The Lioness

Chapter Thirteen

“Look! Damn Knights.”

Ander slipped closer to Kerian, his breath warm on her cheek. In his throat, his pulse jumped. Sweat glistened on his cheeks, and in that he was not so different from Kerian or Jeratt. The sun of late summer shone down hot and the canopy of the forest provided shade but did nothing to cool the air. That certainly accounted for some of the sweat. The rest… the boy was coming close to what Jeratt called “first blood,” his first battle. Today, or another day soon, Ander would do his best to kill another.

“First blood,” Jeratt had said to Ander when they began to draw together resolve and make plans. He drew upon the earth, as he liked to do, sketching maps real and imagined, laying out the strategy of the forest-fighter whose best plan is to use the wood for cover, to dart out and kill and dart back again. In this, he found that Ander had a keen mind, a quick wit for understanding and for seeing how such plans worked. Between the two, the half-elf and the boy, growing respect began to replace grudging acceptance.

Though he spoke most often of tactics, most forcefully, Jeratt also spoke to Kerian and Ander, the untried warriors, of risk. “You spill someone else’s, or he spills yours.”

Ander pointed to the road again, a thin winding branch of the broader Qualinost Road. Kerian nodded to let him know she saw what he did. The narrow road ran beside a broad stream. The jingling of bridles and bits hung in the air, two Knights riding side by side. Behind came a heavily laden cart drawn by two mules. An elf drove the cart, man or woman Kerian couldn’t tell from where she crouched. It was as, only the day before, Felan had told them it would be: two Knights and a cart full of swords, battle-axes, and daggers.

“Sometimes it’s that, got from the smithies in this part of the country, made to Thagol’s order to arm his men, here and in the city. Sometimes it’s gold or jewels taken at the border from traders, hill dwarves from down southern ways who take their pay at our border and don’t set a step into the kingdom. Other times, in season, it’s harvest, most of it going to feed the Knights in the capital.” Bitterly, he said, “We keep enough to seed the next year, barely enough to feed ourselves through winter, no more, and nothing to trade for pots and pans, plough shares, and belt buckles. We don’t trade much for wine now, not for cloth, wool, or boots.”

It was beginning to be here as it was in the eastern part of the kingdom—the elves were made to arm and feed their oppressors while they themselves plunged deeper into poverty. Felan, Bayel, and other dalemen bitterly felt this insult. It hadn’t been difficult to convince them to keep an eye out, an ear to the ground, for the purpose of letting Kerian know when a Knights’ cart or wagon would set out on the road to Acris.

“Listen,” Jeratt told her, “and learn, but keep hold of patience, Kerian.”

So Kerian watched patiently as carts and wagons wound the river road. She stopped counting how much tribute was passing and learned to count how many Knights were deployed for a cart, how many for a wagon. She saw that—cart or wagon—the ones most keenly guarded were those bearing weapons. She learned that once on the Qualinost Road, the escort met draconians that saw every load of tribute on to Acris, the crossroads town some miles distant. From there, Felan said, a stronger force of Knights with more draconians escorted small trains of carts and wagons all the way to the capital.

“Acris,” Felan told them, “is where you’ll find Lord Thagol. His Knights are quartered all over in this part of the country, in villages and taverns, but the Lord Knight stays where he is, right in his den and keeping watch over all.”

Felan and Bayel had sworn to find a dozen elves to join them, young men and women who had for more than a year now been chafing under the oppression of the foreign Knights. “We’ll scour the countryside of ’em,” he’d said. “Drive ’em right back to Qualinost.”

Kerian refused at once, and Jeratt wholeheartedly agreed.

“That’s your pride talkin’, “ he said. “Not a bad thing, unless it kills you. Ain’t no twelve of you going to send Thagol and his Knights anywhere but to sharpen their swords, but Kerian, me, and Ander, we have a fair bit of experience keepin’ out of trouble. You get to learnin’ that, travelin’ as we do. We got no wives or children, no farms to tend.”

Felan had paled at that, and Bayel stayed silent.

“You let us do what we plan,” Jeratt said gently, “and just keep an eye open now and then for a bit of news you might think we’d like. Later—” He shrugged. “Later, things could change and then we can talk again.”

Later they might be looking around for good men and women to add to their number.

“Look,” said Ander again. “Damn Knights. They ride through as if they own the place.”

Kerian nodded. Behind her, Jeratt slipped out of the deeper gloom. “Three of them ugly draconians ahead on the Qualinost Road,” he said. “Waitin’.”

Kerian pointed to the Knights. Jeratt grunted. ›

“Tidy little package,” he said.

Ander nodded. “Two Knights and an elf who’ll flee or join in our side.”

“Can’t count on him not siding with the Knights.”

The Knights came closer. Now Kerian heard the deep thud of hoofs on the road, human voices speaking roughly in Common. The cartwheels creaked, the mule snorted and pulled a little at the reins when the wheels hit a rut. The cart’s burden sang, steel chiming faintly against steel.

“A cowardly elf and two Knights,” Ander said stubbornly. “We could take them.” Ander glanced from one to the other, in his eyes an eager light.

“Now easy, boy,” Jeratt said. He glanced past Ander to Kerian. “Listen.”

“For what?”

Jeratt pulled a predator’s grin. “For me to tell you when to go.”

Sunlight and shadow swam on the road. The willows hung so close to the ground their boughs brushed the earth. Horses snorted, a Knight cursed and looked back over his shoulder at the elf and the cart. The driver slapped the reins hard against the mule’s rump, but the cart didn’t move. The mule spread its forelegs and lowered its head.

Ah, Kerian thought, now slap those reins one more time…

Which the elf obligingly did.

The mule brayed, and the crash of hoofs against the front of the cart boomed through the forest. The Knights swore in unison as the elf slapped the reins again.

The mule kicked a second time, then a third. The cart wobbled, and the front of it broke away. The driver jumped free, as the cart crashed onto its side, spilling shining weapons all over the road.

“Now,” said Jeratt, nudging Ander.

The boy leaped up, Jeratt beside him. Two arrows flew, and a heart’s beat later, a third. Someone screamed high; a Knight tumbled from his horse, the horse itself bellowing in pain. Kerian’s arrow had pierced its neck. Jeratt let fly a second arrow, taking down the second Knight. Behind him Kerian shot another. The Knight on the road was trying to stand, two arrows in his thigh. Ander, breaking the plan, let go his own second shaft. It struck nothing, not even the horse writhing and squealing in agony.

Jeratt grabbed him hard, shaking him. “No! Do what I told you!” He shoved him toward the slope. He turned to glare at Kerian, shouting “Go!”

She ran, scrambling down the hill to the road, slipping on old leaves and grass, righting herself every time. Heart slamming hard against her ribs, she bolted for the screaming horse. In one swift motion, she slit its throat. Blood spurted from the severed artery, rising like a crimson fountain, splashing Kerian’s hands, her face. Beside the beast lay its master, the Knight with two arrows in his thigh. Kerian saw his eyes wide and white in the shadows across the road. Helpless, he lifted a hand to the blood-soaked elf woman standing over him, to plead for mercy or to ward off a killing stroke.

“Do it!” Jeratt shouted. “Now!”

Now, or the draconians would hear the commotion and come to investigate.

Kerian gripped the bone handle, and as she did something hit her from behind, a hard weight driving her to the ground. She lost her knife, the dwarf-given weapon flung from her hand. A voiced cursed her in Qualinesti as the driver of the cart jammed his knee into her back, crushing air from her lungs. The elf grabbed a handful of her hair.

There was her knife, flashing in the sunlight, across her field of vision, down toward her own throat. Her cry of fear and protest sounded like strangling.

Someone thundered, “No!” and the elf strangling her jerked once, then again.

He toppled, the release of his weight as painful as the weight itself.

Kerian tried to gain her feet and fell back. A hard hand grabbed her and dragged her up. Jeratt’s bearded face came close to hers.

“Go,” he shouted. “One of the horses bolted—they’ll see it on the road. Go!”

Go… where? Strip the Knights of weapons and whatever gear they could use. Sink the tribute into the stream, let the fine steel rust and rot, useless to Thagol or the dragon.

Kerian ran, seeing the elf who’d tried to kill her out of the corner of her eye. He’d died of two arrows in the back, Jeratt’s and Ander’s. From the look of them, they’d struck at the same instant.

Jeratt and Ander sank the tribute, hauling the sacks of weapons to the stream, shoving those blades that had spilled out back among their brethren and letting the weight of steel hold the weapons under the water. While they worked, Kerian took the boots of the Knight with the smallest feet. She grabbed the swords of each and their scabbards and belts. Before her companions had returned, she stripped off the black mail shirts and left the Knights face up and staring at the overhanging willows from dead eyes.

She didn’t stop to give in to the sickness roiling in her belly until she, Jeratt, and Ander had fled the scene of the killing. Then she vomited, quietly, violently in a thicket so far from the road that the sounds of furious draconian discovery never reached her.

“You killed one of us,” Kerian said, the sour taste of bile in her mouth hours later. “You killed that Qualinesti. That’s not what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be fighting the Knights and—”

“Just about anyone who’s trying to kill us,” Jeratt drawled, “and that elf was trying to kill you.”

Kerian snorted. “He didn’t know who we were or whether he was in danger—” She shook her head, trying to dispel the memory of the elf’s body flung away by the force of two arrows. “You could have hit him, pulled him off me. You didn’t have to kill him.”

“There wasn’t time!” spat Jeratt.

Silence stood between them, Kerian on one side of the campfire, Jeratt and Ander on the other. They had no hare on a spit over the flames, and no one had gone to catch trout from the nearby stream. Jeratt was eating a hunk of cheese and chewing on a small loaf of hard bread, which they had gotten from Felan’s wife the night before. Chewing, Jeratt jerked his head at Ander, who slipped a hand into the pouch at his belt. Kerian heard the crackle of stiff parchment as Ander unfolded it.

Jeratt jerked his head again, Ander handed the paper across the fire. Little sparks jumped up, Kerian took it quickly.

“Read,” Jeratt said.

She did, her eye leaping along the few short lines of a terse message. It commended the bearer to “the most esteemed Lord Eamutt Thagol of Qualinost and late of Monastery Bone,” and it urged the Lord Knight to reward the bearer according to the measure of his merit.

“Found this on the dead driver,” Jeratt said around the last bite of cheese.

Kerian stared at the message.

“You’re welcome,” Jeratt said dryly.

She looked up, almost absently. “Thank you.”

Ander leaned closer to the fire. “He’d have killed you, Kerian. He was trying to kill you.”

The fire hissed over green wood. “I know the elf was trying to kill me,” she said curtly, then, softer, “I was there.”

Kerian balled up the parchment. “A collaborator! A cowardly collaborator working with the Dark Knights.” She made to throw the balled sheet into the fire—then caught herself in time. She held it a little above the flame, then took it back and smoothed it across her knee.

“What?” said Jeratt, looking from her to the wrinkled page.

Kerian shook her head as she folded the parchment neatly along the original lines. “Nothing. Yet.” She leaned forward. “We need to let Felan and Bayel know. Anyone they speak to could be working for Thagol—they’re taking more of a risk than we guessed, helping us.”

Jeratt snorted. “We aren’t going to stay here and make a career out of kicking Thagol.”

Their plan was to make short, sharp strikes in this part of the kingdom then slip away back home, let Thagol puzzle over things here for a while, then take up their campaign against his Knights from Lightning Falls. Jeratt had traveled back there twice, speaking to Elder, speaking with Ayensha, Bueren Rose, and the others.

“Right,” Kerian said, “but they have to live here. I’m talking about setting down roots. Let’s kick Thagol a few more times before we leave. Let him know trouble is brewing.”

Jeratt nodded slowly in agreement, the grudging expression on his face saying he wondered just who was in charge sometimes, him or her.

She slapped her knee and looked around hungrily. “What’s to eat?”

Jeratt laughed. “Used to be cheese and bread. Not much more now than a heel and a rind. Gotta get a better belly, Kerian.” He jerked his chin at Ander. “You too, youngster. You’re gonna see worse than you saw today. You’ll do worse, too. Might as well not do it hungry, eh?”

Too late to hunt, too late to fish, Kerian and Ander went to sleep hungry. It surprised her, waking in the middle of the night to the sound of Jeratt tending the fire, that she could sleep at all. She glanced at Ander and saw him staring at the leafy canopy, eyes wide and nervous. He slid a glance her way. She saw him shudder and reach for the scabbarded sword lying near to his hand. They all had new weapons this day, looted from corpses. Ander’s fingers didn’t cringe to touch the pommel of a dead Knight’s weapon.

In the morning, without consulting Jeratt, she told Ander to slip quietly through the forest first to Felan’s farm and then Bayel’s. “Tell them we know there was at least one collaborator among the elves here, that there might well be more. Tell them everything we discussed last night, offer them the honest choice—back out now, stay as they have been, or come to fight.”

Ander nodded, eager to undertake the mission. Jeratt watched the two, eyes narrow, expression hard and unreadable.

“After you do that, don’t come back hem” She slipped a finger into the neck of her shirt and hooked the slender gold chain that held two halves of the king’s ring. In a quick gesture, she removed one half and put it into Ander’s hand. “Now, before you leave, speak with Jeratt—”

Jeratt, glaring at her now.

“—and he will tell you how to get to Lightning Falls. You must go carefully, because you’re returning to the area where Knights have been searching for me and very likely now they are also searching for you. When you come near Lightning Falls, you will be challenged by folk who look like”—she laughed “—who look like us. They’re outlaws like us, but answer the challenge humbly and quickly, no arrogance with these folk. Tell them you are from Jeratt and me, be quick, and show my ring. Tell whoever challenges you that seek a woman named simply ‘Elder,’ and tell her all that has happened here.”

Ander took it all in silently, his eyes on her, lighting in excitement for the mission, shadowing in sadness for having to leave.

“After you tell her that, Ander, tell her Jeratt and I will be home before winter. Tell her things are changing in the kingdom now.”

“I’ll do it all, Kerian. I promise. Just the way you tell me.”

“And you won’t come back. The risk that you’d be followed isn’t great, but it’s a chance we can’t take.”

Reluctantly, he agreed.

“You’re a fool,” Jeratt growled when the boy was gone. “You’re reckless. It’s wrong to send the boy so far alone, with such a mission. He’ll be lucky no one kills him before he gets to the falls. By all the gone gods, you’re a fool, Kerian!”

She flared, hot and high and sudden. “Don’t ever call me that again!”

He didn’t step back; in the sudden silence of the forest, Jeratt held his ground, his face set and stubborn.

“You think you’re not bein’ foolish? Y’think the boy didn’t just turn to fire for you? Kerian, he’s in love with ya. He’ll do anything you tell him, and he won’t be thinkin’ about anyone else but you.” Jeratt shook his head, then spat. “That will get someone killed someday.”

“Getting prescient, like Elder, are you?”

“Wonder why I say you’re a fool, do you?”

She flared again, he laughed at that and tapped his chest.

“I have a year or two more on me than you, Kerian. I haven’t lived in gilded palaces; I’ve lived in the hard world, the place where people die of stupidity, their own or someone else’s. Happens all the time, and I ain’t no seer, I just pay attention to what I see.”

The falling fire lay between them, yet they might have been standing toe to toe.

Coldly, Kerian said, “You are welcome to your opinion, Jeratt. I don’t know if you’re right or wrong about Ander, and I can’t undo a boy’s heart, but I can use him where he can do the best work. He’ll let the others know what we’re doing, let them know to be ready for our return. And hell be away from me for a while.”

Jeratt’s stance relaxed, his expression softened. “Y’did what y’could, I’ll grant it.” He stood in grudging silence for a moment longer. “The plan isn’t all that foolish. I’ll grant it, too.”

“But—?”

He met her eyes. “But y’should have sent him on a long time ago.”

By her silence, she agreed.

Between them embers breathed faintly. “I’ll not name you ‘fool’ again, but I might be sayin’ one day or another that y’could think something through a little harder. You have a good, keen mind, Kerian. Sharp as a dagger and bright. You learn, and that quickly.”

“But girl,” he continued, and she heard the affection in the naming, “y’came out of your king’s palace and walked into the forest with no idea but to find a brother who didn’t have the good sense to be happy about it. Now you’re puttin’ together a plan your king doesn’t know he can dream of. Y’like to leap at the bright idea. Maybe that’s good, but a lot of the time, it isn’t.”

Kerian kicked at the dirt, sending a fine spray of it onto the embers. Jeratt did the same. Between them, they smothered the fire. The half-elf winked.

“Well, even when I think you’re bein’, uh, not too sensible, I’m with you, Kerianseray of Qualinesti. I like the flash of your steel.”

Jeratt liked the flash of Kerian’s steel, and Lord Eamutt Thagol learned to hate it. Through the end of summer and into the beginning of a late-coming autumn, he found himself having to increase the size of the escort of Knights who accompanied tribute wagons to Acris. What had seemed to be isolated incidents of brigandage began to look like more than that. Lone wagons, no matter the number of Knights, were raided with increasing frequence and efficiency, and survivors reported that they were struck by growing bands of elves who fought by no rules any Knight or soldier knew, who seemed to reinvent their tactics daily. Soon he sent to Qualinost for more draconians with the trains that went on to the capital.

Through the summer of hot days and steamy nights, the outlaws became four, and then five and then more. Bayel and Felan left their farms and joined them, and so did others from the dales, men and women who wanted to strike a blow. They never ran as a solid or identifiable group. Sometimes they were eight, nine, ten at a time. After a raid the dalemen would fade away, back to their lives as peaceable citizens of a bleeding kingdom. They came at call, they left when the work was done, and each knew the danger of collaborators, the invisible enemy. Each knew he must not speak with anyone who was not part of the group.

They came to be known as the Night People, for they struck most often at night and vanished into the darkness before they could be identified. They went with soot-blacked faces, their bright eyes the more fearsome. They moved like shadows, like darkness.

The Night People. Kerian spoke the name to her growing band of warriors gleefully, proudly as though it were the name of a renowned fighting order.

“They come out of the woods on all sides,” one dying Knight reported to his lord.

The Skull Knight took the man’s head in his two hands, leaned close so his eyes were the only thing the dying man saw. A great shudder went through the man, and blood spurted from the wound in his side. In his mind, he felt Thagol walking, prowling, searching for something.

He wanted a name. The Lord Knight desired to see a face, a form, to know his enemy. The dying man couldn’t give him that, and in the end the agony of his death didn’t have all that much to do with his wounds.

The Night People changed strategy. They stepped up their raids, killed as many Knights as they could, as quickly as possible, then fell back, drawing the infuriated survivors after them and into the mouth of a trap that had been well set—a wall of waiting elves who let through their compatriots and closed around the Knights, howling terrible war cries, curdling the blood with screams. They killed swiftly, and they left nothing alive behind, not Knights, not horses, not draconians. They stripped the dead of weapons and what equipment they wanted, then destroyed the rest, leaving nothing but corpses for Lord Thagol to claim.

Some of the Night People died too, but their bodies were always stolen away and hidden and buried, so that the occupying force no longer knew who to trust in the dale.

Sitting in the tavern at Acris, Lord Thagol ransacked the minds of his dying men. He sent word to every town and hamlet in the forest, every farmstead in every dale, that the elf who gave him what he needed to know, who brought to him the head of the outlaws, would be richly rewarded—but not even then was he able to learn the face of his enemy.

At last, though, he was able to learn of one strike before it was made.