Wildfire (27 page)

 

  
I heard a hectoring, shrill voice—the voice of some objecting part of me—saying,
Run! Run!
But I dared not turn my back on him.

 

  
His expression gave no warning when he moved. He stepped forward and his cloak swirled over the billhook, and he wrapped the fur around the blade and yanked to pull the haft from my grasp. When he swung his cloak, I saw blood dripping down his right hand; he’d led with his left, and his breath rasped in his throat. He was wounded.

 

  
I didn’t resist the pull on the billhook, but followed it with all my force, pushing the spike toward the priest’s right armpit, lunging from a kneeling position and falling forward as the hook scraped between his body and arm.
I felt a thump when I hit him, and heard tearing sounds, but I lacked the strength to force my blow home through fur and padded underarmor and the shield of his rib cage. I landed on my side, and the haft of the billhook jerked in my grasp and I stubbornly held on with both hands. I caught a glimpse of his face, the muscles strained and knotted over the skull. He grunted but didn’t fall. Every moment I thought,
There’s the end,
and after every such moment I was surprised to find I was still alive, though I shouldn’t be.

 

  
Stones clattered about us, then more stones. Mole’s aim was poor in the dark, and a stone stung my back. One struck the priest on his brow and started a small freshet of blood. I wished she hadn’t been so brave. He’d be obliged to kill us both now for the abomination of our stoning him as if he were vermin.

 

  
The priest dropped the billhook and freed his left arm from the cloak and took a swipe at me openhanded, caught me on my shoulder. I rolled away, still clutching the weapon. The billhook had snagged in a rent in the heavy fur. I twisted the blade and tugged until the cloak hung awkwardly from the chains around his neck. I was an arm’s length beyond his reach and my only chance was to keep him that far away.

 

  
He broke the billhook’s haft—though it was seasoned ashwood, thicker than my wrist—by stomping on it too fast for me to see. And I was left with a broken stave in my hands, rolling downhill, getting knees and hands under me, and as I climbed to my feet I saw the priest disentangle the billhook’s blade from his cloak and drop it. That he scorned the blade made me dread him more.

 

  
I lost my footing on the steep bank of the stream, slid down on my buttocks, and stopped with a jolt at the bottom. I couldn’t hear him behind me and I was afraid to look. Just like Mole. As if there was some protection in remaining ignorant. I broke the glistening ice and splashed through the water, and cold bit my feet to the bone. I scrambled up the farther bank. Shale outcroppings gave way underfoot in brittle shards. Surely I’d have heard him if he’d crossed the stream after me. I dared a glance and he wasn’t on my heels, wasn’t anywhere. He was everywhere, in the shape of every tree and boulder. I crouched under the drooping boughs of a cedar that overhung the bank and tried to quell the sound of my breathing.

 

  
Be still, still, still.

 

  
I saw the jut of an elbow, the curve of a shoulder under a cloak, down there by the stream. A breeze came and stirred a branch, and I realized I’d cobbled my enemy out of shadows.

 

  
Then I saw a too perfect curve, as perfect as the Moon, and a reddish black sheen around it. Gods, he was close! Eight, ten strides away, lying
halfway up the near slope. I’d looked too high for him before, man height. The priest’s head turned slightly from side to side. His eyes were slits and I could see the faint glimmer of the whites. He didn’t know where I was or he’d be on me.

 

  
I became afraid he could see the mist from my breath. Cold lanced upward from the ground, through my icy feet, and the need to move was nearly unendurable. To move and put an end to it. But the priest was wounded. The longer he bled, the better.

 

  
I too was bleeding. My upper arm burned where he’d clawed me, leaving three neat cuts side by side. The blood welled out hot and turned cold as it soaked into the swaddling wool of my sleeve. He’d swiped at me once with his hand and cut me three times. How had he done that? It was so fast, I never saw the blade.

 

  
I thought of the moment I’d lunged at him. Everything I did before and after was clumsy, but for an instant I’d known what to do and done it, and I felt an unexpected pleasure in that sense of rightness. I wobbled as I crouched, feeling the strain in my legs. I put out a hand to steady myself and felt the soft brown duff of decayed needles. Good ground for stealth. In my other hand I held the broken shaft of the billhook, as long as my arm.

 

  
I watched darkness swim about the priest. Shadows formed and dissolved, and the only constant was the pale curve of his skull. I was so fixed on him that when a rustling sound came from behind me I nearly pissed myself. I turned and saw a hare nibbling on the bark of a young cedar. The hare was as startled as I was. It looked at me, its eyes flat, shining, and unblinking. When it began to chew, I breathed again.

 

  
Then the hare startled, and went dodging uphill through a stand of coppiced willows in great erratic bounds. A red fox streaked after it, and the last I saw of them both was the whitewashed tip of the fox’s tail vanishing between the withies. The pursuit was fast and noisy, but I heard something or someone else as well, crashing through the brush on the other bank in reckless haste. I turned back to the priest, and he wasn’t there. He was moving along the slope below me, stooping as he went, his left hand outstretched before him to fend off branches. I heard his breath coming in gasps. He was not particular as to quarry. If he lost me, Mole would do as well. He straightened up as he crossed the stream, and took the hill on the other side without troubling to be silent.

 

  
I broke from cover and followed him, the hare chasing the fox. Moonlight shone on the ice and I followed shale steps upstream, stepping on stones or fallen logs that breached the water. The priest’s quarry turned and bumbled downhill, jumping and sliding. I heard a thud and a grunt and a curse—Mole colliding with a stump. I crouched beside the stream and
Mole ran past without seeing me, her skirts drenched. The priest was just behind her, and I swung the broken billhook haft and landed a two-handed wallop on one of his shins. I heard a crack, and couldn’t tell if it was his leg or the wood that broke. He fell forward.

 

  
I knew from listening to fighters talk that a blow to the shin could render a leg numb and useless for a time. I’d reckoned that much, but it was mere luck, not cleverness, that put me on his weakened right side and not his left.

 

  
I stood and thumped him on the back just as he rolled and struck at me with his left hand. The cloak that protected him from blows slowed him down now that it was wet. He missed me and caught my skirt, shredding it with three cuts at once. I jabbed at his face with the splintered end of the haft, but at the last moment I pulled the blow, too squeamish to grind it into his eyes.

 

  
He made a fist and struck at me again, and this time I saw between his fingers three curved blades that had been hidden when he held his hands open. Linked iron rings on all four fingers held the blades in place. A bearclaw, they called it. Only priests of Rift used that weapon. I scrambled backward and screamed as he raked me across the thigh. The priest tried to get to his feet but his leg gave out. He landed hard on his left knee, the other leg stretched out stiffly behind him. His right arm trembled as he propped himself up. He kept his good arm free. Surely he was in pain—his breath sounded rough as an armorer’s rasp. But his face was impassive.

 

  
Even a shackled bear is dangerous—just ask the bearbaiters. He might be feigning hurt to lure me closer. Or so I’d run and he could catch me by surprise.

 

  
Mole had run off downstream, and I thought she was long gone. But she came back, carrying a big stone in her hands. Her eyes looked large in her small pinched face, and her upper lip was shiny from snot.

 

  
She heaved the stone at the priest, aiming at his head, her movements awkward. The stone hit him on the hip and came apart in thin jagged pieces. Mole was sobbing. She groped around in the dark and found a broken oak branch still bearing a few tattered leaves. She swung and he caught the branch easily and twisted it out of her hands. He whipped at her with it, his face for the first time showing anger, and I wondered if he was breaking one of his many vows by using such an inferior weapon.

 

  
I stood there useless. I saw Mole’s rage and wondered why I felt nothing myself. I was chilled clear through, mind and body numb. The priest started to haul himself to his feet, using the branch. He mustn’t get up.

 

  
I hit him square on the anklebone and heard another crack. A splinter of wood went flying from the broken haft. He began to sway and I swung
again for the same spot and hit hard. The oak branch snapped under his weight and he dropped to his hands and knees. Mole had found a better stone, a fist-size lump of granite, and she hammered at his bare round head. I hit his left arm and felt the elbow give way even through the heavy cloak. The ice in me had cracked and underneath there was a deep and fast current of fury at the priest’s impassivity. I wanted to break through it, break him. Never once had he spoken to us. We were prey to him, nothing but beasts. I hit him behind the ear and the haft split in my hands, right down the middle, and left me with a sharp stake.

 

  
For some reason that stopped me. I’d have had to push the jagged point in under his chin.

 

  
Mole went on working doggedly with her stone, trying to break his skull, which proved to be difficult. He fell on his side. Blood leaked from cuts in his scalp and ran over his face. I said, “Stop. He’s dying. Let’s go.”

 

  
“I want his cloak,” she said. Her hand shook but her voice was steady.

 

  
“Why? It’s fair bur, it’s bear, see?” I didn’t understand, because a mudwoman could never wear such fur, she wouldn’t be allowed.

 

  
She hauled the cloak out from under him and gathered it up in a great sopping armful, dragging the golden chains across his throat. She gave the fur a twist and the chains tightened. She twisted again, strangling him. The priest made choking sounds, and I said, “Halt it!”

 

  
He went limp, and Mole stooped to undo the brooches that fastened the chains to the fur. He rolled and clouted her on the side of the head so fast I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it when she sat down in the stream and fell over. I tugged and tugged at her arm to drag her beyond his reach, but he was no longer moving.

 

  
Mole was already dead. The priest had broken her neck and clawed away part of her face and laid bare the jawbone. So it was better that it was quick.

 

  
The heat of his life spilled out into the night. I could see it like a dark flame guttering. His eyes were open, but he seemed to look past me. There were long pauses between each breath. Another would come after I was sure he was dead. I wasn’t kind or ruthless enough to finish him.

 

  
When his hands were cold and would never move again, I stole his bearclaw to keep for a hidden weapon. I understood then why a warrior loves plunder enough to risk the anger of the dead, and how the victor savors his victory twice, first over the living man, then over the shade who must suffer the sight of his weapon in another man’s hand. I wanted to take the priest’s strength for my own; I hoped by diminishing him to make myself greater.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 11
  

  
Shiver-and-Shake
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
S
oon it became known to all that we’d suffered a visitation by Auspices of Rift Warrior. The attackers left behind execrations: small clay statues of the king and queenmother, stamped with the sign of Rift and inscribed with curses to bring upon our army plagues, hunger, and discord. To set free the curses, they’d broken the statues and sown shards about the camp, some said even in Queenmother Caelum’s bedclothes. Three corpses were found headless, all of them Wolves who’d stood high in her counsel. As for the other dead, two cataphracts and a hand of varlets, most had been mistaken for foes in the darkness, and killed by their fellows.

 

  
No dead enemies were found. Sire Erial’s men went to fetch Mole and carry her to the pyre, and the priest’s body was gone, and all signs of him too.

 

  
We left that accursed place without the Crux and his men. Early in the afternoon, my hopes were raised by a party of riders coming up behind us, but it was just men of Eorőe returning empty-handed from the search for their captive kinsmen, having lost the trail in a bog.

 
  

 

  
That evening foot soldiers dug a wide ditch encircling our new camp and put up a palisade of sharpened stakes behind it. Priests of Rift and Torrent led a procession up and down every path to ask the gods to protect us from the execrations; they sacrificed bullocks and claimed there were signs of victory in their entrails.

 

  
But the gossip was about Prince Corvus, and how he had Rift’s Blood in his veins by way of his father, King Voltur. He must have an army of pet priests of Rift. His were better than ours. What had our Auspices of Rift done in the raid? Run around like foot soldiers. King Thyrse and his sister Caelum were Blood of Prey, a fine warlike clan—but no clan, no lineage of the Blood, was born to war like Rift. Suddenly this prince seemed more formidable.

 
  

 

  
Bloodspiller and I raised Galan’s tent by ourselves, for the Crux and the others were still missing. Some hotspurs of our company talked of riding out to search for them, but Divine Hamus said the omens were unfavorable, which he always said when it suited him to be cautious.