Nancy Berberick: The Lioness

“It’s not only his, Kerian. It’s yours. Tell me.” Gilthas rose, tall above her, and when he looked her deeply in the eye he trusted she would see his heart. “You might as well, because you know you cannot go yourself. There are brigands in the forest, outlaws and highwaymen. There are Knights who might well mistake you for any one of those things.”

She swallowed hard but said nothing, the jut of her chin growing more stubborn.

“Kerian, if you go … if you go, you will be gone from Rashas’s service without leave, and I won’t be able to help you. You will be considered a runaway. You will be hunted.” He stopped, caught suddenly as though by a cold hand out of nightmare. “Kerian … if you go, if you are hunted, you will be branded a fugitive. You won’t be able to come back.”

He said no more. They were silent for a moment. “Tell me the name of the village and the tavern, and I will send men to learn if your brother is well. That is the end of the matter.”

Kerian looked at him long, head up and suddenly cool. “It is the end of the matter, my lord king, if you, like Rashas, are ordering a servant.” She did not add, as her brother might have, “or a slave.” Still her sharp words hung between them, edged like steel.

In that silence they heard other voices in outer chambers, the king’s dresser and the wardrobe master preparing his clothes for the senate meeting. Neither Kerian nor Gilthas spoke, and Kerian herself barely breathed. There could be no story to make seemly her presence, barefoot and weeping in the king’s bedroom. Eyes on each other, like crossed swords, the king and his lover kept utterly still, completely silent.

The stubborn line of Kerian’s jaw softened. She kissed the king tenderly. Her lips against his so that Gilthas did not so much hear her words as feel them, she said:

“He is my brother, Gil. If you want to stop me, you have only to call the guard.”

She turned from him. He grabbed her wrist and caught her back. Eyes flashing, Kerian spun on her heel, angry words on her lips where a moment ago he’d felt regret.

The king held up his right hand. With his left, he removed the topaz ring from his forefinger. It was a lover’s clasp, two circlets of gold each shaped as a hand. Worn together, each hand would hold the topaz. It had belonged to his father and before that to some ancient elf king, a trinket worth a royal ransom in the times before the Cataclysm when kings might be ransomed for other than steel. In silence he gave one half of the lover’s clasp to her; in silence she took it.

Outside, the dresser said to the wardrobe master, “Oh—look, there are his rings on the wine tray.” A quiet gasp, then, low, “By all the vanished gods—! He’s in his bedchamber.”

Gilthas put the finger to his lips, the topaz ring into Kerian’s hand. Barely mouthing the words, he said, “Go, my love. If you need me, leave this ring in the hollow of Gilean’s Oak.”

Gilean’s Oak: the broad oak at the far western corner of Wide-Spreading, Gil’s favorite hunting estate. The estate was named for the oaks that dominated the area. The tree itself was named for a discerning god because it was home to generations of owls, their nests admired by elf children. In days past, the owls had been courted by dreamers who believed the old legend that the man or woman who dreamed of seeing an owl there—in truth, the wise god himself—had the right to ask wisdom of him and expect it would be granted.

Kerian pressed the ring between her two hands, and then she took a golden chain from her neck, knotted it through the ring and slipped it over her head again. “Gil—”

Outside, the dresser said something to his companion. The wardrobe master cried, “Good day, Your Majesty!” A woman’s soft, gently modulated voice murmured a question; Laurana could be heard asking if either of the servants had seen the king. Quickly, the wardrobe master said, “I believe your son is sleeping within, Madam.”

Gilthas took Kerian quickly into his arms. He kissed her, holding her as long as he dared as his mother’s knock sounded on the bedchamber door. When he watched Kerian go, slipping on naked, silent feet through a passage so secret only he and the Queen Mother knew it existed, the elf king wasn’t sure he would see his lover again.

In a quiet hour, when few walked the streets but Knights, two of those stood in purpling shadows, Headsman Chance and a man as pale and thin as the solitary sickle moon.

Sir Chance gestured upward to the shimmering span of the eastern bridge. Mist wraithed around the bases of the columns upholding the span, mist grown up from the ground, out from the forest. It drifted up toward the severed heads, pale fingers reaching.

The sickle-thin man looked up and smiled, a stingy pulling back of lips from teeth. They were like fangs, those teeth. Not in that they were sharp, they were only human teeth after all, like fangs nonetheless, for they were startling to see, so white were they, and something about sight of them raised the hair on a person’s flesh, as though he were seeing a wolf’s deadly grin. Lord Thagol licked his lips.

“I think, my lord, there will be no more trouble with robbers,” said Sir Chance.

The Lord Knight’s white face shone like a scar. “Do you think so?” He licked his lips again.

“Well—I don’t know that it’ll stop all at once, but word of this …” He pointed upward with his thumb to the thirteen gaping new heads. A rat ran scurrying on the silvery bridge, another following. What the ravens hadn’t tasted of dead flesh in the day, cheeks, eyes and tongues, the rats would sample tonight. “Word will go out into the countryside and the forest. Things will calm down, my lord.”

The Lord Knight kept still, barely breathed, and his eyes had a strange sheen to them when they settled on Chance. The Headsman shivered again, drew breath to speak, explain something, assure his commander that all would, indeed, be calm now. In time, he let the breath go and said nothing. Lord Thagol was looking at him, but Chance didn’t think the Skull Knight truly saw him. Chance believed that the strange Knight had in his mind already dismissed him. The Knight considered one thing, then another. Should he leave, taking the silence for dismissal?

“Go back out. Today.”

“M-my lord?” The words startled the Headsman, just turning to leave.

“Go out again.”

“But—” Chance cleared his throat and spoke more firmly. “Do you want more heads, my lord?”

Thagol’s eyes grew suddenly sharp, his regard heavy and holding. Under the commander’s gaze, Chance Headsman felt his heart shrink, contract as though squeezed by a hard hand. He gasped for breath, and felt his throat tighten. Pain flashed through his body, ripping across his chest, down his arm.

“My lord—!”

Sir Chance flung back his head, breathless and trying to scream. He saw the bridge, the severed heads and a rat swarming up the shaft of the nearest pike. Inside his own head a voice thundered, words flashing in his skull like lightning.

Never question me. Go. Into the forest. Now.

There was more, a command not framed by words, his lord’s insistent will flowing into him, through him.

When he could see again, Lord Thagol was gone, walking away toward the low stone building that was his headquarters. Another figure walked beside the Knight, an elf by the slim build. Rashas of the Thalas-Enthia. The elf’s voice drifted back on a small breeze, lifted in complaint. To Sir Chance, his head throbbing with pain, it sounded as though he were hearing a voice from underwater.

Sir Eamutt Thagol said nothing to the senator, never turned his head to look at or acknowledge him. He walked on, leaving the elf behind.