Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

‘I was the one who did that,’ Lysaer corrected with quick acerbity; the scout finished with his dressings and withdrew, embarrassed as the discussion went on as if both men were private. ‘I thought I was waiting for you to say what was left to be done. We still have the companies on our flanks.’

Pesquil laughed, but softly. ‘Do we?’

And across from him, Lysaer’s gaze wavered, as cold remembrance touched him: that bad as the river had been, they had yet to encounter any shadows. He collected himself in a breath. ‘Are you afraid to find out?’

‘No.’ Come to his decision, Pesquil dispersed his scouts on a hand-signal. As they fanned out, efficiently soundless, and vanished in pursuit of lapsed duty, their leader backstepped into the shoaling waters of Tal Quorin. ‘Come, then, your Grace,’ he invited. ‘But this time, we hunt Deshans my way.’

In stealth, they worked upriver; past the sprawled dead with their eyes and their mouths clogged with mud; past scarlet-rinsed puddles and broken swords: and the destriers, the curve of their bellies like whales on a beach, but for the straps of breastplate and saddlegirth, or the brush-jammed arch of a stirrup. Lysaer did not flinch from the carnage. When Pesquil demanded that he rip the jewels from his surcoat to kill their chance sparkle in the sunlight he obeyed; for clansmen were stationed in these woods. Upstream, less faintly as they progressed, they could hear sounds of shouting, and the high, shrill screams of dying horseflesh.

The barbarians were still at their slaughter.

From pale, Lysaer had gone sick white. It took every shred of self-control and a humility more demanding than courage to keep still; to stay with Pesquil, moving silent from a thicket of reeds to the shadowy pool beneath a deadfall, keeping each step shallow, so their boots did not break water and cause a splash.

They stopped again. Lysaer clenched his teeth against the pain of his cuts and contusions, and the flaring stabs that resulted when his side or his collarbone was jostled. Movement came, ever so soft, in the fronds of a willow by the riverside. A scout returned. Head bent, Pesquil received the report.

Lysaer could not hear the words, though in the forest, no birds called. The rush and tumble of high waters had receded also, and the gnats were swarming, bloodthirsty. They bounced off his nose and his ears in maddening circles, and inhaling, he had to struggle not to sneeze.

From upstream, also, came silence.

Ankle deep in flat water, Lysaer gripped himself hard to keep from shivering in a paroxysm that had nothing to do with cold or shock. Several moments passed before he became aware that Pesquil stared at him from under half closed lids.

Under that piercing scrutiny, court training alone enabled him to speak with no reflection of urgency. ‘You have news?’

Pesquil’s upper lip twitched, then relaxed in a one-sided smile that held no shred of joy. ‘Shadows,’ he said clearly. ‘Shadows and traps, to the west of us. More traps and archers, over the ridge to the east. The flanking divisions have not passed unscathed. But unlike those drowned by Tal Quorin, there are numbers enough to stand, fighting.’

Arithon was here. Confirmation triggered in Lysaer a tumultuous anticipation.

In a vice of self control tighter than anything he had needed previously, the prince stayed his sword-hand from ripping blade from scabbard in a curse-driven lust to rend and kill. Etarra’s troops were still dying of his mistakes. Their needs claimed his first responsibility. ‘Up this valley there were living men left, just a bit ago.’

‘I know.’ Pesquil surged ahead, lightly mocking to hide admiration. ‘We’ll pass upstream first, never worry.’

The sun beat down and the flow of falling water subsided. Here and there, marsh reeds pricked out of beds slicked into herringbone patterns, dulled with a velvet of drying silt. The air hung thick and quiet. Lysaer chafed at this progress, which stayed slow since Pesquil insisted their advance remain cautious and covert. Tossed across the sheen of bared flats like wads from a rag picker’s pack lay the limp dead of Etarra’s garrison, conspicuously lacking both wounded and living horses. Not all had perished of drowning; not all bore macerating wounds. Lysaer paused in the act of stepping over the body of a petty officer, and the jolt of what eyesight recorded transferred like a blow to his belly.

The man’s throat had been cut.

Choked by an explosion of nausea, Lysaer felt a hand chop the small of his back and propel him forcibly onward. ‘Such surprise,’ Pesquil said sourly. ‘You didn’t really think, did you, that the river could’ve done for them all?’

The heat, the swimming reflections off wet mud, the fall of drops from draggled cattails all conspired to turn Lysaer’s head. He fought back the dizziness, enraged at how long he needed to recapture the semblance of self-command. ‘Whoever did this could not have murdered two divisions without suffering one single loss.’

‘Damn near,’ murmured Pesquil, paused to receive yet another report from a scout. ‘Lord Diegan is alive, at least. He’s downriver, safe, but unable to fight. My surgeon is just now picking an arrowhead and sundry bits of chain mail out of the gristle of his flank.’

But the news that Etarra’s Lord Commander had survived brought Lysaer little reprieve. ‘I’ve seen no barbarian dead.’

‘I have.’ The scout had silently vanished. Pesquil now scanned the wood ahead intently. ‘But precious few, my prince. No clansman will fight when he can ambush. He will not leave cover until his killing is accomplished and even then he’ll do so warily. To catch him and engage him, you must creep close and never let him sight you. And then you must lie in wait with the patience of almighty Ath.’ Pesquil suddenly froze and caught Lysaer back by the shoulder. ‘Don’t answer,’ he breathed sharply; and as the prince stiffened to his touch, ‘Don’t move.’

His attention was trained into the shadows, away from the lit expanse of flats. Lysaer too watched the forest. Past the sun-flecked dances of gnats, under the silvered boughs of beeches that upheld their vaultings of copper leaves, he saw gaping holes torn in the ground, and the slashed earth that marked where horses had struggled as the footing gave under their forelegs. He saw the white gleam of a fallen sword; the gilt fringes torn off a caparison; he saw too the bundled dead, with arms outflung, or hands slackly curled over the shafts of the arrows that had killed them. Through the raw beat of pulse through his veins, and a fury too bitter for expression, Lysaer forced himself to exhaustive search and to read, beyond omission, in ripped brush and scarlet-tipped stakes and desecrated flesh, the fates of the men who had fled the river.

Steiven’s clansmen had been nothing if not thorough.

A man whimpered, unseen in the gloom. Lysaer tensed to rise, prepared to succour survivors. Pesquil snatched him back with a grasp that jarred the broken ends of his collarbone, and also the cracked ribs in his left side that the scout who strapped him had not found. Next, Pesquil’s horny palm closed over his face, stifling even the hissed air that was all his expression of pain.

On a breath scented in garlic, Pesquil mouthed in his ear, ‘Keep silent. The wrong move, the slightest noise, and you kill us all.’ He maintained his suffocating grip, while, in cruel vindication of his warning, the unseen soldier’s suffering became cut off in mid cry.

There followed a bubbling sigh whose cause could not be mistaken. Somewhere very close by, barbarians were yet about their business of slitting the fallen men’s throats.

Slowly, deliberately, the headhunter captain released his restraint. Lysaer blotted his cheek where the studs of Pesquil’s bracer had gouged a scab, the look he returned a blast of stifled frustration.