Brightly Burning

by Mercedes Lackey

  He held to consciousness and twisted the Karsite’s ankles until the man himself shouted in pain, then wrenched himself free of the Karsite somehow, still screaming in agony.

  He scrambled away over the snow on hands and knees, horrible pain making him want to curl himself into a ball and just lie there screaming. He heard a strange sound behind him, as if something very large and soft had plummeted out of the sky to land in the snow as he scrambled, blind and still howling with agony, toward the place where he thought the rest of them were—

  Teeth grabbed his collar and hauled him unceremoniously out of harm’s way, dropping him literally in Ilea’s lap.

  Only then did he fall into blessed unconsciousness.

  :LAN! Lan!:

  Lan ignored the mind-voice—until it resorted to a sort of mind-kick that finally got his attention.

  Shaken out of his entrancement, this time the mind-voice penetrated the wash of fire and the terrible joy.

  :Lan, enough! Pol needs you!:

  Oh, gods—He shook his head and wrenched himself out of the meld with the dragon, fighting to get his eyes open.

  Without his full attention feeding it, the dragon found itself quickly enchanted again by Kalira. Sullenly, it coiled itself deep inside his mind, and dropped into uneasy slumber. Jolted back into the real world, Lan opened his eyes on a black patch in the snow that held nothing, nothing but a bit of melted metal—not a body, not even bones. Nothing but ashes.

  Ilea sat on the bare road, Pol’s bloody head in her lap, a frown of fierce concentration in her face. The gash across Pol’s eyes closed even as Lan watched, but there was no doubt that the knife had cut right across Pol’s eyes, blinding him, perhaps forever.

  Gut-wrenching guilt hit him and nearly knocked him out of the saddle. Oh, gods, what have I done—

  “Don’t sit there feeling sorry for yourself,” Ilea snarled with a touch of hysteria in her voice, without looking up. “I need hot water and bandages, and I need them now. And a fire, before he goes into shock. And don’t wallow in guilt until after you’ve got it going.”

  Elenor was useless; that much was obvious; she knelt in the snow and sobbed into her hands next to her father. That left Lan and Tuck; Lan went for wood while Tuck slid off his Companion and emptied the contents of all the saddlebags onto the ground.

  When Lan returned with the wood, afoot now, with the wood piled onto Kalira’s back, Tuck had spread blankets over the snow and Pol lay on them, his face neatly bandaged. There was a strange scent in the air, not of burned meat, but a metallic scent, hot stone and scorched earth. Lan piled the wood near Pol and Ilea and ignited it, turning it into a roaring fire in an instant. As he went back for more wood, Ilea pushed a small pot holding clean snow near the flames to melt for water.

  When he returned the second time, Elenor was finally doing something, cleaning some of the blood off her father’s face and clothing and helping her mother, although she was sobbing as she worked. Tuck was off getting more wood himself.

  Ilea was on the verge of hysteria. “I can’t stop now!” she shouted at Elenor, in response to a tear-choked entreaty. “I am not going to let your father go blind! I will Heal him, I swear it, if I have to die trying!”

  At that, Elenor took her hands off her mother’s and grabbed Ilea’s shoulders, shaking her. “And what good will that do?” she shrieked, as Ilea went limp with surprise and her head jerked back and forth from the shaking. “You’ll kill him if you die!”

  That seemed to snap Ilea out of her crazed state. She stared at Elenor in shock, then the two of them fell into each other’s arms, weeping. Lan stared at them all, and it was only Kalira who snapped him out of his trance.

  :Drape blankets over all of them and get some more wood!: his Companion said harshly, then actually walked over to her sire and bit him on the neck. Satiran’s sagging head flew up. Lan didn’t hear what went on between them, but he didn’t wait to see anything more. Draping blankets over the sobbing women and over Pol, he escaped to the forest again, and a job he could understand.

  He went back, and back again, until he was stumbling through dusk that obscured everything in his path and was forced to give up. By then, Ilea was sleeping, and Elenor organizing a crude camp. The three Companions arranged themselves in three sides of a square around the blankets spread on the snow, lying down. Pol lay still unconscious, with his eyes bandaged and his head pillowed on Satiran’s flank, between Ilea and Kalira. The fire formed the fourth side of the square. Tuck wearily ate a handful of bread, and Elenor looked up at Lan’s entrance.

  “Get some sleep,” she said shortly, her voice nasal and thick with weeping. “If we can, we’ll have to leave in the morning. We’ve no food and no shelter; we can’t stay here.”

  Lan didn’t say anything; guilt devoured him and killed any appetite he might have had. He lay down obediently and turned his face away from Elenor, sure that he wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep all night.

  And he was right. He stared at Dacerie’s flank and the firelight flickering on it for candlemarks, stomach knotted with misery while the stars wheeled overhead. He heard Tuck lie down and eventually begin breathing deeply. He heard Elenor gently fall over sideways—

  When he looked, she was asleep, half-propped by Tuck’s body, up against Satiran’s shoulder.

  He sat up. :I’ll take care of the fire,: he told Satiran, Mindspeaking so as not to make a sound.

  Satiran nodded, ever so slightly, but did not reply. Lan found some relief from his guilt by making certain the fire burned evenly and without smoke, feeding it diligently as the stars paraded overhead.

  As dawn neared, he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “I’ll take over now,” Tuck said, giving him an understanding smile. He nodded, finally so dull with exhaustion he couldn’t feel anything. He curled up against Dacerie’s shoulder, and knew nothing more.

  HE woke to hear Pol’s voice.

  “—all right,” he said, as Lan started up, turning in his mentor’s direction. Pol’s head pointed toward Lan, and he managed a weak smile. “Lan, thank you.”

  “For what?” Lan responded harshly, scooting over to sit on his heels beside his mentor. The warmth of the fire bathed them both—and at least this fire smelled of wood smoke and pine, and not of burned flesh.

  “That will be enough of that,” Ilea snapped, swiveling her head to glare at him. “What’s better, blinded or half-burned? If you’d gotten the bastard before Pol started to get loose, would Pol have ended up cooking with him? What happened is done, and we’re all alive, and it could have been much worse.”

  Lan trembled anyway. The guilt was there; he couldn’t exactly wish it out of existence. He knew that if he had just not hesitated—

  It won’t happen that way again.

  Pol patted Ilea’s hand. “He’s done you a favor, my love,” the senior Herald said, with an attempt at a laugh. “They’re hardly going to allow me on a battlefield now.” Elenor choked on a sob, and he hugged her with his free arm.

  “‘The tempest ruined the orchard, but applewood makes a sweet fire,”’ Tuck quoted under his breath.

  “Exactly,” Pol replied.

  Ilea’s stare went right through Lan, as if she was daring him to display any more guilty feelings.

  “Rest,” she told Pol. “This is just temporary. I will Heal you.”

  But Pol said nothing, and Lan got a peculiar and gut-twisting feeling that Pol was far from confident that she would be able to do that, and was humoring her with his silence.

  Oh, gods—what have I done?

  Lan was happy to escape into the woods for yet more wood, although he couldn’t outrun his guilt.

  BY late afternoon, Pol was strong enough to drink something hot, and was insisting that he could and must ride.

  “No,” Ilea replied, although weakly; he was wearing her arguments down.

  “Yes,” he insisted. “I’ve ridden with worse wounds than this.” He did sound stronger, although there wa
s still an edge of pain in his voice.

  “And you were twenty years younger at the time,” she responded waspishly, trying to cover up the fact that she was weeping again.

  He shrugged and sat up slowly. “I don’t think I’ve lost too much blood, thanks to your quick work. We can’t stay here. Where there was one assassin, there may be more. We haven’t any more food and no shelter. And I can see well enough through Satiran’s eyes—”

  “How is that going to help?” Ilea asked.

  “I can see to ride,” was all he said. “Help me up.”

  To Lan’s astonishment, with Ilea and Elenor on either side of him, he got slowly to his knees. Satiran went to him immediately and knelt down beside him. With great effort, and Ilea’s help, he mounted. Ilea unpacked the straps meant to hold a wounded and unconscious Herald in the saddle, and strapped him in.

  Satiran lurched to his feet; hindquarters coming up first, then forequarters, as Pol controlled his swift intake of breath, producing the slightest hiss of pain.

  He stayed quietly in his saddle for a long time, as Satiran swung his head about. “Yes. This will be fine, I think. Ilea, come up behind me; I might need a little help with managing the pain.”

  How can he do this? Lan wondered. He’s blind! Shouldn’t he be crying or screaming or—something? As another stab of self-recrimination lanced through Lan, the bandaged head swung accurately to point in Lan’s direction.

  “Before you start in on berating yourself and deciding that you are the only one to blame for this, Satiran says to inform you that you have to take second place to him,” Pol told him then offered a hand to his wife.

  She refused it. Instead, she motioned to Tuck, who made a stirrup of his hands for her. She grabbed the high cantle of the saddle, stood in Tuck’s hand, and swung her free leg over Satiran’s rump up onto the pillion to ride astride, one arm carefully around her husband, the other gripping the cantle for her real support. Lan and Tuck cleaned up the hasty camp, extinguished the fire, and gathered up their belongings, stuffing them any way they would fit into the saddlebags and strapping them all on the pillion-pad of Tuck’s saddle.

  Elenor chose to ride behind Lan, who was very much of a mixed mind about that. But he wasn’t about to voice an objection; he didn’t exactly have a right to. Her arms closed around his waist, and she kept sniffling in his ear.

  “We’re leagues from the battlefield—how did a Karsite get here?” Tuck said aloud. “How did he pass the lines?”

  Ilea was the first to respond, and though her voice sounded controlled, Lan could see she was still white and tight-lipped. “Why drop down on us as if he was waiting for us? What was he shouting?”

  “Death to demons, or something like that,” Tuck supplied. “He couldn’t have been waiting for us, could he?”

  Pol put one hand on the saddle-pommel. “Let’s hold a moment. We need to let others know what happened to us, so it doesn’t happen to anyone else. Satiran?”

  The other two Companions moved forward to touch their noses to Satiran’s while Lan averted his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at Pol’s face or into Ilea’s swollen, bloodshot eyes.

  I will never hesitate again.

  Beneath him Kalira tensed with the effort of Mindspeaking; this was no ordinary Mindspeech; the three Companions had joined efforts so that Satiran could warn every other Companion within range of what had just happened—and they would, in turn, warn others.

  It didn’t take long; a few heartbeats, and Kalira relaxed again, then backed up, shaking her head and snorting.

  Only Pol and Satiran remained still a moment longer, and when Satiran moved, there were no signs in him of relaxation.

  :Lan,: Kalira said, tensing beneath him, :There’s trouble.:

  “We have—troubles ahead,” Pol said tensely, as Ilea responded to the words by wrapping her arm tightly around his chest and taking the reins from him with her right hand. “We have to get to the pass. Now.”

  “You can’t—” Ilea protested weakly.

  “Satiran can gallop and still keep me in the saddle,” Pol replied, though it was clear that he spoke through pain. “We don’t have a choice.”

  Ilea closed her mouth on further protests, just holding Pol tighter than before, as if she did not have as much confidence in Satiran’s ability as he did.

  Satiran moved into a gallop in a couple of strides with Tuck and Dacerie beside him; Kalira waited until Elenor was secure before doing the same. The headlong pace down the gloomy road left no time for thought, much less guilt, for Lan had all he could do to keep himself down over Kalira’s neck and balanced, since he had to compensate for Elenor.

  And it was at a gallop that they pounded into the army encampment, a candlemark before sunset.

  POL wanted nothing so much as to lie down. His head throbbed, the gash across his eyes felt like a burning brand, and he wanted so badly just to have the leisure to mourn his loss—

  But not now. There was duty, and there was Duty, and Lan was desperately needed. If Lan was needed, so was Pol.

  “I don’t care!” Ilea protested behind him, as someone helped her down out of his saddle. “I don’t care how much you need him! You get him a stretcher, and you take him there lying down, and I tell you when he’s spoken enough!”

  Pol wanted to protest but he couldn’t. How could he? He could barely sit astride his Companion, even with the help of all the straps. He let himself be taken down out of the saddle and assisted onto the stretcher—and as his head touched the pillow there, he felt tears of relief seeping into the bandage around his eyes.

  They carried him into the Lord Marshal’s tent. Now Lan was Pol’s eyes; all that time that they had spent linked so that Pol could show him the intricacies of his own Gift was serving a dual purpose.

  Ilea allowed him to sit up, but only with the aid of several pillows and folded blankets. They sat in the tent of the Lord Marshal himself; the Lord Marshal’s Herald watched them solemnly with an unidentifiable expression on his young face. This Herald Turag was a replacement. The Lord Marshal’s original Herald Marak had been one of the first casualties of the stand at White Foal Pass. Not dead, but so seriously wounded that he would be months in recovering, and probably lose a leg.

  “These new Sun-priests—we call them the Dark Servants—turned up a few days ago; they start in on their business at sunset, and these things howl around the tents all night long. Come morning, people are dead in their bedrolls—and the morale of our troops is being hammered,” the Lord Marshal said. The man looked very much as if his own morale was in jeopardy; there were huge circles beneath his eyes, and new lines of strain in his face. His thick, gray hair, tied back from his face in a utilitarian tail, was lank and brittle, and his beard hadn’t been trimmed or properly cared for in a fortnight.

  “We’re outnumbered, but more to the point, we’re at a profound disadvantage,” Lord Marshal Weldon continued. “How can we fight something we can’t see? It strikes in the dark, and no one is safe. They’ve pushed us back every day, and every night we lose more men to their horrors. One more day, and they’re going to break through, and they won’t stop until they reach Haven.”

  Lan clenched his jaw, and Pol felt it, but the boy was hiding his innermost thoughts.

  “Are they out there now—the Dark Servants?” Lan asked. “Can we see them from our lines?”

  “They make damned certain we can,” the Lord Marshal said bitterly. “You can see them—and their cursed bonfires—from here with no difficulty at all. We’ve tried shooting at them, but they’re just out of range and no one wants to get any closer.”

  Pol was suddenly left without eyes—Lan cut off his link. “Please, my lord, I need to see them for myself,” the boy said, then just got up, brushed through the tent flaps and was gone.

  Pol didn’t need to see to know that the Lord Marshal was nonplussed at this very junior Herald’s abrupt departure.

  “My lord—I think we had better follow him,” he said, a
s the new Marshal’s Herald stepped attentively to his side and touched his elbow.

  “No—” Ilea said.

  “Yes,” Pol ordered through clenched teeth.

  The stretcher bearers took Pol outside, following the Marshal, and they all went out into the open air.

  Once outside, Pol found Satiran gently shoving the young Herald aside with his nose and taking the latter’s place. Now he saw what Satiran saw—which was taking some getting used to, since there was a peculiar blind spot straight ahead, but an enormous amount of peripheral vision; one eye saw Pol, while the other surveyed everything on the opposite side. The Lord Marshal’s tent stood on the top of a hill overlooking White Foal Pass, where the army of the Karsites spread out beneath them, an ugly blot upon the white snow. Although it was nearly dark, there was enough light to show more than Pol wanted to see.

  Bonfires blazed along the front of that blotch, seven of them in all, and Pol saw why the Lord Marshal had called the bonfires cursed. At the heart of each was a stake, and tied to the stake was what was left of a man. Beside each fire was a person in long, hooded robes; encircling the fires at a healthy distance were other folk in the robes that Pol recognized as being the Sun-priests he was familiar with. Despite the distance, the clear air of these mountains made it easy to make out what was there—and Satiran’s eyes were exceptionally keen. Lan peered down at the bonfires, one hand on Kalira’s shoulder, standing as still as one of the trees beyond him.

  “It’s when the fires burn down to coals that the things start howling. The victims in the fires are no one of ours—none from the army, that is,” the Lord Marshal growled. “We try and retrieve the bodies of our own before they can get to them, and we’ve seen them dragging ruffians in Karsite rags to the fires and trussing them to the stakes. I’m assuming that the victims are brigands or thieves.”

  “Or just some poor fellows who were in the wrong place,” Pol replied. “Whatever they are—I doubt they deserved—”