The Lioness

Chapter Nine

Nayla and Haugh, with their hounds beside, went in stealth, keeping beneath the crests of the forest ridges, and when they could, they ran, bounding over stone, leaping over blow-downs. They headed for a smith whose forge stood beside the Silver Tresses River, a branch of the White-Rage River that reached into the forest farther east than Sliathnost. He was a friend of theirs, a good man and trusty, and in the days before he knew Nayla, Haugh had been, for a long sweet summer, much closer friends with the forgeman’s daughter than with the smith himself. Frealle was her name. Nayla still wondered about Frealle and how it was that after all the years between that sweet summer and now he knew the way to the miller’s house well as though he were walking on Baker’s Lane in Qualinost, looking for a good place to buy muffins.

Haugh had, in the course of his life, more lovers than most. He watched now as Nayla slipped up to the crest of the ridge, one of the hounds in her wake. The Silver Tresses was a mere shine of a thread in the east, as Nayla paused beside a tall boulder, marking how far they’d come. Wrestle, the hound, stood close. Haugh waited to see if he should follow or if she were only checking the landmark. Wind came softly from the east, smelling a bit like snow off the Kharolis Mountains.

The second hound, Pounce, pushed her nose up under Haugh’s hand. Absently, he scratched her chin. He cocked an eye at the sky. The sun slid down the noonday sky. Pounce growled, her ears flat against her head. Haugh looked to Nayla and saw nothing different than a moment before, yet the hound continued to growl, and Haugh never discounted the reactions of these beasts who had been Nayla’s from the litter. He called her name. Nayla did not move. He looked left and right, up hill as far as he could see, and down.

“Nayla,” he whispered.

She turned, and her face shone white.

Haugh ran up the hill, Wrestle behind him, and looked toward Sliathnost. It looked as though a dragon had run through. Where there used to be houses and shops, the livery at one end, the tavern at the other, was only a dark scar from which small tendrils of smoke rose.

“In the name of all gods,” he whispered.

Nayla’s eyes glittered. “In the name of the gods-cursed dragon. In the name of the damned Skull Knight.” Her voice dropped low. “The damned dwarf,” she said, grinding her words. “All he had to do was keep still, but no—he gave the stupid girl a knife.”

She looked back to the burning, down the hill. Haugh heard her breath shiver, a sob kept at bay.

Haugh put a hand on her shoulder, let it slip down her arm to hold hers. With a low moan she pulled away from him. Loping down the hill, Wrestle at her side, she never looked back. Haugh followed, and by the time he caught her up, they stood at the edge of the town before the ruin of the Hare and Hound. Nothing stood now but burnt stone. Two of the chimneys had been toppled, and charred wood and blackened beams lay just as they had fallen from walls and upper stories.

“Nayla.”

He didn’t say more, for she left him and went into the ruin. She stood there in the center where the common room used to be. She looked around while Pounce and Wrestle poked among the debris. Watching her, Haugh heard nothing, not even crows in the sky. He thought that was strange. It couldn’t have been two days since the fires were set, the burning done. Embers still glowed beneath the collapsed walls like malevolent eyes, red and glaring, yet no crow or raven came, no wolf hunted the empty streets or the fallen houses.

He wondered why, how the carrion eaters could be turned from the will of their nature. The place should be hung with crows, dangerous with wolves. Only wind moved and not much of it.

“Nayla, I don’t like—”

She held up her hand, hissed him to silence.

Out from behind a pile of stone that had once been two chimneys a tall figure stepped. Brown as summer, his silver hair on his shoulders, the newcomer seemed like a spirit of the forest itself. He wore tattoos upon his arms, across his chest. He had the eyes that always chilled Haugh to the heart—the eyes of a Kagonesti in the wild.

Nayla’s hand slipped to the knife in her belt, a broad-bladed glinting knife good for skinning a deer or killing a foe. The Wilder Elf didn’t so much as quirk a brow.

“You,” Haugh demanded. “Who are you and what are you doing here in this ruin?”

The accents of Qualinost, cultured tones no rough garb could disguise, did not impress the Wilder Elf. He looked past Haugh, up the road to the savaged village. When he had completed his survey—a leisurely one, Haugh thought—he looked at Haugh again.

“The same thing you are doing,” he said. “I’m looking.”

Nayla was in no mood. “We’ve been hearing things about the goings on in the forest, Kagonesti. We’ve been hearing about magic and hearing it might have to do with your kind.”

The Kagonesti shrugged and looked away. In his eyes Haugh saw a sly light, a baiting gleam. “Qualinesti,” the Wilder Elf said, “does your woman speak as loudly in the halls of your family as she does in the halls of the forest?”

Something like lightning crackled in the air between the three.

“Kagonesti,” Haugh replied, striving to keep his voice level. “Many of our people have died here, and many of those were our friends. We don’t know who lives, we don’t know who is dead. We’ve come into the forest searching for a friend, a young Wilder Elf woman.”

“A Kagonesti? A friend of yours, eh?” The Wilder Elf spoke as though in disbelief. “You seek her out, and yet you think that maybe Kagonesti had to do with this great burning?”

“No.” Haugh looked around the ruin, the wreckage of homes and hopes where nothing moved but sniffing dogs. Crows called from the forest, from high up the hill. “We think the Nerakan Knights did this.”

The Kagonesti nodded. “You think well. We saw them.” He spat into ash. “They are wolves.”

We saw them.

We…

“Kagonesti,” Nayla snarled, “you saw this happen?”

He nodded. “I have said so.”

“And you did nothing?”

“To prevent? No, we did not. We were only a band of four. We do not have armies, woman. We do not interfere in the business of the city elves and the Knights they allow in their kingdom.”

She flared, filled with grief for deaths, filled with rage. “Kagonesti, you want a better tone with your betters.”

A small smile twitched the corners of the Wilder Elf’s lips. It had nothing at all to do with amusement. “Woman, you want a more courteous tone with anyone.”

Two strides put Haugh between the Kagonesti and Nayla. His hand was out, away from his weapons. The Kagonesti turned.

In the instant, sunlight slipped like fire along Nayla’s blade.

The Kagonesti shouted, “No!” Then again, “No!”

Haugh felt the shock of an arrow in his back. He fell among ashes of the Hare and Hound, stunned by pain and watching his blood run out of him. All the world erupted in storm-wind and thunder, his pulse rushing blood from his body, pounding in his ears. Through the storm of his dying, he heard the roar of a hound—Pounce? was it Pounce?—cut off by its own death-scream.

A hand touched his shoulder, gently. “Hold still,” the Kagonesti said. “Hold still.”

Haugh heard voices now, a man’s, a woman’s, another man’s. The Kagonesti said something to one of them, his voice like an angry whip crack. What he said, Haugh couldn’t tell. His words were simply sounds. In his mind, in his heart he heard other words, those of his king, Gilthas who had said, “Find her, Haugh. Show her the way to me….”

Haugh said, “Listen—”

The Kagonesti leaned close.

“The woman—Kerianseray—”

The Kagonesti leaned closer, and Haugh heard his breathing roughen.

“My pouch—get me my—”

The Kagonesti took the pouch from within Haugh’s shirt. He opened it and spilled its contents into Haugh’s twitching hand, the golden half of a royal ring. “It is the king’s. Find the match—the girl—she will—know what it means—”

The air on his skin felt cold, cold. He felt the tide of his life withdraw, taking all warmth and will. His lips formed a word, shaped a name.

Nayla.

He could give the word no voice and he knew, in the gasping last breath, it wouldn’t have mattered. She would not have heard, his Nayla lying dead in the ashes.

Kerian squinted. When her vision settled, she saw before her a stony clearing, a space in which four small campfires made a semicircle around a larger one, a clearing like a stone basin. Beyond the clearing rose a wall of climbing ground, all boulders and pines. She felt no more breeze here than she had in the narrow cave, the passage behind the falls. The place was well sheltered, and the only way in was through the passage she and Ayensha had just taken, or down the sides of the hill. All around her, the distant thunder of the falls seemed to flow into the whispering of the wind.

“Who are you, girl?” A man glared at her, his eyes hard and cold. He had silver-streaked hair that might once have been the color of bright chestnuts, once brown and shining with red-gold. He was past his middle years, and though his features were elven, his ears canted, his eyes slightly almond-shaped, the shape of his face showed an alien stamp, a coarsening line of his jaw, a roughness of hair on his cheek and chin, and that thickness in the neck seen in humans and half-elves. The man must have a human parent.

Around him, shadowy voices whispered: Who are you? Who is she? How did she get here?

A spy!

The hissing word sent fear through Kerian’s belly, sharp as knives, and the half-elf said, “Are y’that, then? A spy?”

The hair raised up on the back of Kerian’s neck. She wanted to look around to find the shadowy speakers but dared not take her eyes from those of the half-elf. Ayensha, though she might have, said nothing. She had brought Kerian here, and now she seemed inclined to leave her to what fate might find her.

In a firm and clear voice Kerian said, “I’m not a spy, and whatever it is you’re keeping to yourself, you can have. I came here with Ayensha and—”

The half-elf snapped, “Name your name, girl.”

Kerian’s cheek flushed. Girl, he called her, as the dwarf had called her missy, as Dar used to name her Turtle.

Eyes narrow, voice cool, she said, “I am Kerianseray of White Osprey Kagonesti. My parents were Dallatar and Willowfawn, and Dallatar was a chieftain among my people. Willowfawn bore him two children, a son and a daughter, and all elves know that is great wealth. With my brother Iydahar my people lived here in this forest in the time before the coming of the dragon Beryl, even before men, in the years of the lost prince.”

Kerian lifted her head, not ashamed to speak the next words. “Though my kin have not, I have spent time in Qualinost. Now tell me, what is your name?”

Ayensha stood away from the half-elf. She murmured a word to him that sounded, if not kindly spoken, at least reassuring. The man grunted. His arms closing round her again, he looked at Kerian long. His eyes narrowed as he reckoned her.

“Killed a Knight, did you?”

“Yes, I killed a Knight.” Remembering Ayensha’s injuries and the haunted, hunted look in her eyes when she’d come hobbled and bound into the Hare and Hound, she added, “I killed a pig of a Knight.” She narrowed her own eyes in a show of defiance. “It’s a good thing, I think, or you’d be weeping over a corpse now instead of hugging this woman.”

The half-elf raised an eyebrow. A little, the corner of his lips quirked.

“Now it’s time for your name, half-elf.”

The epithet didn’t sting him, it only twisted his mouth into a sneer. “Jeratt,” he said, “Jeratt Trueflight.” He looked around him, at the hills and the passage into the stone of the world behind her. He removed his arm from Ayensha, gently let her go, and he said, “I am of this place.”

“Jeratt Trueflight, I haven’t come here to harm anyone or spy on you. I left Qualinost to find my brother who…” She hesitated, in no hurry to give this man too much information about Iydahar. “I thought my brother might be in trouble, although in five days’ time I find myself in more trouble that I’d imagined he could be in.”

Jeratt snorted. “It gets like that, girl—”

“I told you: my name is Kerianseray.” She took a square stance. “If you like, you can call me Kerian, but if you call me ‘girl’ again, I’ll kick you a good one.”

Jeratt’s eyes widened as though he would suddenly laugh. He held the laughter, though, and cocked his head. “You kick me a good one? How good, girl?”

Swift, hardly thinking, Kerian swept out her leg, caught him with her foot hooked behind the knee and toppled him hard to the ground. His breath whooshed out of him, and she moved again, her heel upon his belly, right over a kidney.

Jeratt laughed then. Right there on the ground, he let go a good-natured bellow. He reached up a hand as if to ask for help up.

Kerian shook her head, not falling for the ruse. She stepped back, gesturing as a courtier. Wryly, she said, “Please, do rise.”

On his feet, the half elf twisted another smile. “Besides Knights on your trail, what brings you here, Kerianseray?”

Kerian relaxed her stance, but not her guard. “Ayensha brought me here… in order to lose the Knights that were chasing us.”

A moment’s silence hung between them, then he turned to Ayensha.

“Knights on her trail, and you brought her here, did you?”

Ayensha moved away from the half-elf to sit upon a flat stone near the tallest fire. She bowed her head, her tangled, dirty hair hanging like a tattered curtain to hide her face. “I had to go somewhere, Jeratt. There’s no one following. You know how careful I am.”

When Ayensha groaned, Kerian took a step toward her.

Jeratt held up his hand, his eyes gone suddenly hard again. “Leave her alone. She’s here now. I’ll take care of her.”

Who was he, her father? She didn’t think so. They hadn’t the look of each other. Kerian wondered, is he her lover then or her husband?

The silence between Kerian and Jeratt deepened, seeping out into the shadows. A small breeze kicked up, sighing low around the boulders and the trees.

“So here you are,” Jeratt said. “In the heart of a place you don’t know, far from anyone you do know, all so you can find—”

“Kill her!”

A woman’s voice screeched, high and ragged and shrill, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, behind and before and around. The hair on Kerian’s neck lifted, hackles rising at the sting of a primitive nerve. It was all she could do not to bolt and run.

“Killer!”

Kerian’s heart slammed against her ribs; her hand dropped to the knife at her belt. Jeratt’s eyes widened, his own hand lifted to warn.

“Don’t move—”

“Kill her!” screeched the banshee voice.

With an odd kind of gentle scorn, Jeratt said, “Don’t worry. No one’s killing anyone. At least not yet. Take your hand off your knife, Kerianseray.” When she hesitated, “Do it now, or I’ll give you to the old woman.”

Kerian dropped her hand from the bone-gripped knife, and as she did, a cold grin changed Jeratt’s expression to dangerous.

“Come to think of it, I’ll give you to the old woman anyhow.”

Shadows shifted. All around the basin the shadows gathered and seemed to coalesce as elves. Men and women came from three directions. Rough-dressed in leathers and buckskins, in oft-mended shirts, in boots they cobbled themselves, they drifted down the slopes.

Though they appeared to be folk who took their livelihood from the forest, they were not Kagonesti, for none showed tattoos. One or two wore bits of armor, a breastplate polished to shining, a leg-guard, a gorget.

As these revealed themselves, Kerian saw one shade-shape among them, a shadow that moved more slowly. The elves around it moved off. Like warriors they took posts around the basin, leaving Kerian and Jeratt and Ayensha alone in the center as the shadow advanced.

Kerian’s mouth dried.

The shadow stopped, standing outside the small ring of fires. In the space of a breath, it began to change shape.

“Elder,” Jeratt said, his voice colored by wariness, by respect and—Kerian felt it—humility. “Here she is.”

She whom Jeratt addressed as Elder looked neither right nor left. She did not look up, and she did not look around. She was not breathing. Not even the least flutter passed her lips or caused her bony breast to rise and fall. She sat like a creature born of the earth, still as stone, her eyes strange and unchancy as wind in the mad season between winter and spring.

“So here she is,” said Elder, her voice cracked as ancient parchment. Her glance never shifted. Kerian wondered whether she were blind, but she saw no milkiness of eye, no scar, no wounding at all. The woman simply looked into some middle distance, some place into which no one else could glimpse. “I see you, child.”

Killer. I see you.

Kill her… killer!

“No!”

She tried to say more, but the old woman’s intrusion into her mind, her soul, had addled her wits and left her feeling like all her words had been scrambled, her tongue changed into something unwieldy as leather. She could not see clearly. She could hardly hear. The sounds around her were muffled as by distance or as though she were under water.

You will kill again. Men will die because of you, women will die, and children will weep. Because of you!

Around her, Kerian felt the world grow cold. She heard a hard wind howling, though she felt no wind on her skin, none in her hair. The voice of the wind became the throaty roar of flames, and before the fire she stood, screaming, killer and victim.

A hard hand grabbed her, then two, holding her back from a fall. In the moment she realized it, Kerian’s knees sagged, her belly went suddenly tight, and bile rushed like fire up her throat.

Kerian’s gut wrenched, the pain doubling her over. Jeratt let her go as everything she’d eaten since daybreak came spewing out. Her belly spasmed again, and falling to her hands and knees, she gagged. The golden chain round her neck slid and slipped, Gil’s ring falling outside her shirt. Light glinted sharply off the facets of the topaz. Sweat cold and thin slid down her neck. Confused, her head spinning, she looked around and saw but a forest of legs.

A hand reached down, big and brown. It took her wrist, not roughly, not gently.

“Up,” said a deep voice, a voice not Jeratt’s.

The word rang in her head painfully, like a clapper in a bell. Kerian winced. She tried to pull away from the hand but had no strength for resistance. The man’s hand slipped down her wrist.

“There can’t be much more left in you, so on your feet, Kerianseray of Qualinost.”

She knew him then. In the scornful twist of his voice, in the subtle insult of the naming, she knew him. He pulled, she rose, and Kerian looked into the eyes of her brother, Iydahar.