite normal to think of her. Let’s hope she’s safe, at least, shall we?”

Ala could see older woman’s eyes reddening at the thought. Palady quickly pulled herself together and continued.

“But today we need to talk about something else, alright? We can’t think of the people we’ve lost and loved all the time, even though we sometimes want to, can we?”

“I guess not,” she said, though she was wondering if they did it too little.

“So now I’m going to talk to you about how you came to Thetwick.”

“OK.”

“The soldiers that brought you were led by a warrior, William the Bull. A proud and honourable man, he was. A hero. William was Jack’s half brother.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s true. He was a good man, it’s said that the Duke even commended him personally many times. He was one of the Duke’s best soldiers. Anyway, William and his soldiers happened upon some enemy soldiers, humans and even some other creatures. William thought they were probably returning from an ambush…”

“An ambush?”

“Yes, that’s a place where travellers had been attacked and hurt by orcks and nasty creatures. He and his soldiers stumbled upon them by accident, William said.”

“What happened then?”

“They managed to chase off the bad creatures and men. They didn’t have time to look where exactly the ambush had happened, even though they could tell from the things that the bad creatures were carrying that it couldn’t have been far away. They looked around, but couldn’t find any other survivors.”

“I was really the only one?” She asked, hoping, though she really knew the answer.

“I’m sorry Ala. I don’t know if your real mother and father were among the casualties, but I’m afraid… I think they might have been. It’s more than likely, I’m sorry.”

“I know, Palady,” said Ala seriously. Thinking about it made her feel empty inside.

“Of course you do. Yo know so many things for such a little girl. Now let me continue the story. The soldiers found you, tied up, slung over a horse. You were a prisoner, so the soldiers freed you and took you with them. Apparently you tried to run away several times. William didn’t really know what to do with you, so I said it was alright if you stayed with me. I promised to look after you.”

“You look after me very well, Palady.”

That caused the woman to smile. “Why thank you, Ala. That’s kind of you to say. But, I think we both know you mostly look after yourself, don’t you? Sometimes you are even the one looking after the rest of us.”

It was partially true. She often took home what she found in the forest often bringing home many mushrooms, berries, wild plants and roots that they could eat. She liked to cook and often did help with the many things that were needed to keep the household running. She really did feel that Palady looked after her very well though.

Ala’s other, older, human sister, Olivia, was already married by then. She had a daughter of her own, named Amelia. Ala often looked after Amelia. Ala was so much older than she looked so that everyone in Palady’s family knew looking after Olivia’s daughter could easily be left to her. It was strange to some of the neighbours to see Ala and Amelia alone together when they were roughly the same size. Thirty years later, Amelia died in childbirth, greatly saddening Ala. After that, she also looked after Amelia’s two older children, Garrett and Aubree, very often.

Ala didn’t know any other half-elves and neither did anyone else in the town. She hadn’t been able to find anyone else who knew any, at least. A half-elf would live a lot longer than other people, Palady had told her, that’s why it made sense that she grew slower. She ached to know how much longer it would take and no one in Thetwick that she’d dared ask had been able to tell her anything useful. No one seemed to know how much longer it took a half-elf to grow up and the answers she’d had had been so different from one another that they were of no use at all.

Palady, her adoptive mother, whom she loved dearly had gotten very old before Alagariel had even developed breasts. That certainly wasn’t the way things worked for humans, she knew. She sometimes cursed her heritage because it put her so far outside the human world. She didn’t fit in with the other children of the village and she didn’t fit in with the adults, so she spent a lot of time on her own. Palady had always tried to hide the fact that Ala was a half elf. She kept Ala’s hair dyed brown and made her wear a headscarf or a hood and sometimes even both to hide her pointed ears. She made Ala arrange her hair so that even if the hood came off, her ears wouldn’t be clearly visible. It wasn’t that her being a half-elf was really a secret. Palady had tried to explain that it would just be safer for Ala if the villagers weren’t constantly reminded that Ala was different.

She often said, “not all folks are as open-minded as me, Ala, best be careful.”

Ala made sure to pay heed to her advice, Palady’s point had been made painfully clear so many times that it was impossible for her to forget about it. She had made a few friends over the years, but many of the villagers kept their children away from her. Those few friends she had made tended to drift away as the discrepancy in ageing made things strange for them. She seemed to lose the connection with them, somehow, when they grew up. The people around Thetwick were used to how she looked, with most knowing about her pointed ears, very pale blue eyes and her skin, which had a slight reddish-gold tinge. Ala didn’t think anyone knew that her hair wasn’t really mousy brown. Even so the villagers still mostly ignored her as they would most children even though she was usually far older than both the children and their parents. She was often even older than their grandparents, which she sometimes even forgot herself.

Disclaimer: This is not the final version as it will be available from the usual e-book sellers and eventually, bookstores. Rather, it should be seen as an (almost) final draft. If you are interested in becoming a beta reader, or you have any comments, suggestions or thoughts that you feel I should consider before publishing please drop me a line using the contact form.

Thetwick

The village she lived in was called Thetwick. It was the only settlement of note in the Westmarch, a thinly populated area mostly covered in trees and bushes, at least to the north of the village. The trees were thickest in the southern part of the March, with large stretches of proper forest and hills that grew bigger the closer you got to the Irin Mountains that made the natural Southern border of the March. In the North, the hills were a little lower and the vegetation wasn’t as thick.

Thetwick was more or less in the middle of the March, next to a river, the Clearflow, that was navigable up to Thetwick for small boats a few months most years. It was a logical place to put goods ashore and she had heard that it had used to be a busier route once, long before Ala came to Thetwick. The river was fordable at the upstream end of Thetwick and the road had once forked to the North to Oaktown and West to Seraphim from there. There was still a weathered stone marker near the town square which indicated the distance to both places. Both roads were barely dirt tracks anymore and had mostly been reclaimed by nature.

When Ala arrived, Thetwick housed no more than thirty families but it steadily grew during the years she lived there. Her mother had told her that Thetwick had grown and shrunk many times in the past and that it was growing again because the Duke was giving free land to those willing to move there. From the point of view of a trader or traveller, the Westmarch was a dead end on the western border of Iurrak. Even if you wanted to travel on the West or North from Thetwick, the journey was hard and often impossible with any kind of cart or wagon.

For Ala, there wasn’t much else she could do except go to school. As she got older she mostly helped her mother’s with chores and anything she could do to contribute to the welfare of the household.. Sometimes there was work she could do, like out in the fields during the harvest. Everyone was needed then, even people as small as half elf children. She liked being out, in the wilderness, particularly in the forests to the south. She never felt quite at ease in town. Most of the humans treated her much the way they treated young human children, which meant that she was largely ignored. Ala sort of understood why. She was the only half-elf in the village and she was probably also the only half- elf that most of them had ever seen. She didn’t like it though. She was decades older than the other children… older than most of the adults too. She had learned that most humans didn’t like it when she pointed that out. She’d had time to learn all the basic things humans were taught as they grew up several times over but no one other than her mother and siblings ever really acknowledged that her long life might make any difference. Even they mostly acted like she was a human child.

When she wanted to be alone, she snuck away to the ruined tower near the town. In the beginning it had been quite a long walk and she could only go when the grown ups were very busy with other things. When she was a little older she would run all the way. It was her favourite spot. She would tell herself all the elvish stories that she knew in her head. Sometimes she would sit down an recite her tales to the animals. Many of them seemed to like that and she could just sit there feeding animals out of her hand. She also spent a lot of time wandering around the nearby forest whenever she could slip away. Sometimes she would look for edible things, like berries and nuts, mushrooms or roots. She didn’t know why she liked the forest so much, it just felt a little bit like home. She wondered if it was just that all forests smelled alike. Would she feel this way in every forest? She was quite good at foraging food and useful materials from the forest and she always made sure to take things home with her that made life a little easier and food a little more abundant.

She wasn’t exactly sure when or where she had learned so many elvish stories or how she knew which plants tasted good and which ones were safe to eat. She could recite many stories from memory and often did, when she was at the ruins alone. She never got sick from the things she ate and sometimes she thought she vaguely remembered a beautiful woman with coppery skin who had taught her which plants to choose and how to tell apart those that were very similar but poisonous. It always left her wondering if she was making it all up? Was it because she wished she knew her mother, or did that coppery skinned woman actually exist?

Sometimes she’d make a little fire. One of the first times she did so, she realised for the first time that the flames did as she asked, easily appearing or disappearing, growing hotter or colder, or bigger or smaller. The effect was mesmerising and she couldn’t stop herself from coaxing the flames to follow her will for hours. Eventually she managed to put the fire out, realising that she would only make it home after dark. Even then, she was hesitant. She knew that wasn’t completely normal to be able to make fire do your bidding and it worried her. She had heard about witches, about how they were bad and what people did to them. She immediately decided it would be safest hide her new found ability completely and never use it again. It was hard though, because using it, feeling the energy flowing through her felt good and exciting. She was too fascinated to stop trying things with her new discovery and tried more and more things whenever she felt she’d been able to check that she was truly alone.

Before long, she didn’t even need kindling. She settled on not telling another living soul about it, not ever. As long as she kept it just to herself and only practised where she was sure she wouldn’t be seen, people wouldn’t do the horrible things to her that were done to magicians, she reasoned. Even in Thetwick, women had been burned at the stake for being witches, the last one, a midwife, had been burned a short while before Ala had arrived in the village. She didn’t think that she could really be counted as a magician, but she wasn’t sure the villagers would believe her if she conjured fire out of thin air. It did feel good though, calling her ’little trick’, as she thought of it. She used it whenever she made her fires, but only when she’d made completely sure she was alone. Every now and again, she’d forget the time, scaring her mother when she came back after dark. She did always try to be on time, because she could see how much it worried the sweet woman if she was out at night.

Because the other children grew quicker than she did, she had been forced to learn to defend herself. In each generation of chil dren, there were always a few bullies. She was very small and she watched other children grow right past her every year. A boy named Edgar Marchmain relished tormenting whoever and what- ever he could. She once found him tormenting a cat, tying things to its tail. She pulled a useful looking hazel branch off a bush and brandished it.

“Stop that! Take that off her tail!” She screamed at him. “Right now!” He glanced at her, putting on an air of disinterest. It was probably for the benefit of his audience, a small group of slightly younger boys whose job it was to assist him in his torments as well as cheer him on.
“Buzz off, stinking half-elf, or I’ll tie them to you!” He said, laughing out loud with his friends.
Ala stomped towards him, though she was a head shorter. He hadn’t expected it so he stumbled unsteadily to his feet, raising his hand to strike her. She was quicker though, whipping him across the face with all her might with the branch, causing him to fall down with a yelp of pain, clutching his temple. His friends were as surprised as Edgar was, but one of them reacted as she was about to bend down to free the cat. “Get her!” There were three of them, all bigger and heavier, but she sensed they felt uncertain. Edgar was still on the ground holding his bleeding brow and whimpering. She knew she probably wasn’t going to win against them in a fair fight, so she turned towards the first one, who had yelled and wanted to grab her. She feinted with her branch and then kicked him in the shin as hard as she could, producing a satisfying yelp. With him in the way of the other two, she kicked the other shin for good measure, which caused him to bend forward and squeal even harder. Next, with his head now in a good position to hit it, she took the opportunity to punch him in the face, feeling with satisfaction how his lip burst against his lower teeth. She then turned and started running. With two of them out of the fight, the last two only made a token effort to pursue her. She went back to find the cat as soon as she dared, but the animal had managed to extricate itself out of its predicament by the time she got to it.

Edgar had a scar over his eye for the rest of his life. Her mother really couldn’t get out of punishing her for that and she had a sore bottom and back for several days. She knew her mother didn’t really disapprove of her saving the cat and no one really believed that she’d beaten both boys to a pulp, but coming home with the offending hazel branch still in her possession meant that she wasn’t really able to deny that part of the incident when her mother questioned her.

She learned how to use her size and speed and she found she had an infinitely deep well of brutality to call on when bigger children tried to bully her. She might be smaller, but she was older, meaner when needed and had more experience. Also, because she grew so much more slowly it was like her body was less unwieldy than the rapidly growing human children. It was always like they were still trying to get their constantly changing bodies under control. Bullies usually only made a single attempt before figuring out she wasn’t an easy target. Her reactions were brutal and she wasn’t scared to really hurt someone if cornered. She usually had them running for home, crying, in seconds.

Once she even knocked a tooth out of a boy much bigger than her. The grown ups didn’t even believe him when he claimed that such a small girl had done it. Ala felt he had deserved it, he’d been tormenting insects, pulling out legs and wings. She had warned him to stop once, but it was years after the Marchmain incident, so he made the mistake of ignoring and insulting her instead. She’d pretended to leave, walking by him and then threw herself on the back of the boy’s head as he was bent over the insects he was torturing. She’d used her entire weight, little as it was, to smash his face into the stone he’d been using as a torture chamber. She got away with it that time, since no one believed the boy when he claimed she’d done what she had.

Even though she had no particular qualms about violently defending herself or others, ageing so slowly that her childhood encompassed many generations of human children meant she periodically had to reestablish her reputation as a dangerous adversary. It also didn’t always work and she got a lot more practice defending herself and running away than she would have liked. Every generation there were a few children who thought they could get the better of her and every time she had to make it clear that they weren’t going to manage. She preferred to do so in such a way that they didn’t try again and got quite good at escalating to a unreasonbly harsh reaction before her assailants realised their mistake.

Her mother thought she should visit the school as much as possible, but relented eventually when she realised there wasn’t anything left there for Alagariel to learn. It became too awkward. Alagariel was still about the size of many of the human children that started school when she’d completed the entire curriculum several times. Most of her classmates from years before had al- ready married and had children. That was strange, mostly for those class mates. By then Ala had already long gotten used to the lives of humans passing her by. She’d had a lot more time to grow used to being different than the humans around her ever got, so she could understand why it was difficult for the humans. Even so, she didn’t like losing friends just because they turned into grown ups while she stayed childlike.

Sometimes her former classmates moved away. Quite a few boys, particularly younger sons, left to join the Duke’s regiment when they were twelve or thirteen. A few of them left with a caravan almost every spring. It was a bit of an event each time, with their families seeing them off. Their siblings often cried and sometimes even their parents. Most that left, if they came back at all, only did so many years later. She’d heard that quite a few boys died while they were soldiers for the Duke too. Such events were important news in town and were always accompanied by an official scroll with the sad news being handed to the town scribe by a visiting caravan master. Very occasionally, a man came back to the Westmarch after thirty five years of service in the Regiment, with a grant of land from the Duke in his pocket. This sometimes caused problems since the best land close to Thetwick was often already occupied by farmers who had no official rights to it.

The girls often married into a different town or one of the few small hamlets that dotted the Westmarch. Some even left the Westmarch altogether, though it was rare for anyone to travel further than Sheffield, the first Barony in Taladaria to the east. The way humans customarily lived their lives emphasised how Alagariel was different. She sometimes wished she’d been born human. At the same time she knew she wouldn’t really fit in to a life like that. The woman she lived with, Palady, wasn’t really her mother, of course. She knew she had been adopted. In her memories there were several tall and beautiful women, but she didn’t even know who was who. She wasn’t even completely sure that it wasn’t just wishful thinking, that she wanted there to be family in her memories. When she’d come to Thetwick, Palady had had two daughters of her own, Emma and Olivia, as well as her husband Jack. Jack had died young, which had made them all very sad. He’d been a gentle man, indulging his wife’s passion for taking in strays, both children and animals, without complaint. He’d always been friendly to Ala too, though he’d obviously seen her as different to his own children.

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