by David Keck
Durand was about to answer when hoofbeats caused him to turn.
A rider broke from the low hills to the west. Maybe it was the light, but he galloped as though there were no army before him, careering into their long shadows without so much as checking his pace. Duke Leovere spurred a dozen Yrlaci knights into the man’s path, ready to strike him down.
At the last, however, the stranger seemed to understand what was before him.
“Beware of ambush! Watch the hills!” Durand roared, and he charged out to meet the stranger with Garelyn at his side.
Duke Leovere had a fist in the man’s bridle, fighting to manage both man and mount. The man wore a knight’s gear. He was bloody, terribly slashed over the face and shoulders. Through the clotted mess, it looked like even the riveted mail was torn. He was small for a knight with a beard that might have been red and eyes like flint buttons. He strained at Leovere’s hand.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
He jerked his reins and must have driven his spurs deep, for his charger nearly lunged free.
“Here, you fool,” snapped Garelyn. “Open your eyes! There are a thousand men watching. Do you think they’ll all run at your say-so?”
The man boggled and twisted, but finally mastered himself enough to say, “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Garelyn swung his horse in close, knee to knee with the man; he was a good head taller. “Me, I am the Duke of Garelyn. Behind me, you’ll find the Host of Gireth. What do you mean by all this? Who are you, eh? That’s a better question!”
Durand watched the man try once more to master himself. There were clean white edges upon the cuts in the man’s face and neck. His hair hung in gummy coils.
“I was with Beoran.” He swallowed, not speaking his own name or titles. “The Hells have opened and devils walk the earth. They are behind me, I swear it.”
“Ah,” said Garelyn. “So you have met our thralls, then.”
The man gaped at them. “Thralls? Aye, thralls. We rode to meet Eodan’s Host. They’d made good time. They couldn’t have come all the way from Windhover. Maybe from Mornaway or Cape Erne. We were guessing.
“At nightfall, we camped. Our scouts: they’d seen him. Maybe half a league, at Merecrop. We had pickets out. Then, it was madness. Something fell upon the Host of Windhover—God knows what.”
“You saw this?” asked Durand.
“Our scouts came in screaming, but our prince, he hardly blinked.” The man’s mouse-dark eyes glistened, clearly brim-full of memories. “He’d been keeping a vigil, all in iron. And he was in his saddle before the riders could tell their tale. We were all Sons of Atthi, he said, then we were off into the dark, men hiking mail coats over their heads.” He looked down. There were no boots on the man’s feet.
“Biedin rode to free his brother?” asked Garelyn.
The little knight mashed his eyes shut. “And then we were on them. Such things, all blood. Giants, stunted things, beasts and vermin like men. I—” His hand, seemingly of its own will, scrabbled at his shoulders, the bloody mass of his face. “Something— It landed on my back, clawing, its lips in my ear, shrieking like a child on fire. I could not think for pain and—I rode, trying—trying to outrace it. I—”
Garelyn was shocked. “What are you saying?”
But Durand needed to hear what the man had seen. He needed to know what was left of the Atthians. “Here,” he said, jostling between Leovere and the knight, trying to look the man in the face. “The Eye of Heaven has driven the thing away.” He put both hands on the slick sides of the stranger’s head. “The Host of the Great Council? The men of Windhover? How many have survived?” In the man’s answer could be the doom of Errest the Old. The doom of them all.
“I do not know,” the man spluttered. “The thing on my back, it—”
Garelyn straightened. “You left those men? You left them alive in the face of the enemy?” No one could deny the truth they saw in the man’s wide-eyed stammer. “You do not know their doom because you fled and saw nothing.”
Durand dropped his hands. He was about to protest; they’d all seen too much.
But the Duke of Garelyn had drawn his sword, and in one dread stroke he took the craven knight’s head—and the forefinger from one of the man’s warding hands.
The corpse slid from its saddle.
“Has there not been enough?” Leovere snarled. His face was a bloody mask.
“No,” said Garelyn. He slid his sword through a pinch of his cloak to clean it. “He could not live. Not with better men dead behind him.”
Leovere’s mouth was a tight line. “I see.”
Durand clenched his teeth. Here was another man dead at his account. Thousands, maybe. “Hells,” he said. “Enough of this!”
He looked into the west. This was the direction from which the dead man had come. Already, kites and crows hung in the air, circling in their hundreds. Durand even spotted his own Rooks, much nearer, but perched by the same track.
So close had the enemy come. In the night, the Hornbearer had struck across the fields and fallen upon the princes.
He was surprised to see Almora practically at his elbow; Garelyn’s barbaric stroke had adorned her cloak with spots of red.
“Durand Col,” she said. “We must learn what has become of Prince Biedin and his brother. Of the Host of Errest.” And she was right. A ride of half a league would tell them the fate of Errest the Old. There would be survivors, or there would not. A chance still existed.
* * *
IN NO TIME, they reached a rise that stormed with kites and crows.
“We are near to Merecrop Well,” said Heremund. “There’s a story about an abbey round a spring. Meant to be holy. Or the opposite. There will be a new tale of Merecrop now.”
Almora nodded Durand onward. And he, with the grim Duke Leovere and a few of the vanguard, mounted the rise.
In a muddy field, he beheld five acres of slaughter. Living men sat among corpses and floundering horses. Some knights were dragging torn comrades into grisly windrows. Some prayed Dawn Thanksgiving. Others wandered, unseeing, while the carrion birds spun crazily overhead.
“There is Prince Biedin, I think,” said Durand, and Leovere nodded. The prince stood in the midst of an armed knot of men. It hadn’t been an hour since the Eye of Heaven would have driven the maragrim into the ground, and every man stood in the posture of a last stand.
Durand and his party rode, wallowing down into a battlefield where the living looked as witless as Durand’s Lost followers, and there were so many surcoats and banners, cloaks and pennons plastered in the mud that it seemed like a whole kingdom had sunk into the mire.
Leovere was pale.
They came to the ring of Biedin’s last knights; Durand bowed low as he reined in before the prince.
Biedin, however, only stared.
“Your Grace,” prompted Durand, as gently as he could.
In time, the gaunt prince rubbed the hollows of his cheeks. His dull eyes swiveled.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Your Grace, I am Durand Col.” He chose not to remind the man of Acconel.
“Durand Col…” He stared at Durand, then winced. There was a hopeless twitch, nothing like a smile.
“They are under our feet, even now,” said Biedin. His men had hardly let their blades sag. Durand looked over the torn earth, the thousand curls of muck and shadow where the maragrim would be teeming. “Cracks in the ground. Fissures. Shadows under stones.” Biedin twitched a glance eastward. “It was the Eye of Heaven. Nothing else.”
“No, Your Grace.” Durand knew the dull stupor that this man must feel. So many had died on his orders. He had saved lives, perhaps, but his men had paid. Still, Durand saw that many men had survived. Hundreds, at least. And he had need of soldiers.
“Your Grace, does your brother yet live?”
Biedin frowned in irritation, but pointed to a spot where, a stone’s throw from them, a smaller island of las
t-standers watched from a rampart of corpses. A tall blond man had stepped from these men and was reeling toward Biedin’s men; dozens of his own men straggled after. On the blond man’s chest, he bore the clenched arrows of Windhover. And, though he was blond, Durand saw in his face a reflection of Ragnal and Biedin.
“Who are they, Biedin?” said the newcomer.
By way of answer, Biedin glanced sharply at Durand.
“Your Grace.” Durand nodded. “We are Yrlac and Gireth. Household guard from Mornaway and Garelyn. The Dukes of Garelyn and Yrlac. And Lady Almora, heiress of Gireth.”
Eodan shook his head. Up close, he resembled Ragnal. He wore a heavy mustache that gave him some of Ragnal’s leonine expression.
“This is some joke of the Powers,” he said. “An hour ago, these men prayed for someone like you. Now we want to dig graves.” Durand could not help but think of the thralls under the earth and the distance to Eldinor.
“No,” Durand said. “There is not time.”
“Who the devil are you, sir, exactly?” bristled Eodan though few of his men had strength enough to lift their blades.
In the east, then, Durand’s own people were cresting the rise. Shadows scissored over the battlefield, over Biedin, over Eodan and his men. It seemed to wake the prince.
“I am Durand Col, of Gireth, Your Grace. I brought men from Gireth, Mornaway, Garelyn, and Yrlac. All under arms.”
“Yrlac?” The big man lifted his chin. “Four dukedoms? You would’ve been welcome.” He glanced to the lines of Biedin’s force. “As was my brother when he came riding.”
Durand nodded cautiously.
“Now, all that is left is to set fires on this ground. To turn a river. To bury the thralls under ten fathoms of stone!” Eodan clutched his face. “I brought so many. Now so many are—” He looked around at his followers. The limbs of men and horses jutted from the ground for acres in all directions. Eodan had brought them to this place, these hunters and knights and yeoman of Windhover.
“Prince Eodan,” said Durand, looking down upon the man from his saddle. “We are many. We have seen the Hornbearer. We have faced his thralls. Your Grace, we have crossed Hesperand. Night and day we have ridden, and lost men every league. But it is to Eldinor we ride. Reilan is waiting his vigil under stone with none but priests and serving men to defend him.”
“Eldinor,” said Eodan as though the idea had only dawned on him. “They will rise from this torn earth and rush the last leagues to Eldinor.”
“We will meet them there,” said Durand.
“The boy’s in Eldinor. Three days under stone,” said Eodan. A brigand’s grin split the prince’s beard and he turned to the few dozen men behind him. “We will go to Eldinor. We will go to Eldinor and await the Hornbearer.”
Prince Eodan turned back, ready to speak to his brother, but the man was gone.
“What is this?”
Duke Leovere pointed: The army of the south was parting for the solitary prince, though he neither spoke a word nor raised his hand. Biedin was riding to Eldinor without a sound. With this example of courage, all of the magnates who had survived from the Council Host—Beoran, Highshields, Cape Erne—bullied their men to their feet.
Eodan laughed with astonishment. “It seems that my brother is riding to Eldinor whether we join him or not. And I, for one, will not be left behind!”
With that, the survivors staggered to their feet and set off on Biedin’s heels, leaving the Host of Fellwood slavering in the cracked earth behind them.
30
The Bay of Eldinor
Biedin rode in grim and resolute silence; he seemed a hero from another age, and no man dared to offer him company at the head of the column. The four hosts followed without a word, drawn by the solitary prince.
It was after Noontide Lauds that dread began to settle upon them, as men still in the blood-stiffened clothing of the night’s battle realized that darkness must return. From time to time, a man would step from the column and settle at the roadside, accepting the death that must come when the Hornbearer overtook him. Slowly, the War Host of Errest the Old became a long and straggling thing with Prince Biedin farther and farther before them.
Durand and the rest of the commanders watched Biedin’s cloak flapping. The thing moved as if it were a fitful sleeper.
Durand took a deep breath and squinted back over the host. “At this rate, Biedin will reach Eldinor alone.” And strung out like beads, the Sons of Atthi would be gobbled up by the Hornbearer’s thralls.
“We are afraid, I think. Nothing more,” said Eodan. “I cannot fathom how so many have agreed to march into the Hornbearer’s path again today. I’m not sure how we’ll bear the dark again. We should all have been mauled to death in that field. And I find that I cannot quiet my hands.” He checked to see that the nearest soldiers were looking elsewhere, and then held up a trembling hand.
Durand blinked at the unwanted images that flickered before his mind’s eye, and swallowed hard to quiet the fluttering in his guts. “This pace will kill them all, brave or not—and without the least hope of victory. The last man in the column will be the first to meet the maragrim. A man who drags his feet might as well be riding headlong at the Hornbearer. If we cannot reach Eldinor, we should send the men into the hills.”
Berchard still rode with Heremund. The one-eyed knight smiled. “Heremund, you’re meant to be a skald, are you not? D’ye know that hunting song? The one with the horns?”
“The Hellebore song? It’s meant for dawn, ain’t it?”
“I can hardly tell the difference, and our foes’ve little love for the Eye of Heaven. Let’s have it!”
Heremund smiled up at dukes and princes, and sang out from the back of his donkey:
The bright horn it calls us a-hunting to ride
we’ll rest us at evening by the cool water side.
O merry the hunter and merry the horn
That calls us a-riding and brings us this morn.
There were chuckles all around. Garelyn sang out and then his men and soon all of Gireth and Yrlac and even the Hosts of Windhover and the Great Council were singing too. That song and then another and another rolled around the company. Songs from Windhover vied with songs from Beoran and Yrlac, and even gloomy Highshields had a grim song about the spearing of a ram that had the men laughing.
The War Host of Errest the Old half-swaggered for an hour while the Eye of Heaven was still high.
* * *
THE AFTERNOON PASSED, and near sunset, Durand sent Vadir forward with Ailric and a hundred men to search out the Bay of Eldinor. They needed to know how far off the city lay and whether the tide was in or out. In Durand’s heart, he had been certain that they would see the towers of Eldinor and the waves of the bay glinting before nightfall, but darkness would soon overtake them on the road, and there was Biedin still riding ahead with no sign of the holy city.
They prayed the Plea of Sunset on the march. And soon, the last light was ebbing from the Vault of Heaven.
Berchard cast about. “It is growing dark, isn’t it? It is not my old eye? Those men, they are singing the Last Twilight.”
“With an especial passion, yes,” said Heremund.
Soon, they began to hear screeches in the leagues behind them. Once, a flight of night birds shot over the company. Somewhere a dog started barking.
“Where are we now?” Durand demanded of anyone listening. The whole circle of commanders, lords, and ladies rode nearby.
Prince Eodan spoke. “We are some three leagues from Scrivensands and the bay. Many years have passed since I was welcome in my father’s city, but still I know the lands where I rode as a youth, I think. I take that smudge of shadow yonder for Haychat Wood, where there are red deer. And that dark village across the fields west is likely Ashwells, where there is a good alehouse all year long. I would be sure if the Eye of Heaven was yet with us.”
“Vadir and the rest have been gone hours.” Eldinor must be somewhere up the road.
He remembered the city in its broad bay. At high tide, Eldinor was unassailable, floating like a diadem upon the waves. At low tide, an army could simply cross the flats and pluck the city from the mud. The tide would make all the difference.
Durand tried to set frustration aside. “If the tide is in,” he said, “we will need every boat on the bay ready when we reach the shore.” He tried to fix the distance across the bay in his mind’s eye. It would take time to row it, and probably too much time at that. “We will want to get everyone off in one go if we can. We want no one waiting on the shore when the thralls come.”
“That is true enough,” allowed Prince Eodan.
The prince tilted his head. “Here is something else to think of. It might be wise to pass the word to the banner knights that we are very near to Eldinor now. The men will be glad to hear it, and it might even be true.”
“What use can these men be if they are weary to the point of death?” said Deorwen.
“We must pray for high tide,” said Durand. “If the tide is in, we might hope to rest. If the bay is full, we will cross to the city while the Hornbearer paces on the shore. It may be that dawn arrives before the maragrim can make their crossing.”
“A night’s sleep and then a stout wall to fight behind!” said Eodan. He gave a smile to Almora. “We might hold out until the patriarchs are finished with my nephew, and that would serve the Hornbearer right!”
But Deorwen was not comforted. “And if the tide is out, Your Graces?”
Before anyone could find the words to answer, Almora spoke. “If the tide is out when we reach the bay, then we will have no need to bother with the silly boats, will we?”
It was then that they finally heard the beating of hooves in the road ahead and Ailric appeared, jouncing out of the dark.
“Your Graces, Lords and Ladies,” he managed.
“The city?” said Eodan. “By Heaven, tell us, boy!”
“It is a league to the shore.”
Eodan was smiling then. “If these devils do not trip us up too badly, we might see the city in an hour’s time!”