The Lioness

Kerian’s gut wrenched, the pain doubling her over. Jeratt let her go as everything she’d eaten since daybreak came spewing out. Her belly spasmed again, and falling to her hands and knees, she gagged. The golden chain round her neck slid and slipped, Gil’s ring falling outside her shirt. Light glinted sharply off the facets of the topaz. Sweat cold and thin slid down her neck. Confused, her head spinning, she looked around and saw but a forest of legs.

A hand reached down, big and brown. It took her wrist, not roughly, not gently.

“Up,” said a deep voice, a voice not Jeratt’s.

The word rang in her head painfully, like a clapper in a bell. Kerian winced. She tried to pull away from the hand but had no strength for resistance. The man’s hand slipped down her wrist.

“There can’t be much more left in you, so on your feet, Kerianseray of Qualinost.”

She knew him then. In the scornful twist of his voice, in the subtle insult of the naming, she knew him. He pulled, she rose, and Kerian looked into the eyes of her brother, Iydahar.

Chapter Ten

Kerian stood before her brother, but she didn’t know him. She knew the shape of his face, the cut of his shoulders, the way he held his head. She recognized him, but not the hardness of his eyes, or the way he looked at her as though across a gulf of distance and time.

“Dar,” she said.

His eyes grew colder.

Elves in their rough gear stood still. The little shadow that had been a screech-voiced old woman was gone.

“Brother,” she said.

Iydahar turned from her. Silently, he held out his hand to Ayensha. “Ayensha,” he said, and in all the years she’d known him, Kerian had never heard such tenderness in her brother’s voice. “Wife,” he said to the woman Kerian had rescued, “where have you been?”

Wife! Kerian drew breath to speak, to give words to her wonder. She fell silent, the words unshaped, for one tear, perfect and silver, slid down Ayensha’s cheek, making a shining trail through the grime of days.

“Husband,” Ayensha whispered. “Ah, I have been on hard roads.”

Kerian saw again the haunted, hunted woman jerked into the Hare and Hound, hobbled and hands bound. She watched in silence, breathless, as her brother took in Ayensha’s words and the meaning Kerian only guessed.

Iydahar opened his arms, gathered his wife to him, and held her gently.

A hand closed round Kerian’s arm. Gruff, his voice like gravel in his throat, Jeratt said, “Give ’em peace, Kerianseray.”

Jeratt led her away, across the basin to the foot of the hill. Someone came and brought her water. Kerian drank without tasting. All the elves who had been hidden in shadow stood now in the light of day, and there were at least a dozen of them. By design or instinct, they ranged themselves so that their backs were to the two weeping in each other’s arms, so that they formed a wall of privacy for the wounded pair.

Kerian did not see or speak with her brother for a week after her arrival at the outlaw camp. Iydahar and Ayensha kept to themselves. That her brother was angry, she did not doubt. No sign of it did she see, but she felt it. At night sometimes, sitting beside a fire at meal, sitting alone and looking high to the glittering sky, she felt Iydahar’s anger.

“Man’s planning,” Jeratt said to her, one evening when all slept around them. He poked at the fire, sending a plume of sparks dancing up. “Man’s planning. You can see it on him.”

Kerian could see very little to recognize in her brother. His eyes were cold when he looked at her, his expression stony, and that had nothing to do with his grief or his anger.

She thought about it often, awake in the nights, often alone. She paced the perimeter of the basin, silent-footed, careful not to disturb sleepers. They did not post watches here, Kerian marveled at that. They all slept the nights through, secure in the embrace of a warding none doubted.

“The old woman,” Jeratt told Kerian on the first night. “You don’t always see her, the woman’s half-crazy, but you can count on the ward.”

Kerian had seen that they all did, going about the nights and days as though they were safe within walls. And so she paced, and sometimes went up the hill and sat on high ground, thinking.

This band were outlaws in the eyes of Lord Thagol, hunted by his Knights and gleeful disruptors of his peace. They hated him, some with passion, some with private cause.

“Saw him once,” Jeratt said. “Pickin’ around the wreck of a supply train we tore up. Cold as winter, him. Nah, you see the mark of how mad he is on his Knights, the poor bastards he sends out to collar us and kill us. Them’s the ones look like ghosts, for all you hear about him being the spooky one. Them’s the ones.” He shook his head, spat, and pulled his lips back in a feral grin. “The Skull Knight, he does something to their minds when he ain’t happy. Fills ’em up with nightmares and such.”

Her voice thin as a blade’s edge, Kerian said, “On the parapet of the eastern bridge in Qualinost, Thagol pikes the heads of those his Knights catch and kill.”