by Shae Ford
“Stand clear!” A small jolt of lightning sparked from Jake’s fingers and struck Declan in the chest.
The wad of giants convulsed as the jolt jumped between them, arcing along the path of their connected limbs. Their bodies stiffened as they rolled helplessly off of Declan — finally collapsing in separate, twitching balls.
“Not an actual shock, you clodded mage! That’ll only make him angrier.”
“Oh. You meant something more along the lines of a surprise?”
Declan got to his feet, eyes black as ever — and Jake moved quickly.
He flexed his hand and a blast of icy air struck Declan in the face. Frost crusted over his hair and brows. He staggered backwards, and the darkness quickly faded. His stony eyes roved from the pirates — who stood in ranks with their swords half-lifted from their sheaths — to where the clump of giants lay sprawled and twitching upon the ground.
“We’re all right, General. Just a wee bit of a shock,” they assured him.
His thick shoulders sagged. “I’m going to have a walk around camp,” he mumbled. Then he slumped away.
“Keep that spell handy, lad,” Morris said as he ducked out from behind a nearby tree.
Jake nodded.
Lysander thrust the Lass back into its sheath. He began to pace, a finger propped on his scruffy chin. “This Grognaut fellow has taken over the castle in the Cleft, you say?”
Jonathan nodded. “That’s what I’ve heard. Which might put a bit of a kink in our rope, if it turns out to be true.”
Morris snorted. “A kink? Try a knot the size of a dragon’s belly. And there’ll be no sating it, Captain,” he warned. “Bandits don’t bargain.”
After a moment, Lysander sighed. “I suppose you’re probably right. There’s nothing for it, then —”
“We’ve come too far to turn back.” Jake’s eyes were sharp behind his spectacles. “Don’t even say it.”
Lysander raised his brows. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Oh. Well, then what —?”
“Save your breath, lad. He’s already got something brewing,” Morris said as he watched Lysander pace. “What’re your orders, Captain?”
“We’re not going to go around Grognaut, and we’re certainly not going to treat with him. There’s only one way to deal with a barnacle,” he said, holding up a finger. “We’re going to dig him out.”
Jake’s spectacles slid down his nose as his brows shot up. “Dig him out? How do you plan to dig out a castle?”
“That’s just a figure of speech, lad. He means we’re going to pop him off his throne and stick a knife through his belly so he don’t grow back.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jonathan said with a grin.
While the rest of the party talked bandits and war, Declan took a slow walk around the edge of camp. The orb glowed in a ring to the outskirts, and Declan traced it carefully — half in the light, and half in the darkness.
A young tree sat by itself a few paces from the shadows. Its canopy was just large enough to shelter a single man. Eveningwing roosted in the branches near its top. A slight breeze moved the limbs gently, bobbing him up and down.
Nadine sat beneath the tree. She had her knees drawn up to her chest and her head buried in her arms. Her shoulders shook gently.
“Are you all right there, wee mot?”
She wiped impatiently at her eyes as Declan stepped in beside her. “I am fine.”
“Those don’t look like happy tears.”
“They are nothing.”
“Well that’s a mightily odd thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of woman who’d cry over nothing. And I’m never wrong about my strikings,” he added when she looked up.
“Why must you always plague me with your words? You will walk for days and never say anything to the pirate captain, or to the strange man you still call fiddler even though he plays so horribly. Why is it always me you bother? Is it because I am small?”
He shook his head. “I would never plague anybody over being small.”
“Then what is it?”
“I suppose it’s because of your voice.”
“My voice?”
“Yeh, you sound so odd — like you’re stumbling over every word. And then if I can get you mad enough, your face turns red and you start muttering all these silly little things nobody knows the meaning of,” he said, lips twitching in the tiniest of smiles. “I like the way it sounds.”
“You would not like them so much if you knew what they meant,” she said vehemently.
He thumped down beside her, and she jerked the blanket over her feet. “What have you got under there?”
“It is nothing,” she said again.
“Then why’s your face gone all sandy-pale?” His arm shot out and ripped the blanket back.
Blisters covered Nadine’s toes and the sides of her feet. Some were red and swollen. Others had burst. They wept openly between the ragged flaps of her skin.
“Plains mother,” Declan hissed.
“I was going to let them breathe before I cleaned them. Eveningwing has been helping me,” she said, pointing to the canopy above them. “It took us a while to figure out how to untangle and tangle them back. But I believe we —”
“Why didn’t you say something, you great stubborn sandbeater? Every man in this camp knows how to work laces!”
“I did not think — what are you doing?”
He dumped her rucksack on the ground and pawed through its contents, digging until he came up with a bottle of ointment. “Stubborn, clodded …” His thick fingers fumbled at the cork until she grabbed his hands.
“You are going to break it!”
“I’m going to break you! No wonder you were crying. You’ve been marching for days with your wee little toes all red and weeping. Why didn’t you speak up?”
“What good would that have done? Lysander is right — I must learn to walk in them before we reach the icy paths of the mountains. Someday my feet will harden and I will not have this trouble. Now hand me the bottle.”
He let go. His lip curled as he watched her dab thick white ointment onto her blisters. “Doesn’t that sting?”
“You are asking if it hurts?”
“Yeh.”
She shrugged. “It is uncomfortable.”
He snorted. “Be honest, mite. It’s a bit more than that.”
She gave him a hard look. “My flesh will heal. These wounds will close and pass away. But there are marks on my heart that will never heal. Those are the only wounds worth my tears, giant. They are the reason I weep.”
Declan opened his mouth, but a flapping sound interrupted him. Eveningwing bobbed on his branches. His head jerked to the side.
“What —?”
Declan clamped a hand over Nadine’s mouth. His shadowed gaze turned to the edge of camp; his brows creased as he squinted. Slowly, he got to his feet. Eveningwing hopped into the upper branches, head bobbing along the light’s edge.
Nadine took her spear and went to stand next to Declan. “What is —?”
His arm shot out and knocked her to the side just as a barrage of objects flew from the darkness. They looked like tiny arrows: bone shaved into needles with dyed feathers as their fletching. They peppered Declan’s arms and neck, sticking firmly into his skin.
He jolted the camp with a roar.
“Bandits!” Jonathan cried. “Don’t let those darts hit you! They’ve got numbing pois — ah!”
He took a dart in the neck and stumbled backwards. Morris got one in the leg and Lysander got hit twice in the chest before he managed to draw his sword. When the wave of darts ended, the bandits leapt in.
Yellowed bone adorned nearly every inch of them. They wore it around their necks and wrists, wove it tangles throughout their beards. Sharp bone ornaments pierced their ears, noses and lips. Breastplates with wolf heads were strapped over their filthy leather tunics. Steel blades hissed as they flew from their sheaths.
“Make them bleed
, boys!” one of the bandits cried. Then he charged straight for Lysander.
Morris hurtled into the bandit’s side, knocking his slight body to the ground. The hapless bandit took several rolls, his bone ornaments clattering with every turn. Finally, he came to a stop near the base of a tree — where another pirate ran him through.
“Form ranks, dogs!” Lysander yelled over the din. He managed to slice one of the bandits in the side before he collapsed, breathing heavily. “I can’t feel my … it’s all …”
“That’s the poison,” Jonathan grunted, stumbling over to him. He swung his sword in drunken arcs, trying to hold the bandits back.
Colored darts peppered the giants’ thick skin. They swung their scythes furiously; the rage of the battle seemed to be holding the poison back. After a few unsuccessful attempts to break their line, the bandits retreated into the shadows.
They slipped to the edge of camp and hung out of the giants’ reach. Without the fight to fuel them, the giants slowed quickly. Even Declan’s rage was no match for the poisoned darts. Slowly, he sank to the ground, collapsing amid the mangled bodies of his foes.
Jake’s magic weakened as the poison took its toll. The spells barely sputtered off his gloves. Soon his fireballs were reduced to little more than wisps of flame. He moaned as he sank to his knees. “What are they doing?”
“Waiting,” Jonathan grunted. “Once we’re all numb, they’ll hack us to bits.”
When the last of the giants had collapsed on all fours, the bandits crept in. “I wonder if the mage’s bones have got any magic in them?” a bandit close to Jake whispered.
“Lots of giants, here,” another said with a grin. “Just think of what we’ll be able to make with their bones.”
The bandits’ circle tightened around the camp. The pirates and the giants watched through glassy eyes, their bodies swaying under the poison’s bite. Not a one of them had the strength to draw his blade.
They all likely would’ve perished that night, had it not been for Nadine.
She lay curled upon the ground where Declan had thrown her, still as a rock. Her tiny form had been of no interest to the bandits: they’d walked straight past her, their eyes set on bigger game.
When the last of her enemies had gone by, Nadine stood with her spear poised over her shoulder and cried: “Cover yourselves!”
The bandits spun, but the spear had already left her hand. It cut through the air and shot for the orb of light that hovered above Jake. The pirates and the giants shut their eyes. Someone threw a blanket over Declan’s head. They bared their teeth as the spear’s point struck and burst the orb.
Piercing light erupted over the camp. It chased the shadows from under every leaf and blade of grass. The ashen lands before them were stricken white. For a breath, everything around them was perfectly and clearly illuminated — including the insides of the bandits’ eyes.
Smoke trailed from their sockets. They screamed and threw their arms over their faces, but it was too late. When the burst of light receded, all of the color had been stricken from their eyes. The bandits stared unseeing through orbs of murky white.
Eveningwing darted out of the shadows. He raked the bandits’ skin with his claws and his screeches drove them into a frenzy. They trampled over one another, trying to get away from him. Nadine picked up a fallen sword and swung it at their backs. She managed to bring two of them down while Eveningwing led a third straight into the low-hanging branches of a tree.
The bandit’s neck snapped with a crunch.
The rest fled blindly into the darkness, where the shadows swallowed their screams. Nadine and Eveningwing stood sentry over their numbed companions throughout the night: she put ointment on their wounds while the halfhawk circled overhead. It was dawn before the poison finally loosened its grip.
“What a fight that was, Captain,” Morris said as he rolled onto his side. He wedged a stocky arm beneath Lysander and, with Jonathan pulling on the front of his shirt, managed to prop the captain up.
Lysander flexed his hand tentatively. “Oh, thank Gravy — I can move my fingers. Are you all right, dogs?”
“Aye, Captain,” they mumbled.
“Giants?”
They answered in a rumble of grunts.
“I’ll be better once somebody takes this clodded blanket off my head,” Declan said.
Jake reached over and pulled it free.
Lysander stared worriedly down at his legs. “Are you certain this isn’t permanent?”
“Nah. It just takes a while, is all,” Jonathan said cheerily. “I got grazed in the rump one time. I couldn’t feel my left side for a couple of hours. Made sitting a bit of a challenge — but I managed. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself on the ground an awful lot today.” He slapped Lysander on the shoulder. “Two in the chest’ll do that to you.”
“Excellent,” he muttered. His stormy eyes swept through camp. “Where’s that desert woman?”
They called, and Nadine appeared beside them.
Lysander held out his hand. “I owe you my thanks.”
“Why?”
“Ah, well … had it not been for you, we wouldn’t have seen the dawn. And I daresay a few of our bones would be missing, as well,” he added with a grimace. “You saved our lives. I don’t think I could possibly thank you enough.”
She shrugged. “We have work to do, Captain — work we cannot do if we are dead. You may thank me by getting to your feet.”
He grinned. “Fair enough. Give me a hand, will you?”
*******
The ashen wastes of the Valley stretched on for miles.
Black grass curled beneath their boots as they traveled. Every breath of air was thickened by ash. A few of the trees still crackled. Sometimes a strong wind would rip across them, stoking their bark into bright red scales. Smoke was an ever-present enemy: their eyes streamed against its acrid breath. They covered their mouths and noses, but the fumes still made them cough.
After a day or so, the smoke abated. The pirates and the giants trudged out of the still-burning lands and into a stretch that was already dead.
Here, the ash had settled and the trees were blackened shells. A few miles more, and they began to see a bit of green: small patches between the ruins of houses and farms. Soon the only signs of destruction were in the things men had built — the land itself had been spared.
When they reached a large orange grove, Jonathan ordered them to a halt. “I’ll bet my left foot the bandits are holed up in Crow’s Cross.”
“What makes you so sure?” Lysander said.
Jonathan shrugged. “The land hasn’t been so crispy, of late. Not even the bandits would set fire to their own front door. They’ve always wanted to get into Crow’s Cross, anyhow. It seems like the guards were always fighting them off. So if they ever got the army to do it,” he shrugged off his pack, “then I’ll bet that’s the first place they went.
“There’ll be no slipping by them, either — they’ll be able to spot us for miles if they’ve taken the city. So we’d better prepare for a skirmish.” He unbuckled his scabbard and dropped it next to his rucksack. Then he fixed a cloak about his shoulders and wedged his fiddle into his belt. “Well, gents. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Lysander grabbed him by the cloak. “Just where do you think you’re going?”
“To check things out, of course. The bandits who attacked us weren’t from the mountains — they were from the forest,” Jonathan explained when Lysander glared. “Mountain bandits and forest bandits hate each other. So either one of them has finally killed the other off, or they’re working together. That’s what I’m going to find out. I know you’re probably going to be worried sick about me —”
“That’s not the first thing I thought of.”
“— but I know what I’m doing. Charming my way into things, spying on the enemy. I’ve done this for Garron loads of times.”
“Oh? You’ve snuck into a village packed with individuals who’d li
ke nothing more than to wear your bones around their necks and emerged unscathed?”
Jonathan paused. “No. But I lived in Gilderick’s castle for a full season and left with all my innards. That’s got to count for something.”
“He’s got a point there, Captain,” Morris said.
Lysander frowned. “I still don’t like it.”
“There’s not a thing to worry about, mate. It’s nearly sunset.” Jonathan rolled his eyes at Lysander’s blank look. “This is the hour of day when the corks start popping! It’s prime sneaking time,” he added with a wink. “The whole village is going to be too boggled to even notice I’m there. An hour or so in the tavern, and I’ll have all the information we need. You want to know what we’re up against, don’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then leave me to my work.” And with a rather dramatic swoop of his cloak, Jonathan marched away.
Lysander paced as the fiddler disappeared over the hill. He walked between the trees, hands clasped behind his back. He paced long after the rest of camp had settled down for dinner, an edge of his eye turned always towards the road.
“He’ll be all right, Captain,” Morris said. “That fellow could charm his way out of a hangman’s noose.”
“One dart — that’s all it takes. One careless word. They’re probably boiling the flesh off of him as we speak.”
“Oh, why would they bother with all that? There’s not enough on him to make it worth the effort. He’ll be fine, Captain,” Morris said when Lysander glared. “You brought him along because he knows the land.”
“No, I brought him because he wouldn’t leave my ship.” At last, his pacing relented. “Though I suppose you’re right. He did survive a stint in Gilderick’s castle.”
“He sure did, Captain.”
“And how many bards could say that?”
“Not many, I’d wager.”
Lysander sighed. “Perhaps I’m only —”
A screech from Eveningwing cut across his words. The hawk darted down into camp, brushing the top of Lysander’s head with the flat of his wing before he shot back into the sky. His form stood out like a hole in the stars as he circled over the direction Jonathan had headed.