Clean, or cleaner, she watched the dog drink and, watching, she decided to test him. One small step she took, back from the basin. The hound never lifted his head, but his low warning growl gave a clear message. He'd been told to keep her, and keep her he would. When she left, he followed her, shadowing her steps, close beside as they came to the entrance again, the darkest place where the light leaking in from the fissure in the stony ceiling didn't reach. Char stood waiting, arms folded across his chest, head back, watching her.
"Fang," he said, never taking his eyes from Elansa. "Go."
The dog brushed past her, past Char, and vanished into the wider cave.
"Come along," Char said. He jerked his head. "There's something to see."
Elansa heard a rush of voices like the sound of a gale in the forest. One voice, a man's, cut through all others. Like a knife it slashed.
"The doing's mine, Brand! Not yours. Mine!"
Voices swelled again. Char shoved her ahead to the fires where many more men stood now than had before. Elansa tried to take a count and guessed at a dozen. They ranged in a semicircle round the bottom of the stairs. Char kept her on the edge of the circle, away from the light and the attention of the outlaws. Brand stood on the high place, the entrance like a gallery above a rough hall. He had the goblin by the scruff of the neck, and the cringing creature's hands were tied behind its back. Halfway up the stairs another outlaw stood, the elf Elansa had seen sleeping.
Cold fear washed through her, only to see that exiled elf, the dark elf whose name she would not speak if ever she came to know it. To see such a one was to see a dead man, lost to decency, lost to his kindred, forever banished from his kind.
The circling outlaws fell silent, so quiet that it seemed to Elansa all she heard was Char’s breathing. Brand, up on his gallery, had the look of a soldier rolling the bones, a gambler reckoning his odds for greatest gain. Elansa’s belly tightened, and her breath caught in her throat. A wave of excitement ran through the outlaws—shouts then sudden silence as Brand reached for the knife in his belt. With one swift motion, he turned the knife and offered it hilt first to the elf.
Behind Elansa, the dwarf said, "You see. You don't keep it all for yourself."
Shivering, Elansa thought his words made no sense. Keep what? She turned to Char and said, "What—"
The goblin threw back its head to scream, its orange neck thin and long. Like fire flashing, the knife in the elf's hand, and then that fire was quenched by dark goblin blood, the scream drowned to a gurgle as the elf kicked the corpse down the stairs.
Elansa’s knees turned to water, and she groaned.
"Now," said Char, his voice quiet but not gentle, "that was a useless hostage. Took him a day or two ago, filled up his father's ears with the promise he’d get his pup back if his miserable tribe killed your escort in the forest. It was a good enough deal. They got the loot; Brand got you. Thing is, Brand never had a mind to send him back to his stinking little goblin town. Hates that goblin’s da, he does. Hates him hard and reckons he's owed this killing and more. He wanted to do it himself, but Ley made his point. Ley had the better claim."
Char grabbed her and shoved her back into the darkness, into the little niche in the wall that had been her sleeping place. There she vomited onto the stone floor and the hem of her sage-green cloak. The cloak had been a gift from her father, she thought, her mind racing on mad tangents as her belly heaved. It had been made in the Street of Weavers by an elf woman of surpassing skill. The sweet scent of apple blossoms perfumed the cloak on the day her father had presented it to her. The Street of Weavers is lined up and down with apple trees….
Shuddering, her belly empty of the thin gruel of her breakfast and giving forth only burning bile now, Elansa sobbed. The cloak had been her bedding, and she'd fouled it.
The elf ran like cloud shadows, swift over the stony ground. Leyerlain Starwing ran south with the wind at his back and a sack in his fist. The sack dripped blood, and the blood followed him in small spatters. In the sky, ravens gathered, for they smelled death and dinner. Leyerlain wasn't sharing, though. He had a use for what was in the sack.
He ran, finding paths in the stoneland that few would think existed. He knew the place as he used to know the shady groves of Qualinesti. He knew where to find water, even in these dry days, and he knew where to find caves if he had to go to earth to hide from an enemy. He'd long ago lost that stubborn elven pride that forbade a man to turn from a challenge or fight, no matter the circumstance. He'd lived a long time in this land, the dark dry realm between Qualinesti and Thorbardin, and so he knew the dicta of elven honor had little to do with how to stay alive outside golden towers.
He ran, and the ravens forsook him as he went up stony slopes and down, going southward and eastward. By midmorning, Hammer Rock lay far behind him to the west, the forest a misty line beyond that. He ran in the direction of ancient Pax Tharkas, but he'd no mind to go so far as that place. When the sun sat noon high, he slipped into a shallow defile, and a new flock of ravens came to see if he would die or let fall the dead thing he carried. He did neither, and now he stopped running and sat quietly in the shadows, the sack close to hand, between his booted feet. He drank from the leather water bottle hung from his belt, then settled. The ravens dispersed, the day grew long, and the light old. A chill breeze awoke, prowling down the defile. It carried the scent of smoke and meat cooking. That was goblin-town food, and he'd have sooner died of starvation than eat it. He sat in stillness until the day ended and the short twilight vanished. Not until darkness filled the defile did he move again.
Standing, he stretched and made ready to run. Most of the blood had leached out of the sack, but Leyerlain reckoned the sack and what it held would serve just fine. His way took him up now. He left the defile and ran along the ridge. The moons still below the horizon, the stars not yet awake, nothing lighted him on the height. He was but a shadow.
That's how they saw him in the goblin town, or how one goblin did. When the watch looked up to the ridge, an old fat goblin half-drunk and sleepy, he saw a shadow. He scowled, and he shook his head. He turned his back, looking for his jug of ale. Something hard hit him, like a stone right between the shoulders. Staggered, he fell to his knees, howling and cursing. He scrambled up again and turned to see what had hit him. He saw the sack.
"By every evil god," he snarled, cursing by deities nearly forgotten. A shadow ran on the ridge, tall and thin, and high keening laughter rang out to mock. The shadow vanished, slipping over the hill, and the goblin howled in fury, calling for his fellows.
He snatched up the sack, smelled the blood, and dropped it. Out from the mouth rolled a head, jaws gaping, eyes wide in the last terrified expression of dying. The headman’s son had come home.
Chapter 4
Unlike their Silvanesti cousins, the elves of Qualinesti didn't think they were the center of the world—the best part of it, perhaps, but not the center. Thus, their maps were not like those of their cousins upon which the Silvanesti kingdom sat at the heart of Krynn, all other lands floated at the borders, pale and only minimally defined, as though they existed in some place beyond a misty border where nothing counted as interesting or important. A map made in Qualinesti showed the wide world around, named all the kingdoms still standing after the Cataclysm and the departure of the gods. Sometimes the maps named the kingdoms that used to be if those old borders could be determined upon the new face of Krynn. They had not been gentle in their leaving, the gods. It had, in truth, been a cataclysmic event, so violent it reshaped the world. But the Library of Qualinost was far-famed for its collection of maps, and so a keen—eyed cartographer could make out what used to be upon the face of what is. They made painstakingly accurate maps, those cartographers. Of course, because they were elves and, in their opinion not necessarily the center of the world but certainly the best part of the world, the forest kingdom of Qualinesti shone like a jewel on every map, all the world around a fittingly depicted setting for it
s beauty.
In the heart of the kingdom stood its capital, Qualinost of the golden towers, guarded by four spans of high bridges, shining in all seasons. The Jewel of the Forest, so poets named the place. Its warden, Prince Kethrenan, had no such lovely image of the city. He was not blind to her beauty, he could enumerate all her charms, but it was and always had been that Qualinost and all the forest beyond was to the prince more than the sum of its glittering parts. 'This was the land of his fathers, defended in blood. This was the kingdom to which his mothers had willingly borne princes and kings. The blood of his ancestors made holy this forest.
None of these words would he have used to describe his feeling. He was no poet; he was a hard-eyed soldier. Still, he felt his connection to the forest and the kingdom as though all the blood of those distant fathers and mothers had watered the ground around his feet, and he himself had put down the roots of an oak, thick and strong. His brother the elf king had his court, his contentious senate, his lords and his ladies. Solostaran was welcome to all that. Kethrenan had his barracks and training grounds, his warriors. He had armories filled with swords and shields and armor, and every smith in the city his to call. These things he wielded for the good of the kingdom.
In the largest of the barracks rooms, the prince stood in the sunlight of a crisp autumn afternoon. A spare place, here Kethrenan loved best to be. One of a dozen like it, the barracks was nothing but a great sleeping hall for his soldiers with brackets for torches upon the walls and—as in ancient days—no hearth but a long fire pit on either side of which stood long trestle tables. He stood now, in the end of the day, leaning over one of the tables, shoulder to shoulder with his cousin Lindenlea. Cousin and the second commander of his brother's army, she was his most trusted friend, a woman who'd set out on the soldier's road at the same time he did, who'd taken her» training alongside him, and who had risen in the ranks as a hawk rises to the sky, effortlessly. Outside the window soldiers practiced swordplay, and arrows wasped and thunked into the thick straw butts. Someone cheered, another jeered, and challenge crossed challenge, like sword blades. These things Kethrenan heard, but only vaguely. His attention he gave to the map spread out on the scarred table.
"Where is the last place you saw them, Lea?"
She pointed to the eastern edge of the kingdom where waterways ran whose banks were not, in this autumn season, too much troubled with water.
"Right here, just across the border. We're drier in the forest than we're used to being in this season, but out there they're dry as stones. The goblins will be crossing into the forest. If not now, soon."
Kethrenan grunted. "And this new leader?"
"An ugly brute, from what I hear. He's not a goblin. He's a hob."
The prince slid his cousin an interested glance. "We haven't seen a hobgoblin around that part of the border in years. What’s his story?"
"I don't know. The best my scouts could learn was that he's come up from the south, or maybe the east. It’s all wind and rumors. What's certain is that Golch is out and this hob Gnash is in. All our scouts agree on that, and that he's running things in the three goblin towns closest to our borders."
Kethrenan took that information in silence, returning to his study of the map. Down from the White-rush River, streams went branching, blue from the cartographer’s inkwell. All had been depicted by the kind of careful line that comes from a tightly nibbed pen and a steady hand. Some had been drawn thin, some fat, some led into lakes, and others wandered through the forest, following the will of the world, growing or shrinking as Krynn herself dictated. The forest through which these streams went—these days slowly—was shown not in inked lines but dappled green brush strokes. Fair Qualinesti, sunny glades and secret shadowed glens, lay upon the map as beautifully as though it were seen in a still pond's reflection. The dab, sweep, and swirl of a brush depicted the wealth and wonder of elms and aspens, of steadfast oaks and, in the south near that edge of the forest that abut-ted the stony land between the elven kingdom and the dwarven, tall pines whose variety rivaled even that of the oaks. So hardy were those pines that when they did not grow on level ground, they managed to cling with gnarled grip to the sheer crumbling edge of the glens that scored the part of the borderland where the world was more stone than soil.
Without a word from her prince, Lindenlea pointed to the map again. "Here," she said, slipping her finger along the White-rush River. "And here, and here." She tapped the western part of the forest, right by the Straits of Algoni. "Here, and here. Right down to the Wayreth border, and of course all through Qualinesti and strong along the Kharolis Mountains."
This she said in answer to the unvoiced question: Where are your scouts?
Kethrenan nodded, satisfied. "I want reports from all the borders in the usual time."
He tapped restless fingers on the eastern border where the cartographer showed only dun reaches. The blandness of the color changed only a little to gray to indicate rising ground in the south and east. These were the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains. They held little of note but the old fortress standing a-straddle the gap between two of the northmost arms of that mountain chain. Pax Tharkas, fallen to ruin. Pax Tharkas, a reminder of better days when there was no wild windy waste between the two kingdoms. In those times, good roads had run through the foothills, kept safe by elf warriors and dwarf soldiers. It wasn't quite as the legends said, that a fair virgin could walk those roads with a sack of gold in each hand and reach her destination unmolested, but things were better then than now. In those days, goblins hob and small had seldom come out of their dark haunts in the deep mountain vales.
"Send word out that I want to hear from your scouts on the eastern border every second day."
Lindenlea nodded, a cool glint in her eye. "And if anyone comes across the hob?"
"Tell them to do what they do best, and don't bother bringing me back a trophy, just the news that it’s dead."
"Yes, my prince," she said.
Outside, a cheer rose up, and other shouts in chorus. Swords clashed, the ringing martial music. Lindenlea glanced out the window to see the last light of day running like silver on a sword‘s blade. They didn't fight with blunted edges. They fought to the bone and the blood, and so good were they by now that mail and armor suffered, but flesh seldom did.
"They'll all be in soon for their mess," she said to the prince. "And I know they'd be happy if you joined them, Keth."
He grunted, his mind still on his map, counting his scouts, counting his borderland guard, and thinking about whether he wanted to send an extra force out to the border or lie back, waiting to see what would happen. Warden of the Forest Kethrenan was, but still at his very heart, he was a hunter. He understood the virtue of patience. By the time the hall began filling up with his warriors, two things had been decided: He would stay to eat with his soldiers, and he would wait to see what the new leader of three goblin towns would do.
Across the barren land a cold wind came up from the south, like word from a cruel land. Elansa woke shivering, her cloak damp with night-chill. Each night, for the past three, the air had hung damp. Never did rain fall, and in the gullies meant to shine with water the stones lay dry with only a thin thread of water slipping over. There was only the wind, and at night wolves howled in the stony reaches. Into that wind, for three days, Brand and his outlaws had traveled, Elansa in tow. They headed north, and though she didn't know for certain, Elansa hoped they were going toward the place Brand had called the Notch, the meeting place where ransom would be delivered and she would be returned to her people.
If Demlin had survived his journey….
If word had been received in Qualinost in time for Keth to send the ransom….
That would infuriate him, that particular demand— two wagons filled with weapons and armor. Kethrenan would find it easier to part with gold and jewels, to open the rich coffers in the tower of the Sun and pile up baubles. To have to part with precious steel… this outrage would burn his heart.
On the first day, Elansa had been forced to walk with her hands bound before her. On the second day, the ropes had been cut. This was at Char's suggestion.
"She's slowing us down, Brand. Either kill her or cut her hands loose."
Brand had looked at the moons, the red and the white like pale ghosts in the afternoon sky. They were five days from full, and he was reckoning time. He looked north, reckoned some more, and told Char to cut her loose.
"Keep that eye of yours on her," he'd said. "Lose her, and I'll kill you."
The dwarf had shrugged, but Elansa didn't think the threat was an idle one.
Now, on this fourth day from Hammer Rock, she woke and lay for a long moment still, trying to find the will to move. In the end, it was not will that helped her to sit. It was the groaning of the muscles in her back and neck, stiff from another night sleeping on stony ground. Sitting, she looked westward to the forest. She saw only a thin dark line sketched on the horizon, like a fading mark on an old, old map. There was Qualinesti, far away.
Here in the stony land, no dawn chorus sparkled, no lifting of birdsong to greet the new day. Here, there was only wind and, for Elansa, hunger and thirst and bruises. She was not always dragged to her feet when she fell. Brand insisted on keeping his hostage in condition to walk, but when he wasn't looking, or when Char wasn't near, Elansa was as often kicked to her feet as dragged. She learned the names of some of the outlaws by hearing their rough voices, talking among themselves about her as though she were a dumb brute.
Kick 'er up, there, Arawn! Dell, drag that useless sack to her feet!
She learned other names that way, walking or stumbling. She heard their voices roughened by drink, by the cold, by the constant grit blowing across the barren land where only rocks and crows and wolves lived.
The Inheritance Page 4
