David Farland - Wizardborn

If she were to tell Gaborn’s secret, Myrrima feared she might betray a man who had never unjustly sought to harm another. Yet if she withheld the news, innocent men would die. To tell was the lesser evil.

Sir Giles took his leave of them and galloped toward Carris.

“The rest of us will need to warn Skalbairn,” Tewkes said. He dismounted for a moment, cinched his saddle for a fast ride. Others drew weapons, and more than one man brought out a stone to sharpen a lance or a warhammer.

Myrrima licked her lips. She wouldn’t be riding south with the others tonight. Gaborn had said that she would find her wounded husband a third of a mile north of the city, near the great mound. But reavers were still hiding out on the field. She tried not to worry.

“Do you want me to come with you, milady?” a voice asked, startling her. Sir Hoswell’s horse had sidled up to her, and he was bending near. “To find your husband? I told you that if you ever need me, I’ll be at your back.”

She could barely make out his face beneath his hood. Hoswell leaned close, as if expecting her to fall into his arms at the first sight of blood.

Hah! she thought. Maybe when the stars have all burned down to ashes!

He had tried to seduce her once. When she resisted his advances, he’d tried to force her. He’d apologized, but she still didn’t trust him, even though she had enough endowments now that she knew he would never try to force her again.

“No,” she said. “I’ll go alone. Why don’t you find some reavers to kill?”

“Very well,” Hoswell said. He drew his steel greatbow from its pack, began carefully to unwrap the oiled canvas that protected it from the rain.

“You’ll fight with that?” she asked.

Hoswell shrugged. “It’s what I use best. A shot to the sweet triangle...”

Myrrima spurred her own mount away from the other lords, rode under the arch toward the largest knot of dead reavers. Borenson would have fallen in the thick of battle. She imagined that he would be there.

In the distance, she could hear others searching the battlefield, calling for loved ones. They shouted different names, but all were the selfsame cry: “I am alive; are you?”

“Borenson? Borenson!” she called.

She had no way to know how severe his wounds might be. If he lay trapped beneath a fallen reaver, she’d make light of it. If he was disemboweled, she’d stuff his guts in and nurse him back to health. She tried to steel herself for whatever she would find.

She imagined what she would say when she found him, rehearsed a hundred variations of “I love you. I’m a warrior now, and I’m coming with you to Inkarra.”

He would object—perhaps on good grounds. She had only gained a little skill with a bow.

She would persuade him.

As Myrrima drew close to the fell mage’s final battleground, she smelled the remnants of the monster’s curses. Residual odors clung like a mist to the low ground.

Even two hours after the mage’s death, the curses’ effects were astonishing. “Be blind,” a curse still whispered, and her sight dimmed. “Be dry as dust”; sweat oozed from her pores. “Rot, O thou child of man”; her stomach knotted and every scratch felt as if it might pucker into a festering wound.

She rode in the shadows of reaver corpses that loomed on every side. She gazed in awe at crystalline teeth like scythes. She caught movement from the corner of her eye. Her heart leapt in her throat to see a reaver’s maw open.

She yanked her mount’s reins to turn it back, but realized that the reaver did not hiss or move.

It was dead. Its maw merely creaked open as the monster cooled. Its muscles were contracting like a clam’s as it dries in the sun.

Myrrima looked around. All of the reavers’ mouths were opening by slow degrees.

The air seemed heavy. No katydid buzzed in a thicket. No wind sighed through the leaves of any trees, for the reavers had uprooted every plant.

“Borenson!” she shouted. She scanned the ground, hoping the reflected firelight might reveal the form of her husband buried beneath a layer of soot.

A trio of gree whipped past her head, wings squeaking as if in torment.

Through the tangled legs of a dead reaver, she glimpsed a flickering light, and suddenly she had the wild hope that Borenson had lit the fire.

She spurred her mount. Around a bonfire had gathered a crowd of warriors from Indhopal. Myrrima felt unnerved by them, even though today they’d fought beside her people against the reavers.

These were no ordinary warriors. They were dark nomads who wore black robes over their armor, as some symbol of status. Their headgear bore steel plates that fell down over the ears to protect the shoulders.

Nine of Raj Ahten’s dead Invincibles lay before the fire. The nomads seemed to be preparing to consign the deceased to a funeral pyre.

Among the dead Invincibles lay a girl with dark hair, practically a child. She rested upon a riding robe of fine red cotton, embroidered with exquisite gold threads to form curlicues like the tendrils of vines. On her temple rode a thin silver crown that accentuated her dark skin.

She wore a sheer dress of lavender silk, and in her hand someone had placed a silver dagger.

Myrrima had come upon Saffira, Raj Ahten’s dead wife. Gaborn had sent Myrrima’s husband to fetch Saffira from Indhopal so that she might plead with him to cease his attacks on Gaborn’s people. Gaborn could have searched the world and found no one better to sue for peace. Rumor said that Saffira had taken hundreds of endowments of glamour and voice.

She would have been more alluring than any woman alive, would have spoken more eloquently.

Obviously Borenson had found Saffira and brought her to the siege at Carris. Now she lay dead among a few Invincibles. Myrrima imagined that the Invincibles had been her royal escort, and suspected that her husband would be nearby.

The leader of the Indhopalese was immediately recognizable. Every eye in the crowd rested on him, and many nomad warriors knelt before him—some on one knee, some on two.

He sat atop a gray Imperial warhorse, glaring down at the dead, talking in an even, dangerous tone. His dark eyes glowed in the firelight as if he struggled to hold back tears of rage. On the right breast of his black robe he wore the emblem of Raj Ahten, the three-headed wolf in red. Above the wolves were golden owl’s wings, and above them flew three stars.

His insignia identified him as more than an Invincible or even a captain of Invincibles.

At his feet, several men in black burnooses knelt on hands and knees. One answered him in a frightened voice.

Myrrima seemed to have wandered into a confrontation. She didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

A tall Invincible came up from the shadows behind her, a man with a forked beard and ivory beads woven into his black hair. The firelight reflected from his dark eyes and golden nose ring.

He grinned at her, and Myrrima could not tell if it was meant as a seductive grin or a friendly greeting. He jutted his chin toward the Indhopalese leader. He whispered, “You see? He Wuqaz Faharaqin, warlord of the Ah’kellah.”

The news struck through Myrrima like a lance. Even in Heredon she had heard those names. Among Raj Ahten’s warriors, Wuqaz Faharaqin was one of the most powerful. And of all the desert tribes, the Ah’kellah were the most respected. They were judges and lawgivers of the desert, hired to settle disputes among tribes.

The fact that Wuqaz Faharaqin was angry did not bode well for the object of his wrath.

The Invincible reached up a hand clumsily, as if he seldom greeted in this manner. “I am Akem.”

“What has happened here?” Myrrima asked.

“His nephew, Pashtuk, murdered today,” Akem said. “Now he question witnesses.”