The Elven King Read Online Free PDF Page A

holding her breath till she let it out.
    “She’ll wake in a day or so,” Aranion continued, “as though from a long slumber. And she’ll remember nothing.”
    “Was that another…?” What was the word he’d used? “Another geis ?”
    “Yes, but a messy one,” he said. He looked slightly sheepish, slightly chagrined. “We do not make a habit of enchanting mortals, you know. In fact, should anyone find out that I crossed over to your world, the punishment would be severe.”
    “Severe… like how?”
    “My name will be stricken from the annals of the World Trees,” he said, “and I will be stripped of my magic, given the ordeal of a thousand cuts, and, once weakened, will be chained to the cliffs of the Hell’s Teeth, just outside the Bane Sidhe’s Court, for the dyre-drakes to feast on what remains of my flesh.”
    Sade stared at him, trying to see if he was joking, but he looked completely serious. “Jesus,” she said, feeling her skin go cold. She hadn’t recognized half the words he’d used, but it all sounded bad. No wonder people didn’t know about these gates, or what lived on the other side of them, if this was the punishment people here received for crossing over.
    “Though,” he went on, “perhaps my father will find some way to mitigate my sentence. He is King, after all.”
    Sade blinked at him – still serious. She shook her head, trying to clear it. “You seem very calm about all this,” she said. It was an understatement.
    Aranion shrugged. “There reaches a point of despair beyond which you simply can’t be afraid,” he said.
    That made Sade look at him in a new light. In the serious expression on his fair, strange face, she could see now the lines of tension in it, the worry and fatigue in his beautiful eyes. Son of the king or not, it seemed as if Aranion had things rough – even rougher then she did. Sade felt her own problems retreat into the background.
    “Listen,” she said, “maybe you can just pin it on me. Say that I just wandered through, or something? Unless you guys as rough on trespassers as you are with your own?...”
    Aranion shook his head, though his lips turned up in an unlikely ghost of a smile. “It’s unlikely that two mortals would just happen to fall through,” he said. “And then that I would kill one of them. And, in any case, even if they would believe it, as an elf, I cannot lie.”
    Sade wasn’t sure which was more shocking: what Aranion had just said about being unable to lie, or that this devastatingly handsome man had just claimed to an elf. “What?” she said cleverly.
    Yes, granted, he did have the ears. And the look. Well, not the look like the department-store elves who supposedly made toys at Christmas, but the unbelievably-handsome look, like in those Peter Jackson movies.
    But who just… came out and said they were an elf? As if it were the same thing as saying they were Cambodian or Jewish?
    Sade hadn’t been into fantasy movies since she was a child. But all of a sudden, she seemed to be living in one.
    It all seemed… impossible.
    “Well, uh,” she said, trying to be practical. “We’ll have to do something about Michael’s body, in any case. Can you… I don’t know… can you set it on magic fire, or something?”
    Aranion looked thoughtfully – even a little sadly? – at the corpse. “I may have to risk it. But the rangers are already hunting me – have been ever since I left my father’s court. And every time I perform magic, I leave a mark on the astral plane, making me easier to find.” He sighed. “In truth, I more than half expected them to be here when we arrived. But I suspect the Gate is muddling my footprints.” He studied the body again, then seemed to come to a conclusion. “The best thing would be to leave him for the carrion eaters,” he said, decisively. “They’ll be here soon enough, anyhow. The ones who eat the dead have sharp senses.”
    The carrion-eaters will be here soon enough? The