I steeled my resolve and nodded to myself. Then I hopped up and ran to the mess of books and papers that littered the floor in the western corridor. The answers would not have been neatly kept, but born of pain. This wreck of a space is where I would find them.
I pulled book after book off the floor, flipping through the elven runes I couldn’t read and ethereal illustrations I couldn’tappreciate. One after the other, I tossed upon the ground, desperate for any sign. Anything that looked like a clue. My hand stilled when I came upon an ancient tome. Unlike the other books written in the neat penmanship of scribes, this one was written in a far messier scrawl.
I brought it over to Elden. “What is it? It seems to be a handwritten account.”
I laid the book in his hands. Elden winced as he worked to sit up. After a few moments of inspection, he said. “It is a journal, written in the hand of King Theronvere. My grandfather’s hand.”
My heart sped up at the discovery. “What can you read?”
Elden read a few passages, “This is his account of the wars with the humans.” Elden flipped excitedly to the middle of the book, “Here he meets Elayna. He writes of their love.”
Elden flipped farther into the book. “He writes of the birth of my father. He was very proud.” Elden flipped a few more pages, and his eyebrows laced together. “His writing is faster here, his penmanship growing more and more messy. Here he says that his grief knows no bounds. He howls in the night.”
Elden turned back a few pages and inhaled, his deep voice sending chills spiraling down my sides. “My Elayna. She is gone. Dead. I awoke on Christmas morning to her lying dead in the bed next to me, her body growing cold in my loving embrace, and I shall never smile again.”
My eyes burned as Elden read page after page of Theronvere’s soul-rending grief. He loved Elayna, truly loved her. Elden read as a darkness crept over Theronvere’s heart. His grief morphed into anger. He hated humans and their frailty. Hated that mortals could die from something so ordinary as a common illness. And he hated Christmas more than anything. No wonder the elves stopped celebrating it.
His entries became less and less frequent as he fell into grief and madness. He banished the humans from the lands of theelves. Then he sent his son to live with his aunt and uncle in Elkhaven, for he could not endure the endless questions about when his mother would return.
“This last potion I made myself, for I have dismissed the last of my servants. This next potion will work. It will return our magic to whom it belongs—the elves. So, I endeavor night and day to break the treaty. To go to war, for at least in war I will feel again.”
Elden and I shared a look, then he kept reading. The writing was more frenzied now, erratic. “I can feel the magic working through me. It is all-consuming. Filling my very soul. The pain is too much to bear. Can’t write. Only feel. Pain, but what is new? I have only known pain this last year. It is nothing to me now. I feel nothing.”
Elden flipped the page to reveal a blank page, the rest of the book unfinished. I sat beside him working my lower jaw, shaking my head. It was the king, the first king of the elves, Elden’s grandfather, who’d broken the magically binding treaty between human and elf. He’d taken magic from the humans; he’d started the blight.
Grief turned King Theronvere into a monster.
27
WHAT DO YOU SEEK?
“Wait.” Something on the last page of the diary caught my eye. “He said he was working to destroy the treaty. Where is it?”
Elden shook his head. “No one has seen it for centuries.”
“Elayna,” I muttered as I stared at the human queen in the painting on the wall before me. A warmth filled me. A tenderknowingI had begun to associate with my magic burned in my heart. Was my magic leading me to an answer? One only another human woman would look toward? Toward another human woman who had somehow earned the love of the Elf King?
“Elayna?” Elden asked, his white eyebrows knit in confusion. “She’s the key.” I nodded, that same warmth filling me. “I know it.”
I stood and ran to the mural.
The human queen had looked familiar upon my first glance, but I hadn’t taken the time to study her.
It was now that I recognized where I’d seen her before. Queen Elayna, first human queen to the realm of Ravensong, was the same woman from the scrolls from the library backin Elkhaven. She was the painter. The artist with magic. Her signature was an “E” with a sword passing through it. I’d seen it spoken of in the scroll about magic humans. It was the same signature I saw on this great Christmas mural. She’d decorated the walls of her castle in the story of her people, and of the elves.
Her love brought both human and elf together. Then her death had sent the Elf King on a mission of destruction.
She was the key to the blight. The shadow curse. Everything.
“Alright Queen Elayna, what is it you want me to find?” I asked the ancient woman. Her eyes stared straight into my soul, a knowing look across her full lips, as if she saw me through her magic. With one hand she held a steaming cup of a hot drink, with the other, she pointed outward toward a large arched door.
“Go through the doorway,” I said to myself. “Got it.”
I took a few steps toward the door, then turned to Elden, knelt down beside him and pressed my forehead to his. Warmth filled my heart again, as if this, whatever it was between the Elf King and me, was right. Good.
Though his face winced in pain.
“I have an idea, but I have to leave you for just a moment.” Guilt spiraled down my back, but the only way to help him was to work to find his cure. “Will you be alright?”
