"Come play prince with me," she would whisper at the door, and he would leave his stern chamber for the luxury of hers.
"Come play warrior-maid with me," he would growl, laughing at the door and holding it wide.
Kethrenan winced, thinking of his bed, her bed…
"No," Lindenlea said, seeing his glance. She stepped into the room. "Don’t think about that, Keth. She's a quick-witted girl, your princess. She'll take care of herself, and she will be well when you find her."
"Do you think so?" he said, but he didn't care about her reply. He settled his sword in its sheath. Rough hands would touch. The hands of outlaws would paw. Humans might already have claimed a princess of Qualinesti. Kethrenan’s mouth filled with the bloody taste of rage, hot and coppery. So strong the flavor that he moved his tongue around behind his teeth, wondering if there were truly blood there.
Lindenlea didn't offer more false assurances. He needed only to look into her eyes to see that she felt what he did: They would find Elansa, and they would avenge her. No matter if she were well and whole. No matter if she were defiled. Those gods-forsaken outlaws who had laid hands on her, if only to snatch her away and no worse, had earned their deaths the moment they touched her.
He did not doubt that Elansa would rejoice to see the blood of her captors run like rivers down the naked stone in the moaning lands where now she lay prisoner.
Elansa counted the days with difficulty. The iron sky made it hard to track the sun. No shadow lay on the ground in such even light. She saw no moons at night, and all her life had become a narrow torment of walking, interrupted only by the agony of a sleep that brought no rest. She no longer stumbled or fell. That had nothing to do with strength or with having become accustomed to traveling stony ground in boots whose leather soles were beginning to split at the seam. She would not fall, for if she did she knew she would not rise again. Brand would have to kill her and give over his scheme for ransom. She did not want to die. She wanted-more than she had ever wanted anything-to reach the ransom point, to see not two wagons filled with weapons but an army of elves geared for killing.
It would not matter if she were killed in the fighting as long as she lived long enough to see Kethrenan spit this outlaw Brand on his lance.
And so she walked, the joints of her ankles, her knees, and her hips aching. When in rare moments she could be still, she sagged against a boulder, head low and groaning, her muscles cramped in painful spasms. There was not enough water to drink. They rationed what they had in the rank-tasting leather water bottles, but no outlaw willingly shared with her.
"No sense in it," Arawn had said. "She's either soon back to her forest, or dead. Why waste the water on her?"
Char pointed out that here was another example of why Arawn wasn't known for long-headedness. "She dies before the ransom point, idiot, and what do we have? Blisters on our feet and a dead elf. She gets there, maybe more."
Grudgingly, Arawn admitted that was so. Nevertheless, he was not the first to share his water bottle. No one had found running water since Char and Tianna had spotted the goblins. In this more westerly part of the barren land it seemed there had been little enough water in good seasons. Now, there was dust.
Dust blew constantly, so that Elansa’s throat burned, and her eyes felt dry as the earth itself. Her skin stung. Her cheeks and throat and arms were wind-scoured and raw. Her hair hung tangled and matted until, in frustration, she could have wept-had she tears.
After the second day, Brand called Tianna and Ley to him. They went aside from the others, talking quietly, and when he came back to the fire, he came back alone. The two went off into the night, loping across the ground as though full sun shone and they had a packed trail ahead of them. No one seemed the least curious, but Elansa lay a long time awake, wondering. She had not seen the gray line of the Qualinesti forest since the day before. She thought-she could not be sure, and so perhaps she hoped-that Ley and Tianna had turned west when they left the camp, back toward the forest.
Elansa looked at Char, sitting a small distance from her. It was, she realized, the distance he'd sit if there had been fire between. She thought she would ask him, "Have they gone to the forest?" But she didn't. He carried two leather bottles, one for water and one for dwarf spirits. His water bottle lay beside his foot, and the other sat upon his knee. He was not a good one to talk to when he'd been pulling at that bottle, sliding from surly to nasty to dangerous.
The night’s cold fingers crept beneath the folds of her dusty green cloak. The hound Fang dropped down beside her, his breath smelling like blood and whatever he'd killed for his supper. Elansa curled into a tight ball of aching muscles and fell into what passed for sleep.
Before dawn had changed the dark of night to watery gray, Char’s booted toe nudged her awake. Fang was gone, but only lately. She had the sense of the hound’s nearness. Char dropped something to the ground beside her, a small strip of rabbit meat. His water bottle he set down more carefully, and it was that Elansa took first, drinking in quick greedy gulps before the dwarf’s hand darted to take it back.
She noted two things in that moment. Char’s hand was strongly scarred, as though fire had kissed it, and she had, in the last few days, acquired the habit of drawing breath to snarl when things were taken from her. She didn't now. She'd have gotten his boot the same way Fang might if he'd snarled. Still she felt it, the tightening of the throat, the instant when her lip would curl…
She thought, Who am I? She climbed to her feet, refusing to groan or even wince at the pain and the stiffness. Who am I? A woman who knows why a dog snarls.
The goblins on the east side of the Forest-Down-Around-the-Hammer-Rock-But-Not-Too-Close held mixed opinions about how lucky they were that the hob Gnash had come to take over things. Some puked up old legends about how living with that hobgoblin as master was a lot like living in the Abyss. There, they said, the only bird in the sky was the vulture, and if Gnash was a bird, he'd have been a vulture. Most, though, didn't go on with god-talk. Goblins had little to do with that, for gods-so everyone believed who wasn't an elf gone fey with age or a dwarf whose brains were calcified to stone-were no more than shadows. Most sensible people believed there were no gods now, just a bunch of stories you tell to children to make them shut up their babble and wail or they'd find themselves in worse straits.
For the most part the goblins who used to belong to Golch and now belonged to the hob Gnash took what came, and often enough it was booty from raids on villages and travelers foolish enough to go into the borderland without a strong escort. It was a good enough life. Goblins didn't mind waking each morning in their little hovels with the scraps and bones of their meals scattered round the ring of ashes that used to be the night’s fire-as long as among the litter they could see the wink and gleam of weapons, the naked limb of a captured elf woman flung out in dream-tormented sleep from beneath a rough blanket, a human woman, any kind of woman not goblin….
The goblin who had found sign of Brand's outlaws in the borderland was like-minded to the more accepting of his brethren. Ithk was his name, and trotting into the goblin town on the east side of the Forest-Down-Around-the-Hammer-Rock-But-Not-Too-Close, his breath streaming in the chill air, Ithk greeted guards and was passed through, recognized. As with all goblin towns, this one used to be a village where humans lived. Some had been hunters who took game out of the Qualinesti forest when they dared, some were farmers who scratched a living out of the stony soil, but the true value of the town had been its inn, a place known for the fineness of its ale and wine-some of that wine got from elven traders who didn't mind stepping out of the forest to do business-and the thickness of its feather beds. Travelers found that inn a good place to stop, and it became a favorite of traders and mercenaries and folk getting from one place to another. And so there were baker shops-two-and a butcher and a herbalist and even a chandler and a blacksmith. It had been a fine little village, as these borderland places go, and ripe for picking.