The Lioness

Kerian relaxed her stance, but not her guard. “Ayensha brought me here… in order to lose the Knights that were chasing us.”

A moment’s silence hung between them, then he turned to Ayensha.

“Knights on her trail, and you brought her here, did you?”

Ayensha moved away from the half-elf to sit upon a flat stone near the tallest fire. She bowed her head, her tangled, dirty hair hanging like a tattered curtain to hide her face. “I had to go somewhere, Jeratt. There’s no one following. You know how careful I am.”

When Ayensha groaned, Kerian took a step toward her.

Jeratt held up his hand, his eyes gone suddenly hard again. “Leave her alone. She’s here now. I’ll take care of her.”

Who was he, her father? She didn’t think so. They hadn’t the look of each other. Kerian wondered, is he her lover then or her husband?

The silence between Kerian and Jeratt deepened, seeping out into the shadows. A small breeze kicked up, sighing low around the boulders and the trees.

“So here you are,” Jeratt said. “In the heart of a place you don’t know, far from anyone you do know, all so you can find—”

“Kill her!”

A woman’s voice screeched, high and ragged and shrill, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere, behind and before and around. The hair on Kerian’s neck lifted, hackles rising at the sting of a primitive nerve. It was all she could do not to bolt and run.

“Killer!”

Kerian’s heart slammed against her ribs; her hand dropped to the knife at her belt. Jeratt’s eyes widened, his own hand lifted to warn.

“Don’t move—”

“Kill her!” screeched the banshee voice.

With an odd kind of gentle scorn, Jeratt said, “Don’t worry. No one’s killing anyone. At least not yet. Take your hand off your knife, Kerianseray.” When she hesitated, “Do it now, or I’ll give you to the old woman.”

Kerian dropped her hand from the bone-gripped knife, and as she did, a cold grin changed Jeratt’s expression to dangerous.

“Come to think of it, I’ll give you to the old woman anyhow.”

Shadows shifted. All around the basin the shadows gathered and seemed to coalesce as elves. Men and women came from three directions. Rough-dressed in leathers and buckskins, in oft-mended shirts, in boots they cobbled themselves, they drifted down the slopes.

Though they appeared to be folk who took their livelihood from the forest, they were not Kagonesti, for none showed tattoos. One or two wore bits of armor, a breastplate polished to shining, a leg-guard, a gorget.

As these revealed themselves, Kerian saw one shade-shape among them, a shadow that moved more slowly. The elves around it moved off. Like warriors they took posts around the basin, leaving Kerian and Jeratt and Ayensha alone in the center as the shadow advanced.

Kerian’s mouth dried.

The shadow stopped, standing outside the small ring of fires. In the space of a breath, it began to change shape.

“Elder,” Jeratt said, his voice colored by wariness, by respect and—Kerian felt it—humility. “Here she is.”

She whom Jeratt addressed as Elder looked neither right nor left. She did not look up, and she did not look around. She was not breathing. Not even the least flutter passed her lips or caused her bony breast to rise and fall. She sat like a creature born of the earth, still as stone, her eyes strange and unchancy as wind in the mad season between winter and spring.

“So here she is,” said Elder, her voice cracked as ancient parchment. Her glance never shifted. Kerian wondered whether she were blind, but she saw no milkiness of eye, no scar, no wounding at all. The woman simply looked into some middle distance, some place into which no one else could glimpse. “I see you, child.”

Killer. I see you.

Kill her… killer!

“No!”

She tried to say more, but the old woman’s intrusion into her mind, her soul, had addled her wits and left her feeling like all her words had been scrambled, her tongue changed into something unwieldy as leather. She could not see clearly. She could hardly hear. The sounds around her were muffled as by distance or as though she were under water.

You will kill again. Men will die because of you, women will die, and children will weep. Because of you!

Around her, Kerian felt the world grow cold. She heard a hard wind howling, though she felt no wind on her skin, none in her hair. The voice of the wind became the throaty roar of flames, and before the fire she stood, screaming, killer and victim.

A hard hand grabbed her, then two, holding her back from a fall. In the moment she realized it, Kerian’s knees sagged, her belly went suddenly tight, and bile rushed like fire up her throat.