Lena lives the way elves were meant

So far this year, May had been more of a gentle June, clear and cloudless, and warm and dry without being stifling. It had been a month of southerly winds, and to Lena, who lived just north of the river, it blew up cool and damp from the carr, and sweet with the smell of the bean fields along the way.

Lena had scarcely ever left the halls and courts of the elves except for brief and well-​​surveilled strolls in the dense forest nearby. The woods behind Paul’s house were neither deep nor desolate, but to Lena it was a wilderness, and she took a secret delight in the idea that she was at last living the way elves were meant to live.

So far this May, now that the planting was done and haymaking had not yet begun, Aengus had the time to come every day except for Sunday. He and she would take Benedict out into the woods for an hour or two, and Benedict would amuse himself sucking on a toy or merely by watching the ferns wave over his head in the southerly breeze. Meanwhile Aengus and Lena would simply amuse themselves.

It did not occur to Lena to be jealous of his other family, or of the fact that he spent twenty-​​two or twenty-​​three hours with them for every afternoon he spent with her. It did not occur to her that she lacked anything. She was happier than she had ever dreamt to be, she who had been raised believing that her own happiness had no importance at all.

No more did it occur to her to wonder whether it would ever end.

On the ninth day of that so far cloudless May it did; or at least what happiness she could recover and reconstruct would never have the flawless luster of the first.

Aengus’s body nearly covered her own with warmth, but she could feel the sudden coolness of a shadow on her bare feet and ankles. Before she could wonder at the appearance of a cloud, she heard a hollow crack that was like a stick smacking a log. Aengus’s body went utterly stiff and then utterly limp, and at last it rolled off of her and lay still.

As short as he was, the elf nevertheless seemed to tower over her. She knew him: small, dark-​​skinned, white-​​haired, scarred, and leering. She knew him. They all knew him – even the young girl at Dunellen whom he had raped only the last moon.

All the fire magic Paul had taught her would not avail her against a fire nature such as his own. This was Imin, the Second of the rebel lord Lar.

He tossed aside the branch he had used as a club, into the ferns and startlingly close to Benedict.

“Sorry I didn’t get here to save you sooner, sweetheart,” he said. “Can’t be too careful in these woods, with all the men running around.”

The instincts of her race prevented her from crying out and alerting any other predators to her distress. The instincts of her race were so strong and her idea of wilderness so profound that she did not remember that she was so close to home that Paul or Osh would have heard her scream.

But she remembered the night when Imin had helped the lord Lar steal Benedict from her. She remembered that he seemed to have been more interested in putting his hands in her gown than in taking Benedict.

“Do what you want to me,” she said, trying to keep her voice low and even so that Benedict would not guess her fear. “But please, please, don’t hurt my baby.”

He had already unbuckled his belt in any case. “Thank you, my dear. But don’t worry about the baby,” he winked. “I’ll come back in the summer and give you another one. An elf baby,” he whispered. “With an elf father. You don’t know what you’ve been missing.”