Battle is Joined
“That is our decision, and it is final,” Allystaire said, with the air of a man repeating himself, thick arms crossed over his broad chest. Torvul stood at his elbow, leaning a bit on his long bronze-shod walking stick-cudgel.
“But the man is in a weak position,” Chaddin insisted, pacing the far corner of his tent. “He must destroy you before the next campaigning season and his support is waning.”
“None of that changes any of what I said. The Mother is not going to be a part of your revolution.”
“What about guarding the weak? What about punishing the wicked?”
“You’ve got it confused with choosin’ among the strong,” Torvul said.
“My father must be destroyed,” Chaddin said with, Allystaire thought for the first time, real heat creeping into his voice. “Whatever he was, he’s become a beast.”
“That we agree upon,” Allystaire said. “And we will give you and your men shelter from him. If our purposes work in tandem while you take that shelter and we can join our strength to defeat him, all to the good. But any alliance stops at the wall of Thornhurst.”
“And those walls will do you no freezing good when my father gets here, unless there’s three thick feet of stone I can’t yet see.”
“It has never been the walls as much as those who stand behind them,” Allystaire replied, with an assurance he did not feel.
“There’s more to ‘em than you think or can see, boy,” Torvul interjected.
Chaddin was silent a moment. “You honestly think you can defeat whatever my father brings? What if there is another sorcerer? Hired Islandmen? What then?”
“I have killed more hired Islandmen than I can remember,” Allystaire said. “And you will recall what I did to your father’s first sorcerer.”
“We’ll have what, three score? Against two hundred? Perhaps three? You’re mad. Perhaps if we fled, went into the mountains—he can’t kill what he can’t find,” Chaddin said, speaking in a sudden rush, curling one hand into a fist in front of him. “Staying behind the walls, we’ve given up all mobility, all initiative…”
“Remember who you are talking to,” Allystaire grumbled. “I was teaching your father what mobility and initiative meant before you were holding a sword.”
“Enough babble,” Torvul suddenly rumbled, smacking the bottom of his cudgel against the hard ground. “Make a decision. You stay and you’ve got the Arm of the Mother beside you. Sixty against three hundred make long odds, but a damn sight better than twenty against the same.”
“I am offering you something no other baron will grant you,” Chaddin said, his voice almost pleadingly desperate now. “Independence for your village—no interference from the Temples, legitimacy for your Goddess…”
“Thornhurst will prosper or fail on its own faith, its own strength, its own people,” Allystaire replied. “And my Goddess, our Goddess, requires no one’s approval for Her legitimacy. I will not make her Church and Her name, small though they may be, a tool in a fight over an inheritance. That is my final word.”
“You’re a mad man,” Chaddin said, shaking his head slowly. “You’re giving up what you say you want for some notion of purity…”
He was cut off by the sound of a yell, which sent Torvul and Allystaire scrambling outside.
In the distance, beyond the southern wall, a column of bright red light plumed into the sky.
“Torvul…”
“That’s one o’ my signals. Red means more than a dozen, armed and close.”
“My armor, now,” Allystaire said. He didn’t run for his tent; he walked with long confident strides.
“What’s our play,” the dwarf huffed, laboring to keep up.
“You, me, Idgen Marte, and whomever else is ready.” Even as they walked, Allystaire was assessing the way the response was meant to unfold. Idgen Marte, Renard, Ivar, and Gideon to my tent. Women and children to the Temple. Ravens preparing the mounts.
He felt a calm and familiar assurance spread through his limbs, felt the rising energy that danger brought, tamped it down, banked it like a fire that needed to last long on too little fuel.
Then he and Torvul were in his tent and Allystaire was throwing off his tunic and pulling on the gambeson that lay on the table with his armor. The silvered, mirror-bright surface caught his eye for a moment, then Torvul was pulling pieces off the table and arranging straps.
“Just a warning,” the dwarf said, as Allystaire was pulling the gambeson on. “If you ever call me your squire, I’ll poison you.”
No sooner was the quilted gambeson on him than Torvul was strapping pieces to his arms. The dwarf’s nimble fingers made quick work of buckles, and soon Allystaire’s arms and hands were plated with vambraces and gauntlets that left only the palm of his left hand bare.
By the time they were hurriedly fitting greaves over Allystaire’s legs, Idgen Marte was throwing back the flap. Her own dark blue leathers were pulled over a thin coat of tightly ringed mail, and her hair was held back by a wide metal band, with a matching piece about her throat. She had her bow to hand, and two bristling quivers, one on her hip and one on her back.
“Ivar sent her three best bowman out as skirmishers. Renard is having trouble getting his men to the wall. Gideon has said he’ll go to the Temple. He asked me to say not to worry, that he’ll still be on the field.” She reached out and tapped his cuirass, finger pinging against the golden sun the boy had magically inscribed there. “Didn’t explain.”
Allystaire choked down a spike of anger. “Orders are meant to be followed, yet they never are. Someone always thinks he knows better.”
“Renard was trying to make sure none of his militia fell on their own spears or shot each other,” Idgen Marte pointed out.
Allystaire grunted noncommittally. “Horses?”
“Saddled, being led here.”
He nodded, and knelt down as Torvul threw the straps of his sword-harness over his back. Allystaire’s gauntleted fingers fumbled with the strap, but Idgen Marte snatched it as he stood up, and cinched it tight.
The dwarf picked up his helm off the table, and Allystaire slid it into place without comment. It felt heavy and close, as it always did, with the cheek and nose guards digging into his flesh.
“Should have a visor,” Torvul grumbled. “Be more proper knightly that way.”
“Never favored it,” Allystaire said. “Cannot see half of what you are fighting with one.” He picked up his hammer, hefted it for a moment, then slid it home, picked up his shield, and headed out into the night.
Ivar was waiting, holding the leads of Ardent and Idgen Marte’s courser. The huge grey destrier was pulling at the reins, bursting with energy, muscles bunching, fighting the warband captain every moment. The animal settled, though, as soon as Allystaire emerged.
Ivar’s head turned, and, slightly shocked, she said, “What the Cold kind of armor is that?”
“The kind I wear now,” Allystaire said, grabbing the grey’s reins and pulling himself hard into the saddle. He felt his mount gathering itself beneath him, ready to run.
He knows battle is close, Allystaire thought. He always did. Another Raven came trotting up, held out Allystaire’s lance, and he took it, adjusting his grip so that he held it far up the shaft.
“String along beside me on the way out,” Allystaire said as he settled in the saddle, pitching his voice to carry as the Ravens gathered around their captain. “But do not obscure my path. If I start Ardent in a charge, he will not stop—do not be in his way. Remember that our own people are out there, the people we are here to defend—be mindful of that as you choose targets in the dark.” He paused, gathered his breath, and said, “Forward.”
He felt a tiny thrill as he said that, though whether it was the Goddess’s approval or his own, he couldn’t say.
This, he knew.
No pitfall negotiations. No preaching. No priestesses with one hand on his trousers and another on a knife. No frozen cabbages or stolen farm implements. His horse, his saddle, his lance and hammer and shield.
As he rode Ardent through the gate that Renard’s men hastily pulled open, a cheer, ragged but honest, went up behind him, and he smiled coldly against the metal pressing into his cheeks. It was for this that I was made, for this that you Ordained me, Goddess. Let me not fail you, he thought, as he gave his mount its head, and, wearing painfully bright armor that carried light through the darkness like a lamp, went out to meet Her foes.
They were not cunning, or hadn’t expected much of a response, for there was no proper ambush set. A handful were tossing lit torches at the buildings of a farmstead, while others assembled on the road. A score at least, though it was hard to tell as many of them were moving, shouting, torches in one hand and weapons in the other. There was enough light to see the green of their cloaks and tabards.
He heard a shriek, a woman’s, pierce the night, rising above the noise around him.
A squadron was assembling on the road, heavy footmen, with long spiked hammers and bowmen on the flanks. Were they led and organized properly, were they veterans, they’d cut mounted men apart.
Bowmen first, he thought, directing the words at Idgen Marte. He felt a sort of nod of acceptance, and then she and her mount vanished from view.
Confusion, shouts of alarm among the men assembling to hold the road.
Panic as two of the four bowmen suddenly screamed as fletchings sprouted from their chests, driven deep through their boiled leather by the Shadow’s short, powerful horse bow.
“Get people clear of the fires,” Allystaire shouted, knowing his voice would carry. Even as he did, he felt the strength of the Goddess’s Gift filling his arm, and he lifted up his lance point in the air, then swung it back to couch it against his side.
It was as light as a reed; it was nothing.
It was twelve feet of strong ash with a foot of sharp steel on its end, and with a forward thrust of his arm it plunged through the chest of one of the skirmishers who was too slow to figure out what to do with his long pole-hammer.
The force of the blow ripped the man’s torso in half, sending an arm and shoulder careening into the darkness.
Allystaire felt the lance shiver and the cracks beginning to run up its length. Dimly, he registered the screams behind him as he tore through their ragged line. It took hard tugging with his knees to wheel Ardent for a second charge at them, and by the time he did they were already scattering. More arrows sailed into them from Idgen Marte’s position in the darkness. They threw down their polearms and fell to their knees, holding out their hands. One had a splash of blood and gore along the side of his face.
His anger was so great, beating so powerfully at his mind, that he spurred Ardent, intending to ride them down.
There was a harsh, discordant note within him—the music that filled his limbs gone, for a moment, horribly awry. It was a sound of desolation and pain and darkness, and if he had to hear it again he would surely lose his mind.
He steered with a sharp knee pressed into the destrier’s side, and Ardent veered away from them, onto the patchy, winter-killed grass.
The farmhouse was perhaps the smallest building on the plot, with a much larger cow byre, and another shed of a size with the house. Perhaps for that reason, the green-tabarded soldiers who’d moved into the area had gone to the larger buildings first.
Idiots, Allystaire thought, but even as the thought came to him, he saw a trio, bared blades in hand, kicking down the barred door, heard shouting inside.
He slid from Ardent’s back, unslung his hammer, and ran across the ground, covering the yards at a speed no man in armor should make.
* * *
The first one through the door had gotten a bolt from her father’s crossbow. The crossbow had been given to her father by the dwarf, who’d slipped her a handful of hard candies at the same time and told her not to worry, which meant she did, because when you were a child and told not to worry, you absolutely should.
Lise had watched her father practice with the crossbow, carefully, shooting at the broad base of a dead tree, every morning, as the dwarf had shown him.
So Lise worried when her dad had gone outside and flung down the bottle the dwarf had brought, the one of red glass, and gotten out the crossbow and the bolts and thrown the bar over the door. She’d become positively terrified when the banging on the door started, and her father had ordered her down to the tiny cellar he’d dug out beneath the kitchen, but had stopped at its entrance long enough to watch the door splinter and shiver and finally burst open, her father squeeze the handle of the bow, the short bolt flying true into the first man, who dropped with a scream.
Then she ducked down into the dugout, hearing another scream, which she thought with terror, sounded like her father’s voice. Then quiet, and footsteps inside, with shouts and horses and muffled screams outside.
Booted feet scurried through the house. Things were tossed and overturned, crockery was shattered, and finally the door of the dug-out cellar hauled open, and a hand reached in, pulling her out by the front of her dress and tossing her raggedly on the floor.
Lise had been taken by the reavers along with her father, those many months ago, and she had learned well not to scream, not to speak, not to give any satisfaction, so she bit down on her cheeks and was silent.
There were two men, both wearing long and mud-stained green tabards; she could see that much by the light of the kitchen fire, both with swords, one of which looked dark and wet to her eyes. She tried to stand up, only to have her legs kicked out from under her.
“Your da shot our chosen man,” one of the men snarled. “Right in the gut. Did for him. Now what do you think is good payback for that? What is due us for our grief?”
Lise swallowed hard, biting back the tears from the pain and searching for her breath and the words to answer. She heard a new set of footsteps creaking on the floorboards, and lifted her eyes hopefully, thinking that her father had crept upon them with the crossbow loaded again.
It was not her father, but Lise smiled all the same when she saw the gleam of the armor.
The men whirled around as the room brightened, but too slowly—the first turned straight into the paladin’s glittering, mailed fist.
It met the side of the soldier’s cheek and stove in his head with a loud, and, to Lise’s ears, entirely satisfactory crunch. The man dropped to the floor of the kitchen bonelessly, and, she hoped, dead. From the way his head lay flat as the blade of a hoe on one side, she assumed he was.
The other tried to bring his sword to play, but the room was close and the paladin was already inside his guard. He caught the soldier’s wrist in one hand, there was another crack, and the sword thunked to the ground. Then the same hand went around the man’s throat and lifted him off the ground.
The soldier’s boots had to be a foot clear of the floorboards, but the silver-armored man didn’t struggle, and there was no hint of strain in his voice.
“What were you going to do to the girl?” The paladin’s voice was low and calm and yet, even to Lise, some way more frightening than the leering soldier, or the snickering reavers had ever been.
“Kill her, maybe—”
“Enough.” He gave the man a slight shake, with a rattle of armor. “Why?”
“Orders to leave none alive, and her da shot our chosen man—”
“Who was breaking down a man’s door in order to murder him and his child.” The paladin, still holding the soldier aloft, turned his head to Lise, and said in a softer voice, “Turn your head, Lise. You need not see any more death this night.”
She turned her head—but not all that far, and peeked back out of the corner of her eye. She was hoping maybe he’d take out his huge sword and cut the man in twain; instead, there was simply a crunch as his hand made a fist around the soldier’s throat.
Lise did turn away then. She heard two distinct thumps. One with the heaviness of a body slumping to the ground, the other smaller. She tried not to think too hard on why there were two sounds instead of one.
“Come on, girl.” Then the paladin was at her side, picking her up, and carrying her out of her kitchen, wrapping one coldly metal-clad arm around her back. She expected to pass her father’s body, and was keeping her eyes tightly shut.
Instead she suddenly found herself being shifted to other arms, more familiar arms. She opened her eyes to see her father—pale, ragged, with a wet hole on his shirt that her leg brushed against—shaking with relief as the Arm of the Mother handed his daughter to him.
“Get to the walls,” the paladin told her father. “Take nothing but your bow and your daughter. The way is clear.”
Lise’s last thought as she saw the paladin walk away with flames and stars reflecting brilliantly, was to wonder why, despite what she’d seen him do back in the kitchen, there hadn’t been a single spot of blood or dirt on his armor.
* * *
Thank you, Mother, was all the prayer Allystaire had time for as he turned away from the girl and her father, and let out a loud call. “To me! The night is not yet ours!”
Idgen Marte raced up, winking into his vision from the night itself, with Ardent following close upon her courser. Allystaire swung himself into the saddle.
“There’s maybe two score of heavy foot coming down the road. Take more than a single man’s charge to break them,” she said. “Still a good quarter mile out but making good time. Look like they know their business. And this is just the tip of the spear.”
Allystaire pulled his lance free from the boot forward of his stirrup, felt keenly the shivered and fractured timber of it as he settled his grip around it. “We shall see.” He tried to focus, tried to think through the searingly cold anger that filled him, past the music that lifted his spirit and pounded his heart into a drumbeat, past the flooding of his limbs with strength. “Ravens,” he cried out, and soon the warband had assembled. They’d made short and bloody work of the amateur skirmishers, and though fires began claiming buildings around them, a stream of folk was headed back to the walls. He spared a look back and saw a group of men moving from the gate to meet them.
When the Ravens, spears in hand, had amassed, he ordered sharply, “Stage on the road, fifty span ahead, loose line—leave room for twice as many men. Hurry!”
Ivar began translating the orders more colorfully, and Allystaire tuned her out, struggling to think clearly, to think of the land as it lay on a map.
“The farms are lost,” Allystaire replied, “but we need to blunt their edge. Show them that no foot of this ground is given cheaply. Find a good shadow ten yards beyond the Ravens.”
Idgen Marte nodded. “Where are you going to get the men to fill out the line?”
He swallowed hard, and said, “From Gideon.”
She nodded, turned her horse and ran off. His next thought was to bow his head and send his thoughts outward, back towards the walls, seeking out the Will of the Mother.
Gideon’s mind was not difficult to touch, and the force with which it met him was daunting.
Gideon, Allystaire thought. I need you. Can you…
It felt for a moment as if a massive presence sorted through his thoughts, then Allystaire felt Gideon’s voice calmly saying, I see. And yes, I can. Through the sun.
You may have noticed that it is dark out, lad.
The sun on your armor. That is why I put it there. Go.
Allystaire felt the contact break. He thought he felt the Goddess’s song grow a little dimmer as Gideon drew on his own power. He spurred Ardent and found the road, covered the place where the Ravens were setting up.
Up the curving west-bound road they could see the mass of men moving in the dark, the torches lighting their way.
“How exactly are we gonna hold off that many heavy foot with a dozen of us,” Ivar was grumbling, as she shifted her grip on her spear and spat heavily into the dirt.
“There will be more of you momentarily,” Allystaire answered him as he pulled up behind. He held his lance gingerly, then felt a buzzing enter the music that still filled him. Then a chime and a flash from the Sun on his chest, and suddenly for every living, breathing Iron Raven on the road, there were three more.
They would not pass a close inspection, or battle. Largely they mirrored the movements of the men they stood beside, wearing the same blackened mail, carrying the same spears and other arms.
In the dark, at a distance? It should do, Allystaire thought.
The line of soldiers murmured in shock and surprise, a few jabbing their spears at their insubstantial partners.
“Calm, and hold,” Allystaire bellowed, a long-accustomed note of command in his voice. The Ravens snapped back to their rank, forty soldiers holding the road with spears bristling outwards.
The Delondeur foot came on, Allystaire searching their ranks as they closed. There, he thought suddenly, seeing the shape trotting alongside them—a mounted man, a knight or officer, leading them forward. In the darkness he couldn’t make out any standards or badges. Ask Torvul for something for the night vision next time.
Once he thought them in reasonable shouting range, Allystaire called out, “You come seeking to kill and burn your own people at the behest of a slaver baron! A man so bent on power and plunder that he will tie his own people to the oars and row them to death so long as the ship sails him towards glory. Turn back or die.”
Take the bait, he thought. Take it.
The column halted at a muffled shout and the mounted man rode forward. He was an indistinct shape in armor, carrying a lance. A hand reached up to push his visor to the crown of his helm, and he yelled back across the distance. “You have raised arms and hired warbands against the rightful Baron of this land. That you speak treason only confirms your intent.”
“Might I know who I am addressing? I like to know a man’s name before I kill him for defending his Baron of shit, his Baron of rapine and filth. A man is who he serves, and I will suffer no man like that to live.”
“Sir Leoben, given command of these Salt Spears,” the man shouted shrilly, and Allystaire’s mind was drawn back to the Dunes and the knight Chaddin had threatened. “And it will be my honor to kill you,” he added. “I have personal dishonor to avenge upon you, Coldbourne!”
“Come forward and die in the service of your Baron then,” Allystaire felt Ardent tensing beneath him, hoped his lance would hold together. The Ravens stepped to the side in a neat, long-practiced maneuver, clearing space for him to bring the destrier through.
He spurred Ardent and felt the destrier’s huge muscles bunch and flex beneath him as it leapt to the charge. Leoben’s horse was of a similar size and breed as Ardent, and though moon and starlight, and the distant fires lit the field poorly, man and horse together were too large to miss.
The lance had the weight of air in his hand, and he aimed it true, striking the center of Leoben’s shield. But the wood couldn’t take another blow and it exploded in his hands, fragments pinging off his armor and scattering into the night, and too little of the force was transferred to do more than rock the knight in his saddle.
At the same time, he felt Leoben’s lance strike the tip of his shield and slide over it. It took him square in the chest. He felt the sick sensation of air being pushed from his lungs, the sudden deep well of black sleep that rose up and threatened to claim him. He felt himself slumping.
Stupid, he cursed himself through gritted teeth as his legs lost their grip on the saddle and he fell over sideways, hitting the ground with a clatter of armor. At least his feet pulled clear of the stirrups, and Ardent rode clear. Too freezing full of yourself, he thought groggily as he struggled back to his feet. Did not even look for his lance. Idiot.
Allystaire swallowed a wave of nausea and pushed himself to his feet. His shield had tumbled from his hand but he still had his hammer. His right hand found it and brought it out, holding it easily, even as he wavered uncertainly in place, searching for Leoben.
“You are unhorsed and undone,” came the knight’s joyful shout. “Yield yourself as my prisoner, return to the Baron to face justice for your crimes, and perhaps some of the poor folk you’ve led astray can be granted mercy.”
The only thing worse than an old fool is a young one, Allystaire thought as he whirled to the sound of the words. Leoben sat his horse a dozen yards away, the destrier’s tail flicking angrily.
“I will not yield,” Allystaire called out, biting off the wooziness that tried to infect the words. “Not to the likes of you. Meet me on foot or on your horse if you must, coward.”
Leoben merely laughed and waved to his footmen, who, Allystaire suddenly and sickeningly realized, were much closer to them than his own, and every bit of two score men.
“Take him,” the Delondeur knight yelled, and the infantry broke ranks and charged towards him.
Now or never, Shadow, Allystaire thought, and before he knew he was doing it, his left arm, shieldless, had reached up to seize his sword and pull it free. Despite its length and weight, with the Goddess’s song still powering his limbs, it was like swinging a dinner knife. He charged towards the oncoming wave of spearmen, hammer and sword swinging, dimly aware that he was yelling as he ran, that all trace of grogginess and nausea had fled, that Idgen Marte had answered him and that a cry had gone up as arrows began to fall among them from behind.
Allystaire did not dwell upon the odds, only on the mass of men and the continual movement of his weapons. He led with the blade, swinging it in a long arc before him, and followed with the hammer when men drew inside his reach. He felt arms and legs part under the force of his sword. Ribcages and armor, helms and skulls gave way like eggshells to his hammer. He felt the nick and cut of their blades, too. No man came for long into the press and crush of a battle and went away unscathed.
Part of him noted that men in blackened mail under black leather had rushed beside him, their own broad-bladed spears defter and deadlier than those of the Delondeur foot.
Soon he found himself face to face with the blurred and shadowy outline he knew to be Idgen Marte. Without a word, spoken or otherwise, they turned their backs to one another and faced a ring of spears.
“Whatever devilry this is, honest Delondeur steel will bring you down,” Leoben gloated from beyond the ring, rising up in his saddle and lifting his sword point to the air. He seemed to gather breath to yell an order, when the fletchings of a crossbow bolt suddenly sprouted from his eye, and he slid bonelessly from his saddle.
“It’s hardly steel and it sure as Cold ain’t honest,” came a shout from a powerful and resonant voice that brought a smile to Allystaire’s face. “And it’s not got an asshair on my devilry,” Torvul roared, his voice made all the more commanding because he was unseen.
That was followed by a sudden gout of flame springing up just behind the Ravens, who had backed off the ring that formed around the two Ordained.
The Delondeur infantry, wide eyed at the display, suddenly broke and ran.
Allystaire’s very first thought was to whistle sharply, and Ardent came trotting to his side. He slid his hammer into its ring and grabbed the bridle, leaned heavily on the destrier, and shouted, “Gather any that live and such weapons, mounts and gear as we can use, then make for the walls!” He started to sheathe his sword, only to feel a telltale weariness start to seep into his limbs, and he had to steady himself and summon strength to do it.
The Ravens burst into action. Bodies lay strewn around the road, and Allystaire took solace in the fact that all that he could see wore green tabards.
Idgen Marte blurred away, and Torvul strolled up, the strange coiled stock of the mchazchen crossbow wound around his right arm, one of its sighting rings locked upward.
“Figured the longer this went the more likely y’were to need me,” the dwarf groused.
Allystaire merely shook his head, pulled himself painfully into Ardent’s saddle, a task monumentally more difficult than sheathing his sword had been. For a moment he teetered in the balance, afraid he was about to spill ass over appetite into the road, but, with a last surge, he swung his leg over and down and slumped on the saddle.
“Have we wounded?” He had meant to bellow the query like an order, but his voice came out in a rasping croak that only Torvul heard.
“Probably none more than you. Snap out of it and heal yourself before you pass out.”
“Got to save it for them,” Allystaire said, and twitched his destrier into motion only to have Torvul seize the bridle with one powerful arm.
“There won’t be any of it for anyone if you don’t attend to yourself first,” Torvul hissed. “Not to mention that the men on the walls and the people inside them need to see you ride back in tall in the saddle and unhurt. Understand?”
He’s right, Allystaire told himself, and with a weary shake of his head, he raised his left hand, slid it onto the back of his neck where there was space beneath his helmet, and reached for the Goddess’s Gift of healing.
“Took it worse than you thought, didn’t you?” Torvul said.
Allystaire could only nod in agreement; one spear had taken him hard in the hip. Others had nicked his thighs and side, points finding gaps in the armor, and one had found his elbow. None of the wounds in themselves were overly dangerous, but all together they might have put him off his feet, in time.
Her song flowed from his mind to his limbs and the wounds neatly sealed.
“Wounded to me as soon as we make the walls if they can walk,” he yelled then, his voice regaining most, if not quite all, of its former commanding timbre. “Now if they cannot!”
None were brought forward, which he regarded as a good sign. All of them bearing prisoners or weapons, and with Idgen Marte having grabbed the reins of Leoben’s destrier, they set off back for the walls of Thornhurst.
A good bit of the farmland outside was in flames, but they would die or be doused before reaching the walls, he was sure. Most, maybe all of the folk who’d lived on it had fled safely inside. “People matter more than land, more than buildings,” Allystaire muttered as they rode.
As they neared the walls, Torvul produced his lantern, kindled in it a bright white beam, and centered it tightly on Allystaire.
The reflection was dazzling, lighting up a circle around him for ten spans or more as he rode in.
Renard threw the gate wide and a ragged cheer went up, and as Allystaire came closer, hushed words began running through the Thornhurst militia manning the walls in their hodgepodge of blue tunics, with their spears and axes and knives.
“Spotless,” Allystaire heard one say. “Untouched,” another. “Impossible.”
But two words circled the crowd more than any other. When Allystaire heard them, he imagined he heard a tiny note of the Mother’s music behind them.
“Still bright.”