“That's reasonable, I suppose,” Van admitted. “Listen, lover, how upset would you be at not staying the couple of days we planned here - at leaving at first light?”
“I told you I wasn't going to hold you back,” Stefen said, with a purely internal sigh of regret. “I'm not going to start now by breaking that promise. If you want to leave, we'll leave.”
“I was hoping you'd say that,” Van replied, kicking off his boots. Stef took his cloak from him, and started peeling off his own clothing, expecting that, as usual, the use of magery would have left Vanyel too tired to do anything but sleep.
Until he felt Van's hands sliding under his shirt.
“Here,” the Herald breathed in his ear. “Let me help you with that. This may be our last real bed for a while...”
In the morning, that brief glimpse of the old Vanyel was gone. Van was back to his new patterns; remote, silent, face unreadable, eyes wary. Stef sighed, but he hadn't really expected anything different. At least I know that down under the obsession, he's still the same person, he thought, dressing quickly in a room so cold that his breath frosted. So when this is over, I'll have him back again the way he was. It was beginning to look like I'd lost the Van I love. . . .
They saddled up and rode out without more than a cursory farewell. Stef had learned how to take care of Melody entirely on his own while they'd been on the road, now he didn't even think twice about getting her brushed down and saddled, he just did it without waiting for the groom's help.
Most of what they were carrying was food for Yfandes and Melody. There was a certain amount of provender out here, even in the depth of winter, and Vanyel could, if he chose, force-grow more overnight in their shelters. He could even Fetch a limited amount every night from the stores here at the Guard post, which was probably what he was going to do. But the fact was it was harder to feed the horse and the Companion out here in the winter woods than it was to feed the humans, so their needs took priority over Van and Stef's.
Stef was very glad for his new clothing, motley though it was, the moment they got out of the shelter of the palisade around the Guard post. Though the sky was as clear as Van had promised - in fact, for the first time in weeks, Stef saw the Morning Stars, Lythan and Leander, on the eastern horizon-it was colder than it had been while it was snowing.
A lot colder. Already Stefs nose was numb, and he was very glad of the wool scarf wrapped around his ears under the hood of his cloak.
Vanyel looked to the east, where the sky was just beginning to turn pink, and frowned a little. But he said nothing, only urged Yfandes on, into the marginally clearer place between the trees that marked what passed for a road up here.
The sun rose - and at the moment it got above the tree-tops, Stef knew what had caused Van to frown. Though weak by summer standards, the clear sunlight poured through the barren branches and reflected off of every surface, doubling, even tripling its effect on the eyes. The ground was a blinding, undulating expanse of white, bushes and undergrowth were mounds of eye-watering whiteness - in fact, Stef pulled his head completely inside the hood of his cloak and rode with his eyes squinted partly shut after a few moments. The only relief was when they passed through sections of conifers that overshadowed the road and blocked the sunlight. Once out of their shade, the reflected sunlight seemed twice as painful as before.
Still Vanyel pressed on, even though Melody and even Yfandes tripped and stumbled because they couldn't see where they were going, and couldn't guess at obstacles under the cover of snow. The farther they got from the Border, the thinner the snow-cover became, but the snow and the light reflected from it were still there, still a problem, even past midday - and they did not take their usual break to eat and rest. Finally Stef pulled Melody to a halt. She hung her head, breath steaming, sweating, obviously grateful for a chance to stop. Yfandes went on for a few more lengths, then paused. It took Vanyel several moments to notice that Stef was no longer behind him.
He turned and peered back through the snow-glare; hooded, White-clad Herald on his white Companion, he was hard to make out against the snow, and he looked like an ice-statue.
His voice was as cold as the chill air. “Why did you stop?”
“Because Melody and Yfandes need the rest you didn't take,” Stef told him bluntly. “Look at Yfandes, look at how heavily she's breathing, how she's sweating! They don't have the chirras in front of them to break a path, Van, they need their rest at noon more than ever -”
“We don't have the time,” Vanyel snapped, interrupting him.
“We don't have a choice,” Stef countered. “Yfandes will carry you until she drops, but what good are you going to be able to do if you kill her?” He nudged Melody with his heels, and she covered the few steps between them stiffly and reluctantly. He gestured at Yfandes, who had taken the same posture as Melody; head down, eyes closed, sides heaving. “Van, look at her, look at what you're doing to her. Hellfires, look at what you're doing to yourself! You can't see, you haven't eaten or had anything to drink since before dawn, and for what? This enemy of yours isn't going anywhere - he's going to be right where he's been all along!”
“But he knows we're coming -” Vanyel began.
“So what difference does that make?” Stefen sniffed, fighting back that traitorous lump that kept getting in the way of what he wanted to say, and rubbed his nose with the back of his glove. “He hasn't done much except throw a little snow at us so far, and that snow might not even have been thrown at us. Van, you're forgetting everything that makes you someone special, that makes you a Herald, every time you start focusing in on this enemy of yours. I mean, that's really it, he isn't an enemy of Valdemar anymore, he's a personal enemy, someone you want to take on by yourself - and you're running over everything and everybody in your path to get at him! Me, Randale, even Yfandes; none of us matter, as long as you can personally destroy this mage! Don't you see that? Don't you see what you're becoming?”
“You -” Vanyel's expression hardened still more, and he drew himself up, stiffly. “You have no idea of what you're talking about. You aren't a Herald, Stefen - you wouldn't even stand by Randale. How can you presume to judge -”
That was as far as he got. Yfandes jerked her head up, and trumpeted an alarm, but it was too late.
Men - hundreds, it seemed-burst through the snow-covered bushes on either side of the road. Melody started awake at Yfandes' scream, then shied violently at the shouting creatures running toward her. Stef clung to her saddle, bewildered -
Ambush? he thought, trying to hold onto Melody as she bucked and shied again, while Vanyel did something with his hands and balls of fire appeared from nowhere to burst in their attackers faces. But -
The exploding fire was the last straw so far as Melody was concerned. She screamed and fled, stumbling, down their backtrail, and bucked Stef off before they had gone more than two lengths.
Stefen went flying headfirst into a snowdrift, and came up, scraping snow out of his eyes, just in time to see Vanyel cut an axe-wielding attacker in half with his sword, while Yfandes mashed in a second man's face with her hindfeet.
At that moment Stef forget everything he ever was, and everything he ever knew. He was no longer thinking, only feeling - and the only thing he felt was fear.
And the only thing of any importance in the entire world was getting away from there.
He turned and ran. Ran as hard as he'd ever run in his life, with fear driving him and nipping at his heels. Ran along the backtrail and then off into the bushes, with branches lashing at him and buried protrusions tripping him.
Ran until he simply couldn't run anymore, until the sounds of fighting were lost in the distance, until he ran out of breath and strength and collapsed into the snow, lungs on fire, mouth parched, sides an agony, legs too weak to hold him.
He lay where he fell, waiting for one of the ambushers to come after him and kill him, fear making him whimper and tremble, but too spent even to crawl.
But nothing
happened.
He pulled in great shuddering breaths of air, sobbing with fright, while his body finally stopped shaking with exhaustion and began shivering with cold. And still nothing happened.
He levered himself up out of the snow, and there was nothing in sight; no enemies, not even a bird. Only the snow-covered bushes he had fallen into, blue sky, bare tree-branches making a pattern of interlace across it, and the churned-up mess of snow and dead leaves of his backtrail through the undergrowth.
He listened, while fear ebbed and sense returned, slowly. He heard nothing, nothing whatsoever.
And finally thought returned as well. Van! Dear gods - I left him alone back there -
He struggled to his feet, and fought his way back through the bushes, staring wildly about. Still there was neither sight nor sound of anything.
Dearest gods, how could I do that -
Once again he ran, this time driven by guilt, along the swath his flight had cut through the snow and the forest undergrowth. He burst through a cluster of bushes onto the road, and literally stumbled onto the site of the ambush.
There was blood everywhere; blood, and churned-up snow and dirt, and bits of things that made Stef sick when he saw them - bits of things that looked like they had belonged to people.
Then his eyes focused on the center of the mess, on something he had first taken for a heap of snow.
Yfandes. Down, lying in a crumpled heap, like a broken toy left by a careless child, blood oozing from the stump where her tail had been chopped off.
No sign of Vanyel.
No -
Stef stumbled to Yfandes' side, afraid of what he would find. But there was nothing, no body, nothing. Yfandes had been stripped of her harness and saddle, and a trail of footprints and bloody snow led away from where she lay.
No -
His legs wouldn't hold him. His mind could not comprehend what had happened. In all the endless things he had imagined, there had been nothing like this. Vanyel had never been defeated - he never could be defeated.
No, no, no -
His heart tried to deny what his eyes were telling him; his mind was caught between the two in complete paralysis. He touched Yfandes' flank with a trembling hand, but she did not move, and Vanyel did not reappear to tell him that it was all a ruse.
His heart cracked in a thousand pieces.
NO!
He flung back his head, and howled.
“Damen!”
The boy started, fear so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, and looked up from the pot he was tending on the hearth across the smoke-filled hall to the doorway.
The Lord. He cringed into the ashes on the hearthstones, expecting Lord Rendan to stalk over and deliver a blow or a kick. The men had gone out every day for the past two weeks on the orders of Master Dark, and had always come back empty-handed. Tempers were short, and Damen was usually the one who bore the brunt of those tempers.
But nothing happened, and his fear ebbed a little; he coughed and took a second look, raking his hair out of his eyes with a greasy hand and peering through a thicker puff of smoke and soot that an errant breeze sent down the half-choked chimney. Lord Rendan stood blocking the open doorway, arms laden with something bulky, a scowl on his face. But it wasn't the scowl Damen had come to dread these past two weeks, the one that told of failure on Rendan's part and punishment to come for Damen -
The boy scrambled to his bare feet, slipping a little on a splash of old tallow, and scuttled through the rotting straw and garbage that littered the floor to the lord's side. “Here,” Rendan growled, thrusting the bundle at him. Damen took it in both arms, the weight making him stagger, as Rendan grabbed his shoulder and turned him toward the hearth. “Put it over there, on the bench,” the lord snapped, as his fingers dug into Damen's shoulder, leaving one more set of bruises among the rest. The boy stumbled obediently toward the bench and dropped his burden, only then seeing that it was a saddle and harness, blood-spattered, but of fine leather and silver-chased steel.
A saddle? But we don't have any horses -
The lord threw something else atop the pile; white and shining, a cascade of silver hair -
A horse's tail; a white horse's tail, the raw end still bloody.
Before Damen could stir his wits enough to wonder what that meant, the rest of the men crowded in through the keep door, cursing and shouting, bringing the cold and snow in with them. Damen rubbed his nose on his sleeve, then scuttled out of the way. He stood as close to the fire as he could, for in his fourth-hand breeches and tattered shirt he was always cold. He counted them coming in, as he always did, for the number varied as men were recruited or deserted and may the gods help him if he didn't see that all of them had food and drink.
One hand's-worth, two hands, three and four hands - and five limp bodies, carried by the rest. One cut nearly in half; Gerth the Axe -
An' no loss there, Damen thought, with a smirk he concealed behind a cough. One less bastard t' beat me bloody when 'e's drunk, an' try an' get into me breeches when 'e's sober.
The others dropped Gerth's hacked-up body beside the door. Two more bodies joined his, bodies blackened and burned; Heverd and Jess. Damen dismissed them with a shrug; they were no better and no worse than any of the others, quite forgettable by his standards.
A fourth with the face smashed in was laid beside the rest, and Damen had to take account of the other faces before he decided it must be Resley the Liar. A pity, that - the Liar could be counted on to share a bit of food when the pickings were thin and there wasn't enough to go around, provided a lad had something squirreled away to trade.
But there was a fifth body, white-clad and blood-smeared; certainly no one Damen recognized. And that one was thrown down beside the pile of harness, not next to the door. An old man, he thought, seeing the long, silver-threaded hair; but that was before they dumped him unceremoniously beside the bench. Then the face came into the flickering firelight, and Damen blinked in confusion, for the face was that of a young man, not an old one, and a very handsome young man at that, quite as pretty as a girl. He was apparently unconscious, and tied hand and foot, and it occurred to Damen that this might be what Master Dark had set them all a-hunting these past two weeks.
He didn't have any time to wonder about the prisoner, for a few of the men set to stripping the bodies of their fellows and quarreling over the spoils, while the rest shouted for food and drink.
Damen gathered up the various bowls and battered cups that served as drinking vessels, and balanced them in precarious stacks in his arms. He passed among the men while they grabbed whatever was uppermost on the pile in his arms and filled their choice from the barrel atop the slab table in the center of the hall. Drink always came first in Lord Rendan's hall; sour and musty as the beer always was, it was still beer and the men drank as much of it as they could hold. Damen returned to the hearth, wrapped the too-long sleeves of his cast-off shirt around his hands and grabbed the end of the spit nearest him, heaving the half-raw haunch of venison off the fire. It fell in the fire, but the men would never notice a little more ash on the burned crust of the meat. He staggered back to the table under his burden of flesh, and heaved it with a splatter of juices up onto the surface beside the barrel, on top of the remains of last night's meal. Those that weren't too preoccupied with gulping down their second or third bowl of beer staggered over to the table to hack chunks off with their knives.
Now the last trip; the boy picked up whatever remained of the containers that hadn't been claimed as drinking vessels, and filled them one at a time from the pot of pease-pottage he'd been tending. He brought them, dripping, to the table, and slopped them down beside the venison, saving only one for himself. He was not permitted meat until the last of the men had eaten their fill, and he was not permitted beer at all.
He sat on his heels next to the hearth, and watched the others warily, gobbling his food as fast as he could, cleaning the bowl with his fingers and then licking it and them bare
of the last morsel. Too many times in the past, one or more of the men had thought it good sport to kick his single allotted bowl of porridge out of his hands before he'd eaten more than half of it. Now he tried always to finish before any of the rest of them did.
But tonight the men had other prey to occupy them. As Damen tossed his bowl to the side and wrapped his arms around his skinny legs, Lord Rendan got up, still chewing, and strolled over to the side of the prisoner. The man was showing some signs of life now; moaning a little, and twitching. The Lord kicked him solidly in the side, and Damen winced a little, grateful that he wasn't on the receiving end of the blow.
Then Rendan reached down and untied the man, who didn't seem to understand that he'd been freed. The man acted a great deal like Rendan's older brother had, after his skull had been broken. Lord Gelmar hadn't died, not right away, but he couldn't walk or speak, and he'd acted as if he was falling-down drunk for more than a week before Rendan got tired of it and had him “taken outside.”
“Careful, Rendan, he's like t' do ye -” one of the men called out.
“Not with that spell on 'im,” the Lord laughed. “That powder Master Dark sent down with his orders was magicked. This 'un can hear and see us, but he can't do nothing.” He kicked the man again, and the prisoner cried out, scrabbling feebly in the dirt of the floor.
“Just what is this beggar, anyway?” Kef Hairlip asked. “What's so bleedin' important 'bout him that the Master wants 'im alive an' talkin'? 'Ow come 'e 'ad us an' ever' other bunch 'twixt 'ere an' the mountains lookin' fer 'im?”
Tan Twoknives answered before the Lord could, standing up with a leaky mug in one hand and one of his knives in the other. “Kernos' balls, boy, haven't you never seen a Herald before?” He hawked and spat a gobbet of phlegm that fell just short of the prisoner's leg. “Bloody bastards give us more trouble'n fifty Kingsmen 'cross the Border, an' stick their friggin' noses inta ever'body's business like they got nothin' else t'do.”
He shoved his knife back into his belt and swigged the last of his beer, then slammed the mug down on the table and strode forward to prod the prisoner himself.
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