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.