4


    Writing his journal and focusing on horses helped Reston to stay in control all those long years, keeping a fragile situation from developing any more cracks.


    He made no more trouble and did no more wandering. To everyone''s eye, a calm and respectful young man. The ideal, high-level servant. Even when his mother chose to move back to Starshire with Sigismund and Kristoff (and later on, little Schwanli) Reston held his peace.


    She was alive. She visited often. The rest, he put on the page or shoved into far-away corners of thought, determined to show nothing, ever.


    Time passed unevenly. Then, one afternoon in late spring, as he was down in the stables, currying one of His Lordship''s fine horses, something happened at last. Another game piece was moved. Someone strode in, looked around and then headed across the long stable; a young elf with red-golden hair and grey eyes. Keldaran, it was; the son of Alyanara and Galadin.


    Reston inclined his head, expression carefully neutral. Motes of hay danced in the warm, sunny air, stirred by the breeze of Keldaran''s fast walk.


    "Good afternoon, Milord," said Reston. "Shall I saddle your horse?"


    But the slender young elf did not answer directly. Simply strode to the stall door and looked over at Reston, frowning slightly.


    Where Kristoff was already a rheumatic elder and Schwanli a portly matron, Keldaran appeared to be still in his late adolescence. Reston was somewhere between; a grim and unsmiling young man. Handsome, quiet, devoted to his work… which presumably Keldaran was there to demand. But, instead of snapping an order, the elf said,


    "You are my brother," almost accusingly.


    Reston blinked. Maintained outward calm, although he faltered a moment in combing Shira''s hay-dappled coat. The black mare snorted and shoved him with her delicate head, urging greater attention to detail. Sadly for her, it wasn''t to be.


    Reston misty-stepped out of Shira''s stall, into the stone-floored passage, beyond. Fetched up facing Keldaran, but angled aside, as custom and courtesy dictated. With a deep bow, he said,


    "Young lord, the subject is a fraught one. There is very little I can say without giving offense. But… I did not choose to be born as an insult." Nor was he the only Feen working at Starloft.


    "You knew all along, and you never said?" Keldaran demanded, coloring slightly. "I''ve had a brother for years? Not just a sister?"


    Reston shook his head. Rubbing at his itching, oft-shaven chin with one calloused hand, he corrected the boy''s error.


    "No, Milord. I am not of rank to claim kinship with you or with Lady Meliara. Lord Galadin…"


    "Who is father to both of us," put in Keldaran, aggressively.


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    "Who is your father and… and mine… has arranged matters as he sees fit."


    And there was no gainsaying High Lord Tarandahl. Keldaran''s grey eyes narrowed, turning suddenly fierce in that perfectly beautiful elven face.


    "You are my brother," he repeated, stubborn as ever a Tarandahl could be. "Someday, I will be Silmerana, and things will change," promised Keldaran, extending a hand.


    A layer of stillness and ash covered all of Reston''s emotions. Had done so for all the many long cycles since his mother''s death. The boy meant what he''d said, though. Reston saw the truth, and he knew.


    After a brief, heart-frozen moment, he extended his own hand to clasp that of Keldaran… his brother.


    XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX


    Much later came that black, awful day when a raiding party of goblins lured forth an elven warband. Splitting their forces, one half led by Lord Keldaran and Lerendar, one half by Reston, the elves had meant to crush the raiders from two sides of a deep, rocky valley. The notion had been advanced by one of their older and quieter fosterlings, Garrin Alfrit.


    Only, somehow, the goblins had known of their plan. The wily vermin laid traps and obstructions to delay Reston''s advance, leaving Keldaran and his warriors to arrive at Dry Valley''s east end without reinforcement.


    Blocking the vale''s west mouth, an ancient, accursed stone forest had been webbed with illusion and shape-shifting monsters. The creatures struck hard and fast and then melted back into the darkness, seeming to boil up out of the petrified ground, strike and then vanish away.


    Reston fought onward, for he could hear the shriek and crump of firebolts, the screaming of terrified horses from the vale''s eastern end. Goblins swarmed the landscape, dropping out of the fossilized branches in numbers too great to count or successfully battle.


    Small by themselves, and poorly armed, in a mass of ten or twelve they could bring down an elf and his or her plunging mount. The goblins were maddened with fear, driven on one side by hulking, cloaked figures while facing sure death on the other from searing flame or lung-choking ash. They perished in droves; burnt alive, hacked to bits or coughing up blood and lung-shreds as they writhed on the ground.


    …but the elves died, too, overwhelmed by sheer numbers and treachery. By powerful alien magic and… unintentionally… Reston, himself.


    Unable to wait for the rest of his struggling warband, hearing the shouts of trapped, dying elves, Reston misty-stepped forward, meaning only to reach Keldaran and Lerendar. He materialized in the midst of great slaughter, amid smoldering heaps of burnt goblins, scattered body parts and dying horses.


    Keldaran was sorely injured, one arm torn halfway out of its socket, great-sword somehow still balanced and deadly in the blood-spattered other. Lerendar was pinned beneath his own fallen mount, fighting wildly to free himself.


    "Reston! Brother, get out!" shouted Keldaran, distracted. Did not see, could not block, the sword-cut that took off his head from behind, as last magic blasted outward, sending Reston back to his own scattered warband


    By the time they regrouped and reached Dry Valley''s eastern mouth, there was no one to rescue and nothing left there to fight. No bodies to recover, either, for all had been carried off.


    Somehow, Reston got the battered remains of his war-party home. There had been a single, brief contact with Lord Valerian, then nothing, for fear that his nephew would be traced and attacked in the City.


    Worse… the spot in his mind and heart that Keldaran had filled was dark now, and empty. Ripped apart by the death of his brother. His first and only real friend.


    Reston blamed himself for Keldaran''s murder. He''d been the one who had counseled acceptance of Alfrit''s mad battle plan, deeming it sound. He''d been the one who''d distracted Keldaran and then watched him die.


    In the dark weeks that followed, the half-elf systematically destroyed every goblin he could turf up or run down, making tremendous slaughter. Male, female, child… just didn''t matter. Riven by sorrow and guilt, he took revenge as completely and pitilessly as possible, recording it all in his journal. Numbers, locations, methods; as if more death could stanch the deep, awful wound inside that wouldn''t stop bleeding. As if he could ever pay back what he owed.