From where he lay Keli saw a thin line of blood, black in the darkness, trickling down Tas's wrists to his fingers. "Stop — " he hissed, "you're bleeding!"
After a moment, Tas sat still. "Why did they take you?"
Keli shook his head. "I–I don't know."
Tigo's shadow, thin as a black knife, cut between them. Keli fell silent, hoping the kender would do the same. For once Tas did.
Tigo's eyes gleamed like dark, hateful stars. "Don't you know, boy?"
Keli chewed his lip and shook his head.
"You don't know the tale of the brave knight Ergon who went boldly against a barely armed pickpocket with his sword?"
Keli flared. "My father would never fight an opponent who was not equally matched!"
"Wouldn't he?" Slowly Tigo raised his hook-hand. For a moment he seemed lost in the play of Lunitari's blood-red light along the steel. His eyes dimmed as though all their gleam had gone into the grapnel. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. If dead men could speak, Keli thought, his was the voice they would use.
"This hook is a thing I must thank the courageous knight Ergon for. My hand he claimed in payment for an old man's purse."
"You lie," Keli spat.
"Careful, boy. This hand is not flesh and it cuts deep."
"Aye, and you'll kill me anyway. You've said as much. I'd sooner die for the truth than a lie."
Tigo's eyes burned, his jaw twitched. "It is no lie!"
The night's heat was cool when compared with Keli's outrage. It was no easy thing to be a knight in these troubled days. All his life Ergon had followed the rules of his order humbly, honorably, as though they were a code he was born to.
"I remember the tale well — I thought my father would die of the wounds he got at your hands and those of your accomplices. And the old man, he DID die, thief. He was no match for four daggers. My father barely was. And it was no sword my father used, but his own dagger."
Keli choked on his fury, would have said more, but Tas, under pretense of shifting cramped muscles, fell hard against him. Tigo reacted with a howl of outrage. "You'll die for your twisted truth, boy, soon enough. But not yet. For now," he said, eyeing Tas, "I've an interest in the kender.
"What's in your pouches, little bandit?"
Tas shrugged and grinned. "Nothing."
"Nothing?" Like a hawk diving, Tigo's good hand came down, caught the kender by the front of his shirt and lifted him full off the ground, dangling him in front of Staag. "Why don't I believe that?"
The buzzing of the gnats and the shrilling of the crickets seemed louder to Keli. He hoped with all his heart that the kender wasn't going to do something to get himself killed. And from the look of things, he thought, hunching around so that he could see, it wouldn't take much.
The thief's dark eyes were only narrow slits now. His teeth, gleaming white in the light from the fire, were bared in a snarl. He threw the kender down at the goblin's feet. The snarl turned to a grin the moment Staag began to cut the pouches from Tas's belt and the kender raised his protests.
Keli didn't understand the kender. What seemed a matter of soul-wrenching pain only a short time ago — his bound wrists and knees and feet — was as nothing now compared with the rifling of his pouches, the throwing away of what he called his treasures.
"A line of wicking," Staag grumbled, "a gray feather, two chipped arrowheads, a bundle of fletching — junk! Nothing but junk!" He pawed through first one pouch, then another. Tas's fury only amused him.
A gold earring he kept, stuffing it into his own belt pouch along with a ring set with polished quartz and a small enameled pin. The rest, an assortment of things that could not have been of value to any but a kender, he kicked aside.
Tigo, like some thin, black vulture, leaned over Tas. "Just where are you taking us, kender?" he demanded suspiciously.
"I told you, to a place I know where you can do whatever you have to do and no one will find you."
"Aye? Not on some roundabout trail that will lead us to trouble?"
Keli felt Tigo's fury, banked but still hot, where he lay. He prayed the kender would be careful now.
He wasn't. "Not trouble of my making."
Tigo kicked Tas hard, and the whoosh of air exploding from the kender's lungs made Keli's stomach hurt. The kender jack-knifed over, nearly wrapping himself around the thief's ankle. He was furious, but not so furious that he didn't take good aim when he bit. His teeth clamped on the man's leg above his boot and it took Staag to pull him off.
Tigo roared. "Hold him while I rip the belly out of him!"
Keli screamed protest, struggling against his bonds.
"Go on," Tas taunted. "Where will you be then, you brain-sizzled, hook-handed ass? Stranded, that's where you'll be! You haven't a drunk's idea where you are now!"
Tigo would happily have crimsoned the earth with the kender's blood, but Staag had no appetite for killing their guide. Moving faster than Keli thought any goblin could, he whisked the kender away and threw him down next to Keli.
"Keep your mouth shut, kender," he hissed. "I won't be able to keep him off you next time."
Tas choked, gasped for air, and coughed. Keli shrugged himself closer to the kender and nudged him with his shoulder.
"You all right?"
Tas muttered something into the dirt.
"What?"
"I want my dagger, my hoopak, a rock, anything!"
Keli braced his own shoulder against the kender's, offering companionship, commiseration, comfort. "Maybe," he whispered, more for Tas's sake than because he believed, "maybe your friends will find us soon."
Merciless summer sun glared from the hard blue sky, baked the ground, radiated from the humped clusters of rocks. Tanis wiped sweat from his eyes with the heel of his hand and bent to retrieve the one thing Flint had missed: a fog-colored wing feather from one of the gray swans of Cristyne.
Because a cut through the forest from Long Ridge would take a day off their journey to Karsa, the half-elf and his friends had bidden the bride and her new husband farewell the night before and struck south and east at first light. Runne would have kept them longer, but Flint pleaded business and promised her that he would see her again on his way back north.
"I don't think," he told Tanis wryly, "that she's going to miss me or anyone for a time."
Tanis, remembering the hard poke in the ribs Caramon had earned for himself with a similar remark, had offered only a noncommittal smile. It seemed that where Runne was concerned some things could only be said avuncularly.
Now, the darkness bordering the edges of those memories, the half-elf absently stroked the edge of the large gray feather with his thumb. Tas had been here recently.
Or his pouches had. And those had been ruthlessly emptied, their contents carelessly scattered. The hot breeze carried Caramon's deep voice from up the trail and Sturm's answer. Tanis knew by their tones that they had found no sign of either struggle or a body. He left the underbrush and joined Flint where he knelt in the path.
"One more thing, Flint."
The old dwarf took the feather without looking and added it to the pile of oddly assorted objects to be stuffed with hard, angry motions into Tas's pouches.
A blade-broken dagger, a blue earthenware ink pot, a little carved tinderbox, a copper belt buckle that Caramon had lost somehow and which Tas would swear he'd always meant to return, a soft cloth the color of dawn's rose, a bundle of the stiff green feathers Tanis liked best for fletching his arrows… all of these kender-treasures and more had been discarded as so much junk.
Flint's anger might seem, from his tight-lipped muttering, to be directed against a packrat of a kender. Tanis knew the old dwarf better than that.