Stanach gagged in the brush, the sound of his retching loud in the stillness. Kerian looked north and south, then east and west. She stood waiting.
Softly, a voice at her back said, “Kerianseray of Qua-linesti.”
She turned and though it had been only since summer that last she’d seen him, she hardly recognized Jeratt, so changed was he. He was not the man she’d left only weeks before, the cocky half-elf who’d led Night People beside her, who had planned raids, strategies and victories. His hair had turned white. His cheeks thin, his eyes glittering, this was not a face she knew. His voice, that she knew.
“Y’never should have left us, Kerian.” He scrubbed the side of his face with his hand. “He knew it when y’left. He took advantage when y’were gone.”
Stanach came out from the brush. Jeratt turned, arrow nocked to bow in the instant. The dwarfs good hand flashed to his side and clasped the throwing axe before Jeratt could draw breath or arrow.
“Hold!” Kerian shouted. She put a hand on Jeratt’s shoulder, felt the muscles quivering with tension. She nodded to Stanach, and the dwarf dropped his arm. “Jeratt, he’s a friend of the, king.”
They stood in heart-hammered silence until Kerian said, “Jeratt, tell me what has happened.”
“You can see it.” He looked around. “This is what they do now, Kerian. Up and down the land, they do this. Maybe they used to think it would teach us some kind of lesson. Now-now it’s Thagol himself doing it and not caring what we learn, past hating him.” He pulled a bitter smile. “He’s waiting for you, Kerian. You’ve been gone; you haven’t killed any of his Knights. He can’t find you on the dream-roads, but he’s still looking for you, and he’s waiting for you to come back.” Jeratt glanced around. “Him and Chance Headsman and their Knights and draconians. He’s brought in reinforcements from Neraka.”
His eyes narrowed. “They’ve broken us, every band, all the resistance you put together It was you, Kerian, who made it work, you who held us together, who heartened us and gave us a will. Without you-” His arm swept wide. “Y’went away at a bad time, Kerian.”
Ah, gods. Yet there had been no choice.
“Elder?”
Jeratt shook his head. “Gone!”
The word ran on her nerves, like lightning. “Gone? Where?”
“Don’t know. One night she was there, sittin’ at her fire. The next… gone. That was only three days after you left. There’s been none of her confusions now, nothing to help.”
“But you kept on.”
Jeratt’s chest swelled proudly. “I didn’t just keep on. I did what we’d planned, put warriors in the south, and I been back to the dales and roused ‘em there, but … I couldn’t keep it going against Thagol. He’s … he’s like the sea, Kerian. We’re all scattered again.”
Looking from one to the other, the scruffy half-elf and the woman who had only days before spoke in the Court of Thanes, Stanach whistled low. Softly he said, “First time I saw you, missy, you were tripping over a Knight’s corpse on the way out the door. Then you show up in the High King’s court. Now …” He shook his head. “What in the name of Reorx’s forge are you about?”
Kerian looked at him, and the smile she crooked had little to do with humor. “Stanach, I’ve been too long gone from the forest. I will take you so far as where you are safe. After that …”
Jeratt looked at her, his mouth a thin line. In his eyes, though, she saw hope rising.
Around the basin, men and women stood. Most Kerian knew, a few faces she didn’t. Some were gone: Rhyl, who had not proved trusty; Ayensha, about whom Jeratt said they would later speak; and Elder, who had vanished one day between midnight and dawn.
Old comrades regarded Kerian variously, some pleased to see her, some angry for her sudden departure and return. Newcomers stood with shuttered eyes, waiting. Bueren Rose looked upon her warmly, but a group of strangers eyed her with thinly veiled suspicion. Each of them, four men and the two women, looked to Jeratt to reckon the mood of the occasion. These were the leaders of other bands, other outcasts, highwaymen and robbers. These Jeratt had collected in Kerian’s absence, and no one knew her. News of her, tales of her, these things they knew. In their world, that mattered nothing at all. The deed done at your side, the back watched, the Knight killed who would have killed you-these things mattered. Of these things, they had no experience with Kerian.
She stepped past Jeratt, past Stanach Hammerfell, the dwarf uneasy among all these rough, suspicious elves.
Kerian looked around at them all, all of them cautious. Out the corner of her eye, she noted Stanach. The dwarf stood watching, blue-flecked dark eyes on her. He had come to speak with her king, and he intended to do his errand then return to his thane, that doubting uncle of his who sat upon the throne of the Hylar. In his eyes she saw how far from Thorbardin he felt, and he stood very still in the face of this unwelcoming elven silence, a careful man trying to know whether the ground had suddenly shifted under his hoot heels.
Kerian laughed, suddenly and sounding like a crow. “You!” She pointed to an elf woman standing apart from the others on the other side of the fires. This one, a woman with hair like chestnut, seemed to be the one to whom others deferred. “I am Kerianseray of Qualinesti. I don’t know you. Who are you?”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. Her hand drifted toward the sword at her belt then stilled. “Feather’s Flight, and I don’t know you either.”
“I don’t care. In time maybe you will. Till then, declare yourself, Feather’s Flight, here in my place, with lightning-” a glance toward the dwarf- “and Thunder to witness: Are you here to join me, you and all of yours to take up arms in my cause?”
“Well, I don’t know-”
“You don’t know my cause? You lie! If you have run with Jeratt, you know it. You know my cause is a king’s, and you know-” she reckoned the woman’s age, she counted on old alliances, and she gambled with her next statement-”and you know that the king’s cause is not far different from the cause of the prince whose name is honored by our elders.”
Feather’s Flight cocked her head, her lips crooked a smile. “I’ve run with Jeratt, true. What if I now choose to run away?”
Kerian laughed. “If you gave me your word to go and go in peace, I would let you go.”
The woman hadn’t expected that. She stood like a deer with her head to the wind, trying to understand a sudden, complicated scent. “You’d let me go! I come and go as I please, Kagonesti.”
Kerian shrugged. “There used to be a man named Rhyl with us. He isn’t now. He didn’t turn out to be as trusty as we like our friends to be. If I thought for even an instant you were untrustworthy, Feather’s Flight, you’d be an hour dead, and I’d be talking to someone else.”
Someone laughed, one of those beside Feather’s Flight. Someone else murmured, and Bueren Rose breathed a small sigh of relief as the outlaw stepped forward and stood before Kerian.
“We are six bands,” said Feather’s Flight. Kerian withheld a satisfied smile as she realized she’d calculated correctly and called out the woman who best represented the others. “We are from the mountains in the western part of the kingdom, past the dales. Even there heads grow on pikes like evil fruit. Some of us did know the lost prince, Porthios, whom some say perished in dragon-fire.” She stood taller. “I came from Silvanesti with him, and we cleaned the green dragons out of the Sylvan Land. I don’t know his nephew, I haven’t heard good of him, but I see you, Kerianseray. I have heard good of you. In the name of the dead, we will join you.”
The others nodded silently. Bueren thumped her shoulder, and Jeratt grinned wide. Beside the half-elf, Stanach Ham-merfell had the look of a dwarf who wasn’t quite ready to relax. Kerian caught his eye and winked.