The Lioness

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.”

“Toward the Stonelands.”

“Yes. Thorbardin, beyond.”

“Thorbardin.” Laurana stood a moment quiet, and at last she gave voice to the question between them. “If Kerian is back, why hasn’t she come here to tell us how her mission to the dwarves fared?”

Gilthas pointed to the fires by which they tracked her. “I don’t think she’s had time to, Mother.”

Wind shifted, smoke stung their eyes, and in the stinging Gil’s sudden bravado shivered. With startling suddenness, he recalled the nightmares that lately haunted him. In those dark dreams he sent his lover to her death. He put a hand upon the parapet to steady himself. Had he doomed her in reality?

Soft, his mother’s hand touched his shoulder, an old gesture, a steadying one. She said nothing, not she who felt the deaths of those in the forest, she who had raised up a son whose nights were often savaged by dreams that looked sometimes like prescience.

Gilthas shook his head, swallowing to steady his voice.

“There is reason to hope, Mother. I don’t know why she hasn’t come here. There are ways to reach her, but I won’t try those now. Whatever Kerian is doing, she does for a reason. The wrong move from me, and I might cause it all to fall in ruin.”

Warm breezes, smoky and thick, tugged at Laurana’s hair as she leaned out over the marble wall framing the little garden. She leaned out to see. Gilthas knew her and knew she did not strain only her eyes to see. She looked with her heart, with all her mind. What was happening in the kingdom? How many more would have to die?

“Mother,” said the elf king. He took her hand and put it in the crook of his arm. “Come away now. We’ll trust her. Whatever Kerian is doing, she is doing her best. As for Thorbardin, we must trust about that, too. She spoke well there and was heard, or she spoke well and wasn’t. We must wait and see.”

For she will not forget. She will come to me, he thought, looking out to the smoky night.

For another fortnight, the king went up to the roof to watch the forest. On almost every night, he saw the signs of burning, smoke hanging. To his city came news that the winter to come would be a hard one. Sir Thagol did not know the meaning of mercy, and he seemed to hate the crops of farmers as much as he hated farmers themselves. In the halls of elven power, Senator Rashas looked around at his fellows nervously, hearing their unease, their fear, and he grew afraid they would recall that he had been the greatest champion of the idea of Beryl’s Dark Knights doing all they could to bring order to an unruly kingdom.

“An orderly kingdom,” he’d argued, “will produce all the tribute the dragon wants. She will thrive, and we will survive. It is the only way!”

Now as his fellows looked out into the forest and marked the smoke, they heard the cries of the people who feared that the winter would be a hungry one, and they began to look at Senator Rashas with narrowed eyes.

“This had better end soon,” said Lady Sunstrike, who held lands out by the eastern part of the kingdom, in sight of the Stonelands. She had received her governorship from the hand of the young king. She had spoken with him lately, the king who sat upon his throne with his usual air of disinterest. To see him, anyone would think he was half asleep. Lady Sunstrike believed otherwise. “If it doesn’t end, we will be wondering what to do with the hungry when the snow comes.”

Rashas looked right and left, trying to think how he could rein in the Skull Knight.

As he thought, Lady Sunstrike cast another glance at the king. He seemed to rouse, his lids lifted. He held the lady’s glance, only a moment. She did not nod, and he did not look again her way, but in the morning a rider went out from the city, naught but a lad with a saddlebag full of missives from his mistress to her steward.

In two days time, Kerian of Qualinesti received from Jeratt the startling news that they had not fought alone in their last battle with Knights. Outnumbered, certain to be killed, Jeratt had looked up to find a dozen fresh, armed men and women at their backs. Rabble, ragged outlaws like themselves, or so they thought until, the last Knight dead, they learned that these were not men and women of the forest at all. They were farmers, two of them villagers, three from the estates of Lady Sunstrike who governed this stony eastern province, all dressed to appear the most disreputable of citizens.

They had little to say, but one, as the others drifted away into the forest, suggested to Jeratt that they would not again fight alone.

“Call on us,” he said. “I’m a stable boy on Lady Sunstrike’s estate. We hear she’s here, the lady who fights like a lioness. We know who she fights. If you call for help, we will come.”

Kerian had lost the faith of farmers who feared to lose their heads. She’d seen her network of trusty villagers fall to ruin. Here, unlooked for, she found a strand with which to reweave her rebellion of elves. Fighters at need, carriers of news, granters of shelter, these would support her and her warriors in her battle.

Kerian watched as Stanach came out of the passage through Lightning-Thunder, as he insisted on naming the falls—his hair and beard glistening with moisture, his clothing damp. The dwarf had been a patient prisoner—his word, not hers—and had done his duty at watch whenever required. He had never offered to go on raids, and no one asked. He was a king’s ambassador and Kerian made it clear from the start that Stanach had no part in this work.

Stanach stood watch, hunted with the others, in all ways did his duty in camp, but he was not a genial ambassador. He kept to himself, told no tales around the fire, and made no friends among the resistance. What he did was watch Kerian. He watched her plan, he watched her lure Thagol this way and that, like a rough handler jerking a hound’s chain. He saw her make maps for her warriors when she planned, he saw her pacing all the while a band of them was gone, on her feet almost every moment till they returned.

When she mourned the dead, she did so feeling the eyes of the dwarf on her. They were not unkindly, but they were always on her.

Damn, she thought, he watches me eat!

For all she knew, he watched her sleep.

There he stood, wet from the falls, his eyes on her again.

“What?” she said.

Usually he shook his head and sometimes he muttered, “Nothing.” This time he nodded to her once, a jerk of his head, up and then down.

“Got company. Looks like a farmer to me.”

Curious, Kerian rose and bade Stanach show the farmer through. The dwarf was gone but a few moments before he returned with a wide-eyed, soaking lad. The boy’s name was Aran Leafglow, he said, and he was no farmer but a village lad. He jerked his head in a kind of bow, tugging at his forelock.

“Lady Lioness,” he said. “I come with news for you.”

Lady Lioness. Kerian caught Stanach’s grim smile out the corner of her eye. Her warriors liked the spreading name, so did the villagers and farmers. Thagol, from what she had learned, hated it, for the people rallied to it.

Thagol had made a mistake. He’d punished the elves widely for crimes they did not commit. In rage he’d fallen on them with the fierceness of a dragon, unleashing his Knights and his draconians, trying to cow the countryside. He had pushed too hard.

“Give me your news,” Kerian said. “Sit and talk.”

The boy shook his head. “No’m. I can’t sit, for I have to get back and there’s all the gorge to travel. I come to tell you—there’s a pack of Knights near. You said you’d want to know. They’re not but beyond Kellian Ridge.”

Kerian drew a breath, long and slow and satisfied. “A pack. How many?”

“Five, no more. Armed to the teeth, though, and they have three draconians with them.”

Eight. She thanked the boy and sent him out through the falls. She called six outlaws to her, three down from the hills, and sent them out with word to gather in all the leaders of her scattered bands. Last she turned to Stanach, and she said, “It’s time now, Stanach Hammerfell. I’m going out to kill some Knights.”

His eyes grew wide. “You’re mad. You said yourself that the next time you kill you’ll draw Thagol to you like steel to a lodestone.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’m going to do just that. He’s going to chase me right to the place where I will kill him.”

“Ach, lass, you’re mad.”

She smiled and took up the sword she liked to wear. She sighted along the edge, decided it needed honing, and sat down to work. He watched her, and she let him. When she was finished with the sword, she took out the knife he’d given her long ago at the Hare and Hound. This, too, she honed with long singing strokes.

As she did, her eye on steel and stone, she said, “Of course there’ll always be a safe place for you here, Stanach. I’ll keep men back to ward you. When it’s over, and Thagol is dead—”

He snorted. “You’re a cocky one, aren’t you Mistress Lioness?”

She smiled, stroking the steel with the stone. “When it’s over and Thagol is dead, I will take you to Qualinost myself, and you can let my king know what you think about his chances for a treaty.”

The dwarf shook his head and merely said again, “You’re mad.”

When she finished with the stone, he took it up and sat to work on the edge of his axe’s blade. He set the axe head on his knee, the edge out, bracing with his right forearm while he worked with his left hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Going with you.”

“No. You’re not.”

“Yes.” He didn’t look up, good at her own game. “I am. I’m here on my thane’s business, Mistress Lioness, and that means I go where I think he is best served.” He looked up then, his blue-flecked black eyes hard and bright. “Will you be trying to stop me?”

She drew a slow, wry smiled. “If you’re killed, there will be two kings I’ll have to answer to.”

Stanach returned to his work. “In that case, you won’t be the one many people envy, will you?”

She said nothing more, seeing he wouldn’t be moved. He kept quiet, listening to the voices of stone and steel with the air of one who hears a long forgotten song.

They did not go quietly through the forest, the Knights and the draconians. They went as though they were lords of the place, crashing through the brush, the broad-chested horses tearing up the little road across the top of Kellian Ridge. A drover’s path, the way a farmer took his sheep or cattle to market, it wandered up through the trees, over the stony crest, and down again. They went laughing, and one bore a sack of heads dangling from his saddlebag.

Kerian smelled the blood, and she knew this one at last was Headsman Chance. So did the nine men and women concealed in ambush. Beside her, Stanach balanced his throwing axe, testing. In the shadows, his teeth shone white in a hard grin. Kerian shook her head, pointing to the two draconians. Scales the color of greening copper, the creatures marched behind. One spat. The stone his spittle hit sizzled then melted. Another, as though challenged, imitated his companion. The acrid stink of acid stung Kerian’s nostrils.

She gestured to her warriors, her fingers speaking her mind: Draconians first, then Knights.

That meant Stanach held back, for he’d lose that weapon if it killed a draconian. The creature would turn to steel-eating acid as it died. He lifted his lip in an impatient snarl. Kerian glared. He stilled.

One Knight went by, then another. The third passed, and nothing moved in the brush on either side of the path. If she had not placed them there herself, Kerian wouldn’t have known her outlaws waited.

A crow called, high. The fourth Knight rode by, and then Chance Headsman with his sack banging on the shoulder of his tall steed. Kerian’s hands itched, her fingers curled around the grip of her sword. Stanach poked her ribs. She smiled wryly and settled.

The first draconian came, a little ahead of the second. Kerian counted three beats and then heard the high whistle of one, two, then three arrows. The first caught the lagging draconian in the eye, right through. The second missed both, and the third fell useless into a hissing pool of acid just as Sir Chance turned.

Kerian shouted, “Go!” and the forest erupted in battle cries, in flashing steel, in wasping arrows. Half her warriors attacked the horses, and the beasts screamed, dying. Knights cursed, falling. The other half went after the last two draconians. Among those, Kerian fought. They fell upon the beast-men with stone from above, heaving crushing boulders from the hilltop, the stone breaking bone. One creature died howling, while the other leaped aside from the path of a stone half its size. Leathery wings rustled, Stanach shouted, and Kerian saw the draconian’s leap turn into a swift glide.

Two arrows flew. One took the creature in the throat, its flight staggered now. Another arrow sped to the draconian’s eye. Screaming, it fell.

Kerian shouted warning to the elves below. Two scrambled, one fell. Stanach leaped to pull the elf up—and Kerian caught him by the back of his shirt as the draconian fell, dead upon the unlucky elf.

Hideous screams rent the forest air as the elf died, his flesh melting from him, his bones rendered to slag.

Kerian cried, “Kill them!” but all around her that work was being done as her warriors gutted the war-horses, toppled the riders, getting the armored Knights down and helpless. Two fell into the road, one fell under his horse. The third slashed about him with singing steel. Another elf died, screaming. Hacking, slashing at the downed Knights, Kerian’s warriors killed three. One remained on horseback, one on foot. Kerian leaped for the unhorsed man, sword high, her steel clashing against his, sparks flying. She fought snarling, she fought cursing, and it had been a long time since she’d killed, but now she longed for blood.

She shoved at the Knight hard, her weight no proof against his. Nimble-footed, she leaped a little aside, got around him, and tangled her feet in his legs. He fell. She stamped on his neck, her boot heel crushing his larynx through gorget and mail. She jerked off his helm and threw it into the brush. With one swift stab, Kerian killed, pinning him to the earth with her sword.

Panting, sweat running on her, she stood with arms trembling from the effort, hearing the cries of her wounded and a sudden thunder.

Someone shouted, “Kerian!”

She turned, saw the sword of Chance Headsman flashing high, the blood-red nostrils of his war-horse, the Knight’s visored face, the face of death. She saw the hand gripping the sword fly out, fly off the man’s arm, fingers still clutching, the sword tumbling, and Stanach’s throwing axe landed on the ground, nearly at her feet.

They fell on the Headsman like wolves, the surviving Night People. They tore him from his horse and flung him to the ground. They held him, ripped his helm from him and one—a young woman with fierce green eyes, picked up his own sword, prying the dead hand from the grip.

The glances of warrior and Lioness met like steel sparking.

Kerian nodded.

In the dust, in the forest he had terrorized, Chance Headsman lost his head, and out near the Stonelands, Lord Thagol felt a jolt and knew he had found his prey, his enemy, at last.

Eamutt Thagol gathered all his forces, every Knight he could spare. He marched them into the forest, he marched them after the Lioness. He flanked his column with blood-lusting draconians, and these he let range out into the forest, searching for outlaw prey. They went like a bludgeon tearing down the roads, ripping through the villages, and they never got very far.

Kerian had all she needed, a canny force of warriors and farmers who knew their territory well. Sometimes they surrounded a column, hitting hard, killing mostly horses in the first wave, then retreating. “Until six breaths after they think we are gone,” she’d say, then the elves would fall upon them again, this time from the rear.

In this way, for Kerian’s well-planned strikes seeming random as lightning, the Night People wreaked havoc upon the Knights. They fought a battle of harassment, Kerian’s forces splitting when she needed them to, coalescing again, and harrying again. She came at the Knights from behind, killing the rearguard. She fell upon them on every side, savaging the flanks, and there was not a bridge for them to use between Qualinost and the Stonelands, not before or behind. The roads were blocked with felled trees.

Kerian drove her enemy deep into the thickest part of the forest, but Thagol would not turn back. He would not give up. He smelled her, he tasted her thoughts, he knew what her blood would feel like on his hands. He hated her with a passion as strong as fire. He dreamed of killing her, waking and sleeping, he had the thousand images of her thousand deaths in his mind.

He would not give up. All around him Knights died, elves died, and Sir Thagol would not give up. Fierce, furious, he drove his men, and one night he saw Kerian’s plan. He looked into her mind and read it as though it were a book. He saw not as a Skull Knight, for she had the ward of an ancient elf woman’s ancient magic on her. He saw as a general. He realized what she would do because he knew what he would do in her place. She wanted to drive him to the eastern edge of the forest, and he thought that was a good idea. A little at a time, he let his men bleed away from him in numbers she wouldn’t notice. He sent them with orders, he ranged them in careful position. He let Kerian harry him on. He didn’t make it too easy for her, but he was eager to put the Stonelands at his back. From there, he would fight her back into the forest and—by vanished Takhisis!—he would drive her into the arms of his waiting reserves.

He would return to Qualinost with the head of a Lioness to hang.

Kerian gathered her warriors, Jeratt, Feather’s Flight, all of them. They came one by one to her fire, rough and bloodied, hard-eyed and weary. They came, and the leader of each band of Night People told their weapons, each speaking the count of sword and dagger, of bows and arrows, of axes, of mail shirts and helms. Each told the names of the men and women in their bands.

Jeratt, who went last, said, “That bastard Knight has the border at his back, and he isn’t going to flee now. Once out of the forest, he’s lost. He won’t get past the border and into the kingdom again. He’ll fight and be trapped, just like you want”

She thought so, too. Across the fire, near Feather’s Flight, the dwarf Stanach stood, his eyes on her. To him, Kerian said, “You can go now. Thagol’s not guarding the roads to Qualinost. I’ll send warriors to guide you to a safe place.”

He shook his head. “No need to.”

“If you go into battle—”

Stanach laughed, a harsh, bitter bark. He lifted his hand, his right, ruined and the fingers twisted. “Nay, no need to tell me what can happen, Mistress Lioness. I’m with you.”

She looked around at them all, the dwarven ambassador, the half-elf who was her friend and her second. She looked at her captains and her good and trusty outlaws. Their numbers had grown while, by last count, Thagol had lost a good part of his force, run off or killed.

“Remember Jeratt,” she said, “Thagol’s mine. No one else gets him, and no one else tries. Now post watch, get some sleep, and we go at him—” She grinned to match Jeratt’s own. “We go at him when the moon sets.”

She watched them go, each of her Night People back to his or her own band. She watched until they became part of the night. Beside her, Stanach said he thought she would do well to sleep. She looked at him long in the firelight and shadows.

“Do you know,” she said, musing, “I used to sleep in silk and satin. I used to sleep in a high bedroom and my lover would wake me gently with kisses and whisper to ask if he could send for my breakfast.”

He is a king, she thought.

“I used to sleep above a tavern,” Stanach said, “with the clatter of the cooks in the kitchen below. Getting hard to remember that, eh?”

“A little.”

“Go,” he said. “Get some sleep. After, I will, then we fight.”

She curled up, her arms wrapped tightly around herself for warmth, the bloodstone amulet in her hand, but she didn’t sleep. This night, her plan was nearly ready to spring, and she dared not dream for fear Lord Thagol would be listening.

A storm roared out of the forest, falling upon the Knights like lightning from the night sky, thunder screaming. Blades shrieking, elf warriors howling for the deaths of their enemies overwhelmed the watch, tearing through them. The Knights leaped up from their bedrolls, naked of their armor, scrambling for weapons, and Lord Thagol’s voice roared over all, cursing. His draconians came in from the outer parts of the camp and met a wall of arrows, a hail of swords, and the forest reeked with their deaths, rang with the shrieks of elves who had fallen to their talons, their fangs, their poison.

All the forest smelled of blood and poisonous acid, all the forest echoed with the clang and clash of steel. Kerian threw all her forces at the Knights, believing them helpless. She flung herself furiously into the fray. She strode the slaughter field and spilled the blood of her enemies. All around her, her warriors gave good accounting, no more than the good and simple folk who had come to fight beside them. The outrages of the seasons past carried them—the killings, the burnings, the savageries of Thagol’s Knights.

They had their cause; they had their fierce Lioness. She had her king’s need. All this carried them, surging into slaughter, made them redden the earth with blood, made them forget they ever knew the word mercy as the din of battle filled their ears. The sound was so loud it pressed the air from their lungs, and their eyes saw such sights as another day would make their stomachs turn.

Through it all, Kerian ran fighting and searching for Thagol, for the Knight who had unleashed the butchery of the past year. She ran killing, and even before she saw him, sword high and about to plunge it into the breast of an elf, she knew she had him. He withdrew, blood dripping, and she ran at him, roaring. He laughed over the corpse and pointed, somewhere behind her, somewhere over her shoulder. Laughing still, he reached for her.

She ducked, sword staggered, her swing broken. She turned and saw what made the Skull Knight laugh.

From out of the forest, like lightning, like thunder, a band of horsemen, all armored in black, all howling for death. Her warriors fell before them, trampled beneath iron-shod hoofs, slashed, beheaded, speared upon lances and flung aside.

His face like a burn-scar, terrible eyes dark as death, Thagol lunged for her, his sword high. He screamed in her head, and it was the sound he imagined she would make, dying one of the thousand deaths he finally chose for her. Kerian turned and tried to defend. She lifted her own sword and knew the gesture for no more than that. His sword hung, right at the arc of his swing and came down—

—hard upon the skull of a young elf leaping between the Lioness and Dark Knight. She saw the boy’s face—Ander! Blood spurted, white shards of skull tumbling through the air, and in the ruin of his face Kerian she saw the terrible surprise in his eyes as he fell. On the face of the Skull Knight there was fury as he lunged again. Kerian dropped back, hoping his thrust would overbalance him. It did not, and she moved swiftly, brought up her own blade, met his and held. Thagol, the heavier, pressed. Kerian, the lighter, let him. He thrust again, she moved as though to counter, then ducked hard aside. He lost his footing on the blood-slick earth. In the instant that bought her, she turned and screamed, Retreat! Retreat! With all the air in her lungs, every second the boy’s life bought her, she shouted her warriors off the field.

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.