He cocked his head. “And you?”
“Well, I have to go talk to Bueren Rose, don’t I?” Her voice had the edge of a blade. “There’s word needs to be spread now.”
He said nothing, frustrated as she. Neither did he look at Rhyl as he bent to the work of clearing the road. He nodded, and she did, understanding between them.
Kerian turned to leave and in the turning felt the return of the ache behind her eyes, the pressure against her temples, as though someone pressed that tender place with thumbs. She closed her eyes, at the same time holding her bloodstone amulet in her hand. The pain began to recede, but it did not vanish. When she opened her eyes again, it was to see Jeratt’s keen glance, his hand reaching to steady her.
“I’m all right,” she said.
He looked doubtful, his brows raised.
“See to this mess.” She looked around. “And see to Rhyl.”
Jeratt scratched his beard.
“He’s out. Meet me when it’s done.”
Gilthas stood in the doorway between his private library and his bedchamber. In the hour before bed, the hour of his poetry, this time when pen drank from the inkwell and his heart brooded on loss, he stood with a stack of tightly rolled scrolls in his right arm. He’d heard a sound, the soft scuff of a footfall, perhaps a whisper from beyond the far wall of the library.
Holding his breath, Gilthas let the scrolls slide out of his arm silently onto the brocaded seat of a delicately carved cherrywood chair. Moonlight spilled through the window in the bedroom behind, washing over the bed. The empty bed, he always named it, for no moon had seen Kerian there in many months.
The empty bed. Not so empty, after all. Nightmare joined him there, often now. Dark dreams that Kerian would know how to banish with a touch of her hand, brooding fears that she was able to soothe, these came to him now more nights than not. He used to dream of fire and death, of the breaking of his ancient kingdom. He used to dream that all he knew and loved would fall to a terror he had no name for, something born in the Abyss of a goddess long gone from the world. These nights only one dream haunted him, cold and fanged. These nights he dreamed he saw a head being freshly piked upon the parapet of the eastern bridge of his city. Honey hair thick with blood, mouth agape, eyes staring, Kerian’s death scream followed him down all the roads of Qualinost.
There! Again, a sound from the secret passage few knew about but he and Laurana. Gil’s heart rose with sudden hope. Only one other than they two knew of the narrow warren behind the walls of the king’s residence. It must be Kerian. He listened closely. He heard nothing now. Outside his suite of chambers, servants murmured in the halls, someone dropped an object of crystal or glass. The shattering of it rang out and did not cover a dismayed cry. The king hardly wondered what had fallen, what had broken.
Behind the wall, he heard another footfall.
Kerian! Had he conjured her? With moonlight and memory and inked lines of longing, had he magicked her?
Even as he hoped, Gilthas knew there was no hope. Kerian was nowhere near the city. He had followed the tales of her, trying to reckon the gold from the dross, the truth from the fables. Easier, far, to reckon out her doings by noting where last Lord Thagol put up a newly fortified guard post.
Nor would she come to him without prior arrangement unless-no. Not even if she were in trouble, especially not then.
Gil’s fingers closed round the silver handle of the knife he used to shave the points of the quills that were his pens. Even as he felt the slight weight of the little blade he thought wryly, against what little sprite or rabbit will this defend?
Soft, a tap. Louder, two more. Soft, a third and a quick fourth.
Gil relaxed, letting go a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. What was his mother doing behind the wall?
She stood in a spill of torchlight, the Queen Mother like a ghost with her golden hair down around her shoulders, a silvery silk robe loosely belted over a flowing blue bed gown.
“Mother,” he said, “you’re barefoot-”
The elf behind her, of middle years with the eyes of an ancient, stood bleeding from a poorly bandaged wound. He wavered, exhausted, and tried to bow. Gilthas caught him before he toppled, and the king and the Queen Mother helped him into the library.
No one cared that he bled on the brocaded chair, no one cared that his muddy boots left tracks on the tapestried carpet.
“Sir,” he said, “I have come with word from the High King of the Eight Clans of Thorbardin.” He gathered himself, wit and strength. “Your Majesty, the dwarf king thinks it best you come soon to defend your suit for alliance or send a champion to do that.”
Smoke rose lazily from Three Chimneys, a roughly built tavern that had, over the course of a long life, been first a roadhouse of doubtful repute, then a post house in the years before the coming of green Beryl. Through all its years, Three Chimneys had been a wayfare, a tavern for travelers to stop and find a good meal, perhaps a bed for the night in the common room or the barn. It was that now, and something more. Bueren Rose ran the place, purchased for a small pouch of steel from an elf who had been happy to sell, eager to leave the area.
“What with the outlaws and Knights and all, I’m going north, where they’re saner and I have kin.”
Kerian stood on the road, watching smoke rise from the stone chimneys that gave the place its name. The smoke hardly disturbed the purpling sunset sky. The tavern lay in a fold of an upland valley, one high above Lightning Falls and farther east. From the hills surrounding, one could see right out into the borderland between the kingdom of the elves and the land of the dwarves.
Bueren Rose walked round the corner of the tavern, a heavy yoke of filled water buckets across her shoulders. Three Chimneys had in its upper story a small, windowless room, a private place between two other chambers, from the outside undetectable. It was this secret room, much like the private passages in Gil’s royal residence, that recommended the tavern to Kerian when she and Bueren Rose had gone looking for a place.
The upper room was a place where plans could be safely hatched. “Three Chimneys is not at a crossroad,” Bueren Rose had said. “That would have been too likely and too dangerous, but it is near the borderland, and tav-erners know that the best news there is flows back and forth across borders with traders and thieves.”
So Bueren Rose had taken possession of the tavern, purchased with steel robbed from a wagon bound for a dragon’s hoard, and she set up business quietly. Her tavern gained a reputation for good food and good cheer, for clean places to sleep and reasonable rates. Her bar was stocked with drink from all parts of Krynn, again thanks to thieves who smuggled a keg of this, a tun of that, a few bottles of something exotic and potent from down around Tarsis.
“Keri!” Bueren stopped suddenly, the yoke rocking, the water sloshing from the buckets.
Kerian leaped to steady the yoke. Water splashed her feet, turned the dust to dark mud around her boots, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Bueren shook her head, her rosy gold hair escaping from her kerchief, spiraling around her neck in loose curls. “I didn’t expect you today. I thought-” Her expression darkened, and the skin around her eyes grew tight She looked behind her, around, and when she felt certain of safety, she spoke very low. “Is something wrong? Is the raid-?”
“The raid won’t happen.”
“But-”
“There’s no time now. Send word to Releth Windrace at his farm. Tell him he has to send his own boys out to stop the others.”
The two farmers down the valley and their sons and daughters, the miller’s own boy, all the dozen others, quiet citizens of a hostage kingdom who could be called upon at need to strike a blow against the dragon of her Knights- word must get to all of these, mouth to mouth, farm to farm, casually and quietly so that no suspicion would fall on any of them.