Lar drops a stone

It was just as it had been when he was a boy – Dasi’s grandmother and her bat’s ears; that same sinking feeling in his stomach and drooping feeling in his arms; the same embarrassment at being caught sneaking in, the same dread.…

But he had done nothing wrong. And he was leader here – over Elara and this boy and all these elves; over this chamber and this hallway and all these tunnels and rooms; over everything and everyone on which the sun and the moon never shone.

Lar was already in the room, but he shoved the door aside with his fingers, roughly enough that it cracked against the wall.

Elara was already sitting up in her bed.

“Lar,” she said ominously. “You better not be coming down here to yell at that boy. That was real low, what you did tonight.”

Lar had the light at his back, so he put all his defiance into his voice. “Low?”

“He was just a tired, scared little boy, and you just told him ‘don’t act tired and don’t act scared,’ and what did you expect? Not four winters have passed him by.”

He grabbed the handle of the other door as savagely if it were a knife. “What did you expect?” he growled. “Why did you let him come if he was so tired and so scared? That’s your job!”

Elara snorted at him, no more impressed of him at thirty than Dasi’s grandmother had ever been of him at eleven. “How could I say no to him? All he wanted since he got here was to see you! And finally he got a chance. How could I say no?”

Lar bared his teeth and snarled, “‘No!’” in demonstration. “You’ll see it’s quite easy with a little practice! And you’ll be getting plenty of it, because I don’t want that whiny little brat tangled up in my legs every time I turn around!”

At last he had her shaken. “Don’t let him hear you say it, Lar,” she quavered.

“He can’t hear it with those puny ears of his!”

Lar yanked open the door and put it between himself and Elara. He had long since shaken himself.

Seven’s “puny ears” had failed him. He was sleeping; he had not heard.

This was a relief – until Lar realized it would be a problem. Somehow he would have to wake the boy. Prodding him with the toe of his boot did not seem the right thing. He was not a dead hedgehog to be flipped over. But neither was Lar a dove to be cooing at him.

Lar scuffed his soles across the stones a few times, to no avail. Finally he cupped his hand over his mouth and coughed like one wolf warning another.

Seven’s entire body stiffened, bending only at the waist as he sat bolt upright. Never opening his eyes, he squealed like a piglet hoisted by a hind leg, and he paddled his arms as furiously as he had the first time Lar had taken him into the water.

Lar reacted just as abruptly, snatching him up from the floor and swinging him up high, far above the danger. But of course, the danger was nothing but Lar: nothing at all. Lar chuckled and held the squirming body and the flailing limbs out to a harmless distance.

It was funny – until he realized how terrifying it was. He might not have been himself. He might have been Dre coming for the boy.

He tried to hold him against his body to calm him, but Seven still fought and kicked.

“Six – Six – Seven!” he hissed. “It’s me! It’s Lar! It’s Larl!”

The arms and legs stopped struggling and began clinging, so tightly and so impenetrably that they seemed to multiply and lash themselves around Lar’s neck. Seven had two and four and eight arms, like a soft-​​bodied spider, and one sweaty cheek he pressed against the stubble of Lar’s own.

“Larl!” he moaned. “Pick me up!”

“I’m already holding you, you fat grub!”

Seven’s grip relaxed slightly, but then his body began to shake with hiccupping sobs.

Lar had often seen Dasi pacing the floor with a little boy on his shoulder, but Lar did not think he could pace – not with Elara listening. Nor did he see the point of the pacing, anyway, once he thought about it. It could not have been important. He only patted Seven’s back awkwardly until they had both calmed.

Finally Seven lifted his head enough to mumble, “I’m sorry, Larl.”

Lar felt his stomach sinking again, his arms weakening. This was the moment when he was supposed to say, “No, I’m sorry…” But moments passed so quickly.

Seven took what was, to him, a deep breath, though it was only a kittenish sigh against Lar’s neck. “I promise I won’t cry again if you sing next time.”

“Is that why you cried?” Lar gasped. “I knew I had a bad voice, but not to that point…”

Seven did not see the joke at all. “Your voice isn’t bad. I don’t like that kind of song.”

Lar frowned. “But those are sacred songs, Six.”

“I know,” he sighed wearily, “but I guess I don’t like sacred things.”

Lar was petrified. “But… that’s… not…”

Seven lifted his head. “What does ‘sacred’ mean?”

“Ah… sacred is like – ”

“Does it mean ‘sad’?”

“Well – ”

“Does it mean ‘scary’? Do you like it? Is it – ”

Lar clapped his hand over the boy’s mouth in desperation. Immediately he felt a smile growing beneath his palm, and when he lifted his hand away, it remained. Somehow he had done the right thing.

“Now listen here, Seven,” he began, using the boy’s true name as a sign of the gravity of what he was about to say.

Unfortunately Lar did not yet know what he was about to say. He wished he had been paying more attention when the church-​​man Aelfden had explained certain things to him.

Slowly the smile wilted away.

“Listen here,” Lar began again. “‘Sacred’ is a word that means… ‘important’. It is the most important thing. Sacred is even more important than eating, because if you don’t eat you die, but if you don’t have sacred things, then it’s not worth being alive anyway.”

Lar had thought this a very tidy definition, but Seven seemed only perturbed.

“It’s what makes the difference between being an elf and being an animal,” he added weakly.

“But I’m not an elf,” Seven sighed. “That’s probably why I don’t like it.”

“I know you’re not an elf, and… listen. That’s a good thing.”

Seven looked up and smiled slightly, hopefully.

“Next time, I want you to stop crying and start paying attention. I want you to learn all those songs. Because, you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because no one else knows those songs except those elves who were in that room tonight. Not even the little girls and big ladies know those songs.”

“Only boys do?”

“That’s right. And I want you to learn them all. Because one day – ”

Lar stopped suddenly, as an elf run up to the very edge of a cliff. This was the sheerest, highest cliff Lar knew. He had waited all his life and still had not heard the clink of the dropped stone.

Seven’s eyes were wide – expectant and trusting. He could not have known what Lar was about to say. But when they reached that cliff, Lar expected his elves to leap. He could do no less himself.

“One day,” he said softly, as if it were only a bedtime story, “maybe we’ll all be gone, all those elves you saw in there. And only you will be left, because you’re not an elf – you’re a man. And I want you to remember all those songs, so when you’re big you can teach them to your boys. And you can tell them about… about the elves who used to live in this valley… when you were a boy…”

Lar’s voice was dying off like the scream of an elf falling and falling away, but it scarcely mattered. It would take a lifetime to tell the sorrow of his people to the end. Even Lar himself did not yet know it to its end. The stone was still falling.

There was no way to tell it. To understand it, Seven would have to live it instead.

Lar could only whisper, “And after we’re all gone, someone will still be singing our sacred songs: you and your boys. And that’s more important to us than being alive.”

Seven’s eyes were still wide, but his face was paler than ever. “Where will you all go?” he asked breathlessly.

Lar felt his arms weaken again in despair. Seven had perceived only the sparest outline of what Lar was trying to say. Lar told himself that the mind of a little boy must be like a long-​​legged insect perching upon water: it only skimmed the surface of the deep idea.

Lar coughed like a wolf to find his voice again. “We’ll all be killed,” he said simply, as he expected his elves to tell their sons. “By those bad elves. Because they don’t want us to live. So they kill… you know how it takes a boy elf and a girl elf to make a baby elf?”

Seven stared blankly at him, but Lar had found a surprising courage in striking upon a subject that was merely awkward, and he went on.

“If they kill all the boy elves, there won’t be any more baby elves, and soon there won’t be any more elves at all. And if all the boy elves are dead, no one will be left to sing our sacred songs. Except for you!”

He tried to make his voice tease and he tried to make his fingers tickle, but Seven would not be fooled. It was too late.

Lar told his elves to raise their boys to be hard and angry. They had to grow up to be killers, or they would grow up to be killed. He had realized too late he wanted something more for this little son of men.

He stared helplessly into the lake-​​like blue of Seven’s eyes as the idea sank down into them. He saw that the skimming insect and the reflecting water were only the surface of the boy’s mind: the depths were the greater part of him.

Now Lar knew why Elara was always telling him to be careful of what he said around Seven. Nothing that fell into those depths was ever lost, and nothing that fell into them could ever be reclaimed.