Katharine Kerr - Darkspell

“Looks like the folk escaped in time, my lady,” Ricyn said.

“So it does. There! Look!”

Next to the ruins stretched the village commons, lined with a thick stand of poplars. Among the trees stood women with children huddled against them, men with flails, pitchforks, sticks, whatever impromptu weapons they’d managed to grab when the raiders swept over them. Gweniver dismounted and joined Dannyn as two old men came to meet them. They stared at Gweniver’s tattoo, then knelt.

“You be Cerrmor men,” one stated.

“We are,” Dannyn said. “When were you raided? How many men were there?”

“Two days ago now, your lordship.” The old man sucked his teeth in thought. “And as to how many, well, it’s hard to say, because they just comes riding out of nowhere. Young Molyc was out with the cows, you see, and if it weren’t for him, we’d be dead, but he sees them coming, so he runs back.”

“And how did Molyc know they were enemies?”

“They had these blue shields, with these silver dragons on them, and Molyc’s never seen any such thing in his life, so he figures it means no good.”

“He was right enough.” Dannyn glanced at Gweniver. “Do you know what those shields mean? These raiders are part of the king’s own men, and they never ride unless a prince of the realm is with them.”

“A prince?” The old man spat on the ground. “He must be a poor kind of prince if he needs our cows that bad. They took everything we had, my lord. Our cows, our chickens, every miserable scrap of food we had.”

“No doubt. Well, you’ll eat well for a while. We’ll leave you all the food we can spare, and a packhorse or two that maybe you can trade for seed grain.”

The old man kissed his hand, then began to sob in convulsive shudders. Gweniver stared in amazement, because she’d expected Dannyn to care even less about peasants than most lords would, which was cursed little. The captain turned to her with a twisted smile.

“I know what it’s like to have naught,” he said. “I remember it every day of my life. That’s somewhat you wouldn’t understand, is it? My most noble lady.”

In embarrassment Gweniver strode away, but the first order she gave was for the carters to unload food for the villagers.

Once the army was settled in for the night and the guard posted, Gweniver joined Dannyn at his fire for a council of war. In the dancing light of the fire, his face was grim with shadows as he drew a plan of the river valley in the dirt.

“Sooner or later they have to turn south to meet their ships,” he said. “Then we have them, if not before.”

“So we do. Here, if we take this prince alive, we’re going to have a nice prize to take home.”

“What? I’d rather have his head on a pike.”

“Don’t be a dolt. If we hold a prince of the realm hostage, we can stop these raids without swinging a sword.”

Dannyn whistled under his breath and looked up.

“Well, my lady, whatever I may have thought of your skill with a sword, there’s no doubt you understand war. Done, then. We’ll do our best to snare this prince like a rabbit.”

On the morrow scouts on the best horses rode ahead, wheeling and circling in front of the army like seagulls round a ship entering harbor. Just past noon they found the place where the raiders had camped the night before. Amid the flattened grass and the usual detritus of a big warband lay two fire pits and the scattered remains of beef bones. Two of the village cows would never come home again, but the tracks made it clear that the raiders were still traveling with about fifty head of cattle.

“And that’s their death warrant,” Dannyn cheerfully remarked. “We can travel faster, even with the wretched carts, than they can if they’re driving stock. Once we get close, here’s our plan. We leave the carts behind and ride out early to catch them on the road. The prince is going to be at the head of the line, of course, so we send a wedge of my best men straight into the line behind him and cut him off while the rest of the lads shove the line of march into their baggage train. You, me, and a handful of picked men go right for the prince and mob him. Try not to knock him off his horse. If he’s trampled to death, so much for our hostage.”

“Sounds splendid. It gladdens my heart that you’re including me and my men in this.”

“We need every man we’ve got. Even if one of them’s a woman.”

For the rest of the day Dannyn kept his army moving fast by riding in the rear and bullying the carters. Up in solitary splendor at the head of the line, Gweniver received the reports from the scouts and led the men where they suggested. By the time they camped, about an hour before sunset to let the horses graze, the scouts were sure that the Eldidd raiders were only some five miles ahead of them. Best of all, they hadn’t met any enemy scouts, a heart-warming bit of arrogance on the prince’s part.

While Gweniver and Ricyn diced for splinters of firewood at their campfire, she told him the news.

“Well, my lady, then we’ll have some proper sport on the morrow.”

“So we will. You’ll be riding with me when we go after the prince.”

He smiled and threw the dice, rolling a five that lost him the game. When he handed her two splinters, she remembered his handing her the first violets of spring, shyly, without ever saying a word, when he must have spent hours hunting for them. She wondered how she could have been so blind to never suspect that a common-born rider would love her for all these years.

“Are you going to throw?” he said. “I’m too far behind to let you weasel out of the game now.”

As she threw, she was thinking that she didn’t mind in the least when he forgot to call her “my lady” or when he yelled at her for doing something stupid. It was odd, considering that her brothers would have had him flogged for such impertinence. It made her wonder if, in her own way, she loved him too, but it was too late for such wondering. Now she belonged to the Goddess alone, and forever.

On the morrow the army rose with the dawn. Dannyn sorted the men out, picked temporary captains, and gathered up the twenty-five who would ride with him and Gweniver for their strike on the prince. The bright summer sun lay on green meadows when they rode. Gweniver felt perfectly calm, as if she were floating through the air instead of wearing nearly thirty pounds of mail. As she made a long, silent prayer to the Goddess, she began to smile. Since she’d put long hours of work into the mirror-scrying, in her mind the image built up effortlessly of the night-dark eyes and terrible beauty of the Goddess, who trembled in lust for the bloodletting ahead. Gweniver heard chanting, a sobbing wail in quarter notes, so old, so strange, that she was sure she was remembering it from a very long time ago, when the worship of the Dark Moon flourished. The chant became so real and so loud that she was startled when Dannyn called out the order to halt.

Dazed, she looked round to find the warband coming to a halt near a woodland. Once it must have been part of a lord’s hunting preserve, because it was open forest, mostly larches and maples, with little underbrush to hold the riders back. Calling orders, Dannyn broke his army’s line and led them scattered into the cover. On the other side lay the road, and far down to the north she saw a cloud of dust coming. The army settled shields and drew javelins as slowly the Eldidd raiders sauntered toward the ambush.

They were only a quarter mile away before some sharp-eyed lad in their warband noticed something odd about the woodlands ahead. A cry spread like wildfire among the raiders as they pulled to a confused halt. Gweniver could see the cattle, lowing miserably at the rear of the line.