“Will you stay the night?” he asked. “You and your companions?”

They were good folk, these farmers. Kerian found herself sitting up late into the night talking, listening to their stories of farm life, their hopes for the newly planted crop. The tales turned to rumors heard about the Knights and how they had, indeed, set up outposts in the larger towns. A little farther east, “between here and poor Qualinost,” no one passed on the roads without first having to beg a Knight’s grace. “Now you never heard about that kind of thing here in this part of the kingdom. Not till lately,” Felan said.

According to him, restrictions in the capital had grown tighter since autumn. Kerian thought of Gil, of the Queen Mother, and wondered whether this meant their cherished plans for a treaty between elves, humans, and dwarves had fallen to ruin.

Moving north along the foothills, keeping far from the chance of running into Knights or draconians, Kerian and her companions found that most farmers in the dales were of the same mind as the farmer and his wife. They were genuinely pleased to welcome travelers, especially hunters who arrived with a brace of quail at the belt or a string of fat fish to offer to the evening meal. These folk were generous with food and fire and news.

Kerian learned that the foothills farther north weren’t so softly green as those in the south, and the soil was stony and stingy, not the kind a farmer likes. She was warned that she wouldn’t find much hospitality from the mountain outlaws. From the sound of them, these were not the type of men and women she’d encountered near Quali-nost. These belonged to no king, to no land, and had lived unchecked for generations uncounted.

“Keep away from them,” warned Bayel, a farmer’s young son. “They have no interest in anything but what they can take from you, starting with your life.”

“Do they trouble the Knights much?”

He shrugged. “They mostly run on the west side of the mountains and a little down into the forest there. The Knights don’t go that far, not yet. They’re set up in the towns east of the spur. For now.”

Bayel sounded like a keen-thinker, like one who knew how to listen and see how things might go. Kerian asked if he’d heard anything about Lord Thagol himself.

The farmer shrugged. “He’s been glimpsed here and there. I’ve never seen him, but I heard from someone in a tavern that he looks like a ghost, pale and dark-eyed. You get the feeling of ghosts, so my friend said. It’s all cold around him.”

Jeratt snorted. “Aye, well, that’d be him. Face like a fire-scar, thinkin’ all the time about killing. Out east, I saw him more than once, saw him with his Knights. He’s a Skull Knight, and them’s the worst They say he can get right into an enemy’s head and next thing you know you’re having nightmares you never had before. I don’t know about that, but Kerian’ll tell you, he’s the one ordered the killing of elves-Kagonesti and Qualinesti-in the eastern part of the kingdom. Bastard’s pikin’ heads on the bridge in Qualinost”

“Draconians are helping ‘em.” Bayel took a long breath and let it out again. In the room beyond the hearth-room the voices of his parents murmured. “One killed my cousin,” he said low. “Killed him for traveling without a permit He was leaving his own farm, out by Iindalenost, heading down the road to visit a kinsman. Who thought you’d need permission for that, eh?” The boy’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Not me, and I don’t see how that’s right”

Silence drifted into the room. The farmer poked his fire again. He leaned toward Kerian from out of the shadows, his face bright in the fading light. “Stay with us,” he said, urging and eager. He looked past her to Ander and Jeratt “All of you, of course.”

Ander moved restlessly. Jeratt saw that and elbowed him still.

“We’re not staying,” Kerian said gently. “We have to keep moving.”

The young man’s eyes lighted with interest. “I’d like to be doing that myself,” he said. He looked right and left, as though someone might be concealed in the deepening shadows of the falling hearth fire. “I’d like to pay back one of them Knights. Or a draconian.”

It should have been all that was said, that night before the dying fire, but Kerian said one thing more: “Do others feel the way you do?”

“Plenty. Lots of talk goes on in the kitchens of farmhouses, but not much gets done.”

Kerian took those words with her as she and Jeratt and Ander left in the morning. They traveled north that day and steered wide of the unwelcoming places where bandits roamed or Knights were known to pass through. That night they made the first camp they’d had out of doors in several weeks, welcoming the starry roof, the embracing fragrance of the forest Kerian took the first watch, and Jeratt sent Ander off to sleep, warning that the last watch would be his. They sat quietly for a while, neither speaking, each listening to the night song. The moon rose, climbing the trees and hanging high above the boughs.

“Tell me what you’re thinkin’, Kerian.”

She glanced at him and nodded. She poked the fire, gathered up her thoughts.

“They’re good folk here in the dales, Jeratt. I’ve spent most of my life in the city.” She stirred the fire and made the flames flare. “In the service of a senator and …” Sparks sailed up to the sky. “And in the confidence of a king. I’ll tell you, Jeratt-the king watches the Knights rule his city, hears how they treat his kingdom.” She shook her head. “If he saw what I’ve seen since autumn, if he heard what I’ve heard-”

“What would he do?”

The scornful sneer, the sudden anger flashing in Jeratt’s eyes irritated Kerian. “He would do anything and everything, if he could. He is a king with no court, the ruler of a Senate that holds all the power-”

“-and hands it over to Thagol.”

“He is powerless, I tell you.” Kerian shook her head, frowning. “As long as he has no army, Gilthas is tied, just like you say, hand and foot, but if he had an army…” She leaned forward. “One no one could say was his, but one he would know is his. If he had a fast-striking army-warriors who weren’t quartered anywhere, who couldn’t be tracked…”

Jeratt’s eyes lighted. “One that ran like ghosts, striking hard and fast and vanishing into the night.”

She smiled. “You sound like you’re ahead of me.”

He nodded. “Long years ago, with the prince, we had such an army. I came up with him from Silvanesti and got kind of good at forest fighting.” He laughed grimly. “Hit those city elves and ran, hit and ran, us and the Kagonesti. Would’ve won, too if it hadn’t been for dragons and bad, bad luck. Would’ve been one kingdom then, a kingdom for all elves.”

Kerian listened to the night, the rising wind that smelled of rain. She looked past Jeratt to Ander, beyond him, south to the dales where farmers still remembered how to greet travelers well and where the people were beginning to resent the mail-fisted Knights. In the wind and the hissing of the fire she heard words from an old woman she hadn’t seen in nearly a year.

Killer!

“I’m thinking,” she said, “that here is where to start.”

Jeratt laughed, startling Ander awake. “You know what to do with them once you flush them out of the dales, the woods, and the hills?”

Again, Kerian’s long, slow smile. “No, I don’t, but you do. Don’t you, Jeratt?”