Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

Now as he rode the wide plain on his way back to the Cauldron in Ylorc he let the gusts of wind clear his mind, carrying away whatever worry they could. The icy flakes that rode the air currents stung as they impacted his skin, but he could tolerate them, concentrating on avoiding them when he could, keeping his mind busy.

He was unprepared, therefore, when the wind that slapped him at the bowl of the Krevensfield Plain carried with it a strong taste of salt.

Achmed slowed his canter and opened his mouth to allow the salty air to swirl in and around it. He spat on the ground.

The breeze contained the salty taste of sweat and blood; somewhere around here a battle was being fought.

In addition, the salt water on the wind had the unmistakable tang of the sea. Achmed spat again in disgust. Since the sea was a thousand leagues away, it could only mean one thing.

Ashe was here somewhere.

Moments later he could hear the voice of Llauron’s son, calling from a swale to the south.

“Achmed! Achmed! Here! Come!”

Achmed exhaled and nudged his mount forward slowly to the upper edge of the swale, looking into the small valley below.

Even before he crested the swale he could taste the carnage on the wind. The smell of pitch mingled with fire and blood was still burning in the air, sending up tendrils of sour smoke toward the wintry sky.

Once he reached the top, Achmed winced involuntarily at the sight. The dip of the swale was strewn with bodies, some scorched from the burning pitch that still smoked on the snowy ground. Riderless horses wandered aimlessly, some still bearing their human burden slumped across their backs. The remains of a wagon burned dully in the midst of the scene. By quick count there had been a score or so horses bearing the colors of Sorbold, and another dozen in dull green or brown, with no standard displayed on their blankets. The Sorbold contingent had numbered, from the look of it, one hundred or so foot soldiers along with the twenty horsemen.

Their victims had been a smaller party, perhaps a dozen in total, apparently ambushed at the bottom of the swale, most of them brawny men, older, with an assortment of armor and weaponry, but no apparent common standard. They had held their own for a while, it appeared, but now their corpses were scattered about on the floor of the swale, their blood staining the ground a rosy pink.

In the middle of this butchery Ashe, his features obscured by the swaths of his hooded cloak of mist, was standing guard over a remaining soldier clad in motley clothing, defending the injured man from the seven remaining Sorbolds, one of whom lay at the ground at his feet. Achmed’s eyes riveted on that soldier; he was swiping at Ashe with a hooked weapon that looked suspiciously like the ones used in the tunnels of Ylorc.

From a distance he judged Ashe to have the upper hand despite being outnumbered; a moment later he was proven right as Ashe, fighting with Kirsdarke, the elemental sword of water, in his left hand, and the wooden shaft of a broken wagon brake in the other, swept three of the Sorbolds down with the shaft and eviscerated a fourth in a flash of streaming blue. He looked over his shoulder at Achmed, who remained motionless atop his mount. Though his face was obscured by the hood of his cloak, the relief in his voice was unmistakable.

“Achmed! Thank the gods you’re here!”

He turned again, reinvigorated, and stabbed the Sorbold with the hook through the chest, parrying the attack from the two that remained standing with the wooden shaft.

Achmed jumped down from his mount and hurried down the face of the hill, stopping halfway. He crouched in the bloody snow and picked up a short sword that lay next to the body of a dead Sorbold soldier; it gleamed in the morning light with a blue sheen as dark as midnight, its razor-sharp inner edge glinting dangerously. It was one of the Firbolg-made drawknives, a weapon restricted to use by Achmed’s elite Bolg regiment. His hands, thin and strong within their leather sheaths, began to shake with anger.

Ashe pulled his sword from the fallen Sorbold’s chest, then spun out of his parry, landing a solid blow to the temple of the rightmost Sorbold. He slashed the one on the left across the neck with Kirsdarke, slamming both their heads together with crushing force. He leapt over the bodies in time to avoid the charge from the last three remaining Sorbold soldiers, looking around for Achmed.

But the Firbolg king was walking from body to body, gathering weapons, cursing under his breath.

Ashe returned to his task, quickly dispatching the remaining Sorbolds in a flurry of thrusts from the glowing water sword. He bent down and checked the fallen man he had been protecting, then turned in annoyance and shouted to the Firbolg king, who was picking up a whisper-thin disk from the ground.

“Thanks for the help,” he called sarcastically as Achmed came nearer.

“You didn’t say ‘help,’ ” Achmed said, not looking up from the weapons he was examining. “You said ‘come.’ I came. Be more specific next time.”

Ashe sighed and returned to the injured man, covering him with a saddle blanket from a riderless horse.

A moment later Achmed was beside him; he dropped the weapons with a clang onto the snowy ground, all but the cwellan disk.

“What happened here?” he asked sharply.

Ashe’s eyes glared up at him from within his hood. “Have a little respect. Do you know who this man is?”

“No, and unless he can answer my question, I can’t say as I care.”

“It was an ambush of some sort,” Ashe said, checking the unconscious man’s breathing. “It appears to be part of a Sorbold column that may have broken off from the rest. I don’t know what happened to the remainder of the column—there are two sets of tracks, separated by half a day or more. Undoubtedly more of the same violence the land has experienced for twenty years, but the first I’ve heard of on the part of the Sorbolds.”

Achmed folded his arms, reflecting silently. He had seen large, spread-out caravans making their way back to various lands on his way through the province of Navarne, though he had stayed at a distance. It seemed to him at the time that they were somber for revelers who had just attended a festival—mournful, in fact. He took a deep breath at the thought of what might have been in the wagons they were following.

“If you are headed to Navarne, you might want to have a look in on Stephen,” he said, “if you can do it from a distance. I can see you are still in hiding, though I can’t imagine why.”

“Gods—the winter solstice festival,” Ashe said softly.

“It would also help if you leave one alive for questioning next time.”

“No good—they’re thralls of the demon. They never remember anything.”

Achmed nodded sullenly. “Who is this man?”

Ashe looked down at the bloodless face. “His name is Shrike,” he said after a moment. “He is a First Generation Cymrian, sworn at one time to Gwylliam, and now to Anborn.”

“And you think this information would somehow interest me?”

Ashe rechecked the twine he had bound around Shrike’s bleeding arm, and pulled out his waterskin.

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” he said bitterly. “He is merely one of the last of your kind, someone who trod the same soil on the other side of the world that you trod, that shares your history. One of the few to live that long and still keep his sanity. He is merely a human being, bleeding his life onto the ground below him. I apologize most sincerely; why on Earth would any of that interest you?”

Achmed picked up the drawknife from the top of the pile and thrust it under Ashe’s nose. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a chicken leg.” Ashe poured the water from the skin onto a bloodstained handkerchief and placed it across Shrike’s forehead. “Or perhaps a long-stemmed daisy.”