| SORCEROUS SIGNALS |
| Written by Edward W. Robertson / Artwork by Marge Simon |
| On the Reproductive Habits of Elves |
Since childhood, Glindwell had read every book he could
find on elves, and had sat raptly through the verbal
equivalent of full encyclopediae from a handful of scholars
who'd actually set foot in the Silver Kingdom, academics
who spoke with the cosmopolitan and semi-prophetic
brag of men given a glimpse of a higher world—probably
because that was exactly the case—but for the 43 years
he'd spent picturing the place, he'd never allowed himself
to imagine he would one day see it himself. They were
cautious with strangers to the point of xenophobia,
elves. And if that's what it took to preserve their sylvan
village, with its staircases and platforms that grew right
out of the maples and willows themselves, he couldn't
blame them.
"It is with great pleasure," the envoy Dwindlemor rambled
on beside him, almost but not quite touching his shoulder,
"that I introduce Professor Glindwell Half-Elf, chair of
elven studies at Whitetower University."
A smile crossed the neither-old-nor young face of
Lleywood Rennigan, the kingdom's youngest prince,
regent of the village of Wyndleweir. "Should I be flattered
or horrified your people have formalized their interest in
our culture? What precisely do you intend to study?"
"Your children." Glindwell pasted a grin over his instinct
to frown. Had Dwindlemor emphasized the word "half" in
his name? That was a new one. In Whitetower, and in
fact everywhere else he'd been, now that he thought
about it, it was the full phrase that mattered, not the
fraction that came before the hyphen. The old "one drop"
theory. Oh, they might introduce you as half-elf,
half-dwarf, half-orc or -ogre, but in human society,
what was important wasn't what that half of you was, but what it wasn't: one of them.
His fellow academics could make the appellation sound like a laudable curiosity, but privately, Glindwell
found it exclusionary, no matter how pure their intentions. In some subtle way, things were different
here. Was Dwindlemor's emphasis on "half" a warning Lleywood couldn't trust the point to Glindwell's
ears? Or on the other end of possibility, a sly welcome, a hint that he, at least in part, belonged?
"Specifically, how you have them," Glindwell added.
As if playing straight to the stereotypes, Lleywood arched one of his elegant blonde brows. "The same as
any other humanoid, I imagine. Unless the orcs really do lay eggs."
"Ha ha," Glindwell said. "My question's a little trickier than that. And, I think, interesting. Specifically, why
do you live so long, yet have so few kids?"
The handsome elf glanced at Dwindlemor, his smile fossilizing on his face. "How unusual."
"And an unusually fine opportunity to let our shorter cousins learn a little more about us," Dwindlemor
said, almost but not quite touching the other elf's elbow. "I've assured Professor Glindwell no man,
woman, or topic will be above his research."
Glindwell's grin was no longer forced. Inside the forbidden forest of the Silver Kingdom, he might, at last,
find his real father.
~ * ~
"How many children do you have?"
Lleywood leaned back on his bench-like branch, his tipped head eclipsing a spear of sunshine penetrating
the dense maple leaves. He tapped his chin. "Two."
Glindwell jotted that down. "Same mother?"
"Of course."
Jabbed by the elf's sharp tone, Glindwell glanced up. "I'm not implying they wouldn't be."
Sunlight poured into Glindwell's face as Lleywood planted his elbows on his knees. "We're not impatient
like you folk. We marry for life."
"But even elves die sometimes, right? I've heard some widows and widowers never remarry no matter
how many hundred years go by, but—"
"Skepticism for rumor is surely a virtue, but in this case the rumor happens to be true."
Glindwell sat back on his own raised branch. The hard, polished wood looked impossibly painful to rest
on for any length of time (at least its bark had been stripped, though it still sprouted leafy twigs here
and there), but it was the conversation, not his seating, that had proved uncomfortable. He couldn't risk
offending Prince Lleywood—the whole point of interviewing him first was to display to the others they
could speak openly to him—but what was the point of conducting a study on elven children when he
couldn't even ask where they came from without getting the parents' hose in a knot?
"I'm sorry I sounded crass," he said. "Among university men, it's a common flaw to be so focused on the
information we're sniffing down that we lose all track of where our nose ends up."
Lleywood chortled. "Am I wrong to guess you reworded that phrase for my benefit?"
"It's a little different in human society," Glindwell grinned back. "Well. How many years apart were your
children born?"
"Eyrick was born 378, Second Reckoning, and Rudiana in 904."
"I see. Have you ever visited Whitetower?"
Lleywood cocked his blonde head. "Several times. Why do you ask?"
"To see if variables such as travel impact the frequency of reproduction," Glindwell lied. In truth, the
question had no academic relevance at all: his mother had lived her whole life in Whitetower, thus any elf
who hadn't been there couldn't be his anonymous father. Who'd been dark-haired, incidentally, ruling
Lleywood out; Glindwell had just wanted to see how he'd react to it. "Speaking of which, how often do
you and your wife make love?"
"As often as anyone else, I suppose."
"Can you be more specific?"
Lleywood's ageless forehead creased. "It varies. We've been married nine hundred years, you know."
Glindwell concealed his frustration with a long entry on his notepad. "What about in the last year, say?"
"I can't say, because I don't keep track. Unlike your kind, among us sex is not a contest. It's not a race
to see who can grab the most partners or the 'juiciest ass,' as you humans might put it. It's an
unquantifiable act of love. Don't ask me to attach a number to the sublime."
"I see," Glindwell frowned. Of course thinking like that was exactly why nobody knew anything about
elven reproductive habits beyond their own sweaty fantasies of long-limbed bodies writhing beneath
moonlight and waterfalls. But Lleywood was a prince, with a correspondingly princely image to uphold.
Perhaps he'd have better luck with the common folk.
~ * ~
Glindwell smiled harshly over his notes. In the two weeks since his arrival in the Silver Kingdom he'd
interviewed 49 subjects, and without exception, the elves' answers on the frequency of their lovemaking
were as useless as they were poetic. "When the moon's face shines as brightly as hers" (monthly?); "as
often as the spirit moves me," (three times a day? Or three times a century?); "whenever the willow's
arms caress each other as gently as my lover's" (every autumn? Or every time there was a stiff breeze?).
As far as Glindwell was concerned, the only hard fact he'd been able to collect was that Thomas owed
him twenty silver pieces.
On the cheery, beery night that had spawned this absurd quest, Professor Thomas Wainwright had bet
that sum on the half-joking theory elves were only fertile in their early years—the first 50-200 years of
their adult life, say—after which they hit some sort of elf menopause and settled down to putter around
the woods through their Golden Eons. But Glindwell's subjects' children were spaced at least ten years
apart, with most seeing age differences of one or several hundred years, and a couple outliers over two
thousand. Elf menopause was out.
Barring those that had been nothing but crude jokes, that left three competing theories. Robin proposed
they just didn't have sex that often ("At least not of the heterosexual variety," Thomas had guffawed.
"After you've seen an elf male, who could blame them?"). Cristov related tales of the northerners'
reindeer-gut contraceptives and forwarded the idea elves fornicated as frequently as humans or dwarves
or anyone else, but they possessed a form of their own "birth control," be it inborn or artificial. Lastly,
Vinson suggested they needed no such thing, as perhaps their fertility rates were naturally miniscule,
and thus elves were "shooting dummy-headed arrows" 99% of the time.
"And you, Glindwell?" Thomas had asked, breath ripe with beer.
Glindwell smiled and shook his head. "It wouldn't be right for me to wager on the outcome of a study I'll
be conducting, would it?" He slapped the ass of a passing barmaid. "Ethics, you know."
He'd meant his answer as a dodge, a joke, no more serious than the rest of their intellectual exercise
had been. Once it entered his head he could use that study to find his father, his furious quill had nearly
set fire to the parchment of his proposal. At his going-away party, he took the bet they'd all be wrong.
On the forest floor, he gazed dumbly at a series of knots protruding from the massive bole of a willow,
regularly-spaced knobs that served as the stairs to Dwindlemor's leafy home. Mere days ago the natural
staircase had struck him as wondrous, representative of the elves' harmonious partnership with a nature
that seemed happy to provide them with a home. Now it was just one more thing he had to climb.
"I've run into some troubles," he told Dwindlemor once he'd announced himself outside the doorway of
hanging willow strands. As he criticized the vagueness of his respondents' answers—after all, how could
you draw conclusions on elf reproduction when you had no damned idea how often they had sex—the
sharp features of the elf gathered in concern, then relaxed in comprehension.
"Here we face a cultural impasse," Dwindlemor said. "Elves are simply more romantic, in part because our
long lives teach us to gentle our rougher instincts. For instance, you will never see an elven prostitute in
the Kingdom, as there is no demand for such things in a sylvan community." He tapped his long-nailed
fingers together. "And despite the prince's endorsement-through-participation, you can hardly expect
the people to be completely open with an outsider."
"I'm half elf myself," Glindwell said. "For all I know, that half came from the Silver Kingdom."
The elf waved one hand for peace. "I know that, but you understand how these things are." His mouth
rounded with thought. "Aha! But what if we remove this unfortunate element from the equation? Get
together an anonymous questionnaire. While you're preparing it, I'll bend some pointy ears about giving
information you can actually use."
"What about all the people who can't read?"
"Every elf can read. Are there many humans who can't?"
"A few," Glindwell allowed. Still, he left heartened enough to plunge right in to drafting and redrafting
questions to be as inoffensive and bias-neutral as humanly possible, and to disguise the ones intended
to narrow down his hunt for the father his mother couldn't name. A day later he'd phrased his queries
so he no longer winced at them. A day beyond that, hand numb and cramping, he'd copied his list three
hundred times over. Dwindlemor, with apparently nothing better to do than appease his half-elf visitor—
the more time he spent in their earthly paradise, the more questions Glindwell had about what any of
them did—he saw no elf farmers, did the trees just hand down berries from their own branches?—
offered to distribute them throughout the forest village. Glindwell paced the thick parallel tree limbs that
formed the floor of his guest home, branches so smooth and sturdy he could believe elf feet had walked
them since the beginning of time.
The first returns looked promising. Poetic as always, but with a consistency to them suggesting the sex
lives of elves weren't so different after all, if a little more leisurely than the rodent-like humping of
humans. Almost uniformly, the responses referenced moon cycles or (especially when the couple was
younger, relatively speaking) the countdown of the planets. One to four times a month. So much for
Robin's bet. Yet some trouble tickled his mind, a suspicion he couldn't find a name for.
On his climb down from Dwindlemor's house, the second-to-last knot-handle came loose under his
slipper. He fell on his ass in the dirt and leaves, and after he'd caught his breath and dusted himself off,
he picked up the handle, intending to call Dwindlemor down to fix it. The words stuck in his throat. The
handle's end wasn't jagged from a break. Instead it was lined with a tight spiral, a wooden screw that
could be inserted into the threading carved into the corresponding hole in the tree. It hadn't grown as a
natural handhold, coaxed from the maple's trunk by primal elven magic. It too had been carved.
Manipulated to look that way to anyone who didn't already know better. He frowned and slipped it into
his pocket.
His suspicion unfolded as easily as the elegantly creased surveys. By the time a hundred responses had
come back, Robin's theory was back in the running and Glindwell was hamstrung. Their answers were too
uniform. Any population showed outliers and clusters; Glindwell could believe most elf couples had sex
once a week or month, but unless they were as unique among all races as they loved to claim, there
should be a handful who abstained entirely and a few who slapped wet parts three times a day. As he
compared pages side by side, his despair ballooned like a court-tinker's flying machine. Undeniably, ten of
them had even been written by the same hand.
The village's answers had been provided for them. In some cases, they'd actually been written for them.
All his results were useless, his scholastic data and even the ten elf males he considered paternal
suspects. He was no closer to his study or his father than when he'd left Whitetower weeks ago. In
some ways, he felt further than ever. As a child, he'd been exhaustingly difficult to get to bed (it was the
elf in him, his mom said; the moonlight-lover), but he'd settled into his straw mattress whenever his
mother, exhausted as she must have been from her long days pitching fish on the docks, told him
stories about the elves. First of all the races, she said, the gods had crafted them with all that was good,
insuring they were as beautiful in spirit as in their fair and fine-boned faces. Heroes and music-lovers,
incorruptible souls ready to step forth whenever the hearts of men wavered with weakness or
temptation. They struck down lies with silver swords and preserved the truth with ageless memories. His
father had been one of them! A graceful, unstained hero! So what, she asked, poking Glindwell's snub
nose, did that make him?
With a cold and vengeful logic, knowing he'd be banished from the Silver Kingdom if he was caught, he
decided to spy.
"How goes your survey?" Dwindlemor asked the next time he handed over a twine-bound bundle of
letters. "Getting some useful information now?"
Glindwell smiled. "I suspect I'm about to."
"I hope our human cousins won't be too disappointed to learn we're not so different after all."
From then on, Glindwell operated under the assumption they weren't. Under the guise of face-to-face
followups, he started sneaking up on elves around the village and met immediate success at catching
them unawares. If their eyes and ears were as sharp as rumored—he'd never noticed any appreciable
difference between his own senses and a human's—they weren't supernaturally so. On his stealthy
climbs, he peered at the handholds and saw seams; hanging beneath the broad floor-branches of one
home, he picked at a small knot until it fell away, exposing the gleam of a metal nail. Three days later,
with the last of the forged surveys returned and his excuses to linger dwindling, he waited for nightfall,
then crouched in the shrubs beneath Prince Lleywood's towering home.
It was a long shot, he knew. Most human male nobles had mistresses both open and secret, but a small
cluster of them stayed devoted to their wives, and in any event even the most flagrant adulterers spent
some nights in their marital beds. After the first fruitless night, Glindwell feared Lleywood might
confound him after all.
His worries died the next night when, quiet as a spider, Lleywood descended to the earth and crept
along the glen's trails to a distant tree. Glindwell followed at the limits of his vision, a shadow in the
maple-blotted moonlight. Ten minutes after the prince climbed the trunk-stairs to an unlit home,
Glindwell started up.
With his face just above the floor-branches, whispers threaded to his pointed ears. A man. A woman.
Robes soughing to the floor. Slow as a panther, Glindwell nosed his face beneath the willow-weaved
door. An elf woman lay naked on a bed of leaves, knees spread and raised to the moon, and Glindwell
saw not all stories of the elves were lies: this woman was achingly, gapingly beautiful, with the buttermilk-
smooth skin and lyre-like hips of a woman out of legend.
She also was not Lleywood's wife.
Glindwell watched for some time longer than professional curiosity allowed.
~ * ~
"You're a liar," he told Dwindlemor under the bright and ground-level daylight of the morning. Glindwell
knew he looked bleary-eyed, hair askew, his posture contorted by the resulting soreness of clinging to a
treeside staircase for the better part of an hour, a veritable vagabond next to the tall, lean elf in his dirt-
and stain-free robes. He didn't care.
Dwindlemor's mouth spread in a slow smile. "I beg your pardon?"
"You are a gods damned liar. And for some reason you've convinced your people to lie to me, too. I want
it to stop."
The elf glanced down the trail, dust motes flittering past his face. "Are you all right? You look fevered."
Glindwell lobbed the broken handhold at the elf's thin chest. "I followed Lleywood last night. I can
promise you he gets his royal wick snuffed more than once a month. Is anything you've told me true?"
"Stop calling me a liar."
"That's right. You're the faithful, pure-hearted children of the gods, constitutionally incapable of even
having dirty old sex, let alone with a person you're not supposed to."
"You don't know the first thing, waterblood." Dwindlemor straightened to his full height and smiled down
on Glindwell like an angry deity. "We have an image to uphold. A reputation to protect. We're the first
people, the ones your kind come running to whenever some tyrant seizes your throne or marches on
your borders. What would happen if you stopped trusting us? Gave up all hope of salvation?"
"We're about to find out."
"No we're not. You and your children are hereby banished from the Silver Kingdom."
Glindwell grinned, heart racing. "Go ahead. Then I'll expose you're just as base as us and you lie about
it. But I'll make you a deal. Cooperate with me, tell me the honest truth, and I'll commit the lie of
omission and leave out your lies. I'll make sure your dignity, if not your mystique, is preserved."
Dwindlemor cocked his head, stroking his hairless neck. "What are you getting out of this? A head chair
at your little university?"
"Knowledge," Glindwell said, picturing the proud faces of all the elf men he'd met since entering the Silver
Kingdom, imagining which one could have snared his mother's heart for a lifetime after the anonymous
night he'd spent with her. "That's all."
~ * ~
The bedroom door opened to him, and Glindwell plunged through it.
Urged by their prince and their foreign liaison to tell the truth, the villagers of Wyndleweir responded with
direct and zealous enthusiasm. Lies and legends Glindwell had believed for 43 years were swept away in a
handful of days. Robin's bet of elven chastity died under a weathering hail of good-hearted confession. It
turned out Dwindlemor had not so much lied to him—elves, by and large, did have sex between one and
six times a month—as concealed all the outliers and extremes that could shame their race. These boiled
down to the usual suspects: promiscuity, adultery, and homosexuality. In other words, the same boring
scandals all the other races engaged in, too.
Cristov's theory of birth control died after a dozen interviews. The elves seemed to have no concept of
it, natural or otherwise.
"You are suggesting I would wear a knotted pig's rectum on my penis?" Pillindor wrinkled his long and
noble nose. "On purpose?"
"It's known in some places," Glindwell shrugged. "How many children have you had?"
Pillindor tipped back his head, giving this some thought. His wife, Saesannae, snorted. "Three."
"All elf children?"
"Two elf, one half-elf," Pillindor said.
"Aha," Glindwell said, jotting their names next to the others he intended to follow up with: anyone with
ties to Whitetower or mixed-race offspring. When he returned for his second interview with the couple
later that week, Pillindor shook his hand. Glindwell couldn't stop grinning. "Where did you meet the
human woman who mothered your third child?"
"It wasn't him," Saesannae said, voice buoyed with an odd pride. "I had a thing for human men when I
was young."
"How did your marriage survive this indiscretion?"
She frowned. "Indiscretion? That guy was just my quarterly."
Glindwell glanced up from his notes. "Quarterly?"
"It's something a lot of us do," Pillindor laughed. "Every 25 years, we're allowed to sleep with someone
who isn't our spouse."
"You find this is healthy for your marriage?"
"Hey, do you know what it's like not seeing another woman naked for 900 years?" Pillindor grinned. "Me
neither."
Saesannae shoved his shoulder. "Right, Baron von Cocksman. When was the last time you even touched
a tit that wasn't mine?"
The male's grin turned sheepish. "Well, most of the time just knowing you can is enough."
Glindwell crossed them off the list. Vinson's theory of basement-level fertility rates stuck around much
longer. While in some way the data supported the idea, it didn't feel right. The numbers should show
extreme exceptions on either end, with some couples having a second child within a year of the
preceding offspring while other marriages never saw their long conceptive odds match up no matter how
many centuries they'd been together. Instead, the distribution of birth intervals were squished together,
with no child born within ten years of his or her sibling and most spaced too irregularly for the flattish
spectrum Vinson's idea suggested. A few couples had produced no children at all, but this could be
written off to everyday infertility rather than something elf-specific. One other number troubled him: a
disproportionately large amount of half-elf children.
Stymied by the opaque elf-elf partnerships and seeking to delay the rapid dwindle of his personal leads,
Glindwell followed his instincts and scheduled a followup with Filomela, an elf woman who'd lived with a
human man five years without having kids.
"Would you say you tried?" he asked.
She shrugged her slim shoulders, gazing past the entwined branches framing her window to the
shimmering green canopy of the forest village. "For the first few years. When I thought we'd be together
his whole life."
"Was it the lack of children that drove you apart?"
Filomela laughed lightly. "I let myself think that for a long time afterwards. But it was him. He never
believed he was good enough for me—it was like he thought of me as a perfect elf maiden, the lady in
the high castle whose slippers he was too low to kiss. I tried to show him I had all the same flaws as a
human woman, but that only frustrated him worse."
"So you left him?"
"He left me. People are so weird, aren't they? It was like he'd rather walk off with his idealized me intact
than come to terms with the living, breathing woman in front of him."
Glindwell smiled with half his mouth. "You would be amazed how many so-called academics refuse to
rethink their ideas no matter how hard they're bludgeoned by new evidence."
It took the rest of the day for him to realize he'd been talking about himself. He laughed in the darkness
of his platform, uncaring how far the sound traveled through the airy village. They'd all been wrong. He
might never find his dad—his mother's description of a blue-eyed, handsome man with long dark hair
was less than helpful in this kingdom of the habitually gorgeous—but once he released his discovery to
his fellows in Whitetower, Glindwell would become a father in his own way, birthing a revolutionary wave
of elven genealogy.
He asked Lleywood if he might stay in Wyndleweir to draft his paper, requesting an extension of his stay
so he could fill in any gaps that sprung up and run his final work past them before he left. This was only
half a lie. There were still a few men he hadn't yet ruled out. Besides, he liked the village. So what if their
homes weren't grown right out of the woods themselves: to him, the screws, nails, and glue holding
Wyndleweir together only made it more magical.
Finally, he exhausted his paternal candidates, ruling them out through chronology, appearance, and the
nature of their relationship with the human women they'd loved and slept with. Prior to his myth-
wrecking visit to the Silver Kingdom, Glindwell would have romanticized the dogged and thorough
persistence that led him to his answer as a long-lived, keen-eyed gift of his elven heritage. Now, he
thought of it as nothing more (or less) than who he happened to be.
Kalavel Windskipper was a rugged male of some forty apparent years who, counter to elf style, trimmed
his black hair down to a fuzzy stubble. His wife had died in a fall 54 years ago. Since then, he'd traveled
broadly throughout the Silver Kingdom, its sister realm of Connobher, and everywhere between, but in
Glindwell's first interview, he'd claimed not to have visited the southern coasts where Whitetower lay in
centuries, a fact he reconfirmed when Glindwell recanvassed any men who'd admitted to extra-racial
affairs.
"I'm sure of it," Kalavel said, shaking his shorn head. "I was in a place with black towers not so long ago,
but nothing like that."
"Whitetower's spires are black," Glindwell said. "When were you there?"
"Not so long ago. Bit after my wife passed. Forty, fifty years?"
Glindwell swallowed against a dry mouth. "Did you sleep with any human women there?"
The elf rubbed his knuckles on one stubbly cheek. "Hell yeah. I was still pretty broken up about Lauria.
Lot of drinking. Lot of women." He grinned. "Don't remember it too well, which is too bad, because that's
how you know it was a good time, eh?"
"Any women with long blonde braids?"
Kalavel squinted, peering down the dim tunnel of memory. "The women on the piers wore their hair like
that. When I asked one of them about it, she said they handled fish all day and couldn't wear their hair
loose without smearing guts and scales in it."
"Do you remember her name?"
He frowned, shook his head. "Like I said, I was drunk a lot."
"I see."
"Are you all right?" A frown creased the elf's sandy features. "Why are you asking this?"
Glindwell shifted on his branch-seat, hugging his elbows to his chest. "Do you know why elves have so
few children?"
"We live long. We don't need many."
"Which may well be why the gods created you as they did. Such that all elves, male and female, are only
fertile every now and then." Glindwell uncurled from his seat as he spoke, forgetting, for the moment,
the particulars of his audience. "Nobody ever guessed; by all appearances, the female elf's menstruation
is the same as a human's, and the male elf's cycle has no physical symptoms at all. There are variations,
of course, but my numbers suggest most of you are only capable of breeding for a span of one or two
months every decade. The rest of the time you're barren. It can take decades, sometimes centuries, for
the cycles of the male and the female partners to overlap. Even then, a child isn't guaranteed." He went
still, staring at his hands, broad-palmed as a farmer's, but with a delicateness to the fingers that
suggested a harpsichordist or a clockmaker. "But humans are fertile all the time. It's much easier for an
elf to have a child with a human than another elf."
Kalavel's face tipped back, eyes drawn in a pensive but star-cold expression Glindwell's human-raised
senses couldn't quite decipher. The elf cleared his throat. "What was her name?"
"Daphne," Glindwell said. "She loved you."
"She only knew me for a day," the elf said softly. He ran a hand over his trim scalp. "Do you want to talk
about it?"
"I need to return to the university." Glindwell rose, as if they were expecting him three hours ago instead
of in several days.
"This is going to be big news, isn't it? If you're too busy to make it back soon, perhaps you could write
to me." Kalavel smiled, eyes bright as a meadow stream. "I'd like to hear the human world's reaction to
their look behind the willow door."
"I will." Glindwell meant it as a promise easily broken. It proved simple enough to forget in the loud,
cantankerous months of speeches, rebuttals, applause, apologias, inquiries, offers, and attacks incoming
from scholars of all races across Aldonia. The letters pouring into his chambers at the University
proliferated in such abundance he was assigned an eager and annoying student to manage them. On the
afternoon Glindwell slipped out to the market, purse bulging with the silver pieces he'd won in the wager
with his fellow professors, he told himself this trip was a brief vacation from the demands of his office.
But soon—and despite the fact he had all these things provided for him at his chambers—he found
himself in the binder's district buying a quill, an inkpot, and a dozen sheets of vellum. He should have
bought a candle, too; he burned one to the base before deciding how to address the man whose name
his mother never knew.
find on elves, and had sat raptly through the verbal
equivalent of full encyclopediae from a handful of scholars
who'd actually set foot in the Silver Kingdom, academics
who spoke with the cosmopolitan and semi-prophetic
brag of men given a glimpse of a higher world—probably
because that was exactly the case—but for the 43 years
he'd spent picturing the place, he'd never allowed himself
to imagine he would one day see it himself. They were
cautious with strangers to the point of xenophobia,
elves. And if that's what it took to preserve their sylvan
village, with its staircases and platforms that grew right
out of the maples and willows themselves, he couldn't
blame them.
"It is with great pleasure," the envoy Dwindlemor rambled
on beside him, almost but not quite touching his shoulder,
"that I introduce Professor Glindwell Half-Elf, chair of
elven studies at Whitetower University."
A smile crossed the neither-old-nor young face of
Lleywood Rennigan, the kingdom's youngest prince,
regent of the village of Wyndleweir. "Should I be flattered
or horrified your people have formalized their interest in
our culture? What precisely do you intend to study?"
"Your children." Glindwell pasted a grin over his instinct
to frown. Had Dwindlemor emphasized the word "half" in
his name? That was a new one. In Whitetower, and in
fact everywhere else he'd been, now that he thought
about it, it was the full phrase that mattered, not the
fraction that came before the hyphen. The old "one drop"
theory. Oh, they might introduce you as half-elf,
half-dwarf, half-orc or -ogre, but in human society,
what was important wasn't what that half of you was, but what it wasn't: one of them.
His fellow academics could make the appellation sound like a laudable curiosity, but privately, Glindwell
found it exclusionary, no matter how pure their intentions. In some subtle way, things were different
here. Was Dwindlemor's emphasis on "half" a warning Lleywood couldn't trust the point to Glindwell's
ears? Or on the other end of possibility, a sly welcome, a hint that he, at least in part, belonged?
"Specifically, how you have them," Glindwell added.
As if playing straight to the stereotypes, Lleywood arched one of his elegant blonde brows. "The same as
any other humanoid, I imagine. Unless the orcs really do lay eggs."
"Ha ha," Glindwell said. "My question's a little trickier than that. And, I think, interesting. Specifically, why
do you live so long, yet have so few kids?"
The handsome elf glanced at Dwindlemor, his smile fossilizing on his face. "How unusual."
"And an unusually fine opportunity to let our shorter cousins learn a little more about us," Dwindlemor
said, almost but not quite touching the other elf's elbow. "I've assured Professor Glindwell no man,
woman, or topic will be above his research."
Glindwell's grin was no longer forced. Inside the forbidden forest of the Silver Kingdom, he might, at last,
find his real father.
~ * ~
"How many children do you have?"
Lleywood leaned back on his bench-like branch, his tipped head eclipsing a spear of sunshine penetrating
the dense maple leaves. He tapped his chin. "Two."
Glindwell jotted that down. "Same mother?"
"Of course."
Jabbed by the elf's sharp tone, Glindwell glanced up. "I'm not implying they wouldn't be."
Sunlight poured into Glindwell's face as Lleywood planted his elbows on his knees. "We're not impatient
like you folk. We marry for life."
"But even elves die sometimes, right? I've heard some widows and widowers never remarry no matter
how many hundred years go by, but—"
"Skepticism for rumor is surely a virtue, but in this case the rumor happens to be true."
Glindwell sat back on his own raised branch. The hard, polished wood looked impossibly painful to rest
on for any length of time (at least its bark had been stripped, though it still sprouted leafy twigs here
and there), but it was the conversation, not his seating, that had proved uncomfortable. He couldn't risk
offending Prince Lleywood—the whole point of interviewing him first was to display to the others they
could speak openly to him—but what was the point of conducting a study on elven children when he
couldn't even ask where they came from without getting the parents' hose in a knot?
"I'm sorry I sounded crass," he said. "Among university men, it's a common flaw to be so focused on the
information we're sniffing down that we lose all track of where our nose ends up."
Lleywood chortled. "Am I wrong to guess you reworded that phrase for my benefit?"
"It's a little different in human society," Glindwell grinned back. "Well. How many years apart were your
children born?"
"Eyrick was born 378, Second Reckoning, and Rudiana in 904."
"I see. Have you ever visited Whitetower?"
Lleywood cocked his blonde head. "Several times. Why do you ask?"
"To see if variables such as travel impact the frequency of reproduction," Glindwell lied. In truth, the
question had no academic relevance at all: his mother had lived her whole life in Whitetower, thus any elf
who hadn't been there couldn't be his anonymous father. Who'd been dark-haired, incidentally, ruling
Lleywood out; Glindwell had just wanted to see how he'd react to it. "Speaking of which, how often do
you and your wife make love?"
"As often as anyone else, I suppose."
"Can you be more specific?"
Lleywood's ageless forehead creased. "It varies. We've been married nine hundred years, you know."
Glindwell concealed his frustration with a long entry on his notepad. "What about in the last year, say?"
"I can't say, because I don't keep track. Unlike your kind, among us sex is not a contest. It's not a race
to see who can grab the most partners or the 'juiciest ass,' as you humans might put it. It's an
unquantifiable act of love. Don't ask me to attach a number to the sublime."
"I see," Glindwell frowned. Of course thinking like that was exactly why nobody knew anything about
elven reproductive habits beyond their own sweaty fantasies of long-limbed bodies writhing beneath
moonlight and waterfalls. But Lleywood was a prince, with a correspondingly princely image to uphold.
Perhaps he'd have better luck with the common folk.
~ * ~
Glindwell smiled harshly over his notes. In the two weeks since his arrival in the Silver Kingdom he'd
interviewed 49 subjects, and without exception, the elves' answers on the frequency of their lovemaking
were as useless as they were poetic. "When the moon's face shines as brightly as hers" (monthly?); "as
often as the spirit moves me," (three times a day? Or three times a century?); "whenever the willow's
arms caress each other as gently as my lover's" (every autumn? Or every time there was a stiff breeze?).
As far as Glindwell was concerned, the only hard fact he'd been able to collect was that Thomas owed
him twenty silver pieces.
On the cheery, beery night that had spawned this absurd quest, Professor Thomas Wainwright had bet
that sum on the half-joking theory elves were only fertile in their early years—the first 50-200 years of
their adult life, say—after which they hit some sort of elf menopause and settled down to putter around
the woods through their Golden Eons. But Glindwell's subjects' children were spaced at least ten years
apart, with most seeing age differences of one or several hundred years, and a couple outliers over two
thousand. Elf menopause was out.
Barring those that had been nothing but crude jokes, that left three competing theories. Robin proposed
they just didn't have sex that often ("At least not of the heterosexual variety," Thomas had guffawed.
"After you've seen an elf male, who could blame them?"). Cristov related tales of the northerners'
reindeer-gut contraceptives and forwarded the idea elves fornicated as frequently as humans or dwarves
or anyone else, but they possessed a form of their own "birth control," be it inborn or artificial. Lastly,
Vinson suggested they needed no such thing, as perhaps their fertility rates were naturally miniscule,
and thus elves were "shooting dummy-headed arrows" 99% of the time.
"And you, Glindwell?" Thomas had asked, breath ripe with beer.
Glindwell smiled and shook his head. "It wouldn't be right for me to wager on the outcome of a study I'll
be conducting, would it?" He slapped the ass of a passing barmaid. "Ethics, you know."
He'd meant his answer as a dodge, a joke, no more serious than the rest of their intellectual exercise
had been. Once it entered his head he could use that study to find his father, his furious quill had nearly
set fire to the parchment of his proposal. At his going-away party, he took the bet they'd all be wrong.
On the forest floor, he gazed dumbly at a series of knots protruding from the massive bole of a willow,
regularly-spaced knobs that served as the stairs to Dwindlemor's leafy home. Mere days ago the natural
staircase had struck him as wondrous, representative of the elves' harmonious partnership with a nature
that seemed happy to provide them with a home. Now it was just one more thing he had to climb.
"I've run into some troubles," he told Dwindlemor once he'd announced himself outside the doorway of
hanging willow strands. As he criticized the vagueness of his respondents' answers—after all, how could
you draw conclusions on elf reproduction when you had no damned idea how often they had sex—the
sharp features of the elf gathered in concern, then relaxed in comprehension.
"Here we face a cultural impasse," Dwindlemor said. "Elves are simply more romantic, in part because our
long lives teach us to gentle our rougher instincts. For instance, you will never see an elven prostitute in
the Kingdom, as there is no demand for such things in a sylvan community." He tapped his long-nailed
fingers together. "And despite the prince's endorsement-through-participation, you can hardly expect
the people to be completely open with an outsider."
"I'm half elf myself," Glindwell said. "For all I know, that half came from the Silver Kingdom."
The elf waved one hand for peace. "I know that, but you understand how these things are." His mouth
rounded with thought. "Aha! But what if we remove this unfortunate element from the equation? Get
together an anonymous questionnaire. While you're preparing it, I'll bend some pointy ears about giving
information you can actually use."
"What about all the people who can't read?"
"Every elf can read. Are there many humans who can't?"
"A few," Glindwell allowed. Still, he left heartened enough to plunge right in to drafting and redrafting
questions to be as inoffensive and bias-neutral as humanly possible, and to disguise the ones intended
to narrow down his hunt for the father his mother couldn't name. A day later he'd phrased his queries
so he no longer winced at them. A day beyond that, hand numb and cramping, he'd copied his list three
hundred times over. Dwindlemor, with apparently nothing better to do than appease his half-elf visitor—
the more time he spent in their earthly paradise, the more questions Glindwell had about what any of
them did—he saw no elf farmers, did the trees just hand down berries from their own branches?—
offered to distribute them throughout the forest village. Glindwell paced the thick parallel tree limbs that
formed the floor of his guest home, branches so smooth and sturdy he could believe elf feet had walked
them since the beginning of time.
The first returns looked promising. Poetic as always, but with a consistency to them suggesting the sex
lives of elves weren't so different after all, if a little more leisurely than the rodent-like humping of
humans. Almost uniformly, the responses referenced moon cycles or (especially when the couple was
younger, relatively speaking) the countdown of the planets. One to four times a month. So much for
Robin's bet. Yet some trouble tickled his mind, a suspicion he couldn't find a name for.
On his climb down from Dwindlemor's house, the second-to-last knot-handle came loose under his
slipper. He fell on his ass in the dirt and leaves, and after he'd caught his breath and dusted himself off,
he picked up the handle, intending to call Dwindlemor down to fix it. The words stuck in his throat. The
handle's end wasn't jagged from a break. Instead it was lined with a tight spiral, a wooden screw that
could be inserted into the threading carved into the corresponding hole in the tree. It hadn't grown as a
natural handhold, coaxed from the maple's trunk by primal elven magic. It too had been carved.
Manipulated to look that way to anyone who didn't already know better. He frowned and slipped it into
his pocket.
His suspicion unfolded as easily as the elegantly creased surveys. By the time a hundred responses had
come back, Robin's theory was back in the running and Glindwell was hamstrung. Their answers were too
uniform. Any population showed outliers and clusters; Glindwell could believe most elf couples had sex
once a week or month, but unless they were as unique among all races as they loved to claim, there
should be a handful who abstained entirely and a few who slapped wet parts three times a day. As he
compared pages side by side, his despair ballooned like a court-tinker's flying machine. Undeniably, ten of
them had even been written by the same hand.
The village's answers had been provided for them. In some cases, they'd actually been written for them.
All his results were useless, his scholastic data and even the ten elf males he considered paternal
suspects. He was no closer to his study or his father than when he'd left Whitetower weeks ago. In
some ways, he felt further than ever. As a child, he'd been exhaustingly difficult to get to bed (it was the
elf in him, his mom said; the moonlight-lover), but he'd settled into his straw mattress whenever his
mother, exhausted as she must have been from her long days pitching fish on the docks, told him
stories about the elves. First of all the races, she said, the gods had crafted them with all that was good,
insuring they were as beautiful in spirit as in their fair and fine-boned faces. Heroes and music-lovers,
incorruptible souls ready to step forth whenever the hearts of men wavered with weakness or
temptation. They struck down lies with silver swords and preserved the truth with ageless memories. His
father had been one of them! A graceful, unstained hero! So what, she asked, poking Glindwell's snub
nose, did that make him?
With a cold and vengeful logic, knowing he'd be banished from the Silver Kingdom if he was caught, he
decided to spy.
"How goes your survey?" Dwindlemor asked the next time he handed over a twine-bound bundle of
letters. "Getting some useful information now?"
Glindwell smiled. "I suspect I'm about to."
"I hope our human cousins won't be too disappointed to learn we're not so different after all."
From then on, Glindwell operated under the assumption they weren't. Under the guise of face-to-face
followups, he started sneaking up on elves around the village and met immediate success at catching
them unawares. If their eyes and ears were as sharp as rumored—he'd never noticed any appreciable
difference between his own senses and a human's—they weren't supernaturally so. On his stealthy
climbs, he peered at the handholds and saw seams; hanging beneath the broad floor-branches of one
home, he picked at a small knot until it fell away, exposing the gleam of a metal nail. Three days later,
with the last of the forged surveys returned and his excuses to linger dwindling, he waited for nightfall,
then crouched in the shrubs beneath Prince Lleywood's towering home.
It was a long shot, he knew. Most human male nobles had mistresses both open and secret, but a small
cluster of them stayed devoted to their wives, and in any event even the most flagrant adulterers spent
some nights in their marital beds. After the first fruitless night, Glindwell feared Lleywood might
confound him after all.
His worries died the next night when, quiet as a spider, Lleywood descended to the earth and crept
along the glen's trails to a distant tree. Glindwell followed at the limits of his vision, a shadow in the
maple-blotted moonlight. Ten minutes after the prince climbed the trunk-stairs to an unlit home,
Glindwell started up.
With his face just above the floor-branches, whispers threaded to his pointed ears. A man. A woman.
Robes soughing to the floor. Slow as a panther, Glindwell nosed his face beneath the willow-weaved
door. An elf woman lay naked on a bed of leaves, knees spread and raised to the moon, and Glindwell
saw not all stories of the elves were lies: this woman was achingly, gapingly beautiful, with the buttermilk-
smooth skin and lyre-like hips of a woman out of legend.
She also was not Lleywood's wife.
Glindwell watched for some time longer than professional curiosity allowed.
~ * ~
"You're a liar," he told Dwindlemor under the bright and ground-level daylight of the morning. Glindwell
knew he looked bleary-eyed, hair askew, his posture contorted by the resulting soreness of clinging to a
treeside staircase for the better part of an hour, a veritable vagabond next to the tall, lean elf in his dirt-
and stain-free robes. He didn't care.
Dwindlemor's mouth spread in a slow smile. "I beg your pardon?"
"You are a gods damned liar. And for some reason you've convinced your people to lie to me, too. I want
it to stop."
The elf glanced down the trail, dust motes flittering past his face. "Are you all right? You look fevered."
Glindwell lobbed the broken handhold at the elf's thin chest. "I followed Lleywood last night. I can
promise you he gets his royal wick snuffed more than once a month. Is anything you've told me true?"
"Stop calling me a liar."
"That's right. You're the faithful, pure-hearted children of the gods, constitutionally incapable of even
having dirty old sex, let alone with a person you're not supposed to."
"You don't know the first thing, waterblood." Dwindlemor straightened to his full height and smiled down
on Glindwell like an angry deity. "We have an image to uphold. A reputation to protect. We're the first
people, the ones your kind come running to whenever some tyrant seizes your throne or marches on
your borders. What would happen if you stopped trusting us? Gave up all hope of salvation?"
"We're about to find out."
"No we're not. You and your children are hereby banished from the Silver Kingdom."
Glindwell grinned, heart racing. "Go ahead. Then I'll expose you're just as base as us and you lie about
it. But I'll make you a deal. Cooperate with me, tell me the honest truth, and I'll commit the lie of
omission and leave out your lies. I'll make sure your dignity, if not your mystique, is preserved."
Dwindlemor cocked his head, stroking his hairless neck. "What are you getting out of this? A head chair
at your little university?"
"Knowledge," Glindwell said, picturing the proud faces of all the elf men he'd met since entering the Silver
Kingdom, imagining which one could have snared his mother's heart for a lifetime after the anonymous
night he'd spent with her. "That's all."
~ * ~
The bedroom door opened to him, and Glindwell plunged through it.
Urged by their prince and their foreign liaison to tell the truth, the villagers of Wyndleweir responded with
direct and zealous enthusiasm. Lies and legends Glindwell had believed for 43 years were swept away in a
handful of days. Robin's bet of elven chastity died under a weathering hail of good-hearted confession. It
turned out Dwindlemor had not so much lied to him—elves, by and large, did have sex between one and
six times a month—as concealed all the outliers and extremes that could shame their race. These boiled
down to the usual suspects: promiscuity, adultery, and homosexuality. In other words, the same boring
scandals all the other races engaged in, too.
Cristov's theory of birth control died after a dozen interviews. The elves seemed to have no concept of
it, natural or otherwise.
"You are suggesting I would wear a knotted pig's rectum on my penis?" Pillindor wrinkled his long and
noble nose. "On purpose?"
"It's known in some places," Glindwell shrugged. "How many children have you had?"
Pillindor tipped back his head, giving this some thought. His wife, Saesannae, snorted. "Three."
"All elf children?"
"Two elf, one half-elf," Pillindor said.
"Aha," Glindwell said, jotting their names next to the others he intended to follow up with: anyone with
ties to Whitetower or mixed-race offspring. When he returned for his second interview with the couple
later that week, Pillindor shook his hand. Glindwell couldn't stop grinning. "Where did you meet the
human woman who mothered your third child?"
"It wasn't him," Saesannae said, voice buoyed with an odd pride. "I had a thing for human men when I
was young."
"How did your marriage survive this indiscretion?"
She frowned. "Indiscretion? That guy was just my quarterly."
Glindwell glanced up from his notes. "Quarterly?"
"It's something a lot of us do," Pillindor laughed. "Every 25 years, we're allowed to sleep with someone
who isn't our spouse."
"You find this is healthy for your marriage?"
"Hey, do you know what it's like not seeing another woman naked for 900 years?" Pillindor grinned. "Me
neither."
Saesannae shoved his shoulder. "Right, Baron von Cocksman. When was the last time you even touched
a tit that wasn't mine?"
The male's grin turned sheepish. "Well, most of the time just knowing you can is enough."
Glindwell crossed them off the list. Vinson's theory of basement-level fertility rates stuck around much
longer. While in some way the data supported the idea, it didn't feel right. The numbers should show
extreme exceptions on either end, with some couples having a second child within a year of the
preceding offspring while other marriages never saw their long conceptive odds match up no matter how
many centuries they'd been together. Instead, the distribution of birth intervals were squished together,
with no child born within ten years of his or her sibling and most spaced too irregularly for the flattish
spectrum Vinson's idea suggested. A few couples had produced no children at all, but this could be
written off to everyday infertility rather than something elf-specific. One other number troubled him: a
disproportionately large amount of half-elf children.
Stymied by the opaque elf-elf partnerships and seeking to delay the rapid dwindle of his personal leads,
Glindwell followed his instincts and scheduled a followup with Filomela, an elf woman who'd lived with a
human man five years without having kids.
"Would you say you tried?" he asked.
She shrugged her slim shoulders, gazing past the entwined branches framing her window to the
shimmering green canopy of the forest village. "For the first few years. When I thought we'd be together
his whole life."
"Was it the lack of children that drove you apart?"
Filomela laughed lightly. "I let myself think that for a long time afterwards. But it was him. He never
believed he was good enough for me—it was like he thought of me as a perfect elf maiden, the lady in
the high castle whose slippers he was too low to kiss. I tried to show him I had all the same flaws as a
human woman, but that only frustrated him worse."
"So you left him?"
"He left me. People are so weird, aren't they? It was like he'd rather walk off with his idealized me intact
than come to terms with the living, breathing woman in front of him."
Glindwell smiled with half his mouth. "You would be amazed how many so-called academics refuse to
rethink their ideas no matter how hard they're bludgeoned by new evidence."
It took the rest of the day for him to realize he'd been talking about himself. He laughed in the darkness
of his platform, uncaring how far the sound traveled through the airy village. They'd all been wrong. He
might never find his dad—his mother's description of a blue-eyed, handsome man with long dark hair
was less than helpful in this kingdom of the habitually gorgeous—but once he released his discovery to
his fellows in Whitetower, Glindwell would become a father in his own way, birthing a revolutionary wave
of elven genealogy.
He asked Lleywood if he might stay in Wyndleweir to draft his paper, requesting an extension of his stay
so he could fill in any gaps that sprung up and run his final work past them before he left. This was only
half a lie. There were still a few men he hadn't yet ruled out. Besides, he liked the village. So what if their
homes weren't grown right out of the woods themselves: to him, the screws, nails, and glue holding
Wyndleweir together only made it more magical.
Finally, he exhausted his paternal candidates, ruling them out through chronology, appearance, and the
nature of their relationship with the human women they'd loved and slept with. Prior to his myth-
wrecking visit to the Silver Kingdom, Glindwell would have romanticized the dogged and thorough
persistence that led him to his answer as a long-lived, keen-eyed gift of his elven heritage. Now, he
thought of it as nothing more (or less) than who he happened to be.
Kalavel Windskipper was a rugged male of some forty apparent years who, counter to elf style, trimmed
his black hair down to a fuzzy stubble. His wife had died in a fall 54 years ago. Since then, he'd traveled
broadly throughout the Silver Kingdom, its sister realm of Connobher, and everywhere between, but in
Glindwell's first interview, he'd claimed not to have visited the southern coasts where Whitetower lay in
centuries, a fact he reconfirmed when Glindwell recanvassed any men who'd admitted to extra-racial
affairs.
"I'm sure of it," Kalavel said, shaking his shorn head. "I was in a place with black towers not so long ago,
but nothing like that."
"Whitetower's spires are black," Glindwell said. "When were you there?"
"Not so long ago. Bit after my wife passed. Forty, fifty years?"
Glindwell swallowed against a dry mouth. "Did you sleep with any human women there?"
The elf rubbed his knuckles on one stubbly cheek. "Hell yeah. I was still pretty broken up about Lauria.
Lot of drinking. Lot of women." He grinned. "Don't remember it too well, which is too bad, because that's
how you know it was a good time, eh?"
"Any women with long blonde braids?"
Kalavel squinted, peering down the dim tunnel of memory. "The women on the piers wore their hair like
that. When I asked one of them about it, she said they handled fish all day and couldn't wear their hair
loose without smearing guts and scales in it."
"Do you remember her name?"
He frowned, shook his head. "Like I said, I was drunk a lot."
"I see."
"Are you all right?" A frown creased the elf's sandy features. "Why are you asking this?"
Glindwell shifted on his branch-seat, hugging his elbows to his chest. "Do you know why elves have so
few children?"
"We live long. We don't need many."
"Which may well be why the gods created you as they did. Such that all elves, male and female, are only
fertile every now and then." Glindwell uncurled from his seat as he spoke, forgetting, for the moment,
the particulars of his audience. "Nobody ever guessed; by all appearances, the female elf's menstruation
is the same as a human's, and the male elf's cycle has no physical symptoms at all. There are variations,
of course, but my numbers suggest most of you are only capable of breeding for a span of one or two
months every decade. The rest of the time you're barren. It can take decades, sometimes centuries, for
the cycles of the male and the female partners to overlap. Even then, a child isn't guaranteed." He went
still, staring at his hands, broad-palmed as a farmer's, but with a delicateness to the fingers that
suggested a harpsichordist or a clockmaker. "But humans are fertile all the time. It's much easier for an
elf to have a child with a human than another elf."
Kalavel's face tipped back, eyes drawn in a pensive but star-cold expression Glindwell's human-raised
senses couldn't quite decipher. The elf cleared his throat. "What was her name?"
"Daphne," Glindwell said. "She loved you."
"She only knew me for a day," the elf said softly. He ran a hand over his trim scalp. "Do you want to talk
about it?"
"I need to return to the university." Glindwell rose, as if they were expecting him three hours ago instead
of in several days.
"This is going to be big news, isn't it? If you're too busy to make it back soon, perhaps you could write
to me." Kalavel smiled, eyes bright as a meadow stream. "I'd like to hear the human world's reaction to
their look behind the willow door."
"I will." Glindwell meant it as a promise easily broken. It proved simple enough to forget in the loud,
cantankerous months of speeches, rebuttals, applause, apologias, inquiries, offers, and attacks incoming
from scholars of all races across Aldonia. The letters pouring into his chambers at the University
proliferated in such abundance he was assigned an eager and annoying student to manage them. On the
afternoon Glindwell slipped out to the market, purse bulging with the silver pieces he'd won in the wager
with his fellow professors, he told himself this trip was a brief vacation from the demands of his office.
But soon—and despite the fact he had all these things provided for him at his chambers—he found
himself in the binder's district buying a quill, an inkpot, and a dozen sheets of vellum. He should have
bought a candle, too; he burned one to the base before deciding how to address the man whose name
his mother never knew.
| Make A Donation |
Born in the Pacific Northwest, Ed has lived in New York, Idaho, and
most recently Los Angeles, where the weather is so nice you really have
to suspect some sort of fiendish bargain. His short fiction has appeared or
is upcoming at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Fantastique
Unfettered, and The Aether Age: Helios anthology.
In addition to writing sci-fi and fantasy, he works as a movie critic and
freelancer.
most recently Los Angeles, where the weather is so nice you really have
to suspect some sort of fiendish bargain. His short fiction has appeared or
is upcoming at AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Fantastique
Unfettered, and The Aether Age: Helios anthology.
In addition to writing sci-fi and fantasy, he works as a movie critic and
freelancer.