“Too quiet down there.”
It was. The muscles between her shoulders tightened. Kerian dropped one shoulder, let her strung bow fall to hand. Jeratt’s long knife hissed free of its sheath and whispered home again, tested. In his own hand, with the swiftness of long-gone magic, his own bow sprang.
The wind shifted, turning a little and coming to them from the forest behind. The tang of pine hung on that breeze, and the sudden musk of a deer. Kerian lifted her head, thinking she caught the thick odor of horse. The wind dropped then stilled. She smelled nothing. The sky darkened with a noisy wing of crows, and below a light sprang in the window beside the front door.
“All right,” Jeratt said on an outgoing breath.
Kerian heard, She’s all right, but hid her smile as she hung back. Jeratt loped ahead. Long-legged strides took him swiftly down the hill. Half-elven, his human parentage aged him well before an elf who bore the same years. In the last light his silvering beard shone, and his eagerness lent youthfulness to a face weathered by the forest and the seasons. Kerian followed, keeping a closer eye on their surroundings. She sniffed the wind, caught the scent of deer again but no whiff of the stable.
Neither did she catch the scent of cooking, of soup, stew, or roast that any farmwife would have simmering on the hob or sizzling over the fire at this darkening hour.
Kerian stopped, still and listening. The crows had long flown over; the sky hung empty of all by dying light. Again, she noted no sound of Felyce’s milk cow, no comfortable lowing.
“Jeratt,” she called, but low.
He heard and stopped to turn. Stopping, he saw her eyes widen in surprise as Felyce came out of her door. Even from this distance, Kerian noted the woman’s pallor, the way her hands moved in restless wringing. Jeratt moved toward her, and Kerian leaped to hold him back.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.”
He moved again, spurred. She gripped hard. “Wait.”
Jeratt quivered under her hand. Feigning a casualness she did not feel, Kerian called, “Good evening, Felyce!” Deliberately casting the lie, she said, “I know we’re unexpected company. I hope we aren’t intruding. We’ve been hunting and came by on the way home to share our take.”
“Aye, who’d thought to see you, Mistress Gellis,” Felyce said, improvising a name even as she yet wrung her hands. “I thought you’d gone to kin out by the sea long before now.”
“The winter caught us,” Kerian said, following Felyce’s lead. “I’m here for the season, like it or not. Come spring though”—she elbowed Jeratt “—come spring I’m poking up my old father here, and we’re bound for Lauranost and the sea.”
Jeratt’s eyes widened to hear himself described as Kerian’s “old father,” but he managed to keep still. He held out the brace of hares, and Felyce came close.
“Go,” she whispered, white-faced, her eyes bright and glittering with fear. “There’s a Knight inside. More are coming.”
A dark shape crossed before the window. Kerian’s blood ran quicker as Jeratt said, “Are you all right, Felyce?”
“Yes.” She pushed a strand of hair from her cheek. “I’m all right. He’s offered no harm, and he seems content to wait peaceably for his brother Knights.”
“Why are they here?”
Felyce shook her head. “I don’t know. He says little. I think they are scouts, Kerian, but the why of it doesn’t matter. They hunt Kagonesti, these Knights, but they haven’t forgotten what brought them here last year, the hunt for you.”
Again, the whiff of the stable. Kerian slapped Jeratt’s shoulder. “Let’s go.”
He hung on his heel, reluctant to leave.
“Go,” Felyce said, and now she spoke only to the half-elf, her pale cheek tinged with a flush of rose. “For the game, my thanks. Go!”
They did, before Felyce’s unwanted guest could come again to the window, curiosity growing, but they did not go far. Up the hill and around into the forest they found a place of concealment from which to watch. Neither spoke. Neither had to. They found a shelf of stone high above Felyce’s little dell, above the low, running breeze, and wedged themselves into the stony shelter.
Night fell. Three of Lord Thagol’s Knights came riding down the hill, following the same track Kerian and Jeratt had lately taken. They went in silence, no sound but the snorting of their horses, the clatter of hoofs on stone. The look of them, horses and men, spoke of a long ride. One pointed to the lights in the dell and rode swiftly down the hill to Felyce’s stone house. The others spurred to follow.
Kerian watched them, narrow-eyed and thinking.
When they’d reached the dooryard, she leaned close to Jeratt and said, “They’ll be there all night. I don’t think they’ll hurt Felyce.”
Jeratt growled and snatched up his bow. Kerian stopped him. “No. If we go in, they’ll kill her right now. You can count on it. Go back to the camp.”
There were, in all, but a dozen and a half outlaws there at this time, eighteen in all not counting Elder.
“Get me ten fighters and come back here.” Her eyes on the Knights, on the stone house below, Kerian said, “Nothing will happen to Felyce while you’re gone, and we have the bastards trapped.”
Jeratt grinned. He took up his bow and with no word slipped away into the night. He was not long gone.
Kerian followed the flight of an owl drifting on the night, wings wide, silently sailing. Concealed from sight of anyone below, she listened to the sigh of wind in the trees. In the dell, every window of Felyce’s house shone with light, orange glowing like eyes looking outward. Now and then a restless Knight would pass before one or another, upstairs or down.
“Like they’ve commandeered the place,” Jeratt growled.
Kerian snorted. “They won’t hurt her as long as they need her to cook and fetch for them.”
They had three times seen Felyce walk out to the stream behind the house and return with laden buckets. By the light from her windows, they’d watched her lay the table in her front room and pile platters high with food.
“My hares,” Jeratt muttered sourly.
“Don’t worry,” Kerian said, gaze roaming the darkness. Somewhere in the forest, ranged round the lip of the dell, elf outlaws waited in utter silence. Their breaths did not make as soft a sigh as the wind. Kerian had asked for ten. Jeratt had found eight volunteers and challenged two vacillators into joining. Her plan was simple and quickly explained. Her order, only one: Not one of Lord Thagol’s men would come out of the forest alive.
“They’ll leave at gray morning,” Jeratt said, not watching the forest but the dell. “They’ll probably take the south-going road, back toward the Qualinost Road and whatever tavern the Headsman is squatting in now.”
“Bayel says he’s at The Green Lea.”
Jeratt and Kerian sat in silence while stars wheeled across the sky, while the lonely silver moon set and the darkest hour came then died before the pale breath of dawnlight. He was first to see the stirring of dark forms in the widow Felyce’s dooryard, the first to hear the impatient snort of a horse.
“Ready now,” Jeratt said, soft.
Kerian fingered the golden chain round her neck, the slender necklace Gilthas had given her on the night she’d left him. Ander had returned the token, and now the ring was whole again, two hands clasped.
“Ready soon,” she whispered, her lips close to Jeratt’s ear. She scanned the rim of the dell and saw nothing moving. She had been with these outlawed men and women on hunts; she knew how still they could keep and for how long.
“Jeratt,” she said, “one band should watch the north road, one the south. You take the north. There is only one signaclass="underline" the movement of Knights. You know what to do.”
They parted, slipping away until they occupied opposing sides of the high ground above the dell, each with a clear sight of the farm and the dooryard. Kerian had charge of a band of six. Even as she completed her orders, Ander came close and said, “They’re leaving the farmhouse, Kerian.”