War Maid's Choice-ARC

by David Weber

  That would be bad enough, yet it was a chance he was prepared to accept. Without the element of surprise, his casualties would climb sharply, but the defenders simply didn’t have enough manpower. The harsh truth was that he could afford far higher losses than the King’s bodyguards possibly could, and given how much they were being paid for this one—

  The staccato cry of a southern bird who had no business on the Wind Plain sounded clearly through the cool, green woods, and Erkân Trâram drew his sword and looked through the thin screen of branches at the top of that ornamental wall Selmar had described.

  “Now!” he bellowed.

  * * *

  Leeana came to her feet with a dancer’s grace, and somehow the strung bow had appeared in her left hand. For just a moment, she wasn’t certain what had snatched her out of her chair. Then she realized—she hadn’t heard that single shouted word; Gayrfressa had.

  She turned to her left, facing the direction from which the command—and it had to be a command—had come, and her right hand drew an arrow from her quiver. Somewhere deep under the surface of her thoughts, she recalled her first morning at Kalatha and her hopeless performance as an archer under Erlis and Ravlahn’s evaluating examination. She’d come a long way since that day, and despite the bigger muscles with which an unfair nature had gifted male arms, there weren’t a great many men who could have pulled the bow she’d mastered in the intervening years. She nocked the arrow, her brain ticking with the cool precision of a Dwarvenhame pocket watch, and felt the alert, tingling readiness purring through her nerves and sinews. Despite her years of hard, sometimes brutal training, she’d never faced an enemy when lives were in the balance, and she was vaguely astonished that what she felt most strongly at the moment was an overwhelming focus and purpose, not fear.

  Well, a small inner voice told her almost whimsically, there’s always time for that.

  * * *

  Trâram’s shout brought his entire company to its feet. Whistles shrilled and other voices shouted their own orders, galvanized by his command, and the attack rolled forward.

  The approaches were most open on the western side of the lodge, which was why Trâram himself commanded that prong of the assault. The dense greenery of the Forest of Chergor swept up to within little more than thirty or forty feet of the lodge’s other walls; here, on the west, the approach lay through the more open and orderly lines of an apple orchard. The apple trees’ leaves and ripening fruit provided a wind-tousled screen, concealing most of his men’s approach from any observer who might be perched awkwardly atop that purely decorative wall, but they were still far more exposed coming through the orchard. On the other hand, the orchard was much more open than the forest’s tangles, which allowed him not only to move more quickly, but also to maintain a tighter formation.

  A bugle blared from somewhere inside the lodge before his men had moved ten yards, and he grimaced at the confirmation that the defenders had indeed had at least some inkling they were under threat. He’d never personally fought Sothōii before, but the deadly reputation of the Wind Plain’s horse archers told him the next few minutes were going to be ugly.

  Still, he’d seen ugly before, and he’d taken the job.

  * * *

  The corner of Leeana’s eye noticed the three coursers turning away from the gate they’d been facing. They moved smoothly to the right, where the southernmost wall was screened from the main courtyard by the stables, taking up a position from which they could reach either the gate or the wall, as need required. Between the stables and the wall, there was—or had been—a small riding ring, but the white-painted fencing around it had been demolished to clear fighting room behind the stables, and she felt a flicker of Gayrfressa’s grim satisfaction as she trotted to one end of that open space between Dathgar and Gayrhalan.

  It was a vague recognition, at the back of her mind, for her own eyes were fixed on the western wall as the first grappling hook soared up over the masonry. Iron teeth clattered, dug into the mortar between the bricks, and there were dozens of them.

  She raised her bow, the watch ticking in her head a bit harder and faster, picturing the men who must even now be swarming up the knotted ropes attached to those grapnels. Men coming to kill her King.

  Men coming for her to kill instead.

  She drew and loosed with smooth, flashing speed, hands and muscles moving before she’d even realized what she’d seen. The range was less than fifty yards, and the man who’d drawn her attention had just transferred from the climbing rope. He flung his arms across the top of the wall to heave himself up and over...and disappeared without even a scream as her arrow tore through the base of his throat, just above the collarbone.

  Something quivered deep inside her, like a momentary flash of nausea, as she realized she’d just killed another human being. It wasn’t like taking a hare or an antelope, yet there wasn’t the degree of shock she’d expected, either. Perhaps there simply wasn’t time to allow herself that distraction. Perhaps it would come back to haunt her later. But for now there was only that clear, clean focus, and she nocked another arrow even as a score of other heads topped the wall.

  More bowstrings sang and snapped—dozens of them—along the northern, western, and eastern walls. There’d been no time to construct any sort of fighting step from which those archers might have engaged attackers short of the walls themselves, just as there was too little space for mounted troops to fight effectively within them. No Sothōii cavalryman was ever truly comfortable fighting on foot, but the Royal Guard was rather more flexible than most, and Swordshank had left his troopers’ mounts in the lodge’s capacious stables rather than pack its interior with a congested mass, unable to maneuver. Instead, he’d positioned his dismounted armsmen carefully around the main lodge, placed where they could simultaneously guard its entrances and cover the walls where the sightlines were clear enough for archery. But most of the southern wall, encumbered by the stables, was impossible to see—or sweep with arrowfire—from the central courtyard. That was why he’d demolished the riding ring...and the reason Tellian and Hathan had moved to cover that vulnerability the instant they were confident the attackers were coming over the walls rather than attempting to storm the gate.

  Of course, the attack on the walls could always be a diversion to draw our attention away from the gate before they smash it open, that preposterously calm voice remarked inside Leeana Hanathafressa’s skull as she loosed a second arrow and another body collapsed.

  This time the corpse sprawled across the top of the wall until the next man up the rope shoved it out of his way. There were screams now, she noticed, nocking yet another arrow, yet the attack never faltered. Whatever else these men might be, they weren’t cowards, and their experience showed in the speed and ferocity of their assault. Clearly they recognized their numerical advantage...and that their best hope of success and survival lay in swamping the defense. There could be only so many bows inside the lodge, and the arithmetic was coldly pragmatic. Spread the defenders as thinly as possible by attacking from all points of the compass simultaneously, then throw the greatest possible number of bodies over each wall as rapidly as possible. King Markhos’ armsmen might wound or kill many of them; the trick was to get the survivors across more quickly than they could be killed. Every one of them who got a sword close enough to threaten one of Swordshank’s armsmen would take that armsman’s bow out of play...and make it easier still for the men behind them to get over the walls, in turn.

  The man who’d swarmed up behind Leeana’s second victim seemed to embrace his predecessor’s body. For an instant, she thought she’d only wounded her second target; then she realized the newcomer was using his companion’s corpse as a shield, putting it between him and the incoming arrows while he rolled across the wall and let himself drop. An arrow plunged into the shielding body. Then another. Someone else’s arrow slashed past him, shattering against the wall’s inner brickwork, as he pushed the dead man clear and plummeted, and Leean
a dropped her own point of aim. He landed in a controlled tumble, coming back to his feet quickly, and she loosed.

  The attackers were more heavily armored than most Sothōii. They wore chain or scale armor, rather than light cavalry’s leather armor, and at least some of them had cuirasses, as well. Someone’s arrow hit a steel breastplate and skipped off harmlessly, but the man springing back upright in front of Leeana Hanathafressa’s pitiless green eyes didn’t have one, and the needle-sharp tip of her arrow’s awl-like pile head drove between the links of his mail. The armor might slow it, might rob it of much of its power, but it couldn’t stop it at that short range, and he cried out, clutching at the shaft quivering in his chest before he crashed back to earth. He lay twisting and jerking in agony, and Leeana swung away from him, seeking another target.

  There were more than enough of them, for there were more grappling hooks than there were royal armsmen, and more and more of the attackers made it across the walls while the defenders were occupied picking off their companions. And just as the attackers had planned, every man who made it to the ground inside instantly became a greater threat than those still swarming up the ropes. He had to be dealt with, and that diverted the defenders’ fire from the walls themselves. Leeana loosed again, and then again, killing one target and watching her arrow glance off the other’s steel plate. She had no time for a follow-up shot against that assassin; he was coming straight at her, and she dropped her bow, shed her protective finger tab, and swept out both of her short swords.

  The man wore an open-faced helmet, and he was close enough now for her to see his eyes, see his sudden savage smile, as he realized the single defender dancing towards the head of the veranda’s steps was unarmored. His sword was much heavier—and at least a foot longer than hers—as well, and she had no shield. He bounded forward, three or four others following at his heels, and Leeana sensed his eagerness to cut her down and be on about the mission which had brought him here. His own armor and helmet gave him an enormous edge, and he drove straight up the steps towards her with a veteran’s ruthless determination to capitalize on that advantage.

  It was a mistake.

  Leeana was taller than most men—over half a foot taller than him—with more than enough reach to offset the greater length of his sword, and war maid training was actually harder, harsher, and more demanding than that of most professional armsmen. It had to be, for they needed that razor edge of lethality, because unlike Leeana, the majority of war maids were smaller than the men they were likely to confront in combat. Leeana wasn’t, but she’d trained to the same hard, unforgiving standard as her smaller sisters, and her own sword technique had been adopted directly from Dame Kaeritha Seldansdaughter. She hadn’t trained in it for as many years as Kaeritha, but very few swordsmen—and even fewer swordswomen—had been mentored by a champion of Tomanāk and then polished under the unrelenting eye of Erlis Rahnafressa and Ravlahn Thregafressa since she was fourteen years old.

  The assassin’s eyes widened in astonishment as Leeana’s left hand blade engaged his longer sword, twisting elegantly about it, binding it and carrying it out and to the side. It was a very brief astonishment, however—his eyes hadn’t finished widening before the razor-edged steel in her right hand licked out through the opening she’d created, precise as a surgeon’s scalpel, and sliced effortlessly through his throat.

  He went down with a bubbling scream, the sudden geyser of his life’s blood splashing Leeana’s arm, and his tumbling body tripped the man behind him. The second assassin managed not to fall, but he was off center, fighting for balance, as Leeana lunged and recovered in a single, supple flash that left another slashed throat spouting blood in its wake.

  It had taken perhaps three heartbeats, and the men following on her victims’ heels paused in what might have been consternation. The two bodies before Leeana encumbered the steps up to the high veranda. There might be space enough for two of them to come up them simultaneously, but they were far more likely to get in one another’s way or stumble over their unfortunate companions, and no one was inclined to share their fate.

  Yet neither were they inclined to abandon the effort, and more and more of the King’s armsmen had been forced to abandon their bows as the tide of attackers swept over the walls. The courtyard was carpeted with bodies—there had to be at least thirty or forty of them—and the gods only knew how many more had fallen backward off the wall, but at least that number had made it into sword range of the archers. They’d charged straight towards the central lodge, forcing the guardsmen to intercept them and stop picking off their fellows as they swarmed across the wall.

  Now half a dozen of them flowed across the body-strewn ground to join the men glaring up at Leeana, and her heart sank as they began to spread. There was only the single set of steps, and the veranda was high enough to be an awkward, climbing scramble from any other approach. The wooden railing along its edge was open, without any sort of upright pickets to bar anyone willing to make the climb, however, and she could be in only one spot at a time.

  She drew a deep breath, forcing herself to focus on only the next few moments, and stepped back slightly from the head of the steps.

  * * *

  Tellian of Balthar dropped his bow.

  He and Hathan had dropped at least a dozen attackers as they scaled the wall, yet there’d never been any hope of actually holding it with only two bows, for the attackers had redoubled their efforts when they realized there were only two archers on the southern side of the lodge’s perimeter. They’d swarmed up the ropes, vaulted across the top of the wall, and dropped exultantly to the ground at its foot, with only a tithe of the casualties their companions had suffered elsewhere.

  Exultation became something else as they found themselves face-to-face with two wind riders and a one-eared chestnut mare with an eye of unnatural blue flame.

  Dathgar, Gayrhalan, and Gayrfressa had swept from east to west along the southern wall while Tellian and Hathan drove arrows into the attackers’ faces. Now they wheeled, facing back to the east, and the space between the the solid block of stables and the lodge’s outer wall was no more than seventy feet across. With the riding ring’s demolition, it was also smooth and obstruction free, like a corridor between two sheer walls.

  With three coursers at one end of it.

  The men coming over that wall could not have been more badly positioned to receive a cavalry charge. They were in no particular formation, without the tight frontage and pikes or halberds which might have fended off even regular cavalry, far less coursers, and the space in which they were trapped was just long enough for those coursers to spring off their hocks and accelerate towards them with preposterous speed.

  As Leeana had already realized, whatever else Erkân Trâram’s men might be, there were precious few cowards among them. Most of the men who’d already made it to the ground drew their swords. Some flung themselves forward, trying desperately to somehow get under the coursers to gut or hamstring them. Others pressed as close to the outer wall as they could, trying to stay out of the coursers’ path and come at them from behind once they’d passed. A handful sprang towards the back of the stables, prying frantically at closed and barred doors, and another handful, closest to the eastern end of the confined space, boiled around that edge of the stables, funneling past it to join their fellows in the main courtyard. And then—

  “Balthar!” Tellian bellowed, leaning low from his saddle, and red spray flew as his saber removed an assassin’s right hand.

  The man’s sword spun away, still clenched in his severed hand, and Dathgar trumpeted a high, piercing echo of his rider’s warcry. Another assassin screamed as steel shod hooves bigger than his own head crushed the life from him, and the baron swept along the inner face of the wall, while Hathan and Gayrhalan took the back side of the stables. The other wind rider always took Tellian’s left flank in battle, for he was left-handed, and his own saber flashed crimson as his courser thundered forward.

  Gayrha
lan’s herd stallion had known what he he was about when he christened the iron gray “Storm Souled.” He’d never been noted for the gentleness of his temper, but unlike Dathgar, he sounded no trumpet call of defiance; he was too busy crushing a shrieking mercenary’s shoulder into ruin between battleaxe jaws. His victim squealed desperately as the courser jerked him off his feet, snapping him in midair like a greyhound with a rabbit, without even breaking stride. Then the body was tossed aside, to bounce brokenly off the stable wall, even as Gayrhalan put his barded shoulder into a fresh victim, knocking him off his feet to sprawl directly in front of Gayrfressa.

  The mare had neither rider nor barding, but she was actually larger than either of the stallions, and mere men in armor held no terror for someone who’d trampled demons in defense of her herd when she was only a filly. More than that, coursers weren’t horses. Even the most superbly trained warhorse was far less lethal than a creature half again as large, as intelligent as any of the Races of Man, and as thoroughly trained as any mishuk in a combat technique the coursers had spent a millennium perfecting.

  Her left forehoof—shod in steel and broader than a dinner plate—came down on the assassin Gayrhalan had toppled with the brutal efficiency of a water-driven Dwarvenhame drop hammer. Her target didn’t even scream, and even as he died, she was thundering forward with the stallions, taking her next victim. She trampled him underfoot, jaws reaching past him, closing on a fourth enemy, and not in Gayrhalan’s shoulder-crushing grip. No—her incisors closed on the mercenary’s head, and when she tossed her head, his went flying like a child’s ball.

  In a bare handful of seconds, the two humans and three coursers turned the space between the stables and the wall into an abattoir where nothing lived. And then the blood-splashed coursers swept around the stables’ eastern edge after the fleet footed enemies who’d escaped their wrath.