by Morgan Rice
He threw the pouches anyway, holding them in the nearest flames until they caught, and then flinging the resulting balls of fire into the midst of the violence. They exploded there, in dust and fire and smoke, and a second later, Dust started to see.
Horrors stalked the fight now. Things with too many legs scuttled through the violence, while scaled creatures stalked among the combatants. Men screamed as they saw them, throwing themselves back, or trying to thrust at things that should never have been there for them to fight. Some even turned to run, and in the chaos of it all, Dust couldn’t see whether they were cut down by enemies, or the creatures that walked through it all, or by men of their own side.
Dust threw himself into it, trusting to the whims of fate, striking out where his hands found themselves led. He threw a needle into a guard’s throat, snatched a blade from another, cut down a third.
“Too wild,” a voice said. “You are being too wild.”
Dust looked round at the sound of Angarthim Ash’s voice. The older man seemed to float among the battle, Dust’s former teacher drifting forward, his hands outstretched for Dust’s throat. Dust flung himself aside, and then cut down a man who thrust into the space where he had been.
“So slow,” Ash said. “So filled with your own thoughts, rather than trusting to the fates.”
“You’re an illusion,” Dust said, twisting away from a blow that seemed to come from his mentor, but turned out to be the thrust of a spear. He killed the wielder with a cut to the throat, and kept moving. “You’re just the effects of the powder.”
“And the powder does not show anything that is not meant to be there,” Angarthim Ash said. “Everything here is a lesson, my pupil. Everything in the world is.”
Lesson or not, the beasts and signs of the powder seemed to be sowing chaos within the battle. Men whirled, trying to keep track of where the next creature might come from. A flock of flying fish made their way across the battle, and a soldier was cut down as he turned to look at them. A spider-like thing pounced toward one of the villagers, and he leapt back so sharply that he impaled himself on the sword of one of his fellows.
More of them poured in now, coming through the gap Dust had made in the fire. Was this what he was meant to do here? He looked around for Royce, trying to find the boy that he had been sent to kill in all of this. Dust thought he caught a glimpse of him, but now he was hidden behind a scaled wyrm, lost to sight, and as Dust rushed forward, men and women got in the way, fighting with one another, fighting to get away, fighting just to survive.
Dust cursed, and it seemed foolish to do that. He’d chosen this, casting himself into the arms of the fates. He couldn’t complain when they didn’t give him what he wanted. Still cursing, he threw himself back from the fight, hoping that the chaos he had caused would be enough.
***
“We can’t fight like this!” Altfor shouted, lashing out at a swarm of butterflies that seemed to flash past his head. He felt the clash of steel as his sword hit something, but he couldn’t see what in the chaos.
“This is nonsense!” his uncle yelled back to him, his sword clutched tight. “This is nothing to be afraid of!”
“Nothing to be afraid of?” Altfor said. “It’s magic! We can’t fight against magic.”
“We can and we will!” his uncle insisted, swinging through the spot where a hairy creature the size of a man stood. A soldier fell, and it took Altfor only a moment to see that the man was one of theirs.
“We can’t see who we’re fighting,” Altfor insisted.
“We’re fighting our enemies,” Lord Alistair said. “This is the best chance we have, with them caught perfectly. We will not let them survive this!”
His uncle fought his way forward, hacking and slashing, cutting his way through the shifting, impossible creatures that surrounded him. Men fell, and then more men, far too many of them their own. Altfor had no problem with sacrificing the common soldiers when it suited, but this risked losing everything. More than that, he saw an opportunity in it.
“Pull back!” he yelled. “Pull back toward the castle!”
He saw his uncle turn toward him, the fury obvious on his face. “We do not pull back,” he yelled back. “We—”
Something hit him on the side of the helm. Altfor couldn’t say quite what the creature was meant to be, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that his uncle fell to one knee, and then tumbled the rest of the way to the ground for a moment, struggling to rise back to his feet.
A more foolish man might have left him then, but Altfor wasn’t a fool. A man who ran risked his uncle somehow surviving to exact retribution for doing it. A man who did the logical thing by going over to finish him risked being called a traitor. There was truly only one thing to do…
“I’m coming, Uncle!” he yelled, heeling his horse forward. He hacked down at an enemy who came too close, kicked another man away, and ducked until the sweep of an illusory thing’s claws. He reached his uncle and grabbed for him, grateful that the older man was still only semi-conscious; certainly not aware enough to give orders.
“Protect my uncle!” Altfor yelled, as he dragged Lord Alistair onto the back of his horse. “We need to get him back to the castle!”
His uncle’s sword lay on the ground and, with a flourish, Altfor snatched it up, struggling to hold his uncle and the blade in place, but managing it somehow. Perhaps it was the part where his life depended on getting this right. Even slightly wrong, and he would look like a coward, rather than a hero, a fool, rather than the one man on the battlefield who had seen sense through the chaos.
He saw Royce as he lifted his uncle up, and for a moment, Altfor considered abandoning his plan to charge for the traitor, but sense prevailed. He wasn’t some thug to fight one on one, trusting to the strength of his arm to prevail. Besides, there were too many men between the two of them, and too many swirling, impossible things that could hide a blade or an iron mace.
So he ran, because running was the thing that offered Altfor the biggest advantage right then; not just to save his life, but to persuade the men who followed him. They ran with him, and together, they thundered back toward the castle.
***
Royce couldn’t see a way out of the chaos. He cut in every direction, parrying blows and then striking back, trying to focus, trying to push through the pain in his head that insisted the world was filled with gods and monsters, things that couldn’t have been there, at least not then.
“It isn’t real!” he called out to the others. “You have to focus!”
He forced himself to concentrate, trying to see past the madness of it all. Royce felt as though the things he saw were just a layer of cloth laid over the rest of it. He knew that if he just concentrated enough, he would be able to tear that cloth away.
Royce turned, and in that moment, he saw through the chaos there. The images weren’t gone, they danced and spun and fought, but he found that he could see beyond them, to the reality that sat there. He saw his people fighting and killing, and dying.
He saw Matilde cutting into a guard with her short blades, heedless of a guard moving up toward her. Royce leapt in, parrying the blow and then kicking the man back.
“Stay with me!” he yelled to her. “Grab the others if you can!”
“Hendrik’s dead,” she said, above the noise of the battle, and Royce could hear the pain there. It mirrored the agony he felt in himself at the thought of the large young man dead.
“I know,” Royce said. “But we can’t stop. We need to save the others. There!”
He pointed to where Lofen stood, waving his sword as he battled something that only he could see. Royce fought his way toward him…
That was the moment when he saw himself in the twisting illusions of it all. He saw himself standing atop a pile of bodies, the crystal sword running red with blood. He saw men of at least three armies standing around, all looking at him with a mixture of terror and awe. It was like some echo of what Lori had told hi
m that she’d seen, only now, Royce was seeing it for himself.
He pushed that aside too, because the most important thing was to get to his brothers. He fought his way to Lofen’s side, grabbing hold of his arm and forcing his brother to face him.
“Lofen, we have to get out of here. Stay with me!”
He pulled Lofen along in his wake, then Garet, then Raymond. One by one, he collected the people who had come there with him, and he was grateful as he did it that Altfor’s forces seemed to be retreating. Some of them weren’t, but those seemed to be the ones who were busy fighting things that only they could see. One got in Royce’s way, and Royce cut him down as he started to lift his sword, but most of them seemed too caught up in their own struggles to truly hope to fight.
“All of you,” Royce called out, “if you want to live, you have to come with me!”
Go where though? Royce still hadn’t worked that part out, and none of their options seemed like good ones right then. The castle lay ahead of them, as strong as it had ever been. Flames licked up around them, growing closer by the moment, and as soon as the visions and monsters had passed, Royce had no doubt that more men would come down after them.
“Matilde, how did you and the others get through the flames?” Royce asked.
“There was a gap,” she said. “We saw… we saw the gray man make a gap.”
The gray man; the same one who had killed Royce’s parents. Instinctively, Royce looked round for him, but there was no sign of the man. What he could see, though, was a space where no flames burned, and where the blackened ground seemed to offer enough of a gap that people might manage to burst through.
“There!” Royce called out. “Follow me!”
He led the way, and maybe it was the way he said it or maybe they didn’t have any other option, but people followed him. Royce stood by the spot where the flames didn’t burn, and guided them through, one by one, person by person. He counted his people out of the circle of the flames, and there were far too few compared to the ones who had come in.
“Now you!” Raymond called from beyond the fire.
Royce took a moment to look back at the battlefield. It was strewn with corpses now, and visions still danced across it like the toys of some mad puppeteer. He’d hoped that by coming here, he might be able to stop Altfor and his uncle from attacking villages. He’d hoped that things might finish here.
Instead, even with so many dead, it felt as though things were barely beginning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Royce led the others back to the meeting place almost in silence. There seemed to be so little to say after what had just happened, at least until they had gotten back, seen to the wounded… counted the dead.
They trudged along the long march back, rain coming down now the way it so often did out on the heather. Around Royce, the others started to huddle in under cloaks and even shields, holding them up the way they might to deflect arrows. There seemed to be far fewer than there had been coming out.
“We failed,” Garet said, keeping pace with Royce. “We were going to smash them, and we failed.”
Royce nodded, not knowing what to say.
“It all seemed so simple when we planned it,” Lofen said. “We knew they were going to try to trap us, and we’d trap them while they did it.”
The fact that it had been Royce’s plan made that worse. He’d thought that after a short time training to fight he could out think a seasoned warrior like Lord Alistair.
“We just didn’t consider the fire,” Raymond said. “That’s all.”
He made it sound like a mistake anyone could have made.
Matilde didn’t sound so forgiving. “Hendrik’s dead.”
Now, Royce knew that he had to say something. “A lot of people are dead. I didn’t think things through enough. I should have guessed what might happen.”
“Who could guess at magic and strange creatures?” Raymond asked.
No one, but that hadn’t been the part Royce meant.
“The truth is, all that saved us,” he said. “I think it scared Altfor’s forces more than us.”
“So we have a friendly magician now?” Matilde said.
Royce shook his head. “No, if it was the gray man, he isn’t friendly. He’s anything but friendly. I don’t think he meant for things to happen like that. That, or he didn’t care how they turned out.”
That was almost more frightening. A would-be assassin out to kill him with all the otherworldly power that this stranger possessed was terrifying enough, but one whose actions couldn’t be predicted at all was worse. It meant that there was no way to plan for him, and no way to keep safe if he did come.
“What now?” Lofen asked. “Do we head for the boats again?”
“I don’t want to run away,” Matilde said. “I want to fight. I want to kill them for what they’ve done.”
“I want to stop them killing any more villagers,” Garet said.
“They’re right,” Royce said, “if we go, we’re just back to where we were, with people dying. We need to think of another way.”
“But what?” Lofen insisted.
Royce didn’t have an answer to that as they approached the bowl-shaped depression where the meeting place stood. They came up on it quietly, in case guards had found it, or guessed that they might have gone there. Royce sent up Ember, and what he saw there in it made him stop dead.
“What is it?” Raymond asked.
Royce shook his head. “You won’t believe it unless you see it for yourself.”
He led the way again, hurrying now, wanting to get to the meeting place. He reached the place where the moorland gave way to it, and just stood there, looking down.
There were people there, so many people that it was hard to believe it. There were men and women, young and old, some armed ready for battle, others merely with the clothes they stood up in. There were so many that they must have come from a dozen different villages, because no one village could possibly hold all of them. More were coming in from the far side of the depression even as Royce watched.
“It seems,” Raymond said to him, staring out over them, “it seems that you have the beginnings of an army.”
***
Royce went down into the meeting place, and everywhere he turned, people looked at him, or waved to him, or even saluted him, as if he were some returning hero rather than a boy who had just led far too many of his friends into danger.
“What is all this?” he asked one of the people he passed, a man who seemed to have pieced together armor from some long-forgotten stint in the guards. “What are you all doing here?”
“You saved us,” he said.
Royce frowned at that. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did,” he insisted. “The duke’s men were coming round, burning and killing, but when they heard that there was a chance to get after you, they all pulled back to do that. It gave us time to run.”
That seemed almost too improbable to believe. Royce had thought that he’d failed. He’d thought that all of this had fallen apart, and that all he’d succeeded in doing back on the battlefield was getting people killed. Now, there were hundreds of people here, if not more, who wouldn’t be alive without what he and his friends had done. It was enough to take Hendrik’s senseless death and turn it into a sacrifice. It was enough to make all of it worth it.
Royce walked through the camp that seemed to be growing there in the open space, taking in the ways people were already starting to organize themselves by putting up tents or starting to gather food. There were so many now, and it seemed hard to believe that all of them could have come there because of something he’d done.
Then he heard the cries of alarm from one end of the camp, saw the people scrabbling for their weapons.
For a moment, Royce’s heart sank. He assumed that Altfor’s men must have followed them, in spite of Ember flying circuits above to watch out for exactly that kind of hunter. Worse, what if it was the gray-skinned man, who seemed
to be able to kill so easily, and who conjured fantastical things out of the air?
Either way, Royce drew his sword and started forward, pushing his way past the other people of the camp as they pulled back, or gathered weapons, or looked around not knowing what to do. As figures walked down into that bowl-shaped depression, Royce didn’t understand the danger at first. It was only as he got closer that he saw the woad and the tartans, the wildness of their hair and the faint wildness to the way they moved.
There were Picti in the camp.
Around Royce, people were starting forward with their own weapons drawn, ready for battle. They seemed prepared to cut the strangers down where they stood, but astonishingly, the Picti stood there. They didn’t rush forward to meet the battle. They didn’t scream war cries and prepare to kill those who had come onto the lands they claimed. Instead, one of them looked around, took off his sword, and laid it down in the dirt.
“Stop!” Royce called out, moving forward past the others. “Everybody stop! I don’t think they’re here to fight!”
He put himself between the Picti and the advancing rush of his people. He stood there even though it would probably make him the first to be cut down if it came to true violence. This close, and he thought that he could make out faces he had seen before, familiar patterns in the woad tattoos and the ornaments. He definitely recognized the girl who stood beside the leader, because she was the one who had spoken to him up by the healing stone.
“What are you doing here?” Royce asked her, knowing that she would understand.
“It’s a free land,” she replied. “For us, at least, not caged in your wee villages and…” She stopped as the man beside her snapped something in the language of the Picti. “Aye, I know. I was there, remember?” She looked back to Royce. “Osin says to say that we’re here because the stone sang, and because of what that might make you. A man like you, we might be willing to follow. And he’d say all this himself, if he’d bothered to learn the tongue of you southerners while he was fighting you.”