“I think we’ve come away from whatever it was that affected the forest,” she said to Ayensha.
Ayensha shrugged. “Do you think so?”
Despite her rescue from Lord Thagol’s Knights, Ayensha evidently didn’t trust Kerian nor seem to think much of her, but the woman knew something about the oddity of the forest’s behavior or suspected a truth she was not willing to share. Of that much, Kerian felt certain.
On the afternoon of the third day walking, the lay of the land changed. No longer did they find the tall oaks like the wood near Qualinost. Here, the trees were all of the same clan, the fir, pine, and spruce. The land became a place of ridges and deep glens where water ran freely and caves studded the walls. Some of the caves ran far back into the earth, others were cracks in stone, a gathering place for shadows. Kerian and Ayensha did not lack for shelter in the night or for water. In these generous places woodland creatures came to drink, and here Kerian trapped or fished with growing ease. It seemed to her that all her senses were becoming honed, keen and bright. One night, sitting in the darkness at the mouth of a snug cave, as she and Ayensha ate the cold meat of hares roasted at the previous day’s camp, they heard the crash and slash of heavy-footed creatures in the forest. All her nerves tingling, Kerian smelled the sulphurous reek of draconian on the wind. Unless the draconians turned from the path they were on, the reptilian beast-men would be near soon.
“Into the cave,” she whispered to Ayensha, pointing into the deeper darkness.
Ayensha, sniffing the foulness too, lifted her head to speak. Kerian cut her short.
“I am no warrior, and you are too weak to make up for what I lack. Into the cave, and we’ll trust ourselves to luck.”
Plainly, Ayensha didn’t like the idea of trusting herself to a servant girl from the capital and her idea of luck. Just as plainly, she understood the need. She slipped into the cave, keeping still in the shadows, so quiet Kerian couldn’t hear her breathing.
Swiftly, her heart racing, Kerian cleaned the area before the cave of bones and any track they had made. They’d had no fire this night, there was no ash or cinder or smoking wood to betray them. She brushed the dirt with pine boughs, scattered forest debris before the entrance. She could do no more, and she sat just inside the cave’s dark mouth, hidden and watching.
They came, four of them, skin the green of tarnished copper, wings wide.
“Kapak,” Ayensha muttered.
The draconians marched upon the lip of the glen, their harsh voices echoing from one stony wall to the other. They spoke in roughly accented Common, each word coming out of thick throats like a curse. Their laughter raked Kerian’s ears like claws. Not one of them stood less than six feet tall, and starlight glinted on their fangs, on their talons.
One, the largest, turned and spread its wings wide, roaring. The bellow lifted the hair on the back of her neck. The roar echoed from wall to wall. Kerian’s fingers tightened round the hone grip of her knife. Her only weapon, it would do her no good if these creatures came her way. In a world where magic leaked away like water from a sieve, Kerian wished for a talisman, a charm, something to make her and her companion invisible.
Not moving, not breathing, she saw the sudden flash of steel, heard a high, rageful death-scream. The smallest of the draconians fell, tumbling over the edge of the gorge, hitting the side, hitting stone, dead of a sword in the gut before it ever hit the ground.
None of the luckless creature’s savage companions even looked twice. One wiped a sword on the ragged hem of a tunic and absently sheathed it, the blade’s work done. Another laughed, a third snarled, and the three were gone while dark blood poured out of their companion. The blood changed to acid, and soon the corpse itself melted into a dark and deadly pool.
“Let’s move,” Ayensha said, low.
“Where-?”
Ayensha snorted. “To a safe enough place, for now. You can follow me, or not. That’s up to you.”
“But my brother-”
Ayensha pulled a humorless smile. “Your brother has managed without you this long.”
The reek of acid fouled the air, stinging their eyes, burning their nostrils and throats. Kerian didn’t argue further, and they left the cave to find another place to pass the night.
The two elves traveled in the opposite direction from the draconians, back tracking and confident that the Kapaks would not do the same. Walking, Kerian breathed the night, the cleaner air. She listened to the hush and sigh of pines over head. When they found another cave, a quieter place, she turned the watch over to Ayensha and settled to sleep. Drifting in the place between waking and sleeping she felt a great satisfaction, for her weary muscles again knew how to find rest upon beds made of fragrant houghs and leaves whose perfume was that of eternal autumn.
They slept only until the sky began to grow light. Outside the cave, Ayensha leaned on her staff, more from comfortable habit now than from need. Four days into their travels, she’d begun to regain strength. Since they had left the Hare and Hound, she’d eaten well of what Kerian snared and the fishes she caught in the streams. She drank the cold, clear water and slept long and deeply at night. Sun had warmed the pallor from her cheek.
Over hours of walking, Ayensha brought them into a maze of gorges, winding and zigzagged, and all the while the walls grew higher. In some places they could not go dry-shod for there was room only for water, and they had to hold on to the damp stony sides for balance. A deep, distant roaring came to them from ahead.
The walls of the gorge grew closer, stone reaching for them, and the sides grew higher as the floor dropped. The two women came to the font of the water running through the gorge, a sudden spring burbling up from a crack in the stony floor.
Ayensha dipped up a handful of water and then another. “A river racing below the ground.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve never seen it, but it’s said there are places in part of the forest where there is more water below than above.”
“Is that what we hear?”
Ayensha shook her head. “Lightning’s voice. A waterfall.”
Listening to Lightning, they walked until the passage became so narrow Kerian had to turn sideways simply to fit through. The rumbling became louder, the sky more distant, the gorge darker, the passage but a slit. Kerian’s muscles cried for rest. She had none. They ate walking, following the brightness in the distance that seemed never to come closer.
At last, the voice of the falls grew louder again, deeper. Above, the slit of blue that had been the sky suddenly widened. The brightness made Kerian squint.
“Noon-bright,” Ayensha said.
Only noon!
“Now put your back into it. We’re almost-”
The gorge turned, daylight opened up ahead. With startling suddenness, they stood at the mouth of the gorge, practically at the stony lip of a shining lake.
“-there.”
The falls known to elves as Lightning for its flash, to dwarves as Thunder for the roar of its voice, sped from such a height as to seem poured out of the sky. Silvery sheets of water flung over a cliff, headlong and heedless as a madman running. Thunder! Its voice bellowed so loudly that it pressed against Kerian’s ears as a physical weight. In the presence of the cascading brightness and the furious roar, she found it difficult to breathe.
“There,” said Ayensha, again smiling. “Nearly where we want to be.”
Blinking, Kerian said, “Where? All I see is water falling.”
Ayensha nodded. She set out around the edge of the lake, Kerian following. Little grew on that shore, only tufts of tough grass between the cracks in the stone.