Lionheart

by Thea Harrison

  Now that she had expanded her search area, she saw a great white lion and a tall black stallion standing about two miles away due west.

  Then she comprehended everything as if it had been laid out as clearly as the map in the council room.

  Oberon had been several steps ahead of everybody. He knew the terrain, and he’d planned it out. The tornado had come in from the northeast and cut diagonally southwest across the basin where the army had camped.

  He had known people would run instinctively, and it would be natural for them to run away from the tornado.

  He had known Isabeau would make a run for the crossover passageway, and even though he was weaponless, he had decided to make a stand.

  Kathryn had been wrong.

  That diving stoop to catch the starling, when Bayne and Graydon had recorded her speed, wasn’t the fastest she could fly.

  * * *

  The morningstar bolt, when it hit, had been an act of inspired genius that came right before the tornado hit.

  Some archers were like that. They could see not where a target was, but where a target would be when they fired a shot. It would seem an unknown Arkadian magic user had the same talent.

  If Robin had not seen the morningstar out of the corner of his eye and dodged, it would have hit them squarely and killed one or both of them. As it was, the puck caught the edge of the bolt on one haunch and screamed in agony. Somehow, he managed to keep from tumbling end over end. At the speed they were going, that was a miracle all on its own.

  But he still stumbled hard enough that Oberon lost his seat and pitched over his shoulder. The lion’s reflexes kept him from slamming into the ground—he was pretty certain Kathryn would regard that as a hard enough blow to the chest—so even as he flew through the air, he arched his body and shapeshifted fast enough to land on all four of the great cat’s feet, which spread out some of the impact.

  Luckily, they weren’t in the tornado’s path, because as he limped over to the stallion, he saw right away that Robin wouldn’t be racing anywhere anytime soon. The stallion’s hind leg was broken and burned badly. The scent of sizzled flesh hung in the air.

  “All right,” he said gently. “I’ve got you.” He caught the stallion by the nose and did a quick scan.

  There was nothing good about a disaster, but at least the break was a clean one. Ignoring the fading roar as the tornado passed, he cast a few healing spells targeted to the area low in Robin’s leg where the break was, and then along the haunch to seal over the raw, burned flesh.

  The puck sagged in relief as the worst of his pain lifted, but even though Oberon knew Robin could use more healing, his own tiredness forced him to stop.

  Weather working took a lot of strength. He had almost used the last of his magic, and in any case, all the healing spells in the world wouldn’t recover Robin’s ability to move at great speeds. Only time and rest would do that. They were spent, and they knew it.

  And they still had yet to come face-to-face with Isabeau. He supposed it was too much to hope that the tornado had killed her. When Robin could walk, he turned, and they headed together to a natural dip in the land between two hills. As the hilltops were broken and craggy, it was the most logical path to anyone who wanted to travel due west.

  If she was going to bolt, it would be right through this grove of trees.

  At some point dawn had come. In the aftermath of the storm, the early morning was weak and uncertain. The pallid light made everything look gray and black.

  As they waited, Oberon said, “I want you to find Kathryn and make sure she’s okay.”

  “No,” Robin replied, peaceably enough. “You know she’s okay.”

  They didn’t speak again. It was good to stand beside his friend.

  The rhythmic beat of horse hooves drummed the ground. Several riders approached. Here we go, he thought.

  Then he saw them, winding through the trees.

  Twelve Light Fae on horses slowed as they grew closer. Oberon smelled Isabeau before he located her. They had not come face-to-face in centuries, but he had never forgotten her scent. His hackles rose.

  She rode between two guards. Her beautiful face was stark with the knowledge of her own defeat, and it was everything he had needed to see before one of them died. Her expression turned to loathing as she looked at Robin.

  “What are you doing here, dog?” she spat. “And why aren’t you with your master?”

  Robin growled, a steady, nearly inaudible sound that sounded bizarre coming from the stallion.

  Oberon watched coldly as the Light Fae began to spread out. Isabeau turned her attention to him. She gave him a pretty smile that didn’t quite mask the worried wariness in her eyes. Things weren’t adding up for her.

  “I had no idea there were any Wyr in Lyonesse, much less one of your stature,” she told him. “My disputes are solely with Oberon and his abominations—I have no quarrel with you, sir. All we want is to leave this land, so let us pass and we’ll go in peace.”

  His lips pulled back in a snarl. Telepathically, he growled, Isabeau, as the gods are my witness, you’re not leaving this place alive.

  She blanched. “You! How can you be alive after all this time—how can you be full Wyr?” She screamed at the other Light Fae, “This is Oberon, you fools! Kill him! KILL HIM! KILL THEM BOTH!”

  Looking as stark as their mistress, the Light Fae drew weapons. Some began to mutter spells. He noted each one. Light began to glow between Isabeau’s gloved hands as she concentrated on creating a morningstar.

  I’m sorry, Kathryn, he thought. I’m not able to avoid physical combat after all.

  With that, he unleashed his control, and the lion roared. Years of outrage and hate poured out of him. It shook the ground. Enough of the man remained to raise the last of his own magic as the lion lunged to engage the nearest soldier who rushed him.

  With a sweep of one giant paw, he snatched the male off his horse, sank his fangs into his torso, and broke his back. Spitting the dying man to one side, he leaped to the next. Robin reared, kicked, and lunged to fight with teeth and hooves. The black stallion had grown fangs.

  Oberon killed the next warrior, and the next. They died quickly, screaming in terror. His vision narrowed to a single focus—he needed to get to Isabeau before she loosed her morningstar. She was still too far away for him to stop.

  He had to try anyway.

  He crouched, readying for a massive spring, but then the most perfectly shaped, deadly feathered bullet plummeted out of the sky, talons outstretched.

  The peregrine falcon did the oddest thing. She tapped the top of Isabeau’s head with both talons. He felt a brief, bright spark of her magic, and then she swooped away.

  Isabeau’s morningstar spell fell apart as her body stiffened. She toppled gracelessly off her horse.

  Oberon had no fucking clue what had just happened, but he loved it. He loved that murderous little falcon. He loved her. Letting loose another roar, this time in delight, he and Robin tore through the other Light Fae. A morningstar burned along the side of his neck and shoulder.

  It hurt like a son of a bitch, but as he whirled to contend with the magic user who had cast the spell, the falcon tore out of the sky with lightning speed and executed her perplexing maneuver again. The magic user toppled just as Isabeau had.

  By the time they had killed the rest of the Light Fae, Oberon was laboring hard. His torso felt like one gigantic bruise. It was hard to breathe without pain, which was localized in the front of his chest. The falcon landed and turned into Kathryn. She looked sharp with worry.

  With a massive effort, he shapeshifted back into a man and stood wheezing, one hand flattened on his chest.

  She sprang at him, raging. “I told you not to—”

  “Oh darling, hush,” he said tiredly.

  Her scolding stopped as abruptly as if he had stuck a cork in her mouth. She threw her arms around him and scanned him. He hugged her—he was covered in blood, but she didn’t seem to mi
nd.

  “No more fighting,” she whispered. “I mean it. You’ve strained the fresh connections in your bones.”

  “I know. I can feel it.” He looked around. “What you did—did you kill them?”

  She had gotten blood on her face, and she wiped it off as she shook her head. “No, I used a medical procedure called a defibrillator spell. It’s an electrical current that’s meant to restart someone’s heart if it stops beating, but their hearts were already beating fine, so their bodies seized up and they lost consciousness. That’s going to wear off soon.”

  Well, in that case. He strode over to the magic user and unceremoniously broke the male’s neck. Then he turned to Isabeau, which was when he noticed Robin.

  The puck had also shapeshifted back into his most humanlike form. He sat cross-legged on the ground and had put Isabeau’s head in his lap. Stroking her golden hair, he contemplated her lovely, still face.

  “Robin…,” Oberon began, but he stopped when he realized he didn’t know what to say.

  He wanted nothing more than to keep Isabeau alive, so he could put her on trial in front of everyone that she had wronged in Lyonesse. But she was much too dangerous to keep captive, not while the three of them were either injured or overextended in some way and with Arkadian soldiers sprinkled like poison throughout the area.

  He exchanged a troubled glance with Kathryn. Threading her fingers through his, she said quietly in his head, Maybe he needs this more than you do.

  Maybe, he admitted. It was difficult to let go, but so much easier, he knew, than what Robin must have endured.

  They watched as the puck sat with Isabeau until she began to stir.

  When her perfect, cornflower blue eyes opened, Robin gave her a smile filled with too many sharp teeth.

  “Hello, darling.” He showed her a slender, shining silver needle that he held pinched between thumb and forefinger. Oberon felt a flash of the puck’s magic. “I have a present for you.”

  Isabeau’s gaze widened. She opened her mouth to scream as her hands flew up. Tired as he had to be, Robin still struck before she could defend herself. With a king cobra’s swiftness, he drove the silver needle through the soft flesh of her temple, deep into her brain.

  Kathryn covered her mouth as the Light Fae Queen convulsed. None of them moved or looked away until she finished dying.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As far as Oberon was concerned, the most important part of the battle was finished, but it still wasn’t over.

  “Corral mounts for yourselves,” he said to Kathryn and Robin. “And check their saddlebags—we need whatever provisions they have, and we have to get out of here fast.”

  Kathryn got straight to work. Robin stirred as well, but as Oberon’s gaze lingered on him, he saw the puck take a knife to slice out the dead Queen’s tongue. With a violence that spoke of some dark, untold history, Robin flung it aside. Then he cut off Isabeau’s golden hair at the nape and stuffed the length into one of his coat pockets.

  Oberon might never learn the full story of what had happened to Robin while Isabeau had kept him in captivity, so it wasn’t his place to judge. If Robin needed something physical from Isabeau to convince himself she was truly dead, Oberon hoped her hair brought him some peace.

  Turning away, he found that Kathryn had already caught two of the horses. The Light Fae horses were experienced battle mounts, and none of them had wandered far. Even though they were uneasy with Oberon’s scent, it was relatively easy work to capture several more.

  Robin joined them. Rapidly they collected weapons and rummaged through the packs. There was plenty to harvest: knives, small iron cooking pots, dried jerky, pouches of salt, flint and strikers for fire starting, and stores of hard biscuits that were the staple food of many armies on a march. Kathryn called it hardtack. Each mount also had a bag of grain for horse feed as well as a cloak and blanket tied in a roll behind the saddles.

  “Isabeau and her party were remarkably well prepared,” he said. “They must have kept ready in case they needed to desert the Arkadians for any reason.”

  “Yes, I can see that they did,” an unknown male said in a cold, clipped voice.

  Fuck. They weren’t the only ones who knew how to cloak their presence. He hadn’t heard anything, and obviously neither had Kathryn or Robin.

  Oberon spun to face the new threat while Robin snarled, and Kathryn shapeshifted and flew to the top of the tallest tree. The part of him that remained constantly aware of her presence took note and passionately approved of her decision. She knew how to use her strengths to everyone’s best advantage. It also got her out of arm’s reach of the twenty Light Fae cavalry that stood facing Oberon and Robin.

  To a person, their expressions were white and drawn. Like Isabeau, they must have come believing they would enjoy a resounding victory.

  One Light Fae male’s horse stood a few feet yards in front of the others. That, along with a strong aura of Power and an air of command, told Oberon this was the leader of the Arkadian army.

  “Whoever you are, you have excellent cloaking skills, I’ll give you that,” Oberon said grimly. Maybe if they hadn’t been so exhausted and focused on their tasks, one of them would have sensed the Light Fae’s approach, but he couldn’t guarantee it.

  “I am Asheroth, Lord of Arkadia,” the Light Fae male told him. “And you must be the infamous King of the Daoine Sidhe.” His hard gaze glittered like blue diamonds set in stone. He didn’t glance at Isabeau’s body. “According to the reports received by the Queen’s council, you were unconscious and dying.”

  He spread out his hands. “As you can see, their reports were mistaken. Asheroth, you are trespassing on my land. Have you accepted how drastic a mistake that was, or do you need more evidence?”

  Standing relaxed and confident and drenched in Light Fae blood, he threw everything he had into the bluff. He had fresh injuries and the surgery to contend with, and he’d used nearly all his available Power. Robin had driven himself to exhaustion and was too injured to run. Of the three of them, Kathryn was the best off, but she was only one person.

  If this came to another battle, it wouldn’t go in their favor.

  But most people didn’t realize weather magic couldn’t produce instant results. The majority of weather events had to be built over time. Lyonesse’s weather had been disrupted for years and had not yet settled into a more stable pattern. That was one of the reasons why Oberon had been able to create such a massive and powerful storm so quickly—that, along with the fact that many preexisting conditions for spring storms had already been present.

  But maybe this foreign lord wouldn’t know anything about weather magic either.

  “You destroyed more than half my army,” Asheroth said in a clipped voice through whitened lips. “Over three thousand souls. Their bodies are scattered everywhere.”

  “And you sacrificed all of them for a woman who deserted you the first chance she got,” Oberon said. “Was the price Arkadia paid worth it?”

  “I did not come here for her,” Asheroth bit out. His horse danced uneasily, and he hauled it under control. “I came because the Daoine Sidhe are responsible for my brother’s death! He was my only heir.”

  Robin laughed wildly. “Is that the story she fed you? You fool, nobody in Lyonesse had anything to do with your brother’s death—they don’t even know who he was! She manipulated you into going to war! She used you to get what she wanted, just as she used everyone else and everything around her. She probably wept pretty tears over Valentin’s body as she spun the story without ever stating a real lie… She kept me in a cage for years, and I watched her do it over and over again.”

  The puck’s voice rang with a truth so sharp and bitter Oberon could almost taste it.

  “I never mentioned my brother’s name,” Asheroth said slowly as he stared at Robin.

  “You didn’t have to. I was in Avalon. Everyone knew who Valentin was. He tried to rape someone, and she killed him for it.” Robin sh
owed his teeth. “And before you try to insist, no, I won’t tell you who killed him. Was it the cook in Isabeau’s castle, or maybe one of the housemaids? Valentin must have raped so many women. But I’m guessing you already know about that. It’s hard to keep a habitual crime like rape hidden for so many centuries.”

  The Arkadian lord drew back sharply, and for a long, tense moment, Oberon thought he was going to attack.

  Digging deep inside, Oberon raised what Power he could so that the Light Fae could feel it amassing like a warning thundercloud. He drawled, “It appears she misled you over just about everything.”

  “Yes,” Asheroth said between his teeth. “It appears she did.” He nudged his horse forward, deliberately walking over Isabeau’s body, and dismounted. Meeting Oberon’s gaze, on the same level as equals, he said, “Just as my dead are scattered all over your countryside, so are the living. Despite the blow you have struck against Arkadia today, I offer a truce, so I can collect my people and take them home.”

  “Despite the blow I struck?” Oberon gave him a hard stare. “Let’s be clear about this. You and I will never be anything other than enemies. You invaded my home and slaughtered my people without verified evidence to justify your need for war. I took your three thousand souls as payment for the hundred you took of mine without asking. You have four days to collect what’s left of your army and leave Lyonesse. Any Arkadian I find after that will be slaughtered without mercy—and I will be looking for them.”

  Now hatred blazed from Asheroth’s eyes. He said bitterly, “We will be gone by the end of your fourth day. Sooner, if I can manage it. I never want to lay eyes on you or your cursed land again.”

  * * *

  The Arkadian lord mounted and issued a command in a harsh-sounding language, and he and his party rode off.