Dragonlance Tales - The Reign Of Istar Part 21

Answering the instinct of fifteen years, I reached for the coil of rope hanging from my saddle. One good cast and I'd have her and the child roped, down, and trussed.

Alyce, seeing my gesture, said, "How much for those two, Hunter-Doune?"

Eighty gold, I told her. Forty for each, the woman not being worth more than the child.

Alyce smiled coldly. "Your share of Kell's bounty is worth ten times that. Are you with me, Hunter-Doune?"

I didn't answer. I was watching the woman run.

Although the wind covered our whispering and our mounts were still, something - a silence of birds, maybe - must have spoken to her instincts. She threw a swift look over her shoulder and stumbled, startled to see us. Her eyes were large and dark, like empty holes in a mask of terror. The sight chilled me, squeezed my heart so that it was as if I felt the desperate fear myself.

The woman recovered quickly, hitched the boy up higher on her back, and ran faster.

I took my hand away from the rope, saw Alyce watching me - not weighing anything, not taunting. Rather,she smiled the way you do when you first meet someone and you're thinking that you like what you see. Peverell looked from one to the other of us, then gestured something. His hands flew too fast for me to get his meaning, but Alyce did. A dark scowl replaced her smile as she told him to stop talking nonsense.

They say that the red moon, Lunitari, is the daughter of Gilean, the deity who is the keeper of all the knowledge possessed by the G.o.ds. Solinari, the silver moon, is Paladine's son, and he watches over all the magic being done in the world. That night, while the others rested, I walked the first watch and saw these two moons - G.o.ds'

children, if you will - rising. First to rise was Lunitari.

When I squinted eastward across the plains, I thought I saw the tall towers of Istar silhouetted against the red disk, dark like a jagged bite taken out of the moon's rim. Second up was Solinari, and he rose a little north of Istar, avoided the teeth of the Kingpriest's city.

Foolish fancy, eh? Well, I had a lot on my mind - too much for sleeping - and I kept coming back to the memory of how I'd felt when Alyce smiled after I'd let the nomads go.

That was just more foolish fancy. Why should I care how I weighed out in her eyes? Aye, she was long-legged and lovely. Her blue eyes, when they weren't mocking, spoke of possibilities, inspired dreams. She was round - and surely soft and warm - in all the right places, but so was many another woman, and I knew that well enough.

The only difference between Alyce and them was that she was a good hand with a sword, good to talk to ... and she was leading me to a quarter share of a fine, large bounty.

Sometimes she looked at me in such a way as to make me want to be what she seemed to hope I was.

Empty? Maybe once. Maybe still, but Alyce, when she looked at me with her eyes soft, a little hopeful, and gravely thoughtful, made me think that she might be able to fill some of those empty places in me.

I shook my head hard, as if I was trying to shake out this nonsense. It WAS nonsense, I told myself. Isn't one woman just as good as another on a cold night?

I was looking at the silver moon when I thought that, so I guess you could say I was praying for something, maybe for an answer, or a way to understand why it mattered to me what Alyce thought.

Of course, Solinari didn't have much to say about it.

The children of G.o.ds have their own business to tend.

When the moons were past their heights I left my watch, stepped carefully around the sleeping minotaur, and sat beside Peverell at the campfire. He gave me a sideways look, then signed something to Alyce. When I asked her what he'd said, she didn't answer right away. I had the idea that she wasn't thinking about how to translate, but whether to. Finally she repeated his gestures, slowly, the way you enunciate each word for the hard of hearing. A longreaching up with both hands to cup something, an abrupt dragging down motion.

"Sun setting," I guessed.

"Right."

She raised four fingers, and I suggested that this, coupled with the first gesture, meant four days pa.s.sing.

"Right again." Her blue eyes danced as she made the fists-and-clasp gesture I knew to mean FRIEND. "You know that one. How about this?"

She repeated Peverell's last gesture: slammed her right fist hard onto her level left palm. Then she mimicked his expression: wide-eyed, drop-jawed surprise.

"What do you think that means, Hunter-Doune?"

"I have no idea."

She moved her lips in a secret little smile. "It's the whole point of what Pev said. I'll leave you to consider it."

I spent the night listening to the wind sigh down the starred sky, thinking long and hard about Peverell's gestures. Might be, I thought, that Peverell's fist-in-palm gesture meant an ambush. If so, perhaps he and Alyce were antic.i.p.ating Kell's surprise to find himself at last taken.

And that in only another four days. But nowhere in that interpretation did Peverell's friend-gesture fit.

Last, before I made ready to sleep, I remembered Alyce's secret smile.

Now I remembered this wasn't the first time I'd seen her smile like that. The first time was in the Hart's Leap, right after she'd hunted around trying to find an oath for me to swear. An oath that maybe I wouldn't have given if I'd known it was Dinn I had to help break out of jail.

Cold and creeping came suspicion.

Might be, I thought, that there's another way to interpret Peverell's gestures and Alyce's secret smile. Might be they were having a laugh over how surprised I'd be to find that the oath she took on her father's sword signified nothing but a means to an end - the minotaur's release from jail, the capture of the heretic Kell, and a third share of the bounty instead of a quarter.

Four days. Friends.h.i.+p. And a violent, smas.h.i.+ng gesture. Surprise.

Alyce - her considering looks, her soft eyes, her surprised pleasure when I let the nomads go? What were those things? Bait, maybe. Four are better than three on the savannah - until the three got where they needed to go.

Time to get out. Time to cut my losses and get out.

I stayed - for the sake of the gold, I told myself. What I didn't admit - didn't even know then - was that I'd foolishly come too far down the road of fancy to turn back.

Alyce kept to herself after that night. Quiet and brooding, she spoke to Dinn only when she had to, and spoke to me hardly at all. She had something on her mind, and if she talked to anyone about it, that one was Peverell - who seemed to know about, and maybe even sympathize with, whatever troubled her.

They conversed in his silent, graceful language of gesture, and so I had no idea why she'd grown so suddenly distant.

***** We left the savannah three days after we saw the nomad woman and her child. We made camp that night in a blind canyon, a long slot of stone and tall, rising walls. No need to post watch there. The only way into the canyon was in clear sight of our camp.

We'd no more than built a fire when Alyce looked around to find the kender missing. "Dinn," she said.

"Where'd he go?"

The minotaur made the kender's fist-hitting-palm gesture.

"d.a.m.n! I TOLD him - " She glanced at me, then took another tack. "Dinn, are you sure?"

Dinn shrugged. "I'm never really sure what he's trying to say, but that is my guess."

Ah, she wasn't happy with that answer. Nor was she very happy when I asked her what the gesture meant. Blue eyes glinting, she said, "It means that that kender's going to find himself in some big trouble next time I see him."

She said no more.

As we ate, the red moon cleared the high canyon walls, spilled light over the stone, made the shadows a web of purple. Alyce, who'd displayed a wharfman's appet.i.te at the Hart, picked only absently at her food. When she tired of that, she bunched a rough woolen blanket into a pillow and stretched out before the fire.

She lay silent, staring up at the narrow sky, the gleaming stars. The fire's flickering glow made her pale cheeks flush rosy, her dark hair s.h.i.+ne, but I only watched that from the comer of my eye. Dinn, sitting in the night shadows and honing his daggers, had the most of my attention. He worked with sure, even strokes and sometimes sparks leaped from the steel and stone. When that happened, the minotaur would look up at me, his dark eyes gleaming, his large yellow teeth bared in something like a smile.

"Doune," Alyce said after a while. "We're near Kell's hideout. Tomorrow, we'll be playing a whole different game."

I looked away from Dinn, not liking the sound of that.

"What do you mean?"

She looked at me, her eyes neither soft and thoughtful, nor brittle and jeering. She wasn't smiling. Her expression was unreadable.

"Doune," she said. "Can I trust you?"

I answered evenly, though I didn't know where the question was leading. (And, no, it didn't remind me of my own doubt. Doubt had haunted me for the past three days.) "I swore I'd deal honestly with you, Alyce."

She nodded. "On your old friend's memory."

I said nothing, remembering Peverell's fist-hitting- palm gesture, repeated again tonight. Ambush for Kell, or betrayal for me? I didn't know, and I waited to see where Alyce's questions would lead. Dinn put aside his daggers, watched and waited, too. But he wasn't watching Alyce. He was watching me.

Alyce said, "Doune, you also said that bounty hunting is just business. Can we trust you to stand by us, no matter what we find tomorrow?"

I laughed without humor. "Unless this Kell of yours has an army with him. Then you can trust me to do whatanyone with sense would do - cut my losses and run. Live to hunt another day, eh? This is a strange time to be talking about that."

She shrugged. "Not really. Tell me, Hunter-Doune, what would you do if - "

A loud whistle - a sudden pattern of sharp notes, shrill enough to make the hair stir on the back of my neck - broke the night silence.

"Goblins," Dinn rumbled, reaching for his daggers.

I scanned the dark heights, saw nothing but shadows and the baleful eye of the red moon gleaming. I listened hard for Peverell's whistle, but heard only the ghostly echo of night wind trapped in the canyon. Then, darkness become solid, goblins lined the heights, black against the moonlit sky. I counted a dozen. Although distance might fool the eye about details, I knew that the least of them was taller than I and more muscular than even the minotaur.

You might think that none of this mattered much, that we could slip through the shadows and the dark, head for the mouth of the canyon and take our chances running and hiding until we lost them in the dark and the mountains. We couldn't.

A huge goblin stepped forward to the edge of the drop.

It held something high, like a dark cleric offering sacrifice.

Alyce cursed softly. The goblin held the kender above its head, had voiceless Peverell for a hostage and a s.h.i.+eld.

Peverell writhed in the goblin's grip as if he wanted nothing more than to overbalance his captor and send him plunging to a bone-shattered death. So furiously did he struggle that I knew he'd not give a thought to his own bones until he was in midair himself. Yet he was lightly built and had not one tenth of the goblin's strength. His struggling was worth nothing but the goblin's annoyance.

Alyce gestured to Dinn, pointed to the canyon entrance.

Wordless understanding pa.s.sed between them in just one look, as though a whole plan had been unfolded and discussed. The minotaur didn't like it, whatever it was, but Alyce reached up, stroked his red-furred shoulder.

"Don't worry, my friend. I'll be fine. Now, go. Go."

He obeyed, as he always did, but in the fire's light I saw his eyes gleaming, all reflected animal glare and as red as Lunitari hanging high in the sky above the canyon's black walls. A dire warning, that look, and directed at me.

"Don't worry," I said, sarcasm not even thinly veiled.

"I'll be fine, too, Dinn."

He exercised admirable restraint, did no more than feint a lunge at me as he pa.s.sed by - and I still have two eyes today because I kept as still as stone when one of his twisted horns came close to my face. Alyce smiled in a cold, absent way.

"You shouldn't bait him like that, Doune. There might come a time when I'm not near to restrain him."

"Might come a time when I'd welcome that."

She said nothing, likely recognizing bravado when she heard it. I looked over my shoulder at the mouth of the canyon, yawning blackness with silvery stars hanging above. I turned back to Alyce, saw her studying me.

"Is this where a bounty hunter decides to cut his losses and run, Hunter-Doune?"

I snorted. "Could I?" "Go and try," Alyce said flatly. With her sword's gleaming tip she pointed to the goblins. They'd found a narrow path, a winding way down the black canyon walls.

They went slowly, being obliged to keep behind the one who was still s.h.i.+elding himself with Peverell. But they came on steadily, and I saw that my first count was wrong.

There were more than a dozen of them; at least twice that.

"There's no profit in this for you now, Hunter-Doune."

None at all.

In that moment the silver moon, Paladine's son lagging behind Lunitari as he always does, rose above the stony heights. By Solinari's light I saw Alyce's face in profile, as white as marble. All her attention was on the kender caught in the goblin's dutches.

The big goblin flung the kender to the ground, laughed when he saw him hit the rough stone and tumble the rest of the way to the canyon floor. Peverell lay where he fell, a pitiful jumble of arms and legs. When I looked at Alyce, I saw one thin line of silver on her cheek, moonlit tears.

"Are you with me, Hunter-Doune? Or will you leave me?"

She was not weighing me now, or taunting. She really didn't know how I would answer. By the light of wise Paladine's son, I saw in her eyes the knowledge that with me or without, she'd probably not get out of this canyon alive. I saw her wanting to believe that I would not abandon her here.

I'd be a fool to stay, but that would be nothing new. I'd been a fool for the last three days, should have gotten out when I knew I wasn't sure whether I trusted her. What had made me stay?

It was a jeweled moment, one of those s.p.a.ces in the soul when you understand that something has happened to change you. Those moments have their sudden, unlooked- for absurdities to send you laughing, if only silently. Once I'd asked the silver moon why I cared what Alyce thought of me. A bit late in answering, was Solinari, but he answered me now, softly, like a whisper in my heart.

WHAT A d.a.m.nED ALL INCONVENIENT TIME TO.

FINALLY FIGURE OUT THAT I'VE FALLEN IN LOVE ...

Maybe Alyce heard the laughter in me. For one moment, swiftly fled, she smiled as though she agreed.

I hefted my sword, took comfort in its trusty balance.

"I swore to deal honestly with you, Alyce. By my reckoning, that means sticking by you now."

We stood braced, back-to-back, when the goblins entered the canyon.