glumly. “They’re encircling us. Grayden doesn’t need to storm the town. He can’t know how many we are, so attacking the wall would be a waste of soldiers. He’s only got to trap us here till hunger and thirst force us to yield, or until he can overwhelm us.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s what I would do.”
Grim silence reigned. Then Porthios drew a deep breath.
“We can’t allow the cache to fall into bandit hands. I’d rather see it destroyed first,” he said. “So we must fight.”
He stood. Instantly, an arrow whizzed by his shoulder, ripping his sleeve as it passed. Kerian grabbed the front of his robe with both hands and dragged him down behind the sharpened logs.
“Take your hands off me.”
She remembered the face under the mask and let go abruptly. With much affronted dignity, Porthios stood again and descended the steps to the street.
Kerian shook her head. She’d known other warriors like him. Bravest of the brave they often were, but frightening. Placing little value on their own lives, they often didn’t value anyone else’s either.
She and Nalaryn peered carefully over the barrier. Here and there, elf eyes could pick out bandit archers settling into position among the burned-out ruins of the squatters’ camp.
Telling Nalaryn to hold his place, Kerian climbed down to the street and followed Porthios back toward the town square.
Once the setting of slave auctions, executions, and Olin’s unsavory entertainments, the square was again a gathering place for the elves of Bianost. Kerian had thought most of the original inhabitants were long gone, driven out or sold away into slavery. But several hundred had gathered, eager to serve their liberator. The word had spread to gather in the square, and the sudden arrival of Gathan Grayden seemed only to whet their appetite for battle.
Porthios walked ahead of Kerian. As he entered the square, his pace slowed. The crowd of elves shifted toward him, determined to get a closer look at their benefactor.
The scene felt oddly familiar to Kerian, reminding her of Gilthas’s progress through the tent city of the exiled elves in Khur. The Speaker of the Sun and Stars was regarded as the noblest being in the world, but while his grateful subjects were welcome to approach the kindly Gilthas, none tried to accost Porthios. Curiosity and gratitude brought them near, but his forbidding demeanor arrested their enthusiasm. Scores lined the way, but not one hand reached out for his ragged robe. Their expressions were different too.
She had nearly reached the fountain in the center of the square before she identified the difference. The Speaker of the Sun and Stars represented a lofty ideal. Porthios was a reflection of each of them, the rage and shame of every elf in the subjugated lands, personified in one gaunt, shabby frame.
The slave pens had been torn down by the mob. Since then, debris and garbage had been removed from the central fountain. Seeing that, Kerian wondered aloud about restoring the flow of water.
An elf standing on the stone platform by the obelisk said, “There is no water.”
“What, none? None at all?”
He explained the feeder pipes were broken or choked with garbage. “Olin never bothered to keep them up. For months, all water has been carried in.”
“In from where?” asked the Lioness, eyes narrowing.
“From the springs in the meadow south of town.”
The squatters’ camp had grown up when traders became tired of tramping in and out of the stockade for water. They moved outside to be closer to the springs.
Kerian gestured peremptorily for Porthios to accompany her. Conscious of being watched by hundreds, he followed. They ascended the steps of the mayor’s palace.
Out of earshot of the crowd, she hissed, “Did you hear? The bandits have us cut off from our only water supply!”
“There are rain cisterns under the streets. We’ll drink that.”
Heatedly, she pointed out the cisterns were likely nearly dry after the long summer drought. Any water in them would be stagnant, an invitation to disease.
“Then we will fight and win before we get thirsty,” Porthios said.
The Lioness’s famous temper nearly broke. Porthios had achieved amazing things, but his bland indifference to their safety made her furious. All the old enmity between city lord and woodland elf welled up inside her for the first time since leaving Khur. This arrogant, mutilated noble was gambling with all their lives!
There was no telling what she might have done had not fate intervened in the person of one of Nalaryn’s Kagonesti, a female called Sky. She jogged up the steps, calling for Kerian and the Great Lord. They were wanted back at the north wall.
Kerian clutched her filthy hair with both hands. “What now?” she groaned.
“The bandits are fighting,” Sky said and took off.
Kerian took that to mean Nalaryn’s band was in peril. She headed down the steps without even looking to see whether Porthios followed.
The crowd of elves in the square peppered her with anxious questions. She fended them off but quickly realized that was a mistake.
“The bandits are coming back,” she announced, not breaking stride. “If you value your liberty and love your race, follow me and bring a weapon. The battle is now!”
There were only a few cries of fear. In a body, the elves grabbed whatever makeshift weapons they could find and streamed after the Lioness.
Near the stockade, Kerian heard the telltale sounds of battle. Entering the last street inside the wall, she was surprised to see Nalaryn’s Kagonesti crouched below the parapet. They did not appear to be engaged, so who was fighting?
She raced up the steps. Behind, the elves of Bianost gripped unfamiliar weapons, their strained faces turned upward.
“What’s going on?” Kerian demanded.
One of the Kagonesti pointed wordlessly. Kerian put an eye to a chink between the logs and peeked out. She drew a breath in sharply.
Beyond the wasteland of squatters’ shanties a considerable battle was indeed taking place. Gathan Grayden’s soldiers, some on foot and some mounted, were milling around their leader’s fluttering standard. No one on the stockade could identify his foe through rising clouds of ash and dirt, but Nalaryn offered a bleak and logical opinion. The rats who’d fled Olin’s town had carried word of his downfall in all directions. The newcomers were probably troops of another bandit lord who sought to grab Olin’s former territory.
“This may be a well-chewed bone, but they’ll fight like rabid dogs to possess it,” he said.
Kerian watched as lancers in bright breastplates charged through Grayden’s disordered ranks. His attention had been focused entirely on the town. He had not expected an attack from elsewhere. The mercenaries formed squares to hold off the cavalry, but they were isolated from each other and unable to do anything but fight to stay alive.
Before the sun set, the battle was over. Grayden himself, surrounded by his best retainers, abandoned the field. His men he left to the mercies of the victor, and like Olin’s mercenaries before them, the bandits broke and scattered. The last Kerian saw of Gathan Grayden was his standard, borne away by a warrior on a black horse.
The townsfolk, watching the melee through gaps in the logs at ground level, set up a cheer when Grayden’s soldiers fled. Kerian silenced them with a thunderous command. The cure might prove worse than the disease.
A block of mounted warriors trotted toward the stockade. The Kagonesti nocked arrows and awaited the order to loose. The approaching column numbered perhaps three hundred.
It was either fight or surrender, and for her part, Kerian had no intention of allowing herself to be chained again. Better to die right here and now.
She gripped her captured sword tightly. Only a modest archer, she left that art to those far more capable. Soon there would be plenty of fighting to go around.
The mounted column halted at the edge of the burned-out section of shanties. A smaller contingent of two score riders came on.
