The sling she’d made from strips of her now useless petticoats and a discarded leather thong, and it had taken her a bit or practice to remember how to use it. The sling was a sport she’d picked up as a girl, one her mother did not believe was appropriate for the daughter of a baron, but when her family had gone into hiding during the war to protect her brother, her sling had been what fed them night upon night.
“That is your lure?” The copper-haired girl looked at her brother skeptically. She crouched in the brush below the great trees and rubbed at her nose, sling swinging from her hand as she watched him set the unassuming sticks in place in the piles of fallen leaves. At thirteen, she was convinced that her brother was the stupidest person who had ever lived and likely to forget to breathe if she did not remind him.
“Aye, it is, and what of it? How it looks matters not.” Ander, a handsome boy of sixteen with a shock of red hair and bright green eyes, stood at the center of the large clearing and smoothed his seamless robes. “What matters is the magic I put into it.”
“If it matters not how it looks, Ander, why have you fussed over it so?”
“Because it still has to be right.”
She could not imagine how the lay of this stick or that should matter, and she was sure he was just trying to irritate her. “It cannot possibly work.”
He laughed. “Why not?”
“Because you made it.” She turned her nose up. “I should have had a brace of fat hares by now had I just gone on my own and set to it.”
“It will work, Glynnis. I promise. And then you can simply sit here and gather rabbits all day if you want.” He ran back to where she was crouching in the bushes and settled in beside her. Then he turned and moved his hands in broad gestures toward the sticks. Nothing happened. He moved them even more emphatically. Still nothing.
She watched for a few moments. She squinted at the sticks, trying to see if anything had changed. “I told you. You did it wrong. I don’t see any—”
He pulled her close and clapped his hand tightly over her mouth, dragging her deeper into the brush behind them. She struggled for a second against him until she felt the curious crackling of his protections extending around her, deepening. Something was wrong, but what? Then she froze when she saw what he saw.
At the far end of the glade, three demons broke and smashed through the thick trees and brush with their huge poison-spiked ha’guaka axes, sweeping this section of the woods in a clear search pattern. Clearly they were looking for something specific, and Glynnis was certain it was her brother. But why? In all of Syon, why would they be searching this section of the southern forest so precisely unless…unless they knew he was here?
She turned her face slightly under her brother’s hand, her light blue eyes involuntarily looking back toward where their mother was camped not far beyond them, right in the path of the demons. She turned her wide eyes toward her brother, and his gaze met hers.
The knights of Brannagh who had come to reprovision at their castle during the Feast of Didian but two seasons past had shared their stories of battle with the demons, creatures that up to that point, the baron’s family had never seen. “Demon” was a name given the creatures in a time of deeper superstition, but the name remained. Whether Kadak had created them himself or whether they had been summoned from elsewhere was the subject of many discussions, but ultimately, what was important was defeating them.
They were fierce and strong and fast, and standing toe to toe, even a knight of great strength and skill could not hope to hold his own for long, to say nothing of the farmers and shopkeepers who had taken up arms. They had weaknesses, but they were quite adept at guarding them, as any creature would be. So the knights and farmers had learned ages ago to engage the demons at a distance and in ambush when they could. The biggest advantage they had was that, at least in the beginning, the demons were not terribly smart. They had had difficulty reasoning out any strategy more complex than a flanking maneuver.
“But Lord Eris,” Ander had asked over his soup that night long ago at the castle, “Surely the mages should be able to outthink them. How is it that they kill so many of us?”
“Well, let’s consider a moment.” Lord Eris, Sheriff of Brannagh, said with a grin as he bit lustily into a crust of bread. “What would you do,” he said as he chewed, “if you saw one of them come through that door right now?”
Ander had grinned. “I’d throw fire at him. And maybe lightning if the fire did not do for him.”
“Aye, and you’d be dead in a trice, son.” The baron, Ander’s father, sipped from his cup.
Ander’s grin faded and replaced with a burning flush. Glynnis chuckled before her mother glared at her to stop. She cast a glance at the sheriff’s handsome nephew, Daerwin, to see if he’d noticed, but no, he was intent on the conversation. She was glad he had not seen her acting the child, but she was disappointed at the same time. It meant he was not looking at her.
“Mark this,” Lord Eris said, leaning over his plate toward the boy. “The most common thing a mage will do when he’s ambushed by these demons is to toss some fire at them. Sometimes it’s not even the mage that throws it but his protections. So your instinct is like that of every mage, and normally, it is a good one. But, you see, with the demons, it’s a mistake and likely to cost you your life.”
“I don’t understand. Do they not burn like all living things?”
“Aye, they do. It angers them for the pain, you see, but it will not stop them because they heal faster than the fire harms them. Best thing for a mage like yourself, boy, is to set them a-panic. Then any weapon, even a mere knife, aimed true, will suffice. When they are panicked, like most animals, they have no sense to guard their weaknesses and their healing slows, almost as if they must concentrate to make it work. Trouble is they don’t take fright easily for all that they’re none too smart. It’s quite harder than you’d think to get inside their thick skulls.”
Now, facing them at last, Ander looked at Glynnis and swallowed hard, trying not to think of the consequences to her or to his mother if he should fail. He had one chance to make this work. “Wait for my signal,” he whispered.
“What signal?”
“I don’t know yet. But you will know when you see it.”
She nodded. She gripped her sling and slipped one of her smoothed stone pellets into it.
What would terrify a demon, he wondered as he moved, furiously searching his mind for any mythology, any stories he’d heard, but nothing came. They had no easy obvious bane that would send them scurrying away, no simple phobias, no guaranteed terrors. No more so, he reasoned, than any other living, breathing creature.
Living.
Breathing.
His eyes went wide. Then he looked up into the trees and smiled.
The demons moved steadily through the clearing, looking under fallen trees kicking at the brush. Ahead of them, something soft thudded to the ground, and they looked up. A shape lay in the dirt, a crumpled mutilated shape that looked like…
Behind them, another wet thud, and beside them another. And another. All around them, pieces of dead demons were falling from the trees, hitting the ground and bouncing to a stop, sometimes just a hand or a leg, sometimes entire bodies with their throats cut or their chests ripped open. One fell right before them with a broken neck, astonished eyes staring out. The living demons backed into a circle and watched the glade around them for the ambush, ready to fight.
Ander watched them carefully. They were afraid, yes, and obviously bewildered, but, they still had not panicked, not quite yet. More bodies fell from the trees, faster and faster, until there were heaps of bloodied flesh and death around them. At last, dim creatures that they were, they turned their attention upward, to where the bodies were coming from. Above them, hundreds upon hundreds of rotting demon corpses swung in the trees, with one and another falling occasionally to the ground.
Ander watched their eyes go wide, and he watched their discipline crumble. There
it was, at last: the panic.
Then he hit them with a barrage of fire.
That, Glynnis decided, was a fine signal. She’d been watching them, looking for the thin spots in their hides, the weaknesses the knights had spoken of. The girl stood and slung a pellet, hard and fast, straight into the temple of the foremost demon, shattering the side of his skull. He staggered for a moment, turning with the force of the blow, then fell behind the others, burning in Ander’s fire where he fell. The other bodies around them were burning, too. Between the falling dead, the fire and the death of one of their own, the other two were now in a complete frenzy, swinging their axes in every direction. It was a wonder they did not hit each other.
Glynnis stepped completely clear of the brush, took aim and slammed another stone straight into the throat of the one nearest her, and he fell to the ground gasping and gurgling, clutching and clawing at his own throat where the wrinkled barky skin was not even broken.
The last of them by now was alternating between snarling at the unseen killers of so many demons and keening in terror behind his axe.
She released another pellet just as the last demon paused in his stride. As a result, it missed completely and splintered into a tree behind him. He looked at the break in the tree’s bark, then snapped his head around at her. His strange eyes narrowed to slits as he scrutinized the small girl in front of him. Could she be the one who killed so many here, his look seemed to ask. He took a step toward her.
“Glynnis!” Ander stepped from cover, picked up a stone to throw at the demon.
The demon turned to face him. “Mage,” it croaked, an evil grin crossing its features. It turned back toward the boy, no longer panicked, and the boy’s eyes went wide.
Glynnis lined up the shot carefully. She had one, at most two, chances to kill the demon before it was on top of Ander. She swung the sling with all her might and landed the stone squarely in the center of the demon’s chest. It faltered for a moment, knocked backward with the force of the blow, but it did not fall. Then it continued toward Ander, who was frantically throwing lightning and fire into it. The illusion of dead demon bodies had faded now with Ander’s attention focused against the monster rushing toward him, and now only the two burning bodies remained in the clearing amidst several burning piles of leaves.
She loaded another pellet and swung the sling again. This time it connected with the demon’s head, but only obliquely and not at the temple. Still he moved forward. He was almost on top of Ander. She loaded another pellet and it fell to the ground. She cursed and picked it up, fumbling it into the sling as the demon got closer to her brother.
Then Ander did something she had never seen him do before.
He stared at the demon and extended his hand as the creature came toward him. He turned his hand, and the creature slowed, gasping, eyes wide with sudden terror. Then Ander closed his hand tightly, and the demon collapsed before him, face first into the forest floor, and was still. A few feet away, the boy staggered and fell to his knees.
“Ander,” she whispered. He only stared at his hand. “Ander!” she whispered again. “We can’t stay here! Come on!”
Later, after they’d moved their camp several miles off their original route, the route they’d told the servants at the castle in case the servants needed to find them, she’d finally gotten to ask him what happened. He told her that in his desperation, he had tried something he had only ever tried before with rabbits and chickens at the castle. He had focused his energy into the demon, deep within the demon, to his heart. He’d been amazed at how very like a man the demon was from within, but how every different the outside. Of course, in the moment, he had had no time to muse on such things, but in the safety now of their camp, he found it fascinating.
He’d focused his attention on the heart, the surest way to kill the creature, and he saw that it was actually damaged, having been shocked by the trauma from her pellet hitting its chest. Blood had been leaking out of the demon’s heart, and whether the demon managed to kill him first or not, the creature would have died soon, regardless.
He hadn’t wanted to tell her the next part, but she’d wrung it from him: he had held his hand out, envisioning it wrapping around this demon heart as the creature came toward him, and he’d simply squeezed it shut. It had been that simple. Oh, of course his actual hand had had nothing to do with it. It had actually had something to do with strands or threads, something about how he envisioned probabilities or some such. She hadn’t listened all that closely since mage things hadn’t really meant much to her. But somehow, her gentle brother had reached inside a demon and crushed its heart.
The next morning when they’d awakened, Ander had been gone. Their mother had alternated in her moods between believing he’d been snatched by demons in the night, a story Glynnis had dismissed out of hand simply because she and her mother yet lived, and assuming that he’d slipped away in the night to try to protect them. But Glynnis had imagined a different albeit more romantic reason for him to leave. He had indeed slipped away to protect them, but not in so passive a way as her mother imagined. His first stop had probably been to go to the family castle, to deal with some treacherous servants who had sold the family out for gold, or perhaps to find the servants tortured and murdered. How else could the demons have tracked them so quickly?
She fancied then as she did now that all these years later, he had become the hunter instead of the hunted. At the war’s end, she’d looked for him in the dust of the roadways, but he had never made his way back to what should have been his baronial seat after their father’s death, nor had he come seeking her at Brannagh.
She smiled sadly to herself at the memory. Somewhere along the line, he had probably been captured and killed long ago, her dear brother Ander, but she liked to think that perhaps he had weakened Kadak’s forces a bit along the way. Surely legends of such a demon hunting mage would have reached her ears had he lived through the war. Still, she would not call herself Baroness Berendor until she was certain he no longer lived.
She sat alone in her tent with the quiet of the evening settling over the camp, her chores and her social duties among the Dhanani discharged. The others would gather by the fires to hear Aidan’s stories and plan their defenses in case the enemies of Brannagh would follow, but she had no place there. For now, her place was here, in this bare tent, among her memories. Among all she had lost.
* * *
“Wirthing’s men have returned to his castle,” Dane said, using a stick to draw a circle on the ground. His face was lit eerily by the flames as he spoke. “I got right in close, staying high in the trees above, so I could hear the talk among them.”
“Gikka would be proud,” Aidan smiled. “She taught you well.”
“Aye, well, but here’s what I’d have you know: Wirthing’s numbers are not what they were, not by a ways. It seems there was a falling out between him and the farmers that came to blows. Wirthing thought to take the unclaimed lands from them, and they saw it otherwise,” he snorted in disgust. “Seems like in light of Wirthing’s demands the farmers might begin to miss the fairness of our lord sheriff, ere the coals of his razed castle are cold. So Wirthing beats retreat back to his own castle to nurse his pride.”
“Good.” Aidan translated the chief’s words to them, wishing the words were stronger. “Such a one deserves to be stripped, beaten and fed to the graetnas.”
Tero nodded. “They all do.”
Aidan sighed, not sure he wanted to hear the answer to his next question. “Did Maddock prevail, then?”
“Aye, he did,” answered Dane with a bitter laugh. “It seems Maddock used Wirthing like a tavern whore and cast him aside.”
“What becomes of the magen?” Lwyn scowled into the fire. “Comes-after the castle falls and where are they going?”
Dane frowned and looked down, displeased by the news he carried. “They went to Damerien.”
Aidan translated quickly for the chief, his voice shaking. If Damerien fell,
all of Syon would fall.
“What?” Tero looked up sharply.
The scout nodded. “Aye, but take heart. From what I could gather from Wirthing’s men, the word they received from the mages was that the duke was not there.”
Lwyn grinned. “Not our duke, for magen to kill in his garden. For Brannagh, Damerien and all Syon!”
The other knights returned the cheer and drank.
“Better still,” Dane continued, “they had no idea where the duke went.”
Aidan smiled. “Some good news at last.”
“Aye,” Dane agreed. “Wirthing is furious. I think he has designs, but until he can show the duke’s corpse and the sheriff’s besides––may Verilion refuse them both for our sakes––Wirthing cannot lay claim to the throne of Syon.”
Tero growled. “He will not see the stone on which it sits.”
Dane nodded. “But since you ask, the mages, having lost Damerien, were making their way to Pyran at last word.”
Bakti started to speak to Aidan, then paused and waved him off. “Reason why Pyran?” he said brokenly. “Pyran danger. Pyran Hadrian.” He spat into the fire. “Not know why m—mages go.”
Aidan shuddered at the word Hadrian. “Were they Hadrian mages?” He could think of nothing more terrifying.
Sedrik crossed his arms. “They did not look Hadrian to me.”
Lwyn shook his head. “They are not. They look to be Verdura witches.” He likewise spat into the fire. “The Verdura are child to them I think from comes-before.”
Sedrik stroked his chin. “That is an interesting thought. Verdura. But the Verdura settlements are to the north and west, along the Anatayan borderlands, and at last word, they were abandoned, no more than ruins. Besides, that’s the opposite way from Pyran, so the question is, again, why Pyran?”
Tero looked up. “Why not Pyran? It is enough to know that they go there. Best we focus on how to defeat them, not on understanding their feelings.”
Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) Page 29