“Oh, I know you’re not supposed to say it, these days,” Vilvithar says airily, “but really, can you even call it assassination?” The elf crosses his legs and flashes a smile. “If someone pays you to kill another elf, that really means something. You’re excising one of history’s beating hearts. But humans — that’s not like killing people, is it?”
“That’s a statement…bound to attract controversy,” Nalzar the Historian says in a papery hiss, the gold paint on its lips glimmering. “How do you reconcile your view of humankind as inherently subelven with an apparently chivalric policy of not harming maidens?”
“Oh, no.” Vilvithar shakes his head. “Basic error on my critics’ part — it’s not chivalric, it’s simple ecological management! Just because they’re not equal to persons doesn’t deny them a role in the world; from a breeding perspective, the jacks are cheaply disposable, but culling mares really hurts their kind’s viability. Such a limited window of fertility, and such an extended gestation in proportion to their lifespan! And such a limited span it is!” He shakes his head, pulling an expression of comical bemusement. “Really, it’s an aberration they can manage to exist alongside elvenkind at all.”
“Hm.” Nalzar makes a last notation in its grimoire, closes the great book, and stands. “Ah, Vilvithar,” it says, as if an afterthought, fastidiously arranging its shimmering silken sleeves; “interesting that we view history, in some ways, from the same vantage.”
“Is that so?”
The bolt that springs, crossbowless, from the Historian’s sleeve catches the assassin directly in his unsuspecting chest. With a startled, rattling final inhalation, he drops sideways off his chair.
“As something to be pruned,” Nalzar says, reopens its book, and scratches out Vilvithar’s name, halfway down a list of notorious elven supremacists.
