She need not have warned, and yet it seemed to Elansa that her own breathing sounded like stormwind. She forced herself to take small silent breaths.
The ogres, three of them, came up the defile, and each carried a dead goat slung across its shoulders. Sunlight gleamed on scabrous, yellow skin. Tiny, mean eyes darted here and there. Thick ropes of saliva hung and dripped from keen fangs. Taller than any elf Elansa had ever seen, taller than any human in Brand's band, they covered the rough ground as easily as ever Elansa had strode through a marble hall.
Tianna mouthed a curse, eyes glancing this way and that, looking to see if more of the horrible creatures would follow or if these would meet with others. The three came closer,’ and the stench of them made Elansa’s gorge rise. She clapped her hand to her mouth and willed the bile burning up from her belly to stay behind her teeth. Her eyes watered from the pain, from the stink, and the three walked by, goat's blood dripping down their backs. They shouted back and forth to each other, not caring who heard them.
One stopped, adjusted the load of the goat round its shoulders. It lifted its head, sniffed the wind, and went suddenly still. It shouted something, and the others stopped.
Tianna mouthed, Do not move.
Elansa could not have. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and sweat broke on her brow. She became aware of her own smell—sweat and skin and hair not washed, the leather of her broken boots, the wool of her cloak. Please, gods, don't let the wind shift!
One ogre shouted to the lingerer, who moved on.
When they were gone, the two women breathed again. Tianna slapped her shoulder, as she might have the shoulder of one of her fellows, a half-friendly gesture assumed to be understood.
"We're out of here, girl. No hunting for us."
Elansa rose, looking at the way back, but Tianna shook her head. Wind caught her silvery hair, and she brushed it back. "We’re not going back in the way we came. I know another way."
She did. Of course she did. And the way took them along the defile, back the way the ogres had come. They walked for a time, following the scents of smoke and death, and came to a rare place in the stoneland, a place of water where tough grass grew around the stream and the little pond. Like broken skeletons, the fire—blackened beams of two buildings that might have been house and barn stood starkly against the dun earth. Goats wandered, lost and bleating. Beside two nannies little black-footed kids skipped. In the middle of what must have been a dooryard, a man lay sprawled, his neck broken, one arm ripped from the socket.
Elansa turned from the sight. "Who would live here?"
Tianna, looking up the slope for a way back into the mountain, answered absently. "Humans do mostly, like him. Sometimes dwarves. Don't bother asking why. There's as many reasons as there are fools who try to live here. Outlaws like Brand, outcasts, stubborn folk who don't like the towns or the company of their own. Sometimes people live here because they remember that before the Cataclysm their long—ago fathers did. They claim the land, though the gods long ago made it useless. Fools, all."
Elansa said nothing.
"Ah," Tianna said, pointing up-slope. "There it is. Come on. Climb. And don't get tired of it, there's going to be more walking before the day's done. We'll be moving right out, count on that. Those ogres look like they're searching for a good spot to set up. That’ ll be inside, and no one I know is crazy enough to stick around when there's a chance ogres are moving in."
So they climbed, hunters with no gain. The way in to the outlaws’ cave opened halfway up the slope, a narrow passage behind a boulder. Elansa never would have found it. She didn't imagine anyone could who didn't know it existed. In the shadowed place between the inside and the out, she paused and looked back. She didn't look north to where the murdered goatherd lay dead. She looked south. No raven flew in the sky, and she said to Tianna that she thought those dark wings hadn't been following death. She thought they'd been fleeing ogres.
Tianna said she supposed so. "No one ever said they were stupid birds."
Elansa would not have said Brand was a stupid man, no matter what else could be told of him. No sooner did he hear Tianna’s news than did he call his men sharply to order.
"We're gone," he said. "Ogres are outside and looking for a way in. Pack up and clean out."
Elansa worked with the rest. She knew the way. They broke the fires and scattered the stones from the rings. They took all the bones of old meals and tumbled them down into the darkness of a crevice that seemed to have no bottom. Stone leaves no track, so they had nothing to do but be certain no sign of them lay behind, forgotten—no leather thong cast away from a boot-mending, no scrap of cloth, no sign of their waste. This they managed in a short time. They were very good at leaving nothing but shadow behind.
Through all the work, Elansa noticed something no one else seemed to pay much attention to. Dell and Arawn did not work together, though they always had before. They worked far from each other, doing different tasks. Elansa looked around from her bone-gathering, and she thought something had changed, something between the two lovers. She saw it finally, something in the mood of the whole band of outlaws. It was the kind of indefinable change you feel in the forest when the wind drops and the whispering trees have nothing to say. Still, you know what they're thinking, those trees: Storm coming.
"You," said Brand, who never named her. "Come here."
She did, her hands full of bones. He looked her up and down. His eyes had the sharpness of calculation. The cave had grown dark. Cookfires were gone, and torches were sputtering to life. She couldn't see him well, just the outline of him—broad shoulders, head back, the red firelight edging the thickness of his beard.
"Listen," he said, and it was the voice he used to give orders. "Get rid of all that, and come right back. Once we're going, you be sure to stay near me."
She didn't understand until she passed Char on the way to dump the bones. The dwarf knelt beside a flickering torch, carefully filling his leather bottle from the last of a stout little keg. He looked up, head cocked to give his good eye the sight of her.
"Do what he says," the dwarf warned. "Arawn, he ain't got no woman now."
Six captains each took a troop of warriors out from Qualinost. Each captain had a finely drawn map on supple parchment, the bold lines in broad strokes of darkest ink. Each map resided in a tooled leather scroll case, safe against the elements and the grit that plagued the borderland. Each captain had the same order from Lindenlea: "In the prince's name, clean the weapons caches."
Proud warriors, they heard those orders and set spurs to horse, riding through the great gates with the sound of thunder. It was not the best order. They imagined a better one that sounded like, "In the prince's name, find the princess!" No warrior lived in Qualinost who didn't feel the burning shame of having had the stolen princess within reach and then losing her. None of them didn't dream of killing the human scum who had twice taken Elansa.
For now, though, these must content themselves with knowing they would take weapons away from the outlaws, and that was good work They ran out to the border and there found more of the prince's soldiers, a great line of them ranging the stonelands from the Notch where they'd lost the princess and north to the edge of Darken Wood, south to the place where the Qualinesti Forest became the Forest of Wayreth, that old land of mages. They made a wall, bristling with swords and lances. Their encampments were not secret but plain for all to see.
"It would be nice to have the chance to spit a goblin or two," Lindenlea had told them, each commander she dispatched. "But that's not the mission. The mission is to keep them in the borderland. There will be no crack in the wall between Qualinesti and them. Engage only if you must."
Those were hard words for winter-weary soldiers, but they were orders and so not to be questioned. Small, shining outposts of Qualinesti set up on the border, and no one traveling by, not human or goblin or wandering hill dwarf thought those encampments would be friendly places to stop.
But the six troops setting out across the borderland thought the sight of all those warriors was a glad one. Their hearts rose to look back and see the brave pennons flying, the sun on burnished shields, on plumed helms. Stern faces, hard hands, these were elves trained in battle, elves whose hearts turned to only one need: Protect the kingdom.
It’s a good day, thought one of the warriors, she who was bound with her fellows to clean out the easternmost cache along the base of the triangle that formed the outlaws’ territory. It’s a good day to pull a wolf's fangs.
And that’s how they saw it, all the Qualinesti, watching or riding. They saw it as a scouring of wolves. No wolf of the goblin-kind would do mischief on the border, and those human wolves in the mountains would soon find themselves toothless and hard-hunted.
Indeed, a good day.
Today the way was up, the passage narrow, and the floor rough. In the womb of Krynn, the change of days was judged to fall on the far side of the longest sleep. Elansa had been counting, and she counted three days passing since she and Tianna had seen the ogres and found the dead goatherd.
The outlaw band went along passages and tunnels she recognized. In these months she had threaded many of the underground ways and had learned to see landmarks here as she would in the forest. In some ways, the picking of landmarks was little different. A grouping of stalactites was like a grove of birches. One recognized a shape, a configuration, and strove to remember it. In some ways, it might have been easier. Sooner will a grove of trees change than a grove of stone.
She knew the way they took on the first day. She even knew it was an easterly way. They were walking toward a weapons cache.
"Not for a take," said Brand when the boy Chaser asked about that. "It’s on the way, and outside of there is some good hunting."
That word, hunting, ran back along the line of outlaws in whisper and echo. There would be a day or two of existing on jerked meat, smoked lengths of juiceless hare so tough that nigh-toothless Kerin would be gumming it for an hour to be able to swallow it. No one was happy about that, and Elansa would have imagined Kerin the least of all of them. The loudest in his complaint, though, was Arawn, who said to Bruin and Swain and anyone who would heed that he would have set out hunting sooner than Brand had roused himself to do. If the thing had been up to him, when they'd had to move out, they'd have had better to eat on the way.
This he said, and other things, and Elansa heard it all, slipping careful looks at Brand as she walked. She thought of Kethrenan and his warriors. She thought that such talk as this would have gotten a Qualinesti soldier so severely disciplined he'd be wondering whether he needed to find another profession. Brand, however, let the talk go, though it wasn't to be imagined he didn't hear it. So close to him did she walk that Elansa saw the muscles tighten in his neck when Arawn questioned him. She saw the bristling of his beard as his jaw clenched.
Walking and taking great care not to stumble so she would not be kicked back to her feet, she wondered why Brand held his peace.
"It’s not a weakness," Char said quietly when they’d stopped to rest. The day had not passed, only some hours, and this moment to be still would not last long. "It's not that. It’s a kind of strength. Arawn knows that. Or so far, he does."
Elansa eyed him keenly, the dwarf who seemed to know all these men and their various tales: Chaser the orphan, Kerin who lost his teeth in a fight with a troll—"Proof the boy's not too bright"—Dell who became an outlaw because she would not become a whore, and the tale of Ley and Tianna. There were other stories to tell, and he knew them all, often drunk in the shadows and hearing things people wouldn't have imagined he'd had a dry wit to understand or recall.
She thought, watching the dwarf now, that he would tell the tale of Arawn and Brand, and she would understand why this outlaw lord tolerated what he did. But Char only said it was time to get going again, and she should take good care not to lag behind Brand.
On the next day, they learned the weapons cache was empty, and the men began to mutter about the loss of their hoard. It had not been stolen by ogres. The place was clean, no sign of their filth. Not even a rag of the oil-soaked cloths meant to protect the steel from rust remained—only the faint scent of the oil and the wet wool. Further, they saw that the way out of the mountain had been blocked by a tumble of stone, the dust of the fall still gritty and fresh on the floor of the cave.
"Our treasure," Swain called it. Nigh-toothless Kerin agreed that the gleaming swords and fine axes had been the due of them all, now stolen. Chaser nodded but said nothing aloud. The one Elansa had expected to complain was silent.
Arawn stood quiet on the outside of things, watching. He did not watch the grumblers or even seem to care about the plundered cache. He stood with his hand on the jeweled grip of Kethrenan’s sword and watched Elansa. She felt his eyes on her, and Brand's. She was again held in tension between two men.
A long moment she stood so, breath held.
"You," Brand said, his voice hard and sharp.
He meant her. She fell in beside him, keeping pace with him as they left the cave and never lagging behind. They walked many long hours, and not even Arawn complained about this. Their cache had been discovered, their way out blocked. It might be chance, a goblin’s luck to find the cache while sheltering against the cold. But he was no fool, Brand, and so he sat a while with Char and Ley. They discussed the next closest way out to good hunting, then he sent Dell, Tianna, Loris, and Pragol ahead to be sure the rest of the caches were secure. A meeting place set, the four slipped away into the darkness, soon parting from each other.
"He doesn't send Arawn," Elansa said to Char.
The dwarf shook his head, his lips set in a grim line. He said nothing, though he had the look of one who knew the answer to her implied question. He would not give it, though, or even look at her as they walked.
It was not until they grew too weary to go on that Brand let his band stop for the night. During that night, he grew impatient of crossing glances with Arawn. So that he would not have to cross swords, he settled the matter of the disposition of his captive. In the ruddy light of failing fires, he called Elansa to him and nodded to the place apart where he'd spread his sleeping fur.
"Your choice," he said. "Me, or Arawn. And when he can't hold you, soon all the rest."
Slowly, like a draining, the feeling went out of her body. She did not tum cold. She did not flush with shame. It was as though all sensation had fled, or perhaps she had herself flown from that complicated structure of flesh and bone and blood that was her body. She did not feel her heart beating, and when she noticed that, she wondered whether it were turning to stone.
Behind her, voices went still. A hound growled somewhere, then fell quiet. In that perfect silence she heard two things: the sound Char's leather bottle made as he unstopped it, and the long breath in-drawn he always took when he was about to enjoy himself for a time. The breath, though, the breath taken was not Char’s. Brand took it in the moment he knew he was going to be able to make his point to Arawn easily and, doubtless, pleasurably.
In the silence, she went to him, for no matter what he said about it, Brand had given her no choice at all. When he told her to, she undressed. Perhaps she shivered in the cold, but she didn't feel either thing, the cold or the shivering. When he gestured, she lay down, and when he touched her, his hands callused and rough, she did not protest or fight him. She would not give the watchers beyond so much as that. She lay silent beneath him. She let him make his case to his outlaws and make her off-limits to them. She was, in the end, grateful for one thing. She was grateful he didn't kiss her or even try to.
Chapter 10
A red-tailed hawk screeched across the sky, the sound the first thing Kethrenan heard waking. He lay watching the rosy gray, the cloudless sky, waiting. He lay, breath held, for that is just what hunters do, even when prey is so far away no breath of theirs can be heard.
He knew how to wait, did the prince. He knew how to watch fo
r a bird in the sky. No good to lie with his eyes darting all about. You miss the motion then. You miss what you're looking for. He lay still, and he became aware of a similar stillness across the campfire—Demlin, on his back, watching for the hawk.
They were good hunters, the two. It was a thing the prince hadn't known about his servant. Until lately, he'd known Demlin to be a good pourer of wine and a good man to pick the right clothing for a state dinner. He'd known him to be a congenial fellow and conscientious. He'd not made him part of Elansa’s escort, all those months ago in autumn, for his battle skills. There had been warriors for that. He'd included Demlin in the party so his wife could have someone of the court to talk to on her way, someone witty and amusing.
Events had turned the courtly servitor into a hunter, hard-eyed, keen to kill, and with the wit to know that he who keeps still has a good chance at the prey that will soon walk past him.
The hawk sailed in the gray sky, wings spread to catch the currents, tilting a little, circling, then climbing. Queen of her skies, she sailed and paid no attention to the elves on the ground. What were they to her? Nothing. She sailed out of sight, rounding away.
Demlin let his breath go. He got to his feet and went around the fire to where the goblin lay curled in a ball against the cold air. He toed Ithk. The goblin had not been sleeping. All the while he'd lain watching the hawk, Kethrenan had known that because he knew what it sounded like when Ithk slept. That was a noisy undertaking.
"Up," Demlin said, toeing the goblin again.
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