Kerian dropped the fat brace of hares to the ground, careful to keep it well away from the bloody snow and the four dead elves. She slipped her longbow over her shoulder as she bent to crouch over the largest of the scattered corpses, the armor-clad man from whose throat sprang six arrows. Her breath hung on the icy air, gray plumes drifting over the carnage, weaving around the shafts of the white-fletched arrows. Winter arrows of the Wilder Kin.
“Kagonesti must have got the Knight,” Jeratt said. She didn’t look up or acknowledge the obvious, and he added, “The Wilder Kin didn’t get the others.”
The others, three elves dressed in the leathers and furs of hunters, had been sword-hacked. These were folk who lived in winter on their wits, not villagers, not farmers, but elves who supplied taverns and the tables of the wealthy. Luckless, this time. One had bled out his life from a throbbing artery severed when his left leg had been hacked off. It hung now from his flesh, a dark fat thread pulled to unravel a life. All around him the snow carried a frozen overlay of bright red blood. Another of the hunters had died of a slit throat. The third had been trampled by steel-shod hoofs, his neck broken, his skull shattered.
The Knight who had killed them …Kenan’s lips curled in a wolfish smile. He’d been made to pay the blood-fee.
“Y’got a bad look on you, Kerianseray.”
Kerian pointed to the frozen spread of blood. “Knights are killing elves all over the hills, Jeratt. Qualinesti and Kagonesti. How sweet should my expression be?”
Jeratt said nothing to that. He picked up her bow and handed it to her.
She looked at him long, and whispering in the silence between them were the ghosts of conversations past, arguments about politics, about the occupation, about knightly abuses like that before them, and worse. The dragon’s tribute, thinly disguised as taxation, was bleeding a rich kingdom like sickness. Over the winter, the cold nights and ice-gleaming days, they all had talked of ancient hopes, the history of the elf kings right back to Silvanos himself who united all elves in Silvanesti. They spoke of ancient glory and ancient wars. They were elves and though they had lived outside the law, some for decades, they knew their history.
Their hearts and imaginations were enchanted by ancient tales. One thing remained unknown. Would all the outlaws fight the dark Knights when she asked them to? Would they lift their swords for a king they despised? Or had they come to be so comfortable in outlawry that in the end they cared for nothing but their own survival?
Count on them, Jeratt had told her each time she wondered.
Kerian snatched up the brace of fat hares. “Come on, Jeratt. You want to give these to the widow, or shall I go do it alone?”
Kerian started away down the hill, Jeratt following quickly. The crisp wind in their faces made breath stream out in wisps behind them. It scoured their faces until their cheeks shone red. At their feet it blew the snow into little dancing white devils. They went strongly, swiftly, each knowing the way over snow-covered ground. They knew the markers that had nothing to do with slender trails, a particular bend of a tree, a boulder where-if there were ground to see-the path would have split. At this boulder they went west and ran beneath the snow-laden boughs of pine trees until it seemed they went through a tunnel, so low did the trees hang with their burden. At the edge of it, in the place where the over-arching trees fell away, they stopped and stood to gaze down into the dale, where a sprawling stone house sat. It had once been the home of a prosperous farmer and his family. The farmer now was dead. He and his son had been killed in a hunting accident years before, leaving only Felyce, a widow who would not give up her homestead.
“Well, y’know,” Jeratt had said, once in early winter when Kerian had asked how it was that Jeratt, such a strong hunter, came often back to camp with far fewer kills than might be expected, “I knew the son, and I knew the father. I’m not going to see the widow Felyce go starving.”
Smoke rose up from the chimney closest to the front of me house. Chickens minced though the mud in the door-yard, dipping low to find the leftover corn from the morning’s feeding. The outbuildings, a stone byre and a wooden hayrick, squatted at the edge of the clearing to the north of the house. Nothing moved near them, and no one seemed to be within.
Kerian looked for other signs of presence and saw none. She listened for the cow that must surely be in the byre by now, for Felyce did not like to go late abroad after her milker in this season when the night fell swift and sudden. Of the cow, they heard nothing. Jeratt came close, his breath warm on Kerian’s cheek.
“Too quiet down there.”
It was. The muscles between her shoulders tightened. Kerian dropped one shoulder, let her strung bow fall to hand. Jeratt’s long knife hissed free of its sheath and whispered home again, tested. In his own hand, with the swiftness of long-gone magic, his own bow sprang.
The wind shifted, turning a little and coming to them from the forest behind. The tang of pine hung on that breeze, and the sudden musk of a deer. Kerian lifted her head, thinking she caught the thick odor of horse. The wind dropped then stilled. She smelled nothing. The sky darkened with a noisy wing of crows, and below a light sprang in the window beside the front door.
“All right,” Jeratt said on an outgoing breath.
Kerian heard, She’s all right, but hid her smile as she hung back. Jeratt loped ahead. Long-legged strides took him swiftly down the hill. Half-elven, his human parentage aged him well before an elf who bore the same years. In the last light his silvering beard shone, and his eagerness lent youthfulness to a face weathered by the forest and the seasons. Kerian followed, keeping a closer eye on their surroundings. She sniffed the wind, caught the scent of deer again but no whiff of the stable.
Neither did she catch the scent of cooking, of soup, stew, or roast that any farrnwife would have simmering on the hob or sizzling over the fire at this darkening hour.
Kerian stopped, still and listening. The crows had long flown over; the sky hung empty of all by dying light Again, she noted no sound of Felyce’s milk cow, no comfortable lowing.
“Jeratt,” she called, but low.
He heard and stopped to turn. Stopping, he saw her eyes widen in surprise as Felyce came out of her door. Even from this distance, Kerian noted the woman’s pallor, the way her hands moved in restless wringing. Jeratt moved toward her, and Kerian leaped to hold him back.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.”
He moved again, spurred. She gripped hard. “Wait.”
Jeratt quivered under her hand. Feigning a casualness she did not feel, Kerian called, “Good evening, Felyce!” Deliberately casting the lie, she said, “I know we’re unexpected company. I hope we aren’t intruding. We’ve been hunting and came by on the way home to share our take.”
“Aye, who’d thought to see you, Mistress GeBis,” Felyce said, improvising a name even as she yet wrung her hands. “I thought you’d gone to kin out by the sea long before now.”
“The winter caught us,” Kerian said, following Felyce’s lead. “I’m here for the season, like it or not. Come spring though”-she elbowed Jeratt “-come spring I’m poking up my old father here, and we’re bound for Lauranost and the sea.”