and king and host desert their post
to hunt and never sleep.
They finished, singing together. It took them a long time, since one or the other often stopped to gasp for air, and it seemed important to them that they finish as one:
And so they shall betray and hunt,
until the day they show
that they somehow fulfill the vow
they broke so long ago."
Done, they collapsed against each other. "Not a bad song, really," the king said. "Needs a little tightening here and there, perhaps, fewer cousin-rhymes, but at least it's something of us left behind."
"True. Many have died with less fame and with worse poetry." The stag's antlers shuddered painfully back into place. The stag, eyes upward, lay his head on the king's lap and stared at the draconian. "Who would have thought that I should be hunted by such as this? Or that you should hunt them?"
The king's voice was low and halting. "True. They are vile, and we were proud. But for once, we both have died for something besides ourselves. And when you have been dead as long as I — " he wavered, and said in a last breath — "a little variety in one's chosen way of dying is not such a bad thing."
And as the stag joined the king in final death, he thought sleepily that after a thousand years of nightly betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death and more painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant. He cradled his head against King Peris's stomach, and the two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.
No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and powdered under the pressure of weather and vines; time's best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient crown and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains. For reasons no one living knows, it does not crumble. Go to the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.
Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade and stood before the single draconian. The crown was tarnished, the sword rusted; only the hoof-print was still sharp and clear. The Forestmaster stared at the print, then looked thoughtfully around the glade. There was not so much as a mound to show that anyone had died here, and even the memory of the draconians was fading from those who lived in Shadow Wood.
The unicorn tipped her head up and quietly sang two stanzas she had heard recently, added onto a very old ballad:
"The shadows in the woods are plain
and mingle now with light;
they flow and play with sun by day
and dance with moon by night.
From darken wood has shadow wood
been granted its release,
those who were killed in vows fulfilled
have there been granted peace."
She strode to the edge of the woods and thrust her horn in among the vines, circling it quickly. Walking back to the statue, she lifted her horn to the stone and slid a floral wreath onto it. It slid down too far; she moved parallel to the sword and adjusted it. For a moment, sword and horn both pointed to the north star, faintly visible in the darkening sky.
She stepped back. "Sleep well, beloved" She turned and was gone.
The wreath of Paladine's Tears stayed fresh a long time.
Hide and Go Seek
For a long time Keli did not know where he was. Sometimes he smelled the forest and the river, sometimes only dirt and rocks. Once the boy thought he heard thunder rumbling far, far away. Then, on the tenuous bridge between darkness and consciousness, he knew with the flashing certainty of lightning's strike that it was not thunder he was hearing.
It was the voice of nightmare: the voice of a goblin.
"Tigo, let's dump the little rat in the river. We have what we want."
Keli expected to feel the goblin's huge gray hands drag him up and cast him into the river.
Far back in his mind he knew about the leather thongs pinioning his arms, binding him at knee and ankle. Too, he felt the hard earth, the fist-sized rock digging into his ribs. Pain, however, was not as immediate as death-fear.
A second voice, sounding like the rattling of old bones, growled, "Bring him over here, Staag; see what he's carrying first."
Someone shouted, then yelped. Keli's eyes flew open, his heart leaped hard against his ribs. He was not alone in his captivity!
Bruised, pinioned, and bound as Keli was, his fellow prisoner was in a worse plight, caught hard by the neck in the goblin's iron-fingered grip. He was small, but no child; the cant of his ears as well as his slim build and small stature marked him as a kender. Several pouches of varying sizes and materials bounced at the kender's belt each timeStaag shook him. And Staag, that slope-shouldered, gray skinned nightmare, shook him often and hard simply because it amused him to do so.
The kender, a game little fellow, hitched up his knees and drove them into the goblin's belly. Had a mouse attacked a mountain the result would have been the same. Laughing, Staag loosed his grip on the kender's neck and dropped him.
The kender writhed against his bonds. "Swamp breathed, slime-brained bull," he croaked.
Keli's heart sank. So much for the kender, he thought. Staag's going to kill him now!
But the goblin didn't. Tigo stopped him with a command.
If Staag, his arms too long, his legs too short, his skin the color of something a week dead, was the nightmare, his human companion Tigo was reality gone twisted. Tall and lean, bony-shouldered, with limbs that might have been stolen from a scarecrow, Tigo bore a four-pronged grapnel where his right hand should have been. His eyes, muddy and brown, held little sanity in them.
"I said bring him over here, Staag." Tigo glanced at Keli, who shivered despite the close heat of the summer morning. "And the boy, too."
A bull, the kender had called the goblin, and bull-strong he was. He tossed the kender over one shoulder, Keli over the other and, with no thought, he dropped them next to Tigo.
Breathless, Keli lay still where he fell. The kender, his face in the dirt, snarled another insult.
"Let's just kill the kender and get it over with," Staag grunted. "We should have slit his throat at the tavern and got done with it."
"Aye," Tigo drawled. "And left him bleeding all over the place for anyone to find. I don't think this one traveled alone."
Staag snorted. "Since when do these little vermin travel in company? Tigo, we waste time." He peered up through the forest's brooding green canopy. "It's almost noon and we're still too close to that village. Let's just kill him and the boy and get OUT of here!"
Keli clamped his teeth down on a whimper and prayed to every god his mother had told him was real.
"Be patient, you'll have your fun. But we're not going to kill the boy yet." Tigo, his hands thief-light, slipped a finely tooled leather map case from the kender's shoulder. He laughed, a sound that reminded Keli of rusty hinges creaking. "Nice collection of maps, kender."
The kender hitched himself onto his back, spat dirt, and looked at Tigo with the expression of a guileless child. "Used to clean middens for a living, did you? I can tell by the smell."
Keli groaned again, hoping the kender's blood wouldn't splatter all over him. Yet, though he paled, Tigo didn't reply. Staag kicked the kender.
"Please, kender," Keli breathed. "Be quiet!"
Sometimes a bad dream, steeped in terror and warped perspective, turns funny. Keli felt he was in one of those odd turns now: the kender winked.
Before Keli could be certain he'd seen the wink, Tigo cuffed the kender hard.
"These maps! How recent, how dependable?"
With a speed that left Keli confused, the kender became the spirit of helpful affability. "Some are very old — I've been collecting them for years, you know. It's kind of a hobby of mine. I like the drawings, especially the things the mappers sketch when they don't know who or what lives in the land. And I like the little legends and poems in the borders of the larger ones. That one, the one drawn on hide, is my oldest and the one I think I like the best. I got it in Schallsea; an old man gave it to me and he said — »