The Lioness

As she approached the eastern bridge, Kerian lifted her head, picking out a scent among all those of the city, one from beyond the shining bridge. Downwind, past the towers where Sir Eamutt’s Knights walked, bristling with weapons, stinking like humans and clanking in their black armor, away past orchards and winding carter’s roads, stealing into the sleeping city came a whisper of smoke, a thin suggestion of burning in the north.

In the next moment the wind shifted, as it does at day’s end in autumn. It slid from the west and brought her the stench of rotted flesh on the severed heads piked upon the bridge.

Kerian hung for a moment in the darkness of shadow pooling around the eastern tower. She listened to the Knights talking above. They spoke in Common with a harsh Nerakan accent that made the utilitarian language known throughout Krynn sound guttural. They wondered when the watch would change, wondered if they would be paid.

Kerian took the ribbon from her hair, the braid bound by slim strips of soft, sueded leather. She did not want to be marked by her master’s colors once she left the city. Should it be necessary, she’d prepared a tale that would leave any questioner believing she was but a servant from an outlying farm, gone to the city for the festival and on her way home again. She let the ribbon go, saw it caught by the wind and sent tumbling along the ground behind. One of the Knights spotted it and said to his fellows that he’d like to follow that bit of silk to the one who’d worn it.

“Ar,” said another, spitting. “She ain’t wearing it now, boy. Means she took it off for a reason that ain’t got to do with you.”

The Knights laughed, and carefully Kerian waited until the sound of their voices grew distant as they resumed their watch walk. When she knew them gone, she slipped right around the base of the tower, out from under the bridge and into the broad swathe of meadow grass that ran down to the peach orchards.

She ran low, bent over and barely ruffling the grasses, and she didn’t stand straight again until she crossed the carter’s road separating the meadow from the orchard. Baskets stood in stacks along the verge, left there from the harvest. Inside the orchard, leaves drooped, spent with the harvest, waiting to fall. Autumn breathed upon the rising mist, the scent of changing, of leaving.

Kerian shivered.

Once Iydahar had said to her, “You will hear it said the Kagonesti are savages. You will hear it said that Qualinesti did not steal us away. You will hear it said that others stole us, humans, minotaurs, ogres, or goblins looking for profit. Sometimes you will hear it said the Qualinesti rescued us from those creatures, but we know better. We will always hear the wailing of our kin. We will always remember the faces of those who stole us from our home. Stay in your city, Keri, but you stay at a cost. There will come a time, Turtle, when you find you can’t remember how to be who you are.”

Turtle. The old pet name didn’t sting. It recalled her heart to another time, another place, and the brother who loved her no matter what befell. How would Iydahar feel about her if he knew her lover was a Qualinesti, and not only that, the king of the Qualinesti?

In the sky, crows shouted, raucous and sailing toward the bridge. The scent of smoke vanished, then returned. Kerian ran swiftly, in and out the rows of peach trees, through the orchard, heading for the forest road and the way to Sliathnost.

At the edge of the orchard, where the ground sloped down into forest, Kerian halted and looked back. Over the gnarled branches of peach trees, four towers stood high. Silver spans of bridges gleamed. Kerian bade silent farewell to the bridges, the towers and the shining city. She ran down the hill and into the forest, that green and glossy realm which so much reminded her of the Ergothian wilds of her childhood. For a time, running, she was again the child, the girl who lived in a land of forest and seaside sky.

“Can’t catch me, Keri! Keri can’t catch me!”

Iydahar flung the old taunt, laughing. Kerianseray had known that scorn all her young life, and she had known its tempering love. What ran between them, brother and sister, was always a weaving of this, the scorn of the elder, the son whose place in the universe of his parents had been encroached upon by this unexpected girl, and the abiding affection he would never deny. She was, after all, and no matter how supremely annoying her very existence, his little sister.

“Turtle!”