by John Booth
“I told her how nice her breasts looked,” Hala paused and her face blushed red. “I haven’t grown any yet, and Jalia’s looked so pretty.”
Daniel nodded in complete understanding. “Do you still mean to try and kill us when you get the chance?”
“No!” Hala was shocked by the question. “Jalia saved my life from the wolves and after that vengeance seemed so silly. My father was not a good man and it was only a matter of time before somebody killed him. If he had got to know her, he would have been pleased that it was somebody as masterful as Jalia.” Hala paused and stared into the fire. “I have nowhere else to go.”
Daniel stood and tilted Hala’s chin so she was looking up at him.
“If you attack Jalia again, I will kill you,” he said. “Regardless of what Jalia wants or tells me I should do. Do you understand?”
Hala tried to nod, but Daniel was still holding her chin up, so she was forced to say the word out loud. “Yes,” Hala said and she meant it with all her heart.
“In that case, we will travel together and you need never fear me.”
“Don’t you believe him, Hala. He spanks really hard,” Jalia said to Daniel’s considerable embarrassment.
“I wish you wouldn’t creep up on people like that.”
“Would you like me to knock on a rock? We seem to be out of doors.” Jalia waved her catch of two large rabbits at Daniel. “Do you think that you could do the cooking tonight? Another night of my attempts and I may die of food poisoning.”
Daniel grinned and took the rabbits from her. He always did the cooking while they traveled, just as he always saw to the horses and made the fire. Jalia considered domestic tasks to be man’s work, or at the least, other women’s work, never hers unless there was absolutely no choice.
It seemed to Hala that night, that the food they ate in the firelight was the best she had ever eaten. She fell asleep almost as soon as she finished. She woke in the early hours to the sounds of Jalia’s cries of pleasure. Hala smiled as she went back to sleep. She knew she was finally living with good people.
15. Bickering
Hala woke with the sunrise and expected to be the first up as she always been at Taldon’s Fort. She found things in camp a little different now that Daniel was back. He had lit the fire and a pot of tea brewed at its edge. The horses were watered and Daniel was saddling them, being careful to check their backs for sores after their day among the briars.
“You will find some bread in that pack, if you’re hungry,” Daniel told her, pointing to a pack on the ground.
A growing twelve year old girl is always hungry and Hala pounced upon the pack greedily. She looked over to where Jalia had been sleeping, but there was no sign of her. Hala looked over to where Daniel had been sleeping, knowing the two of them had been intimate in the night, but Jalia wasn’t there either.
“Jalia is out hunting,” Daniel said, noting where her gaze had been. “We are traveling light and food could become an issue if we don’t catch game every day.”
“I know which mushrooms are safe to eat and I can find wild onions and garlic,” Hala offered.
“Jalia does too.” Daniel laughed. “But two pairs of hands are always better than one. Perhaps you can do that tonight if we don’t catch up with the traders.”
“What are you chasing these traders for? Did they wrong you in some way?” Jalia had told Hala nothing of their quest to recover their property.
“Adon Taldon sold the traders some of our things after he robbed us. Didn’t you know?”
“I didn’t know you had been robbed,” Hala confessed. “You are lucky to be alive because Adon made a point of killing those he robbed. All I knew was that someone in the village of Sweetwater had killed Mallon’s heir and that the clan were out to avenge him.”
Daniel was caught in a vivid flashback to waking in the forest with blood streaming down his head. He had felt the same kind of tingling as when Ygdrassal had transported them across the world. He had touched Jalia and the world had flashed white around him and disappeared. The next thing he remembered was when Jalia woke him.
He knew they had a lot of luck recently in surviving potentially deadly injury. Perhaps a trace of the Fairie magic was still working inside him, healing them from otherwise fatal wounds.
“Daniel, are you all right?” Hala asked, bringing Daniel back into the present.
“I’m sorry. I was miles away for a moment. Adon tried to kill us all right, but he made a bad job of it. He did, however, manage to sell some things of ours before we caught up with him. They have sentimental value and we intend to get them back.”
“What will you do afterwards?” Hala asked, the unspoken words ‘with me’ hung in the air between them.
“Perhaps the three of us will continue to Slarn. Would you like to see a real city, Hala?”
Hala thought hard about that question. She had grown up in a world where she had never seen as many as fifty people gathered in one place. Cities sounded like frightening places.
“Yes, I think I would. Will you sell me into slavery when we get there?” Hala spoke out loud the fear that replaced the one that they were going to kill her.
“I thought you knew how I feel about slavery,” Jalia growled from the edge of the camp.
Hala hunched down on the ground and waited for the blows she was sure would come. Her father had always beaten her when he sounded like that.
“Stop cowering like a frightened rabbit,” Jalia barked and Hala looked up at her. “We don’t sell slaves, but we might punish cowards. Get up and get yourself ready for travel.”
“The hunting did not go well, I take it?” Daniel asked as he poured them a mug of tea. Hala was standing, trying to look like someone who would never cower.
“I saw a wonderful plump duck, but this throwing knife Pender gave me is off balance and I missed it,” Jalia admitted.
“You could have taken the hunting bow,” Daniel reminded her.
“That always feels like cheating to me. I will be so glad to hold my knives in my hands again. I can’t believe how much I miss them.”
Daniel helped Hala get onto her horse. Blaze was a big horse by anybody’s standards and Hala couldn’t get her feet into the stirrups until she was mounted.
“How did you ever manage to steal this horse in the first place?” Daniel asked. “You must have had to dismount a few times while you chased us. There are a few necessary things you can’t do sitting on a saddle.”
Hala smiled. “I would check that there was a fallen tree or a boulder nearby before I got off. I’m not entirely stupid, you know.”
“I’m very glad to hear that,” Daniel replied solemnly. “Traveling with a stupid companion can be so wearing.”
“Daniel is so right,” Jalia said as she rode Swift towards them. “These last few years have brought me close to breaking point.” Giving Daniel a big wide fake smile, Jalia wheeled Swift around and set off down the trail ahead of them.
“Are you two always like this?”
“Only when we are really annoyed with each other,” Daniel replied. He mounted Jet and rode after Jalia, leaving Hala sitting on her horse with her mouth open. She knew something of adult matters, and had expected the two of them to be mellow after their tryst the night before. She sat there almost a minute before she realized that she had better get a move on as her traveling companions were already out of sight. She spurred Blaze into a fast trot to catch up.
Something ugly simmered between Jalia and Daniel all morning, though neither gave a clue as to what was bothering them. Hala decided to keep well back on the trail. She hoped that they sorted it out soon, as it was no fun at all.
It was towards the evening that Jalia finally exploded at Daniel.
“When were you going to tell me about the big diamond ring in your bags? I thought we had an agreement to tell each other about such things.”
Daniel spun to face Jalia. “I was going to tell you at the same time that you told me about
recovering your money belt, and most of the money in it.”
Jalia had the grace to look flustered.
“I’ve had my clothes on around you since I got it back. You’ve been spying on me!”
“Jalia, we made love last night,” Daniel explained patiently. “You might have kept most of your clothes on, but you were on top of me most of the time. Did you think I wouldn’t notice the extra weight? Gold is heavy you know.”
Jalia pouted as she saw the truth in Daniel’s words.
“I was going to tell you, but I never got around to it,” she said contritely. “I know you never bother about money anyway. I would have told you when you needed to know.”
Daniel sighed. “The ring isn’t mine, or yours. It was given to me by Ygdrassal and it belongs to the rightful ruler of Slarn. When I find the man or woman in question, I shall give it them. I didn’t tell you because you see everything as something to own. I should have known you would search my things and find it.”
Jalia’s jaw dropped at this accusation and she pulled Swift to the far side of the road. She simmered at the injustice of what Daniel had said. All right, it was true that she had wondered if Daniel had picked up anything in the dragon’s cave. After all, there were legends of dragon’s keeping hoards of treasure. It wasn’t as though she made a habit of searching through Daniel’s things. Sometimes weeks would go by before she bothered. Daniel was so unfair sometimes.
They rode on in silence for another half an hour before Hala could stand it no longer. She had heard their earlier conversation as they had not made any attempt to be quiet about it. Casting caution to the wind, she rode up to tell them exactly what she thought.
“You two are impossible,” she told them angrily. “It would be clear to even a moron that you love each other and would die for each other. But you spend all your time bickering like old women. I’ve had enough and I’m riding ahead.”
Hala was as good as her word and spurred Blaze up the trail ahead. The companions stared open mouthed, first at Hala as she rode out of sight and then at each other.
“She does have a point,” Jalia said and she started to laugh.
“Do we spank her or praise her when we catch up with her?” Daniel asked with a broad smile on his lips.
“I told her not to cower before us and she seems to have got the idea,” Jalia said as she moved Swift alongside Jet and leaned over. Daniel leaned down and kissed her lightly, no easy trick on a moving horse.
“But the next time she is cheeky to me, I shall cut the switch myself,” Jalia said. The two continued down the trail with broad smiles on their faces.
A few moments later, they pulled their horses aside as Hala galloped between them, out of control. They turned their mounts and set off in pursuit.
“There’s people fighting each other ahead,” Hala said breathlessly when Jalia brought Blaze to a halt. “Two groups of them, a group with crossbows has pinned the other group down by a river. One of the men with a crossbow saw me, so I had to turn and run.”
“You did the right thing, Hala,” Daniel reassured the frightened girl. “Sometimes running is exactly the right thing to do.”
16. The Ambush
Jalia and Daniel inched towards the fighting, using their elbows to crawl across the grass. Hala had told them the ground dropped away and they did not want to find themselves silhouetted against the skyline. They left Hala holding the horses a quarter of a mile down the road. She had not been pleased about it.
“You can’t leave me here,” she had pleaded desperately. “What if you need my help or something happens to you?”
“If they succeed in killing us, your best bet is to run and keep running until you find a village,” Daniel said seriously. “But don’t worry. Jalia and I are quite good at this sort of thing.”
“Adon nearly killed you.”
“Only because he caught us napping,” Jalia replied. “We know what we are going into this time.”
“Hala.” Daniel put his hand on her. “Holding the horses is an important job. If things go wrong we will be coming back at a run and you could save our lives.”
Hala pouted at Daniel, apparently having learnt the expression from Jalia. She desperately wanted to go with them, but Daniel was right. Somebody needed to stay with the horses.
“All right,” she conceded. “But don’t be too long.”
The ground dipped steeply for a couple of hundred yards. Beyond that, a wide fast moving river wound its way to the north. The river was several hundred yards across. There had once been an ancient bridge at this spot. Two stone towers, one each side of the river rose into the sky. Massive gleaming metal chains still hung from the towers, reaching all the way to the ground and into the river.
Amazingly, the roadway that had once connected to the towers and the chains was still in one piece. It had fallen in one piece into the river, and balanced on the rocks beneath so that its surface was visible only a few inches below the water. Most of the river flowed beneath it. What had once been a bridge had become a ford, allowing easy passage to the other side.
It looked to be the only way across the river for many miles. This would make it a boon to travelers and to robbers, as everybody would come this way. It looked as if a group had fallen into just such a robber’s trap.
Some travelers huddled down behind blocks of stone close to the tower. The stones provided a decent amount of cover, but the men were pinned down.
It was unclear how many of them were in hiding, but there were three bodies with crossbow bolts sticking out of them out in the open. One of them had been shot in the back.
“Aren’t those your donkeys?” Jalia asked in a whisper. Five donkeys were happily munching grass a few yards from where the men were hiding.
“Three of them are. Ferd is looking tired.”
“There appear to be four robbers armed with crossbows.” Jalia ignored Daniel’s evident concern for his donkeys. “They have the travelers pinned down. They must be the traders we’ve been looking for. The robbers are waiting them out. That’s a lot safer than going down and risking a close fight.”
“What’s our best strategy?” Daniel asked.
“Wait for the robbers to kill the traders and then take them out while they are gloating over their ill-gotten gains,” Jalia said with absolute certainty. To Jalia, that was the logical thing to do.
“What’s the best strategy for killing the robbers and keeping the traders alive?” Daniel asked again, equally seriously.
Jalia rolled over to face Daniel. “It we save the traders they are going to be a problem when we try and get our stuff back.”
“If we have to kill them later, they will at least have had a chance in a fair fight. Besides which, that robber nearly hit one of my donkeys with a bolt a few seconds ago.”
Jalia gave an exasperated sigh.
“Very well, you take the two robbers on the right. I’ll take the two on the left,”
As soon as Daniel was on his way and no longer able to see her, her face took on a feral grin. Daniel’s way was going to be a much more fun.
A crossbow is capable of firing a bolt with deadly accuracy for fifty feet or more by even a semi-skilled user. The crossbow was the tool of choice for guards in the cities. Hunting bows were the tools of villagers and farmers and were not generally used for fighting.
Daniel and Jalia never considered going back for a hunting bow. They used their abilities to move without being seen to get close enough to the robbers to turn the crossbow’s long reload time into an advantage.
Jalia moved silently towards her chosen target. This was a young man called Bril who had celebrated his seventeenth birthday only days before.
Bril was so frightened and excited that he suspected his trousers were wet. Torin, his friend lying out of sight to the left of him, had told the truth of it. Thieving was so much better than working on the farm being bossed about by his older brothers. He had felt sick though, when Tom and Gef shot two traders without
any warning. Torin managed to shoot a third while the traders were running for cover.
Bril cringed at what Gef was going to say to him later, as his own bolt had flown wide of its target. He peered out from around the rock and aimed his crossbow towards the traders. He hoped the battle was not going to take much longer as his bladder definitely needed emptying, despite the amount he might have already leaked.
Jalia couldn’t think why the robbers were hiding, until a trader recklessly moved out of cover and shot an arrow from his bow towards her target.
Bril hugged the rock as the trader’s arrow flew wide of him. Jalia was amazed to see all four of the robbers dive for cover as the trader revealed himself, rather than taking the clear shot at the man that his stupid behavior warranted.
Jalia wanted to giggle. These robbers were amateurs. She was twenty feet away from Bril when he rolled over and presented an easy target. Her knife flew from her hand and buried itself deep into the youth’s stomach.
Bril felt as if something cold and hard had been dropped into his lap. He looked down and saw the hilt of a dagger sticking out of his tummy. His life blood was already oozing around the edge of the blade. Thieving was supposed to be an easy life and nobody had mentioned getting killed. Then the wound began to hurt in a way that he had never felt before. He wanted his Mummy, he wanted to go home, but most of all he wanted to scream.
Jalia cursed silently. The blade had been aimed at Bril’s heart and a gut wound gave the man an opportunity to raise the alarm. Her new throwing knife seemed to have a mind of its own once in the air. She pulled her sword and ran at her target, ignoring the possibility of being seen by any of his accomplices. She saw Bril drawing breath to scream, and a scream would give her away just as certainly as seeing her would.
On the other side of the ridge, Daniel bided his time. He knew that Jalia would attack first with her knife. He had crept within ten feet of Tom and Gef. They were lying close together, having moved when the trader shot at them. Daniel saw their crossbows were primed and he waited for an opportunity to jump them.