An arrow screamed overhead, then another. Each missed, and she heard the sound of Bayel being flung to the floor. Kerian rolled and saw the sooted face of Thullea, a woman of the northern dales. A silver flash overhead, a dagger flew. The draconian screamed and fell, an elven blade through its eye.
Kerian scrambled to her feet and shoved Bayel out the door.
They found no chaos there, only the eerie silence after killing and two Knights surrounded by the Night People. Wael the taverner shivered in the chill dark as his tavern burned.
“Good,” she said. “Now we’ll settle down to wait.”
They did not wait long. The stars had hardly moved in the sky before Kerian heard the approach of Jeratt and his men. He came with only thirteen, for three had been killed in battle. “We got the rest of’em though. Caught ‘em ragin’ back when they knew they’d been fooled. “
He looked down at the dusty ground. “Didn’t get the big one, though. Killed five of the Knights, left the others bleedin’ in the forest… and Thagol, I don’t know how, but he got away.”
Kerian listened and didn’t say anything for a long while. Fire leaped to the sky, her Night People reunited, and the two bands spoke amongst themselves of the deaths they’d suffered and the deaths they’d dealt. She’d wanted Thagol to see this burning, this ruin. She wanted to kill him here where he’d killed Felan. She wanted to settle that debt and all the debts the Skull Knight owed her from the moment he murdered her cousin and piked her head upon the bridge in Qualinost.
Fire roared, and the heat of it made her men drop back to the crossroad itself, taking their prisoners and poor Wael with them.
At last, Kerian looked up. “Kill them,” she said to Jeratt, jerking her thumb toward the Knights. “Someone take Wael to a safe place.”
Jeratt spat. “And the Skull Knight?”
“He can watch the burning from wherever he’s hiding.” She looked around, at her Night People and the fire. “We’re not finished this night.”
Jeratt understood. He and Bayel gathered half the warriors and sent them out into the forest, running silently through the forest and up the Qualinost Road. Kerian took the rest and paralleled their run across the highway, deep into the wood. Both halves of her force came upon the encampment of tribute wagons in the dark hour before dawn. Six Knights and four draconians heard the single piercing call of a nightjar. Some looked around for the bird, startled, others only heard it in their sleep in the instant before the Night People fell on them. Half the Knights died before they knew they were under attack. The draconians died instantly of arrows through the eye, their deaths causing the agonizing deaths of anyone else near. Kerian herself cut the dray horses loose and sent them into the forest. She, Bayel, and Jeratt handed out weapons from the little wagon filled with that treasure, and scooped up four pouches of coin from another. One she gave to an elf to deliver in secret to the taverner.
“The rest is for Felan’s widow. Give her a good sword, and give her these pouches of steel. Tell her they are her child’s inheritance from his father.”
They fired the wagons, leaving behind nothing of use.
Before the smoke could travel far, they separated, two dozen and more warriors returning like shadows to their homes, some far-flung, others nearby. They would not come out to fight again; they would vanish into the population, become simple farmers and tradesfolk.
“For now,” Kerian told them. “For now, until you hear otherwise.”
For now …they murmured, all in agreement as she went among them, clasping hands, clasping arms.
“And you?” asked one, the eager young woman who had fought beside Jeratt in the forest.
Kerian grinned, bright and feral. “The next time the coward Thagol hears about us, he’ll know that all this kingdom is our battleground.”
Chapter Fifteen
That winter, in the eastern part of the kingdom, there were glad greetings as Kerian and Jeratt returned to the Lightning Falls. “Or Thunder as the dwarves name it,” Ander told Bayel. The young man had settled in well among the outlaws. Jerart’s welcome was one of shouts and laughter and hack thumping. Bayel was introduced and accepted warmly and went easily among them for the sake of his reputation in the east as a harrier of Knights.
Kerian returned to them a different person than they had known. She had been Jeratt’s student in the arts of living, the hunter he must coach, the fletcher who couldn’t fletch, the Kagonesti servant of Qualinesti masters too far gone from her heritage.
“She is not that now,” murmured Briar, a flame-haired elf woman, to the young man who shared her sleeping furs. “Look at her, all golden and tall and-” She shook her head. “Damn if the woman hasn’t learned how to stride.”
Kerian thought there might be some tension over Jeratt, once the leader of the band, now deferring to his student, but none resented that because the half-elf made it clear that he didn’t mind.
“She’s what she is,” Jeratt said, quietly to his old friends while she lay sleeping. “I’m what I am. We’re good enough, the two of us, for what’s coming now.”
Elder, that small huddle of an ancient elf woman, said nothing to either of them upon their return, but Jeratt knew her of old, and so he knew by the feel of the forest, the air, the very stones that made the basin behind the falls, that Elder was pleased. The two began a strange conversation.
Kerian didn’t know for sure, but she imagined that Elder was a shaman of some sort, a sorceress who practiced the kind of earth magic the Qualinesti and their aristocratic kin the Silvanesti had long ago forgotten. In a world from which magic had vanished, where even talismans of legend sputtered into unreliability, Elder kept hold of something made of the ancient whispers of the land itself. Her conversations with Elder were never easy, sometimes as wrenching as tumbling into a maelstrom, for she spoke with a woman who smelled of magic in a world from which magic leaked like heart’s blood from a wound. Yet painful as these conversations could be, confusing, often as terrifying as the very first one which had left her on her knees and vomiting, Kerian never came away from Elder without feeling that she could-here and far away-create a force of men and women who would stand against the Knights and for the elves, who might, one day, be useful to an embattled king.
They settled into winter, the rounds of hunting and trapping, of preparing food and seeing to weapons. Kerian forbade raids on hapless travelers and on Knights.
“Leave them alone, for now,” she said. “Let the winter settle in peace. The Knights will know we’re here when I’m ready.”
Now and then, because he was not known to Knights here or to villagers, she sent Bayel to learn the news. He visited taverns, the forges at the river crossings where folk came and talked, he went among farmers as they used to do in the dales, a hunter come with bounty for the table in exchange for local gossip and a night by the fire. In this way Kerian learned that Headsman Chance still quartered his Knights in the taverns, that he had not forgotten the outlaw maid Kerianseray, and that he continued to hunt Kagonesti, who were seen less frequently now in the this part of the kingdom.
Kerian learned only one stubborn tribe remained, far away in the high forest, and Briar told her this was Dar and his White Osprey.
She learned, too, that the king was well in his palace. The mention of his name woke a longing to see him, to feel his arms around her again. Those longings she kept to herself and changed into dreams. She learned that the Queen Mother remained in health, and that the lords and ladies of the Senate were no different from seasons past. Surprisingly little had changed in Qualinesti politics. The highborn elves played a game of small losses, counting each day they hadn’t lost all as a gain. It was not a difficult game right now, for Sir Eamutt Thagol had been keeping himself and his Knights and draconians in the eastern part of the kingdom where the snow fell thickly and few traveled on the roads or even gathered at taverns. In the cold season after his humiliation, there was scant news of the Skull Knight.