Nancy Berberick - The Lioness

His eyes lighted like green fire, and he leaped to do as she bid.

Kerian kicked the wagon; she kicked the dirt. Patch had a lot of hate to lose, and she wondered whether it was right to use that for her own weapon. She didn’t wonder long. Not all her weapons were as trusty as Patch, and she felt her anger rising hotter. Kerian glared around the clearing till she found her target sitting in the dust, bleeding.

“Rhyl, you’re a fool .”

The word rang again, louder, through the forest. On his knees binding the bleeding arm of a wounded companion, Jeratt looked up, then went back to his work.

Rhyl stumbled to his feet, still wiping blood from a seeping head wound, still stunned from a blow he hadn’t seen coming, the backstroke of the dead Knight’s sword, the blow struck a moment before an arrow took the human through the throat. Rhyl looked around at his friends, living and dead. Wobbly, he put a hand on the wagon to steady himself. The bounty of the wagon lay all over the ground, bales of tanned pelts that would have gone to Qualinost, into the shops of leathermen, there to become boots and jerkins and sheaths for swords. Tribute to the dragon.

“Who are you calling a fool?” Rhyl snarled, wiping blood from his face. “One Knight’s dead, and the other will be soon.”

Kerian grabbed a fistful of the elf’s shirt and jerked him closer until they were nearly nose to nose. “I told you we weren’t hitting anything on this road until the supply wagons came down.” She jerked her head at the little wagon. “That look to you like four wagons full of weapons, Rhyl?”

Rhyl spat in the dirt at her feet.

The others, wounded and hale, looked away, exhausted. Jeratt said nothing.

Kerian drew a purposeful breath. The wagon wheels creaked. In the sky the wind rose and sighed through the trees. Beside the broken wagon, the Knight groaned out the last of his blood. One of the wounded outlaws helped another to his feet. There would be ravens soon.

She said, “Getting hard for you, Rhyl, is it?”

He eyed her suspiciously.

“Hard not to just run down the hill and do a bit of thieving like in the good old days?”

He growled a yea or a nay or a leave-me-alone, and spat again.

The hand that had grabbed his shirt now moved to rest on his shoulder as though in friendly fashion.

“You agreed to be part of this, Rhyl. From the first night we talked about this, from the first moment you lifted a bow to kill a Knight, you agreed to take orders from me. You didn’t do that today. You broke out on your own, hit this little wagon too soon, and now there’s two of our comrades dead and if Patch doesn’t kill that Knight there’s going to be word in Qualinost about this. Maybe there will be anyway.”

Rhyl shrugged and twisted a lip to show he was not intimidated, but he backed a step away when Kerian narrowed her eyes.

“Rhyl,” she said, her voice like winter’s ice. “I have to be able to count on you.”

He snorted. “All this for your king,” he said, sullenly. “We burn a few bridges, we plague a few Knights, we lurk around the taverns to pick up crumbs of news.”

Before Kerian could reply, Jeratt’s laughter rang harsh as a crow’s. “Not hardly, Rhyl. You have a fat little coffer hidden in the passage through the falls, all yours and shining with booty. Didn’t used to be more than a skinny crate with nothing but a few brass coins and mold growing in it.”

The first ravens sailed the sky, circling the clearing. Kerian gripped Rhyl’s shoulder and turned him round to see the wounded and the dead.

“Now I have to know—can I count on you?”

She glanced at Jeratt. The half-elf shook his head.

Above, ravens shouted, the mass of them darkening the sky. Kerian looked up to see a half dozen of them peel away from the rest. They sailed over the forest, westward above the Qualinost Road. A triumphant cry rang through the forest, high and eerie. The hair rose up on the back of Kerian’s arms. Patch had found his kill, and he would be lopping the head from the Knight’s neck even now, using the dead man’s sword to do that.

“Jeratt,” she said, not looking at Rhyl again. “Get things cleaned up here. Don’t make a big job of it. Leave the Knight’s corpse, and drag the wagon into the forest. Thagol’s going to hear about this, so he might as well see some of our handiwork. Just haul the worst of it off the road so farmers can get by.”

He cocked his head. “And you?”

“Well, I have to go talk to Bueren Rose, don’t I?” Her voice had the edge of a blade. “There’s word needs to be spread now.”

He said nothing, frustrated as she. Neither did he look at Rhyl as he bent to the work of clearing the road. He nodded, and she did, understanding between them.

Kerian turned to leave and in the turning felt the return of the ache behind her eyes, the pressure against her temples, as though someone pressed that tender place with thumbs. She closed her eyes, at the same time holding her bloodstone amulet in her hand. The pain began to recede, but it did not vanish. When she opened her eyes again, it was to see Jeratt’s keen glance, his hand reaching to steady her.

“I’m all right,” she said.

He looked doubtful, his brows raised.

“See to this mess.” She looked around. “And see to Rhyl.”

Jeratt scratched his beard.

“He’s out. Meet me when it’s done.”

Gilthas stood in the doorway between his private library and his bedchamber. In the hour before bed, the hour of his poetry, this time when pen drank from the inkwell and his heart brooded on loss, he stood with a stack of tightly rolled scrolls in his right arm. He’d heard a sound, the soft scuff of a footfall, perhaps a whisper from beyond the far wall of the library.

Holding his breath, Gilthas let the scrolls slide out of his arm silently onto the brocaded seat of a delicately carved cherrywood chair. Moonlight spilled through the window in the bedroom behind, washing over the bed. The empty bed, he always named it, for no moon had seen Kerian there in many months.

The empty bed. Not so empty, after all. Nightmare joined him there, often now. Dark dreams that Kerian would know how to banish with a touch of her hand, brooding fears that she was able to soothe, these came to him now more nights than not. He used to dream of fire and death, of the breaking of his ancient kingdom. He used to dream that all he knew and loved would fall to a terror he had no name for, something born in the Abyss of a goddess long gone from the world. These nights only one dream haunted him, cold and fanged. These nights he dreamed he saw a head being freshly piked upon the parapet of the eastern bridge of his city. Honey hair thick with blood, mouth agape, eyes staring, Kerian’s death scream followed him down all the roads of Qualinost.

There! Again, a sound from the secret passage few knew about but he and Laurana. Gil’s heart rose with sudden hope. Only one other than they two knew of the narrow warren behind the walls of the king’s residence. It must be Kerian. He listened closely. He heard nothing now. Outside his suite of chambers, servants murmured in the halls, someone dropped an object of crystal or glass. The shattering of it rang out and did not cover a dismayed cry. The king hardly wondered what had fallen, what had broken.

Behind the wall, he heard another footfall.

Kerian! Had he conjured her? With moonlight and memory and inked lines of longing, had he magicked her?

Even as he hoped, Gilthas knew there was no hope. Kerian was nowhere near the city. He had followed the tales of her, trying to reckon the gold from the dross, the truth from the fables. Easier, far, to reckon out her doings by noting where last Lord Thagol put up a newly fortified guard post.