Lord's Fall (Elder Races #5)(29)

You mean a civil war? Eva said, lifting her eyebrows.

Yes.

The captain shook her head. Before my time, princess.

Pia snorted, and a grin played at the corners of Eva’s mouth. Apparently there was one, and it was big and nasty. Dragos said it changed the landscape of the Earth, caused the Elves to scatter and eventually gave birth to the Light and the Dark Fae.

Shew, what a lot of drama, said Eva. The captain paused. If Numenlaur is the “old country,” then that’s where the war began?

Sounds likely, Pia replied.

Eva remarked, Makes me curious why they coming to visit Calondir and Beluviel.

Pia said, Me too. Keep your eyes and ears sharp in case you get the chance to overhear something, will you?

You bet. I’ll pass the word to the others to do the same.

Silence fell again between them, and that was the last they spoke for a while. Wowzer, thought Pia, after her and Eva’s rocky beginning, it seemed almost peaceful.

The light was beginning to wane when one of the Elves broke away from the group and ran ahead. Pia hoped that meant the Elf was taking word of their arrival to Calondir, and their destination was close at hand. She had long since stopped trying to talk with anyone and rode in a cloud of increasing tiredness.

She must have fallen into a doze, because the next thing she knew a shout of greeting sounded up ahead. She jerked into alertness.

Those at the front of the party passed around a huge age-darkened granite boulder. She looked up at the massive stone. As she neared, what had appeared at first to be random bulges and hollows aligned into an Elven face with noble features and an inscrutable expression. It was impossible to tell if the face was male or female. The sculpture held her mesmerized until she came too close to discern it, and then the stone became just a stone again.

“Will you look at that,” Eva whispered.

“What?” She glanced at the captain who was staring forward, and she looked in that direction too. At first she didn’t notice anything that might cause Eva’s wonder. The travelers from the front of the group had stopped in a clearing at the foot of a rocky waterfall, the fast-flowing, turbulent river ribboning into the trees. Elves dismounted with smiles of pleasure. They called out to others who came to greet them.

Then her perspective shifted as it had with the massive stone face, and she saw the building. It spanned the top of the waterfall, by some trick of architectural genius seeming as if suspended in the air. The building had several levels, its lines modern and ultra-plain. The outside walls were covered in plain sheets of reflective glass so that it all but disappeared from sight.

Once she saw it she couldn’t look away, and she only dismounted when Eva nudged her knee. Beluviel approached, looking as fresh and bright as she had that morning. The consort said simply, “Welcome to our home.”

Pia blinked and forced herself to concentrate on the other woman. “Thank you. It’s stunning.”

Beluviel regarded the building with the same inscrutable expression from earlier when they had talked about the tree table. “We loved the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania, Fallingwater, so much we chose to emulate something of that style. We finished rebuilding in the 1970s.”

She and Eva walked with Beluviel to the wide, winding staircase that had been carved into the stone by the fall, while the other Wyr gathered their packs from the horses and followed close behind. Pia forced her strained, quivering thigh muscles to work and matched the consort step for step.

As they climbed, two tall, Powerful Elves, both male, appeared on the landing at the top of the stairs and watched their approach. One of the males was Calondir. The other was Ferion, whom Pia had met last May in Folly Beach.

Both Elven males wore serious expressions. The High Lord’s hair was long and sable dark, and bound back tightly, his eyes a bright, startling blue. In the May teleconference, Pia hadn’t noticed the resemblance between Ferion and Calondir, but in person, the similarity between the two males was unmistakable. They both had the same strong, elegant bone structure.

Beluviel paused on the top step, and instinctively Pia paused with her. The High Lord and his consort faced each other with cool, perfect courtesy.

Calondir said, “Lady.”

“My lord,” Beluviel murmured.

Pia’s eyebrows slid up before she could get in control of her expression. Maybe she and Dragos would greet each other so coolly too, after they had been together for a bajillion years, but somehow she didn’t think so.

Then Calondir turned to her and inclined his head. “Greetings, Lady of the Wyr.”

Greetings, not welcome. Even though Calondir didn’t show any hint of his emotions, she was suddenly convinced that the High Lord was blazingly furious.

Clearly he was not falling over himself with excitement at her arrival.

Oy vey.

SEVEN

The undercurrents that swirled around Ferion, Beluviel and Calondir were stifling. Pia received the distinct impression that the three of them exchanged an intense storm of telepathic words while she faced the High Lord’s ageless, closed expression. Meeting his cool, Powerful gaze was one of the more challenging things she’d done since, well, since she’d argued with Dragos in the middle of the night.

Suddenly the pressure from the last two days, hell, the last seven months, welled up, and it had to go somewhere outside of her body or she would combust. She cast about mentally . . . where, where . . . but in the end, there was really only one place for it to go.