Blanis looked at it, for a moment, with someone else’s eyes. “Yes,” she said. “The Brightwood people will rest their battle across the Road from you, against the northern slopes of the Rise.”
“Right,” Freelorn said. To the riders around them, he called, “In there, people! Among the trees and in front of them, and as high up the slope as is safe for what you’re riding.” He looked at the sheerer western side of Esheh, and added, “Any of you riding goats?”
There was laughter at this, and some of the troops around who were on Steldenes or other mountain-breds went on ahead to secure the western side. Lorn watched them go along, and many others follow, perhaps three hundred horse who had come after his banner: behind them, filling in the gaps among the riders, came a couple of hundred light-armed foot, and finally some straggling pikes. Freelorn looked back, saw more coming, and said to the pikers as he rode in among them, “Up front, people, on the slope: nothing really to do there—just don’t let anyone through.” Grim smiles showed at that.
He stood in the stirrups again and looked northward. The Brightwood people were steady around the northern spur of the Rise now, a great glitter of pikes in the low sunlight, their horse shifting and fitting themselves to the slope. With reason: off westward was a great dark mass coming, horse and pikes behind, the Arlenes, pushing forward fast. Very fast indeed—
In the center, the Eagle banner had begun to slide backwards, the horse and pikes around it giving ground eastward. What’s the matter? Lorn thought, his gut twisting with worry, as he watched the van of the Arlene army hurrying toward the Darthenes. Why isn’t Eftgan holding, there should be no problem, she has plenty of support there— And the Arlene rear was moving much too fast. The mist was starting to rise early as it did in the autumn, and the ground behind the Arlenes was somewhat obscured: but, squinting, Lorn thought that he saw some other force coming up behind the Arlenes, but scattered, not formed up—
Someone cried out up on the slope. Among the trees there was a crashing of branches, and a screech, not human: Freelorn saw a shadowy shape up there, and a horse toppled, screaming in pain. “Fyrd,” he screamed, “look out, there are Fyrd up there—!”
And the tiny knot of organization and order went all to pieces again in a flurry of animal shapes that suddenly were all among them, leaping on horses and people alike, dragging them down snarling. One one of the nadders came at Lorn, hissing, and he picked the good spot to hit it, just behind the head. So that’s why the Arlenes are in such a hurry. Rian is driving them into us— The nadder reared up, hissing, and Lorn swept Hergótha around and swapped its head off, punching Blackie in the side to take him out of the way of the nadder’s still-writhing body and slashing claws. He shook the blood off Hergótha and wheeled to look for another foe, getting a quick glimpse of Blanis lashing out with her Rod, and Fire cracking from it like a whip-thong, burning out the brain of a maw three times her size: the body went crashing. Over there, another keplian, looking around for a victim. He rode Blackie straight into it before the horse had a chance to see what he was heading at: he saw it, he screamed, the keplian reared and slashed with its claws, but Lorn went right in under them for what he wanted, the big artery on the side of the neck—chopped it sidewise and spurred away: the keplian fell, flailing —
There was a sharp pain in Lorn’s leg. He looked down, surprised, and saw the slash across his thigh from the keplian’s claws—one had gotten past the skirt of his mail. He watched the blood ooze for a nasty moment, and then simply pulled the mail-skirt over it so he wouldn’t have to look at it any more—it was painful and ugly, but shallow, and he couldn’t do anything about it. Freelorn got up in the stirrups again, looking down northward toward the center. It was still giving ground eastward, and now he understood, as he saw the Brightwood levies also holding their position through their own turmoil: frantic motion around the edges of their formation told him that the Fyrd were after them too. “Hold it here,” he screamed to the people around him, “don’t lose it, we’re going to have to charge! Don’t let the Fyrd push us down off here—” He could see the Arlenes punching deep into the Darthene ranks, but the Darthenes were pulling back in order, letting them do it. A little deeper, and fully two-thirds of the Arlenes would be past the two rises where Freelorn and the Brightwood levies held. Are they idiots, why don’t they hold back, can’t they see the trap? But then, they had no choice. The Fyrd were driving them, poor creatures. Freelorn swore. Why is Rian doing this?!
The people around him were getting quieter now, the first wave of Fyrd that had hit them almost dead now. Sounds of weeping and swearing came to him, riders moaning with pain from their wounds. He headed among the pikers. Some of them were dead: more were pulling their own pikes, or others’, out of dead Fyrd. “Keep the line northward,” he said to them, “they can’t get up the back of this ridge without some warning. Horse, everybody up, form up with me, we’re going to be moving in about three breaths! Blanis!”
“Here,” she said, coming up behind him, out of breath and bloody. “Not mine,” she added, seeing his expression.
“Is she ready?”
“Just a bit more time. She wants to be sure.”
“You see what’s coming behind them?”
“I saw.” Blanis turned a grim look on him. “Someone wants bloodshed out here today. If not ours, his own people’s—”
Freelorn shook his head. Then, “Now!” Blanis shouted, and bolted off down the hillside on her dun, with the Lion banner streaming wildly ahead of her in the south wind.
“Will you for pity’s sake wait for me?!” Freelorn shouted. He swept Hergótha in a great arc over his head and yelled to the riders behind him, “Come on, their flank’s wide open! You pikes, come along behind, keep our rear! Horse, down on them, break ‘em open!”
His only answer was a wordless shout as the mounted force looked down the hillside and saw every cavalryman’s dream, a whole army moving so fast it had outrun its own rearguard, with all its flank strung out and exposed, and a friendly force on the far side to be anvil to your own forces’ hammer. Freelorn kicked Blackmane, and the horse squealed and leaped down the hill, half running, half sliding sometimes, until the ground flattened out and they were tearing along toward the Arlenes at full gallop. The Arlenes were no more than a hundred yards away now, spilled well over the side of the Road, and the terror rose up in him one more time, and Freelorn did the only thing he could think of as antidote: lifted the sword he held so that the setting sun caught it, and cried to those who followed him, “Hergóthaaaaaaaaa!”
The Arlenes heard, and turned: he saw shocked faces: too late for them to do anything now. CRASH! and it was all happening again, arms, legs, the sharp end of a bloodied pike waving in his face, knocked aside elsewhere, someone’s sword, hacked out of her hand, the thump and skitter of misfired arrows. Freelorn’s force had caught the Arlene flank at open ranks. They pushed it far in, broke it in about five pieces on this side, and then the light-armored fighters went in through the openings, the pikes following to contain the fight. Caught unprepared this way, crushed against one another and hardly able to defend themselves at all, the Arlenes died in crowds. On the far side Freelorn could see the Phoenix banner pushing in toward him, could see the faces of the Brightwood people hacking their way through the Arlenes, climbing now over ground that was increasingly thick with bodies.
Odd, he thought, taking the head off someone’s spear, how much they all look like Herewiss. The Eagle’s blood running strong, I suppose— The spearman hauled out a sword and tried to hamstring Blackie: unfortunately he was wearing no helm, and Freelorn hit him with Hergótha and took the top of his head off, then whirled to deal with someone on his left who was trying to fling a twirl-spear at Blanis.
Off to the right came a roar, and a cry that carried even over all the shouting: “The Eagle, the Eagle to the Lion at bay!” Freelorn grinned terribly. Many years since that battlecry had been heard, and not in these fields: Coldfields, it would have been, the other s
ide of the Arlid. And what do they mean, ‘at bay’? …Oh. He looked frantically from side to side and realized that he had accidentally worked his way off to the side of his own people: only Blanis with his banner was nearby, and he was almost surrounded by Arlenes, not that most of them weren’t running away. Well, most of them weren’t running away: some of them had noticed that he was by himself and were coming toward him now. Angry faces, frightened ones, and faces simply set grim: a spear poised for the cast—
“One more time,” he whispered to Blackmane, and spurred him to make sure. The horse leaped straight into the spearman, knocking him down. One sword Lorn saw raised, and took off the hand that held it at the wrist: another he kicked out of its owner’s hands while its owner was staring at Hergótha, and then kicked the soldier’s head, too, for good measure. Blackmane squealed and lashed out with his hooves, almost unseating Freelorn but knocking another Arlene down and out of the way. Then suddenly the Lion banner was right in front of him, and about forty Darthene riders were all around him, and Freelorn was sitting still, clutching his thigh and moaning. He had forgotten about the wound.Blanis came pushing through the Darthenes around him, shaking the Banner in her frustration at him. “You don’t listen, do you? Always off by yourself getting in trouble—”
Lorn, looking at her, had a sudden image of a young woman in a farmyard somewhere, shooing chickens with a broom, and he burst out laughing. “That’s what my name means,” he said, “what do you expect? You just make yourself useful. Can’t you fix this leg?”
“Leg?” She gave him a horrified look: he twitched the mailskirt aside, and Blanis looked at the wound. Her expression changed to relief. “Oh, Goddess, I thought it was something worse. Here—” She stroked it quickly: the wound stopped bleeding, and closed. “It won’t be a strong scar for a while, don’t strain it—”
“I’m in the middle of a battle, for pity’s sake, of course I’ll strain it,” Freelorn said: “never mind that now!” He stood up in the stirrups again, and the laughter left him. The Arlenes were utterly broken, those of them that the Darthene force had hit: the Arlene rearguard had split and was being hunted through the early evening mists, past the northern slopes of the Rise and down south towards Daharba. But it was not Darthenes that were doing the hunting, and some of that dark force, new to the field, was coming toward them now. There were at least five thousand Fyrd coming, flowing down toward the Road from north and south, just past the hills.
“Not just dumb animals, either,” Freelorn whispered. “Thinkers, like that last lot. We might as well be facing a whole fresh army. And we’re all over the place, look at us—”
“The center,” Blanis said hurriedly. “The Queen thinks we can hold them there.”
Freelorn shook his head. “She’s out of her mind,” he said. “There are as many Fyrd as we have people. And after them, there are still the forces holding the fords, they’ll come out of their diggings and cut us to pieces—”
“Come on!” Blanis said, and rode off toward the Road.
Freelorn looked west, saw the mist, the unnatural way it was darkening: saw the great crowd of Fyrd coming toward them, running silent save for the occasional ugly beast-cry; saw Prydon behind it all with its walls and towers, a dark shape cut sharp against the sky: saw the sky itself, the long clouds reddening, great patches of darkness edged with fire, the Sun now losing itself behind the hills in a furious radiance as red as blood. He knew the reality of his dream now. This evening, this falling darkness, with an unfought army before them that would not be stopped by the fall of night, and something worse behind that army, waiting Its moment.
He swallowed. And what next? he said—to whom, he wasn’t sure. Possibly to the white shape that had hounded him through those dreams into this disastrous sunset again and again, the image of fear and despair. It’s not Me you fear, the Lion had said. But what I represent: the price—
He rode off hard after Blanis, and the twenty or thirty horse who had been following him closely went after. “Break them!” she was shouting. “She says, break them down the middle, split them into two groups and run them up against the hills!”
Freelorn looked at Hergótha in his hand as he rode, and considered how likely the tactic was to work. The odds were certainly no better than even. But no worse, said some idiotic, stubborn part of him. It was the part that had spent too much time in rr’Virendir, reading old tales of the heroes, and had fallen in love with last stands and death-or-glory charges. And this sword had been in one of the greatest of those, and survived. So had its wielder. In a very different form—
He looked around him as he rode. The ground fell off here, as the Road continued down the last gentle slope toward the Bridge. Down below him the Darthenes were massing for the charge, and there was the Eagle banner, and the white banner of the Brightwood, and his own racing down to meet them: and at the head of everything, sudden, a flash of gold, burning in answer to the sunset, and a blade upflung and blazing blue—a rider with a lightningbolt in his hand, riding what seemed a horse whose mane and tail streamed fire. Freelorn’s heart leaped. How long had it been since he had even seen Herewiss from a distance? He raced down after Blanis and lifted Hergótha as he went, not knowing who might be able to see it. The Darthene van was already pushing forward, gathering speed. Herewiss rode near the head of it, and Lorn came in with his banner and his group of horse from one side, pushing toward the front of the group, determined to fight near Herewiss, or die near him if nothing better could be arranged. It was getting dim enough, between the sunset and the dark mist that was flowing around things, to make telling faces at a distance difficult: but Sunspark shone, and Khávrinen was impossible to miss, as were the Rods of the various Rodmistresses riding around Herewiss, and of Eftgan not too far behind. The pace was increasing, past the canter now: horses were afraid of Fyrd, and the best thing to do was to hit them at the gallop. Freelorn saw Khávrinen lifted, saw a great bolt of Fire break from it and strike out at the mass of Fyrd, only a hundred or so yards away now—
Then the two forces met, and the impetus broke, though not with the same crash and clash of weapons. Snarls and screeches of beast-voices, thick with a malice that no mere beast could know, went up all around: screams of horses and of humans answered them. At first Freelorn thought he could bear it, it was just one more battle—but his weariness was beginning to catch up with him now, and Hergótha began to weigh in his hand as it had not earlier. And the Fyrd came, and came, and kept on coming. No matter how many of them you killed, there was always one more, sometimes two or three of them at once. And the horror of the combat wore on you, unlike that (which was bad enough) of fighting other human beings. Inhuman, half-mad, these creatures hated not only you personally, but all humanity: and they moved with terrible cunning and unison, like parts of a body run by one mind. If in danger of being cut off from the main group, they would drop back, refusing the bait, regroup and attack again—
Freelorn fought and fought, and saw, between glimpses, the Darthene center being pushed in. But not willingly, this time. The Fyrd were killing the horses, going over their bodies for their riders, and then straight at the next line of horse. Soon the Darthenes would have no mobility left at all. Lorn could see his banner, just barely, but he had lost sight of the Eagle in the confusion, and as he looked for it, he saw the Phoenix totter and go down. Horrified, he looked to the front for Herewiss—just in time to see a shape vault up against Sunspark’s brightness, take Khávrinen through its body, screaming, and fall again—but dragging Herewiss with it.
Freelorn’s heart turned over in him in terror. He saw another wave of Fyrd push past where Herewiss had been, heading for something with awful purpose—he looked along their track, and saw the Eagle banner there, and just a glimpse of fair hair seen by the light of a blazing Rod. But the Queen could take care of herself. Freelorn spurred Blackmane toward where he had seen Herewiss go down —
The thunderclap, right overhead, was so loud it nearly struck him
out of the saddle: and Blackie shied and reared, as did many of the other horses. But there had been no lightningstroke. Lorn looked up and saw what he at first could not understand. It was an arrow, or dart, shot high: so he thought at first, from its shape against the high dusk, and the way it flew. But no one could now shoot an arrow so high that it still caught the sunlight, and this did, glancing it back blood-red and half-blinding through the dusk, like a star. But a star that fell. The arrow passed out of the light into darkness, but still showed against the sky, a black shape, falling at greater and greater speed: and it passed over the battlefield swifter than any eagle, with a roar like the angry sea. A moment later, in its wake, came a crash of thunder that echoed between the hills and made the first one sound paltry by comparison.
The wind of the great shape’s passing came after, but not before another of the terrible thunder-crashes, and a third and fifth and tenth as other arrow-shapes lost the gleam of the Sun and dropped lower in its wake, the speed of their passage outraging the air into thunder again and again. Then a gale blew on the battlefield as the first dark form passed over once more, much lower this time. Even the Fyrd reacted to that, howling and hissing threat and rage at the sky. Many of them died in that moment’s confusion, at the hands of people they had been attacking. The roar that the great shape made this time had nothing to do with speed. It was the sound of a great voice, singing in some unknown tongue, singing one word, dreadful and final. It sounded like death.
The dark arrow-shape flew on over the body of the group of Fyrd attacking the Darthenes, unfolded its wings, which had been held close against its body while it dived down from the upper airs, and landed there. The Fyrd who were not crushed by it flung themselves on it, but the darkness shook itself, scattering them like leaves. It spread its great black wings, and arched its neck. In this darkness, Freelorn could see how preparatory lightnings flickered about the wing-barbs and sheeted down the membranes; and then the Dragon flamed.