Nancy Berberick - The Inheritance

"We're out of here, girl. No hunting for us."

Elansa rose, looking at the way back, but Tianna shook her head. Wind caught her silvery hair, and she brushed it back. "We’re not going back in the way we came. I know another way."

She did. Of course she did. And the way took them along the defile, back the way the ogres had come. They walked for a time, following the scents of smoke and death, and came to a rare place in the stoneland, a place of water where tough grass grew around the stream and the little pond. Like broken skeletons, the fire-blackened beams of two buildings that might have been house and barn stood starkly against the dun earth. Goats wandered, lost and bleating. Beside two nannies little black-footed kids skipped. In the middle of what must have been a dooryard, a man lay sprawled, his neck broken, one arm ripped from the socket.

Elansa turned from the sight. "Who would live here?"

Tianna, looking up the slope for a way back into the mountain, answered absently. "Humans do mostly, like him. Sometimes dwarves. Don't bother asking why. There's as many reasons as there are fools who try to live here. Outlaws like Brand, outcasts, stubborn folk who don't like the towns or the company of their own. Sometimes people live here because they remember that before the Cataclysm their long-ago fathers did. They claim the land, though the gods long ago made it useless. Fools, all."

Elansa said nothing.

"Ah," Tianna said, pointing up-slope. "There it is. Come on. Climb. And don't get tired of it, there's going to be more walking before the day's done. We'll be moving right out, count on that. Those ogres look like they're searching for a good spot to set up. That’ ll be inside, and no one I know is crazy enough to stick around when there's a chance ogres are moving in."

So they climbed, hunters with no gain. The way in to the outlaws’ cave opened halfway up the slope, a narrow passage behind a boulder. Elansa never would have found it. She didn't imagine anyone could who didn't know it existed. In the shadowed place between the inside and the out, she paused and looked back. She didn't look north to where the murdered goatherd lay dead. She looked south. No raven flew in the sky, and she said to Tianna that she thought those dark wings hadn't been following death. She thought they'd been fleeing ogres.

Tianna said she supposed so. "No one ever said they were stupid birds."

Elansa would not have said Brand was a stupid man, no matter what else could be told of him. No sooner did he hear Tianna’s news than did he call his men sharply to order.

"We're gone," he said. "Ogres are outside and looking for a way in. Pack up and clean out."

Elansa worked with the rest. She knew the way. They broke the fires and scattered the stones from the rings. They took all the bones of old meals and tumbled them down into the darkness of a crevice that seemed to have no bottom. Stone leaves no track, so they had nothing to do but be certain no sign of them lay behind, forgotten-no leather thong cast away from a boot-mending, no scrap of cloth, no sign of their waste. This they managed in a short time. They were very good at leaving nothing but shadow behind.

Through all the work, Elansa noticed something no one else seemed to pay much attention to. Dell and Arawn did not work together, though they always had before. They worked far from each other, doing different tasks. Elansa looked around from her bone-gathering, and she thought something had changed, something between the two lovers. She saw it finally, something in the mood of the whole band of outlaws. It was the kind of indefinable change you feel in the forest when the wind drops and the whispering trees have nothing to say. Still, you know what they're thinking, those trees: Storm coming .

"You," said Brand, who never named her. "Come here."

She did, her hands full of bones. He looked her up and down. His eyes had the sharpness of calculation. The cave had grown dark. Cookfires were gone, and torches were sputtering to life. She couldn't see him well, just the outline of him-broad shoulders, head back, the red firelight edging the thickness of his beard.

"Listen," he said, and it was the voice he used to give orders. "Get rid of all that, and come right back. Once we're going, you be sure to stay near me."

She didn't understand until she passed Char on the way to dump the bones. The dwarf knelt beside a flickering torch, carefully filling his leather bottle from the last of a stout little keg. He looked up, head cocked to give his good eye the sight of her.

"Do what he says," the dwarf warned. "Arawn, he ain't got no woman now."

Six captains each took a troop of warriors out from Qualinost. Each captain had a finely drawn map on supple parchment, the bold lines in broad strokes of darkest ink. Each map resided in a tooled leather scroll case, safe against the elements and the grit that plagued the borderland. Each captain had the same order from Lindenlea: "In the prince's name, clean the weapons caches."

Proud warriors, they heard those orders and set spurs to horse, riding through the great gates with the sound of thunder. It was not the best order. They imagined a better one that sounded like, "In the prince's name, find the princess!" No warrior lived in Qualinost who didn't feel the burning shame of having had the stolen princess within reach and then losing her. None of them didn't dream of killing the human scum who had twice taken Elansa.

For now, though, these must content themselves with knowing they would take weapons away from the outlaws, and that was good work They ran out to the border and there found more of the prince's soldiers, a great line of them ranging the stonelands from the Notch where they'd lost the princess and north to the edge of Darken Wood, south to the place where the Qualinesti Forest became the Forest of Wayreth, that old land of mages. They made a wall, bristling with swords and lances. Their encampments were not secret but plain for all to see.

"It would be nice to have the chance to spit a goblin or two," Lindenlea had told them, each commander she dispatched. "But that's not the mission. The mission is to keep them in the borderland. There will be no crack in the wall between Qualinesti and them. Engage only if you must."

Those were hard words for winter-weary soldiers, but they were orders and so not to be questioned. Small, shining outposts of Qualinesti set up on the border, and no one traveling by, not human or goblin or wandering hill dwarf thought those encampments would be friendly places to stop.

But the six troops setting out across the borderland thought the sight of all those warriors was a glad one. Their hearts rose to look back and see the brave pennons flying, the sun on burnished shields, on plumed helms. Stern faces, hard hands, these were elves trained in battle, elves whose hearts turned to only one need: Protect the kingdom.

It’s a good day, thought one of the warriors, she who was bound with her fellows to clean out the easternmost cache along the base of the triangle that formed the outlaws’ territory. It’s a good day to pull a wolf's fangs.

And that’s how they saw it, all the Qualinesti, watching or riding. They saw it as a scouring of wolves. No wolf of the goblin-kind would do mischief on the border, and those human wolves in the mountains would soon find themselves toothless and hard-hunted.

Indeed, a good day.

Today the way was up, the passage narrow, and the floor rough. In the womb of Krynn, the change of days was judged to fall on the far side of the longest sleep. Elansa had been counting, and she counted three days passing since she and Tianna had seen the ogres and found the dead goatherd.

The outlaw band went along passages and tunnels she recognized. In these months she had threaded many of the underground ways and had learned to see landmarks here as she would in the forest. In some ways, the picking of landmarks was little different. A grouping of stalactites was like a grove of birches. One recognized a shape, a configuration, and strove to remember it. In some ways, it might have been easier. Sooner will a grove of trees change than a grove of stone.