Nancy Berberick - The Lioness

“Not a day’s walk from here to Qualinost,” Kerian said reassuringly to Stanach.

The dwarf was leaning his back against an oak, his eyes closed. He had the look of a man praying. He groaned something that sounded like a curse then, between clenched teeth, “Good.”

Kerian waited for color to return to his cheeks and for her own stomach to settle. “That’s not where we’ll go. We’ll be wanting to go first to Wide Spreading, the king’s hunting lodge. There we’ll find a trusty man who will take word to the king that you’ve come.”

Stanach looked around at the oaken wood, the tall trees thickly growing. “We’ll walk to where we’re going, aye? Enough of the magic now.”

Kerian agreed, counting herself lucky in the way the talisman had treated them. She gave Stanach a little longer to settle while she calculated a route that would take them to Wide Spreading by forest paths known only to hunters and deer, then she led the dwarf along those barely seen game trails as though along the manicured paths of a garden in Qualinost. Stanach had nothing to say about that, and she was pleased to take his silence for appreciation.

They went until the sun had climbed past noon height. The season had turned in the short time Kerian was away. The taste of autumn hung on the wind, only the suggestion of it in the fading green of the forest, yet she saw no hunters. When they climbed the slope of a green vale and looked down, they saw no farmers at work in their fields. They saw only great swathes of black staining the golden crops, where the roofs of barns and houses gaped with holes.

Stanach’s good left hand filled with his throwing axe.

“It’s long done,” Kerian said, bitterly. She pointed to the sky. “Look, empty. The crows have quarreled and had the best of the feast.”

“You sound like you’re used to this,” said the dwarf.

She did sound so, and she couldn’t help that. “I’m not used to it, Stanach. It’s how things are.”

Yet it seemed to her that something had changed. The depredations of Knights had, until now, taken place close to the towns or in villages. Elder’s confusion of magic, and the swift-striking Night People who seemed to the Knights like forest ghosts, had kept them out of the woods and away from the smaller settlements and isolated farms.

Something had indeed changed.

Nor did they go alone through the forest. Behind them came the soft whisper of a footfall. To the side, the rattle of browning bracken so faint to the ear that one could be forgiven for doubting one’s senses. Above, down the side of a tall, broad boulder, a shadow, slipping across the dapple of sun, soon gone.

“We’re being followed,” Stanach said, the first night as they sat before a small campfire. “You know that.”

She did. “I know who follows. Leave him alone. He’ll come out when he wants to or go away if he wills.”

The dwarf considered this, then said, “You don’t think him a danger?”

Kerian looked out past the fire, out into the shadows and the night. “Oh, he’s a danger; never doubt that. Not to me, though.” Stanach raised a brow. She cocked a crooked grin. “Or to you, Sir Ambassador, as long as he sees you’re no threat to me.”

They said no more that night about it, but Kerian noticed that the dwarf didn’t sleep easier.

Three days later, followed and unchallenged, Kerian and Stanach stood on a high place, a granite hill made of boulders flung during the Cataclysm. Elf and dwarf looked down into a dell where once had spread a thriving village. Nothing stood there now, and the land lay black, scarred by fire and destruction. Kerian went down, Stanach following. She knew the village as one sympathetic to her cause—or had known it. Her blood running cold, she saw the head of every villager, man, woman, and child, lining the broad street, piked upon lances. Their cattle lay dead, their horses, their dogs, and the fowl in the yards.

Stanach didn’t stand long in the street. He stumbled away, back to the forest, and Kerian let him go. She knew the look on his face, the greening of his cheeks. She stood alone, smelling burning, smelling death, and thinking that she had not been gone from the kingdom long, hardly a scant month, but something had changed. Something had happened to bring Lord Thagol’s Knights out in full rampage.

Stanach gagged in the brush, the sound of his retching loud in the stillness. Kerian looked north and south, then east and west. She stood waiting.

Softly, a voice at her back said, “Kerianseray of Qualinesti.”

She turned and though it had been only since summer that last she’d seen him, she hardly recognized Jeratt, so changed was he. He was not the man she’d left only weeks before, the cocky half-elf who’d led Night People beside her, who had planned raids, strategies and victories. His hair had turned white. His cheeks thin, his eyes glittering, this was not a face she knew. His voice, that she knew.

“Y’never should have left us, Kerian.” He scrubbed the side of his face with his hand. “He knew it when y’left. He took advantage when y’were gone.”

Stanach came out from the brush. Jeratt turned, arrow nocked to bow in the instant. The dwarfs good hand flashed to his side and clasped the throwing axe before Jeratt could draw breath or arrow.

“Hold!” Kerian shouted. She put a hand on Jeratt’s shoulder, felt the muscles quivering with tension. She nodded to Stanach, and the dwarf dropped his arm. “Jeratt, he’s a friend of the king.”

They stood in heart-hammered silence until Kerian said, “Jeratt, tell me what has happened.”

“You can see it.” He looked around. “This is what they do now, Kerian. Up and down the land, they do this. Maybe they used to think it would teach us some kind of lesson. Now—now it’s Thagol himself doing it and not caring what we learn, past hating him.” He pulled a bitter smile. “He’s waiting for you, Kerian. You’ve been gone; you haven’t killed any of his Knights. He can’t find you on the dream-roads, but he’s still looking for you, and he’s waiting for you to come back.” Jeratt glanced around. “Him and Chance Headsman and their Knights and draconians. He’s brought in reinforcements from Neraka.”

His eyes narrowed. “They’ve broken us, every band, all the resistance you put together. It was you, Kerian, who made it work, you who held us together, who heartened us and gave us a will. Without you—” His arm swept wide. “Y’went away at a bad time, Kerian.”

Ah, gods. Yet there had been no choice.

“Elder?”

Jeratt shook his head. “Gone!”

The word ran on her nerves, like lightning. “Gone? Where?”

“Don’t know. One night she was there, sittin’ at her fire. The next … gone. That was only three days after you left. There’s been none of her confusions now, nothing to help.”

“But you kept on.”

Jeratt’s chest swelled proudly. “I didn’t just keep on. I did what we’d planned, put warriors in the south, and I been back to the dales and roused ’em there, but … I couldn’t keep it going against Thagol. He’s … he’s like the sea, Kerian. We’re all scattered again.”

Looking from one to the other, the scruffy half-elf and the woman who had only days before spoke in the Court of Thanes, Stanach whistled low. Softly he said, “First time I saw you, missy, you were tripping over a Knight’s corpse on the way out the door. Then you show up in the High King’s court. Now …” He shook his head. “What in the name of Reorx’s forge are you about?”

Kerian looked at him, and the smile she crooked had little to do with humor. “Stanach, I’ve been too long gone from the forest. I will take you so far as where you are safe. After that …”