None of these words would he have used to describe his feeling. He was no poet; he was a hard-eyed soldier. Still, he felt his connection to the forest and the kingdom as though all the blood of those distant fathers and mothers had watered the ground around his feet, and he himself had put down the roots of an oak, thick and strong. His brother the elf king had his court, his contentious senate, his lords and his ladies. Solostaran was welcome to all that. Kethrenan had his barracks and training grounds, his warriors. He had armories filled with swords and shields and armor, and every smith in the city his to call. These things he wielded for the good of the kingdom.
In the largest of the barracks rooms, the prince stood in the sunlight of a crisp autumn afternoon. A spare place, here Kethrenan loved best to be. One of a dozen like it, the barracks was nothing but a great sleeping hall for his soldiers with brackets for torches upon the walls and-as in ancient days-no hearth but a long fire pit on either side of which stood long trestle tables. He stood now, in the end of the day, leaning over one of the tables, shoulder to shoulder with his cousin Lindenlea. Cousin and the second commander of his brother's army, she was his most trusted friend, a woman who'd set out on the soldier's road at the same time he did, who'd taken her» training alongside him, and who had risen in the ranks as a hawk rises to the sky, effortlessly. Outside the window soldiers practiced swordplay, and arrows wasped and thunked into the thick straw butts. Someone cheered, another jeered, and challenge crossed challenge, like sword blades. These things Kethrenan heard, but only vaguely. His attention he gave to the map spread out on the scarred table.
"Where is the last place you saw them, Lea?"
She pointed to the eastern edge of the kingdom where waterways ran whose banks were not, in this autumn season, too much troubled with water.
"Right here, just across the border. We're drier in the forest than we're used to being in this season, but out there they're dry as stones. The goblins will be crossing into the forest. If not now, soon."
Kethrenan grunted. "And this new leader?"
"An ugly brute, from what I hear. He's not a goblin. He's a hob."
The prince slid his cousin an interested glance. "We haven't seen a hobgoblin around that part of the border in years. What’s his story?"
"I don't know. The best my scouts could learn was that he's come up from the south, or maybe the east. It’s all wind and rumors. What's certain is that Golch is out and this hob Gnash is in. All our scouts agree on that, and that he's running things in the three goblin towns closest to our borders."
Kethrenan took that information in silence, returning to his study of the map. Down from the White-rush River, streams went branching, blue from the cartographer’s inkwell. All had been depicted by the kind of careful line that comes from a tightly nibbed pen and a steady hand. Some had been drawn thin, some fat, some led into lakes, and others wandered through the forest, following the will of the world, growing or shrinking as Krynn herself dictated. The forest through which these streams went-these days slowly-was shown not in inked lines but dappled green brush strokes. Fair Qualinesti, sunny glades and secret shadowed glens, lay upon the map as beautifully as though it were seen in a still pond's reflection. The dab, sweep, and swirl of a brush depicted the wealth and wonder of elms and aspens, of steadfast oaks and, in the south near that edge of the forest that abut-ted the stony land between the elven kingdom and the dwarven, tall pines whose variety rivaled even that of the oaks. So hardy were those pines that when they did not grow on level ground, they managed to cling with gnarled grip to the sheer crumbling edge of the glens that scored the part of the borderland where the world was more stone than soil.
Without a word from her prince, Lindenlea pointed to the map again. "Here," she said, slipping her finger along the White-rush River. "And here, and here." She tapped the western part of the forest, right by the Straits of Algoni. "Here, and here. Right down to the Wayreth border, and of course all through Qualinesti and strong along the Kharolis Mountains."
This she said in answer to the unvoiced question: Where are your scouts?
Kethrenan nodded, satisfied. "I want reports from all the borders in the usual time."
He tapped restless fingers on the eastern border where the cartographer showed only dun reaches. The blandness of the color changed only a little to gray to indicate rising ground in the south and east. These were the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains. They held little of note but the old fortress standing a-straddle the gap between two of the northmost arms of that mountain chain. Pax Tharkas, fallen to ruin. Pax Tharkas, a reminder of better days when there was no wild windy waste between the two kingdoms. In those times, good roads had run through the foothills, kept safe by elf warriors and dwarf soldiers. It wasn't quite as the legends said, that a fair virgin could walk those roads with a sack of gold in each hand and reach her destination unmolested, but things were better then than now. In those days, goblins hob and small had seldom come out of their dark haunts in the deep mountain vales.
"Send word out that I want to hear from your scouts on the eastern border every second day."
Lindenlea nodded, a cool glint in her eye. "And if anyone comes across the hob?"
"Tell them to do what they do best, and don't bother bringing me back a trophy, just the news that it’s dead."
"Yes, my prince," she said.
Outside, a cheer rose up, and other shouts in chorus. Swords clashed, the ringing martial music. Lindenlea glanced out the window to see the last light of day running like silver on a sword‘s blade. They didn't fight with blunted edges. They fought to the bone and the blood, and so good were they by now that mail and armor suffered, but flesh seldom did.
"They'll all be in soon for their mess," she said to the prince. "And I know they'd be happy if you joined them, Keth."
He grunted, his mind still on his map, counting his scouts, counting his borderland guard, and thinking about whether he wanted to send an extra force out to the border or lie back, waiting to see what would happen. Warden of the Forest Kethrenan was, but still at his very heart, he was a hunter. He understood the virtue of patience. By the time the hall began filling up with his warriors, two things had been decided: He would stay to eat with his soldiers, and he would wait to see what the new leader of three goblin towns would do.
Across the barren land a cold wind came up from the south, like word from a cruel land. Elansa woke shivering, her cloak damp with night-chill. Each night, for the past three, the air had hung damp. Never did rain fall, and in the gullies meant to shine with water the stones lay dry with only a thin thread of water slipping over. There was only the wind, and at night wolves howled in the stony reaches. Into that wind, for three days, Brand and his outlaws had traveled, Elansa in tow. They headed north, and though she didn't know for certain, Elansa hoped they were going toward the place Brand had called the Notch, the meeting place where ransom would be delivered and she would be returned to her people.
If Demlin had survived his journey….
If word had been received in Qualinost in time for Keth to send the ransom….
That would infuriate him, that particular demand- two wagons filled with weapons and armor. Kethrenan would find it easier to part with gold and jewels, to open the rich coffers in the tower of the Sun and pile up baubles. To have to part with precious steel… this outrage would burn his heart.