Tad Williams - Shadowmarch

“Kendrick has quite enough to think about Oh, gods curse it.” She scowled. Gailon of Summerfield had seen and was spurring toward them.

“My lady! Princess!” He leaned out as if to take the spear from her, and only realized at the last moment that he would be overstepping. “You will hurt yourself.”

She managed to control her voice, but barely. “I do know which end points outward, Duke Gailon.”

“But this is not fitting for a lady… and especially with such a fearsome beast… !”

“Then you must make sure and kill it first,” she said, a bit more gently but no more sweetly. “Because if it reaches me, it will get no farther.”

Barrick groaned, then called the bearer back and took a spear for himself, clutching it awkwardly under one arm while still holding the reins.

“And what are you doing?” she demanded.

“If you’re going to be a fool, strawhead, someone has to protect you.”

Gailon Tolly looked at them both, then shook his head and rode off toward Kendrick and the hounds.

“I don’t think he’s very happy with us,” Briony said cheerfully. From somewhere back along the hillside she heard the master of arms shout her name, then her brother’s. “And Shaso won’t be either. Let’s go.”

They spurred forward. The dogs, surrounded now by a ring of men with spears, were beginning to find their courage again. Several of the lymers darted into the copse to snap at the swift-moving, reddish shape. Briony saw the long neck move, quick as a whipcrack, and one of the dogs yelped in terror as it was caught in the long jaws.

“Oh, hurry!” she said, miserable but also strangely excited. Again she could feel the presence of invisible things swirling like winter clouds. She said a prayer to Zoria.

The dogs began to swarm into the copse in numbers, a flood of low shapes swirling in the dappled light beneath the trees, barking in frightened excitement. There were more squeals of pain, but then a strange, creaking bellow from the wyvern as one of the dogs got its teeth into a sensitive spot. The barking suddenly rose fiercely in pitch as the beast fought its way through the pack, trying to escape the confinement of the trees. It crushed at least one of the hounds under its clawed feet and gutted several others, shaking one victim so hard that blood flew everywhere like red rain. Then it burst out of the leaves and moving shadows into the clear afternoon sunlight, and for the first time Briony could see it whole.

It was mostly serpentine body, a great tube of muscle covered with glimmering red and gold and brown scales, with a single pair of sturdy legs a third of the way down its length. A sort of ruff of bone and skin had flared out behind the narrow head, stretching even wider now as the thing rose up on those legs, head swaying higher than a man’s as it struck toward.

Kendrick and the two other nobles closest to it. It had come on them too quickly for the men to dismount and use their long boar spears properly. Kendrick waited until the strike had missed, then dug at the creature’s face with his spear. The wyvern hissed and sideslipped the blow, but as it did so one of the other men—Briony thought it might be Tyne, the hunting-mad Earl of Blueshore—drove his spearhead into the thing’s ribs just behind its shoulders. The wyvern contorted its neck to snap at the shaft Kendrick seized the opportunity to drive his own spear into the creature’s throat, then spurred his horse forward so that he could use its force to pin the wyvern against the ground. The spear slid in through a sluice of red-black blood until the crosshaft that was meant to keep a boar from forcing its way up the shaft stopped it. Kendrick’s horse reared in alarm at the thing’s agonized, furious hiss, but the prince stood in his stirrups and leaned his weight on the spear, determined to keep the thing staked to the earth.

The dogs swarmed forward again; the other members of the hunt began to close in too, all anxious to be in at the kill. But the wyvern was not beaten.

In a sudden, explosive movement the thing coiled itself around the spear, stretching its neck a surprising distance to bite at Kendrick’s gloved hand. The prince’s horse reared again and he almost lost his grip on the spear entirely. The monster’s tail lashed out and wrapped around the horse’s legs. The black gelding nickered in terror. For a brief moment they were all tangled together like some fantastical scene from one of the ancient tapestries in the castle’s throne room, everything so strange that Briony could not quite believe it was truly happening Then the wyvern tightened itself around the legs of Kendrick’s horse, crushing bones in a drumroll of fright-eningly loud cracks, and the prince and his mount collapsed downward into a maul of red-gold coils.

As Barrick and Briony stared in horror from twenty paces away, Sum-merfield and Blueshore both began to jab wildly at the agitated monster and its prey. Other nobles hurried forward, shouting in fear for the prince regent’s life. The crush of eager dogs, the writhing loops of the injured wyvern’s long body, and the thrashing of the mortally injured horse made it impossible to see what was happening on the ground. Briony was lightheaded and sick.

Then something came up suddenly out of the long grass, speeding toward her like the figurehead of a Vuttish longboat cutting the water—the wyvern, making a desperate lunge at escape, still dragging Kendrick’s spear in its neck. It darted first to one side, then to the other, hemmed in bv terrified horses and jabbing spears, then plunged through an opening in the ring of hunters, straight at Briony and Barrick.

A heartbeat later it rose before them, its black eye glittering, head swaying like an adder’s as it measured them. As if in a dream, Briony lifted her spear. The thing hissed and reared higher. She tried to track the moving head, to keep the point firmly between it and her, but its looping motions were quick and fluidly deceptive. A moment later Barrick’s spear slipped from his clumsy, one-handed grasp and banged sideways into Briony s arm, knocking her weapon out of her hands.

The wyvern’s narrow jaws spread wide, dripping with bloody froth. The head lunged toward her, then suddenly snapped to one side as though yanked by a string.

The monster’s strike had come so close that when she undressed that night Briony found the thing’s caustic spittle had burned holes in her deer-hide jerkin it looked as though someone had held the garment over the flames of a dozen tiny candles.

The wyvern lay on the ground, an arrow jutting from its eye, little shudders rippling down its long neck as it died. Briony stared at it, then turned to see Shaso riding toward them, his war bow still in his hand. He looked down at the dead beast before lifting his angry stare to the royal twins.

“Foolish, arrogant children,” he said. “Had I been as careless as you, you would both be dead.”

This was one of Vansen’s favorite spots, high on the old wall just beneath the rough, dark stone of Wolfstooth Spire, and also one of the most satisfying things about his given task: he had good reason to be up here in the stiff breeze that flew across Brenn’s Bay, with nearly all of Southmarch, castle and town, arranged beneath him in the autumn sun like objects on a lady’s table. Was it shameful that he enjoyed it so?

When he was a child in the dales, Ferras Vansen and the boys from the next croft had liked to play King on the Hill, each trying to hold a singular place at the top of some hummock of soil and stone they had chosen for their battleground, but even in those instants when the others had gone tumbling down to the bottom and Ferras had stood by himself, master of the high place, still the foothills had loomed over them all, and beyond those hills the northern mountains themselves, achingly high, as if to remind young Ferras even in triumph of his true place in life. When he had grown older, he had learned to love those heights, at least those he could reach; at times he had purposely let the sheep wander off, trading one of his father’s sometimes violent punishments for the pleasure of following the straying herd into the high places. Until his manhood, he knew no greater pleasure than a stretch of afternoon when he could clamber up to one of the crests and look out over the folds of hillock and valley that lay before him like a bunched blanket—deep, dark places and airy prominences that no one else in his family had ever seen, although they lay less than a mile from the family croft.