Nancy Berberick - The Inheritance

Kethrenan, who knew how to look into the eye of a foe and reckon him, understood what Elansa did. As soon as she saw her husband know the truth, she knew herself lost. Again.

"Let him kill me," she moaned, the words hardly passing her lips, pressed back by the blade. "Don't let him take me, Keth!"

Kethrenan’s eyes held hers, and it felt as if all the years of her life passed in that moment. He would not cause her death. He could not. Brand laughed, the sound of a gambler who has wagered well.

A cry rose in Elansa’s breast, right to her throat, past the steel blade pressing. She let it die, unvoiced. To fling back her head and scream would have been to slice her own throat. She could not do it, for all she'd asked Kethrenan to let it happen. Neither could she whimper or plead. She was an elf. She was a princess.

And so the outlaw took her away. Brand of the stonelands had the princess once more. A cry did sound for her, though, against the rage of battle, the war cries and the death screams of elves and goblins, long and loud and filled with terrible rage. It followed her, winding through the barren land, the sound of Kethrenan cursing.

Now began the season of lost things in the west part of Ansalon.

The seas lost their ships, all but those few brave craft that hugged the coasts of the New Sea and the Strait of Algoni, mostly fishermen and ferrymen. The winds of winter blew hard and swift from Ice Mountain Bay and around to the top of the world. Even those who lived in the warmer parts of Krynn, away north where there was naught but the mysterious Dragon Isles between them and no one knew what, complained of the cold. This cold blowing went on from H’rarmont and right through the beginning of winter, into the middle months, and looked to blow most cruelly in Rannmont. Out from Tarsis drifted terrible tales of people who went mad from the moan of the wind, the groaning and the unceasing sob.

It was said, at least by Rumor, that those mad ones did all manner of unspeakable things, and the least awful of the tales spoke of the man who murdered his family, insane and thinking they were ghosts come to steal away his soul.

"I have heard them moan! " he screamed, standing in their blood. "They were coming for me…."

So often was that tale repeated, up and down from Tarsis to Palanthas, that people could be forgiven for thinking the whole poor city in the desert had been changed into a lunatic asylum.

All over, old people in all places, humans and elves and dwarves and even a few goblins proclaimed that there had never been such as winter, and that they didn't think they cared to imagine how much colder could get.

Abanasinia and Solamnia lost the grassland green in the last month of autumn, all the tall waving grass gone brown and flat, and it crunched underfoot with as much voice as it has after a hard frost has lain upon it. In the woodlands near Xak Tsaroth and across the New Sea in Lemish, not much of gold or bronze or scarlet replaced the woodland green that year. It seemed that all in a night the canopy looked a bit thin, as it does when autumn is coming, and then refused to shine but fell, all the leaves as brown as oaks, whether the trees they flew from were oak or not. There had been no warning of this, so noted the folk in the mountains around Thorbardin. The birds had not flown away earlier, the hares and badgers and foxes did not go dressed in thicker coats than usual, and no one out calling his pigs from the forest claimed to have seen the squirrels and chipmunks any busier at the gathering of nuts than in years gone. It might be that a sign of the crashing winter could be the absence of goblins in the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains, both on the windward side and the lee. The great gathering of goblins to the hob Gnash had caused no end of woe to the little villages clinging to the foothills and the skirts of the Qualinesti forest. In winter, the raiding and the burning and the killing stopped. The humans did not pray much. They had no use for vanished gods, but they knew about gratitude, and though the winter dealt harshly with them, it did keep the goblins from the door.

They did not know that the winter silence of goblins meant that the hob Gnash had time to sit in his headquarters, that stinking pile that used to be a fine inn, and consider his possibilities. He did not count his losses to the elves in the abortive raid to steal a ransom. He used his goblins as though they were water from an ever-renewing spring. Almost, they were. The deaths of a half-hundred or more were nothing to him. He didn't even much care about the outlaw Brand. That was an old feud and not really his. Perching atop his treasure hoard or carrying out the occasional execution for the edification of his army and his amusement, he thought about how fine it was to wield fine. He thought about the finding of his fire-staff, and he began to wonder whether grander and better things were to be discovered that would make him not just lord of the borderland, but king of this part of the world.

They didn't know, the humans who lived in the borderland-or, for that matter, the elves of Qualinesti- that in Goblintown on the east side of the Forest-Around-Hammer-Rock-But-Not-Too-Close the hob Gnash was weaving plans.

In the season of lost things, Elansa Sungold lived beneath the ground. She saw again the cave beneath Hammer Rock where she'd watched the elf Ley slit a goblin's throat and hack off his head. She saw more caves than that-Brand and his outlaws knew more hiding places in the riddled earth than Elansa had imagined existed. They knew secret ways in and out.

"Not all," Char said one night as he sat pulling on his leather bottle, the one that held dwarf spirits.

It seemed inexhaustible, like a vessel from legend, something touched by gods and made to replenish itself after each sip. But Char did not sip, and no vessel is inexhaustible. He had his stashes, though-a keg here, another there, and woe the cave that had nothing to offer. Roundly cursed, it became a place the dwarf couldn't wait to leave, and his discontent did, some nights, poison everyone’s sleep-the pacing if he waked, the groaning nightmares if he slept. Not that night, though, the one upon which he felt warm enough in the belly to become expansive.

"We got no notion of all the ways in and out of any cave we find, but we got me, little princess. A dwarf in the womb of the world… ah, he'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be able to find his way to anywhere."

They lived mostly beneath the ground. It was not the raiding season. It was winter, and no one traveled the roads. Brand didn't send his men outside the mountain but to hunt. He didn't like to stay too long in one place; he didn't like the idea of settling in. He had upon one hand elves who'd like to kill him for a kidnapping they felt was sacrilege. Upon the other hand he had a feud with a hobgoblin to prosecute. He had, too, a hoard of weapons to cache, a princess's ransom. This he took grim satisfaction in doing, storing swords and fat quivers and graceful bows in every cave that seemed secret enough to him. He conferred with Char, and he spoke in firelit plannings with dark-haired Arawn and the elf Ley. The outlaws who sat beyond their fire seemed content to wait, rolling the bones to gamble, kicking hounds that got too near a supper, honing weapons, and talking about those friends who'd died of a goblin’s sword or a Warrior's arrow. In low voices, they spoke of the hob and his fire-staff, but only to whisper. Like all the godless, these humans were superstitious, having no faith upon which to depend or to turn for explanation of things uncanny. They believed that to speak of such things as magical weapons, talismans, or any artifact from the days before the Cataclysm was to invite bad luck to the fire.