The Revenge of the Elves Read Free

the right thing Caroline? Could the sister have been wrong?”
    “There’s something about this place….It’s making me uneasy.” Caroline’s life before this was sheltered and protected, her father made certain of that. Most of the conflicts she encountered were among her animal friends and easily reconcilable or usually forgotten. Issues like this never plagued her before.
    “We shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts,” Dalloway said, trying to push them from his mind. “We know what we’re supposed to do! If the map was meant to be in Parth, then Tamara never would have left there with it to begin with. We can’t second guess ourselves now.”
    “Still…” she hesitated. “What if she was wrong? What if the boy really does need the map?”
    “I can understand their urgency to remove it from Parth and hide it away somewhere else. There was no question Caeltin would have been there soon enough to claim it for his own. Somehow he knew the sisters had it in their possession,” Dalloway said.
    “But he also knew she left the Tower with it!” Caroline reminded him.
    “Yes, you’re right. That traitor he sent almost wrested it from her. If we hadn’t arrived when we did, that miserable elf would be on his way back to Sedahar with the scroll and the shard, and Tamara would be dead.”
    “It wasn’t luck that brought us to her side. Remember Sidra’s medallion? She knew the sister was in danger. She led us to her.” Sidra again. Always Sidra. “Do you recall anything more about the time you spent with her before my father and I found you?”
    “Very little. After you helped me recover my memory, there were still gaps. Even now I grasp for the threads, but it’s like trying to remember a dream; the memory is just beyond my reach though I know it’s there.” His fingers toyed with the amulet hanging from his neck. “She guided us here too.”
    “Yes, but her light’s faded now. Look at it.”
    Lifting the medallion before his eyes, Dalloway gazed upon it as if unaware he’d been holding it. It was dull and pale in color. But the black sand glistened in the sun, slithering underfoot.
    “It’s left to us to decide what to do then,” Caroline said, stepping carefully.
    “We were told what to do! Can we take it upon ourselves to do otherwise?”
    She shook her head, frowning. “How well do you remember the poem Sidra implanted in your mind?”
    “I’ll never forget it again,” he said, grimacing. “It’s etched in my brain now,” Though the weeks with Sidra were still impossible to recollect.
    “It said to pluck it from their hands. It said that ‘the sisters know not what they do’.”
    “It also said that ‘the Drue keep what they find’. But they didn’t keep the map!”
    “No. But they kept Angeline!” Caroline replied.
    “That never occurred to me,” Dalloway admitted. He climbed a low hill and helped Caroline up and over it. “So you think Sidra wants us to keep the map? That she guided us here for another reason?”
    “I don’t know if she wants us to keep it or not. But I have a feeling she doesn’t want us to destroy it in the way that Tamara was going to; by dropping it down the well.”
    “And have it land upon the daemon’s chest, you mean?”
    “Exactly. It was a Lalas who told Tamara to seek the well. And Sidra seems to be telling us that the Lalas are confused somehow, blinded by some temporary need.” Digging her toe into the loose surface, a small cloud of dust circled around her like a ghost from below.
    “Don’t do that,” he pulled at her arm. Caroline stared at him worried, and looked down at the sand. What did he expect she would uncover?
    Dalloway closed his eyes and recited the entire poem that only weeks before was buried in his subconscious and he could not even recall a single word of it:

    “So much you can, so much you can’t
    Choose those things you must.
    How loud you rave, how loud you rant;
    We all return to dust.
    Do what you may along