by Greylady
Some of the other shouting was not stifled. Instead those voices receded in a clattering of hoofs, cut through by the harshly bellowed demands that they stand still or come back. Bayrd risked another craning through the branches, and a swift count of the remaining opposition. Then he flopped back into Yarak’s saddle and swore venomously under his breath. Only three had run away, two of the Elthaneks and a single one of Gelert’s men. The others had drawn into a tight half-circle with the ruined fortress at their backs and the woman wizard securely in the middle. After what he had heard and seen already, it looked to Bayrd’s jaundiced eye less for her protection than to prevent her escape – and he was still outnumbered.
A swift hot surge of anger that heralded the release of power welled up inside him, but he fought it down again. Maybe the wizard was being forced to help the lord’s-men against her will, or maybe not; but there was little point in fighting fire with fire when he had the equivalent of a small oil-lamp and the woman yonder might have something like a furnace at her command. But then he saw just how willing she really was, and how highly Gelert’s men regarded their allies.
The largest of the Pryteneks, and the man Bayrd would most have laid money on as the source of those two slaps, broke out of the circle and made his way back into the broken labyrinth of tumbled stone that had been Dunarat-hold. When he came back, one of the arrows was clutched in his armoured fist. Either he had seen it fall, or he had heard it. That didn’t matter. He shook it under the wizard’s nose and said something Bayrd didn’t hear, then turned to face the forest, snapped it in two and threw the pieces on the ground, where he spat on them.
“Alban,” he shouted. “Alban, we know you’re there! The trick didn’t work, Alban, did it? We’re still here. How much did this treacherous sow pay you to ‘haunt’ the fortress for her, Alban? Was it enough to pay for what we’ll do to you?” His axe jerked free of his belt, and he laid the flat of the blade under where the wizard’s breasts swelled against her travelling-leathers. “Is it enough for you to watch what we can do to her…?”
It wasn’t his fight; it wasn’t his business; Lord Gelert’s thug didn’t know where he was, because he was shouting his threats at a completely wrong part of the forest. So Bayrd wasn’t entirely sure why he was suddenly sitting astride Yarak squarely in the middle of the old approach-road, with the sun throwing his shadow huge and black down to the old citadel and another arrow in his bow and bloody murder in his heart. Too many stories, said the accusing little voice at the back of his mind. Too many heroes. Except that after what he had just heard, he knew that there could never be too many heroes; that there were more often not enough.
“Let her go,” he said, knowing his voice would carry well enough without the need to shout. “Let her go, and I might let you live.”
There was a spatter of laughter among the lord’s-men, and a quick muttered discussion before one of the warriors Bayrd had marked as Elthanek stepped forward, twirling his cutting-spear. “I defy you,” the man called. “I defy you, and I challenge you to fight me with any weapon that you choose! I am Lerent Skarayz, and I haAkh—!”
Bayrd’s bow thumped once. The spear, still twirling dramatically, clattered on the frozen ground as a single broad-bladed, heavy arrow slammed the rest of the formal defiance back into the Elthanek warrior’s mouth and out through the back of his head in a spatter of blood and spinal fluid. Lerent Skarayz dropped without another word.
“I am the kailin-eir Bayrd ar’Talvlyn; I choose my bow; and I have no more time for challenges.”
It might have been outrage at his conduct, or the sudden horrid realization that none of them had missile weapons, but three of the lord’s-men lowered spear or drew sword and charged at Bayrd. Only one remained; the big man with the axe had not taken its blade from the wizard’s breast, but he had shifted his position just enough to leave her at more risk from a long-range arrow than himself.
Bayrd had seen him move, and put his second arrow instead though a Prytenek warrior’s kneecap before the man who had hoped to run on it was properly in his stride. Suddenly the odds that had seemed so weighted against him were much more in favour, and as the wounded man collapsed shrieking, Yarak was well into a stride of her own. Had they been proper horsemen, rather than fighters on foot who simply travelled on horseback, the two remaining warriors might have seen something to avoid in the malevolent way the small grey mare came for them.
They did not: something obviously a warhorse, like a huge frothing red-eyed stallion, might have concerned them, but it was beneath their notice to be afraid of mere transport. Until that ‘transport’ sidestepped the thrust of a spear with all the neatness of a dancer, snapped her huge square teeth at the face of the man who held it so that he went staggering back off-balance from the unexpected attack, then sent him flying with a vicious, liver-bursting double kick that his armour didn’t do a thing to stop.
As he dropped out of the saddle with longsword in one hand and axe in the other, it struck Bayrd that for all the loud talk he had overheard, none of his assailants had ever been to the ‘invader’s country’. They knew nothing about Alban cavalry tactics, or even that a well-trained horse was more than just an animal, a mount and a mobile archery platform. It was a biting battering-ram six times the weight of a man, it was propped up on four war-hammers, and it knew how to use every one of those weapons to murderous effect.
Nor had they encountered the less formal variants of taiken play, as practiced – not very well – by the late and unlamented Lord Serej ar’Diskan. The last but one of the Pryteneks skidded slightly in the churned snow, then lunged at Bayrd with the curved blade of his cutting-spear. It was taken by the longsword in a simple block that twisted half around into a far from simple parry guiding the spearpoint into the ground, and then its braced shaft snapped under a quick downward chop from the axe.
The lord’s-man snarled something through his clenched teeth then used what remained of his spear as a quarterstaff, bringing it up and around in a solid swing against the flat of Bayrd’s sword. Few swords forged could take that sort of punishment, and this was no exception. The blade snapped off a handspan above the hilt.
Without taking a single lethal second to gape at the damage, Bayrd dropped the useless chunk of metal and swung his axe twice. It had a clipped-crescent blade backed by a four-inch triangular pick, and the first swing brought it up backwards and under the skirts of the Prytenek’s armour to bury that pick in his groin. The man’s mouth and eyes went wide with shock at the impact, but his agonized screech as the pick wrenched free was barely begun when the axeblade came whirring around in a long, merciful stroke through the side of his neck and the sound was cut off at its source.
Bayrd ar’Talvlyn shook blood from his face. It was hardly adequate, but there was no point in attempting to wipe himself clean through the narrow trefoil opening of the warmask, and he still needed to see what had become of the unaware cause of this carnage. A thought wandered idly through his jangling brain. The first wizard you found…but if she had been a man, would you have gone to this trouble? You don’t even know if she’s pretty…
There was no sensible answer to that. He might, or he might not. A man could have defended himself – and then his head snapped around at a sound like the crack of a monstrous whip.
The Elthanek woman and the lord’s-man who had been threatening her with the axe were still where he had last seen them. But there had been some small, subtle changes of posture. That axe now dangled harmlessly by the warrior’s side, and he was leaning back against one of the great rocks of the old fortress walls. The woman’s hand was pressed flat against his chest, where before she had never dared to move a muscle.
And then she took her hand away, shaking it as though it stung, and Lord Gelert’s man fell flat on his face. At least, most of him fell. There was a handprint on the rock where he had been leaning. Punched into the stone, steaming in the cold air and beginning to dribble unpleasantly, the handprint was a thick, glist
ening cross-section of the warrior’s chest; armour plates, the leather beneath, and the flesh, blood and bone beneath that, each separate layer already peeling apart under its own weight. As he walked closer and saw better what that print was, Bayrd winced inwardly and allowed that this woman at least had needed no hero at all.
“Bayrd ar’Talvlyn, you called yourself.” She gave him a speculative glance as she washed her fingers in a handful of snow. “Thank you. I think.”
“Lady, I…”
“Call me Eskra. Most people do.”
“Lady Eskra, my lord – my overlord desires me to ask…”
Eskra looked him up and down, her expression unreadable. “Your lord has a proposal for me?” she asked finally. “Another one. Well. At least you’re an Alban. That makes a change. I might be asked what I think for once.” She finished with the snow, looked at it, curled her lip in faint disgust and dropped it to the ground. “This proposal. Can it wait?”
“Er, yes. Probably.”
“Good.” And she stalked off as though there weren’t five dead or noisily wounded men strewn around her. Given what they had threatened to do to her, Bayrd doubted if she cared. He watched her go, and swallowed nervously. The nerves were not because he had just seen what a wizard could do, but because his hands were sweating inside their armoured gloves, and a peculiar sensation had started churning in his blood. It was a feeling he recognized, and had hoped – though never dared to dream – that he would feel again. Least of all here and now. The last and only time had been on the day he met his second wife for the first time. The only day in all his life when all the carefully learned cynical controls had lost their grip. The only day he ever fell in love.
Until now.
Bayrd shook his head and licked dry, crusted lips with a tongue that was equally dry. Of all the things that might have happened! he thought, trying to be wryly amused about it and not succeeding any better than the last time, this is the only one I never expected. Never rehearsed. Never even considered…
Bayrd looked at the drying blood on his hands, and shuddered. Of all the courtship displays he might have made, why did it have to be this one? Saving a lady’s life sounded very good in the old tales, but somehow they always managed to skim past the grim details of what that saving might involve for those she was saved from. He walked back to Yarak and patted the mare’s nose, stared at the distant snow as though hoping its unblemished whiteness concealed some sort of answer, and finally put Albanak’s and Lord Gerin’s proposal out of his mind for the nest few hours. Because if Eskra was agreeable, and he could summon up enough nerve, he might well make her a proposal of his own…
9. - Shadows
Eskra came back a few minutes later. There was a square satchel of scuffed brown leather slung over one shoulder, and she was leading the string of six remaining horses that Bayrd had guessed were tethered somewhere nearby. “These are yours,” she said, indicating them with a nod of her head. “You won them. And you deserve them.” She hesitated, colouring a little. “You saved my life.”
Blushes or not, it was something of an improvement on the cool ‘thank you – I think’ of their first exchange. Bayrd suspected she was unaccustomed to thanking anyone for favours or kindnesses, however minor; for the simple reason that she seldom received any. It might have been because she was a woman, or because she was a wizard, or maybe for both reasons. The attitudes of the Prytenek and Elthanek warrior aristocracy – or the thugs who passed for them – was a mystery which he had no especial desire to unravel.
“I didn’t,” he said. “If that one had decided to kill you, I was too far away to do anything about it.”
“All right. You distracted him. The distraction let me deal with him. That saved my life. Therefore you saved my life. Or do you want to argue some more?” There wasn’t the grin he might have expected from Mevn, or even the flicker of annoyance that was the other side of that coin. Eskra didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She knew she was right.
“Point taken,” said Bayrd, offering her a small salute. “I agree. The conclusion is proved.”
“Good. Now. What next…?”
Bayrd shrugged. “Food,” he said. “And fire. I’m cold. Unless you’ve something else to do?” Dammit, but that laconic briskness was infectious.
Eskra stared at him for long enough that he began to wonder what she might be thinking; but then she nodded. “Food is good. Fire too.” Her gaze shifted past Bayrd’s shoulder to where the man with the shattered kneecap still wailed out in the snow, and she pointed with one open hand towards the lord’s-man. “And some quiet.”
Hoping that the movement wasn’t obvious, but not especially concerned one way or the other, Bayrd leaned out of the way. He didn’t look around as her hand closed to a fist, even when the wailing stopped as abruptly as if… As if a hand had closed around the Prytenek’s throat and choked the sound to silence.
“He wouldn’t have walked again,” said Eskra. Her voice revealed nothing of what went on in her mind. “And the crows would have had his eyes by evening. Another day of life was no kindness.” She gave Bayrd’s tsepan a thoughtful look, as though wondering why he hadn’t put the weapon to its proper use, then shrugged and strode away without another word.
It was his arrow that had crippled the man, and it was his obligation – and if necessary his tsepan dirk – to see him out of distress one way or the other. Eskra’s lack of comment was a courtesy he didn’t really deserve, and it was one he wouldn’t have received from any Alban kailin of his own rank. They would have taken pains, and maybe some malicious delight, in pointing out the duty he had owed, and would have gone on to say more about the woman and sorcerer who had done what Bayrd ar’Talvlyn could not.
Quite apart from her ruthless streak, and the fluttering inside him that Mahaut had joked about and called ‘the cudgel’, because even though it might feel like a butterfly’s wings or the touch of a feather, it was as hard to ignore as the stroke of a stick, Bayrd found himself starting to like her. That was the thing: there was liking, and loving, and lusting, and they were three different facets of any relationship that a sensible man or woman soon learned to recognize – and to keep separate, if necessary. He had learned that through experience, and was fortunate so little of it had been bitter.
Bayrd had liked Lorey, his first wife, and still liked her now; but he had never loved her. Their arranged marriage-of-alliance had been too cold-blooded for that. He had loved Mahaut, and had liked simply being in her company; the lust between them had been a pleasant extra that waxed and waned with their moods. With Mevn ar’Dru it was liking and lust, with no love involved to muddy the water. There was not, and had never been, any long-term commitment involved. When she married, or he married again, they would still remain as good friends as they were now.
While Eskra…
Eskra was a sorcerer, or a wizard, or both; he would find out the proper definition eventually. Eskra was all business when she wanted to be, or when, such as now, she was covering for the sort of fright and shakiness that her pride wouldn’t allow her to show. She was also lethal when she had to be, and Bayrd had only to listen to the sudden silence, or turn his head and look at the handprinted rock beside the old fortress gate, to gain plenty of evidence for that.
There was a birdlike quality to the quickness of her speech and movement, and to the sharp delicacy of her features; but she was no sparrow. Instead, she was like a hawk Bayrd had once seen, a kestrel, all red-brown plumage and sharp bright eyes. Eskra was just the same, her own dark red-brown hair clipped short around her ears in a style that said little about Elthanek fashions for women, but a great deal about her own practical turn of mind. The hawk’s eyes had been black and hot, hers were blue and cool, but the intensity of their regard remained the same. She had the same way of looking at things, or more unnervingly, at people, as Bayrd’s long-dead grandfather, who the family had said would have stared through a rock rather than take the trouble to walk round it. Her
nose was not that of the hawk she resembled in so many other respects, being short and straight instead of hooked – Bayrd was to learn she had a habit of sighting down the bridge of it as though taking aim with a crossbow – and her mouth was small, with lips more thin than full and well-suited to the short, sharp manner of her speech.
Eskra was no great beauty in the accepted meaning of sensual face and long legs and curved figure, but there was a mind like a razor in there, and a glamour that hung about her in the oldest and truest sense of the word. She looked, and sounded, and behaved like what she was: a wielder of Power.
“You didn’t come here to just look for me,” said Eskra bluntly, between licking the grease of a grilled strip of bacon off her fingers. “So why?”
The bacon had been smoked a deep russet – as well as dried and salted, which Bayrd had suggested to Youenn Kloatr was somewhat extreme – and it smelt very good. What smelt and tasted even better, despite the faint flavour of turpentine it had acquired from a winter of dining on pine-needles, was the white wood-grouse he had shot on the way back from recovering his pack-horse. It had been a fluke, he being more likely to miss than to hit such a target, but Bayrd had no intention of admitting it. He was out to impress, and if keeping his mouth shut about how lucky that snap-shot had been would further his cause, he was going to be as quiet as a newly filled-in grave. Between them, the grouse and the bacon gave him the excuse for a few extra seconds of nibbling and chewing before he had to come up with an answer to Eskra’s question.
She wasn’t quite that patient. “Your lord’s proposal,” the sharp voice rapped. “What did he want? Intelligence? Information? Or a traitor?”
That was when a scrap of bacon went the wrong way down Bayrd’s throat. He had already manfully stifled his chuckle at the concept of some of the Alban lords sending their trusted emissaries out to gather intelligence. Why look in foreign lands for what’s so hard to find at home…? But that mention of a traitor was less funny, and far too close to his original instructions: not just to find a sorcerer, but one who was willing to betray his own people for the sake of offered gold and power and privilege.