The Lioness

This they did, but not happily. Still, they heeded, and they watched the two Knights walk out of the glade, south toward the Qualinost Road. They watched them return, not on their feet but dragged by the heels, corpses come to join their brothers.

“Now,” said Kerian, “strip them all of weapons, even of eating knives. Leave nothing behind we can use.”

She watched as they did so and forbade the looting of personal possessions. Let the rings stay upon the fingers, the talismans around the necks. Only one thing more did she command, and though most of those who heard her didn’t understand, Jeratt did. He took Lea and Briar along to carry out Kerian’s strange order. They were all day gone from their fellows but returned to the stony shelter behind Lightning Falls by dawn.

“Did you do it?” Kerian asked.

Jeratt assured her that he had, and she told him to come sit and eat some breakfast.

Upon the doorstep of the Green Lea four empty helms stood, hung on saplings stripped and changed into woodsy mockery of the pikes that desecrated the eastern bridge in Qualinost. Empty-eyed, like the sockets in the skulls of murdered elves, they stared at the tavern door. So well were they posted that these were the first things Chance Headsman saw when he walked out in the morning on his way to the midden.

His fury passed quickly. He ordered his men mounted and armed and followed a trail easy to see to the glade where his four missing men lay. They were not Kagonesti who had killed his Knights, for none of the arrows he found bore white fletching. Each man had been looted of his weapons and mail shirts and boots, and the horse of each had been killed, gutted or throat-slit. Anything of use to the killers was gone from the corpses; what couldn’t be used had been systematically destroyed.

A chill crept up Sir Chance Headsman’s spine, the kind that warns a man that he is about to fall.

Chapter Sixteen

In the next week snow fell often, but no one believed this was a last assault of winter for the sun shone brightly and warm between the gray times, and snow didn’t last long on the roads or in the clear places. The songs of birds changed from winter-weary dirges to brighter airs. Spring came behind the snow, the changing scent of the breezes said so, and Kerian began to think of her brother. She hadn’t seen him or heard word of Ayensha or even Bueren Rose since they’d left the outlaw camp long ago. The time had come to go and speak with Dar, to let him know that some things had changed in the kingdom and with her. She would ask him to consider a request of hers, a bold demand made in behalf of a bold plan, but first, something else had to be done and said.

“Jeratt,” she said, sitting back on her heels, “I’m going to take a small trip.”

He sat closer to the fire, so the light sent shadows curling around him from behind. She couldn’t read his expression, but she knew him now, and well. This was news to him.

“I must see the king,” she said.

He sat silent.

“Tell me what you’re thinking, Jeratt.”

He shook his head. “No. You tell me if you’re coming back.”

“I’m coming hack.”

Simply, he said, “Then you don’t need to know what I’m thinking.”

Wind soughed around the top of the rocky howl. Camp-fires glowed pale in the thin winter sunlight. Elder slept near the hottest, highest one, and when Kerian looked at her an image ran though her mind—no, behind her eyes—of a huge misshapen beast running. Ice crackled up her spine, and her heart lurched as it did before battle. Voices and the rattle of stone distracted her. She wrenched her gaze away from Elder and saw two hunters coming down the stony slope, one with a small roe deer over his shoulder, another with a brace of quail and one of hares on his hip. She looked behind her and saw Briar going to relieve the watch at the entrance to the falls.

Jeratt said drily, “Give the king my regards.”

She laughed, but the image of a loping beast still haunted her eyes, and her laughter sounded shaky in her own ears. “I’ll see you at the rising of the moon. Here.”

Two weeks. He nodded and reached out a hand. She took it in the hard warrior’s clasp, and she got up and pulled together a kit for traveling—thick woolen trews, a woolen shirt and fine boots looted from a young Knight. Then she went into the forest. Ear to the ground, nose to the wind, she learned of the whereabouts of her lover before she came within sight of Qualinost. He and a contingent of servants, his lady mother, and a covey of senators had removed to his forest lodge, Wide Spreading, for two weeks of hunting. It was there she found Gilthas, and she did so by slipping past his nominal guard, his servants, his mother and her people, and into his bedchamber by starlight.

Kerian stood in the center of a bright square of starlight, silver shafting down from a high window in the ceiling of the royal bedchamber at Wide Spreading. The waking breath of one who had been deep asleep came softly. When the king’s eyes opened and he saw her, he did not start.