Ander took it all in silently, his eyes on her, lighting in excitement for the mission, shadowing in sadness for having to leave.
“After you tell her that, Ander, tell her Jeratt and I will be home before winter. Tell her things are changing in the kingdom now.”
“I’ll do it all, Kerian. I promise. Just the way you tell me.”
“And you won’t come back. The risk that you’d be followed isn’t great, but it’s a chance we can’t take.”
Reluctantly, he agreed.
“You’re a fool,” Jeratt growled when the boy was gone. “You’re reckless. It’s wrong to send the boy so far alone, with such a mission. He’ll be lucky no one kills him before he gets to the falls. By all the gone gods, you’re a fool, Kerian!”
She flared, hot and high and sudden. “Don’t ever call me that again!”
He didn’t step back; in the sudden silence of the forest, Jeratt held his ground, his face set and stubborn.
“You think you’re not bein’ foolish? Y’think the boy didn’t just turn to fire for you? Kerian, he’s in love with ya. He’ll do anything you tell him, and he won’t be thinkin’ about anyone else but you.” Jeratt shook his head, then spat. “That will get someone killed someday.”
“Getting prescient, like Elder, are you?”
“Wonder why I say you’re a fool, do you?”
She flared again, he laughed at that and tapped his chest.
“I have a year or two more on me than you, Kerian. I haven’t lived in gilded palaces; I’ve lived in the hard world, the place where people die of stupidity, their own or someone else’s. Happens all the time, and I ain’t no seer, I just pay attention to what I see.”
The falling fire lay between them, yet they might have been standing toe to toe.
Coldly, Kerian said, “You are welcome to your opinion, Jeratt. I don’t know if you’re right or wrong about Ander, and I can’t undo a boy’s heart, but I can use him where he can do the best work. He’ll let the others know what we’re doing, let them know to be ready for our return. And hell be away from me for a while.”
Jeratt’s stance relaxed, his expression softened. “Y’did what y’could, I’ll grant it.” He stood in grudging silence for a moment longer. “The plan isn’t all that foolish. I’ll grant it, too.”
“But—?”
He met her eyes. “But y’should have sent him on a long time ago.”
By her silence, she agreed.
Between them embers breathed faintly. “I’ll not name you ‘fool’ again, but I might be sayin’ one day or another that y’could think something through a little harder. You have a good, keen mind, Kerian. Sharp as a dagger and bright. You learn, and that quickly.”
“But girl,” he continued, and she heard the affection in the naming, “y’came out of your king’s palace and walked into the forest with no idea but to find a brother who didn’t have the good sense to be happy about it. Now you’re puttin’ together a plan your king doesn’t know he can dream of. Y’like to leap at the bright idea. Maybe that’s good, but a lot of the time, it isn’t.”
Kerian kicked at the dirt, sending a fine spray of it onto the embers. Jeratt did the same. Between them, they smothered the fire. The half-elf winked.
“Well, even when I think you’re bein’, uh, not too sensible, I’m with you, Kerianseray of Qualinesti. I like the flash of your steel.”
Jeratt liked the flash of Kerian’s steel, and Lord Eamutt Thagol learned to hate it. Through the end of summer and into the beginning of a late-coming autumn, he found himself having to increase the size of the escort of Knights who accompanied tribute wagons to Acris. What had seemed to be isolated incidents of brigandage began to look like more than that. Lone wagons, no matter the number of Knights, were raided with increasing frequence and efficiency, and survivors reported that they were struck by growing bands of elves who fought by no rules any Knight or soldier knew, who seemed to reinvent their tactics daily. Soon he sent to Qualinost for more draconians with the trains that went on to the capital.
Through the summer of hot days and steamy nights, the outlaws became four, and then five and then more. Bayel and Felan left their farms and joined them, and so did others from the dales, men and women who wanted to strike a blow. They never ran as a solid or identifiable group. Sometimes they were eight, nine, ten at a time. After a raid the dalemen would fade away, back to their lives as peaceable citizens of a bleeding kingdom. They came at call, they left when the work was done, and each knew the danger of collaborators, the invisible enemy. Each knew he must not speak with anyone who was not part of the group.
They came to be known as the Night People, for they struck most often at night and vanished into the darkness before they could be identified. They went with soot-blacked faces, their bright eyes the more fearsome. They moved like shadows, like darkness.
The Night People. Kerian spoke the name to her growing band of warriors gleefully, proudly as though it were the name of a renowned fighting order.
“They come out of the woods on all sides,” one dying Knight reported to his lord.
The Skull Knight took the man’s head in his two hands, leaned close so his eyes were the only thing the dying man saw. A great shudder went through the man, and blood spurted from the wound in his side. In his mind, he felt Thagol walking, prowling, searching for something.
He wanted a name. The Lord Knight desired to see a face, a form, to know his enemy. The dying man couldn’t give him that, and in the end the agony of his death didn’t have all that much to do with his wounds.
The Night People changed strategy. They stepped up their raids, killed as many Knights as they could, as quickly as possible, then fell back, drawing the infuriated survivors after them and into the mouth of a trap that had been well set—a wall of waiting elves who let through their compatriots and closed around the Knights, howling terrible war cries, curdling the blood with screams. They killed swiftly, and they left nothing alive behind, not Knights, not horses, not draconians. They stripped the dead of weapons and what equipment they wanted, then destroyed the rest, leaving nothing but corpses for Lord Thagol to claim.
Some of the Night People died too, but their bodies were always stolen away and hidden and buried, so that the occupying force no longer knew who to trust in the dale.
Sitting in the tavern at Acris, Lord Thagol ransacked the minds of his dying men. He sent word to every town and hamlet in the forest, every farmstead in every dale, that the elf who gave him what he needed to know, who brought to him the head of the outlaws, would be richly rewarded—but not even then was he able to learn the face of his enemy.
At last, though, he was able to learn of one strike before it was made.
Chapter Fourteen
Felan stood before the lord Knight, his hand trembling slightly so that the parchment he held out rustled, whispering of his poorly suppressed fear. A line of sweat ran down the side of his face.
“M-my lord,” he said.
Lord Thagol didn’t look up. Before him lay spread a map of the countryside, wide and newly made. Upon the map Felan noted the Qualinost Road, that artery connecting this rural part of the kingdom to the capital and places beyond. Today a wagon of fat sacks filled with grain waited in a secluded place, guarded by draconians and Knights. Others would join it tomorrow and the next day until there were enough to escort to the capital. One would be filled with weapons and war supplies, another perhaps filled with the tribute the dragon loved—ancient treasure. In the south of the forest, where rich manors lay, lords and ladies were beginning to pay the dragon’s tax with the family jewels.
Felan registered a series of small red marks on the map, like check marks ticking off a list. These were the sites of recent encounters between the Lord Knight’s forces and the Night People. In none of these had Lord Thagol’s men fared well, and in the last, the battle near a small creek known as Brightflow, fourteen Knights had died. Two of the outlaws had perished as well, one killed by a sword, the other gone screaming to his death in a pool of acid, the revenge of the kapak draconian he had killed.