Kero bit her lip with sudden speculation. That was not what she’d expected him to do.
As she watched, he rose from his impromptu seat, kicking Dierna out of the way impatiently, and took the lock of hair to a flat rock just inside the ring of firelight.
Maybe one of these bastards will go for his back, she thought hopefully. Having a girl within reach must be driving them mad. If one of them tries something, makes a move for her, that’s sure to start a fight. Either the man holding her will react, or one of the others—either way, once a fight starts, it’s bound to spread. If that happens, maybe I can get in there and get her out while the fighting is going on.
But the bandits ignored the robed man; ignored Dierna, which was even odder. Even if this strange man—
Mage. This has to be the mage.
—even if this strange mage had given orders about leaving Dierna alone, scum like this would not have been able to ignore her. They’d have been watching her, hoping for the mage’s back to be turned, hoping for a chance at her. But she might as well not have been there. They weren’t ignoring her—they acted as if they didn’t even see her.
Kero turned her startled attention back to the mage. That flat rock—he had some kind of paraphernalia laid out on it, as if it were an altar. He set the lock of hair on a brazier in the middle of the rock, picked up something Kero couldn’t make out, and began making passes over the burning hair.
I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.
A moment later the hair on the back of her neck was rising, as a circular boundary around the rock began to glow, as if he had piled up a circle of dark red embers. The strange light pulsed at first, then settled down to a steady, sullen glow. There was one small gap in the circle, and the mage put his instrument down as soon as the glow of the boundary settled, and strode through it.
He returned to his boulder, his steps hurried and betraying a certain impatience; he shot out his hand, and pulled Dierna to her feet by her bound wrists. She yelped, a sound that carried above the rest of the noise in the camp—and not one of the bandits looked up.
I like this even less.
The mage dragged the young girl stumbling along behind him, then pushed her through the gap in the boundary. He cleared the flat rock of encumbrances with a single sweep of his free hand, then kicked her feet out from under her and forced her down beside it. He waved his hand again, and the gap in the boundary closed as fire burned from each end of the arc and met in the middle. Then he pulled a knife from the sleeve of his robe, seized Dierna’s head by the hair, and before Kero could take a breath, slashed Dierna’s cheek from eye to chin.
For one moment, Kero was paralyzed, with herself and the sword warring to take over her body and act. And in that moment of indecision, someone—or something—else acted.
Outside the circle of firelight, a wild clamor went up. It was a heartbeat later that Kero recognized the sounds for the voices of half a dozen horses screaming with fear. The thunder of hooves was all the warning the bandits got before an entire herd of them, blind with panic, stampeded through the camp. Then the campfire went up in a shower of colored ball-lightning and huge sparks and explosions just as they hammered past, and they panicked further, scattering in all directions.
And as if that wasn’t chaos enough, one of the revelers fell into the fire with a bubbling shriek of pain, clutching his throat.
And the bandits panicked as badly as the horses.
That’s an arrow! Kero realized, in the heartbeat before her attention was caught again by Dierna and the mage that held her. There’s someone else out there—someone with a grievance and a bow.
But she had no chance to think about it, because the mage caught her attention again. Something—a cloud of smoke, or blood-colored mist—rose up out of the stone. It was the height of a man, and as broad as two men, and it was lit fitfully from within, like the clouds on a summer night flickering with heat lightning. The mage stepped back, releasing the girl; it gathered itself, coiling and rearing up exactly like a snake about to strike. Then it lunged forward and fastened itself on the blood-dripping cut on Dierna’s cheek.
Dierna screamed—high, shrill, the way a rabbit screams when it is about to die.
Kero couldn’t move; now she was as paralyzed with fear as Dierna. But she didn’t need to, for the moment she stopped fighting it, the sword took over.
It flung her out of the bushes, rolling down the bluff in a controlled tumble that somehow brought her up onto her feet just as she reached the bottom. The fire was still exploding, though fitfully; a handful of horses were still trampling anything in their way as they circled wildly through the camp, and there was more than enough confusion for her to get halfway across the campsite before anyone even noticed her.
And even then, the bandits had troubles of their own, for that unknown ally out in the dark was letting fly with arrow after carefully placed arrow, picking off raiders with impressive regularity. There were at least three down on the ground that weren’t moving, and two more clutching their sides and screaming. One of the bandits saw her, and charged right at her—
And stopped dead, as Kero raised her own sword against him, without pausing in her headlong charge. Whatever he saw turned his face as pale as milk; he turned, and ran out into the darkness.
That happened twice more as she half ran, half stumbled across the bandit camp, dodging fear-maddened horses and the fires set by the explosions in the campfire. A few unfortunates managed to get in Kero’s way. The sword did not grant them a second chance. By now Kero wasn’t even trying to fight the sword; she was still wild with fear, but there was a kind of heady exhilaration about this, too; she hardly noticed the men getting in her way except as targets to be dealt with, as impersonal as Dent’s set of pells in the armory.
She dodged around the now-blazing campfire, vaulted a body, cut down a fool who tried to bar her way with nothing but a short-bladed knife, taking him out with one of those unstoppable two-handed strokes—and found herself jerking abruptly to a halt at the edge of the glowing circle.
She couldn’t get across it. There was a real, physical barrier demarcated by that scarlet line. The thin band of crimson might as well have been a wall of iron.
She looked up—and saw the thing still fastened on Dierna’s cheek, the light within it growing stronger and more regular, pulsing like a heartbeat. And beyond it the mage smiled thinly at her, and gestured, making a throwing motion.
Yellow-green light in the shape of a dagger left his hands; she tried to duck, but the sword wouldn’t release her. So she braced herself instinctively, and cold fear froze her from head to toe.
But nothing happened. The dagger of light vanished as it came within an arm’s length of her.
She blinked, trying to comprehend what had just happened. He threw a magic thing at me. It never touched me. And he expected it to kill me—
The mage stared in utter disbelief, and backed up a half-dozen steps. That was enough for the sword.
Kero backed up a step under its direction, and it slashed down across the circle of light, as if it were carving a doorway. A portion of the crimson barrier blacked out immediately.
The blade sent Kero leaping across that blacked-out section like a maiden leaping the Solstice fires.
Her jump ended two paces in front of the flat rock, Dierna, and the thing fastened leechlike to Dierna’s cheek. Dierna was no longer screaming; she was sprawled across the rock, moaning weakly, as if this creature was stealing all her strength. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed utterly unaware of Kero’s presence.
The sword slashed down again, but it was not aimed at the leech-thing. For one horrible moment, Kero thought it was trying to kill Dierna—but the hilt twisted in her hands and cut between the girl and the leech-cloud, shaving so close to Dierna’s face that the blade flicked away a couple of drops of blood from her wounded cheek.
The mage shouted, something incomprehensible, but angry. The cloud reared back as
Dierna came to life and rolled weakly off the rock and out of its way, the strange thing looking more like a leech than ever. Before it could lunge at her and refasten itself to her cheek, Kero had leapt up onto the rock, positioning herself between it and the girl. She slashed at it, cutting nothing, but forcing it to retreat. It glowed an angry sanguine, and seethed at her, the roiling movements within it somehow conveying a cold and deadly rage.
Behind it, the mage chanted furiously, in some language Kero didn’t recognize. She somehow knew that the sword did, though; for the first time she felt something from it—a strange, slow anger, hot as a forge, and heavy as iron.
Her left hand dropped from the hilt and reached for her dagger at her belt, and threw it.
The mage held up his hand, and the dagger hit his palm—
—and bounced, clattering harmlessly to the ground.
Kero wanted to run, but the sword wouldn’t let her. She could only stand there, an easy target. The mage sneered, and raised his hands. They glowed for a moment, a sickly red, then the glow brightened and a spark arced between them. He brought them together over his head, and pointed—and sent a bolt of red lightning, not at her, but into the leech-cloud.
It writhed, but she somehow had the feeling it was not in pain. Then it solidified further—and doubled in size in a heartbeat, looming up over her.
The blade’s anger rose to consume her, and she shifted her grip from the hilt to the sword-blade itself. She balanced her sword for a moment that way, as if it was, impossibly, nothing more than a giant throwing knife. It didn’t seem to weigh any more than her dagger had at that moment.
Her arm came back, and she threw it, like a spear.
It flashed across the space between herself and the mage, arrow-straight and point-first. And as the mage stared in surprise, it thudded home in his belly, penetrating halfway to the quillons.
He gave a strangled cry, staggered forward two steps, and fell, driving it the rest of the way through his body.
The leech-cloud screamed, somehow inside her mind as well as with a real voice; it seemed to split her skull as completely as any ax-blade.
Kero dropped to her knees and covered her ears, the scream driving all thoughts except the pain of her head from her mind. But she couldn’t look away from the thing, her eyes held by the mesmerizing, pulsating lights within it. The light flickered frantically, wildly; the cloud stretched and thinned, reaching upward, and rose to a height of three men—
Then it exploded, vanishing, with a roar that dwarfed the explosions earlier.
Kero blinked dazzled eyes, shaken and numbed, and slowly took her hands away from her ears. There was only silence, the crackling of the fire, and the far-off drum of hoof beats.
She rose to her feet, shaking so hard she had trouble standing, her knees wobbly. Dear gods, what happened? I can’t have killed that thing, can I? She waited for what seemed like half the night, but nothing more happened. Finally she pulled herself together, gathered what was left of her wits, and staggered over to Dierna.
The girl lay quietly beside the rock, eyes wide and staring, face as white as cream. She blinked, but that was the only movement she made; for a moment Kero was afraid that she might have gone mad; or worse—not that she would have blamed her.
But when the older girl came into the failing light from the fire, there was sense in her eyes, and she took the hand that Kero offered in both her bound ones, and allowed Kero to pull her into a sitting position.
“K-K-Kerowyn?” the girl stuttered weakly after a long moment of silence. “Is it r-r-r-really you?”
“I think so,” Kero replied unsteadily, putting one hand to her temple as she looked vaguely around for something to free the girl’s wrists. Although the mage’s dagger lay nearby, she somehow couldn’t bear to touch it. Instead, she retrieved her own knife and used it to cut through the rawhide of Dierna’s bonds.
Once her hands were freed, Dierna clapped her sleeve to her still-bleeding cheek, and began to cry. Kero couldn’t tell if she was weeping out of pain, fear, or for her marred cheek.
Probably all three.
She started to look for something to use for a bandage, but when she turned around—
An old woman in a worn leather tunic and armor that fit her as well as the bandits’ had fitted poorly appeared out of nowhere between her and the fire.
Kero shrieked, and stumbled back, and turned to run—and shrieked again when she came face-to-face—literally—with the biggest wolf she’d ever seen in her life.
Its eyes glowed at her with reflection from the fire, as she groped frantically after weapons she no longer held.
“Stop that, you little idiot,” the old woman said in a grating voice from directly behind her. “We’re friends. Obviously.”
That voice—
She spun around again, just in time to watch the old woman stalk past her toward the body of the mage, the wolf eyeing both of them with every evidence of intelligent interest. The woman surveyed the body for a moment, then leaned over and wrenched her grandmother’s sword out of the mage’s corpse with a single, efficient jerk. Before Kero could say or do anything, the woman handed it to her, hilt first.
She took it, stunned, unable to do anything but take it.
“Clean that,” the old woman growled, a frown harsh enough to have frosted glass on her beaky face. “Dammit girl, you know better than that! Don’t ever throw your only weapon away! Just because you were lucky once—ah, I’m wasting my time. Take that ninny of a sister-in-law of yours, and get back home.”
And with that, the woman turned on her heel and stalked off to the nearest body, wrenching an arrow out of its back. Kero stood staring dumbly as the wolf jumped down off the rock and joined her.
It was only then that Kero noticed that they were the only creatures living or moving in the whole camp. And no few of those bodies were slashed across throat or belly. Her work, or that of the sword—in the end, it really didn’t matter.
She couldn’t help herself; it was all too much. Her guts rebelled, and this time there was nothing to stop them from having their way. She stumbled toward the rock and leaned against it, heaving wretchedly.
She expected Dierna to be having her own set of hysterics, but after the first few heaves, as she dropped her grandmother’s sword from her nerveless fingers, the girl helped steady her while she lost dinner, lunch, and breakfast—and then even the memory of food. Finally, when her guts quieted down for lack of anything else to bring up, Dierna wiped her sweaty forehead with a dust-covered velvet sleeve, and helped her to sit down on the erstwhile altar.
She looked around for the sword; it was just out of reach. Dierna followed her gaze, and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
“I’ll get it,” she said, in a voice hoarse with screaming and crying. “You’ve done everything else tonight. Never mind that horrid old woman.”
Horrid old—now I remember where I heard that voice before. The old woman. That was the same voice I heard on the road, the old woman that stopped me on the way to the Tower—
While Dierna picked the sword up with a clumsiness caused mainly by the fact that she was trying not to touch it, and was doing her best to keep it at arm’s length away from her, Kero looked around for the old woman.
She was gone. So was the wolf. And all the usable arrows.
“Here,” Dierna said, thrusting the sword hilt at Kero. She stared at the girl without taking it; that awful, bone-deep gash was healing right before her eyes, faster than Kero had ever seen anything heal before. By the time she had shaken off her surprise to take the blade out of Dierna’s reluctant grasp, the wound had sealed shut and was already fading from a thin pink line to practically nothing, leaving not even a scar.
It Heals? Dearest Agnira, it Heals, too? After turning me into a berserk killer?
And what was that old woman doing here, anyway?
The sound of dancing hoof beats made her turn, to see one more surprise in a night full of near-mirac
les.
The enormous wolf had returned. In its mouth were the reins of two horses; Kero’s, and one she recognized as coming from the Keep stables. Kero’s Verenna was sweating with fear, and trembling so hard that she was plainly too frightened to try and escape, but the other beast was so tired it was paying no attention to its unusual “groom.”
The wolf led the horses right up to her, and snorted, which made Verenna grunt and shy. Kero grabbed the ends of the reins dangling from its mouth, and the wolf let go immediately. Verenna jerked her head and tried to bolt, but Kero held her, dropping the sword into the dirt a second time, as the mare rolled her eyes with terror and danced. Finally Kero had to grab her nostrils and pinch them shut, cutting off her air, before she’d calm down.
She glanced around guiltily as she retrieved the sword a second time, but the old woman was still nowhere in sight. She had the feeling that she’d get a real tongue-lashing if she didn’t clean the blade off after all this. And somehow she didn’t want that formidable old harridan to unleash the full force of her scorn.
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