Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [227]
“You!” said the Lady, as if everything were Arian’s fault. Her anger, thick with enchantment, pressed on Arian’s mind. Everything she could think of to say sounded ridiculous. The Lady’s own escort and the elves who had been working underground formed a solid mass behind the Lady herself. All glowered at her. “You traitor,” the Lady said. “You figured out some way to trap us here—”
“No,” Arian said. “You trapped yourself by your rudeness to the rockfolk.” She could hardly believe those words were coming out of her mouth, or that she held off the Lady’s enchantment so easily.
“How could you—?”
“We have little time,” Arian said. “The taig needs you, Lady, and I must repair the … the pattern.” She could not make the sound the dragon made.
“You can’t; it’s broken. It was not of my making.” The Lady drew herself up and folded her arms.
“I can repair it.”
“You’re only a half-elf, daughter of a—” The arms came down; the Lady scowled.
Arian kept her own voice level. “You have said you do not know the pattern: I do. Will you sulk here under stone and let your forest burn?”
“It will not burn—I would know if—”
“It is burning now,” Arian said. “The Pargunese brought scathefire from stolen dragon eggs.”
The Lady swayed where she stood; Arian could see the shock on all the elves’ faces. “I didn’t know—how could I not know? I can’t reach it—”
Arian felt a grim satisfaction: the Lady now felt what she had imposed on Arian. “Will you come, or no?”
“If you can repair the pattern—do so!” one of the other elves said.
The Lady moved aside, and Arian came forward. Once the dais had been inlaid with patterns done in mosaic, some purely elven in origin, but the most important—for the moment—the one the dragon had shown her. Now that pattern—and those within an arm’s length of it—were gone, revealing rough gray stone. Heaps of colored stone chips, each heap a different shade of blue or red or green, filled the back of the dais.
“They left us these,” the Lady said, gesturing at the piles. “Taunting us … for only rockfolk, they said, had the stone-wit to know how to place them and bind them in stone so they would stay if I stood on them. Can you repair what full-born elves cannot?”
“Yes,” Arian said, once more surprising herself. Was she that sure? It must be the dragon’s aid. “But Lady, you must be prepared to return this place to those who made it and those who gave you stone-right.”
“I cannot!” the Lady said. “It is the elfane taig!”
“It is only elfane taig where the Lady can sense the taig and wear the elvenhome as a cloak,” Arian said. “Here, under stone, is not your domain.” She pointed to the ceiling. “There—where the taig longs for your return—is your domain and your duty.”
Arian could feel the other elves’ astonishment and dismay.
“You lecture me on my duty? You, whose father—”
“I have fought the fire you did not even know was burning,” Arian said. “Where were you when the scathefire came, when the king needed your aid? Here, under stone—not in the real elfane taig. You did not even know the taig was in peril. Did not the First Singer charge the Sinyi with its protection?”
Shocked silence answered her. The Lady, after a long moment, bowed her head.
Arian said no more, but turned to the problem at hand. The scarred stone was no longer a circle but a rough oblong. Arian took one of her arrows and—fixing the pattern in her mind—set its point to the rock and began to trace the outline of the pattern. She paid no attention to the gasps of surprise as the arrow, its tip glowing, sank into the stone and behind its motion a groove opened. She concentrated on the pattern until she had completed it. As the dragon had first shown it to her, it had been only dark lines on gray stone, but now she felt an urge to give it color: she did not know why.
The others did not move or speak as she went back and forth, colored chips