Nancy Berberick - The Lioness

She knew how to mourn. Though she had not practiced the Wilder mourning in many long years, she had not forgotten how to grieve. They wept the grief-storm, brother and sister. They washed away all the colors of sorrow with their tears. One wept for all the people he knew, the other for all the people she would never know.

In the end, with night falling, they began to talk. Iydahar spoke of his rage, while Kerian spoke of her mission. He told her how well and deeply he hated the Knights, how little love he had for her king.

“The boy who sold his throne. For what? A year or two to play at being king?”

Anger rose in her, flushing her cheeks till then cool with sorrow. “No, Dar, don’t speak of Gilthas that way. He’s—”

His expression grew hard. It was as though a door had suddenly swung shut. “Ah, you, Keri. No one could miss the secret you hold, girl. It’s all over you, all the time. So you keep his bed warm, do you? Aye, well,” he growled bitterly, “good for the little king, then. If he doesn’t get to rule or wield armies, he gets some of the privileges and rights of kings. “

Coldly, she said, “What are you going to call me now, Dar? The king’s whore?”

Iydahar regarded her, hard from narrowed eyes. “No one’s calling you his wife, are they? No one’s looking at you in the streets and naming you his queen. Is he ashamed of his Wilder Elf woman?”

The loud crack of her palm across his face startled them both. He sat gaping. She leaped to her feet, cheeks flaming. The print of her hand showed white where Dar’s grief-paint still clung, red on the naked flesh.

Though she had planned to tell her brother about her plans for a resistance, counted on it, Kerian realized she could not. She did not dare ask him to join a rebellion intended to buy time for a king he despised.

“Dar, is there anything I can do here?”

He shook his head. “I’m not staying.”

“What about Ayensha?”

His eyes flashed, anger and pain. “She thinks she’s found a cause.” He sneered the word. “Go look for her with her uncle and your outlaws.”

Kerian looked around at the scorched earth, the charnel pit, the wolves padding. Softly, night crept down, the howl of the sky turned deeply blue and the pale sliver of the new moon showed in the east, high beyond the tops of the trees. Dar rose. He looked at her long, and she felt a hollowness in her heart, feeling his eyes on her, his distant gaze. He was already thinking about his path away from this black and burned place.

“You’re going?” she asked.

“Away.”

Kerian heard that in silence, then she said, “Don’t go south, Dar. There are draconians there. Don’t go west, they hold every road, and the Knights are with them.”

He didn’t thank her for her warning, and she didn’t wait to hear more from him. She rose and left him. She did not expect to see him again.

“Fool!”

Fists clenching, Kerian looked around at the half dozen fighters, three of them bleeding, two of those unable to stand, and two dead. Flies buzzed over the wounds. The coppery stench of blood hung in the dusty summer air.

One of the dead was Briar, a woman Kerian had first met in the sheltered basin behind Lightning Falls. Autumn had come and gone twice since then, and winter and spring, and now summer grew old around her. Yet it seemed she had known Briar for a score of years, certainly for a score of battles. Briar had become notorious among the Knights for her fierceness. Into every battle the tall elf woman had worn the mail shirt that might, a long time ago, have been made for a prince. Even princely mail couldn’t protect her against stupid mistakes.

Kerian looked at the overturned wagon, two wheels still spinning. Two outlaws dead, three wounded, and one Knight bleeding away the last of his life. The other Knight of the two-man escort had abandoned his companion and the driver of the wagon and fled through the forest to the Qualinost Road. Already, Elder was sinking into that eerie trance of hers to call up the confusion of senses. In moments, the Knight would find himself helpless on a road he’d traveled so often.

A thin line of pain etched between Kerian’s eyes, as if a thumb were pressing hard on the bridge of her nose. Head up, she listened to her body, tracking the source of the pain until the tightened muscles of her jaws assured her that the headache was nothing more than the result of teeth clenched in anger. It could have had a more dangerous source.

In spring the Skull Knight Thagol had returned from the east of the kingdom, drawn by news of the Night People. Since then Kerian suffered headaches, and since then she understood that some headaches were the result of hunger, weariness, or injury, and others had no natural explanation. The touch of the mind of a Skull Knight caused these.

Thagol sought the leader of the Night People. Down the avenues of the night, he hunted her in dreams. The strange headaches had started after the first successful raid Kerian mounted against one of the border outposts. These were ugly structures of stone and wood built between the forest and the gorges that scored the earth between the elven kingdom and the Stonelands. Five Knights had died in the first raid, and four more perished when they arrived to relieve the watch. The four who died last imagined the three black-armored warriors they saw on duty were their knightly brethren and didn’t discover until too late that they were five of the Night People in Knights’ clothing. Kerian had ordered the dead stripped of anything useful then left the corpses to rot. This time that tactic, used for gaining weapons and depriving the enemy of steel, did not serve her well.

Soon after, on a dark-moon night, Kerian woke from a dream and sat up shaking, cold sweat running on her. Shivering with her blankets wrapped around her, she looked up at the sky ablaze with stars too bright to long behold. Across the stony basin, in the night where embers of the outlaws’ fires breathed faintly, she saw the old woman, Elder, whose voice was like prophecy. As though beckoned, she rose and went to the ancient. She sat down beside her. White hair like starlight, shining, Elder leaned close.

“He hunts,” she whispered, her voice low. “He hunts you, Kerian of Qualinesti, on the roads of your dreams. If he catches you, he catches all, even your king.”

“How does he do this? Can you help me?”

Elder didn’t know, but she could help Kerian and did. She knew a way of magic to prevent her dreaming. She knew how to enchant and what spells would serve to protect.

Protected, Kerian also knew loss. She had met the king twice more since that first time in winter, met him in the forest in spring when he called her to warn that Thagol had returned, again at Wide Spreading in early summer. She didn’t dream of him any more, for she carried a bloodstone from Elder, draining her of dreams and shielding her from Thagol’s magic. Even so, the Lord Knight didn’t give up his hunt, and though he could not stalk by night, he did well by day, catching psychic scent of her when one of his Knights died by her hand. Somehow he tracked her by the deaths of his warriors. Waking, she had no warning of his approach, his stalking, his nearness, only headache.

Flies buzzed on wounds; sun glared from a hard blue sky. Kerian again looked around her at her warriors. She pointed to one, a lanky Kagonesti youth who wore the tattoos proudly on neck and shoulders. The boy was named Patch, for the streak of shining white in his dark hair. It had grown there on the dire night he learned the news that the Eagle Flight tribe had been slaughtered. He was one of the handful to survive that killing.

“Patch,” she said, “take Rale and go find and kill that Knight.”