Egelric tells Iylaine's secret

Alred came merrily singing down the road to where Egelric waited at the crossroads. He could see his squire’s shoulders were hunched in irritation at his arrival. Or perhaps simply with cold.

“You don’t look happy to see me!” he laughed.

“What the devil are you doing here?” Egelric growled. It was not only the cold.

“I thought I would keep you company.”

“I was hoping to have company of another sort. Are you mad? She could have killed you on the road.”

“I believe I am mad. I was, at least, going mad, sitting at my table with an open book that I found myself incapable of reading. If you were so worried about me meeting my death on the road, you should have let me come with you tonight so you could protect me. You should have known I would come eventually.”

“We agreed you wouldn’t.”

“I changed my mind. And since I still give the orders here, I ordered myself to come see how you were.”

“Does Her Grace know you are here?”

“Certainly not. Move over, Squire, or won’t you share so much as a stump with your poor lord?”

“How do you propose I explain matters to her when I carry my poor lord’s lifeless body back to her?” he grumbled.

“Tell her I loved her, old man. What do you want me to say? You’re a real bear tonight.”

“I was expecting to do this alone.”

“And? Aren’t two heads better than one? And I brought my sword, which is worth six of yours.”

“The fact is, there is something I meant to do tonight that I did not mention to you.”

“Do you have secrets from me now, Egelric? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It isn’t my secret. Otherwise I should have told you.”

“What is this, Egelric?” Alred asked softly. “Does it have something to do with our pale friend?”

“It does.”

“Then does it not concern me? And us all?”

“Aye.”

“Well? Don’t you trust me?”

“I told you, it isn’t my secret.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Alred said after a moment.

Egelric sighed. “You won’t tell anyone? Not even His Majesty?”

“You’re capable of telling him yourself, if it’s necessary.”

“Is it necessary for me to tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aye, it is,” he sighed, “if you mean to stay here tonight. And I shall not allow you to walk back up this road alone, so you will stay.”

“Then?”

“It’s Baby’s secret. I don’t even know all of it. Last night she gave me this.”

Egelric took a small flask from his cloak and handed it to him. “What is it?” Alred asked.

“It’s supposed to be ‘magical water,’ from what she told me. She gave me some incoherent story about her mother, and something about when she was a baby, and how I am supposed to throw this water at the elf to take her power away, and then kill her and put her back where I found her. And if I didn’t do this, Bertie would be hurt.”

“What?” Alred cried.

Egelric shrugged. “I would have thought it was all a story she had invented out of fear for me, but then I took a look at that flask. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Alred attempted to study it in the dark. “I can’t figure out how it’s made.”

“Neither can I. Baby obviously didn’t make it. I don’t know anyone in this valley that could make something like that. So, what am I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know – she found it?”

“Perhaps. I wonder whether it wasn’t made by elves.”

“Well, why not? She’s an elf. Perhaps one of them dropped it, and she found it.”

“I tried to ask her who gave it to her, but she was quite distraught. It was obvious she wasn’t telling me the truth, and obvious that it was making her miserable to lie to me, and yet it was obvious that it was very important to her that she not tell me the truth. So, tell me, what am I supposed to think?”

“I don’t know, Egelric. Did you open it? There’s something in here, anyway, magical or not,” he said, shaking it gently.

“No, I haven’t. I believe there are three possibilities. The first is that she found or otherwise acquired this flask and made up the rest of the story about magical water and Bertie. The second is that someone – perhaps an elf – gave it to her and told her this story in order to help us. And the third is the same as the second, except that the elf or whoever it was meant to do evil by it.”

Alred nodded thoughtfully.

“I only hope that it wasn’t our ‘pale friend’ herself, as you say,” Egelric muttered.

“Even if it were, what difference would it make? If she wanted to do us harm, she could easily do so without tricking you into throwing water or wine or whatever this is at her. Look, if Baby found the thing and made up the whole story, then it isn’t likely to do harm to try. It might be funny, if nothing else. I should like to die laughing. And if it was an elf that gave it to her, a good elf, then so much the better. I believe you have to try.”

“I mean to. Besides, there was one thing that she kept saying that made me think she didn’t make it up. She kept telling me, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Da.’ Does that sound like something she would say if she didn’t know something I didn’t?”

“No, indeed.”

They sat quietly for a while, Alred running his fingers over the little flask, looking for any sign of how it was constructed.

Egelric said suddenly, “She told me I had to kill her quickly after I throw it at her. I suppose it doesn’t last long.”

“Very odd.”

“Aye.”

Alred handed it back to him and stared out at the snow-​​covered road. It was only a day or two until spring, but it looked like the dead of winter. “Aren’t we supposed to be planting peas and beans at this time of year?”

Egelric looked over at him in surprise. “Aye. The peas and beans will be a little late this year. Lately I forget that there are good things that are supposed to happen on the new moon.”

“Perhaps the next one will be more pleasant, if Baby doesn’t – ” He interrupted himself and laid a hand on Egelric’s arm.

The elf woman was standing on the road, staring at them. Alred could not see how she had come to be there – he had been watching the road. But there she was.

They rose slowly and crept toward her, but she did not move. She only turned her head slightly to look at Alred, and when they were before her said, “How nice to see you again, Jupiter. I shall have the pleasure of hurting you twice.”

Alred smirked and bowed.

“Unless you mean to take me to Druze, of course?” she asked, turning to Egelric.

“I do, on one condition.”

“I make the conditions. You take me to Druze or your friend dies tonight. And this time all the willows in the world won’t help him.”

“I make the conditions,” Egelric said calmly. “I have something you want. You have something I want. We might trade.”

“Your son?” she sneered.

“Aye.”

“Idiot. If I could touch your son, I should have brought you his head already. Or perhaps I should have simply started with one of his little hands – not enough to kill him, you see, but – ”

“Enough! If you do not hold my son, you know who does. Tell them that they shall not see Druze again until my son is safe with me.”

She shook her head slowly. “Your little threats and your little conditions won’t move me. You know nothing about anything, if you can say such things to me.”

“Where is he then?”

Alred realized he meant to get as much information as he could about his son before he tried Baby’s “magical water” – or anything else. He had to hope that this would be his last chance to ask her.

“Where is Druze?”

“Where is my son?”

But it was hopeless. As clever as Egelric was with peas, beans, and castle construction, he could not keep his head where his family was involved. Alred could not blame him, but it was so.

“What is Druze to you?” Alred interrupted.

She turned back to him, her eyes wide. “You dare?”

“He’s abominable you know. Quite putrid in fact. One wonders how he can stand the worms crawling about and tickling the insides of him without laughing out loud.”

She howled in anger and lunged at him, but Egelric caught her and pushed her away.

“I believe that what you need,” Alred continued with a laugh, “is a real man. A nice, warm man who will give you a sound spanking and a few other things that you’ve gone too long without. I have the idea – ”

She shrieked and tried to wrestle past Egelric, but she was too furious to manage him properly.

“I have the idea,” Alred shouted, “that poor Druze is rotten enough that parts of him have a nasty habit of falling off just when you need them most!” He laughed at her discomposure, and then he leapt closer to her so that he might snarl, “You know where Druze is! Now tell this man where his son is. Then you will be even. And then you can talk about conditions.”

“He’s with the elves!” she cried, ceasing her struggles with Egelric. “What good does it do you? You can no more reach him than I can reach Druze.”

“No,” Alred said, “but we can reach Druze, and you can reach the elves.”

“They will never let him go, not if I kill every last one of you. But I think I need not kill you all before you will release Druze. That is my strength.”

“What do they mean to do with him?” Egelric asked in a pitiful little voice.

Alred frowned. He should have simply knocked Egelric over the head at the start, except that he needed him to keep the elf from touching him.

“They mean to wait until he is grown and then roast his heart for the Prince’s supper and make a scroll of parchment from his pretty skin! Elves like nothing better than manskin for their books, and his is so fine!”

Egelric snarled and drew a knife, but caught himself in his lunge and fumbled in his cloak instead. Alred laid his hand on his own sword. The man was making a mess of things again. No doubt he meant to try Baby’s magical water, but he had lost his opportunity.

“That’s funny about the parchment,” Alred laughed aloud. “We tried the same thing with Druze before we chopped him up and packed him in salt.” The woman dropped the hands she had meant to use to strangle Egelric and stared up at him. “His skin peeled off in sheets, but it was a little too green for my tastes. Instead we tacked it up in the windows of a few peasants’ huts. It dried nicely.”

“You lie!” she hissed, but it was too late. Egelric had opened Baby’s little flask and tossed its contents in her face.

It did appear to be mere water. Alred had almost been expecting that she would begin to melt, or smoke, or something. She only spluttered in surprise and anger – but then she howled, “What is this? Where did you get this?”

Egelric replied only with his knife, and with a look on his face that was not pleasant to see.

The elf did not stumble away this time, but slumped against him. Egelric pushed her away, and she fell motionless on the snow.

Alred stared down at her for a moment. She did not, in fact, look any more dead than before, except that she no longer moved. “Let’s take her to Druze, since she was so eager to see him,” he said.

Egelric said nothing, but Alred saw how he trembled in his entire body.

“She wasn’t telling the truth, old man.”

“How do you know?” he asked in that pitiful little voice.

“I know a liar when I see one. Now let’s get your horse and haul her away.”