not imagined, things to make goblins into bed tales for children.”
Hammer-Stag raised his eyebrows, and Chane groaned softly. Why did she have to begin with an insult?
Wynn held both hands out toward her audience.
“Five seasons past, we traveled to the top of the world, to a place of year-round ice on the eastern continent known there as the Pock Peaks. We searched for a treasure lost beyond history—but not for our own gain. We sought to keep it from the hands of a murdering villain and worse . . . one of the undead.”
Chane’s mouth went slack. Did dwarves even know about the undead? From what he had learned of the Numan Lands, such creatures were only fables and folklore here. Several dwarves fidgeted like children suffering in boredom, but all remained quiet. Wynn’s low voice carried throughout the smoky room.
“He was what the people there called a Noble Dead, the highest and most feared of the undead . . . an upér, upír . . . a vampire, a drinker of the blood of the living. We struggled on in those white mountains, trying to find the treasure before he did.”
Wynn’s exaggerated accounts of trials and hardships built as she circled the platform, fixing upon the whole audience and perhaps purposefully ignoring Hammer-Stag. After a while she paused, and silence filled the room. She met the steady gaze of one female dwarf sitting at the back side of Hammer-Stag’s table.
Wynn stepped down from the platform and reached past Hammer-Stag for the woman’s mug.
Though she faltered, no one tried to stop her. She took a fast and deep drink, and slammed the mug back down like Hammer-Stag—or tried to. Compared to his pounding, it sounded like she had dropped the mug.
Ale sloshed out on the table.
Its owner frowned, shaking bits of foam off her stout fingers. Wynn quickly retreated to the platform while others at the table tried to stifle their amusement.
“One night in our search,” Wynn began again, “I became lost in a blizzard. But Chap, the silver sire of my own companion”—and she gestured toward Shade—“found me. Together, we took refuge inside a stone chute to wait out the storm.” Her voice rose slightly. “But we were fools to think a storm our worst enemy. We heard a sound at the chute’s bottom. . . . We peered downward to see two of the Anmaglâhk, the Thieves of Lives, a caste of elven assassins, crawling up to murder us!”
Chane grew still and attentive. He had heard only scant bits of Wynn’s journey, and little to nothing of her time up in the Pock Peaks. He knew what had become of those two elves, for he had seen the bodies. But he had not known they had come so close to Wynn.
A low rumble passed briefly through the crowd. Chane’s ire rose for an instant, until he looked at their faces.
The mention of elves as assassins seemed to startle them into disbelief. But distaste came quickly, as if they accepted Wynn’s accounting. Even the fanciful notion that such a caste might exist did not sit well with the dwarves. Chane remembered Wynn’s earlier warning to keep all weapons in plain sight as an issue of honor and virtue.
“Until then, we didn’t know these eastern elves sought the treasure as well. Chap is fierce, as Hammer-Stag has said, but he would be hard-pressed against such trained assassins. They moved like a sudden night breeze, wielding stilettos as if born with them. I’m ashamed to say I faltered in fear.”
She paused once more at Hammer-Stag’s table, this time reaching for a closer mug, but Hammer-Stag quickly covered the mug with his hand.
Wynn’s face drained of all color at his denial, but Chane was relieved. She had finally failed in her challenge.
“Perhaps another mug would be better,” Hammer-Stag said quietly, and then his face flushed with anger as he glared at the mug’s bleary- eyed owner.
That ragged-looking male with ruddy features blinked in confusion. Horrified realization took him, and he quickly pulled his mug away.
Chane was baffled. For such stout and hardy people, he wondered at any dwarf being so drunk.
Wynn recovered. Exchanging respectful nods with Hammer-Stag, she grabbed another mug and took a drink. And Chane realized what had happened.
That one drunken dwarf had been swilling wood alcohol—which would have killed Wynn if Hammer- Stag had not intervened. Chane’s discomfort grew, not only for Wynn’s safely, but because she was doing better than he expected.
“But as those murdering elves began their