Dragonsbane (Book 3) (48 page)

He brought his lips to her ear and growled: “She already has, Countess … she already has.”

Chapter 44

Under the Stars

At long last, the sun dawned upon the day Kael had been waiting for: the day his army would march for the summit.

Gwen had said they were only three days’ journey from Thanehold. “Though it’ll feel more like a week, with all this snow in the way,” she’d added with a glare.

Winter had finally opened its gullet and the mountains belched snow upon them in a near-constant stream. When they left the frozen lands, the drifts were up to their knees. A day later, they’d risen to just below their waists. Kael knew if they wanted any chance of reaching the summit, he’d have to think of a way to make the journey easier.

He told the craftsmen to use the heat of the forge to melt the snows. He showed them how to imagine the fires consumed their skin, how to hold the image of white-hot flesh inside their heads. Then he’d stepped into the middle of one of the thickest drifts and it’d melted with a hiss.

The problem was that the snow turned to water, and water froze quickly. Kael looked behind him shortly after they’d started walking and groaned to see the giants sliding helplessly at the end of the line. Once they lost their footing, they didn’t stop: a few managed to dig their scythes in, but most slid quite a ways before they finally crashed into a large drift at one of the bends.

The wildmen laughed uproariously.

“Instead of chuckling, why don’t you clodded well help us?” Declan bellowed. He’d managed to dig the tip of his scythe in between two frozen rocks, stopping himself from sliding to the bottom. But the weapon’s shaft creaked dangerously under his weight.

Gwen strode to the edge of the icy slope, rolling a large clump of snow in her hands. “How long do you think you can hold on, giant?”

“Long enough to clobber you, if you throw that,” he said with a glare.

She rolled the snow down, where it got wedged against his arm. “How long, now?”

“Stop that, you paint-faced —”

Another ball rolled it into his mouth. He tried to spit it away and very nearly lost his grip. Soon Gwen had Declan so piled with snow clumps that they could hardly see his face. Though the shaft groaned in protest, he still didn’t budge. When she made the mistake of trying to pack the snow in with her boot, he snatched her around the ankle and slung her behind him.

Gwen howled the whole way down. She slid on her rump and steered with her heels. She popped onto her feet at the bend and flipped, headfirst, over the scattered giants and into a large drift of snow.

A moment later she erupted from the bank, arms raised high. She let out a triumphant howl that the warriors rushed to answer — and it all very quickly dissolved into chaos.

The warriors crowded onto the icy slope. They slid on their backs and chests, trying to see who could go the fastest. They scraped the giants out of their holds, knocked them off their feet, and wound up in such a fantastic tangle of bodies at the bottom that Kael expected there to be at least a dozen broken bones. But there weren’t any — at least not until Jonathan tried skating down on the back of one of the wildmen’s rounded shields.

Then there were four.

“Do you see what comes of your nonsense?” Kael grumbled as he patched up Jonathan’s ribs.

Gwen shrugged. “I didn’t force him to do anything.”

“I’d do it again!” Jonathan said groggily, swinging his fist.

Kael put him to sleep. Then he scooped the fiddler up and held his lanky body out to Gwen. “Here. You carry him.”

She made a face. “Why?”

“Because I’m angry with you. And perhaps it’ll teach you that not everyone in our army can take a beating like a wildman. Some of them are fragile —
no
!” he barked, when he saw a clump of warriors gathering at the top of the slope. “Nobody’s having another go. If you slide down here again I swear I’ll hurl you over the edge.”

They slumped away, grumbling magnificently as they went.

The moment they were gone, he turned back to Gwen. “Carry him until he wakes — and think carefully about how you ought to behave,
Thane
.”

Her grin was sharp as she took Jonathan. “All right …
mutt
.”

He didn’t like the way her words slid across his ears. And he liked her smile even less. But there wasn’t any time to worry about Gwen. He had more important problems to solve.

In order to keep the slopes from freezing behind them, he split the craftsmen into three groups. They walked in Vs: one at the head of the line, another in the middle, and the last towards the end. The heat coming off their skin kept the snows melted and the ice from forming back.

When they finally stopped to make camp that evening, Kael put the final few bits of his plan together. He gathered the craftsmen in a circle and had them show him everything they could remember about their fortress.

Between all of their memories, he got a pretty good image of Thanehold and the stone village surrounding it. Then he tried to see it all through Titus’s eyes, tried to guess how the Earl would use it to his advantage. He played the battle over inside his head, combing through every possible scenario — knowing full well that the Earl would adapt quickly to anything the wildmen threw at him.

All the while he thought, Morris’s words rang inside his head:
The thing about Titus is you’ve got to get him quick, lad … you’ve got to get him before he gets you.

Kael realized that there would be no days-long battle with Titus. In fact, he might only get one chance to strike. So he would have to plan his steps carefully; he could afford to hold nothing back. He would craft a blade and fit it perfectly against Titus’s neck … and the first blow he dealt would end him.

Once his plan lay unraveled, Kael went after his companions.

He’d expected some resistance from the pirates, but Lysander only nodded somberly at his part in the plan. “We’ll do whatever you ask of us, Sir Wright.”

The good captain’s eyes had become considerably clouded in the days following Morris’s death. He spent a large amount of time walking with his hand gripped around the Lass’s whittled hilt, his customary grin lost far behind him.

Kael’s heart stung miserably at the sight. “You don’t have to drag the pirates into battle. I won’t —”

“No. I’ve made a bargain, and I’ll keep my word.” His wavy hair stood on end as he passed a hand through it. “I miss Aerilyn. That’s all it is.”

“Are you certain?”

He sighed heavily. “I suppose … if I’m honest, I
do
miss Morris. Uncle Martin told me to keep an eye on him, to keep him hidden from the Kingdom but always in my sight. He never trusted him. Yet, when Morris had the chance to ruin me, he didn’t. He stayed loyal to me even while I was cursed.” A faint smile bent Lysander’s mouth as his eyes looked back. “He proved himself to me during those years. I’d actually forgotten that I was supposed to keep an eye on him. In fact, I think Morris wound up keeping an eye on
me
. I’ll miss him as dearly as I miss any other pirate … but we must march on, mustn’t we?”

Kael forced himself to smile as he said: “Aye, Captain.”

That brought the grin back to Lysander’s face.

Though the pirates were willing to do their part, Declan was much less enthusiastic about the giants’ role. “I brought my army here to battle — not stomp about and make a great lot of noise!”

Kael tried to be patient. “If everything goes well, there won’t be much fighting. All you have to do is make sure Titus keeps his eyes on
you
and away from the craftsmen. And you can’t go … mad, all right? Things are likely to get pretty thick on that side. You’ll be killed if you charge right in.”

Declan nodded slowly. “Yeh, I think I’ve figured out a way to keep from losing my head. But it’ll involve a good amount of pirate grog.”

“Of course it will,” Kael muttered.

He’d gone to turn away when Declan’s thick hand thudded onto his shoulder. “I want the wee sandbeater on my side of things.”

Kael followed the shadowed cleft of Declan’s eyes across camp, to where Nadine and Elena stood. They’d exchanged weapons and were locked in a rather precarious battle beside the fire. Nadine swung the black daggers in clumsy arcs while Elena tried to knock them out of her hands with the butt of the silver spear.

Jake, who’d recently doused his fur robes in a fresh helping of skunk oil, seemed to be trying to chronicle their attacks in his journal. “Given the superior weight of the hilt, what’s the likelihood that a dagger disarmed would land point down?” he called.

Elena responded by kicking one of the daggers from Nadine’s hand. She swatted it with the butt of the spear and it shot towards Jake — thudding point-first into the skin of the mangy shrub beside him.

He gaped at it for a moment before he scribbled into his journal: “
Rather … likely …
”

It had come as no great surprise to Kael when he discovered Elena was a whisperer. She certainly had a warrior’s strength, and she seemed capable of disappearing whenever she pleased. The wildmen had been so entranced by her ability to meld into the shadows that she’d begun to teach them some of her tricks.

Consequently, Kael now had to assume that every darkened patch around camp was actually a wildman waiting to caddoc the skin off him.

No, he could understand Elena being a whisperer. What he couldn’t understand for the absolute life of him was the way Declan smiled at Nadine.

He didn’t even seem to realize he was doing it. The giant’s mouth was bent at such an unusual angle that Kael felt as if his stern friend had vanished — only to be replaced by a man who hadn’t frowned once his whole life.

Declan quickly stuffed his smile away when he saw Kael staring. “She’s a wee terror, is all. There’s no reasoning with her. She’ll be a harm to herself if she’s not looked after.”

“Is that the problem?”

Declan grabbed him roughly by the front of his jerkin. “As far as you know, yeh — it is.”

Kael managed to hold his smile back until after Declan had stomped away.

With the pirates and the giants ready to do battle, it was time to talk to Jake. Kael was still several yards away when the tang of skunk oil hit him. The stench was at least as much taste as smell: the oil’s reek seemed to bypass his nose and drop straight down his throat.

“I’ve gone numb to it,” Jake said when he saw Kael gagging. “A remarkable orifice, the nose — it’s capable of adapting to nearly any amount of reek in a surprisingly short time.”

Kael thought he would’ve preferred his nose to have simply fallen off and been done with it. “I need to talk to you about our attack on Titus.”

Jake sighed heavily. “Yes, I’ve been giving it a considerable amount of thought, and I’ve realized there’s only one thing I can possibly do: keep my magic to myself.”

“No spells,” Kael agreed. “None whatsoever. It’ll be difficult enough getting the wildmen to do what I’ve asked them. The last thing we need is the smell of magic driving them mad. I think it’d be best if you stayed with Declan.”

Elena glared when Kael turned to her. “I’m staying with the mage. And that’s final.”

He leaned away as she leveled the spear’s head at his chin. “I was going to say that, anyways.”

“You were?”

“Yes. So there’s no need to go pointing things at me,” he said, shoving the spear aside. With the way things were going so far, he thought he was at greater risk of being killed in his own camp than by Titus’s army.

When he told Nadine her lot, she stamped her tiny feet. “This is all
your
doing, giant!” she hollered at Declan. “I will not be made to sit idly while my friends do battle.”

“You’ll do what I tell you, mite.”

“
Mot
!”

Kael could feel himself nearing his wit’s end, and the worst was still to come: he needed to talk to Gwen.

They were camped beneath a cliff face that night. The craftsmen had spent the evening molding several large shelters into the rock: they bent the unforgiving stone back into caves and draped large, pelt tarps over their mouths to keep the snow out.

Kael was rather proud of how well the pelts had been melded together, and how they’d thought to seal the fur to the edges of the caves’ mouths. For days now, the craftsmen had built shelters without his help — steadily improving their quality and speed. There was no doubt in his mind that the wildmen would thrive long after Titus lay dead, even if they insisted on living at the mountain’s top.

A number of campfires ringed the space outside the shelters. Kyleigh and Silas sat near the largest one, busily devouring the carcass of a deer.

“Curse the mountain’s breath — it bites at everything!” Silas hissed. He gnawed unsuccessfully at a chunk of red flesh on the deer’s leg. Judging by how his teeth scraped against it, the meat had frozen solid.

Kyleigh held her portion above the flames for a moment, her brows bent in concentration. “It’ll be much easier to get a decent bite if you warm it.”