On the road, the thunder of horses grew louder. A rough voice shouted something—one vile word in Common. Heart slamming in her chest, Kerian looked around wildly before plunging into the deadfall. Branches tore at her face, at her hair, ripped her shirt as she shouldered through the tangle. Her ankle gave way, she fell, and scrambled up again. On the road, the sound of riding grew, harsh voices shouted to each other. Damning her ankle, her bleeding face, Kerian shoved her way into the thicket of dead trees.
Almost through, the strap of her wallet snagged on the last branch. She pulled, she tried to twist away. On the road the Knights grew closer. Cursing in the language of her childhood, a word her parents had never taught, she yanked her little knife out of the belt sheath and severed the wallet by the strap. She reached for it as it fell—
“Ho!” cried a voice from the road. “Chance, what’s that! Supper, eh?”
Supper: a deer in the thicket, a wild turkey, a covey of quails?
Kerian left the wallet, and heedless of the noise she made now, ran. Tripping, falling, and climbing up again, she put as much distance between herself and the road as she could. Headlong, she splashed through a shallow stream, soaking her boots. She slipped on stones, on patches of fallen leaves.
The last time she fell, she did not rise.
All around her, the forest seemed to waver. Her mouth ran dry; she tried to swallow and failed. The air seemed to press against her ears, against her temples. As from a great distance, she heard the Knights, their voices raised in sharp cries, yet she couldn’t make out their words.
Kerian stood, unsure of her senses. She saw, but not clearly. Blood traced a thin red path down her forehead, her temple, her cheek. She hardly felt that. Most disconcerting, now Kerian heard nothing at all, not the Knights’ faint voices, not even leaves rustling though she dimly saw them sway in the wind.
So it was, bereft of senses, Kerian had no warning before a hard hand grabbed her arm and jerked her down and back.
Chapter Five
Flung off her feet, Kerian hit the ground hard. She felt no pain but found herself gasping for breath. A hard hand clamped over her mouth.
Kerian looked up from the ground and right into the eyes of a dwarf. She had a swift impression of dark hair, a thick beard, and the kind of pale face they have who live under the mountains in Thorbardin. Sweat ran on his face, sliding into his black beard. He breathed hard. He had been running, too.
His eyes flashed, strange dark eyes with glinting blue flecks. He pressed harder, but with his free hand he gestured, away past the distant barrier of broken trees. He didn’t jerk a thumb or point a finger; all the fingers of his free hand were oddly twisted, withered and useless, and so it looked like he was shaking his fist at the distant road.
Kerian tried to sit, but the dwarf shifted his grip and pressed her back, his elbow and all his weight behind it keeping her shoulders flat to the stony earth. She became aware, though dimly, of the sharpness of his elbow, the bite of a rough-edged rock between her shoulder blades.
The dwarf said something. Kerian knew he did because she saw his lips move. She frowned; he jerked his chin. Kerian looked to the road again.
A troop of mounted Knights had stopped there, silent as ghosts in nightmare! Through branches and leaves, Kerian saw their black armor. One, the leader, threw back his visor and she recognized the stocky Knight named Sir Chance, he who had decorated the eastern bridge of Qualinost with ghoulish trophies of murder. Her heart jumped as one of the Knights pointed into the forest. The leader shook his head. He spurred his mount, and the others followed silent as phantasms, up the road and gone.
Kerian’s eyes met the dwarfs. He sat back, letting her sit up. She rubbed the place between neck and shoulder where he’d pinned her. She’d just learned a thing about dwarves few realized—not so tall as elves or humans, still they were weightier than they seemed. As Kerian drew breath to speak, the dwarf shook his head. He pressed a finger to his lips. Then he touched his ear.
Listen!
Kerian did, and she realized that her ability to hear was becoming restored to her. She turned to the dwarf. With great relief, she said, “I can hear.”
The dwarf seemed unimpressed. His voice pitched low, he said, “You can, and maybe yon Knights can’t? Might be you’re seeing better now, and they’re not?” He snorted. “D’ye think, missy, you might want to be quiet a while yet, and a little bit still?”
I am not fond of this dwarf, Kerian thought.
Yet she had to admit he was right: The Knights were on the road, and they were not far away. She heard their voices now, some still pressing the point that they should have chased whatever had bolted into the forest. So close, they would hear her if she spoke too loudly, but they could not see her. There was too much of woodland between them. Stiffly, Kerian got to her feet. She dusted herself off, picked dirt and brittle leaves out of her hair as best she could.
“Who are you?” she said. She didn’t whisper. As he had, she simply pitched her voice low. Suspicion narrowed her eyes. “What are you doing in the king’s forest?”
The dwarf cocked his head. “The better question is, what’s happened to your king’s forest?”
A chill skittered up Kerian’s spine. She had thought of the phenomenon that had confused her senses as a thing that had happened to her, to the dwarf. She hadn’t thought of it as something that had happened to the forest itself, but again, the dwarf was right.
“Didn’t think of it like that, did you?” The dwarf scowled.
Kerian said stiffly. “You haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here?”
The dwarf shrugged. “I could ask the same thing. They’re all kicking up their heels at the autumn party in the city. Not you?” His lips twitched a little in his beard. Not to smile, certainly not. “You don’t look like a hunting girl, and those pretty white hands never planted a field or beat chaff from the grain.”
Kerian raised her chin and lifted her hands to tuck stray locks into her braid. She didn’t know dwarves at all, had not seen them but now and then in Qualinost, and only from a distance in the years before the Chaos War when hill dwarves came into the kingdom to trade their goods.
Her voice cool, she said, “I haven’t heard that of all the dwarf clans, those in Thorbardin are the rudest. I am Kerianseray.” She did not say, “of Qualinost” or “of the House of Rashas.” She did not say “a friend of the king himself,” though she would like to have said all those things to this arrogant dwarf. “You haven’t answered my question.”
He shrugged. “I’m here in the wood for the same reason you are—not interested in having conversations with black-hearted Knights out of gods-blasted Neraka.”
It was no answer, truly, but Kerian didn’t press the point. She looked at him long. His beard was thick and glossy. His dark hair, shining silver at the temples, was cut rough and shaggy, long enough to fall over his shirt collar. The shirt itself was unremarkable, unbleached cotton and the wide-sleeved kind you’d see a taverner or shop-owner wearing. The same could be said for his breeches, made of brown, tough fabric.
Slantwise across his back hung a thick bedroll. Around his waist he wore a broad leather belt from which hung a throwing axe, a leather water bottle filled fat, a coil of rope and a knife. His boots were of fine sturdy leather, and he wore a single earring in his left ear, a bright silver ring to suggest he wasn’t so humble of fortune as he might seem.
“Are y’finished lookin’ now?” he asked when it seemed she was.