It is an ancient site of truce. In happier times, a place of pilgrimage, somewhere treaties are signed, alliances forged, bargains struck. In less happy ones, of course, negotiations have failed, promises overturned, the wide green fields trampled and soaked with blood.
It's been a long winter, threading their way through the Eastern Ranges. The flood of refugees from Hightop provided some cover for their movements, but the Fürsten regrouped rapidly, until it seemed there was a soldier behind every tree, and even sympathetic folks dare not give them a fleeting roof or supplies. Any suspected of harbouring the Fist o' Ribs have had their homes razed, their people imprisoned.
Of their own croft's fate, word is scarce. They dare not return.
"I'd not have called myself Termist," Taelin brooded early on, "but they've left us nowhere else to turn but south." And here they are at last, with a small band of gathered allies, in the foothills above the plains.
The meeting place itself is a shin-high octagonal stone platform, set in a lush grassy plateau. An elegant pergola spans it, now barely greening into spring. At their backs, almost to the treeline, the Highland rangers await the parlay's outcome, lean and grim and ready to run.
Pepperidge, Lilli, Taelin and Longeye walk to the octagon, flanked by chiefs and warriors of their recent recruits. Allister Iron-Hands, black hair streaming waist-length in the winds, huge claymore strapped across his back. The twin chiefs of the Footsteps o' Silence, identical babyfaces rendered warlike with woad and ochre masks; the Spirit-Singer, Gruoch Narrow-Pass-Below-the-Mountain, with her crookedly healed nose and close-cropped auburn fuzz.
Opposite, eight of the Termist number approach, almost equally wary. Pepperidge knows half of them by name alone, and the others not at all, for her rangers are scarce more familiar with them. There's a willow-slender figure wearing a mask of beaten copper, whom they believe to be the Termists' strategist extraordinaire, Avren the Sparrow; two papery figures of regal bearing, who remind Pepperidge uncomfortably of the Fürsten lords' colourless antiquity, of whom Taelin has only shrugged and muttered; the steaming brawn of the shapewalker, Erik in-the-Seeming-of-a-Bear; three generals of the Termist army, although reliable word on how exactly the various Plains clans have merged their strength, and whose word directs it, have been scarce; and one severe and black-clad fellow who'd made Longeye sigh wearily — "oh, I don't remember, some kind of distant in-law to the Call-of-the-Owl-in-the-Moonlight lads, Captain, ye ken? A *charter-*sorceror."
Taelin made a noise which suggested, if the Termists hadn't been watchfully approaching, he'd have spat.
"What kind of a sorceror is a charter-sorceror, to earn such reaction?" Pepperidge wondered, and Longeye blew a derisive raspberry.
"No real one at all," she said. "Properly, they're dedicants — they find a small god, or a great spirit, or some thing offering puissance on the quick, if you'll only love it and fear it and obey it in all things. And it takes out a piece of you, and puts in a piece of itself instead; the power's never yours in any sense, and you never, ever trust a charterer, for their loyalty's no longer their own to give, either."
She must unconsciously touch the heavy pouch at her waist.
"Oh, no, Professor wolf," Longeye says. "Don't you fret. Whatever the ghost's interest in you, my lass, you don't go around becoming a charterer by accident. You'd know, because you'd have asked it straight to do it to you."
"I asked it to help," Pepperidge murmurs.
"Not the same at all," Longeye says decisively, and Taelin echoes her.
"No, Professor, you're in no danger of indenturing yourself by appealing to our ghost to aid us in need. It's not so much that a dedication is a contract; it's that anything that would seek to have you agree to such a contract wouldn't hang it on anything you could so easily argue it didn't uphold. And mercy, burning Hightop is about the very end of what you'd consider aid in good faith."
"It was sufficient distraction for us to leave with our lives," Pepperidge says dryly.
"I'll be sure to thank it properly for that, should it ever appear to me! Now let us hush for the meeting before us."
"Aye, Captain," she says, and they advance the rest of the distance in silence, mounting the octagon slowly, with hands empty and making no movements that might be taken for a threat or a covert signal.
One of the Termist generals takes the step up onto the dais, opposite them, cracking a gleam of a smile within his curly beard. "Ye must be young Captain Taelin Patience-in-Waiting," he says warmly. "Waiting no more, I'd say! Hightop, begods!"
"Ah, well." Taelin spreads his hands. "The Heart's doing, itself, not mine, gentles, I won't lie; but aye! It returns, and strange times with it."
"What!" the other elf chuckles. "You mean it's more wine than wit talking, when they say you have a sorceror ten feet tall, who can set a man ablaze with no than the gaze of their eyes?"
"No sorceror at all," Taelin says apologetically. "Else we'd maybe not have come to harm at the Stormcrow's hands to begin, and we'd all be having a rather different time."
"Ten feet tall, though, aye?" Longeye chirps. "Does a body good to hear that we loom so large in memory!"
"Oh, not us," Taelin says wryly. "The sorceror we don't have."
"You do," says Avren the Sparrow, liquid behind their mask, "have someone rather remarkable."
"Ah, see? They've heard of your appetites after all, Longeye," Pepperidge says, since everyone's going to look at her anyway, and Longeye cackles in appreciative surprise.
"Ah, I don't think you'll get away with that today, Professor," she says delightedly, "but I thank your efforts to keep me known throughout the world as the terror of the bedsheets!"
"Here we are to make a good impression," Lilli says mournfully, "and what we have is the terror of the bedsheets."
There is no need here, Pepperidge reminds herself, to joke as a distraction from impending doom. This is not Hightop, they are not facing the Fürsten. She need not fear these people, not in the same way — probably.
"In seriousness, gentles," she says wryly, "I have never counted myself remarkable at all; though I recognise as you do that I have found myself amidst remarkable events. There is nothing, I think, that I can tell you about them that others cannot; I thank you humbly for my welcome here, but I cannot tell you I have earned it."
"It's irregular," a second of the generals says candidly, and not to her; he directs it at Taelin. "It's irregular she's here; but then, of course, irregular times, that she need be. There's much pivoting on the welcome, if there's a welcome for her."
"Aye," Taelin says, in what could be mistaken for a peaceful tone. "If there's no welcome here for the Fist o' Ribs, that'll set things a particular way."
All posturing, mock fighting that might turn viciously serious at any turn.
"What think you of that, scholar?" says Avren the Sparrow, masked face turned still to Pepperidge. "That we talk about your welcome here, and these of our people say we mean them?"
Ah, a strategem; a multi-pronged attack, to probe their weaknesses.
"Think?" Pepperidge says steadily. "Why, think you that any doubts haven't been discussed already, between us, long ago? I think: what does Avren the Sparrow seek to gain by asking? And my only answer is that there's nothing to gain, only our trust to lose. Which, as the Captain says, will certainly set things a certain way."
And this, too, is posturing.
"What think you, Sparrow?" Pepperidge concludes, holding the gaze that presumably looks from behind shadowed holes.
"Hightop burned," tries one of the elves of aristocratic bearing, and this, this has the sharp air of genuine feeling behind it. "The Heart, you say, and none of your doing. Think you aught of that?"
"You imply I have some say over what the Heart does," the Professor says dryly. "And if you genuinely thought so, I think either my welcome would be without question, or out of the question so clearly you'd see me dead as quick as the Fürsten. No, sir; that's no real question, either."
This is not an answer that pleases him; eyes darken, and the lines of his face sharpen. "And yet the burning is without question," he retorts.
"Aye," she says softly. "Aye. I was there."
Is this the real test, here? That she be put on rigged trial before the judge of this old elf's pain? She cannot think that his inevitable verdict is the fulcrum on which this all pivots, so perhaps it's their demeanour in the face of it, their willingness to be subjected to indignities, should they join the Termist cause.
"And so I say, Hightop burned: think you nothing?"
"You don't seem to be asking me to think, sir; you seem to be asking me to feel," she says firmly. "To feel as you do, to feel the ache of the destruction of something longtime dear; and sir, you demand this knowing that I am not an elf, that I am not of Hightop, and that my acquaintance with it was a terror-shadowed eyeblink even in the terms of my own life, let alone an elven one. Do I have thoughts, do I have feelings? Of course. Are they yours? They cannot be." She looks around the Termist representatives, challenging. "This is what you gentles would have me answer? That I'm guilty of not feeling a terrible homesickness because a doom, that your kinslaying enemies brought upon themselves, burned a home that was never mine?"
There's the dangerous glitter of something between his fingers, and with no greater warning, the pale aristocrat snarls and lunges. A hundred hundred painful, merciless drills at the rangers' hands shiver down Pepperidge's prickling spine.
He holds a weapon. It will not do; she snatches at her cloak, spins heavy cloth through the air to snag his arm. Riding the spike of panic, it is as though Longeye is still at her back, bawling instructions: move your feet, keep your balance, STRIKE, DUMMY!
Her fist meets his onrushing nose, her back foot set like a spear against a cavalry charge.
If she is to die, she will die fighting like a ranger — dirty and relentless. He stumbles back, she sways forward, pen-callused fingers ground into blundgeons. A straight shot to his solar plexus. He folds like a paper doll, and she sweeps the backthrust leg forward. His skull, her knee: the impact is hard enough to set fire to her bones and numb her foot.
He tumbles.
If she were an elf, she would caper back. Sweep her cloak to free her right hand, even that much a suggestion toward drawing her honour. Daunt them, spit fire and poetry.
She slams down her numb foot. Stands square to them and glares.
"Swive me, Professor," Longeye says behind her, in conversational tones writ overtop the taut promise of murder. "He had poison urchin spines. That's for political assassination; someone thinks high of you."
"So to speak," Pepperidge acknowledges grimly.
The Plainsmen shuffle, looking variously at the fallen nobleman, at her, at the flexing honour hands of the elves behind her.
"Bind that treacherous bastard!" one of the generals decides swiftly, and it's all over bar the formalities. The ragged Highlanders trickle across the field and join the Termist army.
