The Lioness d-aom-2

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  * * * * *

  Kerian followed the flight of an owl drifting on the night, wings wide, silently sailing. Concealed from sight of anyone below, she listened to the sigh of wind in the trees. In the dell, every window of Felyce’s house shone with light, orange glowing like eyes looking outward. Now and then a restless Knight would pass before one or another, upstairs or down.

  “like they’ve commandeered the place,” Jeratt growled.

  Kerian snorted. “They won’t hurt her as long as they need her to cook and fetch for them.”

  They had three times seen Felyce walk out to the stream behind the house and return with laden buckets. By the light from her windows, they’d watched her lay the table in her front room and pile platters high with food.

  “My hares,” Jeratt muttered sourly.

  “Don’t worry,” Kerian said, gaze roaming the darkness. Somewhere in the forest, ranged round the lip of the dell, elf outlaws waited in utter silence. Their breaths did not make as soft a sigh as the wind. Kerian had asked for ten. Jeratt had found eight volunteers and challenged two vac-illators into joining. Her plan was simple and quickly explained. Her order, only one: Not one of Lord Thagol’s men would come out of the forest alive.

  “They’ll leave at gray morning,” Jeratt said, not watching the forest but the dell. “They’ll probably take the south-going road, back toward the Qualinost Road and whatever tavern the Headsman is squatting in now.”

  “Bayel says he’s at The Green Lea.”

  Jeratt and Kerian sat in silence while stars wheeled across the sky, while the lonely silver moon set and the darkest hour came then died before the pale breath of dawnlight He was first to see the stirring of dark forms in the widow Felyce’s dooryard, the first to hear the impatient snort of a horse.

  “Ready now,” Jeratt said, soft.

  Kerian fingered the golden chain round her neck, the slender necklace Gilthas had given her on the night she’d left him. Ander had returned the token, and now the ring was whole again, two hands clasped.

  “Ready soon,” she whispered, her lips close to Jeratt’s ear. She scanned the rim of the dell and saw nothing moving. She had been with these outlawed men and women on hunts; she knew how still they could keep and for how long.

  “Jeratt,” she said, “one band should watch the north road, one the south. You take the north. There is only one signal: the movement of Knights. You know what to do.”

  They parted, slipping away until they occupied opposing sides of the high ground above the dell, each with a clear sight of the farm and the dooryard. Kerian had charge of a band of six. Even as she completed her orders, Ander came close and said, “They’re leaving the farmhouse, Kerian.”

  She looked where he pointed and saw motion in the dooryard. The four humans wore faint outlines of light. Her elf eyes saw not only the flesh and bone shape of them, but the heat of their blood running, their life-force glimmering. They stood like red ghosts in the dooryard, and among them stood Felyce.

  “She’s all right,” Ander said with a relieved breath.

  Kerian stilled him with a gesture. Behind the sounds of the dawn, the first sleepy chirp of birds, a brook talking to itself, the wind rising then falling, she heard the voices of those in the dooryard. One Knight turned from speech with a fellow and nodded curtly to Felyce. Something small spun through the air between them, the first light winking on it. A coin dropped into the dooryard at Felyce’s feet The Knights kicked up their horses and rode out from the farmhouse yard, heading south. To the Green Lea, then, to Headsman Chance.

  “Wait,” Kerian said to Ander. “Wait, and soon we’ll follow.”

  In the forest others moved, Jeratt and his band of six. They didn’t move to join Kerian or pursue the Knights. Seven weaponed elves, outlaws and soldiers of an old, nearly forgotten cause, melted into the darkness of the wood and went by various ways to the Qualinost Road.

  Kerian waited until she felt they must be well on their way. She smiled, thinking of a vise, and softly said, “Now Ander. Now we go.”

  * * * * *

  Four Knights rode through the graying forest. One professed himself pleased to see the sun pinking the sky, one smiled to see the shadows fade. Another watched the day prick out glitter on the stream they rode beside. His fellows also watched the water. A dragon’s enforcers, the strong arm of a Skull Knight, they went as though they were lords of the forest. One hawked and spat, the phlegm of a night of drinking from the widow’s wine cellar. In the pines, a jay shouted. From across the purling stream, another answered. Behind, the water splashed, two Knights turned and saw nothing but morning mist rising on the banks. Two others turned right and left, expecting to see the forest shimmer. The trees remained still. Not even the long, thin needles of the pines stirred in the morning breeze.

  A horse snorted. One Knight slipped a hand low, gripping the pommel of the sword at his hip. The gesture sent tension running among them. Other hands touched weapons, seats shifted for balance.

  Now they realized they heard no other kind of bird, just a riot of jay voices as they went carefully downstream.

  When it came at last, the wasping of an arrow flown, it sounded like thunder in the ear of the man it passed, felt like lightning in the eye of man it struck.

  The forest erupted in howling, in war cries and fury.

  * * * * *

  Kerian ran before them all, one of seven elves pouring down the slopes of the forest.

  “The horses!” she cried. “I told you-kill the damn horses first!”

  Fire-haired Briar leaped to the fallen Knight and snatched up his sword. She gutted the horse of the Knight who turned to strike her. She swung upward and hacked the Knight’s leg at the knee, severing it and unleashing the shower of blood that would be his death.

  Screaming, two more horses went down. Blood steamed in the cold air, the thick reek of it hanging. A Knight, caught beneath the bulk of his fallen steed, screamed as his beast writhed in its own agony. The screaming became a bubbling groan. Kerian shouted again, in Elvish, a language none of these Knights understood. Two of her outlaws lifted their voices in ululating cries. When the echo of those cries was gone, so were the elves.

  In the eerie silence, now afoot, the two remaining Knights stood back to back, each with swords held high. Their breaths, panting, streamed out gray on the brightening air. One looked north, the other south. One looked west, his fellow east. They saw nothing. They heard nothing but the death struggle of the horses.

  Silence fell upon the little glade, thick as a funeral pall.

  “Where?” whispered one.

  The other shook his head. He saw nothing, no one, only the dead and dying.

  In shadows thick as night beneath dark pines, Kerian drew a silent breath. Beside her Ander crouched, an arrow knocked to bow. Kerian felt him quicken with excitement, the muscles of his shoulder close against hers quivering. Wind shifted.

  “Wait,” she said, the word only a motion of lips.

  Ander breathed through his nose, silent.

  “Wait,” Kerian said again. Behind her, her outlaws had become as stone again.

  The two Knights put the distance of a step between each other’s back. They consulted in quiet voices. Knights with no foe to fight, no enemy upon whom to take revenge, they turned and left the glade. Their weapons glittered in the new light of day, but neither sword had tasted blood, and this was their disgrace.

  Kerian gestured to her fighters, a simple command: Let them go.

  This they did, but not happily. Still, they heeded, and they watched the two Knights walk out of the glade, south toward the Qualinost Road. They watched them return, not on their feet but dragged by the heels, corpses come to join their brothers.

  “Now,” said Kerian, “strip them all of weapons, even of eating knives. Leave nothing behind we can use.”

  She watched as they did so and forbade the looting of personal possessions. Let the rings stay upon the fingers, the talimans around the necks. On
ly one thing more did she command, and though most of those who heard her didn’t understand, Jeratt did. He took Lea and Briar along to carry out Kerian’s strange order. They were all day gone from their fellows but returned to the stony shelter behind Lightning Falls by dawn.

  “Did you do it?” Kerian asked.

  Jeratt assured her that he had, and she told him to come sit and eat some breakfast.

  * * * * *

  Upon the doorstep of the Green Lea four empty helms stood, hung on saplings stripped and changed into woodsy mockery of the pikes that desecrated the eastern bridge in Qualinost. Empty-eyed, like the sockets in the skulls of murdered elves, they stared at the tavern door. So well were they posted that these were the first things Chance Headsman saw when he walked out in the morning on his way to the midden.

  His fury passed quickly. He ordered his men mounted and armed and followed a trail easy to see to the glade where his four missing men lay. They were not Kagonesti who had killed his Knights, for none of the arrows he found bore white fletching. Each man had been looted of his weapons and mail shirts and boots, and the horse of each had been killed, gutted or throat-slit. Anything of use to the killers was gone from the corpses; what couldn’t be used had been systematically destroyed.

  A chill crept up Sir Chance Headsman’s spine, the kind that warns a man that he is about to fall.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the next week snow fell often, but no one believed this was a last assault of winter for the sun shone brightly and warm between the gray times, and snow didn’t last long on the roads or in the clear places. The songs of birds changed from winter-weary dirges to brighter airs. Spring came behind the snow, the changing scent of the breezes said so, and Kerian began to think of her brother. She hadn’t seen him or heard word of Ayen-sha or even Bueren Rose since they’d left the outlaw camp long ago. The time had come to go and speak with Dar, to let him know that some things had changed in the kingdom and with her. She would ask him to consider a request of hers, a bold demand made in behalf of a bold plan, but first, something else had to be done and said.

  “Jeratt,” she said, sitting back on her heels, “I’m going to take a small trip.”

  He sat closer to the fire, so the light sent shadows curling around him from behind. She couldn’t read his expression, but she knew him now, and well. This was news to him.

  “I must see the king,” she said.

  He sat silent.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, Jeratt.”

  He shook his head. “No. You tell me if you’re coming back.”

  “I’m coming hack.”

  Simply, he said, “Then you don’t need to know what I’m thinking.”

  Wind soughed around the top of the rocky howl. Camp-fires glowed pale in the thin winter sunlight. Elder slept near the hottest, highest one, and when Kerian looked at her an image ran though her mind-no, behind her eyes- of a huge misshapen beast running. Ice crackled up her spine, and her heart lurched as it did before battle. Voices and the rattle of stone distracted her. She wrenched her gaze away from Elder and saw two hunters coming down the stony slope, one with a small roe deer over his shoulder, another with a brace of quail and one of hares on his hip. She looked behind her and saw Briar going to relieve the watch at the entrance to the falls.

  Jeratt said drily, “Give the king my regards.”

  She laughed, but the image of a loping beast still haunted her eyes, and her laughter sounded shaky in her own ears. “I’ll see you at the rising of the moon. Here.”

  Two weeks. He nodded and reached out a hand. She took it in the hard warrior’s clasp, and she got up and pulled together a kit for traveling-thick woolen trews, a woolen shirt and fine boots looted from a young Knight. Then she went into the forest. Ear to the ground, nose to the wind, she learned of the whereabouts of her lover before she came within sight of Qualinost. He and a contingent of servants, his lady mother, and a covey of senators had removed to his forest lodge, Wide Spreading, for two weeks of hunting. It was there she found Gilthas, and she did so by slipping past his nominal guard, his servants, his mother and her people, and into his bedchamber by starlight.

  * * * * *

  Kerian stood in the center of a bright square of starlight, silver shafting down from a high window in the ceiling of the royal bedchamber at Wide Spreading. The waking breath of one who had been deep asleep came softly. When the king’s eyes opened and he saw her, he did not start.

  “Kerian.” Gilthas sat. “I dreamed of you coming here. I dreamed I heard your footsteps.”

  “You didn’t dream, my lord king.”

  He opened his arms in invitation, Kerian covered the distance between his window and his bed with swift strides.

  “Kerian,” he said, whispering against the tangled gold of her hair. “Kerian, is it really you?”

  “You dreamed,” she said, almost laughing. “Now you doubt?”

  As though to answer, the king wrapped her up in his arms. He smelled of soap, and clothing taken from scented drawers, and closets hung with sachets of shaved sandal-wood. He shone, a king well tended, and held her as though the marks she left upon his faultless bed clothing- soot and grime and sweat stains-were not more than the faintest imprint of a perfumed body.

  “Come,” Gilthas said shortly, slipping out of bed. His night robe moved in silken grace around his body. “You look hungry, love, and thirsty. I’ll find you something-”

  Kerian shook her head, a gesture used to still men and women lately grown accustomed to heeding her. The brusque gesture surprised him, and she did not apologize.

  “My lord king, I’m feeling suddenly in need of a bath.”

  He laughed, quietly for the sake of this secret arrival. “All this way for a bath? Well, then, let it be. I will summon Planchet. He will see that you have one and all else you wish. Sit. Here on the bed. It will be brought.”

  There were kettles of steaming water to warm the marble tub kept in the bathing apartment off the bedchamber. With starlight glittering in through wide, tall windows, Kerian bathed long, and later she showed her king how much she had missed him. Afterward, by fading starlight, in her lover’s arms, she looked carefully at him, his face in repose, and she touched the downy cheek inherited from tiie mysterious human who had fathered his own father, Tanis Half-Elven. He stirred to her touch, and she hushed him.

  “I’m sorry to have waked you.”

  “I’m not sorry you did,” the king said.

  He reached for her, but she stopped him, a hand on his chest. “You think I have come home.”

  The bluntness of her statement startled him. Gilthas nodded.

  “I haven’t. You said I couldn’t, my king. You said if I went away, I could not come home again. I went, and I have been to many places and done …many things I never thought I could or would. You were right: I am back now but not home. Let me tell you, love, how it has been with me.”

  She spoke past his doubts, she told the tale of her outlawry, of the first killing at the Hare and Hound, of the burning of the Waycross. She told of finding her brother and losing him. She did not-and this surprised her- speak of Elder, but she spoke well of the half-elf Jeratt, of his band of outlaws and young Ander whose silence on her behalf had made him one of them. She told the king of the elves of the dales, of Felan and his widowed wife, the child orphaned before it was born. She told him all this and more.

  “We are outlaws all, my love, and yet, in truth, we should stop calling ourselves that. We must stop naming ourselves outlaws, for though others say so, we are not. We are more.”

  Gilthas sat forward, eager to hear what caught his imagination.

  “We are some of us outlawed.” Her smile twisted wryly. “All the gone gods know that I am, but many of us are Kagonesti, shunned for being who they are. Others are old soldiers, Gil, forgotten warriors of Silvanesti and of your own kingdom, who once served your Uncle Por-thios.”

  Outside his chamber, Planchet spoke with a servant, and
they heard footfalls come near and retreat as though a message had been given and sped.

  “My lord king,” she said, pride shining in her voice, “we are the ones who through the summer and autumn harried Lord Thagol’s force of Knights in the western part of your kingdom, and we have fought not as brigands and outlaws. We have fought as warriors.”

  Planchet had long ago taken away her worn clothing to be washed and mended, but he had not touched her weapons, her bow and quiver, the dagger and the sword she had taken from a Knight after she’d killed him. She now slipped the blade from its sheath. The steel gleamed in the moonlight, sliver running on the edges.

  “This sword, my king, I have brought you. This, and the fealty of my heart and the loyalty of men and women who have not forgotten the days when they were free.”

  His eyes shone, his poet’s soul leaped with fire as he took her meaning. Outside the window, the sky grayed with the coming day. Gilthas let his glance dwell there for a time, and then, his kindling glance darkened.

  “Things aren’t going well for us, Kerian.”

  “The alliance?”

  He nodded. “My mother has hung her hope on an alliance with the dwarves for as many years as I’ve been alive, Kerian. It’s become more urgent now. The dragon is building her cache and her war trove. The Senate has heen told the tribute in weapons must increase.” He twisted a bitter smile. “Of course, the tribute in gold, silver, and gems must not decrease. We hear from friends outside the kingdom that the dragons are growing restless. Once Beryl gets all she needs of us, what will she do? We need a way out. All of us, Qualinesti and Kagonesti.”

  A way out!

  Like the sudden glint of starlight on the sword’s blade, Kerian knew her moment, the moment when something bright would be born.

  “My king, my love, you need time. There is no way to truly end the dragon’s hold on us or Thagol’s grip. That isn’t the goal anymore, is it? The goal must be to confound and confuse them until Thorbardin can make up its mind.