Author’s Note: the following story is set in the world of my fantasy novels, and will eventually become part of the as-yet-unwritten SwordLore series. Some adult content. For Dave, with thanks for the challenge and the inspiration!

Late of a summer’s night … the camp was quiet except for the diehard sounds of revelry coming from the tavern-tent and the low conversations of the men on sentry duty. The banked glow of the firelight dimmed the heavens, but at the darker edge of camp where a small stream churned restlessly through the weeds, the stars were able to shine through with pallid luminescence.

The stream was a favored spot with what few lover’s pairs there are, behind the Thanian front lines in war-torn Keyda. But this night the two of them had the place to themselves. He walked with her, keenly conscious of the light weight of her hand in the crook of his elbow, aware of the sweet scent of her perfume.

And even more keenly aware of how wrong this was … because as much as he might have come to develop a general fondness for humans, no elf of the Emerin should be out walking with one of their women.

Least of all while disguised as a human himself, not just disguised but altered, the memory of the shaper-mage’s touch still and always heavy in his flesh. An elf, a spy, and even if the humans were not precisely the enemies of the elves, nor were they entirely allies. Peacekeepers, they called themselves, and mediators, and no matter what they called it they were still swept up in the battles.

Yet here he was, and even if it was wrong, he couldn’t entirely suppress a smug sense of pride - of all the soldiers, of all the thousands of them who heard her sing and moaned over her slender grace and coppery beauty, he was the one she chose to walk with every evening. He was the one on whom her gaze lingered those first few nights, when his comrades dragged him to the show and pushed their way to the front.

But the disquiet remained, and he knew she felt it too. To deflect it from himself, he offhandedly said, “Jorgen doesn’t seem to like me much. Less and less each time I come a’calling.”

Rosalyn made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “It isn’t you. He wouldn’t like anyone in your place. He doesn’t think I should get involved with any of the soldiers, and up until now, I hadn’t.” Her voice was smoky and soft, a little lower but no less clear than when she sings.

“Are you and he …?” he trailed off hintingly.

“Jorgen? Gods, no! I think he sees me as more of a pet, a pretty little money-making songbird. He doesn’t want me to be looking beyond the next show, doesn’t want anything or anyone to distract me from my music.” She gave him a sidelong glance with long-lashed eyes that were the pearl-blue of the sky just before dawn. “Until now, that’s the way it had been, and so he must have expected that was the way it would always be. Until I met you.”

“Why me?” he asks, although he knows it is edging into dangerous territory. “I must know two dozen fellows who’ve asked you.”

She stopped and turned to face him. The two of them were almost of a height, and in the play of shadows he could hardly tell she was human at all … a pang twisted in his gut at the very thought, which was at once alarming and alluring.

“Why? I don’t really know … there’s something different about you, Karan Thorn. Something in your eyes. Oh, every man in this war has old eyes … every man in this war has known pain and doubt … but when I looked into yours, even from up on stage that first night … I saw something more.”

Rosalyn’s hand slid along the side of his face, thumb running gently along his cheekbone beneath his eye. Her fingertips innocently brushed his earlobe and he suppressed a gasp.

“As if,” she continued, barely above a whisper, “you didn’t know who you were anymore. Didn’t know where you belonged. And that spoke to me, Karan, because I have felt that way my entire life.”

“It’s true,” he admitted. “But not in the way that you think. It’s not the same. Rosalyn … I like being with you. But I have … secrets … that you’d never understand.”

“Try me.”

“I can’t. Much as I wish I could, wish there was someone I could talk to about what I’m going through, I know I can’t. It’d be too dangerous for both of us.”

Sudden dismay made her withdraw her hand from his face to cover her own mouth. “Karan … are you breaking with me? This talk … that you like being with me but your secrets are too dangerous … is this your way of telling me we can’t be together anymore?”

“I don’t know! We shouldn’t be together, for more reasons than you know … but I …” the words wrenched painfully from him. “I want you. And it’s wrong, gods, it’s wrong, but there it is. I do, and if we keep on seeing each other, walking together, sooner or later I’m afraid I’ll try … and more afraid that you’ll accept.”

“Afraid? Am I so terrible?”

“No … beautiful, wonderful … and that’s the problem.”

She smiled, but it was unsteady and trying to make light of things. “Is your secret that you’re a Knight of Blackmoon, sworn to chastity? Is that it?”

A harsh, humorless laugh burst from him. “No!”

“Because I would never want to come between a man and his vows.”

“I haven’t taken any vows … not as such. It isn’t that.”

“The other girls in the show are always talking about the men they’ve been seeing and found them impatient, even desperate. That was part of what made me like you so,” she said. “You weren’t in a rush, and you looked into my eyes instead of just at the rest of me. But after a while, yes, I did start to wonder … wonder if it was something wrong with me that made you hold back. Because I would accept, Karan.”

“It isn’t, I swear, isn’t something you’ve done wrong.” He took her hands, but dropped them as he realized how his own were trembling, not wanting her to feel it. He was too late.

“What could be so awful as to keep us apart, then?”

He almost told her then, almost spilled out the entire truth. How he had joined the army as so many other young elven men did, and how the aptitudes he’d shown had brought him to the attention of certain people once the war had begun. How he’d agreed to become an operative for them, even to the extent of undergoing this physical change. How he had allowed himself to be subjected to magics the rest of the Emerin thought lost and forbidden. How Feyna plotted against the king …

Yes, he could tell her all of that, but she would never understand, and both of their lives would be forfeit if it ever came known. Which it would, for she would have no choice but to expose him as a spy. But worst of all, he already knew the shock, perhaps even the revulsion, with which she would regard him when she learned just how different Karan Thorn truly was.

“Karan?”

She touched him, the briefest of touches on his shoulder, as if a butterfly had landed amid the loose tendrils of dusty gold hair that had escaped from the ponytail he wore.

“You don’t know who I really am,” he said. “There wouldn’t be a future in it.”

“You don’t know who I really am either. And look around you. The elves with their spells and their bows … the dwarves with their deadly machines of war … and we Thanians caught in the middle. There might not be a future for any of us. What harm, then, in taking what joy we can find? Who could fault us for it?”

She colored faintly as she spoke, and he seized on her modesty though he hated himself for it. “What about Jorgen? What about your family? You deserve better than a short affair with a common soldier.”

Rosalyn fell silent, eyes downcast at her demurely-folded hands. It was a pose similar to that she held in the breathless moments before she began to sing, one of the tender ballads that had won her the hearts of half the Thanian army and inspired even the gruffest of commanders to write impassioned letters home to the ladies they had left behind. Karan could believe that at any moment the music would swell and her voice would rise above it, soaring like some rainbow-plumed and dazzling bird.

“Jorgen does not own me, and my family and I are … estranged. But I will not debate my way into your arms by arguing what I do and do not deserve or what all the world might think of it. I have been forward.” She stepped back from him and looked at him sadly. “If what I’ve already said is not enough, there’s nothing more I can.”

Karan closed his eyes, but the sight of her was already and forever engraved upon his soul. Her hair was dim copper flame in the distant glow of the firelight, her woolen dress of twilight-blue molded itself lovingly to her curves.

“I am sorry, Rosalyn,” he said, still not daring to look at her. “That was unkind. My reasons are what bind me … I shouldn’t pretend to make reasons for you.”

“And you’ll not tell me those reasons.”

“I do want to be with you. To hold someone, to be held, to not be alone. To forget this war and all the things it’s made me do, forget what it’s made me become.”

“I want those things too.”

“But I …”

He opened his eyes, and if she had been regarding him with hurt or anger, he might have been all right. Her expression was only a sorrowful understanding and something else … something he’d not seen for so long … not love, not yet, but what might have been the fledgling beginnings of it. Were it not, that was, on the verge of dying, as her heart was poised to break.

It undid him.

“No!” he cried, all but leaping at her as he saw that breaking begin. He grasped her by the upper arms. “No, Rosalyn, wait … it’s not wrong, not unless we let it be, and I won’t!”

Her lips parted in confusion, perhaps a bit in fear at the sudden intensity of him, and he kissed them as if his very life hung in the balance. And perhaps it did, for at the moment he felt the soft but full yield of her mouth beneath his, some ingrained elven part of him fell away and shattered, and he was glad.

Glad.

He kissed her, and after her frozen moment of initial surprise, she melted into him and never would he have imaged that her body felt so good and right against his own. Her arms went around him, completing the embrace. He moved his hands up, to her shoulders and then to the sides of her throat. Her skin was warm silk, her hair cool fire.

Karan caught himself an instant before he would have made to caress her earlobes, shying away from the knowledge that she wouldn’t respond properly if he did, that he wouldn’t find a tapering sweep of sensual rim. Such might jolt him back into a realization of what he was doing, the taboo he was transcending. He stopped instead at the hinge of her jaw, and cupped her face in his palms.

When the kiss ended, he drew back enough to see the tears shimmering like mist on the twin azure lakes of her eyes. But she was smiling, and holding him, and then leaned forward to rest her head in the hollow of his shoulder and neck.

“Oh, Karan,” she murmured.

Her breath puffed lightly against his ear, a warm cloud in the shape of his taken name, and for a moment he almost told her his real one, wanted to hear her say ‘Karandis’ in that voice like smoke and velvet.

“I want you to know, Rosalyn,” he said, “that whatever happens, what I feel for you is real. I’m sure of that, even if I’m sure of nothing else. Know that no matter what might come to be, I will have never meant to hurt you. And though I may have to keep things from you, it’s only because I must. I must keep them from everyone. Please know that.”

“I know … and let the same be said for me. We have our secrets and they are necessary, so I do understand.”

Overcome, all but moved to tears of his own with relief at the earnestness he heard in her words, Karan kissed her again. This time, it lacked the wild urgency of that first one but was sweeter all the same because it was a lingering, exploring kiss that kindled a blaze at the base of his spine and spread through his veins in a slow but implacable molten flow. He knew then that this night would not end until they slept sated in each other’s arms.

And then, like a splash of water on the embers of his passion, raising steam and a sizzle of irritation, he realized that they could not return to his bed. It was little more than a cot, and while that might have been fine, it was in a tent shared with four other men, and that was not.

“It’s all right,” Rosalyn said when he explained in some anguish. “I have my own. It’s one of the few luxuries reserved for the star of the show.”

With no further need for discussion, Karan followed her there. The entertainers’ tents were set apart from those of the soldiery, near to the ones set aside for the cooks, laundresses, and other noncombatants. The one allotted to Rosalyn was small, and cluttered with trunks that overflowed a rainbow of her costumes, but once she tied the flaps shut behind them, they were alone in as much privacy as canvas walls could allow.

By the light of a single candle, she poured them each wine. Karan nearly dropped his upon noticing it was an Emerinian vintage, a gift to the entertainers from some of the elven troops that had hosted their show before. Not a good vintage, by elven standards, and in that he saw the traditional Emerinian arrogance - why waste good wine on humans, even if they are trying to help?

He did not remark on it, though, except to praise it. And it was praiseworthy by comparison; the worst elven wine outshone the best of the human vintners’ craft. But they soon forgot the wine in favor of each other.

Rosalyn blew out the candle, and in the darkness she was a slim, pale wraith of a shape as she undressed. Karan found that the darkness made it easier, not precisely to pretend she was elven, but to … well … overlook her non-elvenness. More important, it let him overlook his own apparent non-elvenness, for the shaper-mage had been thorough indeed. But even that ceased to matter as they embraced without his uniform and her gown between them.

He began by reminding himself to be quick … that humans didn’t spend as much time … by the way his fellow soldiers boasted of it, to humans it was over almost as quick as a sneeze. But then he knew the silken softness of her, the way she turned and sighed and uttered his name in gasping breaths, and couldn’t bear to rush through the deed.

At some point during the next few hours, he lost control of himself and succumbed to the urge to nuzzle and kiss her ears. Rather than shock him out of his passion, he found himself swept away, lost in the wonder of her, and gave in to his release as Rosalyn arched against him. They cried out together, beyond caring who heard, and at last subsided.

“I’m sorry that was over so fast,” he said when he had his wind back. “It’s … it’s been a long time. Which isn’t a very good excuse, I know … just an explanation.”

Rosalyn raised her head long enough to give him an incredulous look that he could sense rather than see clearly in the darkness. “So fast? It’s nearly dawn!”

Karan silently scolded himself. Aloud, he said, “You’re content, then?”

“Gods!” She curled against him. “Completely! Any more, and they’d have to pour me into an urn and carry me about, for my legs wouldn’t hold me.”

He smiled and put an arm around her, stroking the curve of her hip in ever-slower motions as drowsiness stole up on him. Rosalyn fell asleep with her head pillowed on his chest, and Karan drifted off soon after.

The horns sounded not long after, rousing the camp. Only then did it occur to Karan to worry that he’d been absent from his tent all night without explanation. But his comrades knew of his interest in Rosalyn, and while they might have also envied him, they understood. His sergeant, a man whose life Karan had saved recently in a suicidal display of bravery involving a discarded shield and an explosive dwarven ‘broomhandle’ device, would excuse any number of transgressions on his behalf.

By the bright light of day, Karan might have expected to be distraught over what he had done, but he was not. It no longer seemed to matter that he was secretly so different from the rest of them. Did not, in some way, appearance dictate reality? What seemed to be, was. Or was at least a reasonable enough likeness thereof.

He told himself these things, and as he passed more and more nights with Rosalyn, began to believe it. Every so often, the secret would surface in his mind, and he would come close to confession, but he never quite managed.

The camp moved on, escorting the entertainers and carrying supplies deeper into the duchy of Keyda. Karan attended the shows whenever he was able, claiming a spot at the front. Eventually, given the way she had eyes only for him during her love songs, his relationship with Rosalyn became widely known. On three or four occasions, this led to scuffles with jealous soldiers, but was overall indulgently smiled upon by the rest. Jorgen, who claimed to have discovered Rosalyn singing in a roadside tavern outside of Thanis and guided her rise to greatness, was less indulgent, but his star of the show knew her own mind and would not be dissuaded.

And so it went, as they pressed deeper into Keydan lands, toward the ravaged region between the Emerinian and Montennoran front lines and ever nearer the Dezran grasslands and the threat of ambush by the hated and barbaric minotaurs.

The life that had once seemed so strange and alien to Karan was now familiar, welcome. It was the Emerin that began to seem foreign, far-away. Sometimes it came to him with a sort of creeping horror that he was beginning to think like a human as well as look like one, but other times that same thought brought a strange comfort.

He went about his duties - sentry when assigned, the miserable make-work of the camp otherwise. But in the evenings, more often than not, Rosalyn would be there to take the trials of the day away. She never pressed him, either about his secret or about their future, and as the weeks went by, Karan began to come to a startling but not wholly unpleasant conclusion.

“Rosalyn,” he began, as they rested in her bed late one night.

She had been unusually quiet all day, but as he spoke, something in his tone must have sounded an alarm call in her mind. She sat up, copper hair tumbling around her bare shoulders, and put her fingertips to his lips.

“Don’t, Karan, please don’t say it.”

“Why not?” he asked against her fingers.

“Because we’ll be going separate ways soon, and may never see each other again.”

It was his turn to sit up, concerned. “What? Why?”

“We’ve come as far as we dare. Jorgen is taking us back toward Thanis, to entertain the troops in the west. But you … your unit is still eastward-bound. It will be time for us to say farewell.”

His heart sank. He’d known it was inevitable, of course, had heard the commanders mention it. More to the point, knew that his time here was almost up anyway and he’d be faced with the difficult task of returning to his contacts, resuming his former life. But oh, how it hurt to hear her say what she was saying.

“You have your work to do here,” she went on, “and I have mine. Maybe it’s not as important --”

“It’s moreso. I have seen the way you bring smiles and joy to thousands, give them back the hope they thought they’d lost. Don’t ever say it’s not as important.”

She shook her head, and there was a tremor in her voice. “What is important, to us, is that our paths lead different ways now. We knew it had to come to this.”

“That doesn’t change how I feel. You don’t know what this means to me, Rosalyn. What it means for me to love you.”

“You said it.” Her breath hitched. “Oh, Karan …”

“Is it so horrible a thing to say?”

“Isn’t it bad enough to know we must part without also knowing we love each other?”

He captured her hands, brought them to his mouth, rained kisses on her knuckles and palms. “If we know it, we might as well say it. I love you. I never thought it’d be possible, but I do!”

Before she could reply, a high shrill blast of a horn split the air. It was followed by a general call to arms, and the dull thumps of running feet. Karan sprang up, halfway into his uniform by the time Rosalyn had drawn the blanket around herself.

“What is it?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Whatever it is, it isn’t good.” He buckled on his swordbelt, leaned over, kissed her hard and fast.

She rose from the bed and began dressing as he dashed out. Moments later, he was falling into place with the others of his unit, and under the glare of torchlight, their commander told them the dire news.

“The dwarves have broken through! They came further north than expected, and they’re almost upon us!”

“By night?” someone shouted. “They never attack by night!”

The commander slashed his hand through the air for silence. “They never attack by night, true, but they do move by night. There’s an Emerinian contingent twenty miles east of us, and they are the target … we’re in the way, and so is that village.”

The village he indicated was one of the few whose inhabitants had not already fled. The previous day, they had been delighted to see the soldiers, trading mutton - Keyda’s only product - for other food supplies. There had even been a small show organized by Jorgan, which had been very well-received. The thought of those brave, happy folk in the path of the battle was a chilling one.

“War machines?” Karan called, and in his memory he heard the crackle of lightning, remembered Zanderian’s orders, and underlying all the ground-shaking thunder of the great metal-shod wheels grinding impartially over the earth.

“Something new,” the commander said, and his eyes were bottomless pits of fear evident even to his men. It struck Karan how ridiculously young he was - thirty if he was a day, less than half Karan’s own age and he was young himself. “Some new device of theirs, a rolling spiked wall if the reports are accurate.”

The reports were. Less than an hour later, they could hear it coming, and what few birds still lived in Keyda were skirling into the night sky while the animals fled as if it was an advancing line of fire. By the time the waning crescent of Livana’s silver moon peeked over the distant dark smudge of the Emerin, they could see it, tiny but growing as it came inexorably onward.

It brought its own light, torches flickering atop it and a red furnace glow shining through the cross-barred ranks of windows. The wall was better than a mile long, powered by gods-knew-what dwarven inventions but it gouted gritty black smoke from its many chimneys and the earth groaned and shuddered at the pounding of its monstrous engines.

There was something entrancing about it. Even before they could see the bristle of iron spikes jutting from its front, even before they knew about the pitch-ball catapults mounted on towers at intervals along its length, there was something deadly and ominous and entrancing.

The humans scrambled to organize themselves. Most of them were supply officers and escorts for the entertainers, and hadn’t seen much more than a few skirmishes. A few, like the unit with which Karan served, had done their time at the front lines and knew all too well what the dwarven devices were capable of. The villagers were rendered helpless with fear, milling about much like the sheep they raised.

So mesmerized were they by the approach of the spiked wall that it was only too late that anyone noticed the smaller machines. They preceded it like pages before a king, and suddenly filled the night with searing white fire as they launched their burden of eruptive missiles.

The land turned bright as a blinding winter’s day, everything illuminated in harsh light that hung in the air the way the sun itself did. Karan hissed in pain and covered his eyes, blinded even though he had been prepared for just such a thing. He was deafened not only by the explosions but by screams, as those who had never before witnessed dwarven warfare first-hand found out just how inaccurately the stories conveyed the truth.

In moments, the camp and the village became screaming bedlam. Any rank and order was scattered on the hot smoky wind that preceded the war machines.

“We have to get these people out of here!” yelled Ransey, the commander of Karan’s unit. “Before …”

He didn’t need to say before what. Karan knew what came next, and the dwarves didn’t disappoint. The air began to whistle with sharpened iron spears. Some of these had been heated red-hot and ignited the fields and tents and buildings.

And this, Karan thought crazily as he herded villagers onto overloaded wagons, is just their way of clearing a path!

“Karan!”

“Roslyn!” No amount of din could deafen him to her voice.

She ran up to him, and though he had never put much faith in warnings from the gods, he was suddenly and vividly sure that one of those spears was about to come down and nail her twitching, smoking corpse to the earth.

He threw himself at her, and they both went flying. There came a whistle, a thud, and a baking backwash of heat, and sure enough, Karan turned to see a spear embedded where Roslyn had been standing.

“Come on!” He pulled her to her feet and they raced a mad, weaving course through a quivering forest of iron.

The hail of spears had stopped, because the closest machines were almost upon them. The vast, indifferent wall still trundled relentlessly closer, but it seemed more a force of nature than anything made by a thinking being. The smaller ones, the armor-plated towers and massive catapults with which Karan was so familiar, smashed through buildings as if the wood were no more than paper.

He couldn’t even see a dwarf, concealed as they all were within their metal and ironwood shells. Their progress seemed to uphold everything they had said during the war - they neither wanted nor needed human interference, and it would be best for the Thanians if they would just stay out of the way. The Emerinians were little better, Karan knew, but at least their forces didn’t lay waste to the countryside just by passing through.

Intent on looking behind him, Karan plunged into the path of a wagon and recoiled as an eye-rolling, snorting, frothing draft horse reared up. Its hooves came down inches from his feet, leaving deep impressions, and then it was up again, kicking at the air, while the wagon of people shrieked and jounced.

Rosalyn pulled him back an instant before the horse came down again. He held her briefly, tightly, burying his face in her hair and breathing of her clean, sweet scent.

“I won’t forget you,” he said, and hoped that it would be true, hoped that Kysander Feyna’s mind-magics wouldn’t make a liar of him.

“What do you --”

He didn’t let her finish, picking her up and thrusting her into the back of the wagon. “Go, Rosalyn!”

“Karan!” She reached for him, but he had work to do. When she saw he didn’t mean to come with her, she tried to jump down, but others held her in place. “Karan! No!”

“Go,” he said brokenly, as the driver got the horse under control and the wagon jolted away. “I’ll find you. Somehow, someday, I will find you! That’s a promise!”

“I love you!” she cried.

And then a catapult’s deadly missile slammed into the earth only a few yards in front of him. He had a momentary glimpse of its curved egglike shell, and threw himself flat, covering his head with his hands.

The ground bucked and heaved as the iron shell exploded, spewing sickly yellow-grey phosphorescent fire and shards of flaming metal. Most of it sprayed up and out, but a tremendous gout of blistering heat singed Karan’s hair, blackened his uniform, pulled his skin to a red, shiny tightness, and made his sword almost too hot to hold. Except for a ragged iron hook that tore a line across his back, he was unhurt … for now … but he leaped up and ran for his life as that which had gone up began to come down, a vicious rain of debris.

When he had gotten beyond its reach, he whirled and peered desperately back. The wagon - ah, thank the gods! The horse was in a full-out frenzy, charging south with the bit in its teeth, but they were away from the war machines. He could still see a familiar, copper-haired figure in the midst of the crowded wagon.

“I love you, too,” he said, his voice lost in the clamor.

And turned to join his comrades, in their meager line of defense against the advancing dwarven army.

The End

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