by Milla Vane
“Dragon at the Ran’s sides!” Kelir said sharply, and the other warriors fell in beside and behind Maddek’s horse.
From farther behind them came a crashing through the grasses, a wet snarling that grew louder. Days upon the road had taught Yvenne that almost nothing made loud noise. Predators crept toward their prey; the prey avoided notice of predators if they could. Ahead, though the wolves feinted toward the linen thief’s legs before darting away, the huge bird seemed not to notice them at all anymore, beaded eyes focused ahead, head lifted high.
With a loud honk, the linen thief whirled and dodged into the grass, the red wattle waving like a flag as the bird raced through the tall stalks.
Beneath her, the horse’s muscles bunched. Maddek’s hard chest pressed against her back and she leaned forward, gripping the saddle tight as the Parsatheans surged forward as one.
This was not the first time they had raced together in this way. Yet before, wonder had filled Yvenne, exhilaration. Now only fear clutched her throat and pounded through her veins as she desperately clung to the pommel. Other warriors pressed in around them—the Dragon’s protection a shield of their own horses and bodies. Wind whipped tears from her eyes. She didn’t dare shift her weight and glance behind, probably couldn’t have seen anything past Maddek anyway. Only what was forward and directly to the side. She looked over as Danoh turned in her saddle to loose an arrow behind. An unholy screech answered as if the arrow had found its mark, but Yvenne could not imagine what creature might make such a terrible noise. Even the blood wraiths had not sounded so viscerally ravenous.
The linen thieves bolted out of the grass and onto the road ahead of Kelir. A scream of warning ripped from Yvenne, but the birds were not bent on attack. Balls of fluff were tucked beneath their small wings as they sprinted ahead down the road. Carrying their young away instead of trying to fight the revenants coming from behind—and that was more terrifying than anything else, that the predators even the Parsatheans had feared were fleeing the foul creatures.
Though he was directly behind her, Maddek had to shout over the thunder of her heart and the hooves. “Does Aezil want you dead?”
She shook her head. Her brother didn’t . . . or so she’d believed. As a bride and Nyset’s heir, she was more valuable to them alive. But if Aezil had sent these revenants after them, Yvenne couldn’t be so certain.
Her answer seemed to change the tension in Maddek’s form behind her. He didn’t shout again, yet must have communicated a command to the others because Kelir held up his fist in acknowledgment.
That order was apparently to find a defensible location. They splashed across a wide stream and Kelir came to a halt. All the warriors suddenly seemed in purposeful motion, the horses snorting and prancing in wide circles. Relief filled Yvenne when she saw Steel and Bone at Fassad’s heels.
Swiftly Kelir dismounted. “Put your bride on mine.”
Yvenne knew not what he meant, but she found herself placed atop Kelir’s horse a moment later.
“Stay mounted,” Maddek told her, though he and most of the other warriors were abandoning their saddles as well. “This gelding won’t bolt while we fight—but if we are overwhelmed, ride at speed until you find a village.”
Yvenne could do nothing except nod, her breath coming in heaving rushes. Her own horse and the others Maddek had bought were untrusted to remain steady while the revenants attacked, and only Toric and Danoh were mounted now. Yvenne was sitting amid the riderless horses, the Parsathean mounts on either side of her, the newer ones tied together in a snorting, nervous line.
Ahead, the warriors formed an arc across the road—preparing to fight any revenants who crossed the stream. The creatures would be exposed while fording the waters, so there could be no unexpected attacks from the grasses around them.
“Aezil will not risk his sister,” Maddek told them. “So he will fly the eagle in close to better control the revenants. We hold here until Danoh and Toric take Aezil’s eyes.”
By shooting the eagle from the sky. Still panting from that desperate ride, Yvenne watched the trails through the grass, counting more than a dozen now, some faster than others. Most warriors were not mounted to see. She had opened her mouth to call out a warning when Fassad gave it instead—alerted by the wolves, she realized.
The creature that burst through the grasses on the opposite side of the stream had once been a linen thief but was now a shambling horror within a loose rotting skin covered in ragged feathers. It darted into the stream, hissing wetly from a gristly throat, slowed by the knee-deep water.
“Fassad!” Maddek said.
The warrior’s arrow pierced its skull with a fleshy thunk. Another revenant erupted from the grasses—a louth. The same sort of creature that had rooted harmlessly near Yvenne’s head that morning, diseased and flying toward them on its splayed feet. This time Banek’s arrow felled it while crossing the stream.
“He is raising more corpses from nearby,” Kelir said grimly. “Even a revenant louth is not fast enough to have caught up to us.”
And could not have been one of creatures that had been behind them at the edge of the linen thieves’ territory.
The eagle soared nearer, and Yvenne watched with held breath as first Danoh and then Toric loosed arrows. Danoh’s sharp curse followed when they both missed—though not by much. Yvenne’s heart thundered as they tried again before the eagle circled north, away from the stream.
More revenants approached, and she bit her tongue to stop from calling out the warning, knowing it wasn’t needed and might be a distraction. Each of the warriors faced where the wolves indicated . . . but no revenant burst through.
“It stopped at the edge of the grasses,” Yvenne called out. She saw the uneasy glance Kelir and Maddek shared then. “What is it?”
“Your brother has realized that we will defeat the revenants easily if they cross one at a time.” It was Banek who answered her. “So he will gather them there until he can make them attack in great numbers.”
“He is no experienced sorcerer,” Kelir said, with a glance at Yvenne. “Is he?”
“I do not believe so. I never felt this magic when he lived in the citadel in Syssia—and he only took Rugus’s throne a few seasons past.”
“Then he will not find it easy to hold the revenants here and reanimate more and chase our archers.” Maddek looked to Toric and Danoh. “Ride.”
Both warriors looked pleased by that command. Together they charged north through the grasses and Yvenne followed their progress as it abruptly shifted east—across the stream again.
The eagle made two tighter circles above a rock covered by a swarm of birds before angling east. At first Toric and Danoh seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, not toward the eagle at all, until Yvenne realized they were cutting across the wide circle Aezil’s familiar was making.
“How many, Yvenne?”
Maddek’s voice brought her gaze swinging back to the grasses across the stream. She was the only one with a view over the tall stalks now. “I think . . . eight or nine wait.”
Grimly he nodded. “That is my count. They are not quiet in their approach.”
“At least a dozen more are coming.” Approaching from the wide expanse of grasses, the trails they made far apart yet clearly converging in this direction. Nervously her gaze shot back to Toric and Danoh, who rode not far from some of the revenants’ trails, but the creatures seemed not at all interested in the riders galloping through the grasses. She didn’t know if her brother hadn’t noticed the Parsathean archers or if he simply couldn’t split his focus in that way.
“Tell us when they strike the eagle down,” Maddek said.
Because the revenants across the stream would not be held back by her brother then, and would attack their party. That fight could not be avoided, but hopefully the eagle would be struck down before more revenants arrived. They
’d passed so many corpses on that race through the linen thief’s territory. A sorcerer could not raise dead humans without a demon’s assistance, but there’d been fallen animals aplenty for her brother to reanimate—and those were only upon the road.
With a sharp whistle and command, Fassad sent the wolves to Yvenne’s side. Not only to guard her, she knew. The wolves and the horses might only be tools, but they were too useful to risk—and putting any of the animals in a battle with revenants guaranteed their death. A bite or scratch from a revenant was poison to a human, but to a living animal, the revenant’s poison would change them into the same.
Palms clammy with cold sweat, her brother’s foul magic breathing down the back of her neck, she looked out over the grasses again. Toric and Danoh seemed almost directly below the eagle. With awe, she saw that they did not even slow from a full gallop as they took aim. It seemed the arrows’ flight was as swift as the pounding of her heart, released at one beat—and on the next beat, Toric’s shaft pierced the eagle’s breast.
“It is killed!” she cried.
Even as the eagle tumbled from the sky, the ravenous growls from the stream burst into terrifying howls.
She didn’t recognize the animal that leapt the stream without slowing. An antelope, perhaps, its hide hanging in sheets from withered bones, head lowered and antlers jutting like spikes. Grunting, Maddek blocked the spikes with his shield and jammed his sword up through the creature’s snapping jaw. With a double-armed swing of his axe, Kelir split the skull of a charging bison. At the edge of the stream, Ardyl spun her glaive in an upward slash that beheaded a cowled lizard, then scrambled back as the big animal fell, viscous black blood spurting from the long, writhing neck.
Banek felled a yellow-horned laybeast, sword impaling its soft underjaw. Yvenne drew in breath to cry warning as another bison charged across the stream at him, but with shield at his chest, Fassad rammed into the beast as it reached the bank, knocking it off-stride. The warrior stabbed through its rolling eye with a short sword while the wolves snarled and whined by the legs of Yvenne’s mount, bodies quivering with the need to rush forward and help.
With the same helpless frustration Yvenne watched the battle, until movement north caught her attention. The nesting crows were winging upward in raucous flight. And the rock they’d settled upon . . . had not been a rock.
This creature she recognized, though she’d only seen one before at a distance. Maddek had said whiptails were as tall as trees. And though this one was still a sprint away, it stood taller than any tree Yvenne had seen. Its legs were like trees, and the neck and tail each longer than the span of its giant humpbacked body.
Terror in her heart, she looked to Maddek. In the moment after he struck down another revenant, when it was not so dangerous to distract him, she shouted, “Maddek! To the north!”
She saw him glance in that direction, his face covered in gore, before he raised his shield against another revenant that crossed the stream. The warriors slowly began falling back toward the horses, the defensive arc they made across the road smaller and tighter. On the other side of the stream, Danoh and Toric galloped toward the whiptail. Their arrows pierced the hide but were only like the stings of bees to the enormous reptile.
And the trails through the grasses were not all converging now. One crept slowly toward the mounted Parsatheans.
“Toric!” Yvenne screamed the warning. “Behind you!”
The young warrior had but a moment to turn, shield in front of his chest, when the creature leapt at him. A long-toothed cat, only recently dead, its yellow fur still spotted instead of rotting away in clumps. The revenant slammed into the shield, knocking Toric from his saddle. Yvenne heard Danoh’s faint cry, and then the warrior surged from her horse with axe in hand. The thrashing of the grasses was all Yvenne could see then.
A deafening roar clutched at her heart. The whiptail. It had not been looking in their direction. But Yvenne’s scream had drawn its attention.
Not even in her nightmares could she have imagined such a creature. Not even the trap jaw had been so big—beside the whiptail, even that great predator would have been as a wolf next to a mammoth.
No fangs or claws the whiptail revenant had, yet the foul magic that reanimated the decaying brain within its small head and moved its mountain of rotting meat cared nothing about the original purpose of its host—and teeth that stripped leaves from giant palms could tear frail human flesh from bones.
The ground itself shook when the whiptail took a step, then another, faster with each earthquaking stride. Its huge belly had split, bloodied entrails spilling out and dragging along the ground. Through torn skin and gaping wounds, the whiptail rained gore as it came.
Other revenants were still coming, too. Not all at once, as the first burst had been, but still so many the warriors could not turn away from the stream for more than a moment. They could not run. Unlike horses, the revenants would not slow or tire.
“Ran Maddek!” Kelir shouted, grunting as he slammed his axe into the skull of a louth. “Take your bride! We will hold them.”
Perhaps the small revenants could be held, but that whiptail could not be. It would be like a mouse trying to hold back a horse. Kelir’s axe might chop through the meat of those treelike legs, but it could not crack the solid bones at their centers. Even a mounted Parsathean with a glaive could not swing the blade high enough to reach that snakelike neck. The warriors would die—and Maddek would never leave them. Only a perfectly placed arrow into the brain might fell that monster, yet both Danoh and Toric were unseated, battling the long-toothed cat, at no angle to strike the whiptail’s small head.
Maddek’s fiery gaze shot to Yvenne. “Ride!”
The rage of helplessness clutched at her chest. She looked to the charging whiptail. Had she only more than a day’s practice, she’d have had the strength to kill it.
But . . . she did have strength. She had chosen him for that reason.
Urgent purpose gripped her heart. Kelir’s bow and quiver was strapped to the cantle of his saddle. Untying the weapon, she slid from the tall horse, careful to land on her right leg. She hobbled as fast as she could toward Maddek, notching the arrow in the string.
Maddek shoved a revenant from the end of his sword and glanced over his shoulder. She knew not what to make of his expression when he saw her coming, carrying Kelir’s bow and the arrow. It seemed molten and icy at once, full of anger and fear.
A hoarse, short laugh broke from him and he turned back toward the stream. “Now is not the time for practice, my warrior-queen. It is time to ride away.”
“Help me and I will kill it!”
He whirled on her, eyes on fire. With steely arm he snatched her against his side, tucked between his body and his shield. “Banek!” he roared. “Take my bride and—”
“Maddek!” She reached up and jerked at his beard, slick with the blackened blood of revenants. “I am Nyset’s heir. The goddess Vela looks through my eyes. She will guide my aim. But I need your strength.”
His head snapped down, his dark gaze searching hers. Only a breath passed before he was suddenly behind her, all around her. His left hand gripped the bow beneath her grip, his fingers closed over her fingers, and it was as if his hands were hers when they pulled the bowstring together.
The creak of the wooden bow as it bent was the sweetest of music. She recalled Banek’s tale of Queen Venys, the stolen iron, and a beast felled with one arrow. The whiptail was many times larger than any kergen but surely had the same vulnerability.
“The eye?” she asked, because Yvenne believed it would be the same but could not be certain. Yet Maddek always saw every weakness.
“The eye,” he replied.
The whiptail thundered toward them, quaking the ground. She only had to look at her target and knew the aim was true, and as if her fingers were Maddek’s, he released as she did. The vibr
ating pting of the string filled her heart with such happiness that the slash of pain across her forearm was nothing. Never had an arrow’s flight seemed so swift and true. With held breath, she watched it streak upward before plunging into the whiptail’s infested eye.
For a long moment, she feared it might have been only another bee sting to the great beast. Another step the monster took, then another, and then suddenly it pitched forward. Almost slowly it seemed to fall, an endless beat before the impact of the enormous body shook the ground beneath her feet and blew through the grasses like a putrid gale storm, bending the stalks in a wave along the stream.
Sheer silence reigned for a moment. Silence from the warriors, from the revenants, even the buzzing of the insects quieted.
Then another wet growl sounded, and Maddek shifted his grip on the bow. “You used the wrong arm,” he told her.
And indeed she had, notching the arrow and using the grip most familiar to her, though her fingers were missing. But now he switched their grips, his right hand holding the bow beneath hers and supporting her missing fingers, his left hand assisting hers in notching the arrow on the string.
“The eye again,” he said when a miren revenant began fording the stream.
It mattered not that the target was smaller and guarded by armored spikes above the eye. Again Maddek’s fingers released when Yvenne’s did, and her arrow found its mark. The miren dropped dead halfway across the stream, submerged in the bloodied waters with the bodies of other revenants.
A whoop sounded from Kelir, and breathless laughter from the other warriors, and her own joy almost burst her heart.
“The next is a horse,” Maddek said. “The eyes are at the side of its head and not the front.”
“How can you tell what it is?” Yvenne could see nothing coming, could only hear it crash through the tall stalks.
“The rhythm of its steps,” he told her, and she could hear it now, too—a pattern that had become so familiar during this journey. “We are directly in front, so it will turn its head to better see us. Let loose the arrow then.”