The Lioness

Chapter Five

Flung off her feet, Kerian hit the ground hard. She felt no pain but found herself gasping for breath. A hard hand clamped over her mouth.

Kerian looked up from the ground and right into the eyes of a dwarf. She had a swift impression of dark hair, a thick beard, and the kind of pale face they have who live under the mountains in Thorbardin. Sweat ran on his face, sliding into his black beard. He breathed hard. He had been running, too.

His eyes flashed, strange dark eyes with glinting blue flecks. He pressed harder, but with his free hand he gestured, away past the distant barrier of broken trees. He didn’t jerk a thumb or point a finger; all the fingers of his free hand were oddly twisted, withered and useless, and so it looked like he was shaking his fist at the distant road.

Kerian tried to sit, but the dwarf shifted his grip and pressed her back, his elbow and all his weight behind it keeping her shoulders flat to the stony earth. She became aware, though dimly, of the sharpness of his elbow, the bite of a rough-edged rock between her shoulder blades.

The dwarf said something. Kerian knew he did because she saw his lips move. She frowned; he jerked his chin. Kerian looked to the road again.

A troop of mounted Knights had stopped there, silent as ghosts in nightmare! Through branches and leaves, Kerian saw their black armor. One, the leader, threw back his visor and she recognized the stocky Knight named Sir Chance, he who had decorated the eastern bridge of Qualinost with ghoulish trophies of murder. Her heart jumped as one of the Knights pointed into the forest. The leader shook his head. He spurred his mount, and the others followed silent as phantasms, up the road and gone.

Kerian’s eyes met the dwarfs. He sat back, letting her sit up. She rubbed the place between neck and shoulder where he’d pinned her. She’d just learned a thing about dwarves few realized—not so tall as elves or humans, still they were weightier than they seemed. As Kerian drew breath to speak, the dwarf shook his head. He pressed a finger to his lips. Then he touched his ear.

Listen!

Kerian did, and she realized that her ability to hear was becoming restored to her. She turned to the dwarf. With great relief, she said, “I can hear.”

The dwarf seemed unimpressed. His voice pitched low, he said, “You can, and maybe yon Knights can’t? Might be you’re seeing better now, and they’re not?” He snorted. “D’ye think, missy, you might want to be quiet a while yet, and a little bit still?”

I am not fond of this dwarf, Kerian thought.

Yet she had to admit he was right: The Knights were on the road, and they were not far away. She heard their voices now, some still pressing the point that they should have chased whatever had bolted into the forest. So close, they would hear her if she spoke too loudly, but they could not see her. There was too much of woodland between them. Stiffly, Kerian got to her feet. She dusted herself off, picked dirt and brittle leaves out of her hair as best she could.

“Who are you?” she said. She didn’t whisper. As he had, she simply pitched her voice low. Suspicion narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing in the king’s forest?”

The dwarf cocked his head. “The better question is, what’s happened to your king’s forest?”

A chill skittered up Kerian’s spine. She had thought of the phenomenon that had confused her senses as a thing that had happened to her, to the dwarf. She hadn’t thought of it as something that had happened to the forest itself, but again, the dwarf was right.

“Didn’t think of it like that, did you?” The dwarf scowled.

Kerian said stiffly. “You haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here?”

The dwarf shrugged. “I could ask the same thing. They’re all kicking up their heels at the autumn party in the city. Not you?” His lips twitched a little in his beard. Not to smile, certainly not. “You don’t look like a hunting girl, and those pretty white hands never planted a field or beat chaff from the grain.”

Kerian raised her chin and lifted her hands to tuck stray locks into her braid. She didn’t know dwarves at all, had not seen them but now and then in Qualinost, and only from a distance in the years before the Chaos War when hill dwarves came into the kingdom to trade their goods.

Her voice cool, she said, “I haven’t heard that of all the dwarf clans, those in Thorbardin are the rudest. I am Kerianseray.” She did not say, “of Qualinost” or “of the House of Rashas.” She did not say “a friend of the king himself,” though she would like to have said all those things to this arrogant dwarf. “You haven’t answered my question.”

He shrugged. “I’m here in the wood for the same reason you are—not interested in having conversations with black-hearted Knights out of gods-blasted Neraka.”

It was no answer, truly, but Kerian didn’t press the point. She looked at him long. His beard was thick and glossy. His dark hair, shining silver at the temples, was cut rough and shaggy, long enough to fall over his shirt collar. The shirt itself was unremarkable, unbleached cotton and the wide-sleeved kind you’d see a taverner or shop-owner wearing. The same could be said for his breeches, made of brown, tough fabric.

Slantwise across his back hung a thick bedroll. Around his waist he wore a broad leather belt from which hung a throwing axe, a leather water bottle filled fat, a coil of rope and a knife. His boots were of fine sturdy leather, and he wore a single earring in his left ear, a bright silver ring to suggest he wasn’t so humble of fortune as he might seem.

“Are y’finished lookin’ now?” he asked when it seemed she was.

“You have my name, sir dwarf. What is yours?”

He shrugged. “I mean your king’s kingdom no harm, girl. I’m only a traveler on the road, like y’self. Now and then, one of us dwarves slips us into the forest with wares to sell.”

She made a softly disbelieving sound. “Fairly adventurous for the sake of a sale of goods.”

The dwarf shrugged. “There are some venturesome sons among the clans yet.” He reached into his shirt and took out a small leather pouch. It rang comfortably with the sound of coins. “All I’m here for is some selling—and I did a fine bit of that.” His voice softened with sudden yearning, touched by a kind of gentleness she’d not expected. “I’m goin’ home now, and I’ll be glad to get there. I’m Stanach of Thorbardin. My family is Hammerfell; my clan is Hylar.” He lifted his chin when he claimed his clan; his eyes flashed again, this time defiantly.

A Hylar. Well, Kerian knew her history, even the history of dwarves. There had been wars and wars in Krynn these thirty years past, wars of gods, mortals, and dragons. There had been, too, a war in Thorbardin, and that had been the worst kind of war. A civil war in which clan fought clan, often kinsman fought kinsman, and the balance of power did not simply shift, it shattered. The aristocratic Hylar, for long centuries the ruling clan, did not rule now. In the mountain kingdom the clans were still putting order back together again after a brutal war, still learning to trust each other and their new High King, Tarn Bellowgranite.

A civil war, Gil once said, is the kind of war that will break anyone’s heart, and the kind that would wring the last drop of blood right out of a dwarf’s, for after his forge god Reorx, a dwarf loves his kin best.

High up and far away, crows called, and Kerian shuddered, for those crows were not sailing west to Qualinost where they might be expected to find a feast of flesh on the eastern bridge. These flew east, right along the path of the road, crying their brothers to a feast.

“Ay well,” said Stanach Hammerfell, “we’re all properly introduced now, aren’t we? You’re clumsy for an elf in the home-wood, are y’not?” He looked pointedly at the ripped knees of her trews, her wet boots, scraped face, the torn flesh of her hands. When he marked her tattoos, the graceful vines twining, he shook his head. “You’re one of those special elves besides. One of the Wilder Elves. Wilder than what—the hearth cat?”

Kerian’s cheeks flamed. That from a surly dwarf who’d likely spent all his nigh two hundred years under the mountains and wouldn’t know north from south if the sun were staring him blind!

Stanach ignored her reaction. “I reckon you don’t know a better way to Sliathnost than yon road, do you?”

Stubborn, Kerian said nothing. She didn’t know a better way, and she wasn’t minded to confirm his guess at her ignorance.

Stanach snorted. “I figured.”

She drew breath to say something, and then realized her leather wallet, with food and money pouch, hung somewhere on the branches of dead trees. She looked back, looked ahead. She thought, so what? She would figure something out when the time came.

“I am going to Sliathnost, too. They have a tavern there called—”

“The Hare and Hound, I know. All right then, you can come along with me if you like.”

“You know the way through the wood?”

“I can reckon it. Come along if you like.”

Stanach walked away, heading north through the trees and somewhat east.

Keri can’t catch me!

And you, one of those special elves…

Perhaps it was as Iydahar had warned. Perhaps it was true, she had forgotten herself, forgotten how to be Kagonesti. She had lost herself in the city and the servitude that dressed her in fine silk.

She had lost herself, perhaps, even in the high bed of a king.

Ahead, Stanach stopped, and he looked back over his shoulder. Kerian ran to follow.

The way Stanach chose headed up, dappled in sun and shifting shade. Rocky and seemingly pathless, it wound between tall oaks whose wide stands soon gave way to fragrant pines growing closer together. Beneath Kerian’s feet, oak leaves vanished to be replaced by years of brown pine straw, the fallen needles some as long as her forearm.

Kerian followed Stanach as closely as she could, slipping in the pine straw, picking herself up. No matter if she fell, cursed, and lingered over bruised knees and skinned palms, Stanach didn’t stop. She imagined that if she’d tumbled right off the face of Krynn, he would not so much as look over his shoulder.

Kerian was growing no more fond of the dwarf.

Following, she never saw him consult the slant of shadow or the point of the sun in the sky for direction, yet he went faultlessly north and east, seeming to make his way by landmarks Kerian, versed in the winding ways of every street, path and wandering by-way of Qualinost, could not have recognized. The farther east they went, the more often they encountered great gray boulders thrusting up from the earth. Trees made way for the lichen-patched rocks as though, in some long ago fought-out treaty, they had agreed to cede a part of the forest to stone. There had been no treaty between forest and stone, of course. There had been, in fact, a kind of war, the great and terrible Cataclysm, many centuries before. All the face of Krynn had changed then, the world heaving and breaking, the very continents shifting. After the great upheaval, the land between elven kingdom and that of the mountain dwarves had become a wasteland of rising ground, gaping glens, and thrusting boulders.

Kerian, once a wild running child of upland Ergothian forests and shining sea strands, felt the strain of the climbing terrain. She had been too long in Qualinost, where she never endured any walk more difficult than the sweet curling path from the Library of Qualinost to the Temple of Paladine. Her muscles burned, her lungs seemed to shrink with every passing moment until own breathing was loud in her ears.

Seemingly unaware of her distress, Stanach kept a steady pace through what Kerian saw as a trackless forest. Kerian remained dogged in her determination not to fall behind. Sweat rolled down her cheeks, made her blouse stick uncomfortably to her back. Her legs hurt, her ankles turned, and treacherous stones rolled beneath her feet.

Shadows now gathered darkly beneath the canopy of the forest. High up, the sky deepened. The air grew cool, damp with the day’s end. Kerian’s belly rumbled with hunger; her muscles began to tremble with more than exhaustion. She thought of the bread and cheese and meat in her lost wallet. Foxes must have found it by now, or rats or crows.

Kerian looked at the sky and realized it had a long time been strangely quiet. She and Stanach had traveled past what had interested the crows—or the crows had feasted full and gone on. When Kerian thought she couldn’t take another step, that every muscle in her legs and back had turned to stone, Stanach stopped beside a tall boulder.

Kerian put her back to a rough skinned pine, resting her head against the trunk. She wanted no more than to sink to the ground, and she dared not. She would not rise again, of that she was sure. She locked her knees, clenched her jaw, and she stood.

Not giving her so much as a glance, Stanach slipped the leather water bottle from his belt. He drank deeply, politely wiped the bottle’s mouth, and handed it to her. Kerian’s nose told her this was not water. She took the smallest sip of Dwarf Spirits. Her eyes watered immediately, streaming.

“Ah, that’s enough now,” the dwarf said, reclaiming the bottle. “You’re staggering around enough as it is.”

Stanach looked around again, as though looking for a landmark. How could he, a dwarf out of Thorbardin, know of forest landmarks deep in Qualinesti?

Dark-eyed Stanach saw her watching. “It’s not the first time I’ve been here in your green forest, girl. First time, that was a long time ago and maybe your mam and your da were still looking at you in your cradle trying figure out a name for you. I came in from somewhere. This is true, eh? Do you think I didn’t mark my way in so I could figure one or two ways back?”

Kerian pushed away from the tree. She wiped sweat from her face, tucked stray curls back onto the failing braid, and said, “I suppose I’m not thinking about it much at all. If you know your way back, I’m happy for you. If you’ll point me in the direction of Sliathnost, I’ll be happy for me.”

He thumped the boulder with his right hand. “Then climb up.”

Kerian eyed the tall boulder. “Why?”

Stanach shook his head as over a child’s willfulness. “D’ye have a question for every occasion? Climb up.”

Unwilling, still she did what he said, finding no foothold her wet-soled boots could use and laboriously pulling herself up the sloping shoulder of stone with only stingy handholds. The boulder was only twice her height, maybe a little more. After the exertions of the day, however, she felt as though she’d undertaken a bitter peak of the far Kharolis Mountains.

Once to the top, she looked down at the dwarf. “Well?”

“Well, what do you see?”

“Trees.”

Stanach gestured to indicate she should turn around.

Carefully, uncertain of her footing, Kerian did. She looked to either side and back the way they came. Stanach muttered something about Reorx’s forge and called:

“Would you look south and east, please?”

Kerian did and then saw a faint gray plume of smoke pointing down the breeze. Sliathnost! They had traveled in such a way that now they could enter the town from the north and not the south.

“Satisfied?” Stanach asked.

When Kerian said she was, he started walking away, down the hill toward little Sliathnost.

“Hey!”

Stanach looked up and around.

“Give me a hand—and don’t argue, will you?”

He gave her his good left hand and did not argue. They walked down the slope together, they returned to the road shoulder to shoulder, and together, silently, they walked into the village, past little farms on the outskirts, past a small stone mill, and straight onto a main street lined by tidy houses of wood and stone.

Two large buildings dominated the town, one at either end. Coming in from the north, the blacksmith’s forge and smithy stood strongly before a tall wide barn and livery stable. Behind that stretched a fenced enclosure where horses of various kinds grazed, a pair of little red ponies, a tall chestnut gelding, a neat-footed black mare and three thick-chested draft horses. Kerian looked quickly for signs of Knightly battle chargers and saw none.

At the opposite end of the village stood the tavern, the Hare and Hound. Stone from foundation to oak-shuttered windows, the walls were stout oak to the slate roof. Four chimneys rose from the roof. Smoke curled up from each, for here at the end of the afternoon, they were starting to cook in the kitchen. The Hare and Hound did a good custom, people traveling to and from Qualinost, tinkers and hunters, leathermen, sellers of furs. This season before winter was a traveling time; farmers had the yield of the fields and felt secure enough to spend a few coins on such luxuries as polished silver buttons and buckles, a scroll containing an illuminated text, a pretty blouse for a daughter who had been wearing homespun and home-sewn for the last few years. All these travelers stopped at the tavern and in this season people from the town often came to eat and drink and talk.

Kerian said, “Tell me, Stanach. What did you trade that you did so well on your foray into Qualinesti?”

He looked at her sidelong, his eyes narrowed. Then he shrugged and said he’d traded the wares of his cousin’s metal shop. “Pots, pans, buckles, and bells.”

“No wagon, no donkey?”

Stanach didn’t miss his stride. “Donkey was killed, never did have a wagon. Me, I got lucky. Four bandits fell on me when I was nearly out of wares. They killed the donkey; I killed them.” He was silent a moment, then he looked up at her, his smile cool as truth. “Guess you were lucky, too. Things turned out the other way, I might not have been around to lead you out of your backyard to safety and the road to the fine Hare and Hound, eh?”

Arrogant dwarf!

“Tell me, missy, how do you reckon you’re going to pay for your fare inside?”

Kerian shook her head, not knowing how she’d pay for her supper, not willing to complain to him about her troubles. She would think of something, and perhaps Bueren Rose could be convinced to break the tavern’s strict custom and trust her for the fee.

Coins rang, one against another. Stanach held out his hand, a small bronze piece glittering on his palm. “Go on. Take it.”

After a moment’s hesitation Kerian did, trying awkwardly to thank him. He walked past that thanks, and they said no more, going in silence again.

Kerian kept her eye on the tavern as they walked. Her heart rose with hope and filled with memories of her brother as he was the last time she saw him. Iydahar, tall, lean, and brown, lounging against the long oak bar, talking to the barman or flirting with the barman’s pretty daughter, Bueren Rose. She would see her brother soon! She would see him soon and know at last that he was well.

Weary, tired of this dwarfs company, Kerian squared her shoulders and pushed on ahead. She was not going to go hobbling into the Hare and Hound behind this stranger.

As it happened, she didn’t have to.

Stanach left her in the doorway of the tavern, where she had paused to adjust her eyes to the sudden dimness within. He did not say goodbye or even look over his shoulder. They might have been two strangers who’d never met.

Kerian lost all thought of the dwarf as she became aware of a creeping uneasiness. All the tavern had fallen still when the door opened. Near the fire, two hounds of indiscriminate parentage lounged. One pricked up its ears, the other snored loudly. That sleeping hound seemed to be the only creature in the place unaware of her. Everyone else’s eyes narrowed, mouths in tight closed lines, staring at Kerian. Two plates of steaming food in her hands, even the barmaid, Bueren Rose, looked at her old friend as though at a dangerous stranger.