The Lioness

Yet it seemed to her that something had changed. The depredations of Knights had, until now, taken place close to the towns or in villages. Elder’s confusion of magic, and the swift-striking Night People who seemed to the Knights like forest ghosts, had kept them out of the woods and away from the smaller settlements and isolated farms.

Something had indeed changed.

Nor did they go alone through the forest. Behind them came the soft whisper of a footfall. To the side, the rattle of browning bracken so faint to the ear that one could be forgiven for doubting one’s senses. Above, down the side of a tall, broad boulder, a shadow, slipping across the dapple of sun, soon gone.

“We’re being followed,” Stanach said, the first night as they sat before a small campfire. “You know that.”

She did. “I know who follows. Leave him alone. Hell come out when he wants to or go away if he wills.”

The dwarf considered this, then said, “You don’t think him a danger?”

Kerian looked out past the fire, out into the shadows and the night. “Oh, he’s a danger; never doubt that. Not to me, though.” Stanach raised a brow. She cocked a crooked grin. “Or to you, Sir Ambassador, as long as he sees you’re no threat to me.”

They said no more that night about it, but Kerian noticed that the dwarf didn’t sleep easier.

Three days later, followed and unchallenged, Kerian and Stanach stood on a high place, a granite hill made of boulders flung during the Cataclysm. Elf and dwarf looked down into a dell where once had spread a thriving village. Nothing stood there now, and the land lay black, scarred by fire and destruction. Kerian went down, Stanach following. She knew the village as one sympathetic to her cause—or had known it Her blood running cold, she saw the head of every villager, man, woman, and child, lining the broad street, piked upon lances. Their cattle lay dead, their horses, their dogs, and the fowl in the yards.

Stanach didn’t stand long in the street. He stumbled away, back to the forest, and Kerian let him go. She knew the look on his face, the greening of his cheeks. She stood alone, smelling burning, smelling death, and thinking that she had not been gone from the kingdom long, hardly a scant month, but something had changed.

Something had happened to bring Lord Thagol’s Knights out in full rampage.

Stanach gagged in the brush, the sound of his retching loud in the stillness. Kerian looked north and south, then east and west. She stood waiting.

Softly, a voice at her back said, “Kerianseray of Qualinesti.”

She turned and though it had been only since summer that last she’d seen him, she hardly recognized Jeratt, so changed was he. He was not the man she’d left only weeks before, the cocky half-elf who’d led Night People beside her, who had planned raids, strategies and victories. His hair had turned white. His cheeks thin, his eyes glittering, this was not a face she knew. His voice, that she knew.

“Y’never should have left us, Kerian.” He scrubbed the side of his face with his hand. “He knew it when y’left. He took advantage when y’were gone.”

Stanach came out from the brush. Jeratt turned, arrow nocked to bow in the instant. The dwarfs good hand flashed to his side and clasped the throwing axe before Jeratt could draw breath or arrow.

“Hold!” Kerian shouted. She put a hand on Jeratt’s shoulder, felt the muscles quivering with tension. She nodded to Stanach, and the dwarf dropped his arm. “Jeratt, he’s a friend of the, king.”

They stood in heart-hammered silence until Kerian said, “Jeratt, tell me what has happened.”

“You can see it.” He looked around. “This is what they do now, Kerian. Up and down the land, they do this. Maybe they used to think it would teach us some kind of lesson. Now—now it’s Thagol himself doing it and not caring what we learn, past hating him.” He pulled a bitter smile. “He’s waiting for you, Kerian. You’ve been gone; you haven’t killed any of his Knights. He can’t find you on the dream-roads, but he’s still looking for you, and he’s waiting for you to come back.” Jeratt glanced around. “Him and Chance Headsman and their Knights and draconians. He’s brought in reinforcements from Neraka.”

His eyes narrowed. “They’ve broken us, every band, all the resistance you put together It was you, Kerian, who made it work, you who held us together, who heartened us and gave us a will. Without you—” His arm swept wide. “Y’went away at a bad time, Kerian.”

Ah, gods. Yet there had been no choice.

“Elder?”

Jeratt shook his head. “Gone!”

The word ran on her nerves, like lightning. “Gone? Where?”

“Don’t know. One night she was there, sittin’ at her fire. The next… gone. That was only three days after you left. There’s been none of her confusions now, nothing to help.”

“But you kept on.”