The Rest of the Message
Bannerman Orin Milfair was not, if he really thought about it, entirely sure he’d made the right decision in agreeing to carry the paladin’s message back to the baron’s camp, but he’d been the highest ranking man left alive after Captain Tierne’s head had been crushed, and it had been his duty.
As the paladin had told him in that bone-rattling chill of a voice, Going over the wall and firing the town and slitting throats had been your duty, and you went to that eagerly enough. Returning to the Baron who holds your contract and speaking the truth of what happened should be far easier.
Sneaking and skulking had been the stock in trade of the Long Knives as long as warbands’d had names. Creeping in darkness, scaling the walls to spread confusion and terror, kill guards as they slept, start fires, poison wells. Once or twice, memorably, their action alone had been enough to tip a battle one way, but more often they were simply another arrow in the quiver, as the Baron liked to put it.
Milfair felt naked, walking out upon the road with his weapons stripped from him, and the cold biting through his leathers and his heavy cloak. Any moment he expected an arrow in the back from one of the hard-eyed zealots who’d given him a good kicking after he’d been tossed off the scaffold during the fight, by something that flitted in behind him that he hadn’t even seen.
“Unnatural,” he muttered, though he recalled, earlier in the day, as the wounded in the Baron’s camp had been carted up and trundled over to the other camp, the secret camp that only officers were supposed to know about, and tried not to think too hard about what was unnatural on his side of the wall. Orin hadn’t been with the carts, but he’d talked to men who had, who spoke of how the wounded grew frantic and how many had tried to run when they saw their destination, and the screams the men pushing the carts had heard.
The carts had been empty when they came back.
While he was lost in this thought and what it meant he found himself challenged by the pickets. Milfair had to search his mind for the countersign, and by the time he gave it, a man in a green tabard with a freshly painted shield and a new-looking spear had come forward to glare at him. The spear point hovered towards him for a moment, then slid away once he responded. Even so, he held out his hands and spread his cloak wide to show the empty scabbards on his belt.
“I’ve got parole to bring the Baron a message, then I’m t’give myself back up,” Orin told them.
“What’re you, a knight now?” He didn’t recognize the man who’d challenged him, but they shared the general camaraderie of soldiers on campaign, something they fell into as naturally as breathing. Milfair had found that few enough of the men on this expedition were truly veterans. It was easy to recognize those who were.
“Never that,” Orin responded with a nervous chuckle. “Just point me to the watch officer and from there I can get to his Lordship.”
The other soldier gave him directions and he followed them dumbly. Soon enough he was saluting and reporting to a dark shape huddled close to a brazier.
“Bannerman Milfair, sir, of the Long Knives,” he stated. “Returning with a message from the enemy for his Lordship.”
“Well let’s hear it, Bannerman,” the officer snapped.
“With respect, sir, it was laid upon me to speak my message to the Baron himself.”
“The Baron is in conference in the other camp, and unreachable. We are not to send messages for him there,” the officer replied. “He left specific instructions on that score.”
Milfair sighed, “Have you any suggestions then, sir? I am to report back to my captors within two turns of the glass.”
“Nonsense,” the officer said, waving his hand. “They were fools to let you go. I’ll find two other officers to witness and you can make your report to the three of us.”
Once again Milfair felt that tiny prickle in his back, that thought that he was the fool. “As you will, sir,” the Bannerman replied, still standing stiffly, trying not to eye the brazier, or the stand with the carafe upon it that, he was certain, he could smell wine in.
The officer waved a hand and they moved towards the center of the camp, where higher ranks, knights, lords, and officers were camped. There weren’t too many of the former, but eventually the officer, who wore the Tower-and-Spear of the newly formed unit full of half-trained guards, merchants sons, and new volunteers, was able to round up a knight wearing yellow and purple with a crest of a horse rearing upon a wall, and another Salt Spear officer wearing expensive armor, but with no crest of his own.
The knight must’ve been a minor one, for Milfair, having fought all over the baronies for his entire adult life, didn’t know the crest. A sword-at-hire with a sir is still a sword-at-hire, he thought, dismissively. The three officers found an empty tent, complete with seats, braziers, lit lamps, and wine for themselves while once again leaving Milfair standing to in the cold.
They’d also gathered a scribe, who fussed with his writing-case and produced from it parchment, ink, and pens, though he muttered constantly how it was too dark to do any proper writing.
Once all was finally ready, Milfair stepped smartly to the front of the camp table they’d set up. “I would like the account to show, m’lord, sirs, that I attempted to carry out the charge laid by my captor to deliver my message to the Baron himself.”
The scribe began scratching at the parchment, tsking all the while under his breath. The knight, who had a greasy blond beard and hair, slapped the table lightly with the flat of his hand. “Out with it then, man. The night is cold and we’ve other duties.”
“Very well, m’lord,” Milfair began. “I was told by the pal—”
At this he was cut off by the original officer waving a hand. “Give the man no undue titles. His name is Coldbourne.”
“Yessir. The first part is that I was told by Coldbourne that upon our retreat from Thornhurst he would be willing to release the other captured members of the Long Knives based on certain conditions.”
“How is it that you failed so singularly in your charge?” The officer had a careful way of speaking, an educated polish to his words, that put Milfair off even as he tried to match it.
“They seemed to know we were coming, sir,” Milfair replied. “Killed the first few men over the wall and then Captain Tierne ordered us to yield.”
“If Tierne was alive to order a surrender, then why does he not stand before us?”
“He ordered it, sirs, but then the…then Coldbourne asked questions of him. The answers were, ah, not to his liking.”
“Why did Tierne answer them?” The knight leaned forward, blinking weary, red-lined eyes. “Why was this Coldbourne even asking? That is bad form, to put questions to a man of rank who’s yielded.”
“I don’t think Coldbourne is too concerned with those kinds of form, m’lord,” Milfair said, then swallowed as he felt a droplet of sweat, despite the chill, run down the back of his neck. “And his questions—they must be answered.”
“Torture, then? By a self-proclaimed paladin?” The knight sat back, waving a hand dismissively. “I ought to ride forward and call the upstart out.”
“No, m’lord. No torture. He just asks. And then something bright and hard seizes your mind and the lies and evasions that spring up into it can’t pass your throat. You choke on them, and then you tell him the truth. That’s what Tierne did. And then he died.”
“What? How?”
“The paladin killed him.”
“A yielded foe?”
“Tierne slipped his knives into his hands. Then he sprang at Coldbourne with them, and got a crushed skull for his troubles.” Milfair swallowed again, and said, “There’s more to my message, sirs and m’lord.”
“Go on, go on,” the first officer waved, then poked a finger at the scribe. “Are you recording all of this?”
“Aye,” the man answered, annoyance plain in his voice and features. “Even the nonsense about paladins and truth magic,” he added with a weary sigh.
“You’d not call it nonsense if it’d been done to you, you cowardly scraper,” Milfair spat at the man, who simply ignored him. Then he cleared his throat. “Ah, he also says he will turn the bodies and effects of the men who died over to us upon our retreat,” he said delicately, “provided that it is proven to his satisfaction that benefits are paid to their surviving kin.” He paused. “I think I have that right. Bit longwinded, Coldbourne.”
“And that is all?”
“Not quite.”
Milfair spun around, his hands clenching into fists, because he hadn’t been the one to speak the words. The voice was a woman’s, husky, angry, and a bit terrifying, but there was no one and nothing to be seen.
“The rest of the message is this,” the voice went on, sounding as if it came from behind him, behind the gathered officers, who were also scrambling dumbly to their feet, knocking over the table. They nearly upset the scribe’s writing case, but he deftly pulled it into his lap, even as he fell from his stool and tried to gain his feet.
“That if you wish to play a part of this out in shadow, with fear and flame, then know that we also will do this, and not with murderous warband men as our tools.”
Then a woman’s shape, tall and dark and little more than an opaque silhouette, was standing behind the first officer and plunging something into his shoulder. “We will do it with the power of the Mother,” she said as she leaned forward. Though she seemed an insubstantial figure of shadow, the knife point that pressed through the officer’s mail on the right side of his chest seemed very real, and very wet.
Before any of them could react with drawn weapons, the Shadow was a blur among them. The other two men cried out as the knives slashed at them, the form wielding them slipping in and out of sight, then a brazier was kicked over, and the lamps smashed and flames were licking the sides of the tent.
The scribe had run for it and Milfair heard him screaming outside, raising an alarm. He heard more hard wet sounds of knife meeting flesh.
Milfair knew when it was time to run, and so he did, putting the burning tent behind him and emerging into the dark of night. Regular torches lit the camp, as did the campfires, so he could see a clear path, but he made it no more than a few span before something tripped him, and then that same voice was at his ear.
“This message was supposed to be for the Baron himself. Make sure you tell him that if you’ve not got the courage to come back inside the walls of Thornhurst like you said you’d do. Tell him the Shadow of the Mother is longing to meet him again.”
Then the voice was gone and Milfair was briefly alone in the chaos of the camp waking up to an attack in its midst.
Orin Milfair thought of that bright and hard thing that had seized his throat back in the village and made him speak truth when he’d wanted to lie, and of the blurring Shadow that had just wounded, maybe killed, three well-armed and trained men like they were children. They frightened him, and he was no parade-ground soldier.
But what frightened him most, somehow, was not returning to face the paladin. What frightened him most was giving that man, that bright hard thing within him, reason to notice him, reason to judge him and find him lacking.
So Bannerman Orin Milfair got to his feet, and started pumping them down the road. When he made it past the pickets, he could still hear the noise and alarm behind him, and he began worrying at the stitches of his patches of rank, three green circles, upon his sleeves.
* * *
“In my own camp!” Lionel Delondeur raged. “An assassin! That woman that follows him about, it had to be!”
The raging, the volume of it, was a problem for Nyndstir for two reasons. First was that it was keeping him from sleep, which very little had the power to do. Second was that it meant an assassin had come for the Baron and failed. Shoulda made freezing sure, he thought to himself, as he rolled out from under the wrapping of furs he’d pulled right near the edge of a campfire. Nyndstir sat up, feeling his age, and listened to the baron yell.
Delondeur had been in council with the sorcerers earlier that night and had taken the long route back to his own camp, and then returned at haste with a strong mounted guard all bearing lanterns.
Not very well hidden anymore, he thought to himself, eyeing the Baron’s guards standing about in the leafless wood, lanterns forming shifting pools of light, as he stood, rewrapped his furs casually about himself, took up his axe, and went looking for something to drink.
He didn’t wander too far, though, because he wanted to hear more of this. Why, he wasn’t sure he knew; knowing the plans of men like the sorcerers and the Baron was a good way to find yourself included in them, or dead.
“We must hit them with everything. Everything, as soon as we can,” the Baron was yelling from inside the wagon. There was some hushed discussion, as if the sorcerers were trying to calm or dissuade him.
Nyndstir was staring hard at the door of the wagon when it suddenly opened, and he turned back to his search for a drink. Finally among the jumble of packs he found a clay jar that sloshed promisingly, uncorked it, and had a sip.
The Baron stormed out, cloak billowing dramatically behind him, and immediately his lantern-bearers surrounded him.
“Why the lanterns, Baron?” Gethmasanar followed Delondeur out, the yellow trails leaking from him hanging sickly in the air behind him.
“She calls herself the shadow. Keep it bright enough around me to banish shadows and the witch can’t find me,” the Baron huffed.
“I see.” The sorcerer paused. Nyndstir liked to imagine that he was holding in laughter, but didn’t think he wanted to know what a sorcerer’s laughter sounded like. “No doubt we can devise a more effective protection, given time.”
“There isn’t time,” the Baron yelled. “I want this town erased, this religious nonsense stamped out, I want Coldbourne’s head. And his witch’s, for good measure.”
“We want the man Allystaire,” the sorcerer replied. “As well as the body of the boy, the dwarf, and the girl priestess. You may have the witch.”
“I’ll have what I Cold-damned want,” Delondeur yelled. “You’ve been paid a lord’s ransom, thrice over, to help me get it. Make it so.”
“We will have new Battle-Wights ready in short order. If you launch an attack as soon as you can, in force, we can have more than a dozen of them moving in to support you. Mayhap as many as a score. If your men can force the wall we’ll be able to overwhelm them in no time. Perhaps it is time you ask the religious forces with you to commit themselves.”
Delondeur spat at the ground. “They’re observers only, or so they say. That Choiron was cagey about sending any of his so-called Dragonscales. The priest his Marynth left with me is an idiot and a coward and hasn’t more than half a dozen ceremonial guards. She kept the rest in Londray to, as she put it, stamp out the last sparks of rebellion. The Archioness says she can petition Fortune but that too many of her soldiers already spent their lives here. It’s my men, yours, your creatures, and you. It’s time you showed on the field yourself.”
“We are waiting for certain favorable conditions. We will send the Wights. If they all prove insufficient, we will make more Wights, and eventually they will overwhelm the walls and the peasants upon them. It has never failed us before. It will not fail us now.”
The Baron spat again, kicking at the ground. “Dead men draw no pay, at any rate. Fine. We’ll launch our attack within the turn. Get your men into it as soon as you can. I’ll leave you two riders to coordinate with our camp.”
Freeze this, Nyndstir thought. M’not stayin’ here t’be turned into one of those things. He hefted his axe and walked off a few paces, grabbing at the fur and armor belted around his waist as if he were heading into the woods looking for a likely tree.
Once he was outside of the wide pool of light cast by the lantern-bearers, he trotted off. He wasn’t the best or quietest of scouts he’d ever known—that’d have to be an elfling he once rode with, down from the tundra in some kind of exile—but he’d picked up some woodcraft here and there, and in the darkness, and with no proper guard kept up, Nyndstir Obertsun disappeared into the bare trees, only pausing to reach into a pouch on his belt, pick up a big handful of silver and gold links, and toss them on the forest floor.
“Have your frozen weight back, bastards. Choke on it.”
* * *
Renard, Ivar, and four militiamen led away the string of securely tied prisoners. Allystaire watched them move off into the village, trying not to clench his fists hard enough to rip his gauntlets apart.
“We’ve every right to put them in the ground,” Idgen Marte said, her voice thick. “They came here meaning to murder Mol.”
“And Mol will decide what to do with them when this is done. And we may need them to bargain with.”
“You already decided what t’do with their captain.”
“He made his choice when he stabbed me.”
She grunted and glanced down at the array of weaponry, mostly short blades, that had been stripped from the Long Knives. “What’ll we do with these?”
“Pass them to every man and woman who wants one. Those with children especially.”
“Allystaire!” The shock in her voice told him she had understood his intention instantly.
“What would you have them do, Idgen Marte? If we fall, they will be tortured with exquisite care and forced to renounce the Goddess. And when they are messily killed in public, it will come as a mercy,” he whispered harshly. “If nothing else, I would spare them that.”
“Fine. Where’s the dwarf?”
“Doing what he can to secure some defenses about the Temple. It is time to move them into it. Lionel has probed and played at strategies with us so far. If he wants to take the walls by main force, he can do it simply by attacking in more places than we can defend. And it is what he will do next.”
“How do you know that?”
“Do you think this is the first time he has besieged me? He is impatient by nature. The weather and the politics will make him moreso, but this is his method. Two attempts with craft, a third with a bludgeon.”
“Fine. I’ll take the weapons over and then start going to houses and rounding folk up.”
He nodded. “We will need all of Chaddin’s men, and anyone Renard says can manage to fight from horseback, gathered centrally. I will need Ardent and as stout a lance as can be found.”
“I’m not your freezing squire,” Idgen Marte protested.
“I know, but you can move faster to give out those orders than I can, and while Torvul’s potion lasts,” he said, pointing at one eye, “I want to stay on the wall.”
She nodded and turned away into the darkness, streaking off. He climbed back up the scaffolding. One Raven and a handful of militiamen remained on guard, and he strolled back and forth among them for a few minutes.
“Ya ought t’sleep, m’lord,” one of the Ravens said carefully as he passed.
“There will be time for sleep when this is done,” Allystaire answered, with a practiced, gruff ease that he did not feel. In truth, he was scared of sleep. He felt no fatigue, no weariness of battle; the Goddess’s strength kept it at bay. But he remembered the toll he’d paid for employing her Gift in the past and did not like to think what would happen when the Song no longer filled his limbs.
He turned his eyes out to the fires of the distant camp, wishing for one of Torvul’s looking-tubes, or another potion for his vision.
But even without them he could see men moving, a mass of shapes too far away to be distinct. Too many shapes for a change of guard or a simple patrol. Then larger shapes, mounted men, moved to the forefront, carrying with them a bubble of light, like torches or lanterns gathered for a procession or a fete. The sound of a drumbeat, faint but regular, reached his ears.
“I know you too well, Lionel,” he muttered. “And I am going to end you.”
“What’s that, m’lord?” The solicitous Raven leaned towards him, trying to catch the murmured words.
Allystaire filled his lungs with air and bellowed. “STAND TO ARMS. Delondeur moves again, in strength! To the walls, all who can hold a spear or draw a bow!”
Did you hear that? This he directed towards Idgen Marte and Torvul. Lionel is coming for us with everything. As I knew he would.
I’ve only just got to Chaddin. Getting his men mounted and armed will take time, thought Idgen Marte.
That’s not enough time to get folk to the Temple, Torvul’s strained voice came back to him. I’ve only just started.
Leave that to me. Mol’s voice sounded, clearer and more powerful than Allystaire had ever heard it.
Then her voice again, like a herald’s through a speaking-trumpet. Folk of the Mother! Of Thornhurst! All of you to the Temple, now, with your kin. Leave behind your possessions. Now! All who can bear arms, to the walls at the side of the Arm, the Shadow, and the Wit! Worry not for your beasts, for I will send them to safety. Now move, all of you, at once.
Allystaire knew from the reactions along the wall that all of the men gathered there heard it too.
He unslung his shield and secured his left arm through its straps. His right hand found his hammer and slid it out, letting it come to rest head-down, haft up, on the floor of the walkway next to him. “They are going to need time, men,” was all he said at first. Then he thought for a moment, rolled his right shoulder, and said, “Any spears, rocks, throwing axes—anything that can be hurled and that we can spare, bring to me.”
* * *
Nyndstir had turned his course north, intending to make for the high road and the towns along it as it approached the Ash. Somewhere among them a merchant would need a guard or a tavern would want someone to calm the rowdies. Or, Cold, the greenhats in some larger town might need another man on the wall. He was never short of work in winter.
He didn’t get a quarter mile before the thought came to him. You did their freezing work and took more weight than you tossed back.
Nyndstir stopped, set down his axe, and leaned on it a moment. “My left stone for a young man’s wind,” he muttered, breathing heavier than he expected to.
He turned and started walking back the way he’d come, swinging his legs in long, determined strides that ate up ground.
“What the Cold am I gonna do when I get there? Piss on the ashes?”
He walked on.
* * *
Allystaire held out his right hand and a nearby villager dropped a heavy stone into it. He cocked his arm, turned his hips into it, and sent it sailing into the night.
His vision still brightened by Torvul’s tincture, he followed the arc it described before crashing into the shield of a Delondeur man in the formation as it moved up the road, saw him fall and cause another couple of men to stumble to the ground around him.
All alongside him, the villagers and Ravens peppered the advancing line with bowshot, most of them simply firing into the mass. Torvul alone seemed to carefully pick his targets, and every one of the dwarf’s bolts that Allystaire followed seemed to find a mark.
It is not going to be enough, Allystaire thought.
The Delondeur forces had already paid in the past fighting, but so had the defenders, and it was never an equation that had favored Thornhurst. And even as they advanced, the Delondeur column began to spread out into longer lines with sizable gaps, their flanks spilling well off the path and into the rise of hills on either side.
“Do not waste arrows,” Allystaire yelled. “Choose targets and aim, or hold!”
What I wouldn’t give for some light horse to hit the end of their lines and turn them straight around, he silently cursed. Without the threat of mobile troops hitting their sides, they were free to string along in those loose lines and minimize what his archers could do, despite the height they held.
Behind those lines, Delondeur had drawn up his heavy horse, fifty or better. Half a dozen banners hung above them, unreadable in the darkness even to his brightened eyes.
With a frustrated sigh, he held out his hand again, feeling the heavy haft of a spear settle into it. Throw with the legs, through the hips and trunk, he thought, recalling long ago lessons from the previous Castellan at Wind’s Jaw, Ufferth of Highgate, Garth’s father. Even as the weapon flew straight and true, splitting a Delondeur shield and the man behind it through the thigh, he remembered a fellow page’s complaints. The spear was the weapon of the levy, the peasant, not fit for a knight’s hands.
Ufferth, who’d looked like a barrel on legs and from whom his son Garth had gotten his fair complexion and pale hair, had clouted the boy across the head with the butt of one. And those peasants’d spit you like a capon for the cookfire, you frozen shit, he’d yelled, disgusted. A weapon is a weapon and no man is fit to be an Oyrwyn knight who disdains the one that comes to his hand at need.
Allystaire gave his head a quick shake, snapping back to the moment. The Delondeur foot were making the final push across the last dozen yards. Rocks and other spears joined the thickening arrow fire. Nearly a score of Delondeur men dropped, but the rest rushed to the wall.
They’d been forced to build straight, rather than with the curves or breaks for overlapping killing fields that Allystaire would’ve preferred, so with the men right below them, it was a good deal harder to get his aim, especially with the solid thicket of shields.
The Delondeur foot swarmed to three points: the west gate, and yards away along the north and south. Allystaire would’ve bet his arms they were assembling ladders of wood and rope to be thrown over the wall.
Idgen Marte! Are Chaddin’s horse assembled?
Aye, she replied. And I’m nearly there.
We cannot repel them at all three points. Cold, not even at two. And we will be flanked and overrun if we do not. Can you delay them at the southern point?
He looked to the southern part of the wall, saw hooks tossed over its top and pulled firmly in. And quickly!
Suddenly she was there in his sight, poised carefully atop the rough timbers of the palisade, bow in hand, leaning with a dancer’s balance over the side and shooting down as men climbed towards her.
Hooks on ropes, with flexible ladders attached, were being thrown up at several points. One was no more than a step to his left, so he darted to it and ripped the hooks free, tossing them back over the wall contemptuously. The sound of armored men crashing back to the ground reached his ears.
But he could not be everywhere, and it was apparent that Delondeur was throwing his main strength against the gate and the scaffold along the wall above it, perhaps four score men.
Against which Allystaire had barely a dozen, and more than half of them barely blooded.
“They are going to make the wall,” he yelled, years of practice carrying his voice above the din. “Bowmen fall back. Spearmen to me.”
He saw the clutch of village archers hesitate a moment, and yelled again, “Fall back twenty yards and prepare to cover us!”
Delondeur men were clearing the wall in three places along his parapet, and the work was about to turn close. Ivar spitted one in the belly with her spear, quickly pulled it free, and then darted it down over the wall. A muted scream and then a louder muddled one as men fell back to the ground.
Allystaire bounded to another rope-and-hook ladder, saw a helm rising above the wall, swiped at it with his shield. He felt the shock of the blow up his arm as the metal rim of his shield stove in the side of the man’s helm, and his skull with it.
Unluckily for Allystaire, the momentum of his blow carried his target sideways off his ladder instead of down it, and more men swarmed up in his place. He ducked away a few steps, retrieved his hammer, and came back swinging.
Where he went along the parapet, such as it was, foemen died, their skulls crushed, chests caved in, knocked back over the wall or to the ground below.
But he was one man, and the wall was too much for him to cover alone. He saw Ivar fighting desperately, spear a blur, another Raven overwhelmed and a Delondeur footman viciously thrusting a short, broad dagger through a rent in his black mail and into his ribs.
Allystaire fought his way there, swinging hammer and shield both in wide arcs and sending men tumbling, but the mercenary was dead by the time the paladin reached his side.
Torvul! He wondered if the dwarf could sense the panic in his mental voice.
Ready as we’re going to get. I’m bringing up Keegan’s lot to cover your retreat. Back wall does us no good either.
Allystaire sucked air deep into his lungs and shouted. “The wall is lost! Fall back!”
Something, some instinct, some sense of a battlefield bade Allystaire turn to his left and raise his shield. At nearly the very instant he did, he felt a hard thump as something bit into it and stuck. His eyes darted over the rim to see a Delondeur footman pulling another throwing axe from his belt.
He squatted, shortening his torso and thrusting hips out behind him, putting as much of himself behind his shield as he could, and bulled forward. The axeman released, but too late, and his weapon bounced away into the night. Allystaire was already cocking his arm as he ran forward, and at the moment of impact on his shield he straightened his legs and brought his hammer down.
He had misjudged the angle; instead of the skull, it crashed hard down on the man’s left shoulder. The force of the blow sent bits of mail flying into the darkness and the man collapsed, screaming as blow crumpled the left side of his torso, driving the shoulder down into his chest.
Allystaire spared a quick glance for the wall around him. His section was clear, but wouldn’t remain so for long. Ivar and the remaining Ravens were pulling back, keeping enemies at bay with veteran spear-work. He looked out over the wall. Delondeur’s horsemen were closing. A thought struck him. He slid his hammer back onto his belt and ripped the throwing axe free from his shield.
It was well balanced, with a long head and a very faintly curved haft. He looked out over the line of mounted and armored men.
Near the standard of the tower, he told himself, and he picked out a likely suspect, cocked his arm, adjusted his aim, and threw.
* * *
Baron Lionel Delondeur watched with calm approval as the shapes of his men swarmed over Coldbourne’s pathetic excuse for a wall. The strong bubble of lantern light he’d ordered kept around him didn’t carry too far into the darkness, but each squad of foot carried a torch or two, and the night had brightened as some cloud cover moved away from the moon and stars, so he had a commanding view.
“Runner!” At his yell, a footman dressed in leathers and lightly armed appeared at his stirrup. “Go find Captain Verais. Give him my compliments for his attack. Tell him that once they have the wall he is to secure it and allow our horse to stage within the village before we advance.”
“Yes, my—” Something flashed out of the night and beside the Baron’s horse, which shied away several steps. The runner’s words were cut off in mid sentence with a horrid wet gurgle. It took Lionel a moment to wrestle the charger back to his command amidst a sudden clamor.
The man he’d just issued orders to crumpled to the earth, a throwing axe embedded where his neck met his shoulder, blood pumping freely from the wound. The soldier twitched and struggled, more and more feebly, as blood poured from the rent in his neck. Finally, he went still. The knights and lords around him seemed impressed and fearful, chattering uselessly to each other.
“Impossible throw.”
“At such a distance.”
“Warlock.”
“Madman’s strength.”
Delondeur silenced them with a yelled order. “Forward the horse! The foot will have that gate open or I will have every tenth man lashed!”
He gave his charger the spur, and the animal dashed forward, iron-shod hooves churning over the fresh corpse of the message runner like mud.
* * *
“Well,” Nyndstir muttered to himself as he crested the hill, “at least I didn’t miss everythin’.”
Down at the bottom of the slope he could see a small group of Delondeur spearmen struggling to assemble their rope ladder.
“Get that ladder up! We’re missing the fun, lads,” one of them boomed, all fake cheer and stupidity, announcing their location and intent to anyone nearby. “C’mon, there’s the knack,” he added as the flustered men fumbling with it finally got a few of the wooden slats straight.
Can just hear the freezing stripe on his arm, Nyndstir thought disdainfully. He considered his position. He had elevation and surprise, but there were five of them, and likely more within earshot.
What I wouldn’t give for a throwing axe or two, he thought. Even the odds a bit.
But then some other part of him rebelled at the thought. Evening the odds wasn’t always my way.
Before he knew it he was striding down the hill, axe in hand.
He heard one of the idle men, huddled in his cloak and stamping his feet in his boots, say to another, “Can’t wait to get in there and start burning something, eh?”
The other one snorted. “I’m thinkin’ more about gettin’ into somethin’ warm,” he replied, with the sneer of a man certain of his prospects of plunder. Nyndstir knew it well.
“Cold, did that bastard just go to his dungeons and hand out spears?” Nyndstir called out to them from a few paces away. As one, they jumped in shock and whirled to face him. Freezing amateurs, he inwardly cursed. Didn’t even post one man as a sentry.
The one Nyndstir had picked out earlier as a chosen man turned to face him, hand on his short sword. “Do not be speaking of our Lord Baron Delondeur that way, Islandman. Not when your own Sea Dragon blesses him, and us, with victory this night.”
Nyndstir didn’t get the chance to answer, because one of the shirkers pointed a finger vaguely at him. “Steady—aren’t you one of the hired men from the other camp? I’ve seen you about. Shouldn’t you be joinin’ in? There’s work for all hands.”
“I’m about to,” Nyndstir replied, then brought his axe in a tight, controlled swing straight into the neck of the man who’d just spoken. It cut through mail and leather and bit deep into the flesh, blood spilling out in torrents as he pulled the blade free.
The others were too shocked by the sudden attack to respond immediately, so Nyndstir had time for a second cut at the chosen man. He swiped low, taking his legs out from under him and knocking the man to the ground with a scream as he fumbled for the shortsword he never had time to unsheath.
One of the shirkers came at him with his spear leveled, but it was too close for that kind of weapon to do much good. Nyndstir took one step to the side, then another towards the man, and brought the haft of his axe in a vicious uppercut into the bottom of the spearman’s chin. His legs flew straight up as he was taken off his feet, and his head thudded resoundingly against the ground.
The two men fumbling with the ladder finally disentangled themselves from it. One went for his spear, which he’d leaned against the timber palisade, while the other drew a knife from his belt.
The other shirker was also coming with his knife, and he held it like a man that knew from knife fighting, in a crouched guard, with the blade forward and his body a small target, bouncing lightly from one foot to the other.
Nyndstir quickly backstepped a few feet and sent a whirling cut towards the man’s head, which he easily ducked beneath, then did the same on the backswing of the spike that balanced the heavy blade.
Nyndstir grinned in the darkness, feinted another cut. The grin became a smile as the man took the moment to dart within the axe’s arc, knife out. In the starlight, Nyndstir could read the greedy, triumphant smile on his opponent’s face.
A quick step to one side, a reversal of the axe in his grip, and the would-be knife fighter’s smile turned to a grimace as he charged his belly straight onto the first six inches of the axe’s footlong spike.
Nyndstir pulled it quickly free and drew back a heavy boot, kicked the man in the wound, and sent him sprawling with a scream.
The fourth spearman took a look at his three dead or dying comrades and turned away, running into the night.
“He’ll be back with other men,” the last remaining soldier warned him, knife held out awkwardly as he backstepped, free hand searching behind him for the wall and the spear that rested there.
“Don’t see how that stops me from killin’ you,” Nyndstir said with a shrug. He lunged towards the man, raising his axe in a feint. The green-tabarded soldier dropped his knife and ran, knocking his spear aside as he went.
Quickly, Nyndstir secured his axe to his back, strapping it in place with heavy leather thongs that were stiff from lack of use. He looked at the three men he’d felled: one dead, one dying, one twitching and trying to roll over to push back to his feet. He gave that third one a couple of solid boots to the ribs, and the man crumpled to the ground in a ball.
Then he picked up the tangled remnants of the rope ladder and found the bit he needed: the hook. That he tossed over the top of the wall, thanking Fortune when it set on the first try. Grasping it in both hands, he lifted one leg and placed it squarely against the rough-cut timbers, and then pulled himself up and did the same with the other leg.
The muscles in his shoulders protested, but he gave his head a sharp shake, and hauled himself up with quick steps, wrapping the rope around his forearms as he went.
“Been up as many walls as I have, ya never lose the knack,” he muttered, congratulating himself as he crested the wall.
The congratulations turned to a curse as he realized there was nothing on the other side, and he tumbled over into a longer drop than he’d been ready for.
“Cold dammit, there’s usually some freezing steps or a parapet or something.” He pulled himself out of the dirt, giving each limb a careful shake to see that they were still in working order. Then he unlimbered his axe and ran off towards the sounds of fighting.
* * *
Allystaire pulled himself into Ardent’s saddle, ripping a lance free from the ground where three had been planted for him, points driven into the dirt to hold them up. In another life I would’ve run a squire off his feet for doing that, he noted absently.
Around him, Chaddin’s score of men were similarly mounting and pulling lances from stirrup boots. Not all of them were armed and armored to function as heavy lancers; some were unfamiliarly couching spears under their arms.
“Chaddin!” Allystaire bellowed, searching for him amidst the crowd of riders. Finally one of the better-armored figures rode up to him, pushing up a visor. Chaddin sat his horse a bit stiffly, and he kept shifting his grip on the lance.
“We do not want to come straight up against their foot,” Allystaire told him, once he could see his face. “They are all spears, and would tear us to pieces. But I think your father means to bring up his horse, and we have to give them a bloody nose, keep them from racing beyond us. A loose line, charge only at my command, and remember, it is not a freezing tourney list. You are trying to kill them, and they you.”
Beyond them, there was the sound of commotion and frightened shouting, as the folk of the village poured into the Temple. Torvul had worked a minor miracle, erecting barriers made of carts, barrels, crates, even his own wagon. At the moment, the dwarf, laden with a heavy crate and leather straps full of tools, was trying his best to empty the contents of his boxlike home into the Temple one trip at a time.
Renard, his clearly frightened militia, and the remaining eight Iron Ravens manned the makeshift barricade, spears and bows at the ready. Mol glided among the crowd, stopping to speak with children, or with the most obviously frightened. Idgen Marte moved along behind her, a heavy sack in one hand, from which she drew the confiscated weapons, pressing them into the hands of unarmed adults that passed by.
The sound of horns in the distance froze the scene for a moment. Allystaire listened to the pattern of the blasts, then said, “They are calling formations, trying to organize. Let us not do them any favors! Horse, forward with me!”
He nudged Ardent and the destrier responded, tugging at the reins he clutched in his shield hand as he and twenty of Chaddin’s loyalists went off to meet the Baron’s horse.
They hadn’t far to go, and Allystaire had surmised correctly; the Baron was drawing all of his horse inside the walls, screening them with infantry as he drew them into lines. At a quick guess Allystaire thought he was drawing up two lines of twenty each, with his remainder in reserve, but it was taking a while. Against the force staging inside the western gate, the line of horse looked paltry indeed.
The line of spears in front of them was thin, but it was thicker than his own, and charging it brought the risk of getting cut to ribbons. Idgen Marte. Torvul. What can we do to disperse their foot?
Call in another army, Idgen Marte grumbled back.
Depends on how careful y’need to be about fire now, Torvul thought to him.
Not at all, Allystaire replied. I will use any weapon I have now.
Good. I’ll send ‘er up.
Among the enemy lines, orders were being shouted, but in the dark and in the confusion of any battle, on unfamiliar ground, it took untested men a long time to respond to their orders.
It did not take nearly so long for Idgen Marte to appear out of the darkness behind his horse. The animals to either side of him shied away, stamping at the ground and tugging at their reins. Ardent barely acknowledged it.
She held out a clinking bag in one hand. He set his lance in his stirrup boot and took it. “Hope your arm is still good. He says it won’t burn for long, or very hot, but it ought to give them a good scare,” she said as she handed it over.
He let the bag dangle from his hand and started to open it up. She had already disappeared. He considered for a moment the problem of how to pull the three bottles out of it individually without crushing them in his hand, then spat an oath, yelled, “Hold your line,” to the horsemen around him, and spurred Ardent.
The destrier’s muscles bunched and the huge grey leapt into motion. Before they’d traveled more than twenty yards, Allystaire was swinging the bag over his head in long circles. Another dozen yards and he released it, then pulled back on the reins. He couldn’t follow it in flight, but he knew when it landed. A gout of flame erupted that would’ve filled the largest fireplaces in Wind’s Jaw keep, hearths that were made to hold entire tree-trunks. The flame billowed into the sky and rolled out behind the front line of spearmen.
Panic erupted, frantic officers calling frantic orders. All sense of discipline among the Delondeur foot vanished when another, much smaller fire erupted on their far right flank, and then another close beside it. A dozen men turned and ran, then a score. Some of them, passing too close to the flames, suddenly found their cloaks and tabards catching on tendrils of it, and a few were too mad with fear to drop and smother themselves.
At the sight of their comrades running, and a smattering of them screaming as they burned, the trickle became a torrent, and the Salt Spears turned and ran. Allystaire heard their screams of panic, caught the words “Witchery! Sorcery!” among them.
Allystaire turned Ardent and trotted him back towards his thin line of horse, who cheered. He heard one man call out, “Cowards!” at the retreating foot, others simply celebrating with wordless cries of triumph.
“Quiet,” he bellowed at them. “Burning a man to death is nothing to celebrate! They were unblooded boys, tradesman’s sons. The Baron’s knights and men-at-arms will not be driven off so easily. With me, at the trot,” he finished, snapping command into the words with a lifetime of practice.
He picked up his lance and turned Ardent again, letting the horse take his head. In his stomach, he felt a brief flare of shame when he saw the fires burning ahead of him. Oh, Goddess, he thought in a quick prayer. I am sorry I could not give them a clean death, or better still, a cleaner life. It could be that they are not truly your enemies, only men who are badly led. I am sorry.
With that, his trotting line had come within sight of Delondeur’s horse as they forced their way around the panicked foot. He saw more than one Delondeur knight laying about his horse with a weapon, mostly horseman’s axes or flails they kept on loops around their wrists, driving away or simply felling their own panicked spearmen.
There, he thought then, steeling himself and finding the song flowing louder in his limbs, are better targets.
And there wouldn’t be a better time, as only a trickle of them had managed to pull themselves free of the retreat and started to form a ragged line.
As he began to fill his lungs to give the order, a stray thought crossed his mind. I really ought to teach Gideon the trumpet calls. Then with a pang of sorrow and anger that turned his voice hoarse, he bellowed, “CHARGE!” with all the force he could muster.
Ardent pulled away from the rest of the line before they’d all run five yards, eager for the run, his energy seemingly boundless. Allystaire leveled his lance and picked a target among a knot of little more than half a dozen Delondeur men who’d only just begun to spread out. Two of them tried to turn their horses and run for the flanks rather than confront the charge. Most brought up their shields and tried to wrestle lances into their hands.
His chosen target, whose arms he could not read, got a heavy shield up to take the blow, but had only just got his horse moving and couldn’t hope to match Ardent’s speed, and the force the pair of them brought to bear.
Allystaire’s lance shattered with an explosive sound, and he heard a sharp crack. The other man’s shield or his arm, he hadn’t time to care, but he turned his head to see the man thrown from the saddle as his horse reared back and only just managed to keep its feet.
Luck had been with them. Most of the men of his line were successful on this first pass, though he saw one unhorsed as a Delondeur knight from further back, with more time to prepare, had met a man with his own charge. Even as Allystaire was yelling for them to fall back and reform, he saw three of Chaddin’s knights, emboldened by their success, go racing into the second ranks of Delondeur horsemen, who were quickly finding themselves and splitting into two columns to pass by the flame.
“Fall back, you fools,” he yelled, his ragged voice still carrying, but to no avail. He saw them crash amongst the armored ranks. “Back! They will surround you!” But the trio had gone too far, discarded broken lances, and were now drawing swords or swinging flails. They were quickly overrun. He could hear the sounds of the combat, the yells, the sound of weapons beating on armor, the cries of men wounded or killed.
“BACK!” He whirled Ardent. Those men were lost the moment they kept charging, he told himself. They raced back to their original spot, the two lances that someone had planted in the ground serving as his target. He pulled one free and turned his mount with his knees, counting the other men as they arrived around him.
Sixteen. They’d hurt the Delondeur men, but lost a quarter of their own. “We cannot afford to overreach,” he yelled. “One charge, one target, then pull back as fast as you can.”
He struggled for just a moment to settle Ardent, who wanted back into the fight, when he heard Mol’s voice from too close by for his comfort.
“Hold,” she said, the word ringing out.
Instantly, Ardent settled, letting out a heavy breath. Around him Allystaire could see the mounts of the other men doing the same, instantly rooting themselves in place. She was ordering the horses, he thought, with some slight awe. Not us.
The girl walked to the front of the line. Allystaire swung out of his saddle and stepped in front of her. “Mol. Please, lass. Back to the Temple. You cannot be exposed out—”
“I have a part to play in this too, Arm,” Mol intoned, turning to face him. He could see a tear glinting on her cheek, a glimpse of her true age behind the aura of the Voice. “Though I hesitate to do it.”
She turned to face the darkness. Beyond, Allystaire could hear orders ringing out, knew that the Delondeur knights were fanning out into a line and starting forward. If he squinted, with the very faint dregs of Torvul’s potion remaining to him, he could make out their shapes coming forward, the fires behind them having all but died out.
There was another sound, though, a deep rumbling. And then a long, mournful howl. A wolf? He turned to the girl with puzzlement. Then he heard the baying, and the rumbling grew louder. Not wolves, he thought. Dogs. Dogs, and…
His thought was cut off as the Delondeur line came rumbling into his vision, lances couched. He bent as if to snatch Mol up. Then the far left of the Delondeur line exploded, man and horse flung about and crushed under the weight of a stampede of ordinary cattle.
And then the dogs swarmed over what was left. Village and farmfolk gathered dogs around them everywhere, Allystaire knew, and for a moment felt keenly the absence of the favored hounds he’d left behind him in Oyrwyn. The dogs were of no particular breed or stock; they were large, small, and in between, and they darted at the horses and the knights utterly heedless of their own safety, dozens of them flying in from all directions in the darkness. Those with the size or the legs leapt at the knights in their saddles, breaking teeth on armor and dragging a few from their seats.
Others darted at the horses themselves, snapping at fragile lower legs or flitting beneath them to tear at their bellies.
The sound of their howling and baying filled the night, all too often punctuated with loud yelps as one was stamped on by a horse or fell to a Delondeur weapon.
Allystaire stood watching, transfixed and slightly horrified at the display. Chaddin and his knights did much the same.
“Now!” Mol yelled, snapping him back from the sight. He could hear no small grief in her voice. “Don’t let it be for nothing!”
Allystaire leapt into the saddle, lagging behind, as the other horses leapt to the girl’s command. He could feel Ardent’s impatience, and he didn’t bother to snatch up a lance, instead pulling his hammer free.
The village’s dogs peeled away. He hadn’t time to count but he suspected that less than half of them ran off to safety. He lashed out with his hammer mechanically, too stunned by what he’d just seen to pay enough attention to the fight. He took a hard blow off his shield, and another that skimmed off his helmet and pauldron, blooming pain in his shoulder. Allystaire snapped into focus and bashed out with his shield, sending a man from his saddle. Then he turned for another, hammer swinging in a tight arc and crushing the side of another knight’s chest.
The shock of circumstance and the sudden close combat took the fight of the Delondeur men, and they broke in short order, retreating. Allystaire heard Chaddin’s voice. “After them! On their heels,” he yelled.
“NO,” he yelled. “HOLD!”
Chaddin turned towards him in the saddle, his armor dented and wet, as was the sword clutched in his fist. “We have them on the run! Now is not the time to fall back.”
“Hold,” came Mol’s voice, rising over the yelling and the din of the Delondeur retreat, though it hardly seemed loud enough.
Once again, every horse stopped in its tracks like it was rooted to the spot, and turned, placidly, to face the girl. Delondeur mounts whose riders had been killed or knocked clear did the same, trotting towards her as eager and pliant as if she’d trained them all their lives.
As one, the men—the dozen that were left—swung from the saddle. Mol walked, barefooted, towards Allystaire’s side, and reached up for Ardent’s bridle.
The huge grey lowered his neck towards her, pressing his nose against her shoulder more gently than Allystaire would’ve believed possible.
She murmured to the destrier. Ardent tried to lift his head away with a whinny, but she tugged his face back towards her and murmured again. “Ardent will lead the rest of your mounts to safety out the other gate. The enemy has abandoned its camp there,” she announced suddenly. Then she reached up and deftly unclasped the warhorse’s bridle, tugging the bit from his mouth and tossing it to the ground. “Free their mouths,” she said. “They may need to graze.”
Reins and bridles were tugged free by gauntleted hands as the horses all fell into place behind Allystaire’s destrier.
The huge grey came to Allystaire’s side and nudged against him, pausing for a moment. Allystaire patted the side of his neck carefully. The huge grey gave its mane a shake and pulled away from him.
“Avoid any men,” the girl yelled after him. “Come back only if you hear me.”
The herd of horses fell into place behind Ardent, then thundered out of Thornhurst and into the darkness.
Then she turned to Allystaire, and said hoarsely, “The Temple.” She started walking, and the men, Allystaire included, followed her.
“It’s not fair,” he heard her saying, grief choking the words. “Not right to ask this of them. Not what She would’ve wanted.”
Allystaire took a few steps to her side. “Mol, lass. You may have saved us all tonight.”
The girl stopped and leaned against him. He carefully set his arm against her back, and she muttered, “Her Gift can’t hurt me, you know.”
Still mindful of it, he bent slightly and picked her up. “We do what we can, Mol. And then what we must. She would tell you the same, I am sure.”
She gave him a quick embrace, arms wrapping around his neck, then leapt free to the ground. “That we needed it does not mean it was right to have asked it.”
Behind them, horses, men, and cows cried out in pain and terror, lying broken and dead or dying along the path of the stampede. Allystaire paused and turned back to face them. “You go to the Temple, Mol. I must see to the men and beasts.”
“Aye,” she replied. “Bring all the wounded in first. Gather bodies to burn if you can.”
“Aye.” In his mind he was already reaching out to Torvul and Idgen Marte, and telling them to bring volunteers.
* * *
Nyndstir had been crouching by the cattlepen, taking the lay of the land and wondering where he could do some damage, when the stampede went off and the animals crushed the fence like parchment and went lowing off into the darkness. He’d given a wide berth, then crept closer to watch the carnage as they crashed into the exposed flank of the Baron’s heavy horse.
When all the shouting was done and Delondeur’s men retreated, he had half a mind to go out onto the battlefield and present himself to the man in the bright armor. Something about him tickled Nyndstir’s memory, but he couldn’t put his finger on what.
Don’t want that man takin’ me for an enemy, either, he thought as he watched him and a few others beginning to sweep the battlefield. Staying hidden along a fold of ground seemed the smarter choice.
He expected them to make knife work of it, quick and merciful ends for the wounded. He was all the more surprised when he saw the man in his armor kneel at the side of a man whose legs were crushed under his felled mount. He rolled the dead horse away like another man might a mid-size log for the fire, and then placed his hands upon the blessedly-unconscious knight.
Then the man suddenly woke with a long, harsh scream, swinging his arms wildly about him. Still the knight just knelt by his side.
When the knight stood up, the other man looked down at his legs. Then slowly, disbelievingly, he rolled over, pushed himself to his feet. With wobbling, impossible steps, he followed after the man who’d just healed him.
“Braech bugger me if I’ve ever seen the like,” Nyndstir muttered, awestruck.
Then he watched the man move about the battlefield, one by one, waking the dying and the broken and setting them back on their feet.
As he was watching these miracles unfold before him, he heard a lowing and saw a line of cattle moving past him, headed back towards their pen, retracing the lines of their own stampede. Their numbers were reduced, but they were perfectly calm.
Nyndstir Obertsun was at a loss for the right oath.