Sanctuary

“Happy?” he said, smiling slightly around a mouthful of fruit.

“Very happy, Great Speaker.”

With that, the longtime valet and sometime general of the royal guard withdrew, a cheery, “Rest well, sire,” floating over his shoulder as he disappeared.

Before the Battle of Sanction, when he’d put Planchet in charge of the Qualinesti troops, Gilthas had told him just how important he considered him to be. Friend, advisor, father-figure, bodyguard, Planchet was all of that and more. Kerianseray was Gilthas’s heart, his love, his life; Planchet, he’d come to realize, was his strength, the firm center in the swirling chaos of their lives.

Gilthas lifted the cup to his lips again. His hand trembled. Nettled by the sight, he drank quickly, draining the cup. The nectar was young and raw, inclining to sourness. No one could make good wine while in headlong flight. Nectar, like a nation, needed stability to reach its full potential.

He poured another measure. One had to make do with what one had. He drained the cup again, leaned back in the chair, and closed his eyes.

The world was turned on its head. Filthy goblins prowled Qualinost, despoiling the forested lanes of Kith-Kanan’s city. Great blustering minotaurs inhabited the crystal halls of Silvanost. The bulky monsters could scarcely fit through a typical elven doorway-what use would they have for an entire city? To think such uncouth hands held the twin epitomes of grace, culture, and civilization! The images in his mind-or perhaps the raw wine-made sickness rise in Gilthas’s throat. Coughing, he fought it down.

He chided himself for falling into that trap, thinking that places made a nation. Cities and towers, gardens and temples were only chattel. What really mattered was life, and the things that ensured life: food, water, simple shelter. Those essentials must be secured if the elven race was to survive.

And his people would survive. Gilthas was determined on that point. All else was mere vanity.

Gilthas had brought his people out of the conflagration that engulfed Qualinesti, across the Plains of Dust, to the supposed sanctuary of Khur. Fate had delivered the throne of Silvanesti into his hands when his cousin Porthios, Speaker of the Stars, vanished. Porthios’s son and successor, Silvanoshei, was slain at the end of the war. Queen Mother Alhana, grieving the death of her son, had gone on a desperate search for Porthios. Before leaving, she’d given into Gilthas’s hands the crown of Silvanesti.

Out of the catastrophe of exile had come one of the greatest events in Gilthas’s life, in any elf’s life: the unification of two kingdoms sundered since the Kinslayer War. Alhana, a Silvanesti, and Porthios, a Qualinesti, had hoped their own marriage would bring the two nations together. Instead, it had driven them further apart. Now, against all odds, the two nations were one again, united in the person of Gilthas himself. Once sneered at as the “Puppet King” he was now known as Gilthas Pathfinder. It was up to him to find the path to a permanent home-wherever that might be.

Temporarily, pride could be sacrificed, honor dispensed with, treasure spent. To hold the ancient race of the Firstborn together, he would treat with whomever he must, even a rogue like Sahim-Khan, one of the most conniving, grasping humans he’d ever met.

In a royal line known for black hearts, Sahim’s naked ambition and glowing greed stood out as exceptional. With half his capital in ruins, he dreamed of elven wealth flowing in to repair it. But if it took treasure to buy sanctuary, no matter how makeshift and uncomfortable, for his exiled people, then Gilthas would use every scrap of steel and gold his subjects could raise. Treasure, like buildings and land, was expendable. Life was not.

Once, he had measured his life by the fleeting moments spent with Kerian. Like a tempered blade, she was bright, sharp, and deadly, and must be handled with care. Not for her and Gilthas were quiet comfort and gently murmured vows of love. Theirs was a marriage of opposites. Planchet had said once-after a particularly rough day and too much potent nectar-that it was as if the gods had cleaved apart a single hero, creating strong, hot-headed Kerianseray and thoughtful, feeling Gilthas. Their marriage had joined the two halves together again, creating one person, one soul.

She lived. As certainly as he felt his own heartbeat, Gilthas knew Kerian was not dead.

He hadn’t realized he had fallen asleep until a noise suddenly jolted him awake. The empty nectar bottle lay next to his chair; the clay cup had fallen from his hand.

As he sat wondering how long he’d dozed and what had awakened him, the tent roof shook, sending motes of dust down onto his head. Shouts arose outside. A sirocco must have swept over the tent complex, upsetting some of the less stable dwellings.