I saw was Peverell, and he was chattering to an elderly woman in his silent way, his hands swooping and flying. After a while, the old woman, her face wrinkled like a winter apple, shooed him away as though he were a pesky hen gotten into the house. I wondered, in a vague kind of way, what they'd been talking about, but I fell asleep again.
I slept often and long. One evening I awoke to find Dinn standing beside me.
'There is no longer debt between us, human,' he said. 'You kept her safe when I could not. They're right. You'll do, Hunter-Doune, if you live.' He said that last grudgingly, with a sullen shake of his horns.
Dinn wasn't the only one who was unsure whether I'd survive my wounds. I wasn't all that certain about it myself, but Alyce wasn't having any of that. She was always near, and one morning I awoke to see her standing in the open doorway, looking out. Her left arm was bandaged above the elbow. She wore a soft blue gown of some light, widewoven fabric, the hem of it just brushing sun-browned ankles.
I don't know why I remembered it then — with her looking like a breeze-blown flower come to settle on the doorstep, but in memory I heard someone shout, Kell! And heard her yell, to me! To me!
'Are you Kell?' I asked her.
She turned from the doorway, her blue eyes darkly thoughtful. She was weighing a risk. Finally she said, 'Yes. You see, Hunter-Doune, Dinn does know where that terrible heretic Kell hides out.'
'But why — ?'
She shook her head, laid a finger on my lips, then she pressed her own lips to my forehead. To check for fever, she said.
Later that day I awoke and Alyce was not in the cottage, but I wasn't alone. I had a visitor. He sat in a chair pulled close to the side of the bed, a tankard of ale in his hand. His eyes, dark and a little flecked with blue, were soft-focused, as though his thoughts were far away.
On second look, I saw that what I'd thought was sunlight glinting in his black beard was the silvering of time's passing. He'd aged, and that shouldn't have been surprising. It had been about seven years since I'd last seen him. When he saw me awake, he turned in the chair, and I saw that he'd lost something since the last time I'd seen him: a leg. In its place, strapped to the stump where a knee should have been, was a carved wooden peg.
Although it hurt to move, I raised my left hand, palm up, and hit it with my right fist. Now I knew the meaning of Peverell's puzzling gesture: A hammer hitting an anvil.
Four days. Surprise. Friend.
Toukere Hammerfell.
'Touk,' I said, though hoarsely for trying to sound calm. 'Where am I?'
'Ah, well, that's a story.' He raised the tankard, drank, and held it out to me.
'No,' I said. 'I don't drink ale.'
Smiling a little, as if he were looking down a long road to an old memory, he said, 'Guess you had your fill the night I left Istar, eh? Well, then, listen good, Hunter-Doune. There's a lot to tell about me and the Vale.'
He told me there were two mages living in the Vale. They had made the sky over the canyon rain red and silver light. He grinned when he said that, held that those mages did a fine job of scaring the feeble wits out of the goblins with their little light game. He told me there were five clerics, and some declared their allegiance to the gods of good by their white garb. Others wore the red of neutrality. According to Toukere, it was one of the red- robed clerics who had healed the worst of my hurts.
'And there's enough people — young men and old, grannies and mothers and children — to fill up a small town,' he said. 'Some of 'em you saw in the canyon, which is no great distance from here. Good fighters when they have to be, but mostly they're farmers.'
'But this is no town, Touk, is it?'
He allowed as how it wasn't, not exactly. The Vale was a deep, high-sided valley tucked between two rising mountain peaks. The people who lived there hunted the highlands, raised cows and chickens and pigs, had a fine forge at the broad fording place of the river. Kell's father had founded the place.
'Alyce — Kell — told me her father was a mercenary.'
Touk shrugged. 'He was, once, for a while, but he was a pretty good thinker, and he got to thinking that this habit the Kingpriest has of slaughtering in the name of goodness is a strange one. Once that idea got hold of him, it didn't let go. He opposed the Kingpriest's persecutions with everything he had — heart and soul. He did more than talk about it. He settled this place.
'You call his daughter Alyce,' Toukere said, 'but that's only a traveling name. Here we name her Kell, for that's what her father called her. Kell o' the Vale.'
He told me that all the folk who lived in the Vale were free believers in whatever god or gods they chose. Many of them had come by way of dark paths, hunted for bounty and driven by desperation into the goblin lands. He said that every one of them — men and dwarves and elves, one kender and a minotaur — owed their lives to Kell, the heretic who, like her father, did not believe that torment and execution were fit ways to honor the gods of good.
'We get on well, Hunter-Doune. By which I mean we don't kill each other over the big matters, and we feel free to squabble over the small things.'
'We?'
He finished off the ale and thumped the mug against his wooden leg. He winced a little when he did that, and I saw that the wood was newly carved. The amputation wasn't old enough to be used to.
'We're awfully close to goblin lands, here,' he said. 'That's good and bad. Good because it keeps the Kingpriest's spies and casual visitors away. Bad because we have to keep patrols on our borders against the blackhearted goblins. I am — ' He ran his palm along the wood again. 'I was the one who led those patrols. No more.'
'What happened, Touk?'
He shrugged. 'Just what it looks like. Lost my leg to a goblin's axe, lay too long for the cleric to heal me. But I'm not here to talk about me, Doune. I'm here to talk about you.'
Now, go reckon this — because I can't. There he sat, my old partner whose advice I'd remembered and lived by even all the years after I'd thought him dead, the old friend whose memory I'd sworn by — and I was suddenly angry. Angry and wondering why he'd not found a moment to spare to let me know that he was not dead.
'You want to talk about me?' I said bitterly. 'Why, I'm just fine, Touk. Sword-cut, my ribs broken, gnawed by goblins, and the rest of me feeling like I've been run over by a wagon. But otherwise, fine. How've you been?'
'Now hear me, Hunter-Doune,' he said. 'Hear me.'
'Hear you? No, Touk Hammerfell. You listen to me — '
'Hear me!' His dark, blue-flecked eyes flared, as they'd so often done when — as he liked to say — I had the stubborn fit on me.
'It's me who told Kell to bring you here,' he said, 'and that was a risk. I knew you seven years ago, Hunter- Doune, but I didn't know what you'd become since then. Still I talked Kell into taking the risk. Ah, blackmailed her, I guess you'd say, told her she owed me for my leg.'
'Why, Touk?'
He sucked in his cheeks, as he did when he was thinking, then spoke in a rush, as he did when he was trying to get past sentiment.
'I've never forgotten you, Hunter-Doune, and I hoped
… I hoped you'd still be the man I remembered. I'd have gone for you myself, but you see I couldn't. We need someone trusty, and someone keen-witted. Someone who — ' He shook his head, then went off on another tack. 'They're mostly all farmers here, not fighters. The minotaur wanted the job. He wants nothing more than to be killing goblins every chance he gets. But you know how minotaurs are. Hotheaded and not good at leading men. I'll tell you, he didn't much like being the bait in this game.'
'Bait? For what? For me?'
'Well, I've been dead these seven years, haven't I? Caught by some bounty hunter in Xak Tsaroth.' He grinned, an old familiar twist of his lips. 'I don't reckon you'd have believed it if anyone came to say that your old friend Touk Hammerfell wanted to have a chat.'
I gave him that.
