The Lioness

Chapter Four

Kerian slipped through the first shadows of day’s end, a pretty serving girl with her hair tied back, dressed in clothing of a simple cut, rough cotton shirt, trews of a heavy, serviceable brown fabric, and black boots. But for the ribbon twined into her thick golden braid, she was unmarked by her master’s colors.

The clothing she had from Zoe Greenbriar for a lie. “I’m going away with a party of the Senator’s servants out into the wood to prepare his hunting lodge. The last time I rode in a skirt, thickets tore my skin and it’s long pants for me!” She’d regretted the lie; she and Zoe didn’t swear false to each other, but the Senator truly would depart for his lodge in a few days, and in a house as large as Rashas’s, no one would miss her right away with Zoe’s story as good cover.

The lordly part of the city slept, elves who had the luxury of leaving the debris of Autumn Harvest celebrations to their servants. Those, the Kagonesti in hall and house, cleaned garden and hall, laid firewood for the morning, lifted windows to the first scent of the season, the poignant mingling of settling dew, rich earth and fading leaves. Through the wealthy precincts of her lover’s capital, Kerian went. The streets and byways traced graceful curves, gentle windings round elf-made pond, round garden, past a shadow-draped and sudden house that only seemed to be a jutting of stone and tree from the side of a lofty cliff. Only servants did Kerian see and one or two dark-armored Knights on their rounds. Of those, one looked at her long and whistled low as she passed. Head high, she did not turn or ever acknowledge the man. He was human, lackey of a foreign occupier and dangerous. She had learned that the best way past these creatures of Neraka was to be always aware of where they were and never to make eye contact.

Gradually, the paths widened and became roads. The roads no longer went in wandering ways but became straighter as she came to the part of the city where tradesmen lived and worked. At the mouth of an alley running behind the frame buildings of Milliner’s Row, she stopped and looked back. Down the long shadowy tunnel framed by shops and warehouses, she saw a brightness of late sunshine and the royal residence framed in the opening.

A small breeze drifted from behind, chill fingers tugging wisps of hair from the braid at the sides of her face.

Looking one last time at the royal residence Kerian’s breath caught for a hard moment in her chest, then she turned away, lips tight. No man of the king’s would ever find Iydahar, and if she did not leave her lover she would be abandoning her brother.

In all cities, in all lands, no one knows the ways in and out better than those who serve. Kerian had served for many years in Qualinost; she knew the city as well as all her Kagonesti kin and better than those who were her masters. In the late hour of the first festival day, with the sun slanting long to the west and shadows growing, Kerian made her way through the city unremarked, a servant with a leather wallet slung across her shoulder. Any who saw her thought that wallet held what it always did—missives from her master to one or another of his fellow senators, to the king himself, perhaps to Sir Eamutt Thagol in his grim, cold headquarters. It held nothing like that. In the wallet were a small sack of coins, among them three steel, and a smaller leather sack filled fat with hard cheese, bread and cold slices of lamb.

As she approached the eastern bridge, Kerian lifted her head, picking out a scent among all those of the city, one from beyond the shining bridge. Downwind, past the towers where Sir Eamutt’s Knights walked, bristling with weapons, stinking like humans and clanking in their black armor, away past orchards and winding carter’s roads, stealing into the sleeping city came a whisper of smoke, a thin suggestion of burning in the north.

In the next moment the wind shifted, as it does at day’s end in autumn. It slid from the west and brought her the stench of rotted flesh on the severed heads piked upon the bridge.

Kerian hung for a moment in the darkness of shadow pooling around the eastern tower. She listened to the Knights talking above. They spoke in Common with a harsh Nerakan accent that made the utilitarian language known throughout Krynn sound guttural. They wondered when the watch would change, wondered if they would be paid.

Kerian took the ribbon from her hair, the braid bound by slim strips of soft, sueded leather. She did not want to be marked by her master’s colors once she left the city. Should it be necessary, she’d prepared a tale that would leave any questioner believing she was but a servant from an outlying farm, gone to the city for the festival and on her way home again. She let the ribbon go, saw it caught by the wind and sent tumbling along the ground behind. One of the Knights spotted it and said to his fellows that he’d like to follow that bit of silk to the one who’d worn it.

“Ar,” said another, spitting. “She ain’t wearing it now, boy. Means she took it off for a reason that ain’t got to do with you.”

The Knights laughed, and carefully Kerian waited until the sound of their voices grew distant as they resumed their watch walk. When she knew them gone, she slipped right around the base of the tower, out from under the bridge and into the broad swathe of meadow grass that ran down to the peach orchards.

She ran low, bent over and barely ruffling the grasses, and she didn’t stand straight again until she crossed the carter’s road separating the meadow from the orchard. Baskets stood in stacks along the verge, left there from the harvest. Inside the orchard, leaves drooped, spent with the harvest, waiting to fall. Autumn breathed upon the rising mist, the scent of changing, of leaving.

Kerian shivered.

Once Iydahar had said to her, “You will hear it said the Kagonesti are savages. You will hear it said that Qualinesti did not steal us away. You will hear it said that others stole us, humans, minotaurs, ogres, or goblins looking for profit. Sometimes you will hear it said the Qualinesti rescued us from those creatures, but we know better. We will always hear the wailing of our kin. We will always remember the faces of those who stole us from our home. Stay in your city, Keri, but you stay at a cost. There will come a time, Turtle, when you find you can’t remember how to be who you are.”

Turtle. The old pet name didn’t sting. It recalled her heart to another time, another place, and the brother who loved her no matter what befell. How would Iydahar feel about her if he knew her lover was a Qualinesti, and not only that, the king of the Qualinesti?

In the sky, crows shouted, raucous and sailing toward the bridge. The scent of smoke vanished, then returned. Kerian ran swiftly, in and out the rows of peach trees, through the orchard, heading for the forest road and the way to Sliathnost.

At the edge of the orchard, where the ground sloped down into forest, Kerian halted and looked back. Over the gnarled branches of peach trees, four towers stood high. Silver spans of bridges gleamed. Kerian bade silent farewell to the bridges, the towers and the shining city. She ran down the hill and into the forest, that green and glossy realm which so much reminded her of the Ergothian wilds of her childhood. For a time, running, she was again the child, the girl who lived in a land of forest and seaside sky.

“Can’t catch me, Keri! Keri can’t catch me!”

Iydahar flung the old taunt, laughing. Kerianseray had known that scorn all her young life, and she had known its tempering love. What ran between them, brother and sister, was always a weaving of this, the scorn of the elder, the son whose place in the universe of his parents had been encroached upon by this unexpected girl, and the abiding affection he would never deny. She was, after all, and no matter how supremely annoying her very existence, his little sister.

“Turtle!”

In the sky, gray gulls echoed Iydahar as he ran ahead of her, long limbs shining in the sun, brown and powerful. Kerian struggled to keep up, sand like glue beneath her feet, her little legs pumping hard and seeming to take her nowhere. Iydahar sailed over reaching driftwood, and all the while his bright hair streamed out behind, the color of moonlight. His tattoos seemed like shadows on him, shadows on his back, his arms, his legs. Inordinately proud of those markings was Iydahar, her brother. They were now a year old, the pain of them long ago healed, and they denoted his lineage, his tribal heritage, the hopes his people had for him. Iydahar Runner, said the markings on his legs.

Kerian had not a mark on her except the bruises and scratches from her run through the forest and down to the beaches, from her stubborn insistence on keeping up with her fleet brother. She was still too young for marking, too young to bear the history of her people. This she resented deeply, believing herself to be every bit as worthy as her brother. Perhaps more so, for she was the unexpected girl, the child of parents who had no reason to look for a second, having been granted the gift of the first.

“Come on, turtle-girl!”

The child whose name meant Wing-Swift redoubled her efforts, and tripped over rock and fell flat on her face. The surf pounded the shore, the gulls shrieked, and Kerian lay stunned, the breath blasted from her lungs and little sparks of silver light jumping in her vision.

Iydahar’s laughter skirled up to the sky—and fell suddenly silent. The sound of the gulls became strident, the drumming of the sea against the shore like thunder. Somewhere, far behind in the forest, a stag trumpeted, or seemed to. Kerian’s heart hammered. No stag made that sound, not truly. It was a warning cry voiced by a Wilder Elf.

Spitting sand, Kerian tried to push herself up. Her head reeled, a line of blood trickled down her cheek. Feeling that, she felt sudden sharp pain where she’d torn her cheek. A shadow fell over her darkly. Two hands reached down—Iydahar’s—and jerked her hard to her feet. The sight of his face, his expression tight with fear, stilled her angry protest. Past him, upon the sparkling blue water of the bay, she saw a tall ship, its sails black against the sky.

Iydahar, so much taller than she, bent down suddenly, like swooping. “Run!” he shouted, pushing her hard toward the forest.

Run! For those were slavers. Neither recognized the sails nor any flag, but they need not have. Someone in the forest had got word from someone else, around the curve of the bay, upland at some secret Kagonesti watch-post… someone had seen the sails and known the ship. Word had passed, by runner, by drum, by cries such as that mimicking a stag’s threat. Word had been passed all the way to here, this beach where the two children of Dallatar and Willowfawn ran, playing where they should not have been.

With all her heart and sore lungs, Kerian ran. She fell and scrambled up again. She ran, and she heard her sobbing breaths loud in her own ears. Iydahar didn’t run ahead of her now, he ran behind, shouting: “Run, Keri! Run, or they’ll catch us!”

She fell again, her brother grabbed her up, and this time he didn’t let her go. Grasping her by the wrist, he ran, dragging her along with him, and in the sky the gulls shrieked. They gained the forest as the ship pulled into the bay. They scrambled into the shadows and kept running until they’d climbed up into the thickest part of the forest. Not until their lungs tasted the tang of pine did they stop.

Gasping, shuddering with exertion and fear, Kerian fell to the ground. Iydahar knelt beside her, waiting for her to catch her breath. Gasping, she could not slow her breathing. She thought her heart would race right out of her chest.

“Easy,” he said, softly. He sounded like her father then, his tone gentle and a little amused. “Easy, Keri. You’re all right.” He gathered her into his arms. “We’re all right. Easy, easy.”

Over and again he said that, and she matched her breathing to the sound of his heart, the two slowing together. Iydahar let her go and stood looking around, trying to see down to the ocean. Only a glitter showed between the trees. Looking higher, he saw that these trees offered no hold for climbing, or none that he could reach.

“Keri.” He jerked his head at the tree and made a stirrup of his joined hands.

She understood at once. Hands on his shoulders, she climbed into his hands.

“Up!” her brother cried, and up she went, tossed high and reaching for the branch. She caught it, clung, and pulled herself up to straddle it. Scrambling, she climbed into the pine-scented heights, the long needles of the tree brushing her cheek, the sap clinging to hands and naked feet. The blood had dried on her cut cheek, but the brush of needles against the torn flesh stung. She kept climbing until she had the sky and a clear view of the bay.

“What do you see?” her brother called.

“Water-ship-people—” She stopped, her heart leaping suddenly into her throat. “People coming out of the forest—”

In a long line they came, men and women with children by the hand or on their hips. Kerian counted twenty. They were bound one to the other, and they went attended by weaponed guards. Sunlight ran along the edges of naked blades and pricked on the tips of steel-headed arrows.

“What, Keri? What do you see?”

Shaking, Kerian watched as four boats left the ship rowed by humans. Her stomach felt queasy; her throat went suddenly dry. The boats landed, the prisoners made to run. Up from the beach came the sound of children wailing. Kerian shivered, watching as the prisoners were loaded into the boats, some flung in, others made to move by the pricking of steel. One by one, the guards climbed in after and in short time the rowers had the boats out into the bay again.

“Keri!” Iydahar’s voice held a note of impatience now. “What do you see?”

Tears pricked Kerian’s eyes. She saw the boats return to the ship.

She saw that not all of those who had put the captured Wilder Elves into the hands of slavers had gone with the boats. Five—she counted them carefully—five turned and went back up the beach, into the forest. Five returned to their tribes, their filthy work done.

Years passed, and Kerian earned her tattoos, became known to all as Kerian Wing-Swift. One day she and her brother were caught and taken for “service” in Qualinost. On that day, the two huddled together in the hold of a ship very much like the one Kerian had seen in the waters off Ergoth from the top of a tall pine.

Keri can’t catch me!

The old taunt drifted up from memory and present need.

A swathe had been cut through the forest wide enough for a patrol of six Knights on broad battle chargers to ride abreast. Jagged stumps of killed trees lined the roadside, beyond lay the ruin of trees that the workmen had not had the decency to dry for firewood but left to rot. Tangles of trunks and branches loomed like a barrier between road and forest.

Kerian had a walk of several hours ahead if she wanted to reach the Hare and Hound before nightfall—and she did want that. She wanted to be well off this road with its dead trees like skeletons before dark.

High above, leaves whispered and, higher, crows called; from the middle terrace, softer notes of dove-song drifted down. Shadows gathered here in the wood. Kerian shifted the broad leather strap and the weight of the leather wallet on her shoulder. The will to run like her brother gathered in heart, legs, and lungs.

Under her feet a storm of thunder gathered. The wounded earth groaned beneath the weight of steel shod war-horses.

Knights!

Kerian looked ahead and behind. Quickly, not choosing her direction, she bolted. She ran off the road, scrambling in the stony earth, slipping and sliding down the pitched edge. A rock turned under her foot, her ankle collapsed beneath her. Kerian tumbled to her knees and rolled. She didn’t stop until she fetched up against the barrier of white birches. Hands scraped to bleeding, she pushed up to her feet. Her ankle throbbed, but it took her weight or would for a while. Braced against a white birch, bark peeling under her hand, Kerian stood still, trying to decide how to dare the barrier of broken trees.

On the road, the thunder of horses grew louder. A rough voice shouted something—one vile word in Common. Heart slamming in her chest, Kerian looked around wildly before plunging into the deadfall. Branches tore at her face, at her hair, ripped her shirt as she shouldered through the tangle. Her ankle gave way, she fell, and scrambled up again. On the road, the sound of riding grew, harsh voices shouted to each other. Damning her ankle, her bleeding face, Kerian shoved her way into the thicket of dead trees.

Almost through, the strap of her wallet snagged on the last branch. She pulled, she tried to twist away. On the road the Knights grew closer. Cursing in the language of her childhood, a word her parents had never taught, she yanked her little knife out of the belt sheath and severed the wallet by the strap. She reached for it as it fell—

“Ho!” cried a voice from the road. “Chance, what’s that! Supper, eh?”

Supper: a deer in the thicket, a wild turkey, a covey of quails?

Kerian left the wallet, and heedless of the noise she made now, ran. Tripping, falling, and climbing up again, she put as much distance between herself and the road as she could. Headlong, she splashed through a shallow stream, soaking her boots. She slipped on stones, on patches of fallen leaves.

The last time she fell, she did not rise.

All around her, the forest seemed to waver. Her mouth ran dry; she tried to swallow and failed. The air seemed to press against her ears, against her temples. As from a great distance, she heard the Knights, their voices raised in sharp cries, yet she couldn’t make out their words.

Kerian stood, unsure of her senses. She saw, but not clearly. Blood traced a thin red path down her forehead, her temple, her cheek. She hardly felt that. Most disconcerting, now Kerian heard nothing at all, not the Knights’ faint voices, not even leaves rustling though she dimly saw them sway in the wind.

So it was, bereft of senses, Kerian had no warning before a hard hand grabbed her arm and jerked her down and back.