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, Kenan’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.
Chapter Ten
Kerian stood hefore her brother, but she didn’t know him. She knew the shape of his face, the cut of his shoulders, the way he held his head. She recognized him, but not the hardness of his eyes, or the way he looked at her as though across a gulf of distance and time.
“Dar,” she said.
His eyes grew colder.
Elves in their rough gear stood still. The little shadow that had been a screech-voiced old woman was gone.
“Brother,” she said.
Iydahar turned from her. Silently, he held out his hand to Ayensha. “Ayensha,” he said, and in all the years she’d known him, Kerian had never heard such tenderness in her brother’s voice. “Wife,” he said to the woman Kerian had rescued, “where have you been?”
Wife! Kerian drew breath to speak, to give words to her wonder. She fell silent, the words unshaped, for one tear, perfect and silver, slid down Ayensha’s cheek, making a shining trail through the grime of days.
“Husband,” Ayensha whispered. “Ah, I have been on hard roads.”
Kerian saw again the haunted, hunted woman jerked into the Hare and Hound, hobhled and hands bound. She watched in silence, breathless, as her brother took in Ayensha’s words and the meaning Kerian only guessed.
Iydahar opened his arms, gathered his wife to him, and held her gently.
A hand closed round Kerian’s arm. Gruff, his voice like gravel in his throat, Jeratt said, “Give ‘em peace, Kerianseray.”
Jeratt led her away, across the basin to the foot of the hill. Someone came and brought her water. Kerian drank without tasting. All the elves who had been hidden in shadow stood now in the light of day, and there were at least a dozen of them. By design or instinct, they ranged themselves so that their backs were to the two weeping in each other’s arms, so that they formed a wall of privacy for the wounded pair.
* * * * *
Kerian did not see or speak with her brother for a week after her arrival at the outlaw camp. Iydahar and Ayensha kept to themselves. That her brother was angry, she did not doubt. No sign of it did she see, but she felt it. At night sometimes, sitting beside a fire at meal, sitting alone and looking high to the glittering sky, she felt Iyda-har’s anger.
“Man’s planning,” Jeratt said to her, one evening when all slept around them. He poked at the fire, sending a plume of sparks dancing up. “Man’s planning. You can see it on him.”
Kerian could see very little to recognize in her brother. His eyes were cold when he looked at her, his expression stony, and that had nothing to do with his grief or his anger.
She thought about it often, awake in the nights, often alone. She paced the perimeter of the basin, silent-footed, careful not to disturb sleepers. They did not post watches here, Kerian marveled at that. They all slept the nights through, secure in the embrace of a warding none doubted.
“The old woman,” Jeratt told Kerian on the first night. “You don’t always see her, the woman’s half-crazy, but you can count on the ward.”
Kerian had seen that they all did, going about the nights and days as though they were safe within walls. And so she paced, and sometimes went up the hill and sat on high ground, thinking.
This band were outlaws in the eyes of Lord Thagol, hunted by his Knights and gleeful disrupters of his peace. They hated him, some with passion, some with private cause.
“Saw him once,” Jeratt said. “Pickin’ around the wreck of a supply train we tore up. Cold as winter, him. Nah, you see the mark of how mad he is on his Knights, the poor bastards he sends out to collar us and kill us. Them’s the ones look like ghosts, for all you hear about him being the spooky one. Them’s the ones.” He shook his head, spat, and pulled his lips back in a feral grin. “The Skull Knight, he does something to their minds when he ain’t happy. Fills ‘em up with nightmares and such.”
Her voice thin as a blade’s edge, Kerian said, “On the parapet of the eastern bridge in Qualinost, Thagol pikes the heads of those his Knights catch and kill.”
He scratched his chin. “Aye, but he can’t pike all of us. We’re all over the hills, Kerianseray. Here in the east, out in the western part of the kingdom. Not so many of us up in the north by the White-Rage, but a few in the south, too. Some’s just outlaws, robbers and killers, but a lot of us ain’t that. A lot of us’re just drifters, not fittin’ anywhere but places like here.”
Kerian began to see that Jeratt wasn’t so bad, and she thought that there were worse places to be than in the basin among the outlaws. They were cordial, if not friendly. This, for Iydahar’s sake and for the sake of what she’d don
e for Ayensha.
“Ayensha is my niece,” Jeratt said gently. “Her mother was my own mother’s sister. I love the girl well, and I thank you for the saving of her.”
“Are Iydahar and Ayensha part of your …band?”
He twisted a wry smile. “She is, he ain’t.”
Dar held a kind of sway over them, though. They looked to him; they heeded him. The mystery of that was not one Jeratt was willing to unfold, and Dar himself never came into the light of the fires to share the truth of it.
The days changed, nights brought warning of winter, and sometimes frost sparkled on the stones in the morning. Perhaps Kerian could have moved on, but she still hoped to speak with her brother. Most days there was no glimpse of him. Truth to tell, she didn’t feel much like leaving this safe place.
On one of those frosty mornings, Kerian said, “Jeratt, am I a prisoner?”
Jeratt shrugged. “I don’t know about that. Maybe you’re a guest You sit here among die fires, eat our food and use our blankets to keep you warm, and no one’s stopping you from using the privy places, but you walk up the hfll too for-” He shook his head. “Yeah. Maybe you are a prisoner, something like that You walk too far, you don’t get anywhere fast.”
Kerian knew what he meant She’d twice before felt the distortion of her senses and the lost feeling brought on by the forest She had no interest in feeling that again.
Jeratt chewed on a strip of tough venison, working his jaws until it was soft enough to swallow. He offered her some. She chewed for a while and drank icy water to wash it down.
* * * * *
Into the gilded bedchamber of the elf king came news of death. Word came several nights after he’d seen Nayla and Haugh return to the wood with his order to find Kerian, his token to give to her. He had watched for their return, for Kerian’s return. He had gone to sleep nights waiting, hoping. No word had come.
Now, this night, when he had no court function to attend, no meeting with his mother, no claim at all upon his time or attention to distract him from worry, the king sat reading in his library. He sat warm before a high fire, listening to the sounds of Planchet in the bedchamber, his servant muttering to himself, talking to others, ordering the rest of the night for his master.
Gilthas smiled, hearing his servant’s voice. Planchet had been the first to know how things stood between the king and the pretty servant of Senator Rashas, the Kagon-esti woman Kerianseray. He had been the first enrolled in the secret of their love and the secrets that had grown from it. Gil imagined his trusty man now, going around the bedchamber, his hands full of the clothing the king had discarded throughout the day-the morning robe, the robes of state for the afternoon’s session with the Senate, a riding costume, for he’d hunted in the Royal Forest in hours after that. When Planchet knocked, he was not prepared to see what he did see, the white face, the darkening eyes as Planchet stood in the doorway between the bedchamber and the library.
“My lord king,” he said. He held no armful of clothing, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. They hung, empty by his sides. “They are killed, sir.”
Gilthas closed his book, his heart loud in his ears. The breath of the fire in the hearth was a roaring. The red glow of the tame flames made Planchet’s face shine whiter.
“Nayla Firethorn and Haugh Daggerhart. Dead in the ashes of a burnt tavern. The burning, it was the work of Sir Eamutt’s men. The killing of your mother’s folk …” Planchet’s eyes glittered. “My lord king, that was the work of others. Kagonesti, they say.”
“Kerian-”
“The burning was of the Hare and Hound in Sliath-nost, and many houses in Sliathnost were also burnt. In payment for a Knight’s life, they say. Two other taverns have been burnt, one at Ealanost, another ten miles south at the waycross where the north-south road from Ealanost meets the road to Qualinost. In all cases, it is said by survivors that Knights have come to demand that Kerian be hunted and captured and brought to Qualinost for-” he stopped, then swallowed hard- “for beheading, my lord king.”
Planchet, faithful servant, winced to see his king take each word in, winced to see his poet king’s eyes fill with dread.
“Find her,” said the king, his voice grating, hoarse and thin. “Send more men to find her.”
Gilthas turned his back on the library, on his servant then leaving to do his king’s bidding. He opened the glass-paned doors to the balcony and stepped into the night.
Upon the bridges of the elven capital, the silvery spans that had stood to ward a fabled kingdom for centuries, the king saw that no guard walked. Beneath the starred sky, the moon just rising, no black armored Knight marched. The towers stood dark, no light of brazier gleaming from slitted windows, yet in the misty moonlight, he imagined he saw subtle motion, drifting images of ancient Forest Keepers. He imagined-it seemed so clear to him!-that he heard the tread of their booted feet, the rattle of their armor.
Gilthas shook himself, banishing the fantasy.
Behind him, Gilthas was aware of Planchet returning to the library, the chime of a crystal carafe against a crystal goblet. The king did not turn but remained looking out to the bridges. The severed heads of elves perched upon the eastern bridge. His belly turned as he smelled the stench of rotting flesh brought to him on an unkind breeze. He wondered where Thagol’s Knights were, the ever-present patrols used to marching above the captured city.
Across the city, a tall dark figure walked out from the unlighted eastern tower, illumined by starlight and the new-risen moon. The elf king’s eyes narrowed. The figure stood at the inner parapet, leaning upon the wall with a hand on either side of a severed head. He didn’t seem to notice them or care that he breathed the stench of decay. The night breeze caught the figure’s cloak and tugged it back from his shoulders, flaring like wings. In the starlight, the man’s face shone white as a scar.
The king’s face flushed with anger, his pulse thundered hard, high in his throat. He formed the Knight’s name in thought-Eamutt Thagol!-and the man turned, as though he heard himself called.
Gilthas blinked. Behind his eyes, fire flashed, torches and flames, and smoke roiled up to the sky, blotting out stars. In his ears were the voices of elves screaming, men and women. He heard a child shriek, and the shriek suddenly cut off, as though by a knife.
Anger became mounting fear as Gil saw the evil in the eyes of Sir Eamutt Thagol. For a moment, his stomach lurched. The elf king drew a settling breath then heard the thunder of a draconian march. The air filled with the clank of steel and mail, the hissing laughter like poison on the air. The puppet king and the Skull Knight stood eye to eye across the distance, and when they broke, it was the elf king who broke first. Head high, Gilthas nodded, once, curtly as to dismiss. He turned and went into his library. In his ears still rang the sound of draconian feet. He thought of Kerian, his heart heavy with fear for her.
He called, “Planchet, I have changed my mind. Recall what men you sent after Kerian.”
Planchet reappeared, his eyes widening a little in surprise. “My lord king?”
“Recall them. We will not pursue her; we will not seek her.” He looked back into the night at the Skull Knight in his wind-caught cloak. “We will not lead Thagol to her.”
We will leave her to her fate, thought the king. Bitterly, he thought, we must leave her and hope some god finds her.
* * * * *
Time passed, and in this season, more quickly than in others, for autumn is short-lived. At the end of Kerian’s second week among the outlaws, she smelled cruel frost on the morning air. In the morning, watching hunters come down the slopes with braces of hares and fat quails, Kerian poked the central fire awake, scooting close for warmth as she slipped her knife from its sheath. She was not permitted to go out with the hunters, not even to set or check traps. She was, however, expected to clean and prepare their catch.
“Workin’ fer your supper,” Jeratt said, twisting a smile. She had grown used to his companionable jibes.
One after another, trappers and hunters dropped their catch beside her. This cold morning, Kerian scented snow in the winds crossing the Stonelands to the east. That morning and all the day she sensed change. Later, sunlight fading before purple shadows, the outcasts, all the folk who sheltered in the rocky fastness behind Lightning Falls gathered round the old woman they named Elder.
One other came to the council circle with them, and sight of her filled Kerian with astonishment. She was Bueren Rose, white as a winter moon. In her eyes shone a light like funeral fires ablaze. Kerian drew breath to call her name, moved to take a step toward her old friend, to ask how she had come to be there. Jeratt’s hard hand held her.
“No,” he said. “Be still, Kerianseray. Let her be.”
The sky above grew deeply blue and a thin crescent moon, ghostly yet, rose early over the trees. Bueren didn’t look around or try to see the people she stood among. She did not seem to care about more than whatever consumed her.
Kerian kept to the outside of the circle. If Bueren saw her, all the better, for she imagined the taverner’s daughter would like to see a friendly face in this strange place. Elder lifted her hand.
Iydahar left his wife’s side and parted the circle. He did not stand before the old woman. Rather, he kept his back to her. Head high, he looked into a middle distance, some place no one else could see.
“Hear!” Iydahar’s voice started Kerian. Strong and deep, the one word was weighty as stone. Those gathered grew even more still, and it seemed to Kerian that no one breathed. “Hear, for a thing has been said, and a thing has been done, and all must know.”
Kerian stood still. Around her the outlaws did the same, attentive.
“It is commanded!”
In the sky, a red tailed hawk sailed, its shadow rounding on the stone.
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