They did not hear her, they did not have to. The farmers and townsmen, never trained to fight, were the first to die. The outlaws, her good warriors, knew a losing fight when they saw one. They ran, leaping over the corpses of foes and friends alike, into the forest, deep into the woods and high up the granite slopes where, maybe, horses would find it hard to follow.
Kerian ran after, cursing, and hearing Lord Thagol’s laughter ringing not in her ears but bellowing through her mind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kerian counted her dead. She counted them by reckoning those who did not make it out, who fell in the forest to Knights, to the trampling hoofs of war horses, to swords, to maces, to ThagoPs evil. She counted them in tears and wasn’t ashamed of that. She wept, Jeratt did, and Feather’s Flight did not, for she was among the dead. She lay among the farmers, the villagers, beside Ander the miller’s son who had refused to hand her over to Thagol’s Knights. He’d been in love with her, so said Jeratt.
“When I close my eyes, I see it on him still, Jeratt. The look on him, dying for me.” The flash of madness, of glory as he flung himself between her and the killing steel.
They sat on a high, boulder-topped hill of the kind she first saw an age ago, in another autumn, as she climbed endlessly behind Stanach to avoid Knights on the road to the Hare and Hound. Stubborn, that day she’d climbed in ill-chosen boots until her feet bled. She thought, now, that her heart bled. When she looked down the hill, Kerian saw the dwarf coming up. He’d fought well-for a one-handed man, Jeratt had said.
“What are you going to do about the dwarf, Kerian?”
Kerian shrugged. “What’s to do? He’s here, and I can’t get him safely to Qualinost. He should have stayed hehind. Damn, maybe he should have stayed in Thorbardin.”
Kerian watched Stanach labor up the hill, weary as she, sweat running on him, a filthy handage wrapped around his head.
“Are you all right?” she asked when he came close.
He looked up at her in moonlight, his eyes fierce as a blade’s edge. He said, “No, I’m Weeding. I’m hungry. I am in this gods damned forest, Mistress Lioness. I am not all right.” He looked around, behind, to the sides. “I don’t think any of us are.”
She frowned. Jeratt lifted his head.
“There’s something in the forest,” the dwarf said.
Jeratt rose, his hand on his sword.
“No.” Stanach dropped to a seat beside Kerian, his breathing a weary groaning. Kerian touched his shoulder lightly. He shook his head. “I’m all right. By Reorx’s beard, though, I am tired.
“In the forest,” he said, returning to what he’d started to say. “Not Knights. Not the rest of our folk straggling back or away. Something else. Something sly and quiet.”
Kerian nodded to Jeratt, who went off down the hill to gather a few of those still standing. They went out into the forest, cat-footed. A young woman ran up the hill-where did she get the strength?-to whisper in Kerian’s ear.
“Yes, and quickly. Keep an eye out for friends.”
Down she went, bounding, and in moments, one by one, guards took stands around the hill, setting a perimeter. Stanach put his arms on his drawn-up knees, his head on his forearms. He did not take four breaths before Kerian heard him gently snoring. She sat alone beside the sleeping emissary from Thorbardin, a dwarf far from home. When he wavered, she helped him lie down. He hardly woke, never missed a breath. Neither did he stir when Jeratt came back to say he’d found nothing and no one in the forest.
“I don’t know what the dwarf heard, but we didn’t see sign of anything. Just his imagination?”
Kerian glanced at Stanach, sleeping, then back. “Doesn’t usually have a very active imagination, does he?”
Jeratt agreed that he didn’t “What dwarf does? There’s nothing there, Kerian. Just the night, the forest and our doom, eh?”
Just those things. Jeratt sat down. He’d found a good stream and offered her his leather water bottle, fat and dripping. “That’s supper, I’m afraid, and I’m thinking breakfast won’t be much better.”
After a time, he went away to watch at the edge of the camp, and Kerian saw him walking among the warriors, bending low to speak to one, slapping the shoulder of another. In the morning they would break their fast on a bitter bread. In the morning, Thagol would come through the forest with steel.
She sat a long time thinking, gazing into the forest. After a time, she saw a fire spring up, then another. The blood in her veins was cold, and her heart weighed like stone as one after another fires of ThagoPs encampments glowed, out in the distance, out between the trees. One and one and one …they made a circle, wide and strong.
“They ring us in,” she said to the night.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again her heart stood suddenly still. Upon the forest night, the trees, the darkness, the little bits of light from campfires, something moved between her camp and that of the Knights. Hair rose up prickling on her arms, the back of her neck. Kerian’s breath caught, and she let it go silently. Whatever it was drifted, then stopped, then drifted again. It moved like smoke, like shadow, and as Kerian watched, trying to make out shape and substance, the thing vanished.
Beside her, Stanach stirred. He groaned, cursed, and shoved himself up to sitting. He saw the water and drank deeply. He offered her some, and she drank more.
Kerian pointed to the lights, the real gleams of real fires. Stanach sighed.
“I tell you, Mistress Lioness, I don’t like being away from Thorbardin. It’s never good. I’m meant to be there, I’m supposed to be there. All this …” He swept his arm wide, taking in the sleeping elves, the distant Knights and draconians. “All this, damn, I don’t even know why I’m here anymore-where I am or what I’m fighting for.”
“You’re north of Reanlea Gorge, not far from Lighting-”
“-Thunder.”
“Lightning and Thunder. You aren’t even all that far from Thorbardin. Closer than you’d be if you were sleeping in a bed of goose down in the best chamber King Gilthas could offer.”
A small breeze wandered around the top of the hill, smelling like earth and stone, like the water in the rill below. “Ah, your king. And you, his own, dear outlaw.”
She looked at him sideways. He did not smile, but he slid her a look of knowing.
“His own, dear outlaw, that’s you. What are you going to do in the morning, Mistress Lioness?”
“Fight.”
He shook his head. “You won’t make it through. The Skull Knight is set up to crush you.”
“Us,” she murmured, her eyes on the fires.
He grunted. “You’ll die.”
“We probably will.”
The first howling of wolves wound through the night. One to another, they called out, Brother! Where are you? Brother! There is food! Brother!
Kerian winced, thinking of the corpses to be stripped, the bodies of friends who could not be decently buried.
Softly Stanach said, “How will we die, Mistress Lioness?”
Kerian drew a breath, a long one, and on it she felt again the quiver of tears she’d shed for a boy who had flung himself between Thagol’s sword and her breast.
“We will die well. If anyone knows about it, if anyone of us gets out of here to tell, they will be singing the song of us in every tavern in Qualinesti and all the best bars in Thorbardin.”