The road south from Tarren Mill had been a road once.
Now it was something else. Something that had forgotten what it was supposed to be.
Aldric Tharalion rode through the middle of what had been the road's ghost, picking his way between the cracked and heaved cobblestones that jutted from the earth like the broken teeth of some enormous buried thing. The stones had been good once. He could see that even now. Lordaeron had built well. Lordaeron had built to last. The craftsmen who had laid these stones had done so with pride and with the expectation that the work would outlive them by centuries. They had been right about the outliving. They had not been right about everything else.
Grief was the wrong word for what the landscape communicated. Grief implied something recent, something still warm and close to its source. This was older than grief. This was what grief became when it was left alone too long and nobody came back to tend it.
He rode, and the horse carried him, and the pack horse followed because it had been trained to follow and because it trusted the destrier's judgment the way animals trusted things they could not articulate.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The destrier's name was Caeran.
That is worth saying clearly, because names matter. They had always mattered in Aldric's family, perhaps more than they mattered in most, and a horse that had carried him through the better part of his youth and into the beginning of his adulthood deserved to have his name set down with some dignity.
Caeran was seventeen hands tall and broad across the chest in the way of warhorses bred specifically to carry armored men into the grinding, terrible press of serious fighting. His coat was the color of dark iron in certain lights and simply black in others, and his eyes had the steady, unhurried quality of an animal that has decided, somewhere deep in whatever passed for its reasoning, that the world would simply have to be endured and that endurance was in itself sufficient virtue.
Aldric had been given Caeran when he was twelve years old. He was twenty-three now. The mathematics of that spoke for itself.
There were things Aldric had not told Caeran, over those eleven years, primarily because horses cannot understand spoken language and the exercise would have been futile. But there were things he had said anyway, quietly, in stable yards late at night when the grooms had gone and the light was down to a single lamp, because some words need to be spoken aloud to have any weight, even when the only available listener is a horse. He had said some of those things in the days before he left Stromgarde. He was not sure the horse had opinions about the Troll Wars or the nature of ancient compacts. But Caeran had listened, in the patient and enormous way he listened to everything, and that had been enough.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Ghostlands were ahead.
He knew it before he saw any evidence of it, the way a man knows a storm is coming from the quality of the air and the particular silence of birds. The land here was not yet the Ghostlands proper, but it was becoming something adjacent to them, something contaminated by proximity. The grass, where there was grass, grew in the wrong colors. Browns that should have been green. Yellows that had no business being there. Here and there, at the margins of what had once been cultivated fields, plants had achieved extraordinary sizes through some process that had nothing to do with good soil or favorable weather. They loomed over their surroundings with a kind of grotesque, unearned authority.
The pack horse shifted its load and snorted.
"Steady," Aldric said, not to the pack horse specifically, but in the general direction of unease, because unease was a communicable condition and it did not help to let it spread.
The crates on the pack horse were sealed with good timber and good iron fittings, and within the crates, packed carefully in dense wool and separated by wooden dividers to prevent breakage, were mana crystals and arcane concentrates of several grades, including a quantity of refined essence that had cost him more than he was going to think about in terms that connected to money. He was not going to think about the money. He had not thought about the money when he had spent it, and he was not going to begin now.
His father would have understood. He believed that. His father had been a man of ancient habits and ancient courtesies, and he had understood the difference between spending money on things that were merely expensive and spending it on things that were necessary. His father had also been dead for four years, which meant his opinion was no longer available for consultation, which meant Aldric had to make his best estimation of it and proceed accordingly.
He had been doing a great deal of that lately.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The oaths were not written down anywhere that he knew of. That was one of the peculiarities of truly old compacts. The ones that had been made by old men and aged clerks in rooms designed for the purpose, with wax seals and witnessed signatures. Those were the ones that people broke with relative ease, because they had always been, in some sense, pieces of paper, and pieces of paper could be argued with. The old oaths had been made differently. They had been made by people who understood that certain things, once spoken in the presence of sufficient witnesses and sufficient consequences, became structural elements of the world. Not metaphorically structural. Actually structural, in the way that load-bearing walls are structural, in the way that if you remove them the ceiling comes down.
The Alliance of Arathor and Quel'Thalas had been made in exactly that way.
Aldric knew the history the way he knew his own name, because his family had made certain that its children knew it. The Troll Wars had been, by any honest accounting, a catastrophe that had been narrowly averted, and the narrowness of the aversion was significant. The Amani had been numerous and ferocious and had possessed a tactical intelligence that the early human kingdoms had found deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge. Without the High Elves, Arathor would not have expanded. It would have been strangled with its fields unplanted and its burgeoning villages harassed by raids. Without the humans, Quel'Thalas would not have survived. It would have been overwhelmed by the troll hordes and its cities unmade and its people scattered into forests that would have given them no shelter. The elves had provided something that no human army of the period had possessed, and in providing it they had also undertaken to teach a hundred human magi the foundations of arcane arts, a gift whose consequences were still reverberating through the world millennia later. The humans had provided the elves with the armies to immediately fight the Amani to a standstill.
The compact had said: when one side is failing, the other side comes.
It had not said: unless it is inconvenient. It had not said: unless the political situation is complicated. It had not said: unless our king has died and our kingdom has been reduced to a third of its former extent by Trolls and Syndicate bandits and the grinding pressures of a world that does not pause to allow recovery.
The compact had said: when one side is failing, the other side comes.
Stromgarde was failing. Had been failing for years, by honest accounting. And the elves had not come, it was true. He held that truth without turning away from it. The Scourge had swept through Lordaeron like a fire that had decided to become something worse than fire, and Quel'Thalas had not sent soldiers south. He knew why. He even understood why, in the analytical part of him that could separate knowledge from feeling. The High Elves had always maintained a kind of sovereign separateness from human affairs, a detachment that was not quite arrogance and not quite indifference but occupied some territory between the two. They had believed Quel'Thalas inviolable. They had believed their wards and their ancient magics and the specific quality of their seven-thousand-year civilization would protect them from anything the world cared to send.
They had been wrong. And the wrongness of it had cost them everything.
He was not going south to balance an account. He was going south because the oath said come, and he was the kind of man who paid attention to what oaths said.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He smelled the dead before he saw evidence of the living.
The Ghostlands had their own atmosphere, distinct from the ruin of Lordaeron proper, more concentrated, more specifically malignant. The trees here had died in ways that were not natural dying. Natural dying was a process, gradual and cumulative, and it left a particular kind of evidence: the slow silvering of bark, the retreat of sap, the eventual and dignified collapse of large structures into smaller ones. Wood becoming soil becoming new growth in the proper cycle. What had happened to the trees here was interruption. They had been stopped. Halted mid-process, mid-season, mid-breath if trees could be said to breathe, and then held in a state that was neither death nor life but an approximation of both that satisfied neither condition.
The light was wrong in the way light is wrong in places where something significant has been unmade.
Caeran walked through it without flinching. Not because he was unaware of it. Aldric knew the horse was aware of it. He could feel it in the altered quality of the gait, a fraction more deliberate, a fraction more considered. But Caeran had decided, in his vast equine patience, that the thing to do was to continue, and so he continued, and Aldric sat him and was grateful for the solidity of him beneath his legs, the enormous physical certainty of the horse, which was in some ways the most reassuring thing available.
He heard them before he saw them.
A sound. Not voices, initially. Something more fundamental than voices. The specific human, or near-human sound of distress being suppressed with difficulty. Of someone doing the hard work of not making noise that they needed very badly to make. He knew the sound. He had heard it in the context of wounds and fear and grief, and it was the same sound regardless of context. The same tight, controlled, forcibly quieted exhalation that meant someone was suffering and had decided, or had been forced by circumstance, to suffer quietly.
He turned Caeran toward it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They were sheltering in the ruin of what had been a waystation. The walls had partially collapsed, which meant the roof had gone entirely, but three of the walls remained to a useful height and they had arranged themselves in the angle of two of them, which gave them something approximating cover from the directionless and troubling wind that moved through the Ghostlands.
Four of them.
He took them in with the practiced visual assessment of someone who has been trained to look at groups and understand quickly what he is seeing.
The first was an older female elf. Older in the way High Elves communicated age, which was not the way humans communicated it. Her face held what might, in a human, have been read as early middle age, but the quality of her eyes and the set of her mouth and the particular kind of authority in her posture indicated something considerably further along the span of a life. She was dressed in what had been good clothing, practical travelling clothes of quel'dorei make, now damaged and road-marked and carrying the evidence of many days of hard travel without the supporting infrastructure that made extended travel survivable. She had a sword on her hip. She had her hand on it.
Beside her stood two younger elves. A young man and a young woman, both of them perhaps the equivalent of young adults in human terms, which meant, given elvish development, that they were probably older than they looked. The young man had positioned himself slightly forward of the young woman and slightly forward of the older elf, which was not quite the correct tactical positioning but communicated clearly enough what he intended to communicate. The young woman held a bow with an arrow already seated, not drawn, but ready. Her hands were not steady. He noticed that without judgment.
The fourth was not standing.
The fourth was in a litter, suspended between two poles that had been improvised from branches, the whole construction laid carefully on the ground in the angle of the walls. She was the older elf's sister; he did not know this yet, but he would come to know it, and even now something about the attention the standing elf paid to the prone one communicated a relationship that was more than casual.
She was in a bad way.
Even from horseback, even at the distance he stopped Caeran at, which was a respectful distance that communicated deliberate non-aggression, he could see how bad a way she was in. The trembling alone was visible at thirty paces, a persistent, full-body trembling that did not pause and did not diminish. The kind of trembling that comes from a body being asked to function without something it has been built, over generations and centuries, to rely on. Her skin had a quality he did not have precise words for. Drawn was the closest available word. Drawn as if something were pulling at it from the inside, as if the withdrawal of whatever had sustained her was now creating a vacuum that her physical self was collapsing toward.
He had heard the stories. Everyone in Stromgarde had heard the stories, because stories of sufficient horror travel regardless of road conditions and political complications. The Sunwell was gone. That was the proverbial fact. The stone dropped into the still water from which all the ripples were extending outward in every direction. The Sunwell was gone, unmade by the Scourge for the purpose of raising their great lich, and the High Elves, every single one of them, were now discovering what it meant to have lived for millennia drawing sustenance from something that had simply been taken away.
The stories he had heard had been terrible. The reality in front of him was worse than the stories.
This was generally how it went, he had found. Reality outpaced the account of it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"I mean you no harm," he said.
He said it in Thalassian.
His Thalassian was not perfect. Far from it. He had learned it from books primarily, supplemented by what conversations he had been able to arrange with the small number of High Elves who had passed through Stromgarde over the years. The result was grammatically competent but accented in a way that a native speaker would immediately identify as learned-late and learned-from-the-page. But it was recognizable. It communicated what he needed it to communicate, which was primarily that he had made the effort, that he had cared enough about this conversation to have prepared for a version of it.
The effect was immediate and visible. The older elf's hand did not leave her sword. The young man did not move from his forward position. But something shifted behind the older elf's eyes that had not been there before. He had expected wariness. He had expected hostility. He had not expected the thing he saw, which was, in some complex and guarded way, surprise so profound it had briefly overridden all other responses.
"A human," the older elf said. In Thalassian, and then, after a fractional pause, in Common that was flawless in the way that High Elven Common was always flawless, because they had been speaking it for long enough that its imperfections had been patiently worked out over generations. "Here."
"Yes," Aldric said. "Here."
"Why."
It was not quite a question. It was not quite a challenge. It was something that sat between the two and demanded an honest answer rather than a tactical one.
"Because the road was open and I could ride it," he said, which was not the entire truth but was not a lie either.
The young man said something in rapid, low Thalassian that Aldric caught only parts of. He caught the word for human and the word for alone and a phrase whose specific construction he didn't know but whose intent was clearly interrogative bordering on accusatory. The older elf replied without looking at the young man, a short and final-sounding phrase that ended the exchange.
"Get down from your horse," she said.
"Yes," Aldric said, and did it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He stood on the broken ground of the waystation and let them look at him. He was tall for a human, broad in the way of men who have spent their lives training for the possibility of serious violence and have also spent considerable time doing actual serious violence, though he was young enough that some of the broadness still had the quality of something that was going to become more pronounced with time. He wore practical armor, not ceremonial. Good steel, well-maintained, without the identifying devices he could have legitimately worn because this was not a journey on which identifying devices would have been useful. He had left the Tharalion crest behind deliberately. He was here as a man, not as a representative of an ancient bloodline. Or he was here as a man first, and as a representative of an ancient bloodline a distant second, in the way that some obligations wear the costume of personal choice.
He held his hands away from his body.
The older elf looked at him with eyes that were assessing him in ways he could only partially identify, reading things from his appearance and his posture and the specific kind of stillness he was maintaining that he could not be entirely certain he was communicating correctly. Quel'dorei were, among their many qualities, extraordinarily good at this. Thousands of years of civilization had produced a culture with a very refined ability to read the unspoken parts of a conversation.
"You've come south through Lordaeron," she said. "Through it."
"Yes."
"You're not Lordaeronian."
"No. I am from Stromgarde."
Another small shift. Different from the first one. The young woman with the bow let her arrow hand drop slightly. Not all the way. But slightly.
"Stromgarde," the older elf said. She said it the way people say the name of something they have been thinking about from a distance, something that has existed for them primarily as an abstraction, a point on a map, a concept rather than a place containing people with names and histories.
"The Kingdom of Stromgarde," he said. "What remains of it. My name is Aldric Tharalion." He paused. The name was relevant. He had not wanted to lead with it, but it was relevant in ways that would become clear or would not become clear depending on whether this older elf knew her history. "My family has been in Arathi since before Strom was called Strom."
She was quiet for a moment. The wind moved through the dead trees with its particular and unpleasant sound.
"Tharalion," she said.
"Yes."
"I have heard that name." Something complicated was happening behind her eyes. "Old lineage."
"We have always thought so. Possibly with excessive satisfaction." He said it without irony and without apology, simply as a statement of fact about his family's characteristic quality, one he had enough distance from himself to identify accurately. "My aunt is more restrained about it. I tend toward the excessive satisfaction position when I am not paying attention."
The young man made a sound that was not quite a laugh and was quickly suppressed. The young woman glanced at him. The older elf's expression did not change, but something in it changed that was below the level of expression, something in the specific architecture of how she was holding her face.
"Why are you here, Aldric Tharalion of Stromgarde?" she asked.
He walked to the pack horse. He did it slowly and with deliberate visibility, making no sudden movements, keeping his hands in sight. He unlatched the closest of the sealed crates and opened it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The mana crystals caught what light there was and held it, multiplied it, returned it in colors that did not entirely correspond to the colors of the light they had received. They were beautiful in the way that things are beautiful when their beauty is also their function. He had bought them from a source he trusted. A trader who understood what discretion meant and maintained it as a professional value and he had verified the quality himself, which had required assistance from someone who knew more about arcane matters than he did, which is to say someone who knew anything about arcane matters at all.
He watched them see the crystals.
It is a particular thing, to watch someone see something they desperately need. There is a specific physiological response that exists below the level of decision, below the level of dignity or pride or any of the other filtering mechanisms that conscious people apply to their reactions. He had seen it in men presented with water after too long without it, in people handed a weapon at the moment when the absence of one has become critical. The response existed before thought got to it.
All three of the standing elves had it.
The older elf closed her eyes for a fraction of a second. When she opened them, they were brighter than they had been, and the brightness was not metaphorical. The young woman had drawn a single audible breath and was now very still, the stillness of someone exerting significant effort to maintain composure. The young man had put his hand on the wall of the waystation, and Aldric could see from the way his weight shifted that the gesture was partly structural, was partly holding himself up.
"Those are…" the young man started.
"Yes," Aldric said.
"How did you…" He switched to Thalassian and then back again. "Where did you…"
"I purchased them," Aldric said, "with money I had and some money I borrowed, from sources I will not bother you with the details of, because the details are not relevant to what I'm about to ask you, which is whether you will permit me to help your family."
Another silence. The wind. The dead trees. The particular quality of light that the Ghostlands produced, which was light that had been through something and had come out differently.
"She needs it more than we do," the older elf said. She was looking at the litter.
"I understand that," Aldric said. "I have seen the accounts. I had someone explain to me what the absence of the Sunwell means in physiological terms before I came. I wanted to understand what I was coming into." He closed the crate and went to the pack horse. "There is enough here for all of you, for now. And I have more. Enough to get you to wherever you are trying to reach."
"And what does Stromgarde want in exchange?"
He had known the question was coming. He had thought about how to answer it.
"Nothing," he said. "That's not how this works."
She studied him. He let her study him, because she had earned the right to be thorough and he had nothing in his face he needed to hide.
"Humans always want something," the young man said. He said it without venom but without apology, the way someone states a principle they have arrived at through experience rather than prejudice.
"Many of them do," Aldric agreed. "I want to help your family. That is what I want. If you need me to dress it in different language to make it intelligible, I can try. But that's the thing underneath whatever language I put over it."
"Why?" The young woman spoke for the first time. Her voice was controlled with effort. Her hands had steadied now, which told him something about the quality of her discipline. "Why does a man from Stromgarde ride alone through Lordaeron to bring mana crystals into the Ghostlands?"
He looked at her directly, because she had asked a direct question and it deserved a direct answer.
"Because the Troll Wars ended with a compact," he said. "And the compact said that when one side is failing, the other side comes. Old blood, old ties. My kingdom is in no state to send armies anywhere. I am aware of that. The political situation does not allow what the political situation does not allow. But I can ride." He laid his hand briefly on Caeran's neck, and the horse leaned into it slightly, the unconscious lean of an animal that has been in long company with one person and has calibrated exactly how much contact it wants. "And I could carry what I could carry. So I did."
The older elf was very still.
"You know who we are," she said. Not a question.
"I know you are High Elves of Quel'Thalas," he said. "I know you are trying to get somewhere south of here. I know one of your family is very ill and that the litter she is in is not going to be sustainable much further south without aid." He paused. "I don't know your name. I would like to know it, if you'll give it."
A long pause. Long even by the measure of someone who understands that pauses have length and weight.
"Sylvarie," she said. "Sylvarie Dawnmere. The young ones are my niece and nephew. Elaeni and Corindas. My sister…" She stopped. Her gaze went to the litter. The thing in her voice when she spoke her sister's name, or started to speak it, was something Aldric recognized, because he had heard it in his own voice four years ago, and it was the particular sound of someone carrying a fear they have been carrying for so long it has started to shape the way they speak. "Her name is Valessian. She was a mage of some standing, before."
She did not elaborate on before, because before required no elaboration.
"Then we should give her what she needs," Aldric said, "and then, if you'll permit it, I'll make a fire and we can talk about where you're going and how best to get there."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He carried the crystals to the litter himself.
Sylvarie moved to kneel beside her sister, and Aldric set the open crate at a careful and considered distance. Close enough that reaching them required no effort, far enough that it did not feel like imposition. He stepped back. This was not his moment. His purpose here was to make this moment possible, not to occupy it.
Valessian Dawnmere took the first crystal with hands that shook so badly the stone clicked against the one beside it in the crate. She held it and the trembling did not immediately stop. He had not expected it to stop immediately. But after a time, a short time, the quality of the trembling changed. It became something slightly less catastrophic. The sound she was making, the low, tight, contained sound he had heard when he first approached and had identified correctly as suppressed suffering, gradually altered into something that was still pain but was pain that now had a direction, pain that was going somewhere rather than simply being present.
Sylvarie held her sister's hands around the crystal. Elaeni knelt on the other side of the litter and said something in Thalassian that was too quiet for Aldric to hear. Corindas stood at the head of the litter and looked at the sky and clenched his jaw in the particular way of young men who have decided that the appropriate response to what they are feeling is to look at the sky and set their jaws.
Aldric tended to Caeran and the pack horse. He checked their feet and their gear and the distribution of the load on the pack horse, and he found a section of wall that still had structural integrity and tethered them to an iron ring that had been set in it for exactly that purpose. He found dry wood for a fire, which was not easy in the Ghostlands where everything existing in a state of suspicious halfway-dampness, but he found it eventually under the overhang of a collapsed section of wall where the roof's fall had preserved a pocket of dryness. He built the fire with the economical efficiency of someone who has camped in worse places than this and knows what fire-building actually requires, which is mostly patience and a willingness to start small.
When the fire was going, he sat beside it and waited.
After a time, Sylvarie came and sat on the opposite side of it.
Her face, in the firelight, showed what daylight had partially concealed. She was exhausted to a depth that sleep alone could not address. She was carrying loss that she had not yet fully turned to face, because turning to face it would require a stillness she had not yet been able to afford.
"She is better," Sylvarie said. "For now."
"Good," Aldric said. "The crates have enough to sustain her for some time. And the others."
"Yes." She looked at the fire. "You spent considerably on this."
"Yes."
"For strangers."
"For people," he said, "with whom my family has an old connection. The connection may have been strained by time and events, but it is still a connection."
She was quiet for a while. Corindas brought Elaeni to the fire and they sat, both of them with the posture of people who are keeping themselves awake by an exercise of will because sleeping feels unsafe. They ate a little, from what they had, which was not much, and Aldric offered what he had from his own supplies, which was more, and after some visible internal consideration they accepted it.
"You could have gone west," Sylvarie said eventually. "To wherever is safer."
"I could have," he agreed. "I went south."
"Because of an oath made by people who are long dead."
"Because of an oath." He turned it over. "The people who made it are dead. The oath is not. That's the distinction." He looked at the fire. "My great-great-grandmother used to say that the dead are only completely dead when everything they made and everything they said is also gone. While the oath exists, the people who made it are, in some small degree, still present. I realize that's a particular way of thinking about it."
"It is a very elvish way of thinking about it," Sylvarie said. And she looked at him with those ancient, damaged, firelit eyes and said: "I was not certain that humans thought that way."
"Some of us do," Aldric said. "Not enough of us. But some."
The fire burned. In the litter, Valessian Dawnmere slept for the first time in what her sister would later tell him had been four days. A real sleep, not the hallucinatory half-collapse of extreme withdrawal, but something that looked and sounded like actual rest. Caeran stood tethered to his iron ring and occasionally moved with the slow, contented weight of a horse that has stopped for the night and found the stopping satisfactory. The Ghostlands moved around them with their particular and unpleasant qualities, but the fire held its space against all of it, the way fire does.
Aldric Tharalion sat by the fire he had built and watched over people he had not yet known long enough to call anything specific. He thought about old oaths and what they required. He thought about his father. He thought about the road they were about to travel, which was still ahead of them, waiting for them in murky gloom of a land devastated by the Scourge.
The compact had said: when one side is failing, the other side comes.
He had come.
That would have to be sufficient, for now, and he was prepared to let it be.