The Lioness

Sir Chance’s mind, when it suddenly cleared, was filled with his lord’s orders, with images of maps, rivers, roads. His lord’s plans had been made clear to him.

He would gather up a force of good Knights. There must be watch stations within the kingdom now, guard posts on the Qualinost road. The stations would be manned, outposts of Lord Thagol’s command. These would be established to be certain that those who traveled the road were indeed citizens of the kingdom about their normal business. Robbers would no longer find the good roads built by Knights a convenient place to hunt for prey. Tribute would go through, peace would be assured.

There will be order, Sir Chance thought, even as he knew the thought, the insistent certainty, wasn’t his own, only the echo of Thagol’s will.

Chance shivered in the rising mist. His head ached; when he closed his eyes, he imagined he smelled poison. He breathed deeply through his nose and exhaled through his mouth. He smelled and tasted nothing but misty Qualinesti air, yet the ground itself seemed shiver under his feet. Chance’s blood chilled.

He would have to go out there again, today onto the roads where the Qualinesti Forest moved restlessly before the eye, and he would keep Lord Thagol’s orders.

Chapter Four

Kerian slipped through the first shadows of day’s end, a pretty serving girl with her hair tied back, dressed in clothing of a simple cut, rough cotton shirt, trews of a heavy, serviceable brown fabric, and black boots. But for the ribbon twined into her thick golden braid, she was unmarked by her master’s colors.

The clothing she had from Zoe Greenbriar for a lie. “I’m going away with a party of the Senator’s servants out into the wood to prepare his hunting lodge. The last time I rode in a skirt, thickets tore my skin and it’s long pants for me!” She’d regretted the lie; she and Zoe didn’t swear false to each other, but the Senator truly would depart for his lodge in a few days, and in a house as large as Rashas’s, no one would miss her right away with Zoe’s story as good cover.

The lordly part of the city slept, elves who had the luxury of leaving the debris of Autumn Harvest celebrations to their servants. Those, the Kagonesti in hall and house, cleaned garden and hall, laid firewood for the morning, lifted windows to the first scent of the season, the poignant mingling of settling dew, rich earth and fading leaves. Through the wealthy precincts of her lover’s capital, Kerian went. The streets and byways traced graceful curves, gentle windings round elf-made pond, round garden, past a shadow-draped and sudden house that only seemed to be a jutting of stone and tree from the side of a lofty cliff. Only servants did Kerian see and one or two dark-armored Knights on their rounds. Of those, one looked at her long and whistled low as she passed. Head high, she did not turn or ever acknowledge the man. He was human, lackey of a foreign occupier and dangerous. She had learned that the best way past these creatures of Neraka was to be always aware of where they were and never to make eye contact.

Gradually, the paths widened and became roads. The roads no longer went in wandering ways but became straighter as she came to the part of the city where tradesmen lived and worked. At the mouth of an alley running behind the frame buildings of Milliner’s Row, she stopped and looked back. Down the long shadowy tunnel framed by shops and warehouses, she saw a brightness of late sunshine and the royal residence framed in the opening.

A small breeze drifted from behind, chill fingers tugging wisps of hair from the braid at the sides of her face.

Looking one last time at the royal residence Kerian’s breath caught for a hard moment in her chest, then she turned away, lips tight. No man of the king’s would ever find Iydahar, and if she did not leave her lover she would be abandoning her brother.

In all cities, in all lands, no one knows the ways in and out better than those who serve. Kerian had served for many years in Qualinost; she knew the city as well as all her Kagonesti kin and better than those who were her masters. In the late hour of the first festival day, with the sun slanting long to the west and shadows growing, Kerian made her way through the city unremarked, a servant with a leather wallet slung across her shoulder. Any who saw her thought that wallet held what it always did—missives from her master to one or another of his fellow senators, to the king himself, perhaps to Sir Eamutt Thagol in his grim, cold headquarters. It held nothing like that. In the wallet were a small sack of coins, among them three steel, and a smaller leather sack filled fat with hard cheese, bread and cold slices of lamb.