Caille had wanted her to fix this. Caille had thought she could fix this. She tried, she tried so hard, she tried to find that reaching-out feeling she’d had when Risalyn fought the smooth-haired killer, but it was gone, there were too many. There were only killers around her now, nonneds upon nonneds of killers.
They had left Gir Nuorin a day behind the shield. They had to trick the innkeepers to sneak away. The innkeepers wouldn’t leave them unattended once they knew that all their grownup minders were gone, not with Caille missing. It wasn’t as if the innkeepers had done any better at protecting their own daughter—little Lusonel had been taken the same as Caille. But little Lusonel had reappeared by mid-morning. Just walked out of her room as if she’d been there all along. She couldn’t tell them where the boneman had taken her. A strange wood, she said, and described a place that couldn’t possibly exist. Silver trees, golden leaves, purple sky. A beautiful woman with a glowing ring. It was a fairy story, a tellers’ tale. Lusonel had to be making it up.
None of the grownups believed her.
A lot of other children had been taken, too. All around the same [320] age. Only one other came back. She was found wandering near the quarry, stunned, unable to tell them anything.
It wasn’t Caille
Lusonel loved fairy stories. Pelufer believed that what she said was true in a way the grownups couldn’t understand. The bonefolk were taking the children wherever they most wanted to go. Or sending them. Whether they changed their minds or not.
Caille had asked the boneman to take her to the fighting.
It was the only place they could go to look.
They’d meant to creep around the edge of it, searching, during the day and night before the battle. They’d thought they might see the coppery shine of her, if they got close enough, and if she was trying to do something with her power from a hiding place. Catching a ride from Gir Nuorin with a tinker bound for Gir Doegre and then slipping away down the cutoff toward the Boot Road, they’d caught up with the shield, and rode the rest of the way hidden in one of their supply wagons. When the shielders called a halt, when the news came up the column that this was it, this was the fighting ground, they jumped out. They moved through dense thickets and hedgerows as only Elora could. They searched and searched, getting their bearings, even asking about a little lost girl. Folk told them there were scores of little lost girls these days, and they should get off home before they joined them.
They tried walking straight down a road. Khinish guards turned them back and warned them about bowmen and said all kinds of things about the trouble curious girls could get into. “It’s going to storm,” they said. Typical awayfolk, thinking it would ever rain in the Leg. “Go on off home now.” They’d searched as far as they could Bootward, then came back Headward. But before they could go on around to the Toeward side, the shield moved in, surrounding the Khinish center, and they were caught in between.
Then night fell. Elora said they should ask the nearest fighter for help, shielder or Khinish. Pelufer said no, they’d hold them somewhere then and they’d never find Caille. In a last-ditch attempt to get out of the bind they were in without grownups taking them in hand, they’d moved too fast in the dark, and Elora had stepped in a hole and gone down with a bad sound of bone giving way. Pelufer had dragged her under this tree just as dawn was beginning to lighten the roiling black sky to roiling gray.
Now they were where the fighting was, and Caille was not. Whatever Caille thought she could do, she couldn’t. Whatever Caille thought Pelufer could do, she couldn’t.
From off to Headward, a drum boomed.
[321] There was a pause, a silence at the center of tumult, as if seven nonned folk had all drawn breath at once. Pelufer stared at the trunk too smooth to climb, at the branches too far up to reach, at the tree Elora couldn’t have climbed anyway with a broken ankle. Away above them, the sky was raging, spitting rain, coiling itself to unleash a deluge. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt rain on her. She couldn’t believe that Khinishman had been right. Lightning flashed, and the thunder that exploded on its heels seemed to rumble in the ground, a deafening response to the boom of the drum.
The shielders were shaping themselves into a line, and then another line behind it, and another line. Down Bootward small groups were still bashing at each other, and some Khinish broke away to nock arrows and aim for the gathering shielders. The rest made wedges of themselves, like in the beginning. The two hosts were going to charge straight ahead in a final bid to destroy each other.
A whine came out of her, felt rather than heard. Their boundary hedge, their three wych elms tufted by wild grazebane grass, stood right where the two hosts would meet.
“Stand and lean,” Pelufer said, crouching to push Elora up by the armpits. Elora braced against the elm, pushing with her good leg, and between the two of them they got her upright in three jerking humps along the bark. Pelufer’s back was one-third to the shielder side, but it was the only place where the burls at the nicked and gnawed base left some room for feet. She pressed Elora flat and reached her arms as far as they would go around the trunk. They would become the tree, perfectly still, blended, an obstacle easily avoided. The surging waves of fighters would crash and swirl around them.
Lightning flashed again, in a world going dark. Eerie blasts sounded on the Khinish side, like inhuman cries. Elora groaned from the pain of her ankle, a sound lost in the din. Thunder drowned out the pounding bootsteps of the charging hosts. Pelufer couldn’t tell how close they were. She pressed her face into Elora’s shoulder and squeezed her eyes shut tight.
The ground bucked. It sent her stumbling away from Elora. Elora clung to the tree somehow, or it to her, some trick of her power. Another heave of the ground knocked Pelufer down. Her face was slammed over Headward by the first gush of hard rain.
The shielders were scattered and downed but trying to get up and re-form. A twist of the head as she sat up showed her the Khinish doing the same. They would not let the storm stop them. They had come here to fight. Why? Why were they fighting? What could possibly be worth all this?
[322] A blade in the hand and a job to be done with it, something deep within Pelufer said.
Elora was shouting at her, but she couldn’t make it out. She got her knees under her, but the rain drove her down. They’d never see her now, in the stormdark, in the battle. The only ones who would notice her would be the ones who trampled her.
Elora might not be able to hold on to the tree without her. There might be time to crawl back to her before the fighters got their feet and lined themselves up to charge again.
But she could feel something ... something in the ground under her hands, something connecting her to all that metal, all that blood ... it was that feeling, that reaching-out feeling ... if she could—
Arms caught her, and lifted.
She floated up into the air, unable to see who had her. She floated higher than any human arms could have held her. She felt a prickling tingle all over, as if she were coming apart, but it didn’t hurt. Blood and strength and energy rushed through her. The earth rumbled again, losing its balance beneath them. The ranks of Khinish swayed back, like grass under a breeze, and went down. She saw them as ripples in a myriad array of tiny perfect points. It was like the glittering you saw when you passed out, but she wasn’t passing out, she was more alive and more aware than she had ever been in her life.
And stricken through the heart.
“Elora! Elora!”
She heard back, in her ears or in her mind, a voice like a dry breeze, a voice like the shake of rattleseed, words distorted and slurred but understandable: “She has the way.”
That meant nothing what did that mean there was nothing Elora could do or she would have done it already she was just standing there while nonneds of killers swept down on her if she couldn’t hold on to the tree they would trample her she had a broken ankle what if she couldn’t hold on—
The world disappeared in an e
cstatic, heartbreaking whirl of pinpoints.
Elora stared at the boneman after Pelufer was gone. She didn’t look at the Khinish or the shielders. She wouldn’t be able to hear their pounding charge. But in moments, when the groundshakes eased, they would close like parted waters, and her death would come with them. At least Pelufer and Caille had gone on ahead. She swallowed the cry that came up like bile. She didn’t believe that Caille was dead, not [323] in her heart of hearts, but she didn’t believe Pelufer’s construction either, that the boneman had sent Caille where she wanted to go. She’d had to do something. She’d had to believe something. So she’d come here, because there was nothing else to try. But Caille was gone. Pelufer was gone. She might never see them again. She was alone.
The boneman stepped in close—one step, on his stork-long legs—and held out a spindly-fingered hand, awkwardly, trying on a human gesture, trying to reassure her. Would he take her now, too? Dissolve her like the dead, dissolve her alive? She realised she was screaming at him, screaming that there were nothing but dead bodies around him, couldn’t he find something better to do than take her sisters from her? She was sobbing, and swearing at him, words she would have smacked Pelufer for saying, words that would have killed her father if he heard them come out of her mouth.
The boneman worked fingers against his chest, oblivious of her rant: I go. Do what I do. Follow.
He took another long step, right up beside her, and then a third—stepping right into the wych elm.
That was where he had come from. He had come from behind the tree. She hadn’t seen him come out. He went into trees and came out of trees the way the one who took Caille went into stone.
The fighters had lined up again. The shield boomed. Khine howled reply.
She was leaning on the tree. It was an old tree. Solid and enduring. It held its arms up high over the animals that pestered it. Its bark was wrinkled into sinuous furrows like the flesh of an old woman’s neck. It didn’t mind the arrows much. Wych elms were unpredictable, dangerous, canny; she didn’t think it would drop a limb on her, but she couldn’t be sure. She hopped and twisted herself around. The pain was terrible. She tried to ignore it. She laid her hands on the trunk the way she would if she were doing a working. But this time she didn’t think about bloomings, or healings, or beautiful things, or things she loved. She didn’t think about pain, or mangled bodies, or wicked blades, or driving rain, or quaking ground, or lost sisters, or misery, or terror. She just thought about the tree. Flesh, like her. Spirit, like her. Alive, like her.
The old wood welcomed her. Made way for her.
She was Elora, and she was the tree. She was the soft-hard wood-flesh, the furrowed skin, the languid flow of life’s fluids from roots to crown and crown to roots. She was the seeking roots, the basking leaves, the slow accumulation of rings of years. She was unthinkably old, and absurdly young.
[324] She was the tree, and she was Elora, and she wanted to live.
She leaned in.
As the voices of drum and horn and death tailed off behind her, she sank through.
The Menalad Plain
Kazhe rode the quaking ground as easily as she’d ride Comfrey standing on his back. Her light-clad plains Girdlers did the same beside her, heedless of the downpour that battered the reeling ranks of shielders and Khinish. It had rained on them like this for nearly three years. They had adapted. They were in their new element now.
Half her forces stood with her and half stood across the battleground, come out of their hiding places while the shielders and Khinish engaged. She had two nonned. The Khinish had started with three, Verlein with four. Now she and they looked evenly matched.
They had killed more than enough of each other.
She could watch and see if the spirits defeated them, tilting the ground while smiting them with rain and wind; she could wait for one side to claw a semblance of victory past its own losses, then rout the victor, as planned; or she could stop this now.
If not for the drenching, Khine would win handily. Verlein had misjudged them. She’d thought they would bear down in one great domineering force—aggressive, armored, bent on marching over her. She’d thought she could withstand their first charge, then tighten her circle and crush them. But the Khinish were cats, not bulls. They gave way when least expected to, wheeled their tight maneuverable wedges, shifted bearing on a word. They thought and moved as one, yet each could act alone. At home, in peace, their hierarchies were [326] complex, unfathomable, entrenched. In battle, their fighters were independent and equal, linked like rings in mail, sensitive to each other’s movements, shifting to cover each other and change the attack with an intuitive sense of where both their comrades and the opponent’s weak spots were. Like kenaila, each bore three weapons, and they switched among them at will; there were no archers to command separate from the spearfolk, no spearfolk to be directed separate from the blades. And they saw no disgrace in retreat. They withdrew in order to lure and encircle; they harassed with feints and spears and arrows, then darted in for the mortal blow. They looked like an ironclad wall, but they fought by weaving and crossing, delicate fingers playing upon a loom.
Verlein’s ranks could not stand against that. But the Khinish had underestimated Verlein. They had scoffed at her homespun fighters, her hand-me-down bladelore, her glorified sentries. They had not expected to meet a rugged, disciplined force with a backbone. They had not expected the shieldwall to hold. And they had not expected the spirits of earth and water and air to besiege them.
Let them kill each other off, Kazhe thought. Let them destroy each other, and good riddance. I need a drink.
But they had killed too many good folk. And she had a point to make.
She strode across the bucking, rain-drenched pasture while the two hordes struggled to recover their feet and gather themselves for a third try at their scrambled charge.
Her folk arrayed in two ranks, one facing the Khinish, one facing the shielders. Their instructions were simple and echoed their training. Disarm. If that doesn’t work, kill.
Their intent was clear.
She stated it anyway.
“You will not rule!” she called across to the Khinish. The headman would be somewhere in the center of the front rank, and if he was dead the rest would still hear her. Her voice was raised only to carry to them, not to challenge. Her presence was challenge enough. “This world has never had rulers. As long as I live it never will. And I am kenai.” She drew her blade. The swirling metal was a creamy silver in the gloom, slicing raindrops in its arc over her head. “You cannot kill me.”
Riding the bucking ground, she turned to Verlein, who stood linked arm in arm with her seconds to keep from falling. “You will not rule, Verlein! Have you told your shield what you mean to do? Have you planned their route to the Head, or the Haunch? Is your shield attacking them even now? Look at me. I am an end on it. You’ve [327] become the invasion you feared. You are the outer realms, Verlein. You will not rule!”
Fatuous speeches. She’d have spat at the ground, but the rain made it pointless. Torrin’s haunt would be busting a gut if it wasn’t sitting on the stones that crushed him in the Fist, gazing out to sea forever. But she had to make the effort. Folk deserved to know their options, and understand the deaths they chose.
She couldn’t hear the commands from the shield or Khine, but she heard the drum, she heard the horn, and she understood the arrows that flew wild from both sides.
She shrugged, and plunged her blade straight up into the air.
Her ranks divided. One took the shielders, one took the Khinish.
She went at the Khinish side, the stronger opponent.
She danced.
A parry here, a twist there, and two curved blades flew free. A nick here, a tap there, and two blade hands lost their grip. Her blade scythed ash hafts like wheat, lopping off lance heads, riving spears in two. She’d cleared a path through three ranks of them within moments and withdrew before she could be encircled. S
he let them fill the gap that she might nick and tap and parry some more. She began adding kicks and punches, small flourishes, flamboyant ornaments. Nothing like a broken nose or a sprained knee or dented groin to make a fighter think twice, no matter how he bristled and clanked. Blade spinning, she mowed through a rain of arrows from a clutch of bowmen, then sliced through the line of bows with one horizontal sweep, leaving the archers bruised and welted as their own weapons whipped back on them. It was a pleasant, playful dance. Her blood whined for the kill, but she gloried in the steps, the fluid movements, the ease with which she saved them from themselves. No need to die. Not today. Not if you choose to live.
But beside her, her folk were struggling. Trained up fast, they were good, but inexperienced. It was harder to incapacitate than kill, much easier to lose yourself to bloodlust than work at disarming an opponent bent on killing you. They began to fight. They couldn’t help it. As the Khinish pushed forward, they began to fight harder. Snap a spear and they’d draw a blade. Break a blade and they’d retreat to draw a bow. Crack a bow and they’d draw a knife.
She redoubled her efforts. Bloody spirits, she’d take them all herself if she had to. But each one bore three weapons. Each one had to be disarmed thrice. And each one who took her measure moved down the line for easier pickings.
Her folk began to flag.
Behind her she heard cries. She heard the tenor of the battle [328] change. She felt Benkana’s side, the shield side, lapse into protracted bladeplay, no metal shattering against the bladebreakers. She heard him call to rally them to their purpose. They tried to obey. Overwhelmed, they failed.
Disarm. If that doesn’t work, kill.
She’d created an arc around herself, the Khinish yielding to her and pressing up harder on the folk beside her. She glanced to left and right and saw that the arc was closing into the line behind her. At the edges where shield and Khinish met, they were battling to the death. In the center, her folk disarmed them, and they fell back, snatched up fallen weapons, took blades and spears from the dead, and flung themselves at the corners of the eye shape they had made. The corners elongated. The oval around her flattened. Her folk were coming back-to-back. The battle lines were forming again. They were ragged, they were stumbling under the elements’ onslaught, but they were engaging. Fighting. Dying.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 41