“They’re very dangerous,” said Rufus sagely. “Maybe we should get more soldiers to hunt them down.” The Speaker’s daughter was not about to admit defeat. She slammed her sword home in its scabbard. “No, by the gods! We’ll take them ourselves!” The kender jammed his soggy blue hat down on his head. His new clothes were ruined. “You don’t pay me enough for this,” he said under his breath.
How empty the great house seemed with Verhanna gone and Ulvian sent off to toil in the quarries of Pax Tharkas. Lord Anakardain was away from the city, with the lion’s share of the Guards of the Sun chasing down the last stubborn bands of slavers. Kemian Ambrodel was out questioning new arrivals in Qualinost about the red rain and other marvels of days past.
So many friends and familiar faces gone. Only he, Kith-Kanan, had remained behind. He had given up his freedom to roam when he accepted the throne of Qualinesti. After all these centuries, he finally understood how his father, Sithel, had felt before him. Bound up in chains like a prisoner. Only a Speaker’s chains weren’t made of iron, but of the coils of responsibility, duty, protocol.
It was hard, very hard, to remain inside the arched bridges of Qualinost, just as it was hard to keep inside the walls of the increasingly lonely Speaker’s house. Sometimes his thoughts were with Ulvian. Had he done right by his son? The prince’s crime was heinous, but did it justify Kith-Kanan’s harsh sentence?
Then he thought of Verhanna, probing every glade and clearing from Thorbardin to the Thon-Thalas River, seeking those whose crimes were the same as her brother’s. Loyal, brave, serious Hanna, who never swerved from following an order.
Kith-Kanan rose from his bed and threw back the curtains from his window. It was long after midnight, by the water clock on the mantle, and the world outside was as dark as pitch. He could hear the bloody rain still falling. It seeped under windowsills and doors.
A name, long buried in his thoughts, surfaced. It was a name not spoken aloud for hundreds of years: “Anaya!”
Into the quiet darkness, he whispered the name of the Kagonesti woman who had been his first wife. It was as if she was in the room with him.
He knew she was not dead. No, Anaya lived on, might even manage to outlive Kith-Kanan. As her life’s blood had flowed out of a terrible sword wound, Anaya’s body had indeed died. But undergoing a mysterious, sublime transformation, Anaya the elf woman had become a fine young oak tree, rooted in the soil of the ancient Silvanesti forest she had lived in and guarded all her life. The forest was but a small manifestation of a larger, primeval force, the power of life itself.
The power—he could think of nothing else to call it—had come into existence out of the First Chaos. The sages of Silvanost, Thorbardin, and Daltigoth all agreed that the First Chaos, by its very randomness, accidentally gave birth to order, the Not-Chaos.
Only order makes life possible.
These things Kith-Kanan had learned through decades of studying side by side with the wisest thinkers of Krynn. Anaya had been a servant of the power, the only force older than the gods, protecting the last of the ancient forests remaining on the continent. When her time as guardian was ended, Anaya had become one with the forest. She had been carrying Kith-Kanan’s child at the time.
Kith-Kanan’s head hurt. He kneaded his temples with strong fingers, trying to dull the ache. His and Anaya’s unborn son was a subject he could seldom bear to think about. Four hundred years had passed since last he’d heard Anaya’s voice, and yet at times the pain of their parting was as fresh as it had been that golden spring day when he’d watched her warm skin roughen into bark, when he’d heard her speak for the final time.
The rain ended abruptly. Its cessation was so sudden and complete it jarred Kith-Kanan out of his deep thoughts. The last drop fell from the water clock. Three days of scarlet rain were over.
His sigh echoed in the bedchamber. What would be next? He wondered.
“Thank Astra that foul mess has stopped!” exclaimed Rufus. “I feel like the floor of a slaughterhouse, soaked in blood!” “Oh, shut up. It wasn’t real blood, just colored water,” Verhanna retorted. For two days, in constant rain, they had tracked the elusive Kagonesti slavers with little result.
The Kagonesti’s trail had led west for a time, but suddenly it seemed to vanish completely. The crimson rain had ceased overnight, and the new day was bright and sunny, but Kith-Kanan’s daughter was weary and saddle sore. The last thing she wanted to listen to was the kender complaining about his soggy clothes.
Rufus prowled ahead on foot, leading his oversized horse by the reins. He peered at every clump of grass, every fallen twig. “Nothing,” he fumed. “It’s as if they sprouted wings and flew away.”
The sun was setting almost directly ahead of them, and Verhanna suggested they stop for the night.
Rufus dropped his horse’s reins. “I’m for that! What’s for dinner?”
She poked a hand into the haversack hung from the pommel of her saddle. “Dried apples, quith-pa, and hard-boiled eggs,” Verhanna recited without enthusiasm. She tossed a cold, hard-boiled egg to her scout. He caught it with one hand, though he grumbled and screwed his face into a mask of disgust. She heard him mutter something about “the same eats, three times a day, forever” as he tapped the eggshell against his knee to crack it—then suddenly let it fall to the ground.
“Hey!” called Verhanna. “If you don’t want it, say so. Don’t throw it in the mud!”
“I smell roast pig!” he exulted, eyes narrow with concentration. “Not far away, either!” He vaulted onto his horse and turned the animal.
Verhanna flopped back the wet hood of her woolen cape and called, “Wait, Rufus! Stop!”
The reckless, hungry kender was not to be denied, however. With thumps of his spurless heels, he urged his horse through a line of silver-green holly, ignoring the jabs and scratches of the barbed leaves. Disgusted, Verhanna rode down the row of bushes, trying to find an opening. When she couldn’t, she pulled her horse around and also plunged through the holly. Sharp leaf edges raked her unprotected face and hands.
“Ow!” she cried. “Rufus, you worthless toad! Where are you?”
Ahead, beyond some wind-tossed dogwoods, she spied the flicker of a campfire. Cursing the kender soundly, Verhanna rode toward the fire. The foolish kender didn’t even have his short sword anymore. In the fight with the smoke creature, Rufus’s blade had been broken.
Serve him right if it was a bandit camp, she thought angrily. Forty, no, fifty bloodthirsty villains, armed to the teeth, luring innocent victims in with their cooking smoke. Sixty bandits, yes, all of whom liked to eat stupid kender.
In spite of her ire, the captain kept her head and freed her sword from the leather loop that held it in its scabbard. No use barging in unprepared. Approaching the campfire obliquely, she saw shadowy figures moving around it. A horse whinnied. Clutching her reins tightly, Verhanna rode in, ready for a fight.
The first thing she saw was Rufus wolfing down chunks of steaming roast pork. Four elves dressed in rags and pieces of old blankets stood around the fire. By their light hair and chiseled features, she identified them as Silvanesti.
“Good morrow to you, warrior,” said the male elf nearest Rufus. His accent and manner were refined, city-bred.
“May your way be green and golden,” Verhanna replied. The travelers didn’t appear to be armed, but she remained on her horse just in case. “If I may ask, who are you, good traveler?”
“Diviros Chanderell, bard, at your service, Captain.”
The elf bowed low, so low that his sand-colored hair brushed the ground. Sweeping an arm around the assembled group, he added, “and this is my family.”
Verhanna nodded to each of the others. The older, brown-haired female was Diviros’s sister, Deramani. Sitting by the fire was a younger woman, the bard’s wife, Selenara. Her thick hair, unbound, hung past her waist, and peeking shyly out from behind the honey-golden cascade was a fair-haired child. Diviros introduced him as Kivinellis, his son.