Knights of the Rose

Chapter 4

As the gryphon flew, it was three days’ or four nights’ ride to the principal camp of the clan named after those fierce flying predators.

“Although in truth, I have never seen a gryphon fly half that distance in a straight line,” Hawkbrother added. “They could do it if they wished. They are strong flyers, but they must eat. Or at least they wish to eat, whenever they see something that might be food. And I tell you that a gryphon will make a meal of what would make a carrion bird spew. So they are always swooping down, gorging themselves, then sleeping off their gorging.”

“Have they no enemies to surprise them in their sleep?” Eskaia asked. She seemed insatiable in her curiosity about the life of the Free Riders and about the southern lands in general.

“None but humans, and be sure that we take advantage of this,” Hawkbrother said. “Not our clan, for the gryphon is our totem and thereafter we may not shed its blood. But others, including the bolder Silvanesti, go hunting gryphons in their sleeping lairs. Not altogether a bad thing, either, or the desert skies might be filled with gryphons and the land below be eaten bare of men and their herds alike.”

Pirvan’s company and the Free Riders had no need to stop and gorge, but they did need to avoid lands where hostile clans (the Hawks, the Ravens, the Serpents, and the Dragons) might be roaming. That was doubly true where the Istarians might have gathered, whether the regular host or the ragged mob of tax soldiers.

So they struck away from the river, which Pirvan knew by the Silvanesti name Fyrdaynis and the Free Riders called the River of the Green Moons. (It was said that from its banks, at certain times of the year, any or all of the moons in the sky appeared green. Tarothin found this of more than passing interest, and would have shown more than passing regret for leaving the river, but was not fit to argue.) They rode a twisting path that to Pirvan seemed to go in two or three directions during each night’s ride. Yet at dawn he could always tell from the sunrise that they were farther south. Even by night, he could feel the air turning cooler and see moonlit patches of grass and bushes and dwarfed trees, which did not grow farther north.

“Are we going all the way to the Silvanesti lands?” Eskaia asked as they made camp on the fifth morning of the journey.

“Would it make you uneasy if we did?” Hawkbrother asked in return.

Eskaia did not stamp her foot or slap the chief’s son, but both gestures were in her voice as she replied. “Not in the least. We wish to learn how the Silvanesti see Istar’s intrigues. Who better to ask than the Silvanesti themselves-if they will answer us with words and not arrows?”

“That is indeed the question,” Pirvan said. “And because it is the question, it is why we are going to Hawkbrother’s clan first.” He did not add the question he wished answered but could not ask yet: Would the Free Riders ally with the Silvanesti against Istar, or the opposite?

Neither choice sat well with the knight. If elves and Free Riders made common cause, Istar would invoke the city’s terms of alliance with Solamnia and summon the knights to aid them against “barbarian hordes.” Some injustice had come of this the first time, even without the hand of the kingpriest’s minions. It would be much worse this time.

If Free Riders chose to help Istar settle their old grievances against the Silvanesti (which were many, and some possibly just), the knights might not be required. But the Silvanesti would be direly beset enough without them, and elves driven to desperation had dread resources to unleash when their heartlands were threatened.

It would bring the great war closer, the war of which the kingpriests had spoken more loudly with each generation, the final confrontation of humans and “lesser breeds.” Too much closer for Pirvan’s peace of mind.

When everyone else was out of hearing, Pirvan asked Hawkbrother: “How do you keep peace with the elves?”

“With the Qualinesti, by being too far away to have dealings. Likewise with the Kagonesti.”

“You know who I mean, my friend,” Pirvan said. It had been a long night, and he recovered from hours in the saddle more slowly than he had ten years ago. He was stiff enough that he doubted sleep would come easily, but knew he must not lose patience.

“There is a stretch of the southern desert or the northern forest, call it what you will,” Hawkbrother said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We both claim it, but our fighting over the claim is more sport than war. We do not go far into the woods, where our mounts cannot move swiftly, our eyes are baffled, and an archer lurks behind every tree.

“The Silvanesti return the favor. They do not go far north, where there are no trees but only scorching hot rocks, our mounts let us move ten paces to their one, and the sun flays their pale hides in a matter of hours.”

Pirvan had heard of such long-standing wars, hardly more than amusement for either side, save for the few who were killed or maimed. When the gnomes fought, among one another or with anybody else, it was much like that. Dwarves sometimes seemed to fight simply for an excuse to wander outside their mountains. Kender hardly ever took anything seriously, unless their whole race was in danger, which might become the case if the kingpriests grew more ambitious. The morning was growing warm, but within, Pirvan was chilled at the thought of the whole kender race united to fight for their very existence, with all the skill and ingenuity at their command.

Hawkbrother seemed reluctant to say more about Free Riders and Silvanesti, but Pirvan had learned enough, both for his own use and for the archives of the knights. Both peoples seemed likely to chose freely; their minds had not been shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel by centuries of bloodshed.

With that thought, Pirvan realized he could hope for sleep today, in spite of stiff muscles, saddle sores, and the near-exhaustion of the soothing oil that Haimya used as skillfully as she used her hands.

Krythis, called half-elven only by those who wished to insult him, put both hands on the sun-warmed boulder and vaulted out of the pool. He shook himself like a wet dog, so that his long black hair flew about his shoulders.

From the pool came silvery laughter. A head with near-ivory hair rose from the water, with green eyes and a smile below the hair.

“You look like a dwarfsfoot hedge after a heavy rain.”

Krythis gripped his hair and began wringing the water from it. “Speak for yourself, wife. You sometimes make me think of a snowpod too long without water.”

“You’ll pay for that, Krithot.” The affectionate form of his name took the bite from his wife’s words. Krythis continued to dry his hair until he looked up and saw that Tulia’s head had disappeared. Not even a ripple marked the pool’s surface where she had been.

Krythis’s mouth went dry. It would take magic to bring danger into this pool, where they had been swimming and taking other pleasures since they had made their abode in Belkuthas. But there was more magic abroad than there had been, much of it aimed against nonhumans. Even if none such was directed their way, the Silvanesti rivaled the kingpriests in their distaste for half-elves.

He bent over the pool-and two slim, muscular arms darted from the water and wrapped around his neck. His balance vanished before he even knew he was losing it, and he plunged headfirst into the water.

A man’s height below the surface, he saw Tulia grinning, and felt her tighten her embrace, adding the grip of her long legs to that of her arms. When this happened, he knew from long and agreeable experience what she had in mind. So he did not resist her drawing him toward their private trysting place between two rocks.

A little beach lay there, soft with moss and fallen leaves, but Krythis could have lain down on sharp stones as long as his wife was in his arms. She drove all the world but herself beyond the reach of Krythis’s senses-and she said that he did the same for her.

At last, they slept in each other’s arms, briefly but long enough that the pool was more sunlit than shadowed when they awoke. Tulia was the first to sit up and begin finger-combing leaves and bits of moss from her hair. Krythis decided to lie still. He felt too peaceful, and Tulia was too beautiful.

“Consider, my love, whether we grow too old for this,” Tulia said at last, when her hair at last flowed untangled over her lightly freckled shoulders.

“Does the water pain you?” Krythis asked. “Are you old enough for stiffened joints?”

“I should hope not!” Tulia said. “If one is going to be slow and pain-ridden barely into one’s second century, one might as well be human!” She leaned back against a sun-warmed rock face, looking rather more like a human woman barely past her thirtieth year.

“Then what do you mean?” Krythis said. He could, at least on most days, bandy riddles with Tulia for hours on end. But today was a special day, their daughter Rynthala’s coming-of-age celebration. There was so much to be done that he had doubted the wisdom of slipping away for this morning swim.

“Perhaps Rynthi wants a trifle of dignity in her parents,” Tulia said.

Krythis knew he had been tricked again. “You almost said that with a straight face and an even voice,” he replied. “If she wants dignity from us, let her ask it to our faces.”

“Though not, please Paladine, with a dozen pairs of ears in hearing,” Tulia said.

“Ah, yes, you remember.”

“It was not easy to forget,” Tulia said almost sharply.

Krythis saw that she seemed genuinely ill at ease, more so than could be blamed on the party. Rynthi was doing half the work for that, and Sirbones and the dwarves were doing most of the rest.

“I would wager my manhood that our daughter is a clean maid. Not for want of men who would make her otherwise, but because it is her own wish.

“We have given her a blessing that few children of half-elves receive,” he went on. “Both of her parents were conceived in love, and knew it from the day of their births.”

Tulia looked less uneasy than thoughtful at those words. Far too often, the half-elven were the result of a human father raping an elven mother. Not so Krythis or Tulia.

Krythis was the child of two ranger. His elven father, with Kagonesti as well as Qualinesti blood, had conceived him joyfully in a bed of ferns under the pine-framed sky. Tulia was the child of a Silvanesti mother who had fled an unhappy betrothal and found herself working at an inn patronized about equally by dwarves and humans.

One of the dwarves had spirited her away, when it became plain that the innkeeper wanted her adding to his profits on her back. But it was a human, a footloose but honorable trader, who had bedded her, held her hand while she bore a daughter, then died within months at the claws and teeth of a wounded bear.

Both had been raised more by dwarves than by any other of Krynn’s races, and it was their inheritances from two wealthy dwarven clans that allowed them to make a home of the old citadel of Belkuthas. In the foothills where Thoradin, Silvanesti, and Istar all came together, the citadel was not one that any of the three realms would gladly have ceded to one of the others.

But two half-elves, equally agreeable to their human and dwarven neighbors, offended nobody. Or at least they had not in the sixty years they had lived there.

Now the quarrels of the outer world threatened the peace of Belkuthas. Meanwhile, Rynthala had grown into a woman in both law and fact, while seeing her parents proud of each other and of their love for each other. That had to give her strength that she might not otherwise have had, and that she would need in the years to come.

“If you feel we need Rynthi’s thoughts on this,” Krythis said gently, “we can ask her. But not today, nor for some days after. This is her moment of glory, and I will not let an old man’s fretting disturb a young girl’s joy.”

“Old man, my-!” Tulia said, mentioning an intimate part of her anatomy. Then she gripped her husband by both hands and drew him down to her.

The last time Pirvan’s band and their Free Rider companions made camp, they were within half a day’s ride of the Gryphon’s encampment. Hawkbrother proposed that they rest briefly and finish the journey by daylight.

“There is ample water, between here and the camp,” he said. “The wind will raise no sandstorms.” He was silent briefly, then added, “There is also more risk of ambushes.”

“This close to your camp?” Darin and Gerik asked in one voice.

“Even so. The closer to the enemy’s camp, the greater the honor in a successful ambush.”

“We shall have to see that none of your enemies gain honor this day,” Darin said. It was one of those speeches of his in which each word came down like a hammer on a stone. Hearing him, it was hard to believe he ever laughed.

Darin’s next words were a proposal that he take the rearguard. Pirvan suggested otherwise, as the vanguard was even more dangerous in the face of an ambush, and also that if Darin were dismounted he would be hard put to overtake his comrades.

With no more than a frown, the big knight obeyed, and afterward Hawkbrother took Pirvan aside, as the others watered their mounts and prepared for the final stage of the journey.

“Your blood-son seems to obey you less than your name-son.”

It took Pirvan a moment to realize that no insult was intended by implying that Gerik was hotheaded and that Darin was Pirvan’s bastard. Hawkbrother had only been a warrior chief, speaking plainly of the strengths and weaknesses of a friendly chief’s warriors.

“Darin is ten years older than Gerik. You are old for your years, so do not judge my son harshly, if you please.”

“But Darin-”

Pirvan did not know what the Free Riders thought of minotaurs. Besides, there was no time to give anyone short of a god the full story of Darin’s upbringing as heir to Waydol.

“He is the son of an honorable warrior, whom I defeated in combat and with whom I afterward swore blood brotherhood. Had I died in our last battle together, he would no doubt have fostered Gerik as I have fostered Darin.”

Pirvan could not hold back a smile, at the thought of what Waydol and Darin together might have made of Gerik. Perhaps not a better fighter, but certainly a man quicker to come to a decision.

But the gods had it otherwise, he realized, and the knights are the better for having Darin’s strength joined to theirs.

“Your pardon, if I have given offense,” Hawkbrother said.

“Idle curiosity may give offense. Seeking to learn a friend’s strengths and weaknesses never should,” Pirvan said.

“Teach that to my brothers,” Hawkbrother said with an edge in his voice, “and some may wish to name you chief of the Gryphons when my father dies.”

Before Pirvan could reply, he heard Eskaia hailing them; the watering was about done and the saddling-up beginning.

Krythis and Tulia had taken their bows with them when they went trysting. This probably deceived few, as there was hardly game large enough for a slingshot, let alone one of the great elven bows, within half a day of Belkuthas.

The citadel’s herds made short work of the grass and leaves, and the shepherds’ bows and spears made short work of wolves and bears. Birds and squirrels thrived, but they were left in peace, by the strict command of the citadel’s master and mistress, their dwarven allies, and Sirbones, their priest of Mishakal, who said little for months on end but healed almost every day and wielded more power than he would ever have dared seek.

Certainly lord and lady did not deceive their daughter. She met them at the postern gate. She wore her usual garb of loosely cut trousers over low boots and a tunic cut high but also fitted snugly. She was half a head taller than even her father, and Krythis said she had the look of his mother, the ranger, who could look all but the tallest men in the eye.

Rynthala ran her eyes over her parents’ garb, then twirled a lock of her father’s hair on one tanned finger.

“A heavy dew this morning, eh?”

Krythis and Tulia had learned not to blush at anything their daughter said, since the days when she could truly be called “little Rynthi.” Otherwise they would have spent much of the time from that day to this blushing.

“Something like that,” Tulia replied levelly.

“Thinking that you will miss having a child about the place when I am gone?” Rynthala went on, as if her mother had not spoken. “You needn’t have waited so long, for I-forgive me. My tongue and my wits aren’t always in step.”

“They have ranger blood, and rangers go their own pace,” Krythis said, but he put an arm around Tulia’s shoulders as he spoke, and felt her quiver. She had borne three children before Rynthala, and not one of them had lived past its third year. Rynthi had taken off the curse, for she seemed to have all her siblings’ vitality added to hers, but there’d been no live births and one miscarriage since Rynthala.

“It is ill-omened to speak of leaving home on this day,” Krythis said with a severity that was not entirely feigned. “Also, have you been at the dwarf spirits? If you have, I will summon Sirbones, and he will-”

“-have nothing to do here,” Rynthala replied. “Please, Father, Mother. I can be just as rude sober as most people when drunk, as you well know.”

Tulia smiled faintly. “As long as you know it, no husband will be tempted to seek death by telling you.”

“I hope if the gods want me wed, they will send me a man who always speaks and hears the truth,” Rynthala said. “But perhaps that kind of fortune does not come twice to the same family.”

She embraced her parents; her arms were nearly long enough to span both of them together. Then she frowned. “Sirbones is fretting about the amount of dwarf spirits at hand. He suggested a small spell on the casks-”

“No,” Krythis said. “I will not so insult our guests, and if Sirbones disobeys me he can resume his travels.

“Besides, our guests are a pretty hardheaded lot. If they get drunk and fall down, it’s more likely the stones will break than their skulls. As for brawls and the like, if Sirbones cannot patch up a cracked rib or a cut lip, perhaps Mishakal should take his staff back.”

“Shall I tell him that?” Rynthala said with an impish grin that made her look about fifteen.

“Gods, no!” Tulia said, then laughed and hugged her daughter back. “Tell him our guests are not the sort to spoil this day for you, and he can trust them to do what is right.”

“I can and will,” Rynthala said, and turned, then broke into a run. She could go from standing to running as swiftly as a great cat, and keep up a blistering pace long enough to run down a deer or make a centaur sweat.

“Husband,” Tulia said. “Did you listen to yourself, just then?”

“Eh?”

She repeated Krythis’s words about Sirbones, and this time the half-elf flushed in a way that his daughter could not have made him do. Then he nodded.

“Well, at least she comes by that forward tongue honestly.”

“Honesty does not stand against blood feuds, nor make men courageous enough to face such a tongue.”

“Some men, perhaps. But they do exist, or otherwise how would I have come to be, and then gone on to wed you?”

With one fist, Tulia punched her husband in the ribs, and then tickled him with the other hand. They followed their daughter’s footsteps.

By dawn, High Captain Zephros (he had promoted himself the moment they were out of sight of Aurhinius’s banner) thought he and the three hundred men with him were safe from pursuit.

They were, at least as far as Gildas Aurhinius or any of the other captains of tax soldiers were concerned. The men, however, were still as likely as not to end up feeding the carrion birds, through too little desert-craft or too many Free Riders coming upon them unexpectedly.

Zephros also faced certain other dangers-if one can speak of “facing” danger one does not know of, and indeed can barely imagine.

Two of his captains wished to be in his place because they thought the men under him deserved a better leader, such as one of them. Nor would Kiri-Jolith, who in matters concerning war and warriors knows all, have disagreed.

Three others wished Zephros dead for reasons of their own. One was a Karthayan, seeking the blood of the man who had slain his compatriot, the Black Robe Rubina, on the north shore of Istar ten years ago. Another served the kingpriest, and thought Zephros should die for his ambitions as a warning to those who might share them. A third wished to avenge kin, dishonored by one of Zephros’s intrigues.

None of these seven knew that he or she in turn was being watched, by two pairs of large brown eyes set in small, sharp-featured faces. They would have found these spies hard to believe if anyone short of a god had told them, and perhaps even then. Kender do not commonly travel the open desert.

But kender can go nearly anywhere when they have sufficient cause. Imsaffor Whistletrot and Horimpsot Elderdrake thought they had sufficient cause.