The Industrial Elf Ch. 02

He set them carefully near her swords with as much respect as he could before stepping a short distance away to set his own blades and knives down. When he'd stepped back from them, he said softly with averted eyes, "Please be welcome here. You may keep both your dignity and the thin blade strapped to your thigh there if you wish to see my desire for trust between us. Have you eaten?"

She looked and saw that he was not watching her and stepped out onto the bank, noticing the human-made towel that he had placed there for her use. "You make some use of human things, I see," she smiled, "and I have only eaten a very light meal as I left to come here. I would feel honor to eat with you. I am called Ilmare."

She watched his back as she changed.

He shrugged, "They have a few things that are of use - especially since I have been alone for so long." When he turned back to her he bowed slightly in recognition of her giving him her name.

She smiled at him as she returned his bow, "May much luck and happiness follow you and may you be shielded from misfortune, friend." Ilmare held up the blade that he'd seen and placed it with her other weapons. She stepped forward to clasp his forearm with a wide and genuine smile.

He offered bread and some wine, and she was quick to produce two cans of soup from her pack. She laughed softly as she held them up for him to see. "We both do the unthinkable, you see?" He nodded with a grin and found a pot for the soup.

"Why did you approach as though you were mindful of a possible enemy?" he asked her.

"Because I was being mindful of a possible enemy," she shrugged, "I did not know the state of your mind, friend. The traps that you set were masterful. I found enough to come here alive, but could not spring two of them without dying in the attempt. Why did you set out that dummy?"

He smirked a little ruefully, "I wanted to see if you were truly of the people. If you were human or something else and came here with weapons, I hoped that my poor friend there would take the arrow - or the blade in my stead. That you knew at once what he was told me enough, but still I waited."

As they sat near the fire, he asked what had been burning in his mind since he left the plant, and she explained at length.

"I come from the southeast. We lived in the old mountains there in peace until man found us again. We spoke to one another of leaving to go to the mountains of the west, but did not get beyond the talking of it until we were visited by a young elven traveler."

"I was very young, but she told me of the ways of her clan, and of you, whom she had left while she searched for others. Though she stayed among us for almost two years, she could not abide that our own king could not bring himself to lead us to the west. She had been to every place where our kind had dwelt and we were the only ones who remained. At last she said to us that she would leave to return to her own people and lead them away."

She looked to him with some sadness as she continued, "The day that she left us, she walked through the pass, and - we had never seen the like of it before - but men were working a mine there, and the dynamite they used caved in the mine and one side of the mountain. The blast felled many trees, and loosened much stone. There was no place for her to run. We found your princess dead between a boulder and a blasted-apart oak. My king had seen enough then and the people left to go to the west soon after."

"Since she had taught me much about your clan, I was chosen to tell your people what had happened. I have traveled a long time. Your ruler did not say that her land was on the far side of one of the human borders. I wasted much time because of that."

He offered her more bread and she accepted, "In a direct line," he said, "I think it possible to go between our lands in only a few weeks. You took many years to get here."

"Aye," she nodded, "it took me some time to prepare and then to finally leave. I was told that she left here when she was 122, and you would have been 115 then. Remember that I was alone as well, and I was but a century old. It is young for the trip alone with no other bows at one's side."

"I left a year later, and I had ever to look for food and to hide among them. And Elohan, there was a war between them once as I journeyed. It made the travel harder for some years. The forests were full of men wearing first gray where I was and then blue as I traveled farther on. I am a little proud to say that I took much work along the way if I stopped for a time now and then. But tell me, what of the clan? I see no one here but you."

He sighed, "We remained for longer than our ruler lived, now I learn. After maybe five years, the others wanted to go to the mountains. They would not need me for this, and it was decided - mostly by me - that I would stay on to wait. My clan did not know, but I had already told my liege that I would wait as long as I had to."

He looked sad and cast his eyes down, "I see now that it was folly."

She shook her head, "Not so, Elohan. Not folly surely to wait for one's ruler like this. That is what I see as duty, and I would have done the same."

She held out her hair with a rueful smile, "There was a time when I could stop any young elf in his tracks, and this mane of mine shone like a black cascade. Slowly now I see that it loses its shine. But I am glad to find you alive at the least and at last, though I have spent so long in the looking for you. Looking to give you news that I see can only hurt one such as you."

She saw that he sat looking down, so she politely nudged his arm, "I know that it will give you only small comfort now, but your lady told me often that she wanted most of all to return your love of her openly at last. She wanted only to be your queen and thereby make you Elf-king, for she said that of all of her people, you were already mighty in strength, lore, and magic among your clan at such a tender age, and would only grow more so as time gave wisdom to your mind."

"Might," he said sadly, "in elvish terms means little here and now. One's ability in lore fades as soon as one leaves the forest for there is not much wild forest left. A little magic I can manage, but I do not feel very wise."

"You can manage a little magic?" she asked with a laugh. "What I saw this night, that was a little magic? I have never seen the like of it, Elohan. How did you do that?"

He shrugged, "I learned from them and added it to what I knew. I can do a lot if there is one of their cables nearby, even underground. I have had many years to learn to play with it all as I waited."

He smiled softly, "In truth, I had a thought that it had come to something like this, for I knew - as she herself said to me - that she would do her best to return. That she did not could only mean one of a few things; that she could not, being a prisoner somehow, or that she could not, having passed from this world."

He brightened and smiled at her hopefully, happy to be near one of his kind again. "But now I think that we should not look with bitterness on our long duties, friend. I have never seen the like of you before. Your skin is a rich color to my eyes and your hair - it loses its shine, you say? I do not see it. In the time that I followed you in my wood, you stopped me many times," he smiled.

He saw her thanks to him in her polite nod and the way that she smiled. "What will you do now? Are you attached here, or can you leave this grove behind?"

He thought for a minute, and then smiled at her, "Now that I know, I can leave this place at last and make my journey west. As sad as your tidings are, I feel lighter now in the knowing. I have spent long years waiting, and you have spent as much time looking. I am in your debt for your journey, and happy that you did not give up searching."

He turned and bowed deeply to her and sighed, "I have grown so weary of the waiting. And you? You have also discharged your own duty, though I am sad that you found only one of us. I can only offer my poor welcome. What will you do now?"

Ilmare laughed softly and reached for his hand. For a long moment, they stared wide-eyed at each other feeling the touch of another elf again. Ilmare recovered first with a grin, "Since we are the last of our kind here, Elohan, I think it only fitting that I go with you to the west. After seeing only human men for so long, I would be glad of a companion on the road as easy to look at as you seem to my eyes." She looked at him and reached slowly to touch his face, almost as though she was not certain that he was really there beside her.

"I saw for myself from your princess that the rumors of your kind were true, for she was fair. I was even warned by my own mother that you all were this way and that I ought to guard my heart if I ever found one of you. The princess made it even worse for me for she said that you were fine to look at and very handsome." She shook her head and chuckled, "None of it prepared me for the one that I sought for so long." She tried to suppress her quiet giggle, but failed and threw up her hands, "How to guard my heart when I sit here helpless?"

Elohan chuckled, "I am the same. I would welcome such a lovely traveler and the journey with one such as you. I think that I need for you to come with me just to speak our language again and more - much more since you must have found the best ways to travel among the humans, I think."

"I have!" she said grinning, "At first, I had only to give them some name if asked. Then they must have grown distrustful of each other, for they needed more proof that one is who she says she is. I took the name of a dead child from a grave marker and became her. If I worked for them, I used that name. When that person would surely have grown far older than I appear, I took another name, and left all that I had in their terms to the new name."

"I have done it many times now. I have the papers that they seem to love to demand of each other. I found that humans put their wages into places they call banks, the smarter ones among them. And so I have done this also. With my pay in a bank wherever I worked for them, it grows, and I have the most powerful traveling tool that these people have ever made, and I keep it with me always. With it, I can do almost anything in my travels!"

"What is it?" Elohan asked, intrigued now.

Ilmare's head went back as she laughed, and he thought it was surely the sweetest sound that he'd heard in an age. Her eyes shone merrily as she reached to her pack and held up a thing in the firelight.

It was such a small thing, but from what she said, he knew that it must hold some great power among the humans.

"They call it American Express."