by David Guymer
Trenloe smiled. “Be watchful.”
“Ah, yes. Ironically, the Greyfox and her brigands have probably done more to keep the east clear of Uthuk than General Brant and my cousin.”
“I heard rumors in the Downs that the Uthuk could be behind the Bandit Queen somehow.”
“Pish. Every spy and whisper I have says that the Greyfox is nothing more than a common girl from the Downs. Or was. Before she decided to make herself a queen. I could believe a lot of a young woman like that. Damn, I would like to meet her. But this is Kell, Trenloe. That might not mean a lot to you, free man of the south that you are, but we live every day with the Ru on our doorstep. You only have to face east and feel the danger on the wind. Even the light tastes differently at dawn. Believe me. No man or woman of my land would ever ally with the Uthuk. It’s unthinkable.”
Trenloe nodded.
“You’re a clever man, Trenloe. If you did not delegate all your dealings to Dremmin then you might surprise yourself.”
“I prefer to keep to myself, my lady.”
Dame Ragthorn regarded him slyly. Trenloe felt himself squirm. He was well accustomed to being the center of attention, but it was generally a case of folk wanting to stand back to back and measure themselves against him, feel his muscles in extreme cases, or ask him to lift or bend something. Dame Ragthorn’s determination to find something of deeper worth was unsettling.
“We’ll see,” she said at length.
Trenloe changed the subject. “How long has it been since you last heard from the garrison at the ford?”
“About six weeks.” Trenloe looked sharply at that, but Marya waved away his concern. “No news is not ill news, I assure you. We may not have soldiers to spare riding needless messages back and forth, but some of my fastest horses are stabled at the garrison, and the warning beacon burns brightly enough that you could see it at noon through the thickest fog.”
After a time, even Dame Ragthorn ran out of geography to talk about or past battlegrounds to draw attention to and the ride lapsed into silence.
As the day matured, the sun continued to peel away at the fog, leaving the copses looking spindly and denuded, but far less otherworldly than they had appeared at the ride’s outset. For a moment, Trenloe even fancied himself warm, and a discernable picnic mood came over the company. Warriors began to talk quietly amongst themselves, and after a while Corporal Bethan struck up her zither and sang “The Host of Thorns” twice through. Trenloe did not know if there was any genuine bardic magic in her, the very nature of it made it difficult to be certain, but, if nothing else, Bethan was at least exceptionally good. By the end of her second rendition even Dremmin was humming tunelessly from further down the column.
Trenloe turned in the saddle to see this miracle for himself, just as the dwarf paused, squinting into the fog where it still lay thick over the east. She rode ahead to join Trenloe. “There’s something up there.”
Dame Ragthorn leant aside from Trenloe to confer with Marns and one of her scouts. “You have a keen eye in fog. If ever you wish for a permanent commission as a Hernfar ranger, I will make you a generous offer.” The dwarf growled something without translation, and the woman went on. “That is the eastern watch fort that you have seen. We call it Spurn.”
“An endearing name,” said Dremmin.
“It has high walls, a thick gate, and a good hearth. There are worse places east of here to spend a season.”
Dremmin grunted something to the effect that she could imagine it well and would not wish to overnight in any of those either, but otherwise showed sterling restraint.
Trenloe was proud of her.
“Herald!” Dame Ragthorn called, and a liveried soldier who had been paying Bethan special attention sat straighter in the saddle. “Announce us.”
The soldier put his curling brass horn to his lips and blew. The long note lingered in the heavy fog. Trenloe waited for the answering hail.
He waited.
Nothing.
The horses walked stolidly on.
Trenloe shared a worried look with Dremmin.
“What did I tell you?” said Dame Ragthorn, seeming less concerned than embarrassed. “Excellent fighters and appalling soldiers. They’ll be drunk and passed out in front of the hearth, I shouldn’t wonder. Everything will look brighter once we are closer.”
Chapter Eleven
Andira Runehand
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
The boy came hurrying from the wood as though trailing something terrible he could not see, his strung flatbow over one shoulder, his leggings strangled in stickyweed and holly. He panted something that aspired towards speech, waving a hand that appeared to contain a few threads of white fleece.
“Spit it out,” said Hamma. The man stood tall in the tangled gloom, his battered mail further scored by the shadows of the wood. “Unless snorting on the ground like a wounded stag was your sole intention.”
Sibhard shot the older man a glare and then, opened up his trembling hand. Hamma leant in to look.
“Sheep’s wool, my lady,” said Sibhard, looking past Sir Brodun in favor of Andira. “I found it stuck to a piece of tree bark. About a quarter mile that way.” He turned to point back the way he had just come. “There’s no sheep in the Whispering Forest. Not alive anyway. It’s got to be from one that the Greyfox took in her raid.”
“What does Yorin think of it?” said Hamma, straightening his back and wincing, immediately suppressing it. The infirmities of age were for lesser men.
“I came straight here.” The boy bowed his head. “I thought Andira would–”
“The next time you find something you take it to Yorin first, boy,” said Hamma. “Andira made him her chief scout for a reason. He’ll decide if it’s worth Andira’s attention or mine.”
“But...” said Andira, and held out her hand. “Seeing as you have come all this way.”
Sibhard gazed at the rune that had been inscribed in her open palm, equally fascinated and repelled. He pressed the scrap of fleece into her palm, brushing her skin with as little contact from his own as he could manage and as much as he dared.
Paying him no more heed, Andira closed her hand over the wool and shut her eyes.
She could feel the tickle of the wool against her skin. The way it scratched the uncanny lines of the rune. The cloying odors and rustling whispers of the old wood receded, like the sounds of a distant sea heard from a quiet bedchamber after the shutters had been closed. The forest’s gnarled and tangled spirit grew like a long shadow in her mind, primal and cold, but rooted fully in the rocks and soil of the mortal plane and with no trace of the Ynfernael that her rune’s powers could detect. There was a power in old places like this to resist such encroachment. A pity then that they tended to harbor so little love for humanity. The collective weight of the trees’ souls shuttered her from any sense of her demon quarry, much as their physical mass prevented her scouts from locating the Greyfox, but the wool in her hand was a physical focus, similar to the wands and rods that sorcerers employed to simplify their castings.
She drilled her focus towards that itch in her hand.
A memory flashed through her mind.
It was simpler than her own. Painted in different colors. Interpreted through different senses.
She is confused. Afraid.
She is in a strange place. Different to the place before.
Tall things loom over.
Close.
Whispering.
Others like her talk and jostle. They are comforting. She follows them. Gray shapes run alongside. Showing them where they must go.
Another gray shape waits for them. It is bright in the dark place. Its face is ageless. Neither young nor old. One ear tapers into a mist of silver-gray hair. There is no other. It makes it look crueler. But no less beautiful. Its garb is one of many
colors.
A bit of her coat tears off on a tall thing.
She hurries on.
The gray shape is already forgotten…
Andira blinked open her eyes.
Sibhard was back on his feet, staring at her in wonder.
“The fleece was… I don’t know, it was glowing.”
“I was borrowing the thoughts of your lost sheep.”
“Did you see where the bandits took them?”
Andira smiled “Better. I think I saw the bandit queen herself.”
The boy’s confidence slipped. Andira could not help but be intrigued. She was not an easy woman to follow, she knew, but people tended to do so regardless because she had power and because she had a purpose. She could be as terrifying as all but the most unholy of creatures she had made it her life’s mission to battle, but nevertheless this phantom of the wood that no one in Kell appeared ever to have seen still had the power to frighten the boy.
“It is good that you are afraid,” she said, softly. “Fear is the first enemy that a warrior determined to confront the world’s evils must face. Better to face it just you and it together, rather than when real enemies of flesh and blood surround you.”
“You are kind, Lady Andira.”
“I can be. Sometimes.”
She returned him the tuft of fleece.
He looked at it in wonder as though it had been blessed by the goddess Aris.
“Now get lost,” Hamma growled.
The knight raised his fist as if to administer a slap and Sibhard bolted into the woods.
“Were you never young?” Andira asked him, a smile testing at the deeper muscles around her face.
“No,” said Hamma.
“He is brave. I hope you don’t feel threatened by him.”
The knight gave a laugh, too amused to be offended. “I think the boy is infatuated with you. Nothing more.”
Andira studied her champion’s hard face. Her eyes, for all their perspicacity into the arcane realms above and below, were no more adept at reading the man beside her than they were the trees or the great horse he led. She was envious of the ability that others wielded so casually, the ability to understand people, and she wondered sometimes how much of her power she would surrender to have that gift. “People come to heroism by many paths. Who can say how you came to find me near death in a barrow in Roth’s Vale with this rune in my hand? Or why it was you who found me there? If the loss of my life before this quest has taught me anything it is that our past selves have no sway over us. Those people are the ghosts of ourselves. Not dead. But gone. Because they lacked our purpose. It is what we do today and in the future that is all-important.”
The knight bowed his head. Suddenly, she was half again his height and too fierce for him to look upon.
“Sibhard will serve to the fullest of his gifts, whatever they may be. Come,” she said. The golden halo that she had unconsciously begun to project faded, and she coughed, embarrassed, her commanding aspect diminishing. “Before we lose him in the wood.”
At her movement the pilgrim-soldiers who had been gathered silently in prayer around the nearby trees rose with her and followed.
“You told the boy you saw their Greyfox,” Hamma muttered, a little nervous of her still and keeping his distance as he beat a path through the undergrowth. The trees of the Whispering Forest were the descendants of an ancient world. Andira understood that from somewhere even if she did not quite know from where. They recalled an age when their wood was but another unnamed outpost in a primordial expanse stretching from the Blind Muir Forest in the north to the enchanted Aymhelin wood in the south where the Latari elves made their homes and as far west as the sea. They were prisoners in their own lands, and they were resentful. Branches tussled overhead, crowding the floor of air and light. Roots had an uncanny way of tripping even the wary. The knight kicked at a root and stepped over it, his horse following less assuredly on its lead. “Will you say no more about her? Why we waste our time on her, for instance?”
“Partly because it is the right thing to do. Partly because if I wanted to cross the Whispering Forest then I needed Sibhard and Yorin’s help. And partly again because I feel Baelziffar’s hand behind this bandit queen somehow.”
“What did you see?”
Andira closed her eyes and recalled. “It is… difficult to say. The eyes I saw her through were not my own. She is an elf, I think.”
“You think?”
“Something in the way she seemed. An aura. It reminded me of the old legends. Of how the first elves purportedly journeyed to this existence from their true home in the Empyrean.”
“The dark places of the world have always treated elfkind with a softer glove,” Hamma agreed, and shook his head. “But no elf would ever involve themselves in the designs of a demon.”
“Not usually. At least not knowingly.”
“Leave these eastern peasant folk to their woes, I say. Strike east for the Forest Road while we still can.”
“You are a hard man, Hamma Brodun.”
“And you’re a hard woman when you need to be.”
“When I need to be,” Andira agreed. “But in the Darklands beyond the river the Uthuk raid again. An Ynfernael lord makes his play for Kellar. And at the same time, an elf commands an uprising that leaves half the barony lawless and unwatched. Do you call that coincidence, Sir Brodun?”
The knight grunted.
“You disagree?” said Andira.
“With you? Never.”
Sibhard came into view once more, propped up against an immense tree that five men together could not have spread their arms around. He was whispering animatedly with Yorin. The one-time Darkland Ranger who had volunteered his services as guide following the altercation outside the Black Lamb tavern in Gwellan was clad in forester’s attire, tough hides for turning thorns and natural shades that blended well into the gloom.
Uninterested in what the locals might have had to argue about, Andira crouched, bringing her perspective closer towards that of an animal’s eyes.
She touched the tree beside her.
They were close now.
She felt it.
“Keep your voices down,” Hamma growled, now someway off behind her.
“Yorin’s afraid to go further,” said Sibhard.
“That’s not what I was saying,” said Yorin, with an exasperated breath. “But I’m cautious. This is far deeper into the forest than I’ve ever gone, and we’re still in its outermost fringes yet. If the Greyfox is laired further this way then she’s more courage and guile than we’ve credited her with.”
“Not so much more, I think,” said Andira. “She is not far. The trees have not yet forgiven humanity for the loss of their domains of old. I do not think the most persuasive of elves could charm them into accepting a host of human outlaws into their heartlands.”
“And what about us?” asked the ranger.
“Whatever law holds for village braves and common adventurers does not hold for Andira Runehand,” said Sir Brodun.
“Then we’ll trap her between our bows and the wood,” said Sarb, with a gleam in his eye. “Like the fox she is.”
“The Greyfox has shown she has some cunning in her,” Yorin warned. “Greater generals than you have failed to bring her to heel.
Sibhard drummed his fingers on the limb of his flatbow, apparently not listening. “I only hope I get to see the look on her face before she falls.”
Both men looked to Andira for a comment, but she was already heading off.
Silently she moved through the forest, in spite of her heavy armor. She did not walk with any particular stealth or deliberate care. Branches that might have snapped under the weight of an armored woman, or beds of leaves that would have rustled had she crossed them, were simply not there where her boots fell. The trees themsel
ves recognized her as a power and gave way. On some level they intuited her purpose and saw in her a kindred. At a ridge built up from tangled roots and layers of quilted mosses, she dropped again.
The small rise overlooked a narrow dell that seemed to have been made when the tree at its center had died. Through its snaggle of gray and leafless limbs the sun fell on a carpet of wildflowers. The sky was overcast, interrupted by fits of drizzle, but after the gloom of the forest it looked and felt like a glimpse into the Empyrean. Several hundred sheep and goats and a number of horses grazed around the dead tree, watched over by a handful of men and woman in motley attire. The tree itself was huge, one of the largest Andira had seen, though larger undoubtedly existed in the deeper regions of the wood, and was within a natural hollow in which the bandits had erected their camp. Rope bridges and wooden platforms spread out through the remaining branches; potted tomatoes, strawberries, and a few Daqan banners captured in battle provided the dead wood with a new life of a sort. More bandit fighters stood sentry there. Others patrolled the bridges and gangwalks. Their lair may have been well hidden, but they were wary just the same. Either they had been forewarned somehow or they were very well led.
“It’s a castle,” Hamma muttered.
“We do not fight because it is easy, or because it is hard,” said Andira. “We fight because we must.”
In the branches above them, a bird began to sing.
Yorin was the first to look up.
“It’s just a bird,” said Hamma.
“No,” said Andira, rising. “It is an omen.”
Chapter Twelve
Greyfox
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
The bright little bird twittered at the end of its branch, shuffling about agitatedly as it sang. Sitting cross-legged at the thicker end of the same branch, clad in a jester’s motley of patched-together squares of colored cloth and armor, Greyfox listened. Although she was, in truth, far older than the teenage girl she appeared to be, she was light enough that not a single leaf was disturbed by her presence.