A flame is passed and a leaf falls

“Where are you?” the blind elf barked again.

Dogs understood the language of wolves no better than the wretched kisór understood poetry, but at least they could communicate.

“Downhill, wind over the right flank!” one of the dogs replied.

The elf knew that much from his own ears. The important thing was that they remain in contact.

He hoped he would never again endure anything like the long silence that had gaped between the last scream and the first triumphant bark of a dog on a scent. Truly he had been blind then – blind in his eyes because he could not find her, blind in his ears because he could not hear her, blind in his body because he could not help her, blind in his mind because he did not know what was happening to her.

He went crashing through the brush, making no effort to go quietly.

“Put her down! Put her down! Someone’s coming!” It was the man Egelric shouting. They were not far now if they could hear him with their little ears.

The elf kept up a back-​​and-​​forth with the dogs until he clambered over a log and broke into the clearing where they had stopped.

He heard four men and two dogs. The dogs yipped an ecstatic greeting, but the man Egelric roared, “You! I knew it!” A sword scraped out of its scabbard.

“Where is she?” the elf cried.

“Stay away from her!”

“Where is she?”

“Stay back or I shall kill you here! What do you know about this?”

Egelric sounded to be more than a sword’s length away, so the elf tottered closer, his arms held up before him as much to ward off blows as to feel his way.

However, another man stood between him and Egelric, and he cried, “Stay back!”

The elf was forced to stop. “Where is she?” he wailed.

A third man was standing beside Egelric. “She is beyond all harm,” he said solemnly. It was the polished voice of the man who had let him and Shosudin into Egelric’s castle once. It was the man whose life he had saved.

“Where is she?” he pleaded. “I must find her! I must touch her!”

“By God, she has been touched enough tonight!” Egelric snarled.

“Please! I might help her!”

“There is nothing you can do for her,” Ethelwyn said. “She is dead.”

“Nai! Nai! Nai!” The elf smacked at his head, but it was too late – the idea had slipped inside and was already seeping into everything, staining every thought he would ever have. Only twenty winters had passed him by, and already he was dying a second time.

“I’m sorry,” Ethelwyn added.

“What are you sorry about?” Egelric howled.

“For them.”

“Will you shut up?”

“No, sir.”

While the two men bickered, the elf began creeping closer again, but the third man shouted, “Stay back!” He sounded to be standing very near the log the elf had leapt over. A moment later the entire log was ablaze, and the man shrieked and stumbled away.

“Devil!” Egelric growled. “Demon!”

“Let me touch her!”

“Touch her and your hand comes off!”

“Let him say goodbye to her,” Ethelwyn murmured.

“Shut up, I said!”

“She’s on the ground just before you,” Ethelwyn said quickly. “He saved my life!”

Egelric stomped his boot on the earth. “She’s dead!”

“Out of gratitude, sir. The first kindness was his.”

“His first kindness was in seducing my cousin!”

“I never did!” the elf whimpered as he shuffled through the dry leaves, searching her out her with his feet. “She was my friend. My only friend.”

He was just considering his own cruelty to her when his foot thumped against the limp weight of her body.

“Do her no dishonor,” Egelric growled.

The elf knelt beside her, and his hand went out at once to feel for a heartbeat. It felt only cold, wet cloth. It found the ragged edges of several layers of clothing, and below that the neat edges of a deep, broad wound. Below the wound her heart was still.

“Cat!” he whispered. His hand was wet with her cold blood. She could not answer.

He wiped his hand on his own cloak and then felt up her neck into the curve beneath her jaw. His thumb brushed over her cheek, and he was reminded that he had never touched her face.

Now he would never know it. He would never know her nose or her brows or her cheekbones. He would never know her temples and the hair that grew back from them, the finest of all. He would never know her lips. But he would not disfigure her now by smearing her face with her own blood.

There was only one thing he would seek to know.

Some warmth still lingered in her body, which had not been dead an hour. That was nothing. The log before him was burning brightly, but the tree was not alive. What he sought was the spark of living fire that had twice come up so willingly to dance against his own.

What he found was less than a spark. What he found was more like the smoldering tip of a stem of dry grass, just before it winks out into a last coil of dark smoke. But he had felt it flare up as if his touch had been a breath of air.

“She’s alive!” he cried.

“She’s cold as clay!” Egelric howled. “Devil!”

The elf lifted his hand away and pushed himself to his feet. It was worse than finding her dead. He had found her alive but beyond his help.

He threw back his head, and like a lone wolf he howled the name of his old friend with all the breath in his lungs. “Vash!”

He heard it echo up the mountainside and across the lake, but he knew there could be no answer. It was not a name that carried well; the consonants were lost on the air. All anyone would know was that someone had cried loud and long in despair.

Even if he had understood, Vash would not come for him. And on the night of the new moon, Vash would not even hear.

The elf knelt again. His hands shook like unfallen leaves in a winter wind. He patted her here and there, but everywhere her wool cloak was stiff and heavy with her blood.

“I don’t know what to do,” he whimpered, pleading with her to rise alone, perhaps, since he could not help her, or merely to forgive him.

“Leave her in peace,” Egelric said. “Say your goodbye and go.”

“Hush,” Ethelwyn whispered. “He saved my life when I should have died.”

“She’s already dead!”

He would have to try. If he did not, if he left her in peace, he would never have peace again for himself. He would not be able to live with the knowledge that he had let her die – simply because he was afraid to die himself – simply because he believed his blood too good to be mingled with hers.

It was a monstrous thing, but he was already a monster. It was a crime, but he was already a criminal.

First he passed his hand down the long wound, searing it shut to prevent any more blood from leaking out.

The dogs began to yelp and prance as the odor of cooking meat reached their noses. The elf barked the worst wolf insult he could pronounce, though he supposed it too poetic for their ears.

“He’s burning her!” Egelric howled a moment later. “Devil!”

Ethelwyn cried, “Egelric!”

The elf heard them struggling together, but he did not lift his head. He was already searching in his cloak for his knife.

“Don’t hurt her!” Egelric sobbed, finally breaking down. “She has already suffered enough tonight! Poor, unhappy girlie!”

The elf patted his way up her arm to her hand. He found it crusted and crackling with dried blood, but there was no wound. He imagined her touching her bleeding chest, searching a more intimate knowledge of the source of her pain, or perhaps simply seeking to stop the tide of blood with only this small hand and these slender fingers.

He did not know how her last minutes had been spent, but he had guessed the one, pitiful gesture, and he sobbed like her cousin to think of how she had suffered. However, he could not permit himself to break down.

He worked deftly, slicing into both of their palms with apparent self-​​assurance, but in truth he did not know what to do. He had watched Vash save Malcolm, but he had only watched. He knew repeating the gestures would not be enough, but he would not know what would happen until he tried them.

“What’s he doing?” Egelric cried. “He’s trying to marry himself to her! Let go of me!”

“Egelric! Egelric!” Ethelwyn’s voice shook as the men struggled. Once Egelric had calmed, he whispered, “If she’s dead it doesn’t matter, and if he saves her… Mouse says she loves him, anyway.”

“Not this devil!”

“He has done us no harm.”

He had been crueler than he had known – simply because he had thought his blood too good for hers – simply because he had been afraid to love her himself.

“I’m sorry, Cat,” he whispered, over and over, to slow his panicked heart, to steady his trembling arms.

He could not permit himself to break down. Too much of his blood was seeping out from between their hands and pooling on the fallen leaves. Vash could channel the blood like water, but he could only try to guide it like fire. Fire took its own, unpredictable path.

But his blood settled as it worked its way through her body and her body became his. What was becoming more difficult was making one heart work for two. He was mixing his warm blood into hers, but it did not make her heart beat and it did not make her breathe.

Soon he was panting and light-​​headed. Now he could not afford the breath to whisper anything.

He remembered that Malcolm’s heart had still beat and Malcolm’s breath had not yet stopped. There had been far more life left in him. Vash had only to stir it up again and feed it with new blood.

Cat’s body was dead. His blood did nothing to increase that tiny spark in her that was her life. That had only flared up in response to his.

Egelric had been right after all. He would have to marry himself to her. He would have to share some of his own life with her, taking nothing in exchange. He did not even know whether it was possible to live with only a fraction of a life. But if he died, it wouldn’t matter, and if he saved her…

He only hoped the Mouse-​​girl was right. Catan would be carrying a bat on her back for as long as he lived.

It would not be like the formal ceremony wherein only a spark of fire and a drop of water were exchanged in a smear of blood. So much of his blood was already in her body. She was a broad meadow of dried grass only awaiting a touch of flame to set her all ablaze.

The spark of fire in her leapt up to meet his, as it always had, but his people did not bind fire to fire, and so he was not expecting what happened when they met. He might have known, however – if a single stem of grass already burned when a wildfire unfurled itself across a meadow, it did not make two fires burning in the same field.

Her fire was lost in his, and, strangely, though he had more fire in him than any elf of his generation besides Iylaina, his fire was lost in hers. There was only one fire.

Suddenly his chest was clenched in a giant, crushing hand. He could not even breathe to cry out. He panicked – he had done something wrong. Her fingers tightened over his, and she inhaled a sharp breath and let it out in a moan. Then he could breathe.

Afterwards there was chaos – barking dogs, shouting men, feet shuffling in the leaves all around him. He released her hand, and at once the pain stopped. He understood the pain had been hers. He understood that she was in agony.

“Take her home…” he muttered. That quieted neither the men nor the dogs, so he shouted, “Take her home! She’s suffering!”

That at least stilled the men.

He was growing dizzy. He was perhaps not dying, but he was stalled someplace between life and death. “She needs help,” he murmured. “Get Vash to her. And Shosudin. Soon… Soon…”

They seemed to be hesitating around her, frightened of him. He fell over onto one elbow and dragged himself to the fire. It was fire he needed. The wind had blown the fallen leaves into a pile against it, and he let himself drop upon them all. It was fire he needed, but the fire he truly needed was in her body, and he would have to let them carry it away.

“Are you ill?” Ethelwyn asked from somewhere far above him, far away.

“Take her home. Vash can help her.”

One of the wretched dogs came whining up to him to lick his face with its filthy dog tongue. He did not even have the strength to push it away.

He was not stalled any longer but slipping away, dying, as they carried her off. He had not given her everything, but he knew now that he had given her more than he could spare.

No one would take him home. Vash would not help him. No one would help him.

It would be the wretched kisór to come whining up to his body in the morning, no longer in awe of him now that he was dead. Their people knew nothing of poetry, but it pleased him to think they would find his body lying amongst the fallen maple leaves and his head beside the ashes of a cold fire.