The Lioness

Chapter Fifteen

That winter, in the eastern part of the kingdom, there were glad greetings as Kerian and Jeratt returned to the Lightning Falls. “Or Thunder as the dwarves name it,” Ander told Bayel. The young man had settled in well among the outlaws. Jeratt’s welcome was one of shouts and laughter and back thumping. Bayel was introduced and accepted warmly and went easily among them for the sake of his reputation in the east as a harrier of Knights.

Kerian returned to them a different person than they had known. She had been Jeratt’s student in the arts of living, the hunter he must coach, the fletcher who couldn’t fletch, the Kagonesti servant of Qualinesti masters too far gone from her heritage.

“She is not that now,” murmured Briar, a flame-haired elf woman, to the young man who shared her sleeping furs. “Look at her, all golden and tall and—” She shook her head. “Damn if the woman hasn’t learned how to stride.”

Kerian thought there might be some tension over Jeratt, once the leader of the band, now deferring to his student, but none resented that because the half-elf made it clear that he didn’t mind.

“She’s what she is,” Jeratt said, quietly to his old friends while she lay sleeping. “I’m what I am. We’re good enough, the two of us, for what’s coming now.”

Elder, that small huddle of an ancient elf woman, said nothing to either of them upon their return, but Jeratt knew her of old, and so he knew by the feel of the forest, the air, the very stones that made the basin behind the falls, that Elder was pleased. The two began a strange conversation.

Kerian didn’t know for sure, but she imagined that Elder was a shaman of some sort, a sorceress who practiced the kind of earth magic the Qualinesti and their aristocratic kin the Silvanesti had long ago forgotten. In a world from which magic had vanished, where even talismans of legend sputtered into unreliability, Elder kept hold of something made of the ancient whispers of the land itself. Her conversations with Elder were never easy, sometimes as wrenching as tumbling into a maelstrom, for she spoke with a woman who smelled of magic in a world from which magic leaked like heart’s blood from a wound. Yet painful as these conversations could be, confusing, often as terrifying as the very first one which had left her on her knees and vomiting, Kerian never came away from Elder without feeling that she could—here and far away—create a force of men and women who would stand against the Knights and for the elves, who might, one day, be useful to an embattled king.

They settled into winter, the rounds of hunting and trapping, of preparing food and seeing to weapons. Kerian forbade raids on hapless travelers and on Knights.

“Leave them alone, for now,” she said. “Let the winter settle in peace. The Knights will know we’re here when I’m ready.”

Now and then, because he was not known to Knights here or to villagers, she sent Bayel to learn the news. He visited taverns, the forges at the river crossings where folk came and talked, he went among farmers as they used to do in the dales, a hunter come with bounty for the table in exchange for local gossip and a night by the fire. In this way Kerian learned that Headsman Chance still quartered his Knights in the taverns, that he had not forgotten the outlaw maid Kerianseray, and that he continued to hunt Kagonesti, who were seen less frequently now in the this part of the kingdom.

Kerian learned only one stubborn tribe remained, far away in the high forest, and Briar told her this was Dar and his White Osprey.

She learned, too, that the king was well in his palace. The mention of his name woke a longing to see him, to feel his arms around her again. Those longings she kept to herself and changed into dreams. She learned that the Queen Mother remained in health, and that the lords and ladies of the Senate were no different from seasons past. Surprisingly little had changed in Qualinesti politics. The highborn elves played a game of small losses, counting each day they hadn’t lost all as a gain. It was not a difficult game right now, for Sir Eamutt Thagol had been keeping himself and his Knights and draconians in the eastern part of the kingdom where the snow fell thickly and few traveled on the roads or even gathered at taverns. In the cold season after his humiliation, there was scant news of the Skull Knight.

Kerian dropped the fat brace of hares to the ground, careful to keep it well away from the bloody snow and the four dead elves. She slipped her longbow over her shoulder as she bent to crouch over the largest of the scattered corpses, the armor-clad man from whose throat sprang six arrows. Her breath hung on the icy air, gray plumes drifting over the carnage, weaving around the shafts of the white-fletched arrows. Winter arrows of the Wilder Kin.

“Kagonesti must have got the Knight,” Jeratt said. She didn’t look up or acknowledge the obvious, and he added, “The Wilder Kin didn’t get the others.”

The others, three elves dressed in the leathers and furs of hunters, had been sword-hacked. These were folk who lived in winter on their wits, not villagers, not farmers, but elves who supplied taverns and the tables of the wealthy. Luckless, this time. One had bled out his life from a throbbing artery severed when his left leg had been hacked off. It hung now from his flesh, a dark fat thread pulled to unravel a life. All around him the snow carried a frozen overlay of bright red blood. Another of the hunters had died of a slit throat. The third had been trampled by steel-shod hoofs, his neck broken, his skull shattered.

The Knight who had killed them... Kerian’s lips curled in a wolfish smile. He’d been made to pay the blood-fee.

“Y’got a bad look on you, Kerianseray.”

Kerian pointed to the frozen spread of blood. “Knights are killing elves all over the hills, Jeratt. Qualinesti and Kagonesti. How sweet should my expression be?”

Jeratt said nothing to that. He picked up her bow and handed it to her.

She looked at him long, and whispering in the silence between them were the ghosts of conversations past, arguments about politics, about the occupation, about knightly abuses like that before them, and worse. The dragon’s tribute, thinly disguised as taxation, was bleeding a rich kingdom like sickness. Over the winter, the cold nights and ice-gleaming days, they all had talked of ancient hopes, the history of the elf kings right back to Silvanos himself who united all elves in Silvanesti. They spoke of ancient glory and ancient wars. They were elves and though they had lived outside the law, some for decades, they knew their history.

Their hearts and imaginations were enchanted by ancient tales. One thing remained unknown. Would all the outlaws fight the dark Knights when she asked them to? Would they lift their swords for a king they despised? Or had they come to be so comfortable in outlawry that in the end they cared for nothing but their own survival?

Count on them, Jeratt had told her each time she wondered.

Kerian snatched up the brace of fat hares. “Come on, Jeratt. You want to give these to the widow, or shall I go do it alone?”

Kerian started away down the hill, Jeratt following quickly. The crisp wind in their faces made breath stream out in wisps behind them. It scoured their faces until their cheeks shone red. At their feet it blew the snow into little dancing white devils. They went strongly, swiftly, each knowing the way over snow-covered ground. They knew the markers that had nothing to do with slender trails, a particular bend of a tree, a boulder where—if there were ground to see—the path would have split. At this boulder they went west and ran beneath the snow-laden boughs of pine trees until it seemed they went through a tunnel, so low did the trees hang with their burden. At the edge of it, in the place where the over-arching trees fell away, they stopped and stood to gaze down into the dale, where a sprawling stone house sat. It had once been the home of a prosperous farmer and his family. The farmer now was dead. He and his son had been killed in a hunting accident years before, leaving only Felyce, a widow who would not give up her homestead.

“Well, y’know,” Jeratt had said, once in early winter when Kerian had asked how it was that Jeratt, such a strong hunter, came often back to camp with far fewer kills than might be expected, “I knew the son, and I knew the father. I’m not going to see the widow Felyce go starving.”

Smoke rose up from the chimney closest to the front of me house. Chickens minced though the mud in the door-yard, dipping low to find the leftover corn from the morning’s feeding. The outbuildings, a stone byre and a wooden hayrick, squatted at the edge of the clearing to the north of the house. Nothing moved near them, and no one seemed to be within.

Kerian looked for other signs of presence and saw none. She listened for the cow that must surely be in the byre by now, for Felyce did not like to go late abroad after her milker in this season when the night fell swift and sudden. Of the cow, they heard nothing. Jeratt came close, his breath warm on Kerian’s cheek.

“Too quiet down there.”

It was. The muscles between her shoulders tightened. Kerian dropped one shoulder, let her strung bow fall to hand. Jeratt’s long knife hissed free of its sheath and whispered home again, tested. In his own hand, with the swiftness of long-gone magic, his own bow sprang.

The wind shifted, turning a little and coming to them from the forest behind. The tang of pine hung on that breeze, and the sudden musk of a deer. Kerian lifted her head, thinking she caught the thick odor of horse. The wind dropped then stilled. She smelled nothing. The sky darkened with a noisy wing of crows, and below a light sprang in the window beside the front door.

“All right,” Jeratt said on an outgoing breath.

Kerian heard, She’s all right, but hid her smile as she hung back. Jeratt loped ahead. Long-legged strides took him swiftly down the hill. Half-elven, his human parentage aged him well before an elf who bore the same years. In the last light his silvering beard shone, and his eagerness lent youthfulness to a face weathered by the forest and the seasons. Kerian followed, keeping a closer eye on their surroundings. She sniffed the wind, caught the scent of deer again but no whiff of the stable.

Neither did she catch the scent of cooking, of soup, stew, or roast that any farmwife would have simmering on the hob or sizzling over the fire at this darkening hour.

Kerian stopped, still and listening. The crows had long flown over; the sky hung empty of all by dying light. Again, she noted no sound of Felyce’s milk cow, no comfortable lowing.

“Jeratt,” she called, but low.

He heard and stopped to turn. Stopping, he saw her eyes widen in surprise as Felyce came out of her door. Even from this distance, Kerian noted the woman’s pallor, the way her hands moved in restless wringing. Jeratt moved toward her, and Kerian leaped to hold him back.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.”

He moved again, spurred. She gripped hard. “Wait.”

Jeratt quivered under her hand. Feigning a casualness she did not feel, Kerian called, “Good evening, Felyce!” Deliberately casting the lie, she said, “I know we’re unexpected company. I hope we aren’t intruding. We’ve been hunting and came by on the way home to share our take.”

“Aye, who’d thought to see you, Mistress Gellis,” Felyce said, improvising a name even as she yet wrung her hands. “I thought you’d gone to kin out by the sea long before now.”

“The winter caught us,” Kerian said, following Felyce’s lead. “I’m here for the season, like it or not. Come spring though”—she elbowed Jeratt “—come spring I’m poking up my old father here, and we’re bound for Lauranost and the sea.”

Jeratt’s eyes widened to hear himself described as Kerian’s “old father,” but he managed to keep still. He held out the brace of hares, and Felyce came close.

“Go,” she whispered, white-faced, her eyes bright and glittering with fear. “There’s a Knight inside. More are coming.”

A dark shape crossed before the window. Kerian’s blood ran quicker as Jeratt said, “Are you all right, Felyce?”

“Yes.” She pushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “I’m all right. He’s offered no harm, and he seems content to wait peaceably for his brother Knights.”

“Why are they here?”

Felyce shook her head. “I don’t know. He says little. I think they are scouts, Kerian, but the why of it doesn’t matter. They hunt Kagonesti, these Knights, but they haven’t forgotten what brought them here last year, the hunt for you.”

Again, the whiff of the stable. Kerian slapped Jeratt’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”

He hung on his heel, reluctant to leave.

“Go,” Felyce said, and now she spoke only to the half-elf, her pale cheek tinged with a flush of rose. “For the game, my thanks. Go!”

They did, before Felyce’s unwanted guest could come again to the window, curiosity growing, but they did not go far. Up the hill and around into the forest they found a place of concealment from which to watch. Neither spoke. Neither had to. They found a shelf of stone high above Felyce’s little dell, above the low, running breeze, and wedged themselves into the stony shelter.

Night fell. Three of Lord Thagol’s Knights came riding down the hill, following the same track Kerian and Jeratt had lately taken. They went in silence, no sound but the snorting of their horses, the clatter of hoofs on stone. The look of them, horses and men, spoke of a long ride. One pointed to the lights in the dell and rode swiftly down the hill to Felyce’s stone house. The others spurred to follow.

Kerian watched them, narrow-eyed and thinking.

When they’d reached the dooryard, she leaned close to Jeratt and said, “They’ll be there all night. I don’t think they’ll hurt Felyce.”

Jeratt growled and snatched up his bow. Kerian stopped him. “No. If we go in, they’ll kill her right now. You can count on it. Go back to the camp.”

There were, in all, but a dozen and a half outlaws there at this time, eighteen in all not counting Elder.

“Get me ten fighters and come back here.” Her eyes on the Knights, on the stone house below, Kerian said, “Nothing will happen to Felyce while you’re gone, and we have the bastards trapped.”

Jeratt grinned. He took up his bow and with no word slipped away into the night. He was not long gone.

Kerian followed the flight of an owl drifting on the night, wings wide, silently sailing. Concealed from sight of anyone below, she listened to the sigh of wind in the trees. In the dell, every window of Felyce’s house shone with light, orange glowing like eyes looking outward. Now and then a restless Knight would pass before one or another, upstairs or down.

“Like they’ve commandeered the place,” Jeratt growled.

Kerian snorted. “They won’t hurt her as long as they need her to cook and fetch for them.”

They had three times seen Felyce walk out to the stream behind the house and return with laden buckets. By the light from her windows, they’d watched her lay the table in her front room and pile platters high with food.

“My hares,” Jeratt muttered sourly.

“Don’t worry,” Kerian said, gaze roaming the darkness. Somewhere in the forest, ranged round the lip of the dell, elf outlaws waited in utter silence. Their breaths did not make as soft a sigh as the wind. Kerian had asked for ten. Jeratt had found eight volunteers and challenged two vacillators into joining. Her plan was simple and quickly explained. Her order, only one: Not one of Lord Thagol’s men would come out of the forest alive.

“They’ll leave at gray morning,” Jeratt said, not watching the forest but the dell. “They’ll probably take the south-going road, back toward the Qualinost Road and whatever tavern the Headsman is squatting in now.”

“Bayel says he’s at The Green Lea.”

Jeratt and Kerian sat in silence while stars wheeled across the sky, while the lonely silver moon set and the darkest hour came then died before the pale breath of dawnlight. He was first to see the stirring of dark forms in the widow Felyce’s dooryard, the first to hear the impatient snort of a horse.

“Ready now,” Jeratt said, soft.

Kerian fingered the golden chain round her neck, the slender necklace Gilthas had given her on the night she’d left him. Ander had returned the token, and now the ring was whole again, two hands clasped.

“Ready soon,” she whispered, her lips close to Jeratt’s ear. She scanned the rim of the dell and saw nothing moving. She had been with these outlawed men and women on hunts; she knew how still they could keep and for how long.

“Jeratt,” she said, “one band should watch the north road, one the south. You take the north. There is only one signal: the movement of Knights. You know what to do.”

They parted, slipping away until they occupied opposing sides of the high ground above the dell, each with a clear sight of the farm and the dooryard. Kerian had charge of a band of six. Even as she completed her orders, Ander came close and said, “They’re leaving the farmhouse, Kerian.”

She looked where he pointed and saw motion in the dooryard. The four humans wore faint outlines of light. Her elf eyes saw not only the flesh and bone shape of them, but the heat of their blood running, their life-force glimmering. They stood like red ghosts in the dooryard, and among them stood Felyce.

“She’s all right,” Ander said with a relieved breath.

Kerian stilled him with a gesture. Behind the sounds of the dawn, the first sleepy chirp of birds, a brook talking to itself, the wind rising then falling, she heard the voices of those in the dooryard. One Knight turned from speech with a fellow and nodded curtly to Felyce. Something small spun through the air between them, the first light winking on it. A coin dropped into the dooryard at Felyce’s feet. The Knights kicked up their horses and rode out from the farmhouse yard, heading south. To the Green Lea, then, to Headsman Chance.

“Wait,” Kerian said to Ander. “Wait, and soon we’ll follow.”

In the forest others moved, Jeratt and his band of six. They didn’t move to join Kerian or pursue the Knights. Seven weaponed elves, outlaws and soldiers of an old, nearly forgotten cause, melted into the darkness of the wood and went by various ways to the Qualinost Road.

Kerian waited until she felt they must be well on their way. She smiled, thinking of a vise, and softly said, “Now Ander. Now we go.”

Four Knights rode through the graying forest. One professed himself pleased to see the sun pinking the sky, one smiled to see the shadows fade. Another watched the day prick out glitter on the stream they rode beside. His fellows also watched the water. A dragon’s enforcers, the strong arm of a Skull Knight, they went as though they were lords of the forest. One hawked and spat, the phlegm of a night of drinking from the widow’s wine cellar. In the pines, a jay shouted. From across the purling stream, another answered. Behind, the water splashed, two Knights turned and saw nothing but morning mist rising on the banks. Two others turned right and left, expecting to see the forest shimmer. The trees remained still. Not even the long, thin needles of the pines stirred in the morning breeze.

A horse snorted. One Knight slipped a hand low, gripping the pommel of the sword at his hip. The gesture sent tension running among them. Other hands touched weapons, seats shifted for balance.

Now they realized they heard no other kind of bird, just a riot of jay voices as they went carefully downstream.

When it came at last, the wasping of an arrow flown, it sounded like thunder in the ear of the man it passed, felt like lightning in the eye of man it struck.

The forest erupted in howling, in war cries and fury.

Kerian ran before them all, one of seven elves pouring down the slopes of the forest.

“The horses!” she cried. “I told you—kill the damn horses first!”

Fire-haired Briar leaped to the fallen Knight and snatched up his sword. She gutted the horse of the Knight who turned to strike her. She swung upward and hacked the Knight’s leg at the knee, severing it and unleashing the shower of blood that would be his death.

Screaming, two more horses went down. Blood steamed in the cold air, the thick reek of it hanging. A Knight, caught beneath the bulk of his fallen steed, screamed as his beast writhed in its own agony. The screaming became a bubbling groan. Kerian shouted again, in Elvish, a language none of these Knights understood. Two of her outlaws lifted their voices in ululating cries. When the echo of those cries was gone, so were the elves.

In the eerie silence, now afoot, the two remaining Knights stood back to back, each with swords held high. Their breaths, panting, streamed out gray on the brightening air. One looked north, the other south. One looked west, his fellow east. They saw nothing. They heard nothing but the death struggle of the horses.

Silence fell upon the little glade, thick as a funeral pall.

“Where?” whispered one.

The other shook his head. He saw nothing, no one, only the dead and dying.

In shadows thick as night beneath dark pines, Kerian drew a silent breath. Beside her Ander crouched, an arrow knocked to bow. Kerian felt him quicken with excitement, the muscles of his shoulder close against hers quivering. Wind shifted.

“Wait,” she said, the word only a motion of lips.

Ander breathed through his nose, silent.

“Wait,” Kerian said again. Behind her, her outlaws had become as stone again.

The two Knights put the distance of a step between each other’s back. They consulted in quiet voices. Knights with no foe to fight, no enemy upon whom to take revenge, they turned and left the glade. Their weapons glittered in the new light of day, but neither sword had tasted blood, and this was their disgrace.

Kerian gestured to her fighters, a simple command: Let them go.

This they did, but not happily. Still, they heeded, and they watched the two Knights walk out of the glade, south toward the Qualinost Road. They watched them return, not on their feet but dragged by the heels, corpses come to join their brothers.

“Now,” said Kerian, “strip them all of weapons, even of eating knives. Leave nothing behind we can use.”

She watched as they did so and forbade the looting of personal possessions. Let the rings stay upon the fingers, the talismans around the necks. Only one thing more did she command, and though most of those who heard her didn’t understand, Jeratt did. He took Lea and Briar along to carry out Kerian’s strange order. They were all day gone from their fellows but returned to the stony shelter behind Lightning Falls by dawn.

“Did you do it?” Kerian asked.

Jeratt assured her that he had, and she told him to come sit and eat some breakfast.

Upon the doorstep of the Green Lea four empty helms stood, hung on saplings stripped and changed into woodsy mockery of the pikes that desecrated the eastern bridge in Qualinost. Empty-eyed, like the sockets in the skulls of murdered elves, they stared at the tavern door. So well were they posted that these were the first things Chance Headsman saw when he walked out in the morning on his way to the midden.

His fury passed quickly. He ordered his men mounted and armed and followed a trail easy to see to the glade where his four missing men lay. They were not Kagonesti who had killed his Knights, for none of the arrows he found bore white fletching. Each man had been looted of his weapons and mail shirts and boots, and the horse of each had been killed, gutted or throat-slit. Anything of use to the killers was gone from the corpses; what couldn’t be used had been systematically destroyed.

A chill crept up Sir Chance Headsman’s spine, the kind that warns a man that he is about to fall.