Krayzor's Arc

Chapter 6 of 16

The staffs were still settling in the dirt when boots struck stone outside. A horn blew once, short and flat. Krayzor lifted the dragon skull back onto his shoulders and felt the weight of the horns settle over his eyes. The candles along the cave walls bent in a draft. Someone was coming under boar colors, and his lie about the missing scout had just run out of road. The envoy ducked into the chamber and planted a carved boar staff hard into the dirt, tusks pointed at Krayzor's chest. "A scout of ours went into your trail and did not come out," he said. "Speak plain, skull-man. Where is she." Krayzor did not move from behind the dragon skull. He thought of the fox waiting behind poison flowers, three days promised, one already spent. A lie now would buy him this room and lose him her. The truth would cost him this room and maybe his throat. He chose a third road. "Your scout fell," he said. "That is what your trackers read in the rocks. That is what they will keep reading." He stepped around the skull so the envoy could see his open hands. "But she did not die. I pulled her out. She wears my mark now, and she chose it. Come with me at sundown and she will stand up and say so herself. If she does not, you take my head between those tusks outside and no clan here will lift a staff against you." The envoy's jaw worked. The other scouts watched him, not Krayzor. The fox-carved staff at the center of the ring did not move, but its owner shifted half a step closer to the dragon skull, and that was a vote spoken without a word. The envoy pulled his boar staff out of the dirt and drove it back in beside the others. "Sundown," he said. "And if she is dead, skull-man, your bones join hers." Krayzor nodded once. The room emptied around him and left him alone with the candles and the ring of painted staffs. He had kept the alliance and kept the fox in the same breath, but he had spent the last of his cushion to do it. He had until sundown to cross back through hostile ground, reach a wounded scout behind a wall of poison flowers, and bring her here standing. The promise he had made privately was now a promise made in front of every clan.