Kerian thought there might be some tension over Jeratt, once the leader of the band, now deferring to his student, but none resented that because the half-elf made it clear that he didn’t mind.
“She’s what she is,” Jeratt said, quietly to his old friends while she lay sleeping. “I’m what I am. We’re good enough, the two of us, for what’s coming now.”
Elder, that small huddle of an ancient elf woman, said nothing to either of them upon their return, but Jeratt knew her of old, and so he knew by the feel of the forest, the air, the very stones that made the basin behind the falls, that Elder was pleased. The two began a strange conversation.
Kerian didn’t know for sure, but she imagined that Elder was a shaman of some sort, a sorceress who practiced the kind of earth magic the Qualinesti and their aristocratic kin the Silvanesti had long ago forgotten. In a world from which magic had vanished, where even talismans of legend sputtered into unreliability, Elder kept hold of something made of the ancient whispers of the land itself. Her conversations with Elder were never easy, sometimes as wrenching as tumbling into a maelstrom, for she spoke with a woman who smelled of magic in a world from which magic leaked like heart’s blood from a wound. Yet painful as these conversations could be, confusing, often as terrifying as the very first one which had left her on her knees and vomiting, Kerian never came away from Elder without feeling that she could—here and far away—create a force of men and women who would stand against the Knights and for the elves, who might, one day, be useful to an embattled king.
They settled into winter, the rounds of hunting and trapping, of preparing food and seeing to weapons. Kerian forbade raids on hapless travelers and on Knights.
“Leave them alone, for now,” she said. “Let the winter settle in peace. The Knights will know we’re here when I’m ready.”
Now and then, because he was not known to Knights here or to villagers, she sent Bayel to learn the news. He visited taverns, the forges at the river crossings where folk came and talked, he went among farmers as they used to do in the dales, a hunter come with bounty for the table in exchange for local gossip and a night by the fire. In this way Kerian learned that Headsman Chance still quartered his Knights in the taverns, that he had not forgotten the outlaw maid Kerianseray, and that he continued to hunt Kagonesti, who were seen less frequently now in the this part of the kingdom.
Kerian learned only one stubborn tribe remained, far away in the high forest, and Briar told her this was Dar and his White Osprey.
She learned, too, that the king was well in his palace. The mention of his name woke a longing to see him, to feel his arms around her again. Those longings she kept to herself and changed into dreams. She learned that the Queen Mother remained in health, and that the lords and ladies of the Senate were no different from seasons past. Surprisingly little had changed in Qualinesti politics. The highborn elves played a game of small losses, counting each day they hadn’t lost all as a gain. It was not a difficult game right now, for Sir Eamutt Thagol had been keeping himself and his Knights and draconians in the eastern part of the kingdom where the snow fell thickly and few traveled on the roads or even gathered at taverns. In the cold season after his humiliation, there was scant news of the Skull Knight.
Kerian dropped the fat brace of hares to the ground, careful to keep it well away from the bloody snow and the four dead elves. She slipped her longbow over her shoulder as she bent to crouch over the largest of the scattered corpses, the armor-clad man from whose throat sprang six arrows. Her breath hung on the icy air, gray plumes drifting over the carnage, weaving around the shafts of the white-fletched arrows. Winter arrows of the Wilder Kin.
“Kagonesti must have got the Knight,” Jeratt said. She didn’t look up or acknowledge the obvious, and he added, “The Wilder Kin didn’t get the others.”
The others, three elves dressed in the leathers and furs of hunters, had been sword-hacked. These were folk who lived in winter on their wits, not villagers, not farmers, but elves who supplied taverns and the tables of the wealthy. Luckless, this time. One had bled out his life from a throbbing artery severed when his left leg had been hacked off. It hung now from his flesh, a dark fat thread pulled to unravel a life. All around him the snow carried a frozen overlay of bright red blood. Another of the hunters had died of a slit throat. The third had been trampled by steel-shod hoofs, his neck broken, his skull shattered.
The Knight who had killed them... Kerian’s lips curled in a wolfish smile. He’d been made to pay the blood-fee.
“Y’got a bad look on you, Kerianseray.”
Kerian pointed to the frozen spread of blood. “Knights are killing elves all over the hills, Jeratt. Qualinesti and Kagonesti. How sweet should my expression be?”
Jeratt said nothing to that. He picked up her bow and handed it to her.
She looked at him long, and whispering in the silence between them were the ghosts of conversations past, arguments about politics, about the occupation, about knightly abuses like that before them, and worse. The dragon’s tribute, thinly disguised as taxation, was bleeding a rich kingdom like sickness. Over the winter, the cold nights and ice-gleaming days, they all had talked of ancient hopes, the history of the elf kings right back to Silvanos himself who united all elves in Silvanesti. They spoke of ancient glory and ancient wars. They were elves and though they had lived outside the law, some for decades, they knew their history.
Their hearts and imaginations were enchanted by ancient tales. One thing remained unknown. Would all the outlaws fight the dark Knights when she asked them to? Would they lift their swords for a king they despised? Or had they come to be so comfortable in outlawry that in the end they cared for nothing but their own survival?
Count on them, Jeratt had told her each time she wondered.
Kerian snatched up the brace of fat hares. “Come on, Jeratt. You want to give these to the widow, or shall I go do it alone?”
Kerian started away down the hill, Jeratt following quickly. The crisp wind in their faces made breath stream out in wisps behind them. It scoured their faces until their cheeks shone red. At their feet it blew the snow into little dancing white devils. They went strongly, swiftly, each knowing the way over snow-covered ground. They knew the markers that had nothing to do with slender trails, a particular bend of a tree, a boulder where—if there were ground to see—the path would have split. At this boulder they went west and ran beneath the snow-laden boughs of pine trees until it seemed they went through a tunnel, so low did the trees hang with their burden. At the edge of it, in the place where the over-arching trees fell away, they stopped and stood to gaze down into the dale, where a sprawling stone house sat. It had once been the home of a prosperous farmer and his family. The farmer now was dead. He and his son had been killed in a hunting accident years before, leaving only Felyce, a widow who would not give up her homestead.
“Well, y’know,” Jeratt had said, once in early winter when Kerian had asked how it was that Jeratt, such a strong hunter, came often back to camp with far fewer kills than might be expected, “I knew the son, and I knew the father. I’m not going to see the widow Felyce go starving.”
Smoke rose up from the chimney closest to the front of me house. Chickens minced though the mud in the door-yard, dipping low to find the leftover corn from the morning’s feeding. The outbuildings, a stone byre and a wooden hayrick, squatted at the edge of the clearing to the north of the house. Nothing moved near them, and no one seemed to be within.
Kerian looked for other signs of presence and saw none. She listened for the cow that must surely be in the byre by now, for Felyce did not like to go late abroad after her milker in this season when the night fell swift and sudden. Of the cow, they heard nothing. Jeratt came close, his breath warm on Kerian’s cheek.