David Weber - War Maid's choice

And unlike the stallions, she was unbarded.

Stop that, she told herself firmly. You can’t change it by worrying about it, and Gayrfressa knows what you’re feeling even if you don’t actually say a thing to her. The last thing you need to be doing at this moment is to distract her!

A wordless ripple of love reached back to her, and she drew a deep breath as she reached back.

Guran Selmar came out of the undergrowth as silently as a puff of breeze, and Erkan Traram looked up from the mossy boulder upon which he sat.

“Lieutenant Larark’s in position, Sir,” the sergeant said, and Traram grimaced.

“Should I assume you took a close look at that lodge on your way back?” he asked the veteran noncom, and Selmar chuckled grimly.

“Aye, Sir. I did that.” He shrugged. “’Pears to be pretty much the way it was described, Captain. The wall’s nothing much-can’t be more than twelve, thirteen feet tall, and it looks like it’s only a couple of courses of brick.” He shrugged again. “Don’t see how it could have any kind of fighting step, and the ropes and grapnels should go over it clean and easy. The only thing that bothers me is the gate.”

“The gate?” Traram’s eyes narrowed. “What about it?”

“No tougher or heavier than any of the rest of that ‘wall’ of theirs, Sir. The thing is, though, it’s closed up tight. Seems to me the reasonable thing for them to do would be to leave it open.”

Traram’s face tightened.

“ I’d think so,” he acknowledged. “Our information didn’t suggest anything one way or the other about it, but still…”

He and Selmar looked at one another for several moments. Then the captain shrugged.

“Well, either way, they’ve only got forty or fifty men in there. But if that gate’s closed because they’ve figured out somehow that we’re coming, I think we should just leave it closed. Go tell Lieutenant Rasal-I want him and his men on the west wall with me rather than trying to rush the gate.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Selmar disappeared into the undergrowth once more, and Traram drew a deep breath. The closed gate might mean nothing at all, although that seemed unlikely. The next most likely possibility was that someone inside the lodge’s ornamental wall had caught sight of one or more of his men skulking about in the bushes getting into position. He wouldn’t have believed that could happen-his men were better than that-but anyone could make mistakes, however good they were, and sometimes the other side simply got lucky.

And then there was the least likely probability-that someone had betrayed their operation to the Sothoii. In that case, that gate might be closed to conceal the fact that King Markhos was somewhere else entirely…having left a hundred or so of his elite cavalry packed in the hunting lodge’s courtyard, waiting to come thundering out as soon as anyone was sufficiently injudicious as to disturb them.

You’re jumping at shadows, Erkan, he told himself. Jumping at shadows. If there’d been that much traffic in or out of that lodge, you’d have seen signs of it along the road, and you didn’t, did you? No, the only realistic worst-case is that someone did spot one of the boys.

That would be bad enough, yet it was a chance he was prepared to accept. Without the element of surprise, his casualties would climb sharply, but the defenders simply didn’t have enough manpower. The harsh truth was that he could afford far higher losses than the King’s bodyguards possibly could, and given how much they were being paid for this one The staccato cry of a southern bird who had no business on the Wind Plain sounded clearly through the cool, green woods, and Erkan Traram drew his sword and looked through the thin screen of branches at the top of that ornamental wall Selmar had described.

“ Now! ” he bellowed.

Leeana came to her feet with a dancer’s grace, and somehow the strung bow had appeared in her left hand. For just a moment, she wasn’t certain what had snatched her out of her chair. Then she realized- she hadn’t heard that single shouted word; Gayrfressa had.

She turned to her left, facing the direction from which the command-and it had to be a command-had come, and her right hand drew an arrow from her quiver. Somewhere deep under the surface of her thoughts, she recalled her first morning at Kalatha and her hopeless performance as an archer under Erlis and Ravlahn’s evaluating examination. She’d come a long way since that day, and despite the bigger muscles with which an unfair nature had gifted male arms, there weren’t a great many men who could have pulled the bow she’d mastered in the intervening years. She nocked the arrow, her brain ticking with the cool precision of a Dwarvenhame pocket watch, and felt the alert, tingling readiness purring through her nerves and sinews. Despite her years of hard, sometimes brutal training, she’d never faced an enemy when lives were in the balance, and she was vaguely astonished that what she felt most strongly at the moment was an overwhelming focus and purpose, not fear.

Well, a small inner voice told her almost whimsically, there’s always time for that.

Traram’s shout brought his entire company to its feet. Whistles shrilled and other voices shouted their own orders, galvanized by his command, and the attack rolled forward.

The approaches were most open on the western side of the lodge, which was why Traram himself commanded that prong of the assault. The dense greenery of the Forest of Chergor swept up to within little more than thirty or forty feet of the lodge’s other walls; here, on the west, the approach lay through the more open and orderly lines of an apple orchard. The apple trees’ leaves and ripening fruit provided a wind-tousled screen, concealing most of his men’s approach from any observer who might be perched awkwardly atop that purely decorative wall, but they were still far more exposed coming through the orchard. On the other hand, the orchard was much more open than the forest’s tangles, which allowed him not only to move more quickly, but also to maintain a tighter formation.

A bugle blared from somewhere inside the lodge before his men had moved ten yards, and he grimaced at the confirmation that the defenders had indeed had at least some inkling they were under threat. He’d never personally fought Sothoii before, but the deadly reputation of the Wind Plain’s horse archers told him the next few minutes were going to be ugly.

Still, he’d seen ugly before, and he’d taken the job.

The corner of Leeana’s eye noticed the three coursers turning away from the gate they’d been facing. They moved smoothly to the right, where the southernmost wall was screened from the main courtyard by the stables, taking up a position from which they could reach either the gate or the wall, as need required. Between the stables and the wall, there was-or had been-a small riding ring, but the white-painted fencing around it had been demolished to clear fighting room behind the stables, and she felt a flicker of Gayrfressa’s grim satisfaction as she trotted to one end of that open space between Dathgar and Gayrhalan.

It was a vague recognition, at the back of her mind, for her own eyes were fixed on the western wall as the first grappling hook soared up over the masonry. Iron teeth clattered, dug into the mortar between the bricks, and there were dozens of them.

She raised her bow, the watch ticking in her head a bit harder and faster, picturing the men who must even now be swarming up the knotted ropes attached to those grapnels. Men coming to kill her King.

Men coming for her to kill instead.

She drew and loosed with smooth, flashing speed, hands and muscles moving before she’d even realized what she’d seen. The range was less than fifty yards, and the man who’d drawn her attention had just transferred from the climbing rope. He flung his arms across the top of the wall to heave himself up and over…and disappeared without even a scream as her arrow tore through the base of his throat, just above the collarbone.