Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

The elf talked to him, often serving up the same sort of observations his wife had made on the original trip. Had he been dreaming of the ride last night, letting her siphon from him the raw material to mimic the past? No matter. It soothed him, as did the hand she tucked into his palm.

As they came around a bend at dusk, Jordan gazed across a pasture toward a copse of trees and made out a collection of tents. Even at this distance, he could tell none were made of synthetics. No bright colors. The fabric had been hand-woven of natural materials, the poles selected from deadfall rather than shaped industrially. A handful of fey beings stood in a ring, paying obeisance to the setting sun with raised arms and a crooning that just managed to drift into the car through the half-lowered window.

Jordan had forgotten the camp was located there. Perhaps he had not seen it on the previous excursion. Outsiders tended to be relegated, by their choice or otherwise, into the nooks and crannies of the landscape. The parcel was not unlike the one he had leased to his companion’s clan.

The tents slid out of view, but the memory of them nagged. Finally, when it was clear she was not going to comment, he asked, “Is that how you live in your world? Or do you have homes? You know, solid structures?”

“Would your wife have such knowledge?” The voice and physical mannerisms remained those of Véronique, but the elf had emerged, if only to remind him of the role she was supposed to be fulfilling.

“No. But I’m asking anyway.”

She leaned back, half-closing her eyes as if gazing over the horizon. “We dwell among the forests and meadows in abodes made of living trees and vines. Bowers for the least exalted among us, palaces for the mighty. The trees shape themselves at our command, and in return we revere and nurture them. They have a kind of sentience possessed by only a smattering of the plants in this realm. To walk beneath the leaves of my home near Cnoc na Fírinne…” Her voice faded, wistfulness stealing its vigor.

“You’d prefer to be there right now if you could,” Jordan said.

“Yes.”

“Is it true what they say, that your people were exiled?”

“The details I will not speak of. I and those forced to this side of the gateway angered our Lord and Lady, who believed our actions benefited a scheme of the drows. A year and a day we must pay our penance.”

“But you’ve been here much longer than that already.”

“Time flows differently on this side of the barrier. A century and more will pass here before we can return.”

“That’s awful,” he said emphatically. “Though from what I’ve heard, you’re capable of living to see the day.”

“We do not age once we are grown, but we are not invulnerable. There is so little in this world that sustains us, and what there is of it is dearly bought. Many of us will die before the exile is complete.”

Jordan had read of murdered elves, of suicide. In less than twenty years since the Fall, a third of the tens of thousands who had been banished had already expired, with almost no births to offset the attrition. To him, those facts had been mere statistics, of no greater significance than the number of malnutrition cases in the Third World.

As for the remark about “dearly bought,” the deprivation of the Outsiders had been something for him to exploit.

“You ask me of these matters as if they troubled you personally,” she said.

“I wanted to learn more about you.”

“Are you courting me, then?”

“No,” he said quickly. “No, of course not.”

“Good. It cannot come to fruition.”

The weather turned stormy, as good an excuse as any to sequester themselves in the mansion once more. Jordan placed the weekend before him as if it were another of his projects, concocted a goal, and set about to fulfill it.

“I want you to read aloud to me,” he announced after brunch.

“All right,” she said. “Read what?”

He deposited a large stack of paper on the coffee table. “I want to hear her words,” he said, settling beside her on the sofa.

The stack contained printouts of the archive of email Véronique had sent him over the years. There were scores of letters written during the many separations while he was off on business trips or she traveling from city to city doing her foundation work. His wife had composed them almost as ongoing journal entries, with a depth he was ashamed he seldom put into his replies on the infrequent occasions he answered her by written word. The paper version saved the elf from what were, to her, noxious energies emitted by the computer.

He had reviewed some of the text immediately after the funeral, but hearing the words in Véronique’s voice restored the full impact.

“Charles managed to uproot the entire tulip bed,” she read from a letter written while he had been in Tokyo for a week, manipulating his way past trade restrictions. “Sometimes he’s still such a puppy.”