Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (56 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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Despite the danger, she found she was shifting into a tranquil, almost suspended mental state. The sound of their pursuers’ hoofbeats receded. The place where she had touched her breastbone earlier, feeling for her power, still felt warm. Like the caress of Martin’s hands as he had touched her in the water. Like the summer warmth in Arleon Forest, lazy by some quiet pool. She focused, and the warmth languidly grew and spread. Soon her horse could feel it too. Its ears flickered backward, fear touching it, but she whispered the Huntress’s name aloud, and immediately it soothed. Its gait picked up, enlivened. She extended her power outward, delicately feeling for the shape of its spirit, running through its body as its legs churned, and then, scarcely conscious of what she was doing, she began to lift herself away from it, lightening the animal’s load, easing its run. She was still in the saddle, then, but somehow also above it. A sudden freeness and lightness rushed through her. The jolting movement of the horse, cantering across the rough ground, fell away.
She had expended so much strength, thrown so much power, into Richielle’s sheep. Today, all that power had returned to her, and more. This lightness—this lightness as she rode above the horse—was only playing with the edge of her strength. This—she could easily control this.
From her floating place, she looked calmly outside of her trance, checking for Tullier at her side, the riders behind them. Ahead, Fredeconde’s horse was ascending once again toward the plain. Gaultry set her animal to follow it. The ground was shimmering all around, but ahead two spots of more solid movement emerged amidst the waves of heat: a posse of riders to their left; and a singleton, ahead of them, riding back in their direction. Fredeconde’s horse rose on its hind legs as she turned it, and the lithe scout stood up in the stirrups, just managing to keep her seat.
Gaultry, with a little more time to react, had time enough to turn her mount to follow. Fredeconde drove her animal on, glancing from side to side as she sought a safe place to descend. Then, before she could chose a new route, a mounted rider erupted right in front of her, seemingly from out of the ground. With astonishing agility, the scout retained her seat, swerved, and then fell from sight as her horse charged downward into a hidden gully, barely avoiding a collision with this new aggresser.
Gaultry, blocked along both of the obvious paths, pulled her horse to a halt. Ahead of her was a broken steepness of rock. Her horse would surely break a leg if she forced it on in that direction. “Which way?” she shouted at Tullier. He gestured ahead and down to the left—the steepness gentled there, opening a narrow route into another gully, if the rider who had challenged Fredeconde did not reach it first, cutting off their route.
“Go ahead of me.” She did not think she could make her animal descend that narrow route without a leader. “I’ll make my horse follow you. Or the others will keep me moving.” Shostra and Elthois were still with them. He cast her an anxious glance, then obeyed, taking the lead.
It seemed for a time that they would be lucky. They reached the descent a heartbeat before the other rider, a rangy, flat-faced man, cheeks and arms blue with painted woad, riding a stocky dun-colored pony. Their horses were faster than his. Still, he managed to cut Shostra short. The big ax-man’s horse refused the descent when the rider’s pony challenged it, just short of the edge. Shostra was forced to continue along the high ridge, quickly dropping away from Gaultry’s line of sight.
Glancing back, she saw that rather than chase Shostra or risk the descent following them, their pursuer had pulled up his horse and raised
his thin lance. There was something red tied to that lance—a rag or a cluster of feathers.
“We’re going to have company,” Tullier called back. He too had seen the man’s raised lance. “He’s signaling ahead.” Elthois, still with them and bringing up the rear, shouted confirmation from a little higher on the slope.
They slowed their horses almost to a walk, searching for a side route out of the gully. Atop them on the ridge, a rider appeared, tracking their progress, and then another. “Three at least,” Gaultry said. “If we can avoid those other ones.”
“Not if they’re signaling each other,” Tullier said dismally. They had already lost Fredeconde and Shostra. “They’ll herd us into a blind valley, and disarm us at their leisure.”
“That won’t happen.” Despite the interruptions, Gaultry had not lost the smooth building rhythm of her power. This time there was not a herd of sheep to sponge up her energy. This time there was no syphon-spell to counter her. There was no splitting of her power between separate forces. No dream confusion. The Glamour was in her, potent and pure. She could feel its substance, as solid as a weapon in her hand. “We’ve played that game once already—with Richielle. These men don’t have the power to take us.”
“What do you mean?”
Gaultry slowed her horse. “Tullier, come onto my saddle. We can’t risk being separated in what comes next.”
“We’ll founder it. Your horse can’t carry the weight … .”
“Don’t argue.” She ignored his hesitation, making a space for him in front of her on the saddle. “Just come.”
Seeing she would not be dissuaded, he leapt smoothly across to her, his young body light and agile as an acrobat’s. His horse snorted with disgust at the last violent kick he had made to launch himself, and swerved aside—Elthois, riding now at a short distance behind them, gave an admiring exclamation. There was a slight struggle as the two of them reorganized the reins and the stirrups.
“Do your best not to slip off,” Tullier said tautly, toeing into the stirrups.
“Take us up that line there.” Gaultry gestured to an unlikely rabbit track running up to the ridgeline on the far side from the riders.
“We’ll founder the horse.”
“Just do it.” She wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed
against him. It was awkward with the horse jostling beneath them, but necessary for the magic she intended to perform. The sudden contact made him shiver, and he sawed unintentionally on the reins. “Try to relax,” she whispered, jolting against his ear by the break in the horse’s stride. “I’m going to help the horse take our weight.”
Tullier gasped as the first tendril of her power touched him. “Gaultry—”
She pressed her eyes shut and concentrated on the rhythm, feeling it build as the horse once more moved into its canter. That movement, driving them forward, was all that mattered. As her sense of her physical surroundings dropped away, ghostly shapes appeared to her: her own body, Tullier’s, the horse’s. She could tell from the placement of the horse’s hooves that it had reached the approach to the treacherous rabbit-track, and she redoubled her concentration.
Vaguely, she sensed Tullier kicking the horse to force it up the steep track. She projected herself farther outward, feeling for the ground. As she reached out, a path opened before them through the darkness, veined with shifting, colored light like the aurora that would fill the night sky over her beloved southern forests come mid-winter. She kept her eyes pressed tightly closed, keeping herself in that spectral darkness where she was one with the horse, one with Tullier, herself a bright knot of power, her strength projected outward into them both. They rode upward, onward—
“Gaultry.” Tullier’s voice sounded far away, torn back into her ears by the rushing wind of their motion. “I need to pull up! Stop a minute!”
She opened her eyes. They had escaped the maze of gullies, and were thundering across a dry plain of yellow sod. The grass here was dense but thin, the limestone bedrock covered by a fragile layer of topsoil. She sensed they had come a fair distance, though the horse was still moving easily. It nickered with excited pleasure. Elthois, she glanced back and noted with a stab of concern, had not been able to keep pace with them.
The first cluster of their pursuers was lost somewhere behind them, but ahead—ahead was a fresh Lanai war party. A full dozen warriors, mounted low on stocky mountain ponies. One man, obviously the leader, directed the others with hand signals as they spread out to encircle them. They were an experienced raiding party, men who would not telegraph their intentions with noisy shouts.
“Doesn’t Tielmark control any of its own territory around here?” Gaultry said bitterly, clinging to Tullier’s waist as the boy pulled the horse
up. It was not clear where their best chance lay in breaking the swift-tightening Lanai line.
Tullier’s hands were tense on the reins. “This is just what Fredeconde was saying. These lot are trophy-hunters, trying to seize a last prize before running home to the pack. We must be close to the Tielmaran lines now if there are so many of them.”
“We’ll have to try to crash through.”
Tullier nodded agreement. “If we wait for the Tielmarans to see us, we risk being taken. Those men behind us were signaling. It won’t be long before every Lanai in the area converges on us. I don’t know what you are doing to the horse—but it’s fit to keep on running, even with our combined weight. We were doing well until this lot spread out in front of us.”
Gaultry looked out beyond the Lanai line. They were closing on the mountains now. Ittanier, the mountain Fredeconde had pointed out, was large enough to still look far away, but despite how distant it appeared they had already begun to flank it. Surely they must reach the lake at Llara’s Kettle soon, and the ground held by the Tielmaran armies.
Tullier flexed his wrist, engaging the knife in his sheath. Then he drew his sword. “Let them think we mean an honest attack. I’ll take one in the throat with my knife as we close on them—from there, we will see how it goes.”
Gaultry leaned into him. “We will take them,” she whispered. Knowing that she and Tullier had the strength to destroy these men felt sad. “Too much is at stake, and we can’t allow them to stop us—so we won’t. This poor crew ahead does not have the strength to take us in an open contest of power.”
“I know it.” Disquietingly, he put a hand over hers where she had clasped his waist. “This—this is how I want it. Us together, unconquerable.”
“Tullier—”
He kicked the horse into action rather than allow her to gainsay him. “For Llara!” he screamed. “For the blood of my god!”
Gaultry could only cling to his back and call once again on her magic. She matched his war cry, riding it deep through her body and down into the horse, urging its spirit forward as fiercely as Tullier urged its body.
Tullier drove the horse toward the largest rider. Perhaps he guessed the man would be clumsy on his small pony. Perhaps he wanted the best fight the Lanai could offer them. Their rangy gelding bore down on the
man, even as the line of the other riders converged on them from the sides. Tullier held his sword out before him—trying as he did so not to slice off their horse’s ears. The attackers on the sides began screaming, unnerving ululating screams that went on and on without any pause for breathing. If Gaultry had not been so focused on the internal pictures unfolding before her, she might have been frightened. As it was, the surging power on this plane absorbed all her capacity for emotion.
A focus of angry strength had leapt up in the boy’s body. It sharpened to the point on his wrist where his knife waited, unsprung. Gaultry felt his eagerness, his unconscious gratification as he calculated the distance to the moment of his strike. The big man wheeled his pony to face them and came straight at them, presenting very little target around the front of his mount. He seemed set on ramming them—only at the last possible moment shearing aside, flicking his light lance for an unseating blow. That same moment, Tullier shifted his sword to his riding hand and raised his wrist. The dagger flashed from his sleeve, cutting a terrible furrow across the man’s throat. With an awful, bubbling cry, the man dropped his reins and rode on past them, no longer in control of his mount.
The riders at their backs had not been close enough to see what had transpired, only knowing that their war comrade was sorely wounded. Their cries intensified. Tullier forced the gelding forward—pressing it now, as he had not done before, when he had been afraid it would be unable to carry their combined weight. But the direct attack had given their Lanai pursuers new purpose. They whipped their horses up, closing the gap.
One rider outpaced the rest, a light man on a fast pony. Gaultry tapped even more deeply into her strength, lightening herself and Tullier further, but it was not enough to beat the man’s sheer speed. The narrow muzzle of his pony drew even with their horse’s rump. Tullier fumbled by his hip, still driving the gelding on. “Get ready,” he bit out. “This will hurt.”
He yanked the reins sideways, pulling the gelding so the pony careened off its haunch. Stunning pain shot up through her leg as her foot was crunched between the two animals’ bodies. Then she saw, with a flicker of horror, that Tullier had discarded his borrowed sword in favor of the Kingmaker blade.
“Don’t!” she cried. The blade, a star of light, shimmered at the focused point of his spirit-shape. “Tullier, don’t!”
As she screamed the words, he checked the horse and stabbed downward.
Through the flash of the mêlée, she saw that they had drawn even with the swift rider. Even among the jostling of the cantering horses, Tullier’s aim was sure. Killing, this close killing, was what he had been trained for. The blade slipped under the tribesman’s guard, found his belly, twisted and touched something mortal, all in a flash that was quicker than the space between one heartbeat and the next.

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