David Weber - War Maid's choice

Yet neither were they inclined to abandon the effort, and more and more of the King’s armsmen had been forced to abandon their bows as the tide of attackers swept over the walls. The courtyard was carpeted with bodies-there had to be at least thirty or forty of them-and the gods only knew how many more had fallen backward off the wall, but at least that number had made it into sword range of the archers. They’d charged straight towards the central lodge, forcing the guardsmen to intercept them and stop picking off their fellows as they swarmed across the wall.

Now half a dozen of them flowed across the body-strewn ground to join the men glaring up at Leeana, and her heart sank as they began to spread. There was only the single set of steps, and the veranda was high enough to be an awkward, climbing scramble from any other approach. The wooden railing along its edge was open, without any sort of upright pickets to bar anyone willing to make the climb, however, and she could be in only one spot at a time.

She drew a deep breath, forcing herself to focus on only the next few moments, and stepped back slightly from the head of the steps.

Tellian of Balthar dropped his bow.

He and Hathan had dropped at least a dozen attackers as they scaled the wall, yet there’d never been any hope of actually holding it with only two bows, for the attackers had redoubled their efforts when they realized there were only two archers on the southern side of the lodge’s perimeter. They’d swarmed up the ropes, vaulted across the top of the wall, and dropped exultantly to the ground at its foot, with only a tithe of the casualties their companions had suffered elsewhere.

Exultation became something else as they found themselves face-to-face with two wind riders and a one-eared chestnut mare with an eye of unnatural blue flame.

Dathgar, Gayrhalan, and Gayrfressa had swept from east to west along the southern wall while Tellian and Hathan drove arrows into the attackers’ faces. Now they wheeled, facing back to the east, and the space between the the solid block of stables and the lodge’s outer wall was no more than seventy feet across. With the riding ring’s demolition, it was also smooth and obstruction free, like a corridor between two sheer walls.

With three coursers at one end of it.

The men coming over that wall could not have been more badly positioned to receive a cavalry charge. They were in no particular formation, without the tight frontage and pikes or halberds which might have fended off even regular cavalry, far less coursers, and the space in which they were trapped was just long enough for those coursers to spring off their hocks and accelerate towards them with preposterous speed.

As Leeana had already realized, whatever else Erkan Traram’s men might be, there were precious few cowards among them. Most of the men who’d already made it to the ground drew their swords. Some flung themselves forward, trying desperately to somehow get under the coursers to gut or hamstring them. Others pressed as close to the outer wall as they could, trying to stay out of the coursers’ path and come at them from behind once they’d passed. A handful sprang towards the back of the stables, prying frantically at closed and barred doors, and another handful, closest to the eastern end of the confined space, boiled around that edge of the stables, funneling past it to join their fellows in the main courtyard. And then “ Balthar! ” Tellian bellowed, leaning low from his saddle, and red spray flew as his saber removed an assassin’s right hand.

The man’s sword spun away, still clenched in his severed hand, and Dathgar trumpeted a high, piercing echo of his rider’s warcry. Another assassin screamed as steel shod hooves bigger than his own head crushed the life from him, and the baron swept along the inner face of the wall, while Hathan and Gayrhalan took the back side of the stables. The other wind rider always took Tellian’s left flank in battle, for he was left-handed, and his own saber flashed crimson as his courser thundered forward.

Gayrhalan’s herd stallion had known what he he was about when he christened the iron gray “Storm Souled.” He’d never been noted for the gentleness of his temper, but unlike Dathgar, he sounded no trumpet call of defiance; he was too busy crushing a shrieking mercenary’s shoulder into ruin between battleaxe jaws. His victim squealed desperately as the courser jerked him off his feet, snapping him in midair like a greyhound with a rabbit, without even breaking stride. Then the body was tossed aside, to bounce brokenly off the stable wall, even as Gayrhalan put his barded shoulder into a fresh victim, knocking him off his feet to sprawl directly in front of Gayrfressa.

The mare had neither rider nor barding, but she was actually larger than either of the stallions, and mere men in armor held no terror for someone who’d trampled demons in defense of her herd when she was only a filly. More than that, coursers weren’t horses. Even the most superbly trained warhorse was far less lethal than a creature half again as large, as intelligent as any of the Races of Man, and as thoroughly trained as any mishuk in a combat technique the coursers had spent a millennium perfecting.

Her left forehoof-shod in steel and broader than a dinner plate-came down on the assassin Gayrhalan had toppled with the brutal efficiency of a water-driven Dwarvenhame drop hammer. Her target didn’t even scream, and even as he died, she was thundering forward with the stallions, taking her next victim. She trampled him underfoot, jaws reaching past him, closing on a fourth enemy, and not in Gayrhalan’s shoulder-crushing grip. No-her incisors closed on the mercenary’s head, and when she tossed her head, his went flying like a child’s ball.

In a bare handful of seconds, the two humans and three coursers turned the space between the stables and the wall into an abattoir where nothing lived. And then the blood-splashed coursers swept around the stables’ eastern edge after the fleet footed enemies who’d escaped their wrath.

At least ten men came scrambling towards the veranda.

No one would have accused them of being in any sort of formation-not surprisingly, given the chaos behind them and the knots of royal guardsmen and assassins coalescing in furious swirls of combat around the main lodge. But no one could have accused them of hesitation, either, and if their coordination wasn’t perfect, it was good enough to overwhelm Leeana.

The first mercenary beat all of his fellows up and over the edge of the veranda, and Leeana’s left-hand sword flashed in a crimson-streaming arc as she gave him the victor’s prize. Then she whirled in the same flowing motion to face a man coming at her from the right. She engaged his sword with her right-hand blade, parrying it high barely in time, crashing into him chest-to-chest, and her left hand came up. She switched her primary attack from right to left, as instantly as Dame Kaeritha herself might have, and the man who’d just tried to kill her collapsed as she thrust up under their locked blades and drove the sword in that hand home in his armpit.

He slithered off her steel, and she turned, swaying aside purely by trained instinct, as another sword whistled through the space her head had occupied an instant before. She backpedaled, knowing she had to give ground while she regained her balance, yet painfully aware of the wall behind her. She couldn’t back far, and so she set herself, taking a chance, bulling in on her new opponent before she was fully centered herself. A blade scored her ribs as she twisted her torso aside, and then he, too, went down, clutching at his face and screaming as her right-hand sword drove into his open-faced helmet. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but blood fountained between his fingers as he clutched at his butchered eyes, and she kicked him aside as three more mercenaries came at her.