The Lioness

Ayensha held up a fat pillar candle that had been set on a flat of stone, held in place by its own wax. She handed it to Kerian and by its light folded stiff lengths of oiled sailcloth. These she tucked into a square coffer, one lidded like a case. Every seam was thickly tarred, and the case itself was lined with oily cloth. In there nestled a small pouch containing flint and steel. Beside this, a fatter pouch lay. By the shape, Kerian knew it held other candles of varying sizes. Ayensha snapped the lid shut and tucked the whole thing far back into shadows.

“Now, come!” she called, her voice drowned out, the shape of the words only seen on her lips.

Through a wide, high passage they went, candlelight bounding from slick stone walls. Kerian’s right arm throbbed with pain, but she said nothing, for she would not appear weak before this woman. The deeper in they went, the thinner the mist, the more muffled the voice of the falls until, at last, Kerian saw pale daylight shining.

Something tall and dark came to fill the void and conceal the light.

Kerian gasped, but Ayensha’s breath sighed out of her, shuddering with relief. She blew out the candle and set it high in a notch on the wall.

Kerian heard only the distant voice of the falls, the whispering of the torch. Then, low, a man’s rough and ragged voice said, “Ayensha, my girl, we thought you were dead.”

He held out his arms. Staggering with weariness, her breath still shuddering, Ayensha went to him. He folded her to him, bending low to hear what she whispered.

Kerian heard the man groan, a terrible deep sound of grief. She saw him hold Ayensha long and close and finally turn her and take her out into the light. Alone, ignored, Kerian followed.

Chapter Nine

Nayla and Haugh, with their hounds beside, went in stealth, keeping beneath the crests of the forest ridges, and when they could, they ran, bounding over stone, leaping over blow-downs. They headed for a smith whose forge stood beside the Silver Tresses River, a branch of the White-Rage River that reached into the forest farther east than Sliathnost. He was a friend of theirs, a good man and trusty, and in the days before he knew Nayla, Haugh had been, for a long sweet summer, much closer friends with the forgeman’s daughter than with the smith himself. Frealle was her name. Nayla still wondered about Frealle and how it was that after all the years between that sweet summer and now he knew the way to the miller’s house well as though he were walking on Baker’s Lane in Qualinost, looking for a good place to buy muffins.

Haugh had, in the course of his life, more lovers than most. He watched now as Nayla slipped up to the crest of the ridge, one of the hounds in her wake. The Silver Tresses was a mere shine of a thread in the east, as Nayla paused beside a tall boulder, marking how far they’d come. Wrestle, the hound, stood close. Haugh waited to see if he should follow or if she were only checking the landmark. Wind came softly from the east, smelling a bit like snow off the Kharolis Mountains.

The second hound, Pounce, pushed her nose up under Haugh’s hand. Absently, he scratched her chin. He cocked an eye at the sky. The sun slid down the noonday sky. Pounce growled, her ears flat against her head. Haugh looked to Nayla and saw nothing different than a moment before, yet the hound continued to growl, and Haugh never discounted the reactions of these beasts who had been Nayla’s from the litter. He called her name. Nayla did not move. He looked left and right, up hill as far as he could see, and down.

“Nayla,” he whispered.

She turned, and her face shone white.

Haugh ran up the hill, Wrestle behind him, and looked toward Sliathnost. It looked as though a dragon had run through. Where there used to be houses and shops, the livery at one end, the tavern at the other, was only a dark scar from which small tendrils of smoke rose.

“In the name of all gods,” he whispered.

Nayla’s eyes glittered. “In the name of the gods-cursed dragon. In the name of the damned Skull Knight.” Her voice dropped low. “The damned dwarf,” she said, grinding her words. “All he had to do was keep still, but no—he gave the stupid girl a knife.”

She looked back to the burning, down the hill. Haugh heard her breath shiver, a sob kept at bay.

Haugh put a hand on her shoulder, let it slip down her arm to hold hers. With a low moan she pulled away from him. Loping down the hill, Wrestle at her side, she never looked back. Haugh followed, and by the time he caught her up, they stood at the edge of the town before the ruin of the Hare and Hound. Nothing stood now but burnt stone. Two of the chimneys had been toppled, and charred wood and blackened beams lay just as they had fallen from walls and upper stories.

“Nayla.”