They would camp tonight, Agravain decided.
They had trekked for three days without stopping. They’d found a road that ran between stretches of forest and had made a good distance. But yesterday, Lura had begun to trip over her boots, the third time with a whimper, and he’d been carrying her at his chest since. She needed a true night’s sleep, and the fog that had descended a couple of hours ago would help to cloak them. Maybe he could grab a short rest too. If he could trust the wolf—
A shout sounded in the fog, and he jerked to a halt, clutching Lura as he tried to discern the direction of the cry. She woke and looked around. “Where’s Marcus?”
A moment later, the wolf was galloping toward them, mist swirling around his gray form. He slid to a graceless stop, shifting midway. “Saxons!”
Agravain’s blood frosted over. “Forest, Lura-lass, that way. Burrow like a rabbit—go!”
She scurried into the fog, taking half his heart with her.
A sword sang at his hip as Marcus drew the spare from its scabbard. Agravain scarcely had time to draw his own before the Saxons thundered from the mist.
Three, four, five, all armed. They looked half wild, and his gut clenched on the thought that they might have wolves with them. Wolves would sniff Lura out—he should have told her to climb a tree! But he couldn’t shout it now without giving her away. Growling his frustration and fear, he charged the nearest man.
He was out of practice. He felt slow and clumsy, his blade catching the Saxon’s round shield with glancing blows only. Fortunately, the other man was swinging wildly as well, and soon gave Agravain the opening he needed, raising his sword and exposing his ribs. Agravain drove his sword point deep, then used his foot to shove the man off his blade.
A second man lay gurgling beyond Marcus, but Agravain didn’t have time for more than a glance before another Saxon was upon him, this one taller than the last. Agravain tried to plant his boots but found himself staggering back under blows coming from over his head. This one’s reach was too long to allow him stabbing distance, and it took everything he had to fend off the strikes.
Suddenly, the man’s sword fell from his hand. A blade sliced backward through the side of the Saxon’s neck as Marcus withdrew it, and the man crumpled. Marcus had turned back to the fifth before the fourth hit the ground. Agravain kicked the fallen sword away. But when he started toward Marcus to help fend off the final man, his feet stuttered.
Marcus was striking like a demon, slashing and hacking with a range only someone with his long limbs could, but with a speed and strength Agravain wouldn’t have guessed he was capable of. With no shield to hold, his left hand hovered at his side, balancing the quick, slicing arcs of his sword hand. Then, without warning, the sword was in his left hand, and his right was the counterbalance, and the stunned look on the Saxon’s face must have been reflected on Agravain’s own. But Marcus’s determined stance never faltered, and his tattoos leapt and danced as he rained blows on the man.
“There’s one more!”
It took Agravain a moment to realize Marcus was shouting at him. He spun in place, looking for another attacker, then realized where he might be. A heartbeat’s panic seized him as he lost sight of Marcus, and therefore any sense of where the forest lay. Then Marcus stepped backward out of the mist, still swinging, and Agravain took off running past the man’s shoulder.
The tree line was farther than he recalled it being, so that he half thought he’d run in the wrong direction and gotten lost in the mist. But then the first tree appeared, followed by another and another, and then he was among them. He turned this way and that, trying to sense any movement around him. His blood was beating too loudly to hear even a heavy shuffle. Scanning the needles and brush of the undergrowth, he looked for signs of Lura but saw none of the newly disturbed loam that might give her away.
A growl rumbled, and his blood went to ice again.
The fog made it impossible to pin down the wolf’s location. Sea mist did the same, and many a sailor had gotten hopelessly lost at sea that way. He wasn’t at sea, but his daughter was somewhere in this wood, and gods’ blood, if this wolf found her first—
Something gray sprinted past him from behind. By the time his brain could put a name to it, there were two wolves tussling and snarling on the ground a few paces away.
He stood staring and helpless, unable to tell which was Marcus. The mass of snapping teeth and swiping claws moved too quickly for his slow human eyes to track them. The writhing tangle struck tree trunks and strewed pine needles and leaf litter in a mad, growling fury.
Then one of the wolves yipped, then squealed, and Agravain’s belly felt as if it had turned to stone. One wolf had the other’s throat in its jaws. The legs of the one caught kicked with violent panic. Agravain clutched his sword—should he strike anyway? Then he saw it: the ugly scar along the ribs of the wolf on top.
Marcus.
He reached them in three strides and drove his sword through the ribcage of the Saxon wolf.
Its body went long and taut, as if pulled that way from forepaw to hind. Its haunches trembled, and its tail stood out from its body, rigid. Then the wolf shifted, and Agravain’s blade was planted in the chest of a man.
Marcus rolled off him and shifted too. He lay panting, his mouth and chest smeared with blood, his skin livid with claw marks. His nostrils flared on deep breaths. Finally he opened his eyes and found Agravain. “She’s safe.”
Agravain shouted for Lura. She answered him, and then there she was, easing her way down a tree a few paces behind Marcus. Agravain leapt over him and plucked her off the trunk. He hugged her to his chest and drew a deep breath of her precious scent.
“You climbed a tree.”
“They use wolves.”
His clever, clever lass.
“Is Marcus all right?”
He exhaled in a huff. “Aye.” He looked over to find that the man had risen. Bracing one foot against the dead Saxon, he was pulling Agravain’s sword free. Something about his aspect nudged a memory in Agravain’s mind, but he was too muddled to sort it out just now. He tightened his hold on Lura. “He’s very brave.”
Her small, wiry arms squeezed him back. “I told you so.”