Chane crossed his arms, waiting. Within moments, she would be jeered out of this commoners' arena, and he could finally take her away.
Wynn raised one hand and pointed to Hammer-Stag. Her voice low and not quite steady, it still carried.
"This honored thänæ spoke of a pale woman, a silver dog, and an elf," she began. "These were my companions of old. In company, we faced horrors not imagined, things to make goblins into bed tales for children."
Hammer-Stag raised his eyebrows, and Chane groaned softly. Why did she have to begin with an insult?
Wynn held both hands out toward her audience.
"Five seasons past, we traveled to the top of the world, to a place of year-round ice on the eastern continent known there as the Pock Peaks. We searched for a treasure lost beyond history—but not for our own gain. We sought to keep it from the hands of a murdering villain and worse … one of the undead."
Chane's mouth went slack. Did dwarves even know about the undead? From what he had learned of the Numan Lands, such creatures were only fables and folklore here. Several dwarves fidgeted like children suffering in boredom, but all remained quiet. Wynn's low voice carried throughout the smoky room.
"He was what the people there called a Noble Dead, the highest and most feared of the undead … an upér, upír … a vampire, a drinker of the blood of the living. We struggled on in those white mountains, trying to find the treasure before he did."
Wynn's exaggerated accounts of trials and hardships built as she circled the platform, fixing upon the whole audience and perhaps purposefully ignoring Hammer-Stag. After a while she paused, and silence filled the room. She met the steady gaze of one female dwarf sitting at the back side of Hammer-Stag's table.
Wynn stepped down from the platform and reached past Hammer-Stag for the woman's mug.
Though she faltered, no one tried to stop her. She took a fast and deep drink, and slammed the mug back down like Hammer-Stag—or tried to. Compared to his pounding, it sounded like she had dropped the mug.
Ale sloshed out on the table.
Its owner frowned, shaking bits of foam off her stout fingers. Wynn quickly retreated to the platform while others at the table tried to stifle their amusement.
"One night in our search," Wynn began again, "I became lost in a blizzard. But Chap, the silver sire of my own companion"—and she gestured toward Shade—"found me. Together, we took refuge inside a stone chute to wait out the storm." Her voice rose slightly. "But we were fools to think a storm our worst enemy. We heard a sound at the chute's bottom. … We peered downward to see two of the Anmaglâhk, the Thieves of Lives, a caste of elven assassins, crawling up to murder us!"
Chane grew still and attentive. He had heard only scant bits of Wynn's journey, and little to nothing of her time up in the Pock Peaks. He knew what had become of those two elves, for he had seen the bodies. But he had not known they had come so close to Wynn.
A low rumble passed briefly through the crowd. Chane's ire rose for an instant, until he looked at their faces.
The mention of elves as assassins seemed to startle them into disbelief. But distaste came quickly, as if they accepted Wynn's accounting. Even the fanciful notion that such a caste might exist did not sit well with the dwarves. Chane remembered Wynn's earlier warning to keep all weapons in plain sight as an issue of honor and virtue.
"Until then, we didn't know these eastern elves sought the treasure as well. Chap is fierce, as Hammer-Stag has said, but he would be hard-pressed against such trained assassins. They moved like a sudden night breeze, wielding stilettos as if born with them. I'm ashamed to say I faltered in fear."
She paused once more at Hammer-Stag's table, this time reaching for a closer mug, but Hammer-Stag quickly covered the mug with his hand.
Wynn's face drained of all color at his denial, but Chane was relieved. She had finally failed in her challenge.
"Perhaps another mug would be better," Hammer-Stag said quietly, and then his face flushed with anger as he glared at the mug's bleary-eyed owner.
That ragged-looking male with ruddy features blinked in confusion. Horrified realization took him, and he quickly pulled his mug away.
Chane was baffled. For such stout and hardy people, he wondered at any dwarf being so drunk.
Wynn recovered. Exchanging respectful nods with Hammer-Stag, she grabbed another mug and took a drink. And Chane realized what had happened.
That one drunken dwarf had been swilling wood alcohol—which would have killed Wynn if Hammer-Stag had not intervened. Chane's discomfort grew, not only for Wynn's safely, but because she was doing better than he expected.
"But as those murdering elves began their ascent," Wynn continued, "a black shadow passed overhead." She raised one arm, draping her robe's sleeve below her eyes. "When I looked up, I barely made out the transparent ghost of a raven as it dived down through the chute."
She jabbed her other hand through the sleeve, the fabric whipping aside as her fingers shot out at a nearby table. One young male stiffened sharply in startlement, almost dropping his tankard.
"That black ghost rammed straight through the first Anmaglâhk!"
More dwarves sat upright in their seats.
"He grabbed his chest in pain, but something more pulled my eyes skyward. A hint of white flashed by, running down the chute's wall. It went straight at the elves, and the second one vanished from the chute's mouth as it came. That white form was gone, and the first elf slumped against the stone wall.
"Chap raced after them, for in protecting me, his heart would never turn him from a fight. I rushed after him but stopped at the chute's bottom when I saw the one fallen Anmaglâhk. The elf's ribs protruded around a gaping hole in his chest … where his heart had been torn from his body."
Wynn raised her hand, closed in a partial fist like a claw, as if gripping that heart. She turned, walking slowly around the platform. All the dwarves watched in silence.
"Then I heard the snarls and screaming," she whispered. "I rushed on after Chap to a sight I still cannot push from memory. The other elf lay dead in the snow, his head torn from the gushing stump of his neck … and standing over him was a naked white woman.
"She was so deceptively frail in build, but with fangs and clear crystal eyes. Her hair shimmered black as night, its tendrils writhing in the snow-laced breeze. She was undead, a vampire, but centuries old. And she had torn apart two of the Anmaglâhk like gutted fish."
Wynn paused near another table and locked eyes on a young wide-eyed dwarven couple.
"I could barely breathe," she whispered, "as I stared at her."
This time she did not hesitate and took another long drink. Her brown eyes glittered as she twirled back around to the platform's center.
"To my despair, Chap charged. So fierce was he that he held the white woman in combat for a while. But finally she threw him against the cliff side, and he fell limp in the snow. She turned her eyes on me … and I ran!
"I barely made the chute's mouth before she was on me. She grabbed my throat and slammed me against the sheer stone as I cried out."
Wynn paused so long that Chane thought someone might speak.
"She released me … and cringed away against the chute's far wall."
Hammer-Stag leaned forward, neither smiling nor scowling, his eyes locked on Wynn.
"She stared at me with those colorless eyes. Even through terror that froze my body more than cold, my thoughts were racing. I had cried out for her to stop … and the sound of my words, not my voice, had caused this. I spoke again."
Wynn glanced toward Chane.
"She had been locked away in those white mountains, alone for hundreds upon hundreds of years … so long that she'd forgotten the very sound of speech. Upon hearing words once more, so vaguely remembered, like a home lost so long she had forgotten even the hope of it … she did not kill me.