The Inheritance

Chapter 4

Unlike their Silvanesti cousins, the elves of Qualinesti didn't think they were the center of the world-the best part of it, perhaps, but not the center. Thus, their maps were not like those of their cousins upon which the Silvanesti kingdom sat at the heart of Krynn, all other lands floated at the borders, pale and only minimally defined, as though they existed in some place beyond a misty border where nothing counted as interesting or important. A map made in Qualinesti showed the wide world around, named all the kingdoms still standing after the Cataclysm and the departure of the gods. Sometimes the maps named the kingdoms that used to be if those old borders could be determined upon the new face of Krynn. They had not been gentle in their leaving, the gods. It had, in truth, been a cataclysmic event, so violent it reshaped the world. But the Library of Qualinost was far-famed for its collection of maps, and so a keen-eyed cartographer could make out what used to be upon the face of what is. They made painstakingly accurate maps, those cartographers. Of course, because they were elves and, in their opinion not necessarily the center of the world but certainly the best part of the world, the forest kingdom of Qualinesti shone like a jewel on every map, all the world around a fittingly depicted setting for its beauty.

In the heart of the kingdom stood its capital, Qualinost of the golden towers, guarded by four spans of high bridges, shining in all seasons. The Jewel of the Forest, so poets named the place. Its warden, Prince Kethrenan, had no such lovely image of the city. He was not blind to her beauty, he could enumerate all her charms, but it was and always had been that Qualinost and all the forest beyond was to the prince more than the sum of its glittering parts. 'This was the land of his fathers, defended in blood. This was the kingdom to which his mothers had willingly borne princes and kings. The blood of his ancestors made holy this forest.

None of these words would he have used to describe his feeling. He was no poet; he was a hard-eyed soldier. Still, he felt his connection to the forest and the kingdom as though all the blood of those distant fathers and mothers had watered the ground around his feet, and he himself had put down the roots of an oak, thick and strong. His brother the elf king had his court, his contentious senate, his lords and his ladies. Solostaran was welcome to all that. Kethrenan had his barracks and training grounds, his warriors. He had armories filled with swords and shields and armor, and every smith in the city his to call. These things he wielded for the good of the kingdom.

In the largest of the barracks rooms, the prince stood in the sunlight of a crisp autumn afternoon. A spare place, here Kethrenan loved best to be. One of a dozen like it, the barracks was nothing but a great sleeping hall for his soldiers with brackets for torches upon the walls and-as in ancient days-no hearth but a long fire pit on either side of which stood long trestle tables. He stood now, in the end of the day, leaning over one of the tables, shoulder to shoulder with his cousin Lindenlea. Cousin and the second commander of his brother's army, she was his most trusted friend, a woman who'd set out on the soldier's road at the same time he did, who'd taken her» training alongside him, and who had risen in the ranks as a hawk rises to the sky, effortlessly. Outside the window soldiers practiced swordplay, and arrows wasped and thunked into the thick straw butts. Someone cheered, another jeered, and challenge crossed challenge, like sword blades. These things Kethrenan heard, but only vaguely. His attention he gave to the map spread out on the scarred table.

"Where is the last place you saw them, Lea?"

She pointed to the eastern edge of the kingdom where waterways ran whose banks were not, in this autumn season, too much troubled with water.

"Right here, just across the border. We're drier in the forest than we're used to being in this season, but out there they're dry as stones. The goblins will be crossing into the forest. If not now, soon."

Kethrenan grunted. "And this new leader?"

"An ugly brute, from what I hear. He's not a goblin. He's a hob."

The prince slid his cousin an interested glance. "We haven't seen a hobgoblin around that part of the border in years. What’s his story?"

"I don't know. The best my scouts could learn was that he's come up from the south, or maybe the east. It’s all wind and rumors. What's certain is that Golch is out and this hob Gnash is in. All our scouts agree on that, and that he's running things in the three goblin towns closest to our borders."

Kethrenan took that information in silence, returning to his study of the map. Down from the White-rush River, streams went branching, blue from the cartographer’s inkwell. All had been depicted by the kind of careful line that comes from a tightly nibbed pen and a steady hand. Some had been drawn thin, some fat, some led into lakes, and others wandered through the forest, following the will of the world, growing or shrinking as Krynn herself dictated. The forest through which these streams went-these days slowly-was shown not in inked lines but dappled green brush strokes. Fair Qualinesti, sunny glades and secret shadowed glens, lay upon the map as beautifully as though it were seen in a still pond's reflection. The dab, sweep, and swirl of a brush depicted the wealth and wonder of elms and aspens, of steadfast oaks and, in the south near that edge of the forest that abut-ted the stony land between the elven kingdom and the dwarven, tall pines whose variety rivaled even that of the oaks. So hardy were those pines that when they did not grow on level ground, they managed to cling with gnarled grip to the sheer crumbling edge of the glens that scored the part of the borderland where the world was more stone than soil.

Without a word from her prince, Lindenlea pointed to the map again. "Here," she said, slipping her finger along the White-rush River. "And here, and here." She tapped the western part of the forest, right by the Straits of Algoni. "Here, and here. Right down to the Wayreth border, and of course all through Qualinesti and strong along the Kharolis Mountains."

This she said in answer to the unvoiced question: Where are your scouts?

Kethrenan nodded, satisfied. "I want reports from all the borders in the usual time."

He tapped restless fingers on the eastern border where the cartographer showed only dun reaches. The blandness of the color changed only a little to gray to indicate rising ground in the south and east. These were the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains. They held little of note but the old fortress standing a-straddle the gap between two of the northmost arms of that mountain chain. Pax Tharkas, fallen to ruin. Pax Tharkas, a reminder of better days when there was no wild windy waste between the two kingdoms. In those times, good roads had run through the foothills, kept safe by elf warriors and dwarf soldiers. It wasn't quite as the legends said, that a fair virgin could walk those roads with a sack of gold in each hand and reach her destination unmolested, but things were better then than now. In those days, goblins hob and small had seldom come out of their dark haunts in the deep mountain vales.

"Send word out that I want to hear from your scouts on the eastern border every second day."

Lindenlea nodded, a cool glint in her eye. "And if anyone comes across the hob?"

"Tell them to do what they do best, and don't bother bringing me back a trophy, just the news that it’s dead."

"Yes, my prince," she said.

Outside, a cheer rose up, and other shouts in chorus. Swords clashed, the ringing martial music. Lindenlea glanced out the window to see the last light of day running like silver on a sword‘s blade. They didn't fight with blunted edges. They fought to the bone and the blood, and so good were they by now that mail and armor suffered, but flesh seldom did.

"They'll all be in soon for their mess," she said to the prince. "And I know they'd be happy if you joined them, Keth."

He grunted, his mind still on his map, counting his scouts, counting his borderland guard, and thinking about whether he wanted to send an extra force out to the border or lie back, waiting to see what would happen. Warden of the Forest Kethrenan was, but still at his very heart, he was a hunter. He understood the virtue of patience. By the time the hall began filling up with his warriors, two things had been decided: He would stay to eat with his soldiers, and he would wait to see what the new leader of three goblin towns would do.

Across the barren land a cold wind came up from the south, like word from a cruel land. Elansa woke shivering, her cloak damp with night-chill. Each night, for the past three, the air had hung damp. Never did rain fall, and in the gullies meant to shine with water the stones lay dry with only a thin thread of water slipping over. There was only the wind, and at night wolves howled in the stony reaches. Into that wind, for three days, Brand and his outlaws had traveled, Elansa in tow. They headed north, and though she didn't know for certain, Elansa hoped they were going toward the place Brand had called the Notch, the meeting place where ransom would be delivered and she would be returned to her people.

If Demlin had survived his journey….

If word had been received in Qualinost in time for Keth to send the ransom….

That would infuriate him, that particular demand- two wagons filled with weapons and armor. Kethrenan would find it easier to part with gold and jewels, to open the rich coffers in the tower of the Sun and pile up baubles. To have to part with precious steel… this outrage would burn his heart.

On the first day, Elansa had been forced to walk with her hands bound before her. On the second day, the ropes had been cut. This was at Char's suggestion.

"She's slowing us down, Brand. Either kill her or cut her hands loose."

Brand had looked at the moons, the red and the white like pale ghosts in the afternoon sky. They were five days from full, and he was reckoning time. He looked north, reckoned some more, and told Char to cut her loose.

"Keep that eye of yours on her," he'd said. "Lose her, and I'll kill you."

The dwarf had shrugged, but Elansa didn't think the threat was an idle one.

Now, on this fourth day from Hammer Rock, she woke and lay for a long moment still, trying to find the will to move. In the end, it was not will that helped her to sit. It was the groaning of the muscles in her back and neck, stiff from another night sleeping on stony ground. Sitting, she looked westward to the forest. She saw only a thin dark line sketched on the horizon, like a fading mark on an old, old map. There was Qualinesti, far away.

Here in the stony land, no dawn chorus sparkled, no lifting of birdsong to greet the new day. Here, there was only wind and, for Elansa, hunger and thirst and bruises. She was not always dragged to her feet when she fell. Brand insisted on keeping his hostage in condition to walk, but when he wasn't looking, or when Char wasn't near, Elansa was as often kicked to her feet as dragged. She learned the names of some of the outlaws by hearing their rough voices, talking among themselves about her as though she were a dumb brute.

Kick 'er up, there, Arawn! Dell, drag that useless sack to her feet!

She learned other names that way, walking or stumbling. She heard their voices roughened by drink, by the cold, by the constant grit blowing across the barren land where only rocks and crows and wolves lived.

Ay, Swain! Y'keep lookin' at ’er like you think those skinny elven bones would warm y’up of a night….

Chaser will have the warm of her before you do!

She heard the name Ley applied to the elf. She never heard the whole of his name. He seemed to have little to do with most of them. She'd only seen him speak with Brand and a tall, silver-haired woman whose name was Tianna and who had the look of both elf and human. Sometimes he spoke with Char, but the long silences between them seemed more the dwarf's doing than the elf’s.

Brand's band numbered two dozen, among them all only two were women: dark Dell and bright Tianna. These two harbored no sympathy for the captured woman. Their laughter was as raucous as any man's when Elansa looked around for food or water and got none or little, when she fell and struggled up again….

"Fine, fancy riding boots," Dell said once, looking pointedly at the thin-soled leather boots with the thick heel. "You'd do better, princess, to go barefoot."

Brand and Dell, Tianna, the elf Ley and the dwarf Char, Chaser and Swain and Arawn… these names Elansa learned, for these were often together, perhaps the core of the outlaw band. The names of the other outlaws she didn't know-surly, sullen men who ranged before and behind her, who drifted in and out of the shadows at night. These she knew only as a threat. These were the ones whose eyes looked at her from the darkness when the campfires were low, waiting for her to get up to relieve herself, to walk just far enough outside the light that Char or Brand wouldn't see. Then they followed, one or two or three, like wolves. After the second night, Char sent the hound with her, his long loping Fang, with the curt command, "Keep!"

Elansa looked around her in the chill dawn. The outlaws slept, dark shapes hunched under ragged cloaks. The embers of a campfire glittered nearby, and Brand sat stirring them to life with a burned stick No one else was awake but the watch on the ridge, Char and Tianna pacing. Brand looked up at her and then back to his fire making. Near his hand a cold chunk of meat sat, half a hare, furred in the ash of the fire. Elansa’s stomach rumbled, hungry. She'd not eaten since the morning before. In exhaustion, she'd fallen asleep while a dozen lean hares brought down by slender arrows from Dell's quiver and Ley's still cooked over the fires. No one had waked her, and the several hounds who were Fang’s companions dined in peace, without her hungry eyes on them. Elansa had learned the hierarchy of this brigand band: outlaws ate first, dogs next, the lone captive after. She'd learned to respect it quickly, for to complain was to go without.

She pulled her cloak around her shoulders and rough-combed her hair back from her face. Tangled and dirty, the knots pulled painfully against her fingers. Broken fingernails scraped against her cheek. The princess prepared herself for another day in the outland.

Brand looked at her again, then to Fang who came padding through the camp. He stabbed the hunk of meat with his dagger and jerked his head at the hound. They shared the meat, stripped from the bones, the outlaw wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the hound's tail wagging in lazy sweeps. Elansa’s throat closed up painfully, tears pricked at her eyes.

Yawning, Brand peeled off one more strip of flesh from the carcass, gave it to Fang, and flipped the bones, stringy meat clinging, to Elansa. The hound watched it tumble in the air, glanced at Brand, then at Elansa. Bones and pitiful remains fell in the dust.

"Go on," Brand said, to the dog or Elansa.

She didn't wait to guess. She took up the bones and gristle, and took what meat she could from the whole. The hound crept closer. She snapped a bone from the carcass and tossed it. While Fang’s attention was elsewhere, she cracked a leg bone and split it for the marrow. This she did awkwardly, not so handy as those who did not eat from silver plates. Marrow, until three days ago, was no more than flavoring for what the cooks in the elf king’s household liked to call a Hunter's Stew. Here, marrow was part of a meal, one she had learned early not to scorn.

All around her, outlaws woke, separating themselves from the earth and their cloaks. Two, Dell and Arawn, separated themselves from each other. Upon the ridge, Char and Tianna looked east toward the sullen dawn. Elansa licked cracked lips, looking where they did. Unyielding gray, the sky hung low, holding out the promise of rain that never came.

Swift and sudden, a hawk's screech ripped across the dawn stillness. Elansa’s heart jumped. Outlaws stopped what they were doing and looked around, searching east. Hounds rose from the dust, stretching. Char and Tianna seemed to have vanished from the ridge. Elansa looked harder and saw them bounding down the thin path away from the height.

Brand snapped Dell's name like an order. The woman grabbed Elansa by the arm and dragged her to her feet. A dagger's gleaming edge pressed against the flesh of Elansa’s neck. "Be still," the woman hissed. Elansa didn't breathe. The hare’s carcass fell from her fingers into the dust, marrow dark in the cracks. The nearness of the delicacy broke Fang’s concentration. The hound snatched the carcass and trotted away to enjoy the last of breakfast.

"Goblins," Char said to Brand, the first to return. "Tianna says about a dozen. I make it maybe less. Ten, likely. No matter the count, we both saw the shine of their weapons. We saw them come in from the west and turn north. Making for Stagger Stream, I’d guess. It’s the nearest trusty water."

Brand heard this in silence, his eyes narrowed. The shine of their weapons, Char had said, and Brand had his hand on his own, the knife always at his belt. He cast a quick glance at his sheathed sword lying near the failing fire, then another swift look over Char's head. "Tianna! Get us going, girl! You and Ley think about east!"

Dell's hand gripped Elansa’s arm tighter. "You're running? Brand, you're running from goblin scum? There's only a dozen, at most. You heard what Char said."

Brand turned as though she'd not spoken. He retrieved his sword, belted it on, and said, "Char, make sure there's no sign of us here for anyone to find. Arawn, you and Chaser in the rear." Then he turned to Dell, his eyes glittering. "’You and Swain at the point. Let Ley and Tianna guide. We're heading east. You have a problem with that?"

Tension crackled between them, like lightning in a storm-sky. Her voice low and tight, Dell said, "I have a problem with running from an easy kill."

"Then get out of here. Take on the goblins if you like." He pointed to Elansa, his finger stabbing the air between them. "You," he said to her, "come here."

Held, she took a step but was not released. The knife's blade pressed closer to her throat.

Brand cocked his head, a slight gesture and dangerous. "Let her go, Dell."

Nearby, Char lifted his head, listening as he kicked out a campfire. In his hand Elansa saw the throwing axe that had, a moment before, been tucked into his belt. What Elansa saw, Dell did. Elansa felt it in the reluctant loosening of the woman's grip, the lifting of the knife.

"Touchy all of a sudden, aren't you, Brand?"

Brand shook his head, not to say he wasn't, to say she'd better not pursue the matter further.

With a rough shove, Dell pushed Elansa toward Char. "Here's your charge, dwarf. You know what to do."

The dwarf kept Elansa close as his own shadow while the outlaws broke camp. Each one stripped the meat from the night's leavings, stuffing it into their pouches, even marrow-bones. Char saw to it that campfire ashes were scattered, burned wood flung wide, the naked bones of last night's supper buried. In short time, two dozen outlaws departed the site of their night camp.

When she looked back over her shoulder, Elansa saw little sign that anyone had occupied that stony ground. She saw the thin gray line of the Qualinesti forest. It no longer ran beside her. Now it disappeared behind, swallowed as though the leaden sky had come down and eaten it. Throughout the long morning she thought of the goblin who had been Brand's hostage only days before. She thought of the and how the goblin’s severed head had made Brand's point to the leader of a goblin town: I despise you, and this is how much.

Should his quest for ransom fail, for whatever reason, would the outlaw send her own head back to Qualinesti, simply for the satisfaction?

Elansa did not doubt that he would.

They were twelve running north to find Stagger Stream. Twelve goblins, most of them orange-skinned, but one or two with that blue-brown hide that looks like rotting meat. They were, as Char had guessed, looking for water. Nearly every creature with any kind of sense of self-preservation was looking for water these days, but these traveled under orders. The goblin town to which they had belonged, which had lately become the headquarters of the hob they’d learned to refer to as the Great Gnash, had become too small for their new master's army. Goblins were moving into the place and drinking up the water in the puny stream that ran in the gully. Gnash wanted more water, he wanted more room, and he wanted a bigger goblin town from which to reign over the three he now ruled. He wanted four goblin towns and the seat of his power to be a new one.

Find a village fat for plunder. Find water.

Simple orders, and the twelve set out to do just that. They were the canniest scouts in Gnash’s army, clever even for their savage kind. They would find what Gnash needed, and each one was certain great reward would follow. Not advancement, for goblins don't think that far ahead. Not one of them envies the position of whichever brute may be ahead of him in power or favor. Goblins envy weapons, treasure, and possessions. When they aren't fighting and killing, goblins like to have things to use and spend.

One of these twelve, a fellow with mottled blue-brown skin, was more eager for reward than the others. He wandered a little afield. He went a little east out of his way. He thought he heard water running, and he was right. A small trickle in a dusty gulch: water. And he saw the flung bones of what at first glance seemed to be some scavenger's meal. When he looked closer, he saw that the dead thing had been a hare, and the thighbone of the eaten hare had been inexpertly cracked for the marrow.

Looking around, the enterprising goblin discovered more bones, these buried in haste. He was a quick reckoner. By the number of supper-bones he found, he supposed there had been a dozen, maybe two, camping there. He thought he should call to his fellows, and then he changed his mind. He'd been south and had not seen two dozen men traveling. Off to the west, no sign, nothing in the north. Whoever had camped here had gone east. Curious and hopeful of gain, the goblin moved off in that direction. Soon he found signs to confirm his guess, the dark splashes on earth and stone to show where travelers had relieved themselves, scraped stone where boots had glanced. And only a little while after his fellows had discovered him gone, he saw a dim line moving across the stonelands.

He stood on a high hill. He couldn't count them or see if they were elves or humans or more goblins. The latter, he doubted. Goblins don't clean a campsite, or even try to. He went down the hill, slipping along behind in shadows until he came close enough to see who traveled.

Grinning, his sharp teeth glittering in the gray light of the overcast day, the goblin thought there would be great reward for him, indeed, if he took this news to Gnash. A whole tribe of human outlaws, that stinking troop with the elf and the one-eyed dwarf and damned Brand himself, was headed east and a little north.

Interestingly, they had a prisoner, and by the look of her gear she was not a woman from a rival band. Those boots were of finest leather, her ripped blouse of silk, her cloak woven in Qualinost or near there. The goblin wondered what that meant-an elven prisoner marching carefully guarded.

Whatever it was about, he reckoned Gnash would like to know, and quickly. Not so much because the elf woman would be of more interest to him than anyone he could eventually sell down to Tarsis. He'd be interested because along with the army of the goblin Golch, who'd lost his son's head in a bad bargain, Gnash had inherited Golch’s hatred of the outlaw Brand, the feud coming to him just as had the weapons, females, and house of the unlucky Golch.

Quickly, the goblin went back along his own trail until he came to a place where it seemed best to turn south toward the goblin town. This he did, and he ran swiftly, like the shadow of a storm-driven cloud, silent on the earth. In only a day and a night of running, he came to the goblin town, and what he'd hoped turned out to be true.

The Great Gnash was, indeed, happy to hear the news that Brand was on the move. He didn't much care to wonder why this was so. What interested him was that there were only two dozen of them, and he had a newly swollen army of goblins to try out. Some of them, it might be imagined, would be anxious to prosecute the old feud between themselves and the human, and Gnash himself hadn't killed anyone since he'd overtaken this goblin town of Golch‘s.

The thing that interested Gnash most, however, was that he'd have a chance to try out a weapon he'd found away south. He'd been carrying it around since he'd discovered it, secret and hidden far beneath the mountains. It had taken a bit of figuring out. He'd done all his conquering and killing in the goblin towns along the Qualinesti border with ever-reliable steel. Now, though, Gnash thought it was time to see if what he'd discovered in darkness might prove to be worth more even than steel.