The elf finds no fire

The moon’s light is cold. To this blind elf the moon was dead. He only knew what day it was once per moon, and it was when the moon was dead indeed: on the nights of the new moon, he could no longer hear the distant voices of the elves.

They were only kisór, and they and their senseless singing meant nothing to him. But when he could not hear them, he had for the space of one night a taste of what the future of his race would be. The day would come when there would be no more elves in the world. The earth would be abandoned to men, who loved her so poorly, and they, he was certain, would destroy her in the end.

At first he had ventured out on these nights, as an act of defiance. He dreaded his own death, but he did not fear it. However, nothing had ever happened. If he was the only elf abroad, then he, blind, should have been an easy victim. It appeared that the killing had stopped.

It made this ban on the nights of the new moon seem just the sort of superstition the miserable kisór would invent, and it disgusted him more than ever with the Khor, who had imposed it.

It was one of the many things he wanted to say to him the next time they met. Though he knew they would never meet again, these imagined confrontations helped pass the time, and more importantly prevented his mind from wandering into thoughts that could make his numb heart ache even now.

Late that night, before he had quite fallen asleep, he heard a two-​​legged creature crashing about in the leaves outside his cave. It walked with the careless tread of a man, but he should have heard a man approach from a great distance. Had he fallen asleep after all?

His sword was on the other side of the cave, but for a man he would need nothing more than his bare hands. He stood and waited, calm and quiet beneath the overhanging rock. He did not fear death. He did not fear anything.

But as the crashing approached, he heard beneath it a whimpering and a sniffling. He heard a voice he knew. He waited, paralyzed. There was one thing he still feared, and it was awake now, aching, and pounding against his ribs.

The two-​​legged creature knew where she was going in spite of the new moon darkness that must have made her nearly as blind as he. She came, sniffling and sobbing, down the narrow passage into his cave.

He could hear her every breath, but he could not see her.

“Friend!” she cried mournfully. She had seen him.

“Cat!” he whispered.

“Friend!” She was coming closer, and there was something like relief or even joy in her voice. He heard a rasp of fabric across skin, and he thought she must have been wiping her eyes.

“I thought I had you beaten,” he laughed nervously. His hands longed to go out in search of her, but without his eyes, he could not begin to guess what she was thinking, nor, more importantly, what she was feeling. He was afraid to touch her. He was afraid she would pull away, as she had the last time he had tried to take her hands.

“Beaten?” she sniffed.

“You told me you would be my friend if you liked, and I couldn’t stop you. I thought I had stopped you that day.”

He had planned that little speech weeks ago. He had had a hundred hundred conversations with her in his head, though they were precisely the sort of imaginary confrontation his dream debates with the Khor were meant to prevent.

She did not laugh at his joke as she did in his head. Instead she gasped and tried to hold back a sob, but that only made it more plaintive when it broke free.

His hand went up on its own and bumped into her elbow. An elbow was a safe place to lay one’s hand.

“Why do you cry, Cat?” he murmured. “Are you hurt?”

From her elbow, his hand could slide up her arm and over her shoulder. One she called Friend might permit himself so much.

Cat did not answer. She cried softly but deeply, as when one first began to cry and intended to cry for hours. One never did, of course, but when one began to cry like that, the ache was such that one could not imagine an end to tears. He knew how it was.

“Has something happened? Are you frightened?” Now that he had an arm over her, he could lead her. “Come here by the fire and get warm. You mustn’t be out in the middle of the night like this. You should come visit me in the day, when it’s sunny and warm and safe. And you mustn’t come out on the night of the new moon.”

It was very agreeable to scold and fuss over somebody. More agreeable, he thought, than having someone to scold and fuss over him.

But Cat continued her crying, unmoved by his words, unmoved by the arm that lay across her back.

The pace of his heart quickened, and he felt that familiar tremor take over his limbs and that familiar dizziness begin to whirl in his head. It was the unspeakable frustration of blindness. It was panic. It was helplessness.

“Cat! You must tell me!” His voice was shrill and shook like the rest of him. “I’m blind – I can’t see what’s wrong with you.”

“I don’t know,” she sobbed.

“You don’t know? Cat? Then why are you crying?”

She did not answer.

“Cat! Has someone hurt you?”

At the thought, his other arm very nearly went around her. He thought particularly of Egelric, who had tossed her about like a cat playing with a mouse. He thought he would like to show Egelric how it felt to be the mouse.

“No…” she sniffled.

In his relief, he let his head fall closer to hers – almost against hers. It was close enough that it brought his face into her hair, and for a moment he nearly forgot her distress.

He knew he would never be able to see her, but he often wondered what she looked like. Her hair interested him especially, because a lady’s hair was much more than something to look at. Hair was texture, more than anything, and hers was loose, soft against his face, slightly curled and incredibly light.

He longed to put his hands in it and braid it for her – he was certain he could still braid a lady’s hair by touch alone. He had told himself she must be dark if she was Egelric’s cousin, but he could imagine her blonde with such fine, floating hair, like his mother’s.

All that lacked was a scent. He had never smelled the hair of a woman before, but it was not like elf hair with its faint perfumes of grass and moss and fading flowers. Indeed, she did not smell like anything at all. He had always found that men and women had a rather unpleasant smell, but it appeared that when they were clean, they smelled like nothing.

He lifted his head, troubled, and he was reminded that he was not touching her merely for the sake of touching her. She continued her hushed crying.

“What is it, Cat? Are you hurt?”

He was growing bolder, and his free hand was dancing very near where he supposed her hands were, if she was crying into them as it seemed.

“I missed you,” she whimpered.

“Cat!”

He was briefly struck dumb, and she cried on.

“But I’m standing right here, you beetlehead!” he laughed. That did not seem to help. After a moment, not trusting his voice, he whispered, “I missed you, too. But that’s no reason to cry, since you are here. So stop that now.”

Even that was more gruff than he had intended. He had forgotten how to be gentle – it had been so long since he had faced anything or anyone with something besides rage.

But she gave a choking laugh that did not turn into a sob. That was already something.

“That’s right,” he murmured to test his voice. It held. “You’re here and I’m here, so let’s not worry these hands by crying into them. Now you shall give them to me instead to hold.”

He knew next to nothing about the rest of her, but he knew her hands well. He had healed one, of course, but most importantly he had once walked halfway down the hillside with her hand in his.

She turned towards him, and his arm had to leave her shoulder. But after she had wiped her face on her sleeve, he felt her hands slip into his own. They were small, as he knew, and her fingers were short but slender. They were neither hot nor damp.

Blind, he could not know what she was feeling by reading her face, but she could see his, and he turned it away. He turned it down, towards her hands, as if he could see them. In truth, he had not been blind for so long that he could not see them in his mind. He knew everything about them except their color.

He knew that what he was about to do was wrong, and he knew she could neither consent nor understand, but he could not resist. For only a moment, he would tease out the spark of fire in her, only so that he could greet it with the fire in him.

He had tried it last when he had healed her finger. She had not seemed to notice it, but it had confirmed what he had learned when he had not been able to kill the man Malcolm. Men were not like deer: they possessed a wisp of flame in them, too, deep in the blood. He knew how to bring it up and make it dance just below her skin. Her skin was against his skin, and the great fire was in him and waiting.

But he could not bring it up. He could not even find it.

What he was about to do was wrong, but he was confused, and he had to know. He searched down deep inside of her. He searched all the way down to the beating heart of her, and there was no fire to be found. This was what he had always expected of men, but he had touched Malcolm and he had touched her, and he had found fire in both of them.

It was too unnerving. It was far stranger than the lack of scent. She was cold all the way to the heart. She had less life in her than a deer.

He shook her hands out of his and stepped back.

“Who are you?” he growled.

“What?”

“What are you?”

“I’m only Cat! Friend!”

Her hands touched his face before he knew she was near. He snarled and swatted them away.

“What magic is this?” he howled. “What trick is this?”

“Don’t you know me?” She was sniffling again.

“Who is behind this?” he shouted in his own language.

The cave echoed his question in several different voices, but there could be no answer – no one would hear on a night of the new moon. Was this the reason for the ban? Was it a ghost? A madness?

Whatever it was, it was gone. The sound of its breathing and the sound of its swishing skirts had ceased abruptly. No body stood between him and the heat of his fire. He was alone.

He had been tricked by somebody or by his own mind, tricked in the cruelest possible way. Someone had seen all the way down into the aching heart of him and brought up this phantom. To torment him. To wound him. To mock him.

He would not be tricked again. He swore it. He would not be tricked again. The next time somebody reached down into his heart, he would find it as cold as hers.