The Lioness

“Who is she, Jeratt?” Though he’d seen no sign of it—and an admirer would look hard—he ventured what he imagined was a man’s question. “Is she your lover?”

The half-elf laughed. “Not her. She’s the friend of an old friend who has a high regard for her.”

Kerian lay in the dark, eyes shut and thinking about what she had overheard. At first she thought Jeratt referred in some oblique way to the king, but soon she realized that wasn’t it. Her brother? No, they never spoke of her brother, and it had been months since she had word of Iydahar. The last person Jeratt had spoken with at the falls was Elder. Elder, who’d named her Killer and made a prediction that she’d earn that name over and again.

Puzzled, Kerian realized that the old woman must have charged Jeratt with her safety.

Even in this mildest of winters the three had to pour all their energies into securing food and shelter. She no longer required Jeratt to tell her such things as what creatures came to water near their sheltering cave. Now it was she who showed Ander the difference between the mark of a hare and a rabbit, the print of a wolf and that of a dog.

“They run feral,” Kerian instructed him about dogs, “then they are as dangerous as wolves, for they remember how it is their far grandfathers lived or how they died. If they are not feral, still they are dangerous, for they slip out from a town, away from a farm, and then you want to be as careful because that means there are elves about.”

“How about the draconians—how will we know when they are about?” Ander inched closer to the fire, the light and the warmth. “Will they pursue us into the forest?”

When she said nothing, Ander looked to Jeratt, who shrugged. “We won’t likely find them roaming the forest, but I don’t doubt they are quartered around here. They keep on the move, like us, but,” he said with a grin, “we will smell them before they smell us.”

At the end of winter, the three drifted south and followed the Elfstream along its westernmost banks. They continued to avoid roads and fed themselves from the bounty of the land. They gradually approached the legendary Forest of Wayreth. Here they came across signs of Knights more often than anywhere they’d been. Kerian was eager to understand why Lord Thagol’s men were so thickly clustered here, why they saw the main roads widened and scarred, looking much like the Qualinost Road near the capital.

“Usual reason,” Jeratt said.

They sat on a treed hill, a bluff over hanging a road. Piles of newly raised earth lined the raw edges, trees killed for being in the way made fanged barriers into the forest Beyond, across the road and into the forest, lay a town of some size. The smoke of many chimneys made an orderly climb to the sky.

“Roads here are widened to let tribute wagons pass. Knights are stationed in the larger towns to make sure all goes well on the roads, and more Knights come to sweep out into the countryside to make sure everything gets safely through the roads.” He pointed to a place north of the town to where a blacker, thicker smoke rose. “Forge there, and it don’t look like a small one. See—there’s water. You just see the silver through the trees. Might be that’s an armorer or a swordsmith. Dragon likes that stuff as much as she like gold and jewels.”

Somewhere, not far, surely, a tavern quartered Lord Thagol’s Knights or fed them or endured them. Another barmaid tried to elude a rough grab, another serving boy was kicked hard to get him moving faster. These things were happening nearby, or they would be soon, for that was the vile illness spreading over the Qualinesti kingdom.

The Elfstream became their road, the river winding from the foothills of the easternmost reaches of the curving spur of the Kharolis Mountains up across the northern border of the kingdom where a branch became the Dark-water River, the waters spilling to Darken Wood. Another, mightier trunk became the swift White-Rage and defined the borders between a free land and a captive kingdom. Kerian wanted to go there, all the way north, and breathe the air of a Free Realm. Jeratt had no objection* and faithful Ander would have followed anywhere. They found that they must keep to the deeper forest not only to hunt but to keep out of the sight of regular Knightly patrols.

“Ain’t like in the home-wood,” Jeratt said, “There they didn’t like to come in too far. Here—” He spat. “Ain’t like in the home-wood.”