Dre gets off a shot

“I think I can help you.”

Like most boys of his age, Surr’s mind roiled with a swarm of conflicting emotions he could not control. Dre found this tended to make them bothersome pawns, but in Surr they were burning hot and pure enough to interest him. These elves were passionate in proportion to their suffering.

There was a lot of nonsense involving girls, of course, but in Surr there was also love gripped in the suffocating tentacles of hatred, and loyalty half-​​flayed by the fangs of vengefulness. Dre thought these beasts would be amusing to tease, particularly if he could keep the love and loyalty alive a while.

But he was captivated by what lay beneath it all. At the smoldering heart of the boy there was the pearl and plaything and own besetting sin of the Jinn: jealousy.

Dre thought it a pity he could not stay to nourish it and train it up. But before he returned to that “godforsaken island”, as Nimea so cunningly put it, he could get off one parting shot, and make the boy his arrow.

“Help me find my way out of here?” Dre asked innocently.

“No. Help you…”

The boy’s mind scuttled away from shadowy thoughts of what, exactly, he thought he would be helping Dre to do.

He blurted, “Are you still looking for a half-​​elf child?”

Dre lifted an eyebrow thoughtfully. The boy did not seem to realize it was not a half-​​elf child he sought, but one of these unusual Scots. The elven half interested him little: it had only ever served to alert him to the Scotsmen’s strangeness by virtue of the fact that they could have male children with elven women.

His later exploration of the body of the woman Catan had shown him that they were unusual indeed. In seventy and half again seventy generations of men, he had never seen such a creature among them. He was even beginning to suspect that Araphel truly believed himself a father again after all, though he was still far from believing that Araphel was right.

But to the boy he said, “I am. However, I had all but given up hope.” He smiled regretfully and shrugged. “The elf Lar has shown himself incapable of producing one, for various reasons.”

At the mention of the name Lar, the boy flared up like a bonfire: love and loyalty, hatred and resentment, and, hottest of all, jealousy.

“He could have,” Surr muttered. “He just didn’t want to.”

“Ah!” Dre chuckled. “That may have been one of the reasons.”

“He could have,” Surr repeated. “He has a son. A half-​​elf son.”

Dre cocked his head. “Does he? Hmm. He never talks about that.”

“I think he only told the elf Imin, and maybe my father. He acts like he hates him, but he doesn’t. He killed my cousin Sela because he didn’t want her to have any more children with a man, but he had a child with a woman and he didn’t kill that one!”

Dre was delighted. Jealousy within couples could be found so easily it no longer amused him, but this jealousy was of a rare and exquisite sort, born of an idolatrous love for a father figure who was some other boy’s father.

“Perhaps he loves him more than he cares to admit,” Dre said gently.

“No!” Surr cried, though it was clearly what he feared. “He doesn’t want to kill him because he thinks he’s so much better than we are. He didn’t want to have children with my aunt the elf Zevadra at all. Because she wasn’t good enough for him. Because we’re not good enough for him.”

“Perhaps. But you may see things differently when you are a father, Surr. It changes an elf. One doesn’t know what it is to truly love a child until one has a child of one’s own.”

It was precisely what the boy had not wanted to hear.

“So do you still want it or not?” he snapped.

“Of course! I simply wonder what Lar will say… I fear he will not be pleased.”

“What do you care?” the boy cried. “He hates you anyway!”

“Do not you, Surr?”

Surr gasped and reflexively put out his arms to steady himself, as if he had been more than mentally knocked off balance.

Dre frowned. “Indeed, I wonder why you wish to help me.”

“Only because I want this – thing to be over with. With the half-​​elf babies. Leave our ladies alone.” Surr scowled at him like an angry kitten.

“I see. Hmm. A son of Lar would make an interesting specimen, certainly. I am looking forward to seeing him.”

“He lives at the castle across the lake. He’s easy to find. I could show you where he goes to play.”

“Ah, but I can’t stay, Surr. I must leave this morning. I shall need your help.”

Surr was growing queasy as he was forced to confront those shadowy thoughts. He feared that Dre would expect him to kill the boy.

But killing was perhaps too easy. Killing could be clean and anonymous, as with an arrow. There was little amusement in that.

“Don’t worry,” Dre assured him. “I don’t need the boy himself. I merely need his ears.”

Surr gasped. “His – ”

“…ears. Not the tips, mind. The entire ear. Both.”

“His…” Even in the ruddy firelight Surr was growing pale. “What will you…”

Dre said nothing. He would let the boy imagine his own atrocities.

“It’s a… a little like blinding an elf,” Surr said slowly. He was trying to justify the crime to himself. “Except it’s the ears.”

“And what is more elven than the ears? You understand,” Dre said with a knowing nod.

Surr did not understand, but he did not protest. “It seems… fitting in a way. The unblinded elf… and Lar…”

Surr’s mind was a confusing swarm of emotions and half-​​thought thoughts, but the jealousy burned bright behind their fog. Alongside it smoldered a second fire: his longing for revenge against Lar for bringing this fate upon his family.

Dre had got off his parting shot, but it would not be clean and anonymous. The boy was more than an arrow.

Dre thought there would be much amusement in the outcome, whatever it chanced to be. It would give him something to think about as he groveled like a madman on the shore.