Since the morning she’d awakened to find Palin gone, Usha had found no comfort in Solace, and in Haven no refuge from her doubts.
Each evening, Dez would return, kicking her own frustration into the nearly empty common room ahead of her, no closer to fulfilling her mission of ordering supplies for her family’s inn.
“I’m telling you, Usha, something’s wrong.”
Dezra shifted in her seat, her frown deepening to a scowl. She moved to slip her dagger from its sheath, then caught the barkeeper’s eye and resisted the impulse to mar the table more. She reminded many people of her infamous aunt, the dragon highlord Kitiara. Golden of hair and skin where Kitiara had been dark and pale, still Dez recalled the fabled highlord in face and form. Caramon, her father, didn’t like to think so, but Dezra had grown up on stories of Kitiara uth Matar, Caramon’s half-sister. The warrior had ruled nearly half the continent of Ansalon before the War of the Lance ended. It was not in Dezra’s nature to seek or embrace the darkness as Kitiara had, but no one doubted that Dez had inherited her aunt’s fierce and restless spirit.
Across the room Banlath the barkeeper sent the gully dwarf to clean the kitchen while he continued wiping the gleaming oak bar, polishing the wood till it shone. He whistled tunelessly through gapped front teeth and did not seem to be paying attention to the two women sitting alone and talking. Still, Dez lowered her voice and dropped her foot from the bench to lean closer to Usha.
“I come here every year. You know that.”
Usha nodded as she finished the last of her supper, a plump patty of flaked fish seasoned with spices and herbs.
“Every year,” Dez said, “I go to Rinn Gallan’s uncle to order the hops, and I go to Varal Kamer for the wine from his own vineyards—even the white my father says isn’t as good as the elven stuff.” She snorted. “But who can get elven wine these days? Probably not even elves.”
“And dwarf spirits,” Usha said. She’d heard the litany before. “I know, Dez. So, what’s wrong?”
“No one has any. Rinn’s uncle knew I was coming from the first day I arrived. From what Rinn said when he saw us, we were expected and welcome. But now—and suddenly, if you ask me—no one has anything. No hops, no wine, and for some reason, in this city where hill dwarves have lived for gods only know how long—” Again, Dez’s boot heel thumped on the bench—“not a drop of dwarf spirits to be found. Or,” she said, darkly, “none to sell. Whatever farmers are selling in the market, the serious merchants seem to have nothing.”
“All your suppliers?”
“Not just mine. Everyone’s! You can’t buy flour in any great quantity, nor grain or seed either. The poulterers aren’t killing their chickens, and shepherds aren’t bringing their flocks in from the hills.”
Listening to Dez was like watching shadows begin to coalesce into an ominous image. “They’re stockpiling. Aline says they’ve been edgy here all summer. We’ve seen that since we arrived. Who wouldn’t be with the air full of rumors about Beryl moving dark knights around? But edgy is one thing ...”
Dez nodded. “Stockpiling is another.”
Usha looked over her shoulder at the barman and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Aline tells me Qui’thonas has heard nothing about an impending attack, but... people decide to hoard for two reasons, don’t they? Either they’re afraid. Really afraid. Or they’re hoping to make a tidy pile of coin once a shortage sets in.”
“Or both.”
Outside the sky had gone dark enough for stars to shine. They heard the cry of a watchman on the city wall, faint and distant. Closer, the clop of a horse’s hooves and the murmur of its rider as they passed by the tavern door.
“Usha, let’s get out of here. Something’s up. Something’s going to happen.”
Usha felt it, a creeping sense of doom like the stillness before a storm.
“First thing tomorrow,” she said. “We can come back later—or find what we need somewhere else and let people remember this as the year the ale wasn’t as good as usual at your father’s inn. Much better than remembering it as the year we went for a trip to Haven and never came home.”
It did not take them long to pack, and Usha paid the landlord his due while Dez saw that their horses were fed an extra measure of oats. They would not take time for those things in the morning. They wanted to be at the gates when the sun rose over the river.
Seated high upon the back of his black dragon, Sir Radulf Eigerson, the knight known as Red Wolf, took his talon of dragons across the night sky. The Qualinesti Forest was a vast darkness below until, surging lower over the White-rage River, they left the elf kingdom and entered the Free Realm of Abanasinia. At Sir Radulf’s command, with the moon behind them, the six red dragons dropped over the river and followed its gleaming waters through Darken Wood until the walled city of Haven came into view.
Sir Radulf pumped his fist twice, and the talon separated into three parts, sailing out ahead of him. A word of command leaped from his mind to that of Ebon, his great black dragon. The beast’s spiny crest rose—dark, killing joy gleamed in her eyes. With a powerful thrust of her wings, Ebon flew higher and circled the city in wide loops. From this height, Sir Radulf watched as his six knights took their red dragons into a long-practiced maneuver. Two at the north end of the city, two at the south, and the third pair soaring over the center of Haven, the dark knights set their dragons to work.
Great gouts of fire poured from enormous, fanged jaws. Mounted upon high-backed, tall-fronted saddles hung with weapons and chased with silver, encased in armor as black as the hide of the talon’s leader, a half dozen knights guided their beasts in carefully coordinated flight, igniting roofs, destroying a tall-masted ship moored at the riverside and setting the wooden piers alight.
Tracing the brilliant line of flames racing along the waterfront as the piers burnt, Sir Radulf urged Ebon lower, the better to watch his talon at work. The red dragons’ wide, leathery wings beat the air with a sound like thunder.
Connected one to the other in heart and mind, the knight felt Ebon’s wild surge of bloodlust, her fierce urge to be with her comrades at the killing. He had some sympathy for the dragon’s feelings, but Sir Radulf held the beast back. He would not give in to that kind of thing himself nor allow it in his knights; he would not permit it in the dragon. Savagery was for foot soldiers, draconians, goblins, brutes, and those humans who hadn’t the skill or wit to be more than battle fodder.
Over the river, one red broke ranks with his partner. The lady knight Mearah sent her dragon lower to set alight a line of piers on the side of the river where the tall houses of Haven’s wealthy sat upon brooding clifftops. She was a fierce one, Lady Mearah, the daughter of an old Solamnic family who’d found her warrior spirit needed the kind of fire that had become nothing but ember and ash among Solamnics. Lady Mearah warmed herself at grim fires and rumor said her kin referred to Lady Mearah as the fallen child. In her hands, the operation she and Sir Radulf had so perfectly envisioned and planned was now being faultlessly executed. It would win the praise of their masters in Neraka, perhaps the approval of the green dragon herself.
And so Sir Radulf would allow nothing to interfere in its execution. To him, smiling thinly behind the black mask of his helm, the sounds of terror drifting up from the ground were not a call to join in a slaughter. They simply meant that all was going as planned.
3
Usha woke suddenly, Dezra’s voice cutting through the haze of sleep. “Get up, Usha! Fire! Get up!”
She scrambled out of bed and dragged on her clothes. She heard screaming from the street and smelled smoke. It came in through the window on a choking gust of night wind, and it came from under the door as well. Someone pounded on the door, yelling, “Get up! Get out!” and ran on to hammer the same warning at another door, then another.