Free Steel and Stone by Ellen Porath Page B

she passes through. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.” Caven looked back at Kitiara. “A suspicious man might think you’d been avoiding him, my love,” he said.
    Kitiara pulled herself up straight, but she was still came up only to Caven Mackid’s shoulder. “I’m still your superior officer, soldier. Watch yourself.” Her tone was bantering, but her eyes showed no warmth.
    The minstrels’ tune continued, but several onlookers, sensing a possibly greater show in the making, gaped instead at Kitiara and Caven.
    At Kitiara’s words, Caven’s hands dropped to his sides, and the friendliness faded from his face. The big man gazed at Kitiara with a strange light in his eyes—anger mixed with something else. Something was afoot that the half-elf wasn’t privy to, but he was experienced enough with women to realize that Kitiara at one time had been much more than a commanding officer to this man.
    “I believe you have something of mine, Captain Uth Matar,” Mackid said silkily. “A money pouch, perhaps? No doubt an oversight on your part; our personal belongings did get a bit
mingled
there for a while, as I recall.”
    The slim teen-ager snickered. “I’ll say,” he said with a leer at Tanis.
    “And as I recall,” Caven Mackid went on, disregarding the youth, “you left in quite a hurry, my dear—too hasty even to leave a message. Pursued by ogres, no doubt. But I trust you’ve kept my money safe and have it now.”
    The teen-aged boy leaned toward Tanis. “Took off while he was out hunting, she did, and nipped most of his savings,” he whispered. “If she’d just took off, I don’t think he would’ve minded much. But it was the filching that stuck in Caven’s craw.”
    “Wode!” Caven gently reprimanded the boy. “Good squires keep their mouths shut around strangers.”
    Behind Kitiara, the minstrels finished the ballad and launched into a reel. The swordswoman finally noticed the half-elf. “Tanis, this is Caven Mackid, one of my
subordinates
in my last campaign.”
    Caven smiled in an almost friendly fashion atTanis, but he addressed his words to Kitiara. “A half-elf, Kitiara? Lowered your standards a bit, haven’t you?” His squire snickered again, but the man quelled the outburst with a look. Instead, Caven gazed directly at Kitiara. His next words were an order. “My money. Now.”
    *   *   *   *   *
    Off to one side, unnoticed by any of the four, a woman with skin the umber of burnished oak pulled back warily into a shadowed portal. A soft woolen robe, the color of a dove, set off her dark features. Her gaze was direct, her eyes azure around pupils of surprising darkness. Her straight, blue-black hair poured over her shoulders, over the crumpled hood of her robe, and down her back.
    “Kitiara Uth Matar,” she murmured softly to herself. “And that dark-haired soldier … I know him, too.”
    Eyes narrow, slim fingers fondling the silk pouches that dangled from her waist, she continued to watch wordlessly from the shadows.

Chapter 4
Double Trouble

    T HE WHINING OF A THOUSAND MOSQUITOES couldn’t mask the thud of the monster’s footsteps or the complaints of the beast’s two heads in the darkness.
    “Res hot!”
    “Lacua hungry.”
    “Dumb bugs. Want snow. Why hot?”
    “Spring. You stupid.”
    Pause. “Res go home now.”
    “No!”
    In a small prairie south of Haven, the thirteen-foot ettin faced off with itself—no mean feat for a creature with such short, fat necks. The ettin’s watery eyeswere tiny, like a pig’s, and at the moment, bloodshot with anger. Each hamlike hand, controlled by the head on that side of the body, waved a spiked club. The argument came in a mishmash of orcish, goblin, and giant tongues.
    “Quit time,” Res, the right head, roared. “Res go home now!”
    “Mage say not! Find soldier lady,” Lacua, the left head, insisted.
    “On trail long. Too much long. No soldier lady. Gone, gone.” It might have been the longest speech