Kerian took those words with her as she and Jeratt and Ander left in the morning. They traveled north that day and steered wide of the unwelcoming places where bandits roamed or Knights were known to pass through. That night they made the first camp they’d had out of doors in several weeks, welcoming the starry roof, the embracing fragrance of the forest Kerian took the first watch, and Jeratt sent Ander off to sleep, warning that the last watch would be his. They sat quietly for a while, neither speaking, each listening to the night song. The moon rose, climbing the trees and hanging high above the boughs.
“Tell me what you’re thinkin’, Kerian.”
She glanced at him and nodded. She poked the fire, gathered up her thoughts.
“They’re good folk here in the dales, Jeratt. I’ve spent most of my life in the city.” She stirred the fire and made the flames flare. “In the service of a senator and …” Sparks sailed up to the sky. “And in the confidence of a king. I’ll tell you, Jeratt-the king watches the Knights rule his city, hears how they treat his kingdom.” She shook her head. “If he saw what I’ve seen since autumn, if he heard what I’ve heard-”
“What would he do?”
The scornful sneer, the sudden anger flashing in Jeratt’s eyes irritated Kerian. “He would do anything and everything, if he could. He is a king with no court, the ruler of a Senate that holds all the power-”
“-and hands it over to Thagol.”
“He is powerless, I tell you.” Kerian shook her head, frowning. “As long as he has no army, Gilthas is tied, just like you say, hand and foot, but if he had an army…” She leaned forward. “One no one could say was his, but one he would know is his. If he had a fast-striking army-warriors who weren’t quartered anywhere, who couldn’t be tracked…”
Jeratt’s eyes lighted. “One that ran like ghosts, striking hard and fast and vanishing into the night.”
She smiled. “You sound like you’re ahead of me.”
He nodded. “Long years ago, with the prince, we had such an army. I came up with him from Silvanesti and got kind of good at forest fighting.” He laughed grimly. “Hit those city elves and ran, hit and ran, us and the Kagonesti. Would’ve won, too if it hadn’t been for dragons and bad, bad luck. Would’ve been one kingdom then, a kingdom for all elves.”
Kerian listened to the night, the rising wind that smelled of rain. She looked past Jeratt to Ander, beyond him, south to the dales where farmers still remembered how to greet travelers well and where the people were beginning to resent the mail-fisted Knights. In the wind and the hissing of the fire she heard words from an old woman she hadn’t seen in nearly a year.
Killer!
“I’m thinking,” she said, “that here is where to start.”
Jeratt laughed, startling Ander awake. “You know what to do with them once you flush them out of the dales, the woods, and the hills?”
Again, Kerian’s long, slow smile. “No, I don’t, but you do. Don’t you, Jeratt?”
Chapter Thirteen
“Look! Damn Knights.”
Ander slipped closer to Kerian, his breath warm on her cheek. In his throat, his pulse jumped. Sweat glistened on his cheeks, and in that he was not so different from Kerian or Jeratt. The sun of late summer shone down hot and the canopy of the forest provided shade but did nothing to cool the air. That certainly accounted for some of the sweat. The rest… the boy was coming close to what Jeratt called “first blood,” his first battle. Today, or another day soon, Ander would do his best to kill another.
“First blood,” Jeratt had said to Ander when they began to draw together resolve and make plans. He drew upon the earth, as he liked to do, sketching maps real and imagined, laying out the strategy of the forest-fighter whose best plan is to use the wood for cover, to dart out and kill and dart back again. In this, he found that Ander had a keen mind, a quick wit for understanding and for seeing how such plans worked. Between the two, the half-elf and the boy, growing respect began to replace grudging acceptance.
Though he spoke most often of tactics, most forcefully, Jeratt also spoke to Kerian and Ander, the untried warriors, of risk. “You spill someone else’s, or he spills yours.”
Ander pointed to the road again, a thin winding branch of the broader Qualinost Road. Kerian nodded to let him know she saw what he did. The narrow road ran beside a broad stream. The jingling of bridles and bits hung in the air, two Knights riding side by side. Behind came a heavily laden cart drawn by two mules. An elf drove the cart, man or woman Kerian couldn’t tell from where she crouched. It was as, only the day before, Felan had told them it would be: two Knights and a cart full of swords, battle-axes, and daggers.
“Sometimes it’s that, got from the smithies in this part of the country, made to Thagol’s order to arm his men, here and in the city. Sometimes it’s gold or jewels taken at the border from traders, hill dwarves from down southern ways who take their pay at our border and don’t set a step into the kingdom. Other times, in season, it’s harvest, most of it going to feed the Knights in the capital.” Bitterly, he said, “We keep enough to seed the next year, barely enough to feed ourselves through winter, no more, and nothing to trade for pots and pans, plough shares, and belt buckles. We don’t trade much for wine now, not for cloth, wool, or boots.”
It was beginning to be here as it was in the eastern part of the kingdom-the elves were made to arm and feed their oppressors while they themselves plunged deeper into poverty. Felan, Bayel, and other dalemen bitterly felt this insult. It hadn’t been difficult to convince them to keep an eye out, an ear to the ground, for the purpose of letting Kerian know when a Knights’ cart or wagon would set out on the road to Acris.
“Listen,” Jeratt told her, “and learn, but keep hold of patience, Kerian.”
So Kerian watched patiently as carts and wagons wound the river road. She stopped counting how much tribute was passing and learned to count how many Knights were deployed for a cart, how many for a wagon. She saw that-cart or wagon-the ones most keenly guarded were those bearing weapons. She learned that once on the Qualinost Road, the escort met draconians that saw every load of tribute on to Acris, the crossroads town some miles distant. From there, Felan said, a stronger force of Knights with more draconians escorted small trains of carts and wagons all the way to the capital.
“Acris,” Felan told them, “is where you’ll find Lord Thagol. His Knights are quartered all over in this part of the country, in villages and taverns, but the Lord Knight stays where he is, right in his den and keeping watch over all.”
Felan and Bayel had sworn to find a dozen elves to join them, young men and women who had for more than a year now been chafing under the oppression of the foreign Knights. “We’ll scour the countryside of ‘em,” he’d said. “Drive ‘em right back to Qualinost.”
Kerian refused at once, and Jeratt wholeheartedly agreed.
“That’s your pride talkin’, “ he said. “Not a bad thing, unless it kills you. Ain’t no twelve of you going to send Thagol and his Knights anywhere but to sharpen their swords, but Kerian, me, and Ander, we have a fair bit of experience keepin’ out of trouble. You get to learnin’ that, travelin’ as we do. We got no wives or children, no farms to tend.”
Faran had paled at that, and Bayel stayed silent.
“You let us do what we plan,” Jeratt said gently, “and just keep an eye open now and then for a bit of news you might think we’d like. Later-” He shrugged. “Later, things could change and then we can talk again.”
Later they might he looking around for good men and women to add to their number.