The Lioness

On the misty plane where Skull Knights can roam, what was fresh news to the royal family of Qualinesti was old news to Thagol Dream Walker. He wandered the dangerous roads between consciousness and dreams, listening to the sounds of death—the scream, the whimper, the moan. He listened for the sigh, the bittersweet acceptance, and the final silence. In him, his dream, his heart, his chilly soul, were the strains of a dark, descending symphony.

He knew the very moment when Sir Barg died, the Knight who in better times, older days, would not have been so much as a groom in the stable of the lowliest Knight of Takhisis. He knew the murderer, who was a slave in the house of Senator Rashas. It had often been she who ran messages between the Lord Knight and the senator. Kerianseray, her name. Kerianseray. In his mind, he tasted the Knight’s death, knew all the bitterness of his dying, felt the shock of it, the knife scraping on ribs, sliding into the beating muscle that was his heart. Like ice, he felt what rushed in as Barg’s blood rushed out.

By the time Gilthas had begun his meeting with the elf woman Nayla, Lord Thagol had left his dreamwalking and completed a meeting of his own with Senator Rashas. The two spoke only briefly, then the Lord General was standing before his assembled garrison, dark-armored warriors like pieces of night come to life.

In the minds of the men was only one thought—each knew he must stand well before the Skull Knight, never moving, his breathing hidden inside the shell of his armor, his eyes straight ahead, hands still. They might wish the sweat didn’t run on them, the small motion of a salty bead sliding down a cheek, something to draw the Lord Knight’s attention.

He had but two things to impart to his garrison, and Lord Thagol did that swiftly. One was the command that the elf woman Kerianseray be brought back to Qualinost for killing. His thought leaped from his mind to theirs. In their minds they saw the woman, the golden mane of her hair, the tattoos that marked her as a Kagonesti. They saw the killer as though in a flash of lightning. They saw a murdered Knight as though his body lay at their feet. With one motion, ten Knights stepped forward to volunteer for the work. Thagol wanted more Knights than those. He commanded that those ten take patrols of four and range the roads of the elf kingdom, stopping in every town of note, every waycross with a tavern.

The other thing Sir Eamutt Thagol told his men was that the watch rotations on the four bridges would double, and in short order no Knights would be required to keep post at the doors to his headquarters, the ugly stone building that so irritated the Qualinesti.

Chapter Eight

Like a storm come out of season, Lord Thagol’s Knights flashed along the roads of Qualinesti. The hard hooves of war-horses tore the earth, trampling. Their voices lifted in laughter and cursing, for these Knights had been too long away from battlegrounds, too long consigned to the backwater of the green dragon’s conquered lands. Out upon the roads, each patrol like a dark-shining blade, they sang battle songs, they recounted deeds brave and terrible. Blood-lusty they rode, each patrol upon its mission, each with a leader who spoke words of proclamation before the doors of taverns, inns, and hostels, in the squares of villages, on the streets of towns. These words they’d gotten from Thagol himself, not from his lips but words graven into their own minds in flashing bolts. No one of the messenger Knights, speaking, changed so much as the rhythm of their lord’s speech.

It is commanded! By order of my lord Sir Eamutt Thagol, he of Neraka and lately of the Monastery Bone …

Elves would stand in perfect stillness, some caught like rabbits in terror, most of them taking care to keep their truest feelings from these Knights. They were not stone, these farmers and shopkeepers, the gods had made them of flesh and bone, and they had true hearts that stirred at the darkness of Knights. They had learned over the years of occupation that an elf could die of a resentful glance, a perceived arrogance. They kept quiet, they kept still, and they listened as the war-horses snorted and danced and Knights laughed in scorn.

The Knights gone, the elves would gather and speak of anger. Some spoke resentment, and when they did the name of the outlawed woman sprang to their lips.

Who is this Kerianseray of Qualinost? Who is this woman who brings down a plague of Knights upon us?

They would argue among themselves, quietly as elves do, their passion seen only in the glinting of their eyes. They would remind themselves that they must not let the Knights change them, they must not let these dragon-days become the days of their undoing. They had never tolerated murderers among them. Should they now because the killer killed a Knight?