In the deepest part of his sleep, then, he went out walking. Sir Thagol went out from his body and traveled on the roads of dreaming and through the deep places of sleeping minds. It was no unusual journey for him, and he found no unusual thing. When he woke, the soft gray light before the dawn in his eyes, Sir Thagol had the feeling that something had changed in the forest.
It was a feeling he knew, akin to the air of a barracks when warriors are called to muster.
Sorrow drifted like ghosts through the forest. Villages lay in ash and ruin. Heads were posted everywhere as warnings. In the little towns untouched by Lord Thagol and Chance Headsman’s blighting hands, people shunned the rebels now. Kerian’s name was known in every quarter of the forest now, as was the price for her head. The Skull Knight did not offer steel, gems, or precious metals. He offered nothing. He promised death to all he looked upon until she was brought to him, alive for killing.
At farms where once they had been welcomed, no one dared open a door to Kerian, Jeratt, or any of the Night People. In this forest now, all strangers were suspect, any traveler going by could be one of the resistance fighters Lord Thagol hunted. Anyone could lose his head on the mere suspicion that he’d given aid to one of them.
“He doesn’t know where I am,” Kerian reminded Jeratt. They had hunted well, and thanks to Stanach’s deft hand with a snare, they had five fat rabbits to spit A clear cool stream ran nearby. “Right now, this moment, he can’t even guess.”
Stanach said he wondered how she knew that Kerian and Jeratt exchanged wry grins as she tapped her forehead.
“I know.” She pulled the bloodstone out of her shirt. “This hides me from him, but if I kill, it doesn’t keep him from knowing I’m around. I haven’t killed. I don’t feel him in my head. He doesn’t know where I am.”
The dwarf grunted skeptically, then sat in silence for a while. Then, “When are you taking me to Qualinost?”
Kerian leaned close to the fire, to the warmth, for the night was chill.
“You’ve seen this place,” she said. “You’ve seen what Thagol and Chance Headsman are doing. Do you think I could get you as far as Qualinost?”
Stanach snorted. He was a long time quiet, his face, his eyes above his black beard gone still as he cradled his ruined right hand in the palm of his left.
“In good time,” said Kerian.
Jeratt grinned. “And we’ll get you there with your head still sitting on your shoulders.”
Stanach turned his head this way and that, as though trying to loosen a kink in his neck. “I’d appreciate that.”
The fingers of his left hand curled round the haft of his keen-edged throwing axe as he stood to take the first watch. Beyond the fire, he looked at Kerian, a long, considering moment. He thought about the serving girl he’d met in the forest, perhaps not far from here, two years ago. She had been a tender creature then, soft hands, perfumed hair. Now here she sat, a leader of a shadowy force of warriors known as Night People. She crouched before her forest hearth, in leather boots and woolen trews, a shirt a man might wear. Her tattoos shone in the light, and it seemed to Stanach she had as much of the forest about her as the owl now sailing the night between the trees.
The elf woman screamed. Her voice soared high above all the rest; her face shone white in the night as she clutched her child to her breast. Howling, five Dark Knights ringed her round, circling, swords high, laughing. One howled higher than all, and one kept starkly silent. She fell to her knees, bent over the child, the little creature wailing in her arms against her breast. A voice shouted “Erathia!” A sword screamed through the air, and the voice did not shout more. Erathia wailed, knowing her husband dead, knowing his head would join the heads of other murdered elves.
Horses thundered round her, Knights yelling madly.
Erathia prayed to a goddess long fled the world, she prayed to Mishakal, the giver of mercy elves named Quenesti-Pah.
“Merciful goddess, lady of light, spare my child, oh spare-”
Beside her face, so close the iron shoe ran red with firelight, a tall war-horse stamped and grew still. Around her, the others did the same. Erathia had heard no command, but these Knights had a Skull Knight for a lord. There had been a command.
Trembling, she hunched lower over her child and realized she heard nothing of elf voices. No villager wept, howled, or pleaded.
Gods, she was the last.
“Merciful Lady…”
She looked up, and two Knights departed from the circle around her; two came close, one on either side. They wore their helms closed, and that didn’t matter. Erathia knew which was the Skull Knight. From him, his very being, flowed the coldness of death, like a wind out of winter, belling in the forest, howling in her heart. He flung back the visor of his helm. The other mirrored the gesture.
“Headsman,” he simply said.
She looked to them, to one and the other, the agents of her death. In the eyes of the Skull Knight she saw nothing, not a killing lust, not hatred, not even determination to get the job done. Nothing, as though she looked into the windows of an empty huilding, into blackness. In the eyes of the other, Chance Headsman, she saw fire. Flames leaping, consuming, bloodlust and killing-need.
In his eyes she saw her death, the raising of his blade before he lifted it, the fell swing hefore he caused it. She screamed, flung herself aside, and there was nowhere to go. A horse jostled her, and the child fell from her arms, wailing.
Whistling, the sword of Chance Headsman swooped low. She looked into the eyes of the Skull Knight, perhaps to plead. In the moment of her death, the moment the blade kissed her neck, she saw a thing happen in those eyes. They kindled with sudden savage joy.
Chapter Twenty-One
The season of Autumn Harvest began in woe, and grief ran through it like a river of blood. Sorrow rained upon the forest in that season once known for joy, and the fires lighting the night were not the traditional harvest bonfires. No one danced round these, laughing girls and lusty lads. No one shouted for the joy of the harvest; no one cried out thanks.
They wept before these fires, elves pared to bone by their grief, their voices fit only to keen and moan.
A pall of smoke hung over the land, drifted like the ghosts of the dead between the trees. Looking, a person would have thought all the forest had been put to the flame. It had not been, but villages burned. Farmhouses, barns and byres, and the neat stacks of hay in the fields-these all burned.
For two weeks, the Speaker of the Sun watched from the highest point in the city, from the gardens on the roof of the Tower of the Sun. He stood alone on some nights, watching, and thinking, It is she. Kerian is back!
Once he said this to his mother, Laurana standing beside him and tracking the fires. She asked him how he knew this, and he said, “Mother, think like a general. Before, Thagol went here, and then he went there. You could imagine his next blow only looking at a map. Look now-over the last nights we’ve seen no pattern at all. He is chasing someone. He’s chasing Kerian.”
Laurana considered this, looking out past the bridges, the eastern one bristling with the skulls that marked Thagol’s rage. They gleamed now in the moonlight, bleached by the seasons.
“What is she doing, my son?” she asked, her voice heavy with sadness.
Gilthas didn’t know, and he said so. “I do know Kerian, and so I think she’s engaging him, Mother. I think she’s jerking him wherever she wants him to be. I would guess that she’s drawing him north and eastward.”