David Drake - Balefires

When the first hound belled, Lena ignored it. She knew now from long experience that the dogs were not her enemies. She had been away from the family the past three days, spending the daylit hours in the Forest fringe and the nights deeper into the open lands than she had ever gone before. The castle sitting gray on a detached plateau had drawn her eyes months earlier, but anticipation itself had delayed her approach to it. Now at last she had slipped to the very edge of its straggling curtain walls, let her fingers caress the rough stone. It could easily be climbed, but its hidden interior made the act not a moment's but a thing for long pondering in the Forest depths. That in her mind, Lena had started back, her course across the fields more hasty than deliberate since she had let the dawn stride too nearby as she studied the wall.

The second joyous bugling would have been a surface impression as well, except for the prompt echo of the hunting horn.

Lena was already among the trees. Her first reaction was that of her foster father, to choose the highest and secrete herself in the upper branches. A premonition that this hunt was no chance crossing of her path drove her instead to headlong flight. Panic rode her, a brutal jockey whose violence spewed out the strength that might otherwise have carried her free.

For a mile she sprinted, leaping obstacles and dreading at every instant that the hounds would give tongue again. They did not. She half turned, then, her nerves begging for the object of their fear, and her right shoulder brushed an oak sapling. It was no more than a glancing blow, but it sufficed to break her stride and allow reaction to her masterless effort throw her to the ground.

And as she lay sobbing on the needle-strewn earth, the hounds and the horn sounded again. She had gained on her pursuers; but they knew, dogs and men, that a hunt was decided in its last moments, not the first. They suited their pace to that certainty. With proper governance, Lena could have run all day. In the darkness, when the men were blind and the dogs nervously unwilling to range ahead, she would have disappeared. A night of sleepless excitement and the disastrous sprint had gutted her. Fear drove Lena back to her feet, but she had lost the ability to force the pace.

With leisure to choose the course, Lena might have led the hunt into empty stretches of the Forest where only squirrels would have been disturbed by its passage. Terror eliminated all chance of such forethought and she plunged straight as a plumb line for the distant cedar copse in which she had last huddled with the woods folk. Perhaps she would have done the same in any event: Lena had never before been hunted, and she lacked the instincts of the wild-born.

The sun was well up before a bright goosequill signaled the nearest of the hunters to Lena's backward glance. The feather bobbed, visible when the green hat and man and charger beneath it were not. She turned as if unfeeling, her face an ivory cameo, her legs scissors of bronze. She did not pump her arms as she ran, avoiding a practice that could stitch a runner's torso with cramps while the great veins of his legs still balanced oxygen and poisons in the working muscles.

The hounds were close behind her. The men may not have known how close, for except in that instant's flash down an aisle of trees they had been beyond sight. Rausch left little to chance, and two of the riders were horse handlers leading picked remudas. But time was lost changing from foundered mounts to fresh ones, and the strings could not follow with the ease of the unhindered riders through brush that clutched at leadropes. The dogs, loping with their muzzles high and quivering with the fresh scent, yelped madly but did not attempt to close the twenty yards separating them from their quarry. They were the fingers of Death, but not his jaws.

In a noon-bright clearing deep in the Forest, Lena stumbled a second time. She rolled smoothly to her feet and collapsed, her reflexes whole but her body without the strength to effect them. The hounds were in a yapping, yelping circle around her. When she tried to rise again the foam-smeared breast of a great stallion slammed her down.

Lena's lungs were balls of yellow fire. Above her bellowed the green-suited hunter, a little man who had unslung his cocked arbalest to wave it as a signal of triumph.

The knobbed end of a ten-foot tree limb dashed his brains out with the effectiveness of a trebuchet.

Kue-meh, bandy-legged and slight, had darted through the pack. If her strength was inferior to that of Kort, it was still beyond the standards of true men-and the female had the cold will to overcome panic and act in the face of catastrophe. The hounds gave back, snarling. The riderless horse lurched away from the dragging weight still caught in the reins. Two more men, Karl in red silk and cloth-of-gold and Rausch beside him, his grim face a fortress in the midst of chaos, burst into the clearing in which their victim lay: Kue-meh hissed at them and waggled her brain-spattered club.

Rausch reined up and his left hand caught his master's bridle as well, preventing the youth from thrusting into the deadly circle of the club. Then he whistled and from behind his horse, stark as Furies, loped a pair of mastiffs.

There was neither choice nor hope. Kue-meh strode forward as boldly as if her death were not certain. She swung at the nearer of the mastiffs, missing her aim as it reared back. Kort bellowed from the edge of the clearing, but his rage was too late. The second mastiff 's leap ended with its fangs grinding on the bones of Kue-meh's right shoulder. She cried out despairingly as the first dog's jaws closed on her head.

Her neck popped loudly.

The smack of a hunting crossbow was simultaneous.

Halfway between the brush and the killer dogs, Kort's body jerked backwards. The fourth hunter had ridden into the clearing, having paused first to lay a square-headed quarrel in the launching groove of his weapon. The great iron bolt lifted Kort, carrying part of his breastbone with it through the back of his ribs.

The mastiffs stalked away as the pack began to scuffle for its trophies. The archer slung his arbalest from the saddle of his blowing horse and dismounted to whip the dogs away from Kort. Rausch, too, slipped to the ground, a purposeful thumb on the edge of his blade as he walked toward Kue-meh.

"No, these-creatures-are unclean," the Ritter said, triumph vibrant through the weariness of his voice. "We won't carry those back. Let the dogs eat." He lifted himself out of the saddle. His eyes remained fixed on Lena's, holding her firm as a snake would a rabbit. His breeches and tunic were shot with gold no brighter than his unbound hair. Froth from the succession of horses he had ridden to death blackened his calves and thighs, and his tunic was dark with his own sweat. Still his broad shoulders did not droop and there was laughter on his tongue after he splashed it with wine from the skin Rausch offered. "So… She gave us a run, did she not, my Rauschkin? But I think she was worth a few horses, no…? And even poor Hermann, he rode well, but it was his own fault if he let a troll brain him."

In a more businesslike voice he added to Rausch, "Be ready to hold her arms."

Lena's eyes were open, staring. But even if the fact registered on her mind, she would not at first have understood why von Arnheim was unlacing his breeches.

Eventually, awareness returned. They had tied her for the ride back to the castle, her wrists to the saddlehorn and her ankles lashed to one another beneath the horse's belly. That pain she had escaped as during the grim, slow jogging she lay slumped over the corpse of Hermann who hung crosswise in front of her. Her blond hair was matted over a pair of transverse welts. Rausch had finally used the loaded end of his whip to quiet the girl for his master.