Silver Shadows - Elaine Cunningham [11]
Foxfire was not certain which of the intruders was the less natural-dog or master. He'd seen what the mastiffs could do to a captured elf. Gaylia, a young priestess of his tribe, had been herded by such dogs into the iron jaws of a foot-hold trap and then worried to death. The humans had left her torn and savaged body there for the elves to find. Left behind, too, were the tracks that told Foxfire the humans had stood by watching as their dogs killed the helpless priestess.
"To the trees," Foxfire ordered tersely. "Scatter, but do not let them follow you. Meet me at dusk in the ash grove."
The elves, seven of them, all armed with bows and quivers full of jet-black arrows, scrambled up the ancient trees as lightly as squirrels. There they would be invisible to the eyes of the humans and beyond the snapping jaws of the humans' four-legged counterparts. They disappeared into the thick canopy, making their separate ways from tree to tree.
Only Foxfire stayed behind, feeling uncomfortably like a treed raccoon as he waited for the human hunters to come to the call of their hounds. The mastiffs circled the giant cedar, baying and snarling and leaping against the massive trunk. Foxfire was fully aware of the danger of his position, and never would he have asked this of any elf under his command. There were answers, however, that he must have.
The elf waited patiently until the humans came into view. There were twenty of them, but Foxfire had eyes for only one. He knew this human by his massive size, by the dark gray cloak that flowed behind him like a storm cloud, and by the iron-toed hoots he wore. The elf had found large, unusual boot prints very close to the place of Gaylia's death-bloodless prints upon blood-soaked earth, prints that indicated the man had stood by and watched the elf woman's horrible fate. And after a battle that had cost the lives of two elven fighters, Foxfire had glimpsed the swirl of that dark caps, as the human shouldered the body of one of the elf warriors and bore him away-for what purpose, Foxfire could not begin to guess. He knew only that in this man the elves of Tethir had a formidable and evil enemy.
Carefully he committed the man's face to memory. It was a face easily remembered, a visage that matched the grim deeds of its owner: black-bearded, with a scimitar of a nose and eyes as cold and gray as the snow clouds that gathered around the peaks of the Starspire Mountains.
The man stalked toward the yapping hounds, his face a mask of fury. He kicked out hard, and his iron-clad boot caught one of the mastiffs in the ribs. The force of the blow lifted the large dog off its feet. It fell heavily on its side and lay there, kicking and yelping piteously. The others cringed away with then- tails tucked tightly between their legs.
"Useless curs!" the man swore and kicked out again. This tune the dogs mustered enough wit to dodge.
"Set the tree afire, Bunlap?" one of the men inquired. "That'd smoke the long-eared bastards out!"
The leader whirled on the fighter. "If you had the sense the gods gave a dung beetle," he said coldly, "you would know that the elves are long gone. They leap from tree to tree like Chultan monkeys."
"What, then?" another man demanded.
The man called Bunlap shrugged his massive shoulders. "We call the hunt a loss. Too bad. That farm south of Mosstone-the one that grows pipeweed-would've paid well for more wild-elf slaves! Best workers they've got, or so the man tells me."
"Seems to me those scrawny elves wouldn't be worth the trouble it takes to break 'em," observed another man, a thin, rangy fellow who carried the bow of a forest elf. Foxfire's eyes narrowed as he took note of that bow. He had little doubt how the man had obtained it, for no elf would part willingly with such a treasure.
Bunlap responded to the