Can we go back?” Kerian asked, sitting across a dwindling fire from Jeratt.

Outside, beyond the sheltering hills known as King’s Haunting, the wind moaned, sounding like ghosts to give the place a name. Legends told of dead kings slipping in and out of the shadows of these hills, kings of elves, kings of dwarves, even a goblin king or two … or whatever passed for a king among the goblins who roamed in the Stonelands. The wind made good stories with the night, but pretty much everyone knew where their kings were buried and where they haunted. Behind Kerian and Jeratt, in the shelter of the smallest hill’s stony shoulder, Ander slept, or pretended to. Kerian cocked an eye at him. The boy kept very still beneath his blankets.

Jeratt didn’t look where she did. He seldom looked at the boy and neither spoke to the other unless he must.

“Ah, Kerian,” he said, “you do seem to be a woman who makes a habit of getting thrown out the door, don’t you?” He poked at the fading fire with the stick they’d used to spit the lean hares that had been their supper. “I think we can go back. Sooner or later. Right now the camp behind the falls is gone, broken up and scattered across the forest. They heard about the hunt for you even before I got back to tell ‘em.”

“Who did you tell then?”

He pulled a lean smile. “Elder. Old woman don’t run fast, so she don’t run at all. She was there, sitting by her fire and taking care of herself. I don’t expect anyone will find the way to her if she doesn’t want them to, do you?”

Kerian didn’t. “Why did the others leave?”

“They left because they wouldn’t be confined, even by Elder’s magic. She let ‘em. She’s no jailer. They’ll be back, once they feel it’s safe to run there again.”

They were like animals, Kerian thought, a band of outlaws who didn’t fight for ground, didn’t hold land. Threatened, they cleared out until they could return to the good hunting ground again. Like shadows, they lived outside the society of the kingdom.

“They ain’t got no grudge against you, Kerianseray,” Jeratt said “It happens. You get found, you have to run. You come back if you can.”

She looked at him levelly. “And you? It seems you don’t feel quite the same way.”

“Me?” Jeratt shrugged. “I’m here, ain’t I? Told you I would be.”

He looked around at the enclosing darkness, up to the starred sky between the hills. “We have to say away from the others for a while. We need to figure where to go next. Elder says the hunt for you has spread beyond Sliathnost again. They know you’re nearby, those Knights.” He spat. “If yon boy didn’t turn them on you, one of his fine friends or neighbors did. They’re swarming all over the hills.”

He coughed softly, and jerked his head in a northerly direction, toward Qualinost “You ever see any maps of the kingdom while you were chattin’ with him-your king?”

She hid a smile at his attempt at delicacy. “A few. You want me to speak a map or draw one?”

“Ach, don’t speak it. That’s a pretty thing you Wilder Elves do, hut I’ve not much use for that way of mappin’. Put it right out on the ground so I can see it, will you?”

Kerian took the spit, the tip dark as charcoal now, and began to sketch a map on the clear ground. She showed the several streams running away from Lightning Falls, some flowing due south, others wandering away west to fill little lakes in the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains.

“Here,” she said, drawing a large, ragged oval well below Qualinost and west of the city. “This is a lake whose feeder streams run out through the densest part of the forest, all the way to where the mountains wrap around north again. Past that spur of mountain is even more forest, far more than on the eastern side. After that, the sea. Ever been there?”

Jeratt shook his head. Behind them, the sound of Ander waking, the first long breath, the stirring beneath his rough blanket.

“I have.”

Kerian glanced over Jeratt’s shoulder.

“When?” she asked, as though she didn’t see Jeratt’s scowl.

“A few years ago.” Ander sat up. “Not to the sea, not past the mountains, but almost to them. My father was from Lindalenost, a little town near that lake. It’s called Linden Lake because it’s all edged with linden trees. They look like mist, the trunks are so gray. When he was murdered …well, we went there with his body so his family could lay him to rest among his kin.”

Kerian considered this. Then she said, “We’ve heard there are Knights deployed in the south and draconians with them.”

Ander nodded.

“We’ve heard they pretty much own the roads,” Jeratt said, his voice hard with suspicion. “What do you know, boy?”

“Not much, except I heard about the Knights and dra-conians.” He twisted a wry grin. “But that I heard from a traveler at the mill.”

“Could we go there for a time?” Kerian asked.

Again, Ander shook his head. “The village is right on the Qualinost Road. We’d be seen by Knights and draconians, but we could go into the forest, deep. They have small settlements here and there, sometimes just a few houses gathered around a tavern and a river ford. The Knights won’t go far into the forest-”

Jeratt rose. “Because of that weird slipping of your senses.” He scuffed away the map. “Shouldn’t be a problem that far down there, or did your kinfolk say it is?”

Ander looked from Kerian to the half-elf. “I told you, I haven’t heard from them since my father’s funeral.”

Jeratt looked up at the sky again. Kerian followed his glance and saw the stars fading before the gray light of dawn. “Okay, let’s go. Deeper into the forest.”

The three companions ranged far from territory any of them knew. Kerian felt the excitement of strange places when she turned her face to the winds coming down from the northern arm of the Elfstream, there known as the White-Rage, the border between Qualinesti and haunted Darken Wood in Abanasinia. Through the pale winter days, gray with threat and white with snow, Ander ran beside them, an eager boy who sometimes looked back. He had not in all his life been so far from home; he had never tasted water from the Elfstream or hunted fat quail so far north as this watery border between the kingdom of the elves and the lands of the humans. These far reaches of the kingdom overflowed with wonder for him. The young elf shone brighter the farther they traveled.

“I don’t think he had a very good life back home,” Kerian said to Jeratt, one night when they two sat watch.

Jeratt didn’t answer at once. He’d become reconciled to the idea that Kerian had dropped this village lad into their hands, but only grudgingly. He stubbornly didn’t trust the boy, who stubbornly did not trust him. Mostly, and this he’d made clear to her, he didn’t like it that Kerian had brought Ander to their rendezvous at King’s Haunting. He didn’t like being forced into a choice he would not have made.

Jeratt spat into the fire, making the embers hiss. “Thinkin’ about stepfathers and old nursery stories, are you? Don’t be a fool, Kerianseray.”

She considered asking him what senseless thing she’d done or said this time to have earned the name of fool. She did not Kerian was growing weary of Jeratt’s scorn.

When she said nothing, he looked at her sourly. “Have y’not considered that the boy’s a little in love?”

Kerian laughed, genuinely surprised. “No. I’ve considered that he lived among people who would beat him and kill his dog.” Her voice growing lower, she said, “I’ve considered that you must be a hard and unwelcoming sort in his eyes.”

They said little more, and for a long while the subject didn’t come up again.

They hunted and they trapped. Ander didn’t have much skill at hunting large game, or even small, but he was a good hand at the preservation of what Kerian and Jeratt brought down. He knew how to smoke even fish so they were palatable days later. Their wallets were never empty of food, even when the territory they roamed might be.