Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

And an arrow struck him in the throat, drawing a sudden geyser of blood, and the Knight spun helplessly into the trees.

Amara blinked and looked back at the coach.

The Count of Calderon stood in a low crouch atop the coach, his war bow in hand, his legs spread and braced against the howling wind. He stood atop the coach simply balanced there, without any kind of safety strap, without so much as a rope to belay him. Bernard had cast off his cloak, and his expression held all the distant, cool indifference of a professional archer. Moving with unhurried precision, he drew another arrow, eyes focused above Amara and behind her, and another arrow flashed out.

She turned to see it strike another enemy Knight, though the shaft flew wide in the wind, slamming through the man’s right arm rather than his heart. He screamed and slowed, carefully controlling his flight to let the enemy pull ahead.

“Amara! ‘ Bernard called. He took one end of his bow in hand and held the other out to her.

Still dazed, it took her a second to understand what she was to do, but she grabbed the bow and let Bernard pull her to a landing on the coach’s roof. She sat there for a moment, and Bernard shot twice more-both misses. Without being able to touch the earth and call upon his fury’s strength, he could only draw the bow part of the way back, which would both make aiming more difficult and changing the dynamics of the arrow’s flight. And regardless of anyone’s skill, the turbulence of flight made it enormously difficult to hit anything more than a few yards away, and the Knights Aeris were keeping their distance for the moment, dodging and weaving in and out to provoke Bernard into shooting-and expending his arrows on shots unlikely to strike his foes. They could see, just as Amara could, that only a handful of arrows remained in his quiver, but by the time Bernard realized what they were doing, only three remained.

Amara s wits unscrambled in a sudden rush. The pain was still there in her arm and left shoulder, but it was distant and of minimal importance. A glance down at the nearby treetops told her that though the coach was moving swiftly, it was weaving about, dangerously unbalanced as the bearers’ strength waned.

“What are you doing, you fool? “ she called to Bernard.

“No room to shoot inside, love,” Bernard answered.

“If we survive this, I’ll kill you with my bare hands,” she snarled at him. She leaned over the side and called, “Lady Aquitaine! We’ve got to move faster!”

“She can’t hear you!” Aldrick called back, voice tight with pain. “It’s all the both of them can do to keep the coach in the air!”

Red lightning flashed, and a shadow fell across the back of the coach.

Amara looked back to see Kalarus descending toward them. His cloak had been torn in a dozen places by the same tree branches that had slashed the left side of his face to bloody, swollen meat. His teeth were gnashed in hate and rage, and when he met Amara’s eyes, the blade of his sword suddenly began to glow like iron on the forge, red, then orange, then white-hot. The metal shrieked in anguished protest.

Bernard moved, hands blurring, and let fly two arrows as Kalarus closed in. The High Lord of Kalare flicked them aside with his burning blade, shattering them with armor-piercing heads. Kalarus came on, murder in his eyes. Amara hurled Cirrus against him, but she might as well have tried to stop a charging gargant with a silk thread. The High Lord powered through Cirrus as though the fury had not been there.

She wanted to scream in frustration and terror, in helpless protest that this scum, this, this… creature was going to kill her, kill her husband, kill everyone in the coach, and drag Alera into total chaos. She turned to Bernard, eyes searching for his. She wanted to be looking at him when Kalare’s blade took her life. Not at the animal who had killed her.

Bernard’s face was pale, but his eyes held no trace of defeat, no hint of surrender. He looked down at Amara, a single, fleeting glance-and winked at her.

Then he set his last arrow to string and loosed it as Kalare closed to within ten feet of the coach. Once more, Kalare sneered, blade moving with sinuous grace to strike the arrow before it could reach him. Its shaft shattered into splinters.

But the arrow’s head, a shaped, translucent crystal of rock salt like the ones he’d loosed against the windmanes in Calderon, exploded into powder.

It tore into Kalarus’s wind furies, blanketing him, ripping his windstream to shreds, murdering the power that kept him aloft.

Kalarus had time for one brief, mystified expression of shock and disbelief.

And then he screamed as he fell like a stone into the trees below.

Then there was silence, but for the surf-thunder of steady wind.

Bernard lowered his bow slowly and let out a long breath. He nodded his head pensively, and said, “I think I’ll write Tavi and thank him for that idea.”

Amara stared at her husband, speechless.

She needed to tell the bearers to keep going for as long as they could before setting down to rest beneath the canopy of the forest, somewhere near a large stream or small river, so that she could send word to the First Lord. But that could come in a moment. For now, the need to look at his face, to realize that they were alive, that they were together, was far more important than mere realms.

Bernard slung his bow over his shoulder and knelt beside Amara, reaching gently for her arm. “Easy. Let’s see what you’ve done to it.”

“One of your salt arrows,” she said quietly, shaking her head.

He smiled at her, his eyes alight with green, brown, and flecks of gold; colors of life and growth and warmth. “It’s always the little things that are important,” he said. “Isn’t it.”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed him gently on the mouth. “Excellent,” said the water figure of Gaius, a translucent form that lacked the solid-color enhancement the First Lord used to favor. “Well done, Countess. What is the status of the rescuees?”

She stood beside a large, swift stream that rolled down from the hills many miles from Kalare. The forest here was particularly thick, and they’d barely managed to get the coach down through it in one piece. The bearers had all but collapsed into sleep, without even unhooking their flight harnesses. Bernard went around to each man, gently freeing them from the coach and letting them stretch out on the ground. The High Ladies were in a similar state, though Lady Aquitaine managed to seat herself primly at the base of a tree before leaning her head back against it and watching Odiana help Aldrick to the stream to tend to his wound.

Lady Placida hardly seemed strong enough to keep her head held up, but she insisted on staying with Atticus Elania, who had been injured during the flight-not by a weapon, but when the wounded Aldrick had half fallen back into the coach. He’d fallen hard against one of the crowded seats and broken the girl’s ankle. Lady Placida had managed to ease Elania’s pain, then promptly fallen back onto the grass to sleep.

Rook stepped out of the coach with her eyes closed, holding her daughter’s hand. She found a patch of ground near the stream bank, where the sunlight reached the warm earth. She sat in the light, holding her daughter, her face weary and sagging with something rather like shock.

“Countess?” prodded Gaius gently.

Amara looked back to the water-image. “My apologies, sire.” She took a deep breath, and said, “Atticus Elania Minora was injured during the escape, but not seriously. A broken ankle. Well have it crafted well again soon.”

Gaius nodded. “And Lady Placida?”

“Exhausted but otherwise well, sire.”