Girl of Iron and Magic

7.

PRESENT DAY

Maloru found food in the woods. It was the only thing Lotte could currently care about. Food and water. This time of year, in the gentle winter of the peninsula, most prominent were the mushrooms. Maloru knew which were poisonous and which could be eaten.

He found some apples too, and had no problem climbing up to collect them.

Lotte ate raw mushrooms and crunched the tart apples, but it was difficult to satisfy hunger without some form of meat. Despite the iron most animals had in their blood, Leilan elves had no difficulty eating flesh once it was well cooked. In fact, while Yomi elves ate mostly plants, Leilan elves mostly ate meat.

Her human half was more adaptable, and with enough apples, she felt a certain semblance of strength return to her.

They came upon a creek and drank its muddy water, neither caring about how clean or dirty it was, only about thirst.

"How did you come to be raised by humans?" Lotte asked eventually when she could think of something other than eating and drinking.

"My parents died during the Socolar Massacre and I was found inside a shrub in Belcork woods."

Lotte knew her history, Poe made sure of that. She had had to learn the history of humans and elves both from human textbooks and from elven scrolls. "But the Socolar Massacre was half a century ago," she said.

"Sixty-one years ago, to be exact," Maloru said.

Lotte stopped walking so she could examine the elven boy from head to toe. "No." She shook her head. "Even elves don't grow that slowly."

"I was growing fine for the first few years of my life," he said. "But then, I stopped."

"You want to tell me," she said. "That you've been a ten-year-old boy for fifty years?"

"Fifty-one years, but who's counting..."

Lotte really had to gape now, she simply didn't have any other method to cope with this new turn of events. "But...how is that even possible?"

"I'll be ten years old until I die if I don't get to drink the waters of the Hallerdin or have something magically equivalent happen to me."

"What's magically equivalent to the waters of the Hallerdin?"

Maloru shook his head. "I don't know if there's such a thing."

Lotte took a moment of silence to ponder what he said. No matter how many times she looked at him, she couldn't see him as anything but a little boy.

And that was probably intensely straining to this poor elf.

"We have to get you to Lasuran. They have to accept you."

Maloru frowned, turning to look away from her. "How about you? If the humans find you..."

"I'm trying to avoid that, obviously," she said. "I'm headed to Serades."

"Serades!" Maloru clapped his hands. "I heard it's charming there. Take me with you?"

"You're not actually serious..."

The elven boy laughed. "Maybe as a last resort."

Lotte suddenly stopped and looked at Maloru, raising her eyebrows. "Wait, did you say the water of the Hallerdin?" She had completely forgotten about the bottle she had found last night on the battlefield.

"Yeah?"

"It so happens," Lotte said, retrieving the elven bottle from her pack. "That I have some." She handed it to him.