He would have to go out there again, today onto the roads where the Qualinesti Forest moved restlessly before the eye, and he would keep Lord Thagol’s orders.
Chapter Four
Kerian slipped through the first shadows of day’s end, a pretty serving girl with her hair tied back, dressed in clothing of a simple cut, rough cotton shirt, trews of a heavy, serviceable brown fabric, and black boots. But for the ribbon twined into her thick golden braid, she was unmarked by her master’s colors.
The clothing she had from Zoe Greenbriar for a lie. “I’m going away with a party of the Senator’s servants out into the wood to prepare his hunting lodge. The last time I rode in a skirt, thickets tore my skin and it’s long pants for me!” She’d regretted the lie; she and Zoe didn’t swear false to each other, but the Senator truly would depart for his lodge in a few days, and in a house as large as Rashas’s, no one would miss her right away with Zoe’s story as good cover.
The lordly part of the city slept, elves who had the luxury of leaving the debris of Autumn Harvest celebrations to their servants. Those, the Kagonesti in hall and house, cleaned garden and hall, laid firewood for the morning, lifted windows to the first scent of the season, the poignant mingling of settling dew, rich earth and fading leaves. Through the wealthy precincts of her lover’s capital, Kerian went. The streets and byways traced graceful curves, gentle windings round elf-made pond, round garden, past a shadow-draped and sudden house that only seemed to be a jutting of stone and tree from the side of a lofty cliff. Only servants did Kerian see and one or two dark-armored Knights on their rounds. Of those, one looked at her long and whistled low as she passed. Head high, she did not turn or ever acknowledge the man. He was human, lackey of a foreign occupier and dangerous. She had learned that the best way past these creatures of Neraka was to be always aware of where they were and never to make eye contact.
Gradually, the paths widened and became roads. The roads no longer went in wandering ways but became straighter as she came to the part of the city where tradesmen lived and worked. At the mouth of an alley running behind the frame buildings of Milliner’s Row, she stopped and looked back. Down the long shadowy tunnel framed by shops and warehouses, she saw a brightness of late sunshine and the royal residence framed in the opening.
A small breeze drifted from behind, chill fingers tugging wisps of hair from the braid at the sides of her face.
Looking one last time at the royal residence Kerian’s breath caught for a hard moment in her chest, then she turned away, lips tight. No man of the king’s would ever find Iydahar, and if she did not leave her lover she would be abandoning her brother.
In all cities, in all lands, no one knows the ways in and out better than those who serve. Kerian had served for many years in Qualinost; she knew the city as well as all her Kagonesti kin and better than those who were her masters. In the late hour of the first festival day, with the sun slanting long to the west and shadows growing, Kerian made her way through the city unremarked, a servant with a leather wallet slung across her shoulder. Any who saw her thought that wallet held what it always did—missives from her master to one or another of his fellow senators, to the king himself, perhaps to Sir Eamutt Thagol in his grim, cold headquarters. It held nothing like that. In the wallet were a small sack of coins, among them three steel, and a smaller leather sack filled fat with hard cheese, bread and cold slices of lamb.
As she approached the eastern bridge, Kerian lifted her head, picking out a scent among all those of the city, one from beyond the shining bridge. Downwind, past the towers where Sir Eamutt’s Knights walked, bristling with weapons, stinking like humans and clanking in their black armor, away past orchards and winding carter’s roads, stealing into the sleeping city came a whisper of smoke, a thin suggestion of burning in the north.
In the next moment the wind shifted, as it does at day’s end in autumn. It slid from the west and brought her the stench of rotted flesh on the severed heads piked upon the bridge.
Kerian hung for a moment in the darkness of shadow pooling around the eastern tower. She listened to the Knights talking above. They spoke in Common with a harsh Nerakan accent that made the utilitarian language known throughout Krynn sound guttural. They wondered when the watch would change, wondered if they would be paid.
Kerian took the ribbon from her hair, the braid bound by slim strips of soft, sueded leather. She did not want to be marked by her master’s colors once she left the city. Should it be necessary, she’d prepared a tale that would leave any questioner believing she was but a servant from an outlying farm, gone to the city for the festival and on her way home again. She let the ribbon go, saw it caught by the wind and sent tumbling along the ground behind. One of the Knights spotted it and said to his fellows that he’d like to follow that bit of silk to the one who’d worn it.
“Ar,” said another, spitting. “She ain’t wearing it now, boy. Means she took it off for a reason that ain’t got to do with you.”
The Knights laughed, and carefully Kerian waited until the sound of their voices grew distant as they resumed their watch walk. When she knew them gone, she slipped right around the base of the tower, out from under the bridge and into the broad swathe of meadow grass that ran down to the peach orchards.
She ran low, bent over and barely ruffling the grasses, and she didn’t stand straight again until she crossed the carter’s road separating the meadow from the orchard. Baskets stood in stacks along the verge, left there from the harvest. Inside the orchard, leaves drooped, spent with the harvest, waiting to fall. Autumn breathed upon the rising mist, the scent of changing, of leaving.
Kerian shivered.
Once Iydahar had said to her, “You will hear it said the Kagonesti are savages. You will hear it said that Qualinesti did not steal us away. You will hear it said that others stole us, humans, minotaurs, ogres, or goblins looking for profit. Sometimes you will hear it said the Qualinesti rescued us from those creatures, but we know better. We will always hear the wailing of our kin. We will always remember the faces of those who stole us from our home. Stay in your city, Keri, but you stay at a cost. There will come a time, Turtle, when you find you can’t remember how to be who you are.”
Turtle. The old pet name didn’t sting. It recalled her heart to another time, another place, and the brother who loved her no matter what befell. How would Iydahar feel about her if he knew her lover was a Qualinesti, and not only that, the king of the Qualinesti?
In the sky, crows shouted, raucous and sailing toward the bridge. The scent of smoke vanished, then returned. Kerian ran swiftly, in and out the rows of peach trees, through the orchard, heading for the forest road and the way to Sliathnost.
At the edge of the orchard, where the ground sloped down into forest, Kerian halted and looked back. Over the gnarled branches of peach trees, four towers stood high. Silver spans of bridges gleamed. Kerian bade silent farewell to the bridges, the towers and the shining city. She ran down the hill and into the forest, that green and glossy realm which so much reminded her of the Ergothian wilds of her childhood. For a time, running, she was again the child, the girl who lived in a land of forest and seaside sky.
“Can’t catch me, Keri! Keri can’t catch me!”
Iydahar flung the old taunt, laughing. Kerianseray had known that scorn all her young life, and she had known its tempering love. What ran between them, brother and sister, was always a weaving of this, the scorn of the elder, the son whose place in the universe of his parents had been encroached upon by this unexpected girl, and the abiding affection he would never deny. She was, after all, and no matter how supremely annoying her very existence, his little sister.