Wind soughed around the top of the rocky bowl. Campfires glowed pale in the thin winter sunlight. Elder slept near the hottest, highest one, and when Kerian looked at her an image ran though her mind—no, behind her eyes—of a huge misshapen beast running. Ice crackled up her spine, and her heart lurched as it did before battle. Voices and the rattle of stone distracted her. She wrenched her gaze away from Elder and saw two hunters coming down the stony slope, one with a small roe deer over his shoulder, another with a brace of quail and one of hares on his hip. She looked behind her and saw Briar going to relieve the watch at the entrance to the falls.
Jeratt said drily, “Give the king my regards.”
She laughed, but the image of a loping beast still haunted her eyes, and her laughter sounded shaky in her own ears. “I’ll see you at the rising of the moon. Here.”
Two weeks. He nodded and reached out a hand. She took it in the hard warrior’s clasp, and she got up and pulled together a kit for traveling—thick woolen trews, a woolen shirt and fine boots looted from a young Knight. Then she went into the forest. Ear to the ground, nose to the wind, she learned of the whereabouts of her lover before she came within sight of Qualinost. He and a contingent of servants, his lady mother, and a covey of senators had removed to his forest lodge, Wide Spreading, for two weeks of hunting. It was there she found Gilthas, and she did so by slipping past his nominal guard, his servants, his mother and her people, and into his bedchamber by starlight.
Kerian stood in the center of a bright square of starlight, silver shafting down from a high window in the ceiling of the royal bedchamber at Wide Spreading. The waking breath of one who had been deep asleep came softly. When the king’s eyes opened and he saw her, he did not start.
“Kerian.” Gilthas sat. “I dreamed of you coming here. I dreamed I heard your footsteps.”
“You didn’t dream, my lord king.”
He opened his arms in invitation, Kerian covered the distance between his window and his bed with swift strides.
“Kerian,” he said, whispering against the tangled gold of her hair. “Kerian, is it really you?”
“You dreamed,” she said, almost laughing. “Now you doubt?”
As though to answer, the king wrapped her up in his arms. He smelled of soap, and clothing taken from scented drawers, and closets hung with sachets of shaved sandal-wood. He shone, a king well tended, and held her as though the marks she left upon his faultless bed clothing—soot and grime and sweat stains—were not more than the faintest imprint of a perfumed body.
“Come,” Gilthas said shortly, slipping out of bed. His night robe moved in silken grace around his body. “You look hungry, love, and thirsty. I’ll find you something—”
Kerian shook her head, a gesture used to still men and women lately grown accustomed to heeding her. The brusque gesture surprised him, and she did not apologize.
“My lord king, I’m feeling suddenly in need of a bath.”
He laughed, quietly for the sake of this secret arrival. “All this way for a bath? Well, then, let it be. I will summon Planchet. He will see that you have one and all else you wish. Sit. Here on the bed. It will be brought.”
There were kettles of steaming water to warm the marble tub kept in the bathing apartment off the bedchamber. With starlight glittering in through wide, tall windows, Kerian bathed long, and later she showed her king how much she had missed him. Afterward, by fading starlight, in her lover’s arms, she looked carefully at him, his face in repose, and she touched the downy cheek inherited from the mysterious human who had fathered his own father, Tanis Half-Elven. He stirred to her touch, and she hushed him.
“I’m sorry to have waked you.”
“I’m not sorry you did,” the king said.
He reached for her, but she stopped him, a hand on his chest. “You think I have come home.”
The bluntness of her statement startled him. Gilthas nodded.
“I haven’t. You said I couldn’t, my king. You said if I went away, I could not come home again. I went, and I have been to many places and done... many things I never thought I could or would. You were right: I am back now but not home. Let me tell you, love, how it has been with me.”
She spoke past his doubts, she told the tale of her outlawry, of the first killing at the Hare and Hound, of the burning of the Waycross. She told of finding her brother and losing him. She did not—and this surprised her—speak of Elder, but she spoke well of the half-elf Jeratt, of his band of outlaws and young Ander whose silence on her behalf had made him one of them. She told the king of the elves of the dales, of Felan and his widowed wife, the child orphaned before it was born. She told him all this and more.
“We are outlaws all, my love, and yet, in truth, we should stop calling ourselves that. We must stop naming ourselves outlaws, for though others say so, we are not. We are more.”
Gilthas sat forward, eager to hear what caught his imagination.
“We are some of us outlawed.” Her smile twisted wryly. “All the gone gods know that I am, but many of us are Kagonesti, shunned for being who they are. Others are old soldiers, Gil, forgotten warriors of Silvanesti and of your own kingdom, who once served your Uncle Porthios.”
Outside his chamber, Planchet spoke with a servant, and they heard footfalls come near and retreat as though a message had been given and sped.
“My lord king,” she said, pride shining in her voice, “we are the ones who through the summer and autumn harried Lord Thagol’s force of Knights in the western part of your kingdom, and we have fought not as brigands and outlaws. We have fought as warriors.”
Planchet had long ago taken away her worn clothing to be washed and mended, but he had not touched her weapons, her bow and quiver, the dagger and the sword she had taken from a Knight after she’d killed him. She now slipped the blade from its sheath. The steel gleamed in the moonlight, sliver running on the edges.
“This sword, my king, I have brought you. This, and the fealty of my heart and the loyalty of men and women who have not forgotten the days when they were free.”
His eyes shone, his poet’s soul leaped with fire as he took her meaning. Outside the window, the sky grayed with the coming day. Gilthas let his glance dwell there for a time, and then, his kindling glance darkened.
“Things aren’t going well for us, Kerian.”
“The alliance?”
He nodded. “My mother has hung her hope on an alliance with the dwarves for as many years as I’ve been alive, Kerian. It’s become more urgent now. The dragon is building her cache and her war trove. The Senate has been told the tribute in weapons must increase.” He twisted a bitter smile. “Of course, the tribute in gold, silver, and gems must not decrease. We hear from friends outside the kingdom that the dragons are growing restless. Once Beryl gets all she needs of us, what will she do? We need a way out. All of us, Qualinesti and Kagonesti.”
A way out!
Like the sudden glint of starlight on the sword’s blade, Kerian knew her moment, the moment when something bright would be born.
“My king, my love, you need time. There is no way to truly end the dragon’s hold on us or Thagol’s grip. That isn’t the goal anymore, is it? The goal must be to confound and confuse them until Thorbardin can make up its mind.
“I have come with the coin to buy you the time you need. I have come to bring you warriors. They are few now, but the Wilder Kin in the forest have reason to appreciate us. I think this force of warriors I offer can be as many as you desire.”
Gilthas looked at her long, his face alight, his hope shining. “Who are you?” he whispered, and she thought she heard a note of superstitious wonder in his voice, as though some mage of old had cast a change-spell upon her.
Kerian took his hands in her own. “Why, I thought you knew. I am the King’s Outlaw, my love. I am your weapon, I am your warrior, and I am your lover, my lord king. Never doubt it.”
In the golden firelight he looked upon her as though upon something magical, powerful, and his.