Damsel Knight

by Sam Austin

  He’s staring over them, down toward the city wall. She follows his gaze and sees - nothing. The slums burn fierily, wind flicking the flames this way and that. Maybe the fire has figured out it’s trapped there in that place between stone buildings and wall, and it’s trying desperately to escape before it dies.

  But he’s not looking at the slums. He’s looking beyond that, eyes tracing back and forth above the far away wall.

  “What is it?”

  He flinches at the sound, then flinches again as he glances back at the golden road, seeing how close they are to the enemy. His brown eyes hold a complicated tide of emotions she doesn’t know how to interpret. Neven, who she used to think was so simple to work out. When did he become such a stranger to her? Or is it her who changed and became the stranger?

  He grabs her arm - her good one she’s glad to see - then slows down his footsteps until they fall to the back of the crowd. It wouldn’t have been easy with a formation like the barbarians have, but in their rough gaggle of men and boys it’s too simple.

  “I don’t like this,” he says. “There’s something wrong.”

  Relief floods through her. This is something she understands. He’s scared. “It’s a battle Neven. Just fight honourably and everything will be fine.”

  She’s heard stories of the King bringing back people who die honourably in battle when he’s able. If they win and their heads remain intact, death might not even be the end. All they have to do is fight loyally.

  A bitter thought pops into her head. Her father had served loyally and honourably for years. The King hadn’t brought him back. She tries to shake it away, but it clings like quick mud.

  “It’s not that I’m frightened Boone,” Neven says through gritted teeth. “I’m no coward. It’s. Watch above the wall. Watch what flies over it.”

  She watches. The lighter debris flies every which way above the flames. A large swatch of what she thinks used to be part of a wall flies abruptly over the city wall, then drifts downward and slowly back over the wall to the flames.

  “See.” Neven jabs a finger toward the sight. “That’s what’s wrong. Right there.”

  She blinks several times before something clicks. “You said some of the slum materials had magic to make them burn faster.”

  Neven nods. “And the city wall lets magic out but-”

  “It’s not supposed to let magic in.” She frowns, looking at the barbarian army, trying to fit them into this equation.

  The debris is moving in and out of the city walls, even parts that don’t look burned. Maybe this is a coincidence. Maybe the flying pieces are newer without magic, all the other pieces burned. Or maybe Neven’s right and something’s very wrong here. Something to do with why the other army is standing right in the middle of the golden road, far from any cover, and doing nothing.

  They haven’t fired yet, even though she’s pretty sure their shields have a better range than most of Sir Angus’s bowmen. Why? Because they want them to come closer. Why?

  “The barbarians broke the barrier on the wall,” Neven says, still gripping her arm. “I don’t know why they did that, but if they can break that barrier, then they can break the barrier on the palace wall as well. There’s no protection. They didn’t even leave anyone on the wall. If it breaks, then Ness and the others are as helpless as children.”

  If the outer wall is broken, then Neven is right about everything but one detail. The palace does have protection. They’re the palace’s protection. And if she were an invading army, the first thing she’d want to do is take them out.

  She knows why they broke the outer wall.

  Shrugging Neven’s grip off, she weaves her way through the chaos Sir Angus’s men call a formation. Sir Julius is at the very front with the other horses, riding his white mare beside Sir Angus’s black stallion. A few of the red soldiers on horseback have their bows at the ready, but most of the archers walk between the horses, arrows nocked and waiting for the other side to make a move.

  “Sir Julius!” Boone shouts, pushing aside those in her way. They grumble, some snapping at her with tension in their voices.

  He’s too far ahead, through both groups of marching men, and in front of all the horses. Cold shoots down her spine. It’s too late.

  The barbarians don’t fire from their shields. Their side doesn’t fire their arrows.

  Sir Angus calls out a command and the horses charge forward. A heartbeat later the volley of arrows the archers were holding shoot over the horses into the bulk of the enemy. The enemy still doesn’t move.

  Boone stops, frozen. Old men and boys push past her, some trembling, but all more eager to chase honour than drop their weapons and run. One boy younger than her shoves her as he passes, calling her a coward.

  “Wait,” she says, too late, and too quiet. They don’t wait. They run after the knights. The horses reach the enemy, and the enemy doesn’t move.

  Then the enemy does move all at once, as if they’ve practised this a thousand times. They spin like dancers, and raise their shields to avoid the blows from the mounted soldiers. And then everything changes.

  Somehow they swap places with the mounted soldiers. Not all of them, but the ones who struck a blow at least. Though as she watches many of the barbarians on the ground disappear between one blink and the next. Barbarians dressed in tan uniform sit on top of the horses, and on the ground stand red uniformed soldiers holding bronze shields. They drop the shields quickly as if scared at what other magic they may possess.

  Magic. They broke the outer wall so they could ambush the remaining soldiers with magic.

  Sir Angus’s men on foot rush in, pulling the barbarians from the horses and running them through with swords. Something in her lightens at the same moment it clouds over with confusion. Most of the mounted barbarians don’t fight back. They seem surprised at being attacked. Some yell, though she can’t hear the words. Some even seem to plead for their lives.

  It’s a mass of fighting and confusion. She should be there, fighting with them. She grips her sword tight, stepping forward.

  Neven grabs her, this time by the wrong arm. She shakes him off quickly enough, a thought in the back of her head telling her she’ll have to do something about it at some point. Cure it, cover it, cut it off. It can wait until after the battle. They’re winning, and she knows she should be happy about that, but something’s not right. She knows Neven senses it too.

  “Did something go wrong with their magic?” She asks, every muscle in her body humming with the need to run toward battle. If they finish the battle and see her standing here, they’ll label her as coward for the rest of her life. She could lose her chance to be a knight. But one small but warm part of her heart says no. Neven says stay away from the battle. Trust him.

  It takes everything she has to keep her feet rooted and listen to that voice.

  “Why would they cast a spell, just to move them a few feet?” Neven asks, gripping his own chipped sword in the way she taught him to before starting a fight. His shield is held ready, as if expecting some invisible foe to charge at them.

  She turns it over in her head, quickly yet thoroughly. Answer. They wouldn’t. So either the spell was meant to move them further, or - or what? There’s no answer. Irritation burns through her, as bad as the hollow pounding behind her eyes, and the raw choking feeling in her throat that had been there since the fire. This is her battle too. She should be with them, not standing back and looking at this like some impossible puzzle.

  “Boone,” Neven says, his voice pleading, already knowing what she’s going to do.

  She shakes her head, stalks down the golden road with her father’s sword in one hand and shield hanging from the other. She hopes her cold arm follows her orders this time. There’s a hesitancy in her steps that she can’t justify. She’s just about to shove it aside by forcing herself to run into the mess of people, and swords, and screams in front of her when she sees something.

  Not everyone is fighting
. A mass of her own men break off from the others, most of them wearing the red uniform of soldiers. Sir Angus leads them, walking up the golden road toward her with purpose in his steps. He walks with a kind of steady grace she associates with high born women who are taught for many years to find that balance between perfect poise and absolute deference. Only the balance is off. The deference is there, but much less than it would be - which makes sense since Sir Angus is no woman. But -

  But Neven’s right. There’s something very wrong here. Sir Angus doesn’t walk like that. He walks with a glower, and swings his body in a way that makes him look even bigger than his large size. Every movement is a way to express power, and strength. She’s not sure he can show deference if he tried.

  Neven steps to her side. His sword is raised though the arm that holds it trembles. “His eyes,” he whispers.

  Then she sees it. Then it makes sense. A feeling colder than the lost ones lodges in her belly. She raises her sword.

  Sir Angus’s dark eyes are a pale blue.

  It’s not Sir Angus, and behind them, many of their eyes greys, blues, and greens. Those are not Sir Angus’s men. Nor she suspects are they men of the circle where darker eye colours dominate.

  The barbarians didn’t swap places with the soldiers. They swapped bodies.

  “Stop there!” She shouts as loud as she can, hoping someone from the battle or the wall will notice. A sinking feeling tugs at her stomach. There are no men on the wall, and those in battle are too busy taking down their own comrades. “Your disguises don’t fool me!”

  Sir Angus laughs, and a wave on unreality washes over her. It’s a woman’s laugh, coming out of the mouth of a man. Looking again at those pale blue eyes, she thinks of the woman barbarian with the red hair who spared them on the way back from the fire. Is that who’s hiding under Sir Angus’s face.

  They stand, two boys against over fifty men. Impossible odds. To move aside would let them at the wall, and if they break this one the same way they did the outer one, then the palace will have no protection against man or magic.

  “Stand aside,” the woman’s voice says, Sir Angus’s mouth moving. And she sounds… warm, comforting. Like honey cakes and warm milk. Sharp soap and clean clothes. Familiar. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

  A high pitched whine shreds the air. Boone glances over at Neven in time to see him rock back as the metal shooters around his arms discharge. His sword clangs as it falls onto the golden road.

  Two men either side of fake-Sir Angus are thrown backward in a splatter of blood. A lot of blood. It splashes before Neven’s feet like paint, and seeps from the fallen men, crawling down the golden road toward the battle where the ground is already thick with it.

  If they still had their bronze shields, she thinks they’d be blown away at that moment, but they don’t. They advance, swords out that she sees now are too thin and dark to be from the circle. They’re like her father’s sword, only smaller.

  She doesn’t want to be cut into pieces by swords that remind her of her father.

  Panic claws at her, flashing her whole body from as hot as the slum fire to as numb as her arm. Neven snatches his sword up from the ground, and she grabs him, running for the palace. They’re not running away, they’re - they are running away, but she doesn’t have time to analyse what that means.

  All she knows is she doesn’t want to die.

  The gate is closed, thick wood, and on the other side of that even thicker iron. They hadn’t marched far before they’d stopped short of the battle like cowards. It still takes too long to get there, uphill and running from barbarians. Her muscles tense for the blow she’s sure is about to fall. Her arm screams at her to turn and swing her sword, while her legs scream to keep moving, keep running.

  Neven reaches the gate first, slamming his fists into the solid wood with an ineffectual sound. The shooters stay standing up on his arms. Out of ammo she thinks, or he would’ve tried them again. “Put men on the wall!” He shouts. “We need men on the wall!”

  He doesn’t ask for the gates to open, because he can’t she realises, her stomach sinking so far down it feels like she’s standing on it. If that gate opens, then fake-Sir Angus and his-her men can walk through. No one will stop them.

  A chunk of wood disappears from the gate and an old man’s face peers out through the gold circles. His wide scared eyes hover over them, then skate over the barbarians approaching. Some of the fear seems to fade, and he leans back to yell “open the gate” to someone inside.

  “No!” Neven shouts, shield hanging limply from one arm as his fingers search through his pockets. He digs out small smooth stones and slots them clumsily into the metal shooters. “Don’t open the gate! Don’t open it. They’re not our soldiers. They’re barbarians.”

  “They cast a spell.” Boone glances back at the barbarians, close enough to speak themselves. If it were really Sir Angus he could end this all now with one word, but it’s not. One word of that woman’s voice would be convincing enough for the old man to put archers on the walls, and fill the barbarians with arrows.

  Instead one of the men on Sir Angus’s right steps forward. “The battle is ours,” he says. The words are rough, with a slight lilt that reminds her of her father’s voice. “You may open the gates.”

  “No.” Boone hits her shield against the wood in frustration. “It’s a trick.”

  Neven nods earnestly, almost dropping the second stone before it slots into place. “Just look at their eyes.”

  The old man narrows his eyes. Suspicion screws up his features as he scans the group of soldiers. He pushes away from the hole with a huff with the words “the city wall doesn’t let magic in.”

  The wooden gate creaks open. Behind it the gate with the golden rings starts to do the same.

  Boone fights the urge to curse. Apparently being male doesn’t mean everyone listens to you.

  Neven squeaks and the metal shooters whine and fire again. This time the barbarians lift the battered shields in time. With a sick feeling in her stomach she wonders where they got them from. The uniforms and faces have to be fake, but if they’re using shields then they have to be real.

  One stone hits a shield with a solid bang. The other rides high and gets the man through the head. She’s struck by how no hole appears on his face despite the blood running down, and once he falls, pooling beneath his head. The mask covers some things, but not others.

  “Gods,” the old man gasps, appearing in the small opening between the gates. “What are you kids-”

  Boone cuts off any further words by slamming her shield down on the man’s head. He slumps to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

  There are more voices behind him, questioning and fearful. They can’t go in there. Not to hide, and not to close the gates and man the walls themselves. It may only be wounded and feeble left behind, but they can still put up a fight against two boys.

  But they can’t let the barbarians go in there. That’s what they want. It’s unlikely they’d try to take a palace with only fifty men, so she guesses whatever needs to be done to break the spells on the wall has to be done from inside.

  “Close the gates!” The voice shouts from behind the barbarians. Sir Julius races up the golden road on his white mare, her flank red with blood, and her sides heaving. “Close those gates!”

  It’s enough for whoever’s behind the slowly opening gates to swear, tugging the old man from view, then starting the heavy gates on their way to closed. The fake Sir Angus starts forward with their men, the man who spoke before doing so again, ordering them to open the gates.

  Boone looks from her sword to her shield, then digs a hand in Neven’s pocket to grab a handful of stones. Throwing as hard as she can, she aims for faces. Out of her half a dozen stones, only two get around where she wants them to, but it’s enough of a distraction to make the barbarians pause and turn their way.

  Neven takes her lead, and turns out to have better aim than she’d expe
cted. Every one of his ammo bounces off somewhere around the eyes, and in one memorable case goes right down the throat of the guy trying to speak, causing him to choke and grasp at his neck. Then seeming bolstered by his success, he takes the blunted knife from his belt and throws that too, landing a solid stick in Sir Angus’s leg.

  The fake knight lets out a womanly sounding gasp, then covers her mouth with a huge hand. No red soaks his trousers, at least, no red they can see. Boone suspects the red is staining her tan trousers instead, under whatever magic is covering it.

  It takes their attention from the gate long enough for the inner rings of gold to click closed.

  The knight’s hands flick through the air, casting small silver somethings. Boone ducks behind her shield on instinct. The knives lodge themselves deep into the wood of the gate just as it shuts. A pained yelp makes her spin toward Neven, who clutches his shoulder tightly, still trying to hold onto his sword at the same time. Red trickles through his fingers. A little more to the left and the knife could’ve lodged firmly in his chest.

  All at once they aren’t two boys facing a group of men. They’re two boys, trapped against a wall, while barbarians out of some wives tale come to tear them apart.

  Sir Julius bears down on them, swinging his sword. Six soldiers fall before a swipe to the white mare’s chest makes her rear up, tossing the knight from his saddle. He lands, cat-like on his feet as the horse sprints away.

  “What’s going on down there?” Calls a lone voice from the wall. Nervous, frightened. No use to them.

  If there are any arrows, they’re just as likely to hit her, Neven and Sir Julius as they are the barbarians. And if Sir Julius and they are killed, then who’s to stop the barbarians from asking for the gate to be opened again, or finding another way in?

  She stands slightly in front of Neven, shield up to her chest. Her legs tingle, exposed. If she makes it through this with her squirehood attached, she’s going to ask Sir Julius for a shield that she can duck her whole body behind. Some armour too.