'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, honorably, 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
