The Inheritance

Chapter 11

Elansa felt Brand's eyes on her everywhere she went. They tracked, they followed, and when she turned or lifted her head to look at him, he did not look away. He was thinking about her, and she knew he was weighing something, perhaps her fate. He watched her eat, and she did not challenge. She drank from the stream, slipped away into the privy place, and came back. He watched her leave, he watched her return, and she did not challenge.

Elansa pressed her back to cold stone and rested her head against the wall. Brand stood talking to Char, the two a little apart from the others. The dwarf gestured, sometimes broadly, sometimes subtly.

Quiet as a shadow, Tianna dropped down to sit beside her. She took a broad-bladed dagger from her belt and a whetstone from a little leather pouch In silence, she made stone and steel sing, honing the weapon. Little sparks flew, dancing in the dim light. She lifted the blade, touched it lightly with her finger, and found it keen. She turned it and, not looking up, said, "What are they talking about?"

The question surprised her. Elansa shrugged. "I'd be the last to know."

At this, the half-elf looked up. "You should be the first. You sleep with him."

Elansa watched the sparks fly. "Not by choice. There is no pillow talk, Tianna. There is only…" She shook her head. There was only command. "You had a better chance for that than I will or want."

Elansa studied her face. "Tianna had a lovely face. Her lips were wide, and her eyes were not so long as an elf’s but lovelier than a human's. She had bathed, somewhere in privacy, as did Dell. They could. They had long ago let their male companions know how they would enforce their privacy. And so her hair, clean and shining, was the brightest thing not afire in the cavern. She wore it in a thick braid, and a widow’s peak framed her brow.

Tianna looked up, and her long eyes gleamed with humor. "He can be a good lover," she said, low. "I didn't get tired of that."

Elansa ventured a question. "What did you get tired of?"

Tianna looked around, at Brand and Char in their animated conversation, at Swain and Ballu and Chaser rolling the bones, at Dell sleeping and Arawn brooding. Her glance swept past Nigh-toothless Kerin, Pragol, Loris, and Bruin, whose hair was the same color as a wolf's pelt. She looked at her father, the elf who spoke very little and not to many of his companions.

She said, "I’m tired of this. Tired of moving and tired of all these men." She sighted along the edge of her dagger, the tip of it glittering. "I won't be leaving him now. There is too much shifting and change in the air. One of us goes, and it could all come down."

"Arawn would like that."

"He acts like he would. No matter. I'm here for now. When we get where we're going…" She shook her head. "Brand'll be getting where he's going. Me, I'll just be going."

They sat a moment. Chaser crowed in triumph, and Swain grumbled about ill luck.

The silence settled in again. Tianna slid Elansa one swift sidelong glance and whispered, "You'll want to keep an eye on me, princess."

Elansa understood that the words weren't warning but suggestion. Tianna got to her feet and strode away. Elansa, for months a prisoner, had grown used to living as a captive. She knew how to keep her feelings close. As though the half-elf had said nothing at all, she settled back against the wall, feeling the cool damp stone against her shoulders.

She looked around her. A grander cavern, still this little forest of stone was a robber’s den. For this time, these brief hours of rest, the outlaws had fallen into old patterns-gambling, sleeping, and quarreling. She knew all their voices. She could pick them out with her eyes closed. She heard them each night in her sleep. She stretched out her legs and stretched her arms up high She was cold and cramped and weary. The light shafting down from some high crack in the stone ceiling grew fainter, paler. Day was ending. Perhaps moonlight would soon reach down here.

Ah, for the smell of the outside air, the freshness of a quickening breeze! She thought of the red-tailed hawk, winged and free. Secretly, behind the mask of her face, she thought of Tianna’s words. Keep an eye on me, princess. They sounded like wind in the sky. They sounded like hope.

She felt his eyes on her-Brand’s keen glance. Wrapped in her cloak, as much against his regard as against cold, Elansa lay down with her back to the wall. As she had long ago learned to do, she slept, but she didn't sleep peacefully. For the first time since her capture, Elansa dreamed.

She dreamed about being watched. Eyes were upon her-Brand’s brown eyes, weighing her, judging her. She dreamed she did not suffer that. She dreamed she allowed it, and in her dream, she looked into those eyes and spoke as a princess speaks, in the full confidence that her station was her shield, her rank her defense against all who would harm her. She was, after all, an elf among these half-savage outlaws, a princess of the royal house of Qualinesti.

She said, "Look, Brand, as deeply as you dare, and see if I am afraid of you."

In her dream, she was not.

Elansa felt the shadow of the hand before she felt the flesh and bone. Cool, sliding over her flesh, she felt the shadow gliding. Her heart slammed up into her throat. She stiffened and jerked away. Too late! A hard, callused palm clamped across her mouth, another grasped her wrists, her two slender wrists in one broad-handed clasp, prisoned as though by ropes again.

Elansa’s blood pounded in her temples. It seemed the whole dark world beat to the rhythm of her sudden terror. Her breath snagged in her throat, pressed back by the hand across her mouth, and she struggled, trying to find flesh to bite. Her teeth came down upon the pads of the palm. Her captor grunted, and she tasted blood even as he gripped harder. Eyes wide, she saw in the pale moonlight the flaring red outline of a man bent over her. By that dim light she saw his eyes, wide and white, and his mouth opening. His breath reeked of spiced jerky, and he stank of sweat and smoke.

"Hush," he whispered.

Brand.

A little, Elansa relaxed. Her muscles eased, the tension drained.

Brand's grip on her hands loosened. In one swift motion he pulled her to her feet. "Quiet, and come with me."

Shaking and wrapping her cloak around her shoulders against the chill of the underground, she stood in barely broken darkness. Faint light suffused the cavern-the light of the two moons gone pale for all the dark distance it had to travel to find them. Brand stood close, his beard bristling against her face.

"Come," he said, and his breath touched her cheek.

She heard no threat, no danger in his voice. He turned, assuming obedience. Following, Elansa walked carefully past the sleeping forms of Brand's outlaws. Char and Fang, master and hound, each twitched in sleep. Passing those two, she smelled the scents of hound and dwarf spirits all tangled up. She walked around Dell in her corner. Arawn and the others were hunched and unmoving as stone. Four were missing. She saw them in the distance, darker forms against the darkness, standing watch near the entrances to this stony forest.

Elansa looked across the stream to the stony wall, at all the pillars built up over centuries uncounted, minerals dripping down from the roof to form accretions on the floor, age after age growing tall until this wonderful forest of stone lived beneath the earth, illuminated by thin shafts of moonlight and pale blades of sunlight. This was the work of gods, or the work of the world itself. Yet here in this wonderful place someone had fashioned steps, the breadth and height carefully measured, the stone beautifully smoothed and polished, and her feet knew those steps as well as she knew those in the elf king’s hall.

Elansa and Brand walked to the water, right to the edge of the stone where the stream was noisiest. When he stood farthest from his men, Brand put his back to the water and turned to face her.

"Now, tell me something," he said. Here fell a broader shaft of mingled moonlight, so she saw how bright his eyes were. "Tell me what you know about Pax Tharkas."

"Pax-"

"Hush!"

He warned even as she heard her own voice begin to echo. Behind them, someone stirred, then stilled. Over her shoulder she saw Swain at one of the entrances turn his head, then turn back to his watch.

"Pax Tharkas," she whispered. "I know much about it, or what it used to be. Why? Hasn't Leyerlain told you about it?"

"Never cared about it till lately. Tell me what you know."

Curiosity pricking her, she said, "Pax Tharkas has long tales attached to it. In the library at Qualinost we have a whole room devoted to the histories of the place. Our greatest king commissioned the building of it-"

"Kith-Kanan."

"Yes," she said, surprised to hear that name on human lips.

Brand shrugged. "In the Stonelands, you hear things." He cocked a curious eye. "You kin to him?"

Coolly, she murmured, "No. My husband is Kethrenan Kanan, and he is kin to the ancient king."

But his attention had wandered. He was not impressed. "Ah, well, married to kingly kin, that’s not so bad." Again, he quickened, his eyes glinting with barely suppressed eagerness as he returned to what most interested him. "Now. Pax Tharkas. Tell me."

Low in the air of the cave, torch smoke drifted through the faint beams of moonlight that arrowed down from a ceiling they could not see. Two hounds growled over a bone. Char dreamed again.

"Pax Tharkas was, a long time ago, a monument to friendship between elves and dwarves and humans."

She looked past him, to the black-and-silver stream running, and warmed to her story, telling him that for a thousand years and half a thousand more the fortress whose name means Peace of Friendship stood inviolate, guarding all the land about in three kingdoms. The rich Tharkadan Iron Mines were there, safe behind the great walls and guarded by the two tall towers. From there came the iron and steel that had, before the treaty, been the cause of wars between dwarves and elves and humans. With the treaty and the building of the fortress to seal it, trading pacts were made, and wars became the stuff of history.

Then came the Cataclysm and the withdrawal of the gods from Krynn, the withdrawal of the elves to Qualinost and the dwarves to Thorbardin, the scattering of the humans….

In those hard times, the very face of Krynn was remade. Seas shoved out of their basins, and the climate across the face of the world changed. In the ensuing years, kingdoms fell like toppled sand castles, and the wealthy became poor, and poor people became desperate. Pax Tharkas became the sole property of the mountain dwarves, the far western outpost of Thorbardin manned by clans grown suspicious of outsiders. Old alliances fell to dust, old treaties were forgotten, and the names of old friends went unspoken as the elves of Qualinesti and the dwarves of Thorbardin grew eager to turn inward where the godless could not come.

"Pax Tharkas was many long years in the making, and few deny it is the finest craft of dwarven hands," Elansa said. "It’s built astride a south-running mountain pass, an enormous fortress of stone with two tall towers and an outer wall no enemy has ever breached. Kith-Kanan, the first king of the Qualinesti, our first Speaker of the Sun, is buried there in a fine crypt, and his Royal Guard lies near."

"Have you ever seen it?" Brand asked.

"The crypt in the Hall of the Ancients? No. No one alive has. It’s guarded by dire magic. And I've never seen Pax Tharkas itself." Her voice dropped low. "But I think we are near Pax Tharkas."

Brand's eyes lit with amusement. "What makes you say that?"

She pointed to the step upon which they stood. "Dwarf-made, don't you agree?"

He didn't disagree. How could he? He'd spent years in the outlands of Thorbardin. The mark of dwarves was everywhere to be found and not in the least noted in the ancient stonework in the robber-hall under Hammer Rock. Cunningly worked columns lay shattered beneath the ledge where his men had long kept watch, as though some great temple had once stood, then fallen. If one didn't see mountain dwarves much outside Thorbardin, one often saw the ancient work of their hands.

Elansa took his silence for agreement. "I believe the dwarf who made these steps must have been in the Tower of the Sun. I'm sure he saw the steps these mirror. This work is ancient, and so are the steps in Qualinost. He was, I think, one of the designers of Pax Tharkas."

Brand snorted. "A step’s a step."

She bent to one knee, tracing her fingers along the riser until she felt the mark that made her case. "Look." She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. "Put your hand here and see the proof of what I say."

He bent, and she guided his hand toward the mark she wanted him to feel. So close to him that she felt his breath on her cheek, she knew his surprise when he touched and traced the lily-mark.

"That is the mark a dwarf made upon those steps in the Tower of the Sun, in the feast hall, and that hall was commissioned by a woman whose name, in Elvish, means Lily of the Night. Why would her sigil be here in this place if the maker of these steps hadn't had to do with Qualinost and Ashanlilana, the Lily of the Night?"

"An elven queen," he said, "marked there and marked here."

Color rose to Elansa’s cheek. Ashanlilana hadn't been a queen in Qualinost, though for a time she had been queen in the king's bed. The Lily of the Night had managed no official status for herself, though her mark, her lily, remained in several chambers of the ancient Tower of the Sun-on tiles, stair risers, and in bas-relief on two of the colonnades that led out from the tower and into the royal family’s private gardens. She had, in her time, had great influence on the heart of the king.

"Tell me this," Brand said, pulling her to her feet, "who lives in Pax Tharkas now?"

"Why, no one." Did these humans know nothing?

Did they roam between the Tower of the Sun and Pax Tharkas as though they'd been dropped down into foreign lands? "No one lives there. The dwarves held on to it for nearly a century after the Cataclysm, but they lost it during the Dwarfgate War. Now the only things living there are ravens and wolves and rats and-"

"Ghosts. You call it Pax Tharkas, and dwarves do. The rest of us call it the Fortress of Ghosts."

That was a dark enough name for a place meant to stand as a monument to friendship, but it wasn't the name that made her draw in her breath. Sudden understanding and wonder filled her, and she looked over her shoulder to the place where she saw Char and his hound.

"He led us all this way, so close to Pax Tharkas, with no sight of sun or moons or stars."

"He's a good guide when he's not drinking. None better in the hills around or even here in the belly of Krynn."

"I don't doubt he is. Arawn doesn't seem to agree."

"Arawn’s a fool," Brand said. "He's looking for trouble, but Char won't give it to him."

"Why do you keep him?"

"Arawn or Char?" He shrugged. "We're long-time friends, me and Arawn. Me and Char, too. They have their faults. One drinks a bit, the other… he has a hard time with things sometimes. Arawn doesn't like it when things change. Makes him feel like he's got to shove up against me to prove who he is." Brand combed his fingers through his thick beard, and his lips quirked in a mirthless smile. "I won't kill him unless he makes me."

The moment had an odd clarity, a strange stillness, and Elansa realized that the observation Brand had just made might have been one Kethrenan might have made. Not couched so roughly, but they knew their men, these two. They knew what moved them, how far to push them, and when to stop.

Caught in the disjointed moment when she saw her husband and her captor in a similar light, she spoke with perhaps more softness than she had in months. She said, "Brand, why are you going to Pax Tharkas?"

He scratched his beard. Head cocked, he looked at her, deciding if he should say. In the stillness, she saw the gleam of silver around his neck, the glinting of the sapphire phoenix on his chest. He reached to touch it, the god-figure, and Elansa thought, He doesn't know what he's touching. He doesn't feel the magic.

"Do you know the Notch?"

How could he ask?

"Sometimes I used to stay with the farmer and his family," Brand said. "I liked their daughter. She liked me for a time. They were friends. They’d feed me when I needed it, shelter me if I wanted that. I gave them things-sometimes steel, sometimes just a brace of hares. It was a good place to be, a little fastness in the border to keep them."

But it hadn't kept them. It had burned, tumbled down, and been deserted. Elansa had seen it.

"What happened to them?" she asked.

Brand's eyes narrowed, and his hand fell from the phoenix. "Got raided."

"Goblins?"

Whatever warmth she'd seen in Brand's expression was gone.

"No," he said, and his eyes touched her, cold. "Elves. Too close to your precious border, that farm. They took a deer or two, hare or pheasant when they could without going too far in. Took too much." He jerked his head. "The little fastness couldn't stand against your husband's will. And I moved on, back and forth, building me a feud with goblins. But I remembered them and their little stone fastness that stood true against all but an elf prince. I thought I'd find a fastness of stone for myself. One that would stand against anyone. I'd sit there in the mountain, stash weapons all over the inside of this place, and never a goblin or elf would stand against me."

But the goblins had got a hob for a leader now, Gnash whose army swelled daily, or so it seemed. And the elves… well, that hadn't worked out well, either.

"What will you do in Pax Tharkas?" Elansa asked. He lifted his head, rough and shaggy. He looked at her long, and she saw that his nose jutted like an eagle's beak. "I have enemies. I will hold the place against them, and they will not take me."

The boldness of his reply astounded Elansa. His dozen outlaws grumbled against this journey daily, they grumbled against each other, and one threatened to break the band asunder while another planned to leave. Yet Brand spoke as though he were a general in the field, and all his troop loyal to the last heart.

I have enemies, and they will not take me.

Is he mad? She wondered. It might be he is.

A sudden cry shattered the moment-Chaser's shout of terror. Elansa turned but didn't see what hit her, what crashing weight bore her to the ground. She didn't know it was Brand on top of her till she smelled his breath and felt his beard on her neck.

The cavern erupted in a howling so terrible she thought the stone would break.