Robin Hobb - Assassin's Quest

Then Will's face changed. Regal looked at me out of his eyes. He was as unmoved by Burl's death as he would be by Will's. I sensed no grief, only anger at a lessening of his power. "Perhaps," he said with Will's voice, "perhaps then, all I should care for is killing you, Bastard. At whatever the cost." He smiled at me, the smile of a man who knows how the tumbling dice will fall before they land. I knew a moment of uncertainty and fear. I flung my walls up tighter against Will's insidious tactics.

"Do you really think a one-eyed swordsman has a fighting chance against my blade and my wolf, Regal? Or do you plan to throw his life away as casually as you have the rest of the coterie?" I flung the question in a faint hope of stirring discord between them.

"Why not?" Regal asked me calmly with Will's voice. "Or did you think I was truly as stupid as my brother, to be content with only one coterie?"

A wave of Skill struck me with the force of a wall of water. I staggered back before it, then regained myself and charged at Will. I'd have to kill him quickly. Regal had control of Will's Skill. He little cared what it would do to Will, how it might scorch him if he killed me with a Skillblast. I could feel him drawing up Skill power into himself. Yet even as I put all my heart into killing Will, Regal's words ate at me. Another coterie?

One-eyed or not, Will was fast. His blade was a part of him as he met my first thrust and turned it. I wished for an instant for the familiarity of my battered shortsword. Then I threw such thoughts aside as useless and thought only of breaking past his guard. The wolf moved swiftly past me, belly low, as he sought to close on Regal from Will's blind side.

"Three new coteries!" Will's voice gasped with effort as he parried my blade again. I slipped away from his thrust and tried to wrap his blade. He was too fast for that.

"Young, strong Skill users. To carve dragons of my own." A swiping slash whose breeze I felt. "Dragons at my beck, loyal to me. Dragons to bring down Verity, in blood and scales." He spun and darted a thrust at Nighteyes. The wolf leapt wildly away. I sprang in, but his blade was already back to meet mine. He fought with incredible speed. Another use of the Skill? Or a Skill-illusion he forced on me?

"Then they shall clear the Red-Ships. For me. And open the Mountain passes. The Mountains will be mine as well. I shall be a hero. No one will oppose me then." His blade struck mine hard, a jolt I felt in my shoulder. His words jolted me as well. They rang with truth and determination. Skill-imbued, they pounded against me with the solid force of hopelessness. "I shall master the Skill road. The ancient city will be my new capital. All my Skill users shall be drenched in the river's magic."

Another swipe at Nighteyes. It shaved a wisp of hair from his shoulder. And again that opening passed too swiftly for my own clumsy blade. I felt I stood shoulder-deep in water and fought a man whose blade was light as a straw. "Stupid Bastard! Did you truly think I cared about one pregnant whore, one dragon a-wing? The quarry itself is the true prize, the one you have left unguarded for me. The stuff from which a score, no, a hundred dragons shall rise!"

How had we been so stupid? How had we not seen what Regal truly sought? We had thought with our hearts, of Six Duchies folk, of farmers and fishermen who needed their king's arm to defend them. But Regal? He had thought only of what the Skill could win for him. I knew his next words before he flung them. "In Bingtown and Chalced they will bend their knees to me. And in the Outislands, they will cower at my name."

Others come! And above us!

Nighteyes' warning nearly killed me. For in the instant I lifted my eyes, Will sprang at me. I gave ground, all but running backward to avoid his blade. Far behind him, from the mouth of the quarry, a dozen men ran toward us, brandishing blades. They moved not in step but with a oneness to them far more cohesive than any mere troops could have mastered. A coterie. I sensed their Skill as they approached like the stormwinds that precede a squall. Will suddenly halted his advance. My wolf raced to meet them, teeth bared, snarling.

Nighteyes! Stop! You cannot fight twelve blades wielded by one mind!

Will lowered his blade, then casually sheathed it. He called to the coterie over his shoulder. "Don't bother with them. Let the archers finish them."

A glance at the towering walls of the quarry showed me this was no bluff. Gold-and-brown-clad soldiers were coming into position. I grasped this was what the troops were about. Not to defeat Verity, but to take and hold this quarry. Another wave of humiliation and despair washed over me. Then I lifted my blade and charged at Will. Him, at least, I would kill.

An arrow clattered across the stone where I had stood, an other skittered right between Nighteyes' legs. A scream rose from the walls of the quarry to the west of us. Girl-on-a-Dragon swept low over me, the Fool on her back, a gold-and-brown archer writhing in the dragon's jaws… The man was gone suddenly, a puff of smoke or steam swept away by the wind of her passage. She banked her wings, came in low again, snatching up another archer and sending one leaping into the quarry to avoid her. Another puff of smoke.

On the floor of the quarry, all of us were frozen, gaping up. Will recovered more quickly than I did. An angry shout to his archers, ringing with Skill. "Fire upon her! Bring her down!"

Almost instantly a phalanx of arrows went singing toward her. Some arched and fell before they even reached her. The rest she deflected with a single powerful beat of her wings. The arrows suddenly wobbled in the gust of her wind, and fell tumbling like straws to shatter on the quarry floor. Girl-on-a-Dragon abruptly stooped and came diving directly at Will.

He fled. I believe Regal abandoned him for at least as long as it took him to make that decision. He ran, and for an instant it appeared that he chased the wolf who had nearly closed the distance between him and the coterie. Save at the moment the coterie realized that Will was fleeing toward them with a dragon sheering through the air behind them, the coterie turned on their heels and fled as well. I caught a brief flash of Nighteyes' delighted triumph that twelve swordsmen would not stand to meet his charge. Then he cowered to the earth as Girl-on-a-Dragon swept low over all of us.

It was not only the harsh wind of her passage that I felt, but also a dizzying sweep of Skill, that in an instant snatched from my mind every thought I had been holding. As if the world had been plunged briefly into absolute darkness and then handed back to me in full brightness it was. I stumbled as I ran, and for an instant could not recall why I carried a bared sword or who I chased. Ahead of me Will faltered as her shadow swept him, and then the coterie staggered in their turn.

Her claws snatched fruitlessly at Will as she passed. The scattered blocks of black stone were his salvation, for such was her wingspan that he could elude her in the narrowness of their maze. She shrieked her frustration, the high wild cry of a hawk thwarted. She rose and banked to make a second sweep at him. I gasped as she flew right into a singing flight of arrows. They rattled uselessly off her hide as if the archers had targeted the black stone of the quarry itself. Only the Fool cowered away from them. Girl-on-a-Dragon changed course abruptly, to fly low over the archers and snatch another from their midst and consume him in an instant.

Again her shadow swept over me, and again a moment of my life was snatched from me. I opened my eyes to find Will gone. Then I caught a brief glimpse of him, veering as he ran dodging between the standing blocks of stone much as a hare breaks his trail as he flees from a hawk. I could no longer see the coterie, but suddenly Nighteyes sprang from the shadow of a stone block to race by my side.