Gate to Kandrith (The Kandrith Series) (30 page)

Vez’s Malice. Sara dared not leave the line; Brendan might be discovered at any moment and a search instigated. She shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she mumbled.

“Then why go?” the apprentice demanded, his face full of frustration. Clearly, he wanted to go off to battle and fight, not stay here and melt down bits of iron into swords. Most of the people in line were men, Sara noticed. The few women present looked fiercely determined and bore pitchforks or cleavers.

“She can help me with the wounded,” Lance called out from about ten people farther down the line.

“You wear the Brown?” the smith asked.

Lance nodded. Sara noticed he’d wound a strip of cloth around his broken fingers.

“Then go to the front of the line,” the smith said, exasperated. “They’ll need your hands desperately.” He raised his voice. “All healers, red vests and shandies to the front of the line!”

Sara tried not to show her panic as Lance moved past her. She felt horridly vulnerable.

The queue ended at a peculiar stone hut. It was circular with a thatch roof, but it looked far too small to be a granary. Sara had thought that people were going inside the hut, but Lance stood outside it—then disappeared.

He’d been moved to the battle. By magic.

More details became clear as Sara approached the head of the line. The stone hut had a wooden door—no, more of a window, that swung open at waist-height. Someone sitting inside would reach out, lay hands on the person in line—and they would vanish.

As the line ahead of her dwindled, Sara’s tension ratcheted higher. Any moment now she would be denounced, escape snatched away—

Sara tried to distract herself by working out the magic in her head. The person in the hut was a Mover, therefore he must have sacrificed his ability to move. The idea brought to mind statues, but the Mover could clearly move his hands. So…?

Then it was her turn. Still no outcry.

The Mover proved to be a middle-aged man with bushy red sideburns and close-set brown eyes. “To the battle?” he asked.

Sara nodded, jittery. He leaned forward and clasped her elbows—and it was like being healed by Lance. A bell-like tone shivered in the air, and Sara smelled spring flowers; a wave of heat raced over her body. Startled, Sara tried to take a step back, but the Mover tightened his hold. Just before the magic whipped her away she saw through the window, down inside the hut—

Instead of two legs in trousers, the Mover had but a single leg swathed in black robes. His feet were bare and had grown together, toes dug into the ground. Sara felt nauseous. The stone hut had no door, because the Mover was rooted to the spot.

—wind roared around her, spinning her, sucking at her breath. Before she could panic, her ears popped, and she was thrown onto her hands and knees on a patch of grass. Her blanket fell off her head, and she hastily fumbled it back on.

An elderly man in a red vest took her arm and helped her up. “Move along, before the next person arrives.”

Sara moved a few paces aside and then stopped as disorientation struck hard. The courtyard and Hall were simply gone. She was partway up a mountain, standing in a field of tree stumps. A woodcutter’s cottage and a scattering of outbuildings lay on one side and deep forest on the other.

For the first time, she understood how Kandrith had remained its own country for so long. The ability to send messages over long distances and to move troops instantly were both huge advantages. Advantages Kandrith desperately needed, because a battle was raging in front of the cottage—a lop-sided fight between farmers with pitchforks and trained legionnaires with swords and shields.

Sara would have turned away had she not suddenly recognized Lance’s broad back in the thick of it. He was unarmed, without so much as a cudgel to defend himself.

* * *

When Lance arrived on the mountain, half a dozen legionnaires and their prisoners were holed up in the woodcutter’s cottage. His mother stood fearlessly out in front and called for them to surrender.

The legionnaire captain refused. “And now Madam, I must warn you to step back as any person still within twenty paces when I count to ten will receive an arrow to speed them on their way. One, two…”

“We have the men to take them if we charge,” Donal advised the Protector.

She shook her head. “No. We’ll take too many losses.” She raised her voice. “Move back!”

Lance stayed on the fringes of the silent crowd, not wanting his mother to notice him. He glanced back at the field of stumps, but Sara had yet to arrive. And he looked, in vain, for another brown vest. He saw a few elders in red vests; even if they did make the sacrifice their abilities would be much weaker than his own. Grimness filled him, but he knew he could not leave the army with no healer at all.

Someone suggested burning the cottage, but his mother quickly overruled that. “There are children inside.”

“I can get the soldiers out,” a voice rasped. The crowd parted to let Olwydd through.

The Protector regarded the horned shandy thoughtfully. “There’s a back window they’ve shuttered. If you go in through there, they’ll spill out the front.”

Olwydd nodded, then took off in a shambling run.

Lance couldn’t see what happened inside the cottage, but the noises were easy enough to follow. A loud crash as Olwydd burst through the window. Screams and swearing. The high-pitched shriek of a child. Lance prayed the sound was born of terror, not pain. Olwydd was enough to scare a grown man.

“Stand and fight!” the legionnaire captain called, but it was too late. Five men poured out of the house—to be charged at the Protector’s signal.

But in the length of time it took the howling mob to cross the yard, the captain came out with a bloodied sword in hand. “Shields down!” he bellowed.

And suddenly a shield wall sprouted between the Kandrithan army and the legionnaires.

Thereafter the battle turned grim. Man after man was cut down without getting through.

Lance darted forward and pulled out an injured man, healing the bloody gash in his throat. Then another and another, until he was using both hands at all times, heedless of the pain from his broken fingers. Once a third man with a gutted stomach crawled up and laid a trembling finger on Lance’s arm. A torrent of power rushed through him, more than he’d ever handled before, enough to burn. Lance gritted his teeth and endured.

It gave him great satisfaction to see wounded men get up and rejoin the attack. “You!” a legionnaire exclaimed as a pitchfork stabbed him through the shoulder. “I already killed you.”

A gap appeared in the shield wall. Men howled and threw themselves forward until the wall shattered. In moments, the skirmish was over. For the combatants. The wounded, including Olwydd, kept Lance busy for awhile.

Of the six legionnaires, only two yet lived when Lance wearily finished. One legionnaire, a brutish man of forty, had a row of nasty punctures in his shoulder. The clean-shaven captain lay curled around a deep belly wound.

Lance beckoned the woodcutter and his plain-faced wife closer. Lance had healed the man of a broken arm already, and the woman of worse hurts, but their two little girls were physically unharmed. The children clung to their mother’s skirts, pale faces peeping out.

“I need you to stand as Justice,” he told them. “Should I heal their wounds?”

As the new Farspeaker, the woodcutter was necessarily mute, but he shook his head vehemently.

His strong-jawed wife hesitated. “I don’t know. The captain is dangerous. The others would have surrendered without him, and they—” she pointed out the row of five Kandrithans laid out for burial—men Lance hadn’t reached in time to save, “—would likely be alive. But he stopped them from killing Liam.”

Her husband shook his head, obviously disagreeing.

“Yes, I know,” she said to him. “He only did it so’s to claim the slave price, but you still live. We all still live. He let the others rut on me, but he didn’t take a turn himself and he kept them off of the girls. Maybe his reason for doing so was greed, but I’m still grateful. As for the other pig—” The woman spit on the bearded legionnaire and walked away.

Lance made his decision. He put his hands on the legionnaire captain and let the Goddess heal through him. The other man, the rapist, could live or die without his help.

* * *

“Get out of there,” Sara whispered, uselessly, because Lance was too far away to hear and wouldn’t have listened anyhow. Not while there were still wounded to heal—even, apparently, his enemies.

But at any moment the next person in the steady stream of the Moved could bear the news of Sara’s resurrection. She’d thought the tidings had arrived earlier when Donal drew the Protector aside and spoke to her urgently, but Lance’s mother had merely directed him to the place where the food and supplies were being organized. Their luck couldn’t hold.

And now the Protector had moved to stand beside her son and probably question the two prisoners.

Sara thought she could guess some of the answers. The woodcutter must have stumbled across one of the legionnaires and so the cottage would have been garrisoned to prevent the inhabitants from spreading news of the invasion. And who knew when more legionnaires would come to relieve this bunch, or if one of their number had sent out a warning.

“Make some excuse and go,” she pleaded from behind the screen of pine trees.

“There is no excuse for treason.” A deep growl sounded beside her as a shandy stepped out from behind some trees.

Vez’s Malice. It was the nightmare, Olwydd. Sara had seen him from a distance during the attack on the cottage. He must have circled around behind her. She stood very still. “Lance’s mother knows?” She was surprised she could talk; her legs had turned to water.

“Yes. She sent me.” Olwydd prowled closer.

Sara found herself noticing how peculiar his gait was with the two bear paws in front and the horse hooves behind. Olwydd had been the slowest of the three shandies, but Sara harbored no illusions. He could run her down in the blink of an eye. Which begged the question: Why wasn’t she already dead?

“Am I to have another trial?” Sara’s hands clenched on the wish that they held a pitchfork, a club, anything to defend herself. All she had was a moderately sharp belt-knife with a short four-inch blade. Olwydd’s horns would impale her long before she could stab him.

Olwydd made an odd grunting sound—his laugh. “You’re already dead. Dead dolls don’t need trials.”

“And Lance? Are you to kill him too?” Sara tried to think of a lie that would keep Lance from being dragged down with her.

“No. I am not so ungrateful. He wears the Brown and is too valuable during a war. His mother will hush up his part in this.” He took another step forward, crowding her so that pine needles jabbed her arms, and grunted again when she flinched.

His laughter made her angry. Her spine straightened.

Olwydd didn’t like that. “Shall I gore you with my horn?” he asked. “Or rip out your throat with my tusks?”

Olwydd expected her to act like a noblewoman, to cower and scream until he finished toying with her. Sara hadn’t survived having her head cut off just to die now. But if she was to have a chance, she had to force him off balance.

She made her voice supercilious. “If the Protector means to hush up my death, then we should move farther away from here.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned her back on him and started to walk—uphill because the Republican camp probably lay that way.

Olwydd growled, but stalked after her instead of charging. She’d gained a little time.

Sara let the blanket-shawl slip down to her shoulders and cleared her too-tight throat. “Tell me, Olwydd, were you handsome when you were a man?”

Olwydd blinked, an eerily human gesture in a beast’s face. He seemed bewildered by the change of topic. “What?”

“Did you draw women like flies the way Julen does?” Sara cocked her head to one side. “No, I don’t think so. I think you were maimed in some way.”

Olwydd snarled. “Who cares what you think?”

As they walked, Sara folded the blanket over one arm as if too hot. “Were you burned? Was your face scarred?” With her other hand, she drew her belt-knife and held it concealed beneath the blanket.

“You’re talking nonsense. Shut your mouth.” But Olwydd avoided her gaze as if uneasy.

Sara kept at him. “Dyl and Rhiain are just as deadly as you, but their new forms are beautiful. Why did you choose to be a monster?”

Olwydd snarled in reaction.

Was she pushing too hard? Sara’s heart thudded. “When you became disfigured did your master call you that? Monster? Is that why you became one in truth?”

Tension coiled in Olwydd’s muscled body. He was watching her face not her hands on the blanket.

“You killed your master, didn’t you? You showed him what a true monster looked like.”

“Her, not him. I ripped her throat out.” Olwydd bared his fangs. “Just like I’m going to kill you.”

* * *

“If you’re looking for that woman,” his mother said coldly, “don’t bother.”

Lance stilled. She knew then. “Her name is Sara.” A quiet challenge.

“No, it’s Lady Sarathena Remillus—or it was. I set Olwydd on her trail a quarter hour ago. I imagine she’s long past your ministrations by now.” Savage satisfaction darkened her eyes.

Olwydd. Lance grabbed his mother’s arm, his fingers digging into flesh. “Tell me you didn’t do this. Tell me you didn’t kill the woman I love. Again.”

She inhaled sharply, face stricken. “She can’t mean that much to you. Think who she is!”

“You don’t know her,” Lance began. A few weeks ago he’d had the same low opinion of all noblewomen. If he could just make his mother see Sara as a person…

“I know her kind,” his mother said dismissively.

Lance felt as if they were standing across a gulf from one another. “Her kind?” he repeated. “That’s how they talk about us, you know. As dirty barbarians, all alike, so stupid they deserve to be enslaved.”

His mother looked affronted. She missed his point.

“I know exactly who Sara is.” His mouth twisted. “It’s you I don’t recognize.”

* * *