Chance spurred his horse forward. Halfway across the wooden bridge, he pulled to a stop and looked back over his shoulder. Beyond the gorge, beyond the clearing, the forest shimmered, shifting before his eyes.
A heat mirage, he thought, wiping sweat again.
Chill touched him, turning sweat cold between his shoulders. Why did only the trees shimmer, the branches waver as though he were drink-addled and his eyes unable to hold sight steady? Chance felt suddenly that eyes peered at him from the shadowy depths of the Qualinesti Forest, malevolent watchers.
“What?” said the guard, looking where Chance did.
He looked, but plainly he did not see.
Chance shook his head. “Nothing. Just the heat.”
Uneasiness followed Chance across the bridge and along the road as the four silver bridges spanning the city came into sight, the golden towers of Qualinost rising above in the late sunlight In their bloody sack, the heads of thirteen elves, one bleeding fresher than its fellows, bounced against the horse’s broad shoulder. Passing beneath the east-facing span of Qualinost’s shining bridge, Sir Chance Garoll, Chance Headsman, looked up to the parapet running from watchtower to watchtower. North, south, and west, those parapets ran in clean, unbroken lines. This eastern one, though, bristled like a hound with its hackles up. Spears thrust up from the rampart, two dozen of them evenly spaced. Gleaming points winked at the sky. Here would rest the remains of one farmer and a dozen elf robbers killed like the worst criminals, beheaded with axe and sword. They were not more than luckless members of the scattered bands of ruffians and outlaws who had spent the summer harassing the green dragon’s Knights. Chance and his fellows had harvested these heads from as far south as Ahlanost near the border between the elf kingdom and Thorbardin of the dwarves. The orders to rout and kill these marauders came from Lord Eamutt Thagol, himself commissioned by the great Marshal Medan, the dragon’s own overlord and general, whose job it was to keep order in the elf kingdom.
A last chance for Lord Thagol, Chance thought grimly, this post to Qualinost No one ever said it out loud, but Knights did whisper that Thagol had fallen afoul of his sponsoring lords in Neraka, had become a liability. It was Medan’s faith in the man that kept Thagol from a worse posting than this one. They had once served together in the Chaos War, brothers in arms before the gods left Krynn and the world fell to the Dragon Purge.
It might be, said rumor, that Medan had his old friend posted to Qualinost, this relatively quiet place, because he’d seen or sensed the first shiverings of madness threatening the Skull Knight and wanted to get him out of the way of those who would judge him unfit to serve. Too long inside the minds of others, it was said of Eamutt Thagol, or it might be the Skull Knight had looked into the wrong skull, there in Neraka where the lord Knights of the order ruled.
When Marshall Medan heard a whisper or two in the forest, a tale in a tavern, a song newly minted about outlaw-heroes, he understood that this tinder needed only a spark for rebellion to flare, and only a man like Lord Thagol could curb such a rebellion.
The eastern bridge of Qualinost sprouted heads. Many more heads would join them as the robberies and outlawry continued. They were a stubborn and subtle people, the elves of Qualinesti, thought Headsman Chance.
Suddenly his belly clenched; his blood ran chill. He forced himself to think of something else. From Sir Eamutt Thagol few things remained long secret. Thagol Dream-walker, some named him, and such thoughts as those Chance had just entertained might well look like doubt, or worse, like insubordination. Such thoughts as these were best not framed in words, even inside the borders of his own skull.
Chapter Two
Soft, the girl with the spilling mane of honey hair slipped from her lover’s bed. She smelled of exotic spices and foreign lands, for her soaps and oils and perfumes came to her from distant Tarsis. By merchant caravan, these toiletries came, traveling the green dragon’s realm and brought to the royal residence, a king’s gift for his beloved. Just then, Kerianseray’s scented hair was her only covering, falling to her hips, thick and rippling down her back. On padding feet, she crossed the room, her footfalls making no sound on the soft thick rugs scattered around the high chamber. Woven in Silvanesti, a long time ago in the years before even the First Cataclysm, these rugs represented wealth on a scale that would have then fed a village of farmers for generations.
Kerian scooped up her clothing from the floor, the rose and purple blouse, the linen trousers, her small clothes. Lightest silk, the white camisole slid easily over her head. She stepped into silken trews of the kind that came only to above the knee and cinched the waist loosely with a drawstring of golden silk cord. In bed, the king stirred. Kerian glanced over her shoulder to see if he stirred to wake. He did not. Some dream moved him. She took a step closer, back to the bed, then another.
No sun shone in the window yet; the stars had only started to fade. Beneath a canopy of shadow, the elf king slept, and what light there was came in through the window to illuminate his face. His hair lay like gold on the pillow, his arm cradled his cheek. The son of Tanis Half-Elven, Gilthas would never have the beard his father had, for he had not the same measure of human blood in him. Still, in some lights he showed a downy cheek, the suggestion of a beard.
Again the king stirred. Kerian wondered whether he stirred in pleasant dream or in nightmare. With the latter, she had some familiarity. He was a haunted one, her lover. Outside, in corridors, voices ghosted by, whispering the day awake. Kerian turned from the king to continue dressing, crossing the room to the mirror, a long sheen of glass framed in scrolled silver. As she lifted her hair, she heard the king wake.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling at Gilthas in the mirror as he sat up. He was a little taller than most elves, for he had a human grandfather, it was whispered, a man whose name no one knew. It was said that Tanis Half-Elven, the king’s father, was a child of rape.
Gilthas gestured, one small motion of his hand, and Kerian turned, holding her hair ready to braid.
“Let me do that,” said the king of the Qualinesti elves.
“Gil, no. I have to go. If I’m missed from my quarters-”
He gestured almost imperiously. His voice, though, was a lover’s and so did not command. “Don’t worry about Kashas. He’s going to be hours dressing for the procession today. He won’t miss one servant among all those in his hall.”
So much was true. It took a king less time to prepare himself for the procession that traditionally welcomed the season of Autumn Harvest than this one proud senator. Rashas likely would not miss Kerian, a servant of the humblest station.
Kerian went to the king, holding back her hair as she sat on the end of the bed. He took the shining weight of it from her and combed it out with his fingers, separating it into three thick strands to braid. He worked gently, in silence, and bound up his work with a ribbon of rose-colored grosgrain. Finished, he gave the braid a gentle, playful tug. She turned, laughing, and he put his two hands on her shoulders, tenderly tracing the line of her collarbone with his thumbs. His forefinger outlined the tattoo on her neck, the twining vines winding round and round and down. That touch, the warming light in his eyes, she knew what these meant.
“No, Gil.” She lifted his hands. “I have to go.”
He knew it She would go in secret, threading passages few but the king himself knew about. He had designed his residence, his forest palace built not in or of a grove of tall oaks, but as part of that grove, a many-chambered mansion that did not require the felling of ancient oaks but demanded that rooms and stairways, atria and sudden secret gardens, be built in such a way as to let the grove of trees guide the shaping. Because this royal residence had been dismissed as a moody boy-king’s amusement, few had paid attention to the planning or the building. Few knew that, here and there, secret passages lay behind seemingly innocent walls, narrow ways to take a traveler hastily from certain chambers out into an innocent garden. One of these passages lay behind the eastern wall of the king’s own bedchamber.