The Lioness

“He’s dead.” He stopped, looking down at his feet, then swiftly up at her. “They wanted me to tell them where you were. In the village, some of them wanted to find you and turn you in to the Knights. I wouldn’t tell them. You could have killed me. The other one, that Jeratt, he wanted to, but you wouldn’t let him. I couldn’t tell them where you were after that, and they—” He fingered his split lip. “They tried to make me tell, and Ulf …”

Ulf had gone to the defense of his master, and he’d paid the ultimate price for his loyalty.

“Do you have any place to go, Ander?”

He shook his head. “I came to warn you, but. . now there’s nowhere to go.”

Kerian made her decision quickly.

“Go get your pack,” she said, nodding toward the fire. “I have a place to go, and you can come along with me as far as you like.”

Chapter Twelve

Can we go back?” Kerian asked, sitting across a dwindling fire from Jeratt.

Outside, beyond the sheltering hills known as King’s Haunting, the wind moaned, sounding like ghosts to give the place a name. Legends told of dead kings slipping in and out of the shadows of these hills, kings of elves, kings of dwarves, even a goblin king or two … or whatever passed for a king among the goblins who roamed in the Stonelands. The wind made good stories with the night, but pretty much everyone knew where their kings were buried and where they haunted. Behind Kerian and Jeratt, in the shelter of the smallest hill’s stony shoulder, Ander slept, or pretended to. Kerian cocked an eye at him. The boy kept very still beneath his blankets.

Jeratt didn’t look where she did. He seldom looked at the boy and neither spoke to the other unless he must.

“Ah, Kerian,” he said, “you do seem to be a woman who makes a habit of getting thrown out the door, don’t you?” He poked at the fading fire with the stick they’d used to spit the lean hares that had been their supper. “I think we can go back. Sooner or later. Right now the camp behind the falls is gone, broken up and scattered across the forest. They heard about the hunt for you even before I got back to tell ‘em.”

“Who did you tell then?”

He pulled a lean smile. “Elder. Old woman don’t run fast, so she don’t run at all. She was there, sitting by her fire and taking care of herself. I don’t expect anyone will find the way to her if she doesn’t want them to, do you?”

Kerian didn’t. “Why did the others leave?”

“They left because they wouldn’t be confined, even by Elder’s magic. She let ‘em. She’s no jailer. They’ll be back, once they feel it’s safe to run there again.”

They were like animals, Kerian thought, a band of outlaws who didn’t fight for ground, didn’t hold land. Threatened, they cleared out until they could return to the good hunting ground again. Like shadows, they lived outside the society of the kingdom.

“They ain’t got no grudge against you, Kerianseray,” Jeratt said “It happens. You get found, you have to run. You come back if you can.”

She looked at him levelly. “And you? It seems you don’t feel quite the same way.”

“Me?” Jeratt shrugged. “I’m here, ain’t I? Told you I would be.”

He looked around at the enclosing darkness, up to the starred sky between the hills. “We have to say away from the others for a while. We need to figure where to go next. Elder says the hunt for you has spread beyond Sliathnost again. They know you’re nearby, those Knights.” He spat. “If yon boy didn’t turn them on you, one of his fine friends or neighbors did. They’re swarming all over the hills.”

He coughed softly, and jerked his head in a northerly direction, toward Qualinost “You ever see any maps of the kingdom while you were chattin’ with him—your king?”

She hid a smile at his attempt at delicacy. “A few. You want me to speak a map or draw one?”

“Ach, don’t speak it. That’s a pretty thing you Wilder Elves do, hut I’ve not much use for that way of mappin’. Put it right out on the ground so I can see it, will you?”

Kerian took the spit, the tip dark as charcoal now, and began to sketch a map on the clear ground. She showed the several streams running away from Lightning Falls, some flowing due south, others wandering away west to fill little lakes in the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains.

“Here,” she said, drawing a large, ragged oval well below Qualinost and west of the city. “This is a lake whose feeder streams run out through the densest part of the forest, all the way to where the mountains wrap around north again. Past that spur of mountain is even more forest, far more than on the eastern side. After that, the sea. Ever been there?”

Jeratt shook his head. Behind them, the sound of Ander waking, the first long breath, the stirring beneath his rough blanket.

“I have.”

Kerian glanced over Jeratt’s shoulder.

“When?” she asked, as though she didn’t see Jeratt’s scowl.