The Lioness

Chapter Twenty

Magic did not set Kerian and Stanach down where they hoped, but at least it didn’t drop them down in Tarsis or the Sirrion Sea. It put them down only a few miles from Qualinost, in the thickness of the oak forest north and west of the capital. They were reeling with dizziness. The dwarfs face showed green.

“Not a day’s walk from here to Qualinost,” Kerian said reassuringly to Stanach.

The dwarf was leaning his back against an oak, his eyes closed. He had the look of a man praying. He groaned something that sounded like a curse then, between clenched teeth, “Good.”

Kerian waited for color to return to his cheeks and for her own stomach to settle. “That’s not where we’ll go. We’ll be wanting to go first to Wide Spreading, the king’s hunting lodge. There we’ll find a trusty man who will take word to the king that you’ve come.”

Stanach looked around at the oaken wood, the tall trees thickly growing. “We’ll walk to where we’re going, aye? Enough of the magic now.”

Kerian agreed, counting herself lucky in the way the talisman had treated them. She gave Stanach a little longer to settle while she calculated a route that would take them to Wide Spreading by forest paths known only to hunters and deer, then she led the dwarf along those barely seen game trails as though along the manicured paths of a garden in Qualinost. Stanach had nothing to say about that, and she was pleased to take his silence for appreciation.

They went until the sun had climbed past noon height. The season had turned in the short time Kerian was away. The taste of autumn hung on the wind, only the suggestion of it in the fading green of the forest, yet she saw no hunters. When they climbed the slope of a green vale and looked down, they saw no farmers at work in their fields. They saw only great swathes of black staining the golden crops, where the roofs of barns and houses gaped with holes.

Stanach’s good left hand filled with his throwing axe.

“It’s long done,” Kerian said, bitterly. She pointed to the sky. “Look, empty. The crows have quarreled and had the best of the feast.”

“You sound like you’re used to this,” said the dwarf.

She did sound so, and she couldn’t help that. “I’m not used to it, Stanach. It’s how things are.”

Yet it seemed to her that something had changed. The depredations of Knights had, until now, taken place close to the towns or in villages. Elder’s confusion of magic, and the swift-striking Night People who seemed to the Knights like forest ghosts, had kept them out of the woods and away from the smaller settlements and isolated farms.

Something had indeed changed.

Nor did they go alone through the forest. Behind them came the soft whisper of a footfall. To the side, the rattle of browning bracken so faint to the ear that one could be forgiven for doubting one’s senses. Above, down the side of a tall, broad boulder, a shadow, slipping across the dapple of sun, soon gone.

“We’re being followed,” Stanach said, the first night as they sat before a small campfire. “You know that.”

She did. “I know who follows. Leave him alone. He’ll come out when he wants to or go away if he wills.”

The dwarf considered this, then said, “You don’t think him a danger?”

Kerian looked out past the fire, out into the shadows and the night. “Oh, he’s a danger; never doubt that. Not to me, though.” Stanach raised a brow. She cocked a crooked grin. “Or to you, Sir Ambassador, as long as he sees you’re no threat to me.”

They said no more that night about it, but Kerian noticed that the dwarf didn’t sleep easier.

Three days later, followed and unchallenged, Kerian and Stanach stood on a high place, a granite hill made of boulders flung during the Cataclysm. Elf and dwarf looked down into a dell where once had spread a thriving village. Nothing stood there now, and the land lay black, scarred by fire and destruction. Kerian went down, Stanach following. She knew the village as one sympathetic to her cause—or had known it. Her blood running cold, she saw the head of every villager, man, woman, and child, lining the broad street, piked upon lances. Their cattle lay dead, their horses, their dogs, and the fowl in the yards.

Stanach didn’t stand long in the street. He stumbled away, back to the forest, and Kerian let him go. She knew the look on his face, the greening of his cheeks. She stood alone, smelling burning, smelling death, and thinking that she had not been gone from the kingdom long, hardly a scant month, but something had changed.

Something had happened to bring Lord Thagol’s Knights out in full rampage.

Stanach gagged in the brush, the sound of his retching loud in the stillness. Kerian looked north and south, then east and west. She stood waiting.

Softly, a voice at her back said, “Kerianseray of Qualinesti.”

She turned and though it had been only since summer that last she’d seen him, she hardly recognized Jeratt, so changed was he. He was not the man she’d left only weeks before, the cocky half-elf who’d led Night People beside her, who had planned raids, strategies and victories. His hair had turned white. His cheeks thin, his eyes glittering, this was not a face she knew. His voice, that she knew.

“Y’never should have left us, Kerian.” He scrubbed the side of his face with his hand. “He knew it when y’left. He took advantage when y’were gone.”

Stanach came out from the brush. Jeratt turned, arrow nocked to bow in the instant. The dwarfs good hand flashed to his side and clasped the throwing axe before Jeratt could draw breath or arrow.

“Hold!” Kerian shouted. She put a hand on Jeratt’s shoulder, felt the muscles quivering with tension. She nodded to Stanach, and the dwarf dropped his arm. “Jeratt, he’s a friend of the king.”

They stood in heart-hammered silence until Kerian said, “Jeratt, tell me what has happened.”

“You can see it.” He looked around. “This is what they do now, Kerian. Up and down the land, they do this. Maybe they used to think it would teach us some kind of lesson. Now—now it’s Thagol himself doing it and not caring what we learn, past hating him.” He pulled a bitter smile. “He’s waiting for you, Kerian. You’ve been gone; you haven’t killed any of his Knights. He can’t find you on the dream-roads, but he’s still looking for you, and he’s waiting for you to come back.” Jeratt glanced around. “Him and Chance Headsman and their Knights and draconians. He’s brought in reinforcements from Neraka.”

His eyes narrowed. “They’ve broken us, every band, all the resistance you put together. It was you, Kerian, who made it work, you who held us together, who heartened us and gave us a will. Without you—” His arm swept wide. “Y’went away at a bad time, Kerian.”

Ah, gods. Yet there had been no choice.

“Elder?”

Jeratt shook his head. “Gone!”

The word ran on her nerves, like lightning. “Gone? Where?”

“Don’t know. One night she was there, sittin’ at her fire. The next… gone. That was only three days after you left. There’s been none of her confusions now, nothing to help.”

“But you kept on.”

Jeratt’s chest swelled proudly. “I didn’t just keep on. I did what we’d planned, put warriors in the south, and I been back to the dales and roused ’em there, but … I couldn’t keep it going against Thagol. He’s… he’s like the sea, Kerian. We’re all scattered again.”

Looking from one to the other, the scruffy half-elf and the woman who had only days before spoke in the Court of Thanes, Stanach whistled low. Softly he said, “First time I saw you, missy, you were tripping over a Knight’s corpse on the way out the door. Then you show up in the High King’s court. Now …” He shook his head. “What in the name of Reorx’s forge are you about?”

Kerian looked at him, and the smile she crooked had little to do with humor. “Stanach, I’ve been too long gone from the forest. I will take you so far as where you are safe. After that...”

Jeratt looked at her, his mouth a thin line. In his eyes, though, she saw hope rising.

Around the basin, men and women stood. Most Kerian knew, a few faces she didn’t. Some were gone: Rhyl, who had not proved trusty; Ayensha, about whom Jeratt said they would later speak; and Elder, who had vanished one day between midnight and dawn.

Old comrades regarded Kerian variously, some pleased to see her, some angry for her sudden departure and return. Newcomers stood with shuttered eyes, waiting. Bueren Rose looked upon her warmly, but a group of strangers eyed her with thinly veiled suspicion. Each of them, four men and the two women, looked to Jeratt to reckon the mood of the occasion. These were the leaders of other bands, other outcasts, highwaymen and robbers. These Jeratt had collected in Kerian’s absence, and no one knew her. News of her, tales of her, these things they knew. In their world, that mattered nothing at all. The deed done at your side, the back watched, the Knight killed who would have killed you—these things mattered. Of these things, they had no experience with Kerian.

She stepped past Jeratt, past Stanach Hammerfell, the dwarf uneasy among all these rough, suspicious elves.

Kerian looked around at them all, all of them cautious. Out the corner of her eye, she noted Stanach. The dwarf stood watching, blue-flecked dark eyes on her. He had come to speak with her king, and he intended to do his errand then return to his thane, that doubting uncle of his who sat upon the throne of the Hylar. In his eyes she saw how far from Thorbardin he felt, and he stood very still in the face of this unwelcoming elven silence, a careful man trying to know whether the ground had suddenly shifted under his hoot heels.

Kerian laughed, suddenly and sounding like a crow. “You!” She pointed to an elf woman standing apart from the others on the other side of the fires. This one, a woman with hair like chestnut, seemed to be the one to whom others deferred. “I am Kerianseray of Qualinesti. I don’t know you. Who are you?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her hand drifted toward the sword at her belt then stilled. “Feather’s Flight, and I don’t know you either.”

“I don’t care. In time maybe you will. Till then, declare yourself, Feather’s Flight, here in my place, with Lightning—” a glance toward the dwarf—“and Thunder to witness: Are you here to join me, you and all of yours to take up arms in my cause?”

“Well, I don’t know—”

“You don’t know my cause? You lie! If you have run with Jeratt, you know it. You know my cause is a king’s, and you know—” she reckoned the woman’s age, she counted on old alliances, and she gambled with her next statement—”and you know that the king’s cause is not far different from the cause of the prince whose name is honored by our elders.”

Feather’s Flight cocked her head, her lips crooked a smile. “I’ve run with Jeratt, true. What if I now choose to run away?”

Kerian laughed. “If you gave me your word to go and go in peace, I would let you go.”

The woman hadn’t expected that. She stood like a deer with her head to the wind, trying to understand a sudden, complicated scent. “You’d let me go! I come and go as I please, Kagonesti.”

Kerian shrugged. “There used to be a man named Rhyl with us. He isn’t now. He didn’t turn out to be as trusty as we like our friends to be. If I thought for even an instant you were untrustworthy, Feather’s Flight, you’d be an hour dead, and I’d be talking to someone else.”

Someone laughed, one of those beside Feather’s Flight. Someone else murmured, and Bueren Rose breathed a small sigh of relief as the outlaw stepped forward and stood before Kerian.

“We are six bands,” said Feather’s Flight. Kerian withheld a satisfied smile as she realized she’d calculated correctly and called out the woman who best represented the others. “We are from the mountains in the western part of the kingdom, past the dales. Even there heads grow on pikes like evil fruit. Some of us did know the lost prince, Porthios, whom some say perished in dragon-fire.” She stood taller. “I came from Silvanesti with him, and we cleaned the green dragons out of the Sylvan Land. I don’t know his nephew, I haven’t heard good of him, but I see you, Kerianseray. I have heard good of you. In the name of the dead, we will join you.”

The others nodded silently. Bueren thumped her shoulder, and Jeratt grinned wide. Beside the half-elf, Stanach Hammerfell had the look of a dwarf who wasn’t quite ready to relax. Kerian caught his eye and winked.

“Ay, Jeratt,” she said. “The dwarf looks like he could use a meal. Me too, for that matter. Anyone been hunting lately, or is it all bone and stone soup?”

On the hills, elves kept watch. No one counted on magic now, for with her going it seemed Elder had taken all her useful confusions. The dwarf Stanach volunteered to take his own turn at watch, and Kerian didn’t refuse him.

What will he say to his thane about all this? Kerian wondered. How will I get him to Gil so he can form some kind of opinion?

Ah, well, that was for another day’s thinking. She looked at Jeratt. Firelight made him seem older; shadows sculpted his face till Kerian might have imagined him twice his age.

“You know,” Jeratt said, “no matter how well you plan our raids, Kerian, Thagol’s going to find you the first time you kill someone. He’s like a dog sniffing down the road.”

She remembered. Absently, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. There was the old pain forming. From old habit, she gauged the headache, trying to know it for what it was. Not Thagol, hunting. Not yet. This time the throbbing behind her eyes was weariness.

“Before we fell apart, we were all over the place, several bands striking at will and no one for him to grab or follow.” He shook his head grimly. “It’s why he started this slash and burn campaign. Figured he’d cut us off from the villagers and the farmers. He did that right. No one was going to risk his life to feed us, no one would shelter us or even give us news for fear of their own lives. Let me tell you, Kerian, it all fell apart fast.”

Kerian nodded, thinking.

“The first time you kill, though,” Jeratt continued, “he’ll catch up with us, Kerian. The first time you kill, he’ll know it.”

Yes, he would. She’d thought of that. She was considering it very carefully. Her outlaw bands would begin a stealthy campaign. At dawn they would scatter through the forest, making a noose around the capital. They would continue Jeratt’s plan of random strikes, each band falling on targets as they would, in no discernible pattern. Tribute wagons, supply wagons, these were of no moment now.

Now the struggle would intensify. Bridges would be thrown down, roads would be blocked with fallen trees. Streams and rivers would be clogged. “We will not go so far as to fire the woods,” Kerian said. “That is forbidden, but we will fall on his work details as he rebuilds the bridges and clears the roads, we will kill all the Knights who guard those details. We will give the bastard no quarter!”

They would strike hard and strike without mercy. Slowly, in no obvious way, they would move farther out from the city, farther out into the forest, drawing Thagol’s forces into the deeper woods.

“Jeratt,” she said, still rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I’m not going to be at any one of those raids. I’m not going to kill any of the enemy. When I next come to kill, I’ll kill Eamutt Thagol. If I join a raid, it will be to lop the head off Headsman Chance.”

She paused, gave him a moment to digest that, then said, “Jeratt, where is my brother?”

The question surprised him; she saw it on his face. “I don’t know.”

Kerian shook her head. “Yes, you do. Ayensha isn’t here, and you know where she is, so you know where my brother is. Where is Dar?”

She watched him thinking and watched him choose. He’d held faithful to her trust after she’d gone, without notice, to Thorbardin. He’d done better than that: He’d tried to build the core of what would now become—if all gone gods were good!—the terror of Thagol’s Knights. Yet she saw it now, again as she had a year ago. Jeratt had a deeper allegiance to her brother, to Iydahar who did not trust her or like her king.

“Who is he to you, Jeratt?”

The question surprised him. “Dar? He’s my friend.”

She snorted, unbelieving. “He’s more than that. I’ve seen how you are when he’s around—all of you. It’s like he’s a… I don’t know, priest or shaman.”

Jeratt sat a long time quiet, poking at the fire, chasing bright orange cinders up to the sky. Kerian watched him; she looked at the guards on the hill, then at Jeratt again.

“He’s none of those, Kerian. He’s—he was a man of the prince. He fought beside Porthios, and when the prince vanished and most of Dar’s folk went away into the forest, Dar stayed. You don’t know, Kerian. Maybe you don’t remember how hard the winter was that year, you in your towers at Qualinost. Maybe you looked out your window and saw the snow falling and you thought it was pretty.” He stopped, his eyes gone suddenly hard. “Maybe you scurried out from the silks and the satins of your lover’s bed and thought how cold the floor was when your little foot missed the carpet.”

Kerian drew a breath, sharp and swift.

“Dar is the one who gathered up all of the prince’s broken men and found us shelter in a winter that would have killed us. Broken bones, broken hearts, broken spirits. He took us all as his, when he could have gone away with his kin, with your father and mother and the White Osprey tribe. He healed us and helped us, and when the spring came and he did go away to be with Ayensha and her folk, he never forgot us. He brought us news, just like in that terrible winter he brought us food and healing. In all the years, though we fought for no cause but our own anger and greed, your brother never let us go afoul of the Knights we hate if he could help it, and one day he brought us Elder to keep and care for….”

In silence, he poked at the fire again. In silence, he watched the embers, light flowing across them, like fire breathing.

“He was our brother in arms, Kerian. We were sworn to the prince, and that’s like we were born of the same kin. Dar never forgot that. We owe him everything, and though we’ve sworn to your cause—I’m sorry to say it, we don’t owe you him. Dar wants no part of you, your cause, or your king, and there’s no persuading him. I ain’t going to be the one to go against him. Now, Ayensha will be back in the morning, so you go get some sleep now. We got a bit of work ahead of us, eh?”

Ayensha would be back, so he’d said, but in the morning she didn’t come. Neither did she on the morning after, or the one after that, and on the fourth morning, Jeratt said no more than that the girl must have come to her senses.

“She learned she is childing in the time you were gone. She’s come to her senses now and will not be following you to war.”

He lay upon a bed of bracken, the Skull Knight among his men. They’d made camp in the forest, out of sight of the Qualinost Road heading west. Watch had been posted and turned twice before he’d finally settled to sleep. The forest smelled of fern and earth, and down a thin wind, distantly of draconian. He never let those creatures camp near his Knights. They disgusted most humans, and black-armored Knights were no exception.

Thagol closed his eyes. His disciplined mind let go of the thoughts and concerns of the day. He had plotted his next strike, scouted the village, and deployed his men. It would be a fiery morning, this he trusted. In Gilianost lived a taverner who had given shelter to one of the outlaws, a half-elf on the run from two of Thagol’s Knights. The taverner would find that offense costly.

Thagol settled, and though he had not lain upon a true bed in a month, still he settled easily. He didn’t miss Qualinost, that warren of elves, the very scent of whom turned his stomach. He lay upon the forest floor, the hard earth that hated the very touch of his body, that loathed the sound of his voice. As willingly as he hated Qualinesti, so did Sir Eamutt Thagol imagine the forest hated him.

In the deepest part of his sleep, then, he went out walking. Sir Thagol went out from his body and traveled on the roads of dreaming and through the deep places of sleeping minds. It was no unusual journey for him, and he found no unusual thing. When he woke, the soft gray light before the dawn in his eyes, Sir Thagol had the feeling that something had changed in the forest.

It was a feeling he knew, akin to the air of a barracks when warriors are called to muster.

Sorrow drifted like ghosts through the forest. Villages lay in ash and ruin. Heads were posted everywhere as warnings. In the little towns untouched by Lord Thagol and Chance Headsman’s blighting hands, people shunned the rebels now. Kerian’s name was known in every quarter of the forest now, as was the price for her head. The Skull Knight did not offer steel, gems, or precious metals. He offered nothing. He promised death to all he looked upon until she was brought to him, alive for killing.

At farms where once they had been welcomed, no one dared open a door to Kerian, Jeratt, or any of the Night People. In this forest now, all strangers were suspect, any traveler going by could be one of the resistance fighters Lord Thagol hunted. Anyone could lose his head on the mere suspicion that he’d given aid to one of them.

“He doesn’t know where I am,” Kerian reminded Jeratt. They had hunted well, and thanks to Stanach’s deft hand with a snare, they had five fat rabbits to spit. A clear cool stream ran nearby. “Right now, this moment, he can’t even guess.”

Stanach said he wondered how she knew that. Kerian and Jeratt exchanged wry grins as she tapped her forehead.

“I know.” She pulled the bloodstone out of her shirt. “This hides me from him, but if I kill, it doesn’t keep him from knowing I’m around. I haven’t killed. I don’t feel him in my head. He doesn’t know where I am.”

The dwarf grunted skeptically, then sat in silence for a while. Then, “When are you taking me to Qualinost?”

Kerian leaned close to the fire, to the warmth, for the night was chill.

“You’ve seen this place,” she said. “You’ve seen what Thagol and Chance Headsman are doing. Do you think I could get you as far as Qualinost?”

Stanach snorted. He was a long time quiet, his face, his eyes above his black beard gone still as he cradled his ruined right hand in the palm of his left.

“In good time,” said Kerian.

Jeratt grinned. “And we’ll get you there with your head still sitting on your shoulders.”

Stanach turned his head this way and that, as though trying to loosen a kink in his neck. “I’d appreciate that.”

The fingers of his left hand curled round the haft of his keen-edged throwing axe as he stood to take the first watch. Beyond the fire, he looked at Kerian, a long, considering moment. He thought about the serving girl he’d met in the forest, perhaps not far from here, two years ago. She had been a tender creature then, soft hands, perfumed hair. Now here she sat, a leader of a shadowy force of warriors known as Night People. She crouched before her forest hearth, in leather boots and woolen trews, a shirt a man might wear. Her tattoos shone in the light, and it seemed to Stanach she had as much of the forest about her as the owl now sailing the night between the trees.

The elf woman screamed. Her voice soared high above all the rest; her face shone white in the night as she clutched her child to her breast. Howling, five Dark Knights ringed her round, circling, swords high, laughing. One howled higher than all, and one kept starkly silent. She fell to her knees, bent over the child, the little creature wailing in her arms against her breast. A voice shouted “Erathia!” A sword screamed through the air, and the voice did not shout more. Erathia wailed, knowing her husband dead, knowing his head would join the heads of other murdered elves.

Horses thundered round her, Knights yelling madly.

Erathia prayed to a goddess long fled the world, she prayed to Mishakal, the giver of mercy elves named Quenesti-Pah.

“Merciful goddess, lady of light, spare my child, oh spare—”

Beside her face, so close the iron shoe ran red with firelight, a tall war-horse stamped and grew still. Around her, the others did the same. Erathia had heard no command, but these Knights had a Skull Knight for a lord. There had been a command.

Trembling, she hunched lower over her child and realized she heard nothing of elf voices. No villager wept, howled, or pleaded.

Gods, she was the last.

“Merciful Lady…”

She looked up, and two Knights departed from the circle around her; two came close, one on either side. They wore their helms closed, and that didn’t matter. Erathia knew which was the Skull Knight. From him, his very being, flowed the coldness of death, like a wind out of winter, belling in the forest, howling in her heart. He flung back the visor of his helm. The other mirrored the gesture.

“Headsman,” he simply said.

She looked to them, to one and the other, the agents of her death. In the eyes of the Skull Knight she saw nothing, not a killing lust, not hatred, not even determination to get the job done. Nothing, as though she looked into the windows of an empty building, into blackness. In the eyes of the other, Chance Headsman, she saw fire. Flames leaping, consuming, bloodlust and killing-need.

In his eyes she saw her death, the raising of his blade before he lifted it, the fell swing before he caused it. She screamed, flung herself aside, and there was nowhere to go. A horse jostled her, and the child fell from her arms, wailing.

Whistling, the sword of Chance Headsman swooped low. She looked into the eyes of the Skull Knight, perhaps to plead. In the moment of her death, the moment the blade kissed her neck, she saw a thing happen in those eyes. They kindled with sudden savage joy.