She watched him thinking and watched him choose. He’d held faithful to her trust after she’d gone, without notice, to Thorbardin. He’d done better than that: He’d tried to build the core of what would now become-if all gone gods were good!-the terror of Thagol’s Knights. Yet she saw it now, again as she had a year ago. Jeratt had a deeper allegiance to her brother, to Iydahar who did not trust her or like her king.
“Who is he to you, Jeratt?”
The question surprised him. “Dar? He’s my friend.”
She snorted, unbelieving. “He’s more than that. I’ve seen how you are when he’s around-all of you. It’s like he’s a … I don’t know, priest or shaman.”
Jeratt sat a long time quiet, poking at the fire, chasing bright orange cinders up to the sky. Kerian watched him; she looked at the guards on the hill, then at Jeratt again.
“He’s none of those, Kerian. He’s-he was a man of the prince. He fought beside Porthios, and when the prince vanished and most of Dar’s folk went away into the forest, Dar stayed. You don’t know, Kerian. Maybe you don’t remember how hard the winter was that year, you in your towers at Qualinost. Maybe you looked out your window and saw the snow falling and you thought it was pretty.” He stopped, his eyes gone suddenly hard. “Maybe you scurried out from the silks and the satins of your lover’s bed and thought how cold the floor was when your little foot missed the carpet.”
Kerian drew a breath, sharp and swift.
“Dar is the one who gathered up all of the prince’s broken men and found us shelter in a winter that would have killed us. Broken bones, broken hearts, broken spirits. He took us all as his, when he could have gone away with his kin, with your father and mother and the White Osprey tribe. He healed us and helped us, and when the spring came and he did go away to be with Ayensha and her folk, he never forgot us. He brought us news, just like in that terrible winter he brought us food and healing. In all the years, though we fought for no cause but our own anger and greed, your brother never let us go afoul of the Knights we hate if he could help it, and one day he brought us Elder to keep and care for….”
In silence, he poked at the fire again. In silence, he watched the embers, light flowing across them, like fire breathing.
“He was our brother in arms, Kerian. We were sworn to the prince, and that’s like we were born of the same kin. Dar never forgot that. We owe him everything, and though we’ve sworn to your cause – I’m sorry to say it, we don’t owe you him. Dar wants no part of you, your cause, or your king, and there’s no persuading him. I ain’t going to be the one to go against him. Now, Ayensha will be back in the morning, so you go get some sleep now. We got a bit of work ahead of us, eh?”
Ayensha would be back, so he’d said, but in the morning she didn’t come. Neither did she on the morning after, or the one after that, and on the fourth morning, Jeratt said no more than that the girl must have come to her senses.
“She learned she is childing in the time you were gone. She’s come to her senses now and will not be following you to war.”
* * * * *
He lay upon a bed of bracken, the Skull Knight among his men. They’d made camp in the forest, out of sight of the Qualinost Road heading west. Watch had been posted and turned twice before he’d finally settled to sleep. The forest smelled of fern and earth, and down a thin wind, distantly of draconian. He never let those creatures camp near his Knights. They disgusted most humans, and black-armored Knights were no exception.
Thagol closed his eyes. His disciplined mind let go of the thoughts and concerns of the day. He had plotted his next strike, scouted the village, and deployed his men. It would be a fiery morning, this he trusted. In Gilianost lived a taverner who had given shelter to one of the outlaws, a half-elf on the run from two of Thagol’s Knights, The taverner would find that offense costly.
Thagol settled, and though he had not lain upon a true bed in a month, still he settled easily. He didn’t miss Qualinost, that warren of elves, the very scent of whom turned his stomach. He lay upon the forest floor, the hard earth that hated the very touch of his body, that loathed the sound of his voice. As willingly as he hated Qualinesti, so did Sir Eamutt Thagol imagine the forest hated him.
In the deepest part of his sleep, then, he went out walking. Sir Thagol went out from his body and traveled on the roads of dreaming and through the deep places of sleeping minds. It was no unusual journey for him, and he found no unusual thing. When he woke, the soft gray light before the dawn in his eyes, Sir Thagol had the feeling that something had changed in the forest.
It was a feeling he knew, akin to the air of a barracks when warriors are called to muster.
* * * * *
Sorrow drifted like ghosts through the forest. Villages lay in ash and ruin. Heads were posted everywhere as warnings. In the little towns untouched by Lord Thagol and Chance Headsman’s blighting hands, people shunned the rebels now. Kerian’s name was known in every quarter of the forest now, as was the price for her head. The Skull Knight did not offer steel, gems, or precious metals. He offered nothing. He promised death to all he looked upon until she was brought to him, alive for killing.
At farms where once they had been welcomed, no one dared open a door to Kerian, Jeratt, or any of the Night People. In this forest now, all strangers were suspect, any traveler going by could be one of the resistance fighters Lord Thagol hunted. Anyone could lose his head on the mere suspicion that he’d given aid to one of them.
“He doesn’t know where I am,” Kerian reminded Jeratt. They had hunted well, and thanks to Stanach’s deft hand with a snare, they had five fat rabbits to spit A clear cool stream ran nearby. “Right now, this moment, he can’t even guess.”
Stanach said he wondered how she knew that Kerian and Jeratt exchanged wry grins as she tapped her forehead.
“I know.” She pulled the bloodstone out of her shirt. “This hides me from him, but if I kill, it doesn’t keep him from knowing I’m around. I haven’t killed. I don’t feel him in my head. He doesn’t know where I am.”
The dwarf grunted skeptically, then sat in silence for a while. Then, “When are you taking me to Qualinost?”
Kerian leaned close to the fire, to the warmth, for the night was chill.
“You’ve seen this place,” she said. “You’ve seen what Thagol and Chance Headsman are doing. Do you think I could get you as far as Qualinost?”
Stanach snorted. He was a long time quiet, his face, his eyes above his black beard gone still as he cradled his ruined right hand in the palm of his left.
“In good time,” said Kerian.
Jeratt grinned. “And we’ll get you there with your head still sitting on your shoulders.”
Stanach turned his head this way and that, as though trying to loosen a kink in his neck. “I’d appreciate that.”
The fingers of his left hand curled round the haft of his keen-edged throwing axe as he stood to take the first watch. Beyond the fire, he looked at Kerian, a long, considering moment. He thought about the serving girl he’d met in the forest, perhaps not far from here, two years ago. She had been a tender creature then, soft hands, perfumed hair. Now here she sat, a leader of a shadowy force of warriors known as Night People. She crouched before her forest hearth, in leather boots and woolen trews, a shirt a man might wear. Her tattoos shone in the light, and it seemed to Stanach she had as much of the forest about her as the owl now sailing the night between the trees.
* * * * *
The elf woman screamed. Her voice soared high above all the rest; her face shone white in the night as she clutched her child to her breast. Howling, five Dark Knights ringed her round, circling, swords high, laughing. One howled higher than all, and one kept starkly silent. She fell to her knees, bent over the child, the little creature wailing in her arms against her breast. A voice shouted “Erathia!” A sword screamed through the air, and the voice did not shout more. Erathia wailed, knowing her husband dead, knowing his head would join the heads of other m
urdered elves.
Horses thundered round her, Knights yelling madly.
Erathia prayed to a goddess long fled the world, she prayed to Mishakal, the giver of mercy elves named Quenesti-Pah.
“Merciful goddess, lady of light, spare my child, oh spare-”
Beside her face, so close the iron shoe ran red with firelight, a tall war-horse stamped and grew still. Around her, the others did the same. Erathia had heard no command, but these Knights had a Skull Knight for a lord. There had been a command.
Trembling, she hunched lower over her child and realized she heard nothing of elf voices. No villager wept, howled, or pleaded.
Gods, she was the last.
“Merciful Lady…”
She looked up, and two Knights departed from the circle around her; two came close, one on either side. They wore their helms closed, and that didn’t matter. Erathia knew which was the Skull Knight. From him, his very being, flowed the coldness of death, like a wind out of winter, belling in the forest, howling in her heart. He flung back the visor of his helm. The other mirrored the gesture.
“Headsman,” he simply said.
She looked to them, to one and the other, the agents of her death. In the eyes of the Skull Knight she saw nothing, not a killing lust, not hatred, not even determination to get the job done. Nothing, as though she looked into the windows of an empty huilding, into blackness. In the eyes of the other, Chance Headsman, she saw fire. Flames leaping, consuming, bloodlust and killing-need.
In his eyes she saw her death, the raising of his blade before he lifted it, the fell swing hefore he caused it. She screamed, flung herself aside, and there was nowhere to go. A horse jostled her, and the child fell from her arms, wailing.
Whistling, the sword of Chance Headsman swooped low. She looked into the eyes of the Skull Knight, perhaps to plead. In the moment of her death, the moment the blade kissed her neck, she saw a thing happen in those eyes. They kindled with sudden savage joy.
Chapter Twenty-One
The season of Autumn Harvest began in woe, and grief ran through it like a river of blood. Sorrow rained upon the forest in that season once known for joy, and the fires lighting the night were not the traditional harvest bonfires. No one danced round these, laughing girls and lusty lads. No one shouted for the joy of the harvest; no one cried out thanks.
They wept before these fires, elves pared to bone by their grief, their voices fit only to keen and moan.
A pall of smoke hung over the land, drifted like the ghosts of the dead between the trees. Looking, a person would have thought all the forest had been put to the flame. It had not been, but villages burned. Farmhouses, barns and byres, and the neat stacks of hay in the fields-these all burned.
For two weeks, the Speaker of the Sun watched from the highest point in the city, from the gardens on the roof of the Tower of the Sun. He stood alone on some nights, watching, and thinking, It is she. Kerian is back!
Once he said this to his mother, Laurana standing beside him and tracking the fires. She asked him how he knew this, and he said, “Mother, think like a general. Before, Thagol went here, and then he went there. You could imagine his next blow only looking at a map. Look now-over the last nights we’ve seen no pattern at all. He is chasing someone. He’s chasing Kerian.”
Laurana considered this, looking out past the bridges, the eastern one bristling with the skulls that marked Thagol’s rage. They gleamed now in the moonlight, bleached by the seasons.
“What is she doing, my son?” she asked, her voice heavy with sadness.
Gilthas didn’t know, and he said so. “I do know Kerian, and so I think she’s engaging him, Mother. I think she’s jerking him wherever she wants him to be. I would guess that she’s drawing him north and eastward.”
“Toward the Stonelands.”
“Yes. Thorbardin, beyond.”
“Thorbardin.” Laurana stood a moment quiet, and at last she gave voice to the question between them. “If Kerian is back, why hasn’t she come here to tell us how her mission to the dwarves fared?”
Gilthas pointed to the fires by which they tracked her. “I don’t think she’s had time to, Mother.”
Wind shifted, smoke stung their eyes, and in the stinging Gil’s sudden bravado shivered. With startling suddenness, he recalled the nightmares that lately haunted him. In those dark dreams he sent his lover to her death. He put a hand upon the parapet to steady himself. Had he doomed her in reality?
Soft, his mother’s hand touched his shoulder, an old gesture, a steadying one. She said nothing, not she who felt the deaths of those in the forest, she who had raised up a son whose nights were often savaged by dreams that looked sometimes like prescience.
Gilthas shook his head, swallowing to steady his voice.
“There is reason to hope, Mother. I don’t know why she hasn’t come here. There are ways to reach her, but I won’t try those now. Whatever Kerian is doing, she does for a reason. The wrong move from me, and I might cause it all to fall in ruin.”
Warm breezes, smoky and thick, tugged at Laurana’s hair as she leaned out over the marble wall framing the little garden. She leaned out to see. Gilthas knew her and knew she did not strain only her eyes to see. She looked with her heart, with all her mind. What was happening in the kingdom? How many more would have to die?
“Mother,” said the elf king. He took her hand and put it in the crook of his arm. “Come away now. We’ll trust her. Whatever Kerian is doing, she is doing her best. As for Thorbardin, we must trust about that, too. She spoke well there and was heard, or she spoke well and wasn’t. We must wait and see.”
For she will not forget. She will come to me, he thought, looking out to the smoky night.
For another fortnight, the king went up to the roof to watch the forest. On almost every night, he saw the signs of burning, smoke hanging. To his city came news that the winter to come would be a hard one. Sir Thagol did not know the meaning of mercy, and he seemed to hate the crops of farmers as much as he hated fanners themselves. In the halls of elven power, Senator Rashas looked around at his fellows nervously, hearing their unease, their fear, and he grew afraid they would recall that he had been the greatest champion of the idea of Beryl’s Dark Knights doing all they could to bring order to an uruly kingdom.
“An orderly kingdom,” he’d argued, “will produce all the tribute the dragon wants. She will thrive, and we will survive. It is the only way!”
Now as his fellows looked out into the forest and marked the smoke, they heard the cries of the people who feared that the winter would be a hungry one, and they began to look at Senator Rashas with narrowed eyes.
“This had better end soon,” said Lady Sunstrike, who held lands out by the eastern part of the kingdom, in sight of the Stonelands. She had received her governorship from the hand of the young king. She had spoken with him lately, the king who sat upon his throne with his usual air of disinterest. To see him, anyone would think he was half asleep. Lady Sunstrike believed otherwise. “If it doesn’t end, we will be wondering what to do with the hungry when the snow comes.”
Rashas looked right and left, trying to think how he could rein in the Skull Knight.
As he thought, Lady Sunstrike cast another glance at the king. He seemed to rouse, his lids lifted. He held the lady’s glance, only a moment She did not nod, and he did not look again her way, but in the morning a rider went out from the city, naught but a lad with a saddlebag full of missives from his mistress to her steward.
In two days time, Kerian of Qualinesti received from Jeratt the startling news that they had not fought alone in their last battle with Knights. Outnumbered, certain to be killed, Jeratt had looked up to find a dozen fresh, armed men and women at their backs. Rabble, ragged outlaws like themselves, or so they thought until, the last Knight dead, they learned that these were not men and women of the forest at all. They were farmers, two of them villagers, three from the estates of Lady Sunstrike who governed this stony eastern provi
nce, all dressed to appear the most disreputable of citizens.
They had little to say, but one, as the others drifted away into the forest, suggested to Jeratt that they would not again fight alone.
“Call on us,” he said. “I’m a stable boy on Lady Sunstrike’s estate. We hear she’s here, the lady who fights like a lioness. We know who she fights. If you call for help, we will come.”
Kerian had lost the faith of farmers who feared to lose their heads. She’d seen her network of trusty villagers fall to ruin. Here, unlooked for, she found a strand with which to reweave her rebellion of elves. Fighters at need, carriers of news, granters of shelter, these would support her and her warriors in her battle.
* * * * *
Kerian watched as Stanach came out of the passage through Lightning-Thunder, as he insisted on naming the falls-his hair and beard glistening with moisture, his clothing damp. The dwarf had been a patient prisoner- his word, not hers-and had done his duty at watch whenever required. He had never offered to go on raids, and no one asked. He was a king’s ambassador and Kerian made it clear from the start that Stanach had no part in this work.
Stanach stood watch, hunted with the others, in all ways did his duty in camp, but he was not a genial ambassador. He kept to himself, told no tales around the fire, and made no friends among the resistance. What he did was watch Kerian. He watched her plan, he watched her lure Thagol tins way and that, like a rough handler jerking a hound’s chain. He saw her make maps for her warriors when she planned, he saw her pacing all the while a band of them was gone, on her feet almost every moment till they returned.
When she mourned the dead, she did so feeling the eyes of the dwarf on her. They were not unkindly, but they were always on her.
Damn, she thought, he watches me eat!
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