"Very well," he said. "I grant what I grant."
The outlaw's sword rose, fell, and Elansa heard Demlin’s cry of pain before she saw his blood. Demlin fell to his knees. Horrified, she leaped for him, catching him before he pitched forward. Holding him, his blood seeping into the fabric of her torn blouse, warm on her own skin, she saw what harm had been done. Demlin’s left ear, severed, lay bloody on the stony ground.
"Beast!" she cried, turning, Demlin still in her arms. "Beast! You-"
The outlaw grabbed her arm and jerked her to her feet. He sheathed his blade and held her with one hand.
"Get out of here," he said to Demlin, his voice cold as steel. "Go back to your masters and tell them to find ransom for your lady."
Demlin, bleeding, managed to spit in disgust. "We will find ransom," he said, his voice ripped and ragged. "We'll pay it in steel blades-"
The outlaw laughed, a cold booming. "Now that's just what I'm wanting. Swords and knives, steel arrowheads and helms and chain mail." He kicked him, and Demlin fell onto his face. The gaping hole on the side of his head poured blood onto the stony path. "You see to it they pay in just that coin, elf, enough to fill two wagons. Tell them to bring it to the Notch, north of here and by Stagger Stream. Have it there by the rising of the full moons-two men, unattended!-and they'll find your mistress alive. Otherwise, they'll find her somewhere in the borderlands, dead when we've done with her."
Down from the rocks, spilling like shadows, came other outlaws, no more than ten, all human but for a dark-haired dwarf, one-eyed and hiding the lack behind a bright green eye patch. At Brand's word, the dwarf tied Elansa’s hands behind her back, and others dragged her away up the trail. Demlin cried out, calling after her.
"Princess! We'll find you! Have faith!"
He said more, shouting to assure her, but his voice had the hollow sound of a memory only dimly recalled.
Chapter 3
In the sky, ravens swirled like storm clouds gathering. Their cries echoed, sharp as knives, in Elansa’s ears. They quarreled at feast, vying for good places on corpses.
Names drifted through her mind. Wing-gloss, Oaktrue, Emberbright, Starglance…
These were the family names of Kethrenan’s trusted warriors. Grief tightened round her throat, a necklace of pain.
Glimmergrass, Slenderbirch, River-reed, and Forrestal… all the names of bright and shining men and woman, all devoted to her husband, all pledged to keep her safe. All dead, surprised by goblins and outlaws in the home forest and murdered.
In her mind, Elansa recited their names over. She must remember them. She must be able to speak them like a litany of praise so she could tell her husband how they'd tried to defend her, how none of them broke and ran, how each stood ground until a goblin's arrow or blade snuffed out his life.
Elansa’s stomach turned, sickened by the stench of the outlaws crowding her close, before and behind. They smelled of old beer and ale, of sweat and untanned leather. They smelled, she thought with bitter disgust, like humans. You'll never mistake the scent of them, an old elf wife had told her. "Humans," she'd said, "why the span of their lives is so short you can smell them dying."
Elansa’s head throbbed with pain. Each step she took, stumbling and weary, seemed to drive the pain deeper, like a hammer driving a nail. She tried to look up the trail, the stony defile that grew more and more narrow. Lifting her head, she stumbled and fell to her knees. Kicked from behind, amid curses and laughter, she staggered up again.
Had they crossed Qualinesti’s borders yet? The thought made her tremble. She'd never in all her young life been outside the forest. Since she was a child, thoughts of the world outside were images of howling wilderness, a place peopled by beings rough and strange. Godless folk-all but the dwarves of Thorbardin and the Silvanesti, those distant cousins of the Qualinesti. Wretched and fallen from sense, since the Cataclysm some of these were engaged in a wild and fruitless search for gods other than those who'd been forever known to the peoples of Ansalon. Seekers, these were called. You heard about them sometimes the way you hear about people's nightmares. Elansa shuddered. Others simply didn't care about gods, believing them to be fictions of the long-lived, superstitions and perhaps demonic agents of a magic they no longer understood. Into these hands she had fallen.
But not for long, she told herself. Not for long. Demlin would be on his way back to Qualinost. He'd tell his tale-his mutilation would scream it!-and Keth would come to fetch her home. He'd not bother with that absurd ransom demand. He'd not care about the orders of outlaws. He'd ride to the Notch with such a force of warriors as these miserable ragtag bandits had never seen. Keth would come to bring her home, and she need only keep herself alive and whole so she could watch her captors receive from the prince's hand what they had earned.
Elansa looked up, a brief glance, and saw only a hard bright sliver of sky, no sun to mark the passing hour. Ahead she saw nothing but the backs of outlaws, bent to climb, their leather shirts greasy and stained black with sweat. On each side, the stone walls grew taller, closer, and sometimes Brand, the most broad-shouldered among them, had to turn sideways to slip through.
Ravens swirled above, like black ash drifting across the sliver of sky. Ravens feasting on the flesh of good men and women, in the forest reveling. Elansa shivered, as though she walked in winter. Did not the name Brand, in some old dialect of Thorbardin, mean Raven?
Climb now, she told herself, climb. Bend your back and climb. Bend and climb, bend and climb. This darker, more brutal chant drove out the litany of the warriors’ names, overriding until it formed her only thought. Mindless as a beast, she climbed, and when at last the way before her cleared, bandits parting and moving right and left, she hardly understood what it was she saw, nor was she able to look at it long.
Noon sun shone overhead, the light darting and glancing from bald stone, a field of rock spread out before her. Elansa tried to lift her hands to shield her eyes. The motion dragged a groan from her. She fell, and it didn't seem to matter to anyone that she did. She lay with her cheek on stone, a princess who had never felt any pillow harsher than satin. A cool wind from the heights passed uncaring hands over her still form, tangling her sweat dampened hair. She opened her eyes and saw that she lay upon a high place, a barren table of rock. Ahead she saw no forest, only fields of stone and tall towers formed by a long-ago tumbling of boulders. Behind, she saw only the dark opening that led back into the defile.
Two hands grabbed her under the arms and dragged her up. A knife flashed, just out of the comer of her eye. She hadn't the strength to be afraid, not even the strength to be grateful when she felt the rope binding her hands fall away. Blood rushed back into her limbs, like blades in her veins, racing. She cried out, then forced herself silent.
Brand stood above her, tall and dark. He dragged her to her feet, grabbed her wrists and tied them again, this time in front. He attached a rope to the one binding her wrists, a long line as if she were a mule to be led. This he gave to Dell, who jerked hard so Elansa must follow. At the brink, she saw a vast field of stone spread out below, chunks of granite like the waste fallen from a sculptor's hammer, heedless as he worked. And the hammer, why it seemed she saw that, too, thrusting up from the stony field as though the sculptor had left it standing on its head, the haft pointing to the sky.
First over the edge was Brand, like a mountain goat as he leaped from stone to stone. Others followed, and now Elansa saw the full count of them. She counted eight bandits before Dell urged her forward. Then she looked at nothing but the ground, making her way by taking each stone right after Dell did. There would be no room for error, and she knew it. One stumble, and she would be dragged.