War Maid's Choice-ARC (73 page)

And unlike the stallions, she was unbarded.

Stop that
, she told herself firmly.
You can’t change it by worrying about it, and Gayrfressa knows what you’re
feeling even if you don’t actually
say
a thing to her
.
The last thing you need to be doing at this moment is to
distract
her!

A wordless ripple of love reached back to her, and she drew a deep breath as she reached back.

* * *

Gûrân Selmar came out of the undergrowth as silently as a puff of breeze, and Erkân Trâram looked up from the mossy boulder upon which he sat.

“Lieutenant Larark’s in position, Sir,” the sergeant said, and Trâram grimaced.

“Should I assume you took a close look at that lodge on your way back?” he asked the veteran noncom, and Selmar chuckled grimly.

“Aye, Sir. I did that.” He shrugged. “’Pears to be pretty much the way it was described, Captain. The wall’s nothing much—can’t be more than twelve, thirteen feet tall, and it looks like it’s only a couple of courses of brick.” He shrugged again. “Don’t see how it could have any kind of fighting step, and the ropes and grapnels should go over it clean and easy. The only thing that bothers me is the gate.”

“The gate?” Trâram’s eyes narrowed. “What about it?”

“No tougher or heavier than any of the rest of that ‘wall’ of theirs, Sir. The thing is, though, it’s closed up tight. Seems to me the reasonable thing for them to do would be to leave it open.”

Trâram’s face tightened.

“
I’d
think so,” he acknowledged. “Our information didn’t suggest anything one way or the other about it, but still...”

He and Selmar looked at one another for several moments. Then the captain shrugged.

“Well, either way, they’ve only got forty or fifty men in there. But if that gate’s closed because they’ve figured out somehow that we’re coming, I think we should just
leave
it closed. Go tell Lieutenant Râsâl—I want him and his men on the west wall with me rather than trying to rush the gate.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Selmar disappeared into the undergrowth once more, and Trâram drew a deep breath. The closed gate might mean nothing at all, although that seemed unlikely. The next most likely possibility was that someone inside the lodge’s ornamental wall had caught sight of one or more of his men skulking about in the bushes getting into position. He wouldn’t have believed that could happen—his men were better than that—but anyone could make mistakes, however good they were, and sometimes the other side simply got lucky.

And then there was the
least
likely probability—that someone had betrayed their operation to the Sothōii. In that case, that gate might be closed to conceal the fact that King Markhos was somewhere else entirely...having left a hundred or so of his elite cavalry packed in the hunting lodge’s courtyard, waiting to come thundering out as soon as anyone was sufficiently injudicious as to disturb them.

You’re jumping at shadows, Erkân
, he told himself.
Jumping at shadows. If there’d been that much traffic in or out of that lodge, you’d have seen signs of it along the road, and you didn’t, did you? No, the only realistic worst-case is that someone did spot one of the boys
.

That would be bad enough, yet it was a chance he was prepared to accept. Without the element of surprise, his casualties would climb sharply, but the defenders simply didn’t have enough manpower. The harsh truth was that he could afford far higher losses than the King’s bodyguards possibly could, and given how much they were being paid for this one—

The staccato cry of a southern bird who had no business on the Wind Plain sounded clearly through the cool, green woods, and Erkân Trâram drew his sword and looked through the thin screen of branches at the top of that ornamental wall Selmar had described.

“
Now!
” he bellowed.

* * *

Leeana came to her feet with a dancer’s grace, and somehow the strung bow had appeared in her left hand. For just a moment, she wasn’t certain what had snatched her out of her chair. Then she realized—
she
hadn’t heard that single shouted word;
Gayrfressa
had.

She turned to her left, facing the direction from which the command—and it
had
to be a command—had come, and her right hand drew an arrow from her quiver. Somewhere deep under the surface of her thoughts, she recalled her first morning at Kalatha and her hopeless performance as an archer under Erlis and Ravlahn’s evaluating examination. She’d come a long way since that day, and despite the bigger muscles with which an unfair nature had gifted male arms, there weren’t a great many men who could have pulled the bow she’d mastered in the intervening years. She nocked the arrow, her brain ticking with the cool precision of a Dwarvenhame pocket watch, and felt the alert, tingling readiness purring through her nerves and sinews. Despite her years of hard, sometimes brutal training, she’d never faced an enemy when lives were in the balance, and she was vaguely astonished that what she felt most strongly at the moment was an overwhelming focus and purpose, not fear.

Well
, a small inner voice told her almost whimsically,
there’s always time for that
.

* * *

Trâram’s shout brought his entire company to its feet. Whistles shrilled and other voices shouted their own orders, galvanized by his command, and the attack rolled forward.

The approaches were most open on the western side of the lodge, which was why Trâram himself commanded that prong of the assault. The dense greenery of the Forest of Chergor swept up to within little more than thirty or forty feet of the lodge’s other walls; here, on the west, the approach lay through the more open and orderly lines of an apple orchard. The apple trees’ leaves and ripening fruit provided a wind-tousled screen, concealing most of his men’s approach from any observer who might be perched awkwardly atop that purely decorative wall, but they were still far more exposed coming through the orchard. On the other hand, the orchard was much more open than the forest’s tangles, which allowed him not only to move more quickly, but also to maintain a tighter formation.

A bugle blared from somewhere inside the lodge before his men had moved ten yards, and he grimaced at the confirmation that the defenders had indeed had at least some inkling they were under threat. He’d never personally fought Sothōii before, but the deadly reputation of the Wind Plain’s horse archers told him the next few minutes were going to be ugly.

Still, he’d seen ugly before, and he’d taken the job.

* * *

The corner of Leeana’s eye noticed the three coursers turning away from the gate they’d been facing. They moved smoothly to the right, where the southernmost wall was screened from the main courtyard by the stables, taking up a position from which they could reach either the gate or the wall, as need required. Between the stables and the wall, there was—or had been—a small riding ring, but the white-painted fencing around it had been demolished to clear fighting room behind the stables, and she felt a flicker of Gayrfressa’s grim satisfaction as she trotted to one end of that open space between Dathgar and Gayrhalan.

It was a vague recognition, at the back of her mind, for her own eyes were fixed on the western wall as the first grappling hook soared up over the masonry. Iron teeth clattered, dug into the mortar between the bricks, and there were dozens of them.

She raised her bow, the watch ticking in her head a bit harder and faster, picturing the men who must even now be swarming up the knotted ropes attached to those grapnels. Men coming to kill her King.

Men coming for
her
to kill instead.

She drew and loosed with smooth, flashing speed, hands and muscles moving before she’d even realized what she’d seen. The range was less than fifty yards, and the man who’d drawn her attention had just transferred from the climbing rope. He flung his arms across the top of the wall to heave himself up and over...and disappeared without even a scream as her arrow tore through the base of his throat, just above the collarbone.

Something quivered deep inside her, like a momentary flash of nausea, as she realized she’d just killed another human being. It wasn’t like taking a hare or an antelope, yet there wasn’t the degree of shock she’d expected, either. Perhaps there simply wasn’t time to allow herself that distraction. Perhaps it would come back to haunt her later. But for now there was only that clear, clean focus, and she nocked another arrow even as a score of other heads topped the wall.

More bowstrings sang and snapped—dozens of them—along the northern, western, and eastern walls. There’d been no time to construct any sort of fighting step from which those archers might have engaged attackers short of the walls themselves, just as there was too little space for mounted troops to fight effectively within them. No Sothōii cavalryman was ever truly comfortable fighting on foot, but the Royal Guard was rather more flexible than most, and Swordshank had left his troopers’ mounts in the lodge’s capacious stables rather than pack its interior with a congested mass, unable to maneuver. Instead, he’d positioned his dismounted armsmen carefully around the main lodge, placed where they could simultaneously guard its entrances and cover the walls where the sightlines were clear enough for archery. But most of the southern wall, encumbered by the stables, was impossible to see—or sweep with arrowfire—from the central courtyard. That was why he’d demolished the riding ring...and the reason Tellian and Hathan had moved to cover that vulnerability the instant they were confident the attackers were coming over the walls rather than attempting to storm the gate.

Of course, the attack on the walls could always be a diversion to draw our attention away from the gate before they smash it open
, that preposterously calm voice remarked inside Leeana Hanathafressa’s skull as she loosed a second arrow and another body collapsed.

This time the corpse sprawled across the top of the wall until the next man up the rope shoved it out of his way. There were screams now, she noticed, nocking yet another arrow, yet the attack never faltered. Whatever else these men might be, they weren’t cowards, and their experience showed in the speed and ferocity of their assault. Clearly they recognized their numerical advantage...and that their best hope of success and survival lay in swamping the defense. There could be only so many bows inside the lodge, and the arithmetic was coldly pragmatic. Spread the defenders as thinly as possible by attacking from all points of the compass simultaneously, then throw the greatest possible number of bodies over each wall as rapidly as possible. King Markhos’ armsmen might wound or kill many of them; the trick was to get the survivors across more quickly than they could be killed. Every one of them who got a sword close enough to threaten one of Swordshank’s armsmen would take that armsman’s bow out of play...and make it easier still for the men behind them to get over the walls, in turn.

The man who’d swarmed up behind Leeana’s second victim seemed to embrace his predecessor’s body. For an instant, she thought she’d only wounded her second target; then she realized the newcomer was using his companion’s corpse as a shield, putting it between him and the incoming arrows while he rolled across the wall and let himself drop. An arrow plunged into the shielding body. Then another. Someone else’s arrow slashed past him, shattering against the wall’s inner brickwork, as he pushed the dead man clear and plummeted, and Leeana dropped her own point of aim. He landed in a controlled tumble, coming back to his feet quickly, and she loosed.

The attackers were more heavily armored than most Sothōii. They wore chain or scale armor, rather than light cavalry’s leather armor, and at least some of them had cuirasses, as well. Someone’s arrow hit a steel breastplate and skipped off harmlessly, but the man springing back upright in front of Leeana Hanathafressa’s pitiless green eyes didn’t have one, and the needle-sharp tip of her arrow’s awl-like pile head drove between the links of his mail. The armor might slow it, might rob it of much of its power, but it couldn’t
stop
it at that short range, and he cried out, clutching at the shaft quivering in his chest before he crashed back to earth. He lay twisting and jerking in agony, and Leeana swung away from him, seeking another target.

There were more than enough of them, for there were more grappling hooks than there were royal armsmen, and more and more of the attackers made it across the walls while the defenders were occupied picking off their companions. And just as the attackers had planned, every man who made it to the ground inside instantly became a greater threat than those still swarming up the ropes. He
had
to be dealt with, and that diverted the defenders’ fire from the walls themselves. Leeana loosed again, and then again, killing one target and watching her arrow glance off the other’s steel plate. She had no time for a follow-up shot against that assassin; he was coming straight at her, and she dropped her bow, shed her protective finger tab, and swept out both of her short swords.

The man wore an open-faced helmet, and he was close enough now for her to see his eyes, see his sudden savage smile, as he realized the single defender dancing towards the head of the veranda’s steps was unarmored. His sword was much heavier—and at least a foot longer than hers—as well, and she had no shield. He bounded forward, three or four others following at his heels, and Leeana sensed his eagerness to cut her down and be on about the mission which had brought him here. His own armor and helmet gave him an enormous edge, and he drove straight up the steps towards her with a veteran’s ruthless determination to capitalize on that advantage.

It was a mistake.

Leeana was taller than most men—over half a foot taller than him—with more than enough reach to offset the greater length of his sword, and war maid training was actually harder, harsher, and more demanding than that of most professional armsmen. It had to be, for they needed that razor edge of lethality, because unlike Leeana, the majority of war maids were
smaller
than the men they were likely to confront in combat. Leeana wasn’t, but she’d trained to the same hard, unforgiving standard as her smaller sisters, and her own sword technique had been adopted directly from Dame Kaeritha Seldansdaughter. She hadn’t trained in it for as many years as Kaeritha, but very few swordsmen—and even fewer swords
women
—had been mentored by a champion of Tomanāk and then polished under the unrelenting eye of Erlis Rahnafressa and Ravlahn Thregafressa since she was fourteen years old.