As she drew even with Lord Li, he turned his head ever so slightly in the dirt, eyes widening as he recognized her. Ashlyn leapt off her horse, keeping hold of the reins as she hastily shoved her sword into its sheath on her back. She dropped to her knees beside her father.
“Hold onto me, Dad!” she yelled, grabbing one of his arms and hooking it around her neck. She tried to stand, but he was too heavy. Suddenly there was an explosion next to them and her horse spooked, shying sideways. Ashlyn held onto the reins and was dragged across the dirt, losing her grip on her father. She rolled aside, kicking to get her feet out of a smoldering clump of grass, and scrambled to her feet. Dirt hailed down on her from one of Skye’s attacks, the blond swordsman decimating everything around them and scaring her horse even worse.
A ninja appeared beside her. Ashlyn ducked under his haphazard punch and landed a solid kick to his knee, knocking his leg out from under him. She followed up with an uppercut, but was pulled backwards again by her frightened horse before she could land a third blow. Ashlyn knew she couldn’t let go of the animal or all chance of escape would be lost. Frustrated, she pulled the horse’s head around with the reins, turning the animal in circles in an attempt to contain its movement, and trying to force it back towards her father. In the middle of one rotation, she glimpsed Drake kneeling next to her dad, his midnight-colored horse standing calmly beside them.
“Drake!” she screamed, and she didn’t think her voice was loud enough to carry over the noise of battle, but the vampire looked up and met her eyes.
“Get him out of here!” she called. Drake nodded and turned, picking up Lord Li easily in his arms. Too late, Ashlyn saw two ninjas running for Drake with their swords drawn. She grabbed her shuriken, slicing her hand open in her haste, and flung it sideways. The hira arced gracefully, slicing across one soldier’s throat and glancing off the other’s shoulder. Ashlyn turned and vaulted into her saddle, and her horse was only too happy to run. She urged the animal towards the ninja who was now raising his sword to strike at Drake, but before she could get there, Drake pivoted out of the way, awkwardly supporting her dad on one arm and drawing his pistol with the other. He shot the ninja point blank.
Ashlyn drew her horse to a halt next to Drake, and the animal skittered sideways, too nervous to stand still. Ashlyn leaned down, hooking one knee over her horse’s neck as she came out of the saddle, made a swipe and managed to yank her shuriken from where it was embedded in the ground.
“Take him,” Drake shouted as she straightened up in the saddle, and before she could object, he was moving towards her, lifting her dad across the saddle in front of her just before her horse danced aside again. Even though she hadn’t been strong enough to pick him up, Lord Li was still surprisingly easy to support, and Ashlyn curled one arm across his torso, hooking the fingers of her bleeding hand over his shoulder to try to anchor him against her. Drake turned away and shot five times in quick succession, dropping five ninjas who were advancing on him, and used the butt of his gun to slam a sixth ninja in the face.
There was an explosion right behind her- pretty much the worst luck anyone could have EVER, Ashlyn thought later- and her stupid horse bolted. Ashlyn struggled to keep control, wishing with all her might that she had her own horse, Suki, back right now, and somehow managed to turn the animal back towards Drake just in time to see him duck under a swing from Kou’s katana.
Ashlyn screamed Skye’s name, searching for the swordsman amidst the flames and smoke and rain of earth. Drake was driven back by blow after blow from Kou and two other ninjas, blocking as best he could with his silver glove. Ashlyn tried to concentrate to cast fire on Kou, but her horse was moving too much and she was struggling too hard to keep her dad in the saddle with her.
Terrifyingly, Ashlyn glimpsed a strike from Kou that landed true- slicing diagonally across Drake’s chest even as the vampire jumped backwards. Drake fell to his knees, and for one horrible moment Ashlyn thought that it had been a severe wound, but then her horse spun angrily, trying to escape from the pressure of the reins, and she lost sight of Drake for just a moment.
When she managed to quiet the horse and saw Drake again, he was on his feet, and his eyes were glowing brighter than she’d ever seen them. His lips curved in a snarl, and he was hunched over, fingers curled like claws. He stalked around Kou like a wolf circling its prey. There was something animalistic and feral about him, something she’d never seen before.
It was then that she realized Kou had cut the cord that held the resist stane.
She’d never seen Drake without resist, but she’d heard enough stories about vampires to know that her situation had just become infinitely more dangerous.
Skye emerged from a cloud of smoke to her right exactly at that moment, dragging a soldier who had apparently tried to strike him using a whip, and Ashlyn shrieked his name. Without looking up, Skye opened a cavern in the ground directly beneath the soldier and sliced through the whip with his sword in the same moment. The falling ninja’s screams somehow reached Ashlyn’s ears through the din. Skye urged his horse towards her.
“What’s wrong? Get out of here!” he told her, using earth to ripple the ground by the cavern he’d just created, sending several other soldiers falling into its depths.
“Drake lost resist,” Ashlyn said to him, feeling dizzy from all the circles her horse was turning. Her father was slumped in her arms, unconscious.
“What?” Shock registered on the swordsman’s face, and he followed Ashlyn’s gaze to Drake, who was on top of a screaming Toryn ninja, tearing at the other man with his teeth. Kou was nowhere to be seen.
“We’ve got to get it back to him,” Ashlyn pleaded, and almost before she’d finished her sentence, Skye was rushing forward. Ashlyn’s infuriatingly spastic horse followed after him, the sudden movement throwing Ashlyn off balance and forcing her to grab at its mane as she struggled to keep both herself and her father upright.
It seemed like things were moving in slow-motion as Ashlyn felt herself falling to one side, losing grip on the saddle as her horse darted and leaped around fallen soldiers in terror. When it became obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to recover her seat, Ashlyn clutched her father to her chest and kicked her opposite foot out of the stirrup, turning so that Lord Li fell on top of her.
The impact knocked the wind out of her, and she found herself skidding in fresh, moist dirt before coming up to rest against the body of a soldier. Ashlyn struggled to sit up, still keeping an arm around her dad’s waist, and watched as her horse galloped off into the woods. Crap, she mouthed as her lungs screamed for air. Trying not to panic, she glanced down at her dad and saw the resist stane, still threaded on its cord, lying in the dirt next to his head.
She grabbed it and struggled to stand up. Her father was still too heavy to lift, so she rolled him off her as gently as she could. She had to get back on a horse somehow. Could she even find a horse? Her eyes came to rest on Drake’s horse, standing quietly exactly where Drake had left him as battle raged around the poor animal. Ashlyn gritted her teeth and shoved the resist stane into her pocket, then grabbed her dad’s arms and tried to drag him. First things first…she had to get her dad back on a horse…then she could help Drake.
Something slammed into her from the side, knocking her to the ground and rolling her over twice, and Ashlyn gasped in pain as her shoulder hit a rock. She brought up an elbow, striking her attacker in the nose. He snarled and rolled off, and Ashlyn scrambled up, yanking her sword off her back.
Drake stood in front of her, furious and growling and very un-Drake-like.
“I have resist,” Ashlyn said unsteadily. “Let me put it back on you, Drake.”
Drake lunged at her, and she flipped backwards, kicking him in the chin on her first flip and landing in a sideways crouch on the second, ready to leap aside at any second.
Behind Drake, Ashlyn saw Skye grabbing her father, lifting Lord Li into the saddle. Please go, Ashlyn willed him silently. Please tak
e him and go. But Skye barely managed to prop the unconscious Toryn on top of the horse before another ninja attacked him.
Drake leaped at her again, and this time Ashlyn sidestepped and spun in a leg sweep. Drake jumped over it and snatched the front of her tunic, dragging her forward. Ashlyn swung her sword down, slicing across his knuckles. Rather than yanking away from him, she advanced, swinging with the sword, driving him back furiously with a series of blows that were blocked by his glove. Ashlyn had never fought Drake before and had never wanted to. Despite his preference for long-range weapons, his vampiric strength made him a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat. She didn’t want to give him a chance to hurt her.
At last she retreated, fists raised, her legs trembling and angrier than she could remember being in a long time. “Find the will, you moron!” she snapped. “Vampirism doesn’t control you any more than the resist stane does. Fight it!”
Her words fell on deaf ears, and the vampire lunged a third time. This time Ashlyn fell backwards deliberately, bringing up her feet to catch him in his midsection and propel him over her head, sending him tumbling behind her.
Ashlyn jumped up, sheathing her sword, and ran to Drake’s horse. She slammed her foot into the stirrup and pulled herself up, but was just swinging her opposite leg over when someone grabbed a chunk of her hair and yanked. Ashlyn yelped, but grabbed the saddle and barely managed to avoid falling, and there was a harder yank and then- suddenly she was free. She clambered up onto the horse, looked over and saw that Skye had plowed into Drake with his horse, slicing off half the length of her hair with his sword.
“Run!” Skye yelled at her. He circled around and cast an earth spell that flung Drake backwards into a throng of soldiers that had just managed to make their way around the dirt barriers.
Wordlessly, Ashlyn jammed her foot into the other stirrup and wheeled Drake’s horse around, galloping for the forest with her father slouched in the saddle in front of her.
Chapter 5
Control
The wind whipped Ashlyn’s newly-short hair into her face, and she shook it out of her eyes impatiently, fighting to stay focused even as her joints protested their ongoing abuse. Her legs were exhausted and cramping from being clamped against her horse’s sides for so long, and her arms were aching from straining to keep her father on the saddle in front of her. He didn’t weigh much, which was both frightening and fortunate, because Ashlyn was terrified for his weakened state but she knew if he had been any heavier she wouldn’t have been able to support him.
With some effort, she managed to shift her grip on the reins, cueing the horse to angle west, away from the coast. Although the route she’d taken to get here was a straight path back to Toryn, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to risk the lack of cover on the beach. Already, Drake’s horse’s neck was lathered with sweat, his breathing harsh and labored. She didn’t know how much longer she could force the animal to run.
They leaped over a small log and galloped into the forest, the moon above blotted out in an instant as they entered the cover of the trees. Ashlyn racked her brain for the layout of the island, simultaneously cursing her faulty memory and her own stupidity for not returning to her homeland more often over the last three years. From what she could recall, the forest thinned out closer to a small lake, and on the other side of the lake were The Barrens, where her mother was buried. From there it was an easy enough trek to Toryn.
The gelding faltered, a slight stumble, a skip in the rhythmic run, and that was the only warning that Ashlyn had before the poor creature went down. Suddenly Ashlyn was tumbling forward, head over heels because she hadn’t had time to prepare herself for it, and she felt the crunchy leaves jump up to bite into her shoulders as she rolled. She came to an unceremonious stop against the trunk of a tree, hard enough to hurt but not enough to injure, and lay there for a moment, trying to catch her breath.
“Dad!” She bolted upright, belatedly remembering that she hadn’t been alone in the saddle.
Her father was lying face-down a few feet away. Ashlyn crawled to him and gently pulled at his shoulder, turning him over. He was still unconscious, and far too frail and light, his cheeks sunken, his normally tanned skin pale and drawn. One arm was bent at an odd angle below the elbow, obviously broken.
“Oh Dad,” she muttered, tears springing to her eyes. She hastily untied her belt and looked around. There was a stick close by that was a bit too thin and long, but would still work for now. She snapped it over her knee to make it a more suitable size, then gently picked up her dad’s arm, straightening it very slowly. She prodded the skin with her fingers, feeling the bone within. It seemed like a clean break, but she didn’t want to try setting it herself. Instead she placed the stick against the arm and wrapped her leather belt around both the arm and the stick as many times as she could, tying a knot to secure the makeshift splint. At least she could prevent it from being injured any further until they got back to Toryn.
Lord Li’s breathing was steady but light. Ashlyn looked over at where Drake’s horse lay, its sides heaving. She couldn’t force the animal to move, and they’d already run so far. She bit her lip, wondering if anyone had followed them. No one had confronted them yet, so maybe she was in the clear. What should she do?
The plan was, if they got separated, to meet up back in the city, but that would be a difficult trek to make without a horse. Maybe if she waited a bit, the horse would recover enough to take them back, even if it was just at a walk. If not…Ashlyn supposed she could probably drag her father, although she’d have to construct some kind of stretcher that she could pull behind her. It would be very slow going.
Right now the most important thing was to get under some kind of cover. Ashlyn sat quietly, listening to the sound of running water. She knew she wasn’t close enough to the beach to hear the ocean, so she was probably close to the lake. Was there a cave behind the waterfall there? She frowned, trying to remember. It had been so long.
Drake’s horse startled her by lifting its head at that moment, stretching its upper lip out comically as it tested the air with its nose. Ashlyn got to her feet, wincing at a slight pain in her ankle, and walked to the gelding. One foreleg was stretched out in front of it, and she ran a hand down the coarse hair, noting that the leg was already swelling, but did not appear to be broken.
She didn’t know if heal worked on animals or not, but she wasn’t very skilled with the magic anyway and it would be very risky to attempt to heal a patient who couldn’t say what was wrong or where it hurt. Ashlyn sighed, chewing on her lower lip as she debated what to do. Her father wasn’t very heavy and the horse could probably handle his weight, even with the injured leg. If she could somehow manage to get her father on the horse, they could at least get to the lake and seek out shelter. The issue would be getting her dad on and then convincing the horse to get up.
She looped her hands under her dad’s arms, holding at the apex of his arm and shoulder, and grunted as she tried to drag him towards the horse. The first attempt only moved him a few inches, and Ashlyn gritted her teeth. She dug in her feet, bent her knees and hauled as hard as she could. As thin as he was, her dad was still much bigger than her. “Your bones are heavy, old man,” she groused as they moved along, inch by painful inch. “I’m never letting you give me a hard time about my weight, ever.”
Her stomach grumbled loudly when she finally got her father to the horse, and she realized suddenly that she hadn’t had anything to eat in more than a day. Well, plenty of time for that later. With some effort, Ashlyn managed to prop her dad up against the side of the horse, soothing the animal when it seemed a little bothered by what she was doing. Eventually she was able to get Lord Li’s leg over the saddle, and from there she pushed him up so that he was lopsidedly lying on the horse’s back, as much on the saddle as she could get him. Now it was just a question of getting the horse up without her dad falling off.
Ashlyn picked up her makeshift weapon harness where it lay next to
a tree, noting that it had torn when she’d gone flying. She’d have to fix it somehow. Sighing, she picked up the reins off the ground and moved back to stand beside the horse’s belly. How is this going to work? She held the reins in her left hand and hooked the weapon harness over her right wrist so she could grab her dad’s leg with that hand. “Okay, mister,” she muttered. “Time to give me a hand here.” She tugged upward on the reins.
Fortunately, Drake’s gelding was nothing like the horse that had almost gotten Ashlyn killed in battle less than an hour before, and the black steed obediently gathered its hooves underneath it and tried to stand. As Ashlyn expected, the animal rose to its feet unevenly, and the saddle listed off to one side, but fortunately she was able to grab onto her dad’s uninjured arm and maintain her hold on his leg to keep him from falling off. One of the saddle bags came loose and fell to the ground, but she figured she could come back and get that later.
“Oh, thank the gods,” Ashlyn whispered, patting the horse’s neck. “And thank you. I promise I’ll give you a break if you can just get us to the lake, sweetheart. Come on now.” Checking to make sure that her dad was still resting evenly on the horse’s back, Ashlyn started off in the direction of the lake, leading with the reins.
It took them several minutes to complete what should have been a thirty second walk, but Ashlyn wasn’t complaining when they finally emerged into a clearing with a beautiful, sparkling lake and a small waterfall. She edged around the lake, trying to steer clear of the muddy parts so as not to leave tracks, and made her way to the waterfall.
The horse knew how to ground-tie, right? It had certainly appeared that way earlier. “Um…stay,” she said uncertainly to the gelding, dropping the reins and pointing at the ground. “I’ll be right back.”
Regret (Lady of Toryn Trilogy) Page 6