Mercedes Lackey - Owlflight

Bit by bit, the mage pushed Darian back, struggling in eerie silence. Bit by bit, Darian’s feet slipped, and he scrambled to reestablish his hold.

If the mage got loose, he’d kill Darian - then he’d kill Snowfire and all the others. Then he’d go after Nightwind and Starfall and Kelvren. And all because Darian had failed.

“No!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Not - this - time! “

With a last burst of energy, he drove the mage back, and felt a surge of elation.

But the madness left the man’s eyes for a moment, and the mage screamed something guttural. The handle of the pitchfork burst into flame, splintered, then crumbled away, leaving Darian standing with a handful of kindling and ash. The mage plucked the metal tine out, and cast it to the ground contemptuously.

Darian stared, frozen.

The mage laughed, and reached out, his fingers curling into a claw.

Darian ducked and rolled to the side. He came up running, or trying to, heading for the open stable door.

Behind him, the mage screamed something else, and the door slammed shut in his face; he hit it, unable to stop in time, and dropped to the floor.

The mage laughed again, and Darian rolled over, his back to the door, and his hand fell on the bar that had held it shut. He didn’t even think; he just grabbed it, and came up swinging.

He caught the mage on the side of the head, once again catching him by surprise. The man reeled back, and Darian swung again.

This time the mage caught the wooden bar and wrenched it out of Darian’s hands, throwing it aside.

Darian dove underneath the man’s grasping hands, gambling that the wound in his side was too painful for him to move easily. He somersaulted and came up on his feet on the other side; the mage was between him and the door again. He looked frantically about for a weapon, any weapon.

His eye fell on the forged tines of the pitchfork as the mage turned.

This time he didn’t dare fail. It didn’t matter if he died; he couldn’t fail the others.

He snatched up the tines, braced the rounded end against his chest, and charged again, but this time with every last bit of strength, and every bit of his weight, holding back nothing.

He drove the larger man back against the closed door; felt the tines hit flesh that yielded, resisted, then gave with a wet pop. The man screamed horribly; he flailed at Darian and a terrible blow to the side of his head knocked him away, stunning him; he fell to the ground as everything went dark.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t see anything.

Am I blind? With a convulsive shudder, he managed to move, to get to his knees, but he still couldn’t see anything. Everything was dark.

Then, with a creak, one of the stable doors swung open, and vague and flickering red light outside proved that he wasn‘t blind after all. It was the mage-light that was gone.

But the mage was still moving. In a moment, he might get up again. He was hurt, but by no means dead yet.

Darian’s right hand was wet, as was his sleeve, and as he moved it, his fingers touched his abandoned bucket. He grabbed it and lurched to his feet, staggering over to the mage who stared up at him in the changing light, spittle at the corner of his mouth.

He gave the man no chance to act; he brought the bucket down on his head as hard as he could. If the man wouldn’t die, at least he wasn’t going to stay awake for long!

He hit the mage a couple more times for good measure, then left the bucket upturned over his face and staggered, exhausted, out into the open. He didn’t care who or what saw him at this point. He stood in the middle of the dirt path, swaying on his feet, wondering where he should go next. The shouting had decreased; who was winning?

Then he sensed something gathering at his back; something oddly familiar. Magic - but - where and when had he sensed something like this before?

Magic - like - For some reason the sensation called up a memory of Justyn, but Justyn had never had enough magic for him to sense like this -

Except the day he destroyed the bridge!

Fear gave him energy he thought he didn’t have; he sprinted for shelter, any shelter, heading for the nearest building as fast as his feet would carry him. He reached it just as the stable behind him exploded into flame, the shock of the blast knocking him into the side of the cottage. He saw fireworks behind his eyes for a moment, and had all the wind knocked out of him. He struggled to breathe, lying on his side, trying to make his lungs work again.

He didn’t stay that way for long; when his eyes cleared and he got a few good breaths, he picked himself gingerly out of the remains of a flower garden. He looked around, and things were pretty much the same as they had been. With a single exception, that is. What was left of the stable blazed fiercely, as if it had been soaked in oil.

Darian went looking for Snowfire and the others, but didn’t have to go far to find them. No sooner did he round the corner of the house than he saw the entire cavalcade approaching - the Hawkbrothers, battered and injured, but all still alive, followed by the villagers.

The villagers of Errold’s Grove were a far different group of people than they had been a half moon ago. They had clearly been kept on short rations by their captors, and just as clearly had been worked to exhaustion. They were filthy, unkempt - precisely the kind of folk that they themselves would have turned away from the village as vagabonds. Clothing, dirty, torn and tattered in the course of hard labor, had not been changed, cleaned or mended in all the time they’d been captives. Some of the men showed signs of beatings; all looked as wary and spooked as the horses running freely among the houses.

But Darian had no eyes for them; with a joyful shout, he ran to Snowfire and the others, who answered his shout and surrounded him, babbling questions, while the villagers stared at him with wide eyes. The villagers recognized him, yes, but this was not the same Darian that they had scorned and disregarded before.

“One at a time!” Snowfire ordered, and some of the babble subsided. “Dar’ian, we were surprised by a group coming to claim some of your people. We were attacked. We took shelter in the barn, and were promptly put under siege. What saved us was that the elite fighters that were left here had been drinking, and simply didn’t fight together at all well. We were holding our own, until we were attacked by a - a bear-creature. It must have been summoned and controlled by their mage. It broke through our defenses and killed three of your people and injured several of us. We are sorry - there was just nothing we could have done to save them, though we tried. Then, the creature suddenly went berserk, as if it was no longer under control, and turned on the barbarians! They had to fight us and it at the same time; they killed it, but seemed to lose heart and retreated - then there was a tremendous roar and flames shot into the sky, and their retreat turned into a rout! What happened here?”

“It was the mage,” Darian said, too tired to feel even a flicker of pride in his deed. “I saw him making magic and I knew I had to do something. I think he’s dead; I think he did what Justyn did at the bridge.”

He told the tale as quickly as he could, in as few words as possible. He was a little afraid that Snowfire and the rest might not believe him. After all, who was he to claim to have destroyed a powerful mage? - but they accepted his tale at face value. And the results were there for all to see, so perhaps it was not as difficult to believe as he had feared.

“You were one thing he would not have been concerned about,” Snowfire said thoughtfully. “He would never have believed that a single young boy could be a threat to him, not even when he had the evidence of that threat slashed into his own body. He should have known better. We all know that the smallest creature can become dangerous when driven to desperation.”