The Lioness

Jeratt understood. He and Bayel gathered half the warriors and sent them out into the forest, running silently through the forest and up the Qualinost Road. Kerian took the rest and paralleled their run across the highway, deep into the wood. Both halves of her force came upon the encampment of tribute wagons in the dark hour before dawn. Six Knights and four draconians heard the single piercing call of a nightjar. Some looked around for the bird, startled, others only heard it in their sleep in the instant before the Night People fell on them. Half the Knights died before they knew they were under attack. The draconians died instantly of arrows through the eye, their deaths causing the agonizing deaths of anyone else near. Kerian herself cut the dray horses loose and sent them into the forest. She, Bayel, and Jeratt handed out weapons from the little wagon filled with that treasure, and scooped up four pouches of coin from another. One she gave to an elf to deliver in secret to the taverner.

“The rest is for Felan’s widow. Give her a good sword, and give her these pouches of steel. Tell her they are her child’s inheritance from his father.”

They fired the wagons, leaving behind nothing of use.

Before the smoke could travel far, they separated, two dozen and more warriors returning like shadows to their homes, some far-flung, others nearby. They would not come out to fight again; they would vanish into the population, become simple farmers and tradesfolk.

“For now,” Kerian told them. “For now, until you hear otherwise.”

For now... they murmured, all in agreement as she went among them, clasping hands, clasping arms.

“And you?” asked one, the eager young woman who had fought beside Jeratt in the forest.

Kerian grinned, bright and feral. “The next time the coward Thagol hears about us, he’ll know that all this kingdom is our battleground.”

Chapter Fifteen

That winter, in the eastern part of the kingdom, there were glad greetings as Kerian and Jeratt returned to the Lightning Falls. “Or Thunder as the dwarves name it,” Ander told Bayel. The young man had settled in well among the outlaws. Jeratt’s welcome was one of shouts and laughter and hack thumping. Bayel was introduced and accepted warmly and went easily among them for the sake of his reputation in the east as a harrier of Knights.

Kerian returned to them a different person than they had known. She had been Jeratt’s student in the arts of living, the hunter he must coach, the fletcher who couldn’t fletch, the Kagonesti servant of Qualinesti masters too far gone from her heritage.

“She is not that now,” murmured Briar, a flame-haired elf woman, to the young man who shared her sleeping furs. “Look at her, all golden and tall and—” She shook her head. “Damn if the woman hasn’t learned how to stride.”

Kerian thought there might be some tension over Jeratt, once the leader of the band, now deferring to his student, but none resented that because the half-elf made it clear that he didn’t mind.

“She’s what she is,” Jeratt said, quietly to his old friends while she lay sleeping. “I’m what I am. We’re good enough, the two of us, for what’s coming now.”

Elder, that small huddle of an ancient elf woman, said nothing to either of them upon their return, but Jeratt knew her of old, and so he knew by the feel of the forest, the air, the very stones that made the basin behind the falls, that Elder was pleased. The two began a strange conversation.

Kerian didn’t know for sure, but she imagined that Elder was a shaman of some sort, a sorceress who practiced the kind of earth magic the Qualinesti and their aristocratic kin the Silvanesti had long ago forgotten. In a world from which magic had vanished, where even talismans of legend sputtered into unreliability, Elder kept hold of something made of the ancient whispers of the land itself. Her conversations with Elder were never easy, sometimes as wrenching as tumbling into a maelstrom, for she spoke with a woman who smelled of magic in a world from which magic leaked like heart’s blood from a wound. Yet painful as these conversations could be, confusing, often as terrifying as the very first one which had left her on her knees and vomiting, Kerian never came away from Elder without feeling that she could—here and far away—create a force of men and women who would stand against the Knights and for the elves, who might, one day, be useful to an embattled king.

They settled into winter, the rounds of hunting and trapping, of preparing food and seeing to weapons. Kerian forbade raids on hapless travelers and on Knights.

“Leave them alone, for now,” she said. “Let the winter settle in peace. The Knights will know we’re here when I’m ready.”