Love And War (12 page)

Hide and Go Seek? Keli turned away in disgust. “This is not a game, kender. I told you,
those two are going to kill me.”

As before, the kender grinned and shook his head. “Those two? Flint alone could handle
three or four of that sort. Or five, or six, depending on the circumstances . . .”

Tigo booted the kender up ahead again, and Keli was left with something to consider.

His friends, the kender had said. Keli squinted hard at the kender's back. He DID look
familiar. Had he been at the tavern last night? Aye, and, despite what Staag had said
about kender not traveling in company, this one had been with a red-haired hunter who had
an elven look about him, three young men, and a dwarf. He remembered them because one of
the young men, thin and pale-eyed, no warrior like his two companions, had threatened to
turn the kender into a mouse and fill the tavern with cats if he so much as looked at his
pouches again. A mage, by the sound of that threat. Keli had thought at the time that the
others probably traveled with the mage just to keep the kender in line.

Could it be that these companions would be looking for the kender? I'M MAKING SURE THAT MY
FRIENDS FIND ME. . . . How? Keli drew a breath, and hope with it.

But the hope was small and too slim to flare. Hide and Go Seek, the boy thought, is played
with friends in the streets and alleyways of the town you live in. Not with goblins and
thieves in the forest.

The bride was a summer princess, her hair golden wheat, her eyes blue-touched with dawn's
mist. Roses blossomed in her cheeks. Her laughter rose and dipped the way a bird's song
will.

So she seemed to Tanis. She must have seemed that way to Flint, too, for he gifted Kavan,
the miller's son, with her hand as though presenting the boy with jewels. How Karan felt
was clear for all to see; all the jewels of Krynn would be but poor stones and rubble when
compared with this girl.

“Lucky fellow, this Kavan,” Caramon murmured when the ceremony was ended.

Tanis gave him a sidelong look and a grin. “Caught, is what he is, but the jailer is
pretty enough, isn't she?”

“Aye, and it won't be bread and water for him. Though it will be some time before he has
any interest in kitchen matters - ” He did not finish the thought but jerked around when a
hard finger caught him between the ribs.

“Keep a civil tongue in your head, youngster,” Flint growled.

“I didn't mean - ”

“I know what you meant. Now why don't you go off and do what you do best: find yourself
something to eat.”

It was a suggestion Caramon never found amiss. When he was gone, Tanis grinned again.
“Runne is a beauty, isn't she?”

“Aye, she's that. Her grandfather would have been proud this day.”

Memories darkened the old dwarf's eyes again, clouds in a clear sky. As though to deny the
sudden thread of sadness running through his day, Flint looked around, searched the crowd
of family and friends now surging around the new bride and her husband. “That addle-pated
kender never turned up.”

“I haven't seen him, but Tas isn't one to miss a celebration. He'll be here before long
and likely you'll be wishing he wasn't.”

Yet through the long summer afternoon and into the hot dark of night the guests at the
wedding moved easily, refilling wine goblets or ale pots and plates too soon emptied of
the good food. No one cried thief, no one wondered where his purse had got to, no lady missed even the smallest trinket or scarf.

There was no kender in attendance, and by the time red Lunitari reached his zenith and
white Solinari left the horizon behind, Sturm came to Tanis wondering.

The forest had thinned near sunset, the oaks and pines were spare now, replaced by stony
ground and boulders. Night's dark cloak brought no relief from the day's heat, and Tigo
was not bearing the simmering night well at all. His eyes were black pits, his lean, hard
jaw jerked from time to time under a tic of which he seemed unaware. His fingered hand
stroked the grapnel's hook as though he'd decided to do murder with it.

Beyond a gulp of water, Keli and Tas were granted nothing. The rope tethers were gone, the
knee and ankle thongs were back. Above the whine and drone of gnats, the bright song of
crickets, Keli heard the kender's low cursing. Twisting so that he faced the fellow, Keli
grudgingly whispered, “Are you all right?”

“It's not,” the kender grumbled, “so much that I'm nearly starved to death and those two
have eaten everything but the bones of that rabbit. It's these thongs. It's not easy to
breathe when your hands, your knees, AND your feet are tied!”

The kender was more actively suffering now, so completely bound, than he had been all day.
His breathing was the short, hard gasping Keli had seen once in a dog whose collar was
caught in a fence.

“Kender,” he whispered, thinking to distract his companion from his troubles, “I'm Keli.
What's your name?”

“Tasslehoff Burrfoot. Call me Tas, all my friends do.” “Tas, how did they get you? And
why?” “With a sack over the head, followed quickly, I can tell you, by a big stick of wood. I was in the barn, at the tavern, just looking. Someone had
ridden in that night on a big red horse, and Caramon said he'd never seen a bay with a
mane and tail that color before. They were all gold, you see, and I just wanted a look.
Nasty beast, too. Nearly took off all my fingers when I went to touch his mane. It was
like gold, though, soft and yellow.“ Tas hitched himself up so that the small of his back
rested against a boulder. In restless preoccupation, he worked his wrists against the
binding leather. ”I walked in on them just as they were tying you up.”

From where he lay Keli saw a thin line of blood, black in the darkness, trickling down
Tas's wrists to his fingers. “Stop - ” he hissed, “you're bleeding!”

After a moment, Tas sat still. “Why did they take you?” Keli shook his head. “I - I don't
know.” Tigo's shadow, thin as a black knife, cut between them.

Keli fell silent, hoping the kender would do the same. For once Tas did.

Tigo's eyes gleamed like dark, hateful stars. “Don't you KNOW, boy?”

Keli chewed his lip and shook his head.

“You don't know the tale of the brave knight Ergon who went boldly against a barely armed
pickpocket with his sword?”

Keli flared. “My father would NEVER fight an opponent who was not equally matched!”

“Wouldn't he?” Slowly Tigo raised his hook-hand. For a moment he seemed lost in the play
of Lunitari's blood-red light along the steel. His eyes dimmed as though all their gleam
had gone into the grapnel. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. If dead men could
speak, Keli thought, his was the voice they would use.

“This hook is a thing I must thank the courageous knight Ergon for. My hand he claimed in
payment for an old man's purse.”

“You lie,” Keli spat. “Careful, boy. This hand is not flesh and it cuts deep.” "Aye, and
you'll kill me anyway. You've said as much.

I'd sooner die for the truth than a lie.“ Tigo's eyes burned, his jaw twitched. ”It is no
lie!" The night's heat was cool when compared with Keli's outrage. It was no easy thing to be a knight in these troubled days. All his life Ergon
had followed the rules of his order humbly, honourably, as though they were a code he was
born to.

“I remember the tale well - I thought my father would die of the wounds he got at your
hands and those of your accomplices. And the old man, he DID die, thief. He was no match
for four daggers. My father barely was. And it was no sword my father used, but his own
dagger.”

Keli choked on his fury, would have said more, but Tas, under pretense of shifting cramped
muscles, fell hard against him. Tigo reacted with a howl of outrage. “You'll die for your
twisted truth, boy, soon enough. But not yet. For now,” he said, eyeing Tas, "I've an
interest in the kender.

“What's in your pouches, little bandit?” Tas shrugged and grinned. “Nothing.” “Nothing?”
Like a hawk diving, Tigo's good hand came down, caught the kender by the front of his shirt and lifted him full off the ground,
dangling him in front of Staag. “Why don't I believe that?”

The buzzing of the gnats and the shrilling of the crickets seemed louder to Keli. He hoped
with all his heart that the kender wasn't going to do something to get himself killed. And
from the look of things, he thought, hunching around so that he could see, it wouldn't
take much.

The thief's dark eyes were only narrow slits now. His teeth, gleaming white in the light
from the fire, were bared in a snarl. He threw the kender down at the goblin's feet. The
snarl turned to a grin the moment Staag began to cut the pouches from Tas's belt and the
kender raised his protests.

Keli didn't understand the kender. What seemed a matter of soul-wrenching pain only a
short time ago - his bound wrists and knees and feet - was as nothing now compared with
the rifling of his pouches, the throwing away of what he called his treasures.

“A line of wicking,” Staag grumbled, “a gray feather, two chipped arrowheads, a bundle of
fletching - junk! Nothing but junk!” He pawed through first one pouch, then another. Tas's
fury only amused him.

A gold earring he kept, stuffing it into his own belt pouch along with a ring set with
polished quartz and a small enameled pin. The rest, an assortment of things that could not
have been of value to any but a kender, he kicked aside.

Tigo, like some thin, black vulture, leaned over Tas. “Just where are you taking us,
kender?” he demanded suspiciously.

“I told you, to a place I know where you can do whatever you have to do and no one will
find you.”

“Aye? Not on some roundabout trail that will lead us to trouble?”

Keli felt Tigo's fury, banked but still hot, where he lay. He prayed the kender would be
careful now.

He wasn't. “Not trouble of my making.”

Tigo kicked Tas hard, and the whoosh of air exploding from the kender's lungs made Keli's
stomach hurt. The kender jack-knifed over, nearly wrapping himself around the thief's
ankle. He was furious, but not so furious that he didn't take good aim when he bit. His
teeth clamped on the man's leg above his boot and it took Staag to pull him off.

Tigo roared. “Hold him while I rip the belly out of him!”

Keli screamed protest, struggling against his bonds.

“Go on,” Tas taunted. “Where will you be then, you brain-sizzled, hook-handed ass?
Stranded, that's where you'll be! You haven't a drunk's idea where you are now!”

Tigo would happily have crimsoned the earth with the kender's blood, but Staag had no
appetite for killing their guide. Moving faster than Keli thought any goblin could, he
whisked the kender away and threw him down next to Keli.

“Keep your mouth shut, kender,” he hissed. “I won't be able to keep him off you next time.”

Tas choked, gasped for air, and coughed. Keli shrugged himself closer to the kender and
nudged him with his shoulder.

“You all right?” Tas muttered something into the dirt. “What?” “I want my dagger, my
hoopak, a rock, anything!” Keli braced his own shoulder against the kender's offering companionship, commiseration, comfort. “Maybe,” he whispered, more for Tas's sake
than because he believed, “maybe your friends will find us soon.”

Merciless summer sun glared from the hard blue sky, baked the ground, radiated from the
humped clusters of rocks. Tanis wiped sweat from his eyes with the heel of his hand and
bent to retrieve the one thing Flint had missed: a fog-colored wing feather from one of
the gray swans of Cristyne.

Because a cut through the forest from Long Ridge would take a day off their journey to
Karsa, the half-elf and his friends had bidden the bride and her new husband farewell the
night before and struck south and east at first light. Runne would have kept them longer,
but Flint pleaded business and promised her that he would see her again on his way back
north.

“I don't think,” he told Tanis wryly, “that she's going to miss me or anyone for a time.”

Tanis, remembering the hard poke in the ribs Caramon had earned for himself with a similar
remark, had offered only a noncommittal smile. It seemed that where Runne was concerned
some things could only be said avuncularly.

Now, the darkness bordering the edges of those memories, the half-elf absently stroked the
edge of the large gray feather with his thumb. Tas had been here recently.

Or his pouches had. And those had been ruthlessly emptied, their contents carelessly
scattered. The hot breeze carried Caramon's deep voice from up the trail and Sturm's
answer. Tanis knew by their tones that they had found no sign of either struggle or a
body. He left the underbrush and joined Flint where he knelt in the path.

“One more thing, Flint.”

The old dwarf took the feather without looking and added it to the pile of oddly assorted
objects to be stuffed with hard, angry motions into Tas's pouches.

A blade-broken dagger, a blue earthenware ink pot, a little carved tinderbox, a copper
belt buckle that Caramon had lost somehow and which Tas would swear he'd always meant to
return, a soft cloth the color of dawn's rose, a bundle of the stiff green feathers Tanis
liked best for fletching his arrows ... all of these kender-treasures and more had been
discarded as so much junk.

Flint's anger might seem, from his tight-lipped muttering, to be directed against a
packrat of a kender. Tanis knew the old dwarf better than that.

“We'll find him, Flint.”

Flint still did not look up, but drew the thong tight on the last of the kender's pouches.
“Did you find his map case?”

“No.”

“Good. I wish whoever took it the joy of trying to find his way with those maps! Hardly
one of them is worth the parchment it's penned on.”

Tanis found a smile. Few of Tas's maps were any good at all without his interpretation and
translation. And those were never the same twice.

“We'll not make Karsa any time soon now, Flint.”