Out from the watch tower a stocky figure came, a Knight in black mail, high-booted, his hair cropped short as was the custom of all Knights. He carried with him a sack, and from the forest a murder of crows gathered over his head. The Knight pulled a head out of the sack by its long hair. Red hair it had been, and now it was matted with dark blood. The dead one had been a woman; Gil saw it by the delicacy of her features as the Knight took the head by the ears and thrust it hard down onto the steel tip of a spear. The dead woman’s jaw dropped, as though to scream.
Beside the king, Lady Elantha seemed not to have noticed. Some of the senators murmured among themselves. One, behind the king’s litter, made a choking sound of sickness. Horses that had never seen battle or smelled blood other than that of game, snorted and danced as the breeze from the forest brought them the stench of elf blood.
Only Rashas sat his mount calmly, in silence looking at the Knight on the wall as he walked back to the guardhouse.
“My Lord King,” he said, never turning to look at Gilthas, “you see there the expected issue of Lord Thagors new orders. He fears the folk in the forest are becoming too … obstreperous.” The senator turned, his long eyes glittering cold, his face a waxen mask. “He doesn’t want to see the robbers on the highway become a thing for a dragon to notice. Of course, you needn’t distress yourself, Your Majesty. It’s certain the robberies will stop now, the dragon’s tribute will go by unmolested, for word will go from here, even today, of this display. Thagol only wants peace, My Lord King. He only wants order and compliance.
“As do we all, Your Majesty. The dragon, her overlord, your own most loyal Thalas-Enthia. Peace and order and-” Rashas moved his mouth in an imitation of smile. “-compliance.”
In silence the senator said to the king: I will treat with this Knight, with our enemies. Not you, boy, and so let there be no more talk of Lord Firemane’s governorship in further meetings of the Thalas-Enthia. From now on, let there be only your compliance with my wishes.
Sharp and cold, Rashas’s command moved the procession along. Horses snorted, the clip of hooves quickened.
Gilthas let the silk hangings fall. After a certain amount of time had passed, he asked Lady Elantha to send word to Kashas that the king felt fatigued and wished the procession to come discreetly to an end near the royal residence. Once returned, he went to his chambers. He wanted quiet and a place to calm an anger he hadn’t given Rashas the satisfaction of seeing, anger he wouldn’t give him the pleasure of hearing about in gossip.
A newly laid fired crackled in the hearth, testimony to a servant’s efficiency and acknowledgment that though the first day of autumn shone warmly outside, the night would come cool. Upon the marble-topped sideboard in the small dining chamber adjacent to both his library and his bed chamber, a silver tray sat, with two golden cups and a tall crystal carafe filled with ruby wine.
Gilthas had worn many rings that day, and now he removed all but one, a gleaming topaz whose fiery heart reminded him of a man long dead, his father the half-elf, Tanis, against whom he so often measured himself. What would his father have done, seeing the heads of elves decorating the silver bridge? Gil didn’t know, couldn’t ask. The man was long dead. He dropped the rings carelessly into the tray and saw propped against one of the cups a half-sheet of creamy parchment. Gilthas recognized the firm hand, the letters that looked as though they’d been formed by a general in the field. Even after all these years, his mother wrote dispatches, not letters.
The king poured a cup, tasted the sweetness, and glanced toward his library. He had a burden of poetry in his heart, a grim, dark mood setting itself into verses that would look like raven’s wings on paper and sound like the voices of murdered men when read. These he had, the words and the will to work them out.
Once in his library, the door closed behind him, and the scent of books and ink and rising sorrow surrounding, Gilthas would lose himself in words. He drew a long breath, hungry for that. He would change from his festival clothing and take these few hours before he must join his Senate in session.
Setting down the wine, he lifted the note from his mother.
Your Majesty,
I had thought we would have another guest at dinner, however as his health at the moment seems uncertain, I have advised the steward not to expect him.
L.
Gil’s heart sank as he recognized the coded message. The guest, of course, was the treaty, its health at the moment uncertain. He read the note again and after the third scan took some hope from between the lines. Uncertain health was not a sentence of death, or so one could hope. Wearily, he tossed the note into the fire and went through to his bed chamber.
There he found Kerian, and he could hardly credit that a woman so shaken by sobbing could weep as silently as she did.
Chapter Three
“Kerian!”
Sobbing shook her; she did not lift her head or move in any way to acknowledge that she heard Gil’s voice. The morning’s bright dancer lay like a broken bird, hardly able to move.
“Kerian,” the elf king whispered, lifting her gently into his arms. Gilthas barely caught the scent of the Tarsian perfume that had enchanted him in the morning. She smelled of the city, his city. Her perfumes were the richer scents of the horse fair, warm spice rolls from Baker’s Way, a tang of mint from the garden in which she had danced.
Kerian looked up, her lips bitten to bleeding. She pushed her tangled hair from her face with shaking hands.
“Gil, she’s one of those killed! Lania-she’s been murdered!”
Through the window a breeze drifted, and it carried the sound of the celebrating city. The soft song of a mandolin twined with the laughter of children and the voices of their elders melding into a constant, pleasant hum that would not subside till dawn. The first whiff of wood smoke hung in the air. Tall fires would light the city tonight, a reminder in these genteel precincts of an earthier existence and a time when the elves who cleared spaces in the forest to farm lit up the sky with their hot, high fires to celebrate the seasons of light that had brought them health and harvest and to bid the long days of summer farewell.
Gil held her close. When he felt her calm, he let her go and went out quickly to pour a golden goblet full of ruby wine. She took a sip, then another. He took the goblet from her, and softly he said, “Who is Lania?”
Her tanned cheek flushed, her fists clenched, and the bitten lip bled again. “She was my cousin. Gil, did you see …” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand, blood and tears and wine. “Did you see on the eastern bridge?”
Feeling anger again, and shame, Gilthas said, “I did.”
Cold, her voice, like wind from winter. “Did you see my cousin, my lord king? Did you see her with the ravens round her head?”
“Ah, Mishakal’s mercy,” he whispered, feeling powerless. “Kerian, I don’t know how-she wasn’t a robber, surely.”
Color drained from her cheeks, golden tan turned ashen gray. The angry set of her jaw faltered and tears rose again in her eyes.
“No! She was …Lania was my brother’s dearest friend. Gil…”
Gilthas had not seen Kerian’s brother Iydahar in many years, not since before the Chaos War and the time of the disaster that resulted in the death of his mother’s brother Porthios who had been, for a brief and blood-soaked moment, Speaker of the Sun and Stars, king of two elven nations. Upon his apparent death, Gilthas the puppet king had taken the throne.
Iydahar was, Gilthas knew, a proud man of the forest to whom even Qualinesti hunters seemed effete. He abhorred the status of his fellow Kagonesti, had no patience for the word “servant” when “slave” seemed, to him, closer to troth, yet fierce Iydahar had once embraced the cause Por-thios had espoused, the dream that the two elven kingdoms, Qualinesti and Silvanesti, would be joined as one, mat their Wilder Elf kin would be welcome in that broad and beautiful realm. Iydahar had believed with all his wild heart in this cause.
Iydahar had conceived no love
for the boy-king who took the prince’s place and turned over the kingdom to a dragon’s Dark Knights. Porthios’s wife, the Silvanesti queen Alhanna, and Silvanos their infant son, had fled Qualinesti. Exiles, they dwelt in wild lands now, forbidden to live in Qualinesti for their part in a failed rebellion, forbidden to return to Silvanesti by the foes they had made there. Gilthas had not seen his lover’s kinsman since then.
Gilthas shuddered. Behind closed eyes he saw again the head of a red-haired woman, her mouth gaped wide, a dark veil of crows gathering round her bloody hair.
“Kerian,” he said. “I’m sorry about your cousin. I know you’re worried about your brother. I am too. I pray Lord Thagol is done now with his -”
Now she did move from him, only a little, but her eyes narrowed. “Done, my lord king?” Color flared in ashen cheeks. “He’s done with Lania, surely.”
She flung up from the bed, and the belled anklet made no sweet sound, only a tinny jangling. In one angry instant, Kerian reached down and yanked it from her ankle, flinging it across the room in almost the same gesture.
Calmly, the elf king said, “Kerian, I will send my men out into the forest to see what they can learn. I will speak to Rashas about Thagol.”
With cool steadiness, Kerian said, “Do you think men of yours will be able to find a Wilder Elf if he doesn’t want to be found? We both know that Thagol has just begun to count heads.”
She stilled. In that instant, standing upon an anciently woven carpet, in the bedchamber of a king who longed to make her his queen, Kerian looked like a wild creature, head up and testing the air. Wilder Elf! He had not seen her so in many years. Her tattoos enchanted him, his lips, his hands loved to trace the shape of them, but he didn’t remember, or not often, that these twining vines signified that his Kerianseray had been born in Ergoth and lived in the upland forests on the foaming sea coasts, wilder places than ever he had visited. They marked her out as a member of the White Osprey Kagonesti, the daughter of the leader of that tribe, the sister of the man who surely led it now.
“Kerian,” said the king, now firmly, “you underestimate my determination. I promise you my men won’t come back till they’ve found safe word about your brother.”
Kerian shook her head. “No matter how careful your men will be, Gil, Iydahar will know they’re coming almost before they leave the city. No.” Her jaw stiffened. “Iydahar is my brother. He is in danger. I must go myself.”
“Kerian, you haven’t seen Iydahar in years. You can’t have any idea where he is.”
Kerian looked at him long. “We know how to reach each other, Gil. There is a village, and there is a tavern. I can go there and leave the right word in the right ear. He will find me, or someone will show me the way to him.”
She said no more, though he waited. At last, into his silence, she said, “My lord king, I will not give away Iyda-har’s secret.”
He answered as her lover, the man who feared for her safety, who could no longer imagine how impoverished his life would be without her. Unfortunately, when he spoke, he sounded like her king.
“It’s not only his, Kerian. It’s yours. Tell me.” Gilthas rose, tall above her, and when he looked her deeply in the eye he trusted she would see his heart. “You might as well, because you know you cannot go yourself. There are brigands in the forest, outlaws and highwaymen. There are Knights who might well mistake you for any one of those things.”
She swallowed hard but said nothing, the jut of her chin growing more stubborn.
“Kerian, if you go … if you go, you will be gone from Rashas’s service without leave, and I won’t be able to help you. You will be considered a runaway. You will be hunted.” He stopped, caught suddenly as though by a cold hand out of nightmare. “Kerian …. if you go, if you are hunted, you will be branded a fugitive. You won’t be able to come back.”
He said no more. They were silent for a moment. “Tell me the name of the village and the tavern, and I will send men to learn if your brother is well. That is the end of the matter.”
Kerian looked at him long, head up and suddenly cool. “It is the end of the matter, my lord king, if you, like Rashas, are ordering a servant.” She did not add, as her brother might have, “or a slave.” Still her sharp words hung between them, edged like steel.
In that silence they heard other voices in outer chambers, the king’s dresser and the wardrobe master preparing his clothes for the senate meeting. Neither Kerian nor Gilthas spoke, and Kerian herself barely breathed. There could be no story to make seemly her presence, barefoot and weeping in the king’s bedroom. Eyes on each other, like crossed swords, the king and his lover kept utterly still, completely silent.
The stubborn line of Kerian’s jaw softened. She kissed the king tenderly. Her lips against his so that Gilthas did not so much hear her words as feel them, she said: “He is my brother, Gil. If you want to stop me, you have only to call the guard.”
She turned from him. He grabbed her wrist and caught her back. Eyes flashing, Kerian spun on her heel, angry words on her lips where a moment ago he’d felt regret.
The king held up his right hand. With his left, he removed the topaz ring from his forefinger. It was a lover’s clasp, two circlets of gold each shaped as a hand. Worn together, each hand would hold the topaz. It had belonged to his faather and before that to some ancient elf king, a trinket worth a royal ransom in the times before the Cataclysm when kings might be ransomed for other than steel. In silence he gave one half of the lover’s clasp to her; in silence she took it.
Outside, the dresser said to the wardrobe master, “Oh- look, there are his rings on the wine tray.” A quiet gasp, then, low, “By all the vanished gods-! He’s in his bedchamber.”
Gilthas put the finger to his lips, the topaz ring into Kerian’s hand. Barely mouthing the words, he said, “Go, my love. If you need me, leave this ring in the hollow of Gilean’s Oak.”
Gilean’s Oak: the broad oak at the far western corner of Wide-Spreading, Gil’s favorite hunting estate. The estate was named for the oaks that dominated the area. The tree itself was named for a discerning god because it was home to generations of owls, their nests admired by elf children. In days past, the owls had been courted by dreamers who believed the old legend that the man or woman who dreamed of seeing an owl there-in truth, the wise god himself-had the right to ask wisdom of him and expect it would be granted.
Kerian pressed the ring between her two hands, and then she took a golden chain from her neck, knotted it through the ring and slipped it over her head again. “Gil-”
Outside, the dresser said something to his companion.
The wardrobe master cried, “Good day, Your Majesty: A woman’s soft, gently modulated voice murmured a question; Laurana could be heard asking if either of the servants had seen the king. Quickly, the wardrobe master said, “I believe your son is sleeping within, Madam.”
Gilthas took Kerian quickly into his arms. He kissed her, holding her as long as he dared as his mother’s knock sounded on the bedchamber door. When he watched Kerian go, slipping on naked, silent feet through a passage so secret only he and the Queen Mother knew it existed, the elf king wasn’t sure he would see his lover again.
* * * * *
In a quiet hour, when few walked the streets but Knights, two of those stood in purpling shadows, Headsman Chance and a man as pale and thin as the solitary sickle moon.
Sir Chance gestured upward to the shimmering span of the eastern bridge. Mist wraithed around the bases of the columns upholding the span, mist grown up from the ground, out from the forest. It drifted up toward the severed heads, pale fingers reaching.
The sickle-thin man looked up and smiled, a stingy pulling back of lips from teeth. They were like fangs, those teeth. Not in that they were sharp, they were only human teeth after all. like fangs nonetheless, for they were startling to see, so white were they, and something about sight of them raised the hair on a person’s flesh, as though he were seeing a wolfs deadly grin.
Lord Thagol licked his lips.
“I think, my lord, there will be no more trouble with robbers,” said Sir Chance.
The Lord Knight’s white face shone like a scar. “Do you think so?” He licked his lips again.
“Well-I don’t know that it’ll stop all at once, but word of this…” He pointed upward with his thumb to the thirteen gaping new heads. A rat ran scurrying on the silvery bridge, another following. What the ravens hadn’t tasted of dead flesh in the day, cheeks, eyes and tongues, the rats would sample tonight. “Word will go out into the countryside and the forest. Things will calm down, my lord.”
The Lord Knight kept still, barely breathed, and his eyes had a strange sheen to them when they settled on Chance. The Headsman shivered again, drew breath to speak, explain something, assure his commander that all would, indeed, be calm now. In time, he let the breath go and said nothing. Lord Thagol was looking at him, but Chance didn’t think the Skull Knight truly saw him. Chance believed that the strange Knight had in his mind already dismissed him. The Knight considered one thing, then another. Should he leave, taking the silence for dismissal?
“Go back out. Today.”
“M-my lord?” The words startled the Headsman, just turning to leave.
“Go out again.”
“But-” Chance cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. “Do you want more heads, my lord?”
ThagoFs eyes grew suddenly sharp, his regard heavy and holding. Under the commander’s gaze, Chance Headsman felt his heart shrink, contract as though squeezed by a hard hand. He gasped for breath, and felt his throat tighten. Pain flashed through his body, ripping across his chest, down his arm.
“My lord-!”
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