C. Dale Brittain (39 page)

There was blood on her gloves, making the knife grip slippery, but she was not sure if it was hers or her enemies’.
 
Roric bled in several places, but no wound slowed his sword—fighting for honor, his life, or for her.
 
She tried, even while fighting herself, to keep her eyes on him, to see him in his final glorious moments before superior force finally overcame them.

But suddenly the way before them was empty of warriors.
 
“We’re through!” Roric yelled to her.
 
“Across the ford!”

Their horses had leaped, scrambled, and kicked their way through most of the band.
 
Even close to fifty men on foot, hampered themselves by the boulders and broken ground, had trouble standing against a stallion of voima and a rider who attacked as though berserk.

But as their horses raced the last hundred yards, the warship with the red sail ran its keel up onto the shallow gravel of the ford, and warriors and dogs leaped over the side.
 
The warriors already had their swords drawn as they hit the water and splashed ashore, giving their war cries.
 
These men Karin knew well.
 
Many were Hadros’s men, and most of the rest her father’s.

The armed men she and Roric had just escaped hesitated.
 
They halted a bow shot from the river, and several ducked behind boulders again.
 
Looking back, she suddenly realized the ambush had not been for their own benefit.
 
Their attackers had been hoping to catch Hadros’s ship by surprise.

The first of the king’s warriors ashore was grizzled and held his sword left-handed.

“Single combat!” Roric shouted to him, tossing back his hair.
 
“This is between you and me, Gizor.
 
Stay back, Hadros, stay back, you warriors, by all the powers of voima!
 
You, Gizor, I challenge to single combat, immediately, on an island here in the river!”

He leaped from the stallion, throwing Karin the reins, and braced himself to meet a fully armed warrior without even a shield of his own.
 
He was grinning again.

But the fight never began.
 
King Hadros was only a step behind Gizor, and he grabbed him by the sword arm to spin him around.
 
“No one touches him!” he bellowed, his face purple.
 
“Not until I have some answers out of him!
 
After that, I’ll take his hide off with my own bare hands.”

Roric hesitated, his sword still at the ready and his shoulders heaving with his breath, but there was suddenly no one before him.
 
Karin, looking past him, saw her father clambering out of the warship, and there, standing at the rail, the last person she had expected to see, Queen Arane.

She jumped down from the mare with a shout for King Kardan.
 
Maybe it would not be as bad as she had feared to be caught.
 
Since Kardan and Hadros had pursued them together, they must not be trying to kill each other.
 
With Arane’s help, she should be able to persuade Hadros that Valmar was safe, that Roric had nothing to do with his disappearance.
 
Maybe they could even help find the Witch of the Western Cliffs who was supposed to know how to reach the Wanderers from these mountains.
 
And her own father looked so happy—

That is when the men on shore attacked.

Coming down toward the river with long leaps, shouting their war cries, they fell on Hadros’s warriors just as the sun disappeared over the edge of the world.
 
Some attackers splashed through the ford toward the ship while the rest of Hadros’s warriors sprang out to intercept them.

Roric whirled around, reaching for his stallion, but Gizor grabbed him from behind.
 
“No flight for you again!” he bellowed.
 
If Roric answered, she could not hear him over the yells and sounds of steel on steel.

Someone pushed her back, away from the fiercest fighting, but she tried to struggle forward.
 
Muscled backs and shoulders were on every side of her, and she could no longer see Roric.
 
The dogs’ wild barking rose above the war cries and the ringing of sword on shield.
 
The gravel shore on both sides of the river churned with knots of men locked in combat, but she had to find Roric among them.
 
He needs me, she said soundlessly between dry lips, he needs my knife to save him.

Men shouted and fell on both sides of her, but she had no time to distinguish royal warriors from raiders.
 
She had to find Roric before the end of the rapidly fading light.
 
He’s gone already, she thought wildly.
 
But maybe he was on the river’s far side.
 
She ran through the ford, soaking her dress to the knees, scarcely noticing the cold water until she came up on the other shore and the weight of the wet wool almost made her lose her balance.

She saw him then, farther away than she had expected.
 
He had somehow eluded Gizor but was still on foot, desperately fighting again against the warriors who had appeared from out of the boulders.

Stumbling, trying to call to him though she felt as though she had no more voice than in a nightmare, she staggered forward.
 
With no attention to give to the men near her she focused on Roric, on her need to reach him while there was still time, to help him if she could, and if not to kiss him again before he died.

She did not reach him.
 
She was suddenly seized from behind and her arms pinned.
 
A hard blow knocked the knife from her hand.
 
“Retreat!” she heard a bellow above her head.
 
“Back to the mountains!”
 
And all of the ambushers, hearing that bellow, hoisted up their fallen comrades and began to run.

She was tossed over someone’s shoulder; she still had not seen the face of whoever grabbed her.
 
She tried to kick him as he ran, but he only laughed loudly and mockingly.

“We’ve beaten them!”
 
“They’ve got no stomach for a real fight!” she heard the triumphant shouts from Hadros’s warriors.
 
“Do you want to come back, boys, and get trained in
real
fighting?”

And then someone realized she was gone.
 
Trying to raise her head, she thought she could see through her hair and her tears a group of Hadros’s warriors racing after her.
 
But they were several hundred yards behind.

“Karin!” she heard Roric’s voice ringing out over all the din.
 
“I’ll save you!”
 
But his voice broke off sharply as though he had been struck.
 
She could not see him.

The mountains began almost immediately on this side of the salt river.
 
The ambushers raced without hesitation up dark and narrow tracks, leaping from rock to rock like goats, turning aside where there seemed no way to go to squeeze through narrow crevices.
 
Twice they paused to roll boulders down toward the heads of the warriors trying to follow them, giving mocking shouts.

Several times she was tossed unceremoniously from one set of arms to another.
 
She saw then the face of the man who had grabbed her originally, a man with a fierce look in his eye but a scar at the edge of his mouth that made it seem as though he was always smiling.
 
He laughed again as he dropped her to another warrior at the bottom of a stony ditch, then sprang down himself.

“Hope you aren’t still thinking they’ll save you!” he said with another laugh.
 
And she realized she could no longer hear any pursuit.

2

Some of King Kardan’s warriors half-carried, half-dragged him back to the ship.
 
“It’s no use, sire,” they told him, their voices unsteady.
 
The dogs had raced off ahead of them, but come back—those that
had
come back—without even a mouthful of enemy tunic.
 
“We’ll never catch them in the dark, and it’s not safe trying to climb around those rocks any longer.”

“Karin!”
 
He meant it to be a cry she would hear wherever they had taken her, a shout such as Roric had given just before Gizor One-hand knocked him unconscious.
 
It came out more a sob.

“We’ll find the princess tomorrow, sire,” said one of the warriors in completely unconvincing tones of reassurance.
 
“They’ll know better than to hurt her.”
 
It was one of the older warriors, who had known Karin well when she was a little girl, before she had first gone away.

The sailors had gotten out the rollers and worked the ship up onto the shore, away from the tides of the river.
 
The warriors laid out the dead and injured:
 
four dead, including one man crushed by a boulder while chasing Karin’s abductors, and a number of men with greater or lesser wounds.
 
Only one of the wounded looked likely to die.

Roric had regained consciousness and sat leaning against the barnacled side of the ship, one hand across the bruised forehead and black eye where Gizor had struck him.
 
Both his ankles and waist were secured by heavy ropes.
 
His boots and jerkin were badly chafed as though he had struggled against the bindings, but he now sat quietly.

Kardan sat down beside him.
 
Roric glanced at him without interest, then looked away.
 
But Kardan studied by the light of the fire this man with whom his daughter had run away, trying to find some clue in his unkempt appearance and bitter expression why she had left home for him.
 
He had assumed all the way up here that he would have Roric declared an outlaw, but now he scarcely cared if he had abducted her as long as he could help rescue her from her new abductors.

“First light, we’re after them,” said King Hadros, “even before we sing the songs for the dead and bury them.”
 
Queen Arane was with him.
 
She looked at Roric with interest but drew no closer.
 
“Those warriors may know their secret mountain paths in the darkness, but they cannot hide from us by daylight.
 
But tonight we keep the fires burning and guard the ship.
 
Only half the unwounded men sleep at a time.”

“Also tonight,” growled Gizor, “we execute the traitor who turned against his sworn king and has a blood-guilt on him that can never be repaid.”

He held the other end of the ropes that secured Roric, though he had also taken the precaution of running them through rings on the ship.
 
Queen Arane said something quickly to Hadros, who walked over to Gizor.
 
He stood there with legs apart, contemplating his oldest and his youngest warriors.

“I’ll need the judgment of the royal Gemot to execute him, Gizor,” he said at last.
 
“Which means we would need to get him home first.
 
Do you plan to lead him around like a trapped bear while we rescue the princess, then hold him like that on the ship all the way back?”

“I can kill him for you if you’re too delicate!” retorted Gizor.

Hadros slowly pulled out his knife and struck him across the mouth with the hilt.
 
He glared at Gizor while deliberately returning the knife to his belt.
 
“Be quiet, and don’t
you
decide to attack your sworn lord,” he said in a low, icy voice.

Gizor put his hand up to staunch the blood and said nothing.
 
Roric gave him a quick, grim look, but he too was silent.

“King Kardan told me,” said Hadros to Roric, still in an icy voice, “that Valmar left his kingdom well before you arrived there.
 
That had better be true.”
 
When Roric did not answer, he continued, “We’ll ask the princess about this when we find her, but you’d better start preparing yourself for a judicial duel if there remains any doubt.”

Hadros turned then back to Gizor.
 
“Roric challenged you to single combat.
 
All his blood-guilt—
if
Valmar is still alive—fell on him in a fight in which you were also involved.
 
We may be able to settle your quarrel even without the Gemot if the two of you want to fight it out on one of these islands in the morning.”

“But we have to rescue Karin first!” Kardan cried out.

Roric spoke then for the first time.
 
“Your daughter has the power of voima in her, sire,” he said in a surprisingly gentle voice.
 
“She will still be alive when we find her.”

Kardan startled himself by almost believing him, even though he was not sure Roric believed it himself.

Kardan took the first watch.
 
He and a number of his men sat in stony silence, listening to the sounds of the night, occasionally rising to circle their encampment.
 
But there was no sign or sound of their attackers.
 
The loudest noises were the groans from the wounded.