Chapter Forty-Two
They made better time from Ballion than Chris had hoped. Seven hours of jouncing over cobbled roads, dirt roads, and no roads had left him with cramps in his back, his arms, and his brain. After the first hour, the buzz from the wrak antidote wore off, and after the second, he began to agree with Tireus’s opinion of his plan. It wasn’t just crazy, it was probably suicidal.
By the time he gunned the Land Rover over the crest of the last hill and into view of Glen Arden, Brooke’s full tank of gas had evaporated into fumes. He shut down the engine and unbent himself to open the door and step up onto the running board.
Blood roses filled Faramore Flats, the meadow that funneled down to the lakeshore. With their upright petals and black centers, the flowers bloomed by the thousands, rippling in the wind like a stained sea. Overhead, a strange crimson dawn stormed across the sky and cast a contorted reflection into the lake around Glen Arden. Faramore Bridge hung eerily empty, and the semicircle of sunken redoubts on the shore lay in silence.
Then he raised his gaze. At the far end of the meadow, Koraudian troops plowed through the blood roses. Little more than five miles of open ground lay between them and the subjugation of their enemy’s capital. He forced the air out of his lungs.
“God in heaven,” Worick murmured.
Hanging out of the opposite door, Allara peered through her spyglass. “There’s Mactalde.”
Chris groped for his own spyglass.
A battalion or so to the rear, Mactalde sat his horse by the side of the road. He leaned to the side, reading a map held by one of his aides. Every few seconds, he glanced up to scan his troops.
Chris lowered the spyglass. “All right. Here’s what we’re going to do.” His pulse pounded against his bandaged ribs. “I want you all to run down to the nearest redoubt. Alert any troops you can find to get out here and make a stand. Then all of you get into the city.” He looked at Allara. “Blow the bridge and cut the skycar cables.”
Her eyebrows formed a dark line. “What about you?”
“Mactalde’s just sitting out there. If I can get through the trees fast enough, I might get a shot at him.”
Behind him, Quinnon rumbled. “You get that close and you’re a dead man, one way or t’other.”
“How are you going to get down there fast enough?” Allara asked. “That’s a league and a half, at least.”
“They’re coming my way anyway. We’ll meet in the middle.”
He shucked out of his coat and checked the load on his Glock. He only had ten more rounds. He’d meant to bring over more ammunition today, but with all the commotion in camp and Brooke’s unsolicited visit back in Chicago, he hadn’t managed it. He snapped the magazine back into place and steeled himself with a breath. Ten shots would have to do. If not, he’d have to fall back on chewser and estoc.
He turned to see his father leaning through the gap between the front seats. Worick’s frown furrowed his face, but he didn’t say anything to stop him. Chris hadn’t expected him to. Worick knew the score here. He knew what Chris was going to have to do sooner or later, and as much as his father might want to protect him, he would probably be disappointed in him had he chosen to do anything else.
“When you get into the city,” Chris told him, “get Mom and the girls and bring them up to the palace. The waterfront’s probably not going to be the safest place for a while.”
Worick tucked his chin in a tight nod. His face conveyed all the worry his voice didn’t, but it also offered something else: a spark of pride. “Be careful.”
Allara ducked back inside the car and leaned across the seats to snatch Chris’s sleeve. “What about the Tarn?”
In the backseat, Orias sat motionless, his bound hands resting on his thighs. He might have seemed calm if not for the slow blue flush rising under his milky skin.
Chris looked back at Allara. “Keep him with you. If you get into any trouble, let him go.”
She shook her head. “I don’t trust him.”
He touched her hand. “Then do it because you trust me.”
“I . . .” She let him pull her hand free of his sleeve. The blue of her eyes stared up at him, and he realized for the first time what maybe even she didn’t know herself—that she did trust him. When had that happened?
He shot Orias one last glance. “Keep them safe?”
Quinnon emitted a soft snort, but Orias inclined his head, almost regally.
That was all he had time for. In less than an hour, the red in the meadows wouldn’t be just from the roses. He jumped down from the running board and sucked the cold wind into his lungs. Then he hunkered down and slipped into the trees.
He tore through the underbrush, trying to find a balance between pacing himself and pushing himself. He was in good shape, but not for running miles after a sleepless night on top of a recent injury, however minor. When he reached Mactalde—if he reached Mactalde—he needed to be steady.
For the first mile or so, he kept within view of the meadow. Periodic glances over his shoulder showed him Allara and the others abandoning the Land Rover and running downhill to the circular redoubts sunk into the ground on either side of Faramore Bridge.
Both redoubts were supposed to hold a full complement of Guardsmen, but who knew how many Tireus had pulled out to defend Ballion. Of those who were left, who knew how many were still loyal? The lookouts had obviously been bought out or incapacitated, since no one in the city had yet raised the alarm. With any luck, Allara would find enough men still able and willing to slam the brakes on Mactalde’s advance.
By the time he was near enough to hear the Koraudians’ marching tread, the cold had seared his lungs. He angled deeper into the woods, where they couldn’t see him, and slowed so they couldn’t hear him. His pistol clamped in his numb fingers, he crouched and listened.
The pop of a signal flare and the crackle of its explosion echoed from the redoubt. So Allara had gotten that far. He closed his eyes and breathed out. The signal would both alert the city and be relayed back to Tireus. Not that he would ever get here in time.
Commotion swept through the troops in the meadow. A faint sound, like the growing rumble of thunder, reached him more as a feeling in the soles of his feet than a sound. Then it grew and the shouts of men joined it. It wasn’t the storm, but a charge. The Koraudians were charging.
He rose and angled back toward the edge of the meadow. Red tabards flashed between the trees. The thud of their footsteps and the roar of their battle cries washed over him. He broke into a run.
Half a dozen Koraudian foot soldiers, prowling within the tree line, heard his approach and turned. He raised the Glock and took a wild shot at the first. The man ducked, and the shot went wide. The Koraudian shouted at his companions, and they all started toward him. As far as they knew he’d have to reload before firing again.
He forced himself to stop and place his next shots deliberately, just as Paul had taught him. He dropped all six men in eight shots. That left him just one bullet for Mactalde.
Blood roaring in his ears, he left the carnage he had just created and ran to the tree line. The Koraudian charge flooded the meadow. A thin battalion of Laeler soldiers had emerged from the city. They crashed into the Koraudians and shattered against the sheer weight of overpowering numbers. Blood roses engulfed them, drowning men and horses up to their knees and swallowing the dead.
Chris scanned back through the Koraudian lines. On a knoll, not fifty yards away, Mactalde sat on his horse and glassed the field. Aides milled around him. Rotoss was nowhere to be seen.
Chris was only going to get one shot, and he needed to get as close as he could. He breathed deep, bounced once on the balls of his feet, then ran. He made it all of twenty yards before someone saw him and shouted. Without hesitating, he dropped to one knee and raised the pistol to Mactalde’s chest.
Mactalde glanced around. His eye found Chris’s, and Chris pulled the trigger. One of the three aides threw himself in front of
Mactalde, and the bullet crashed through him.
Almost before the aide fell, Chris cast aside the Glock and drew the chewser from his second bandoleer holster. Mactalde and his aides were already moving, already spurring their horses, but not to get away. Sword in one hand and a flanged mace in the other, Mactalde spun to face Chris and charged. Chris pulled the chewser’s trigger, and the heavy caliber slug ripped into the second aide’s horse, cartwheeling it over the top of its rider.
The third aide reached him, before he could reload. He hurled the heavy chewser into the man’s face, even as he leapt. With one hand, he shoved the aide from the saddle and with the other he caught the saddlebow and pulled himself up and over. He dragged the horse around to trample its rider and to face Mactalde. He drew his sword.
Thunder shredded the sky, and for a millisecond, lightning froze the world in its glare. He passed Mactalde at a gallop and leaned halfway out of the saddle to hammer his blade at him. In one blow, he could decapitate the enemy of Lael once and forever and save the worlds from breaking.
But, of course, it couldn’t be that easy. Mactalde caught the sword against his crossguard and pounded the mace down on the flat of Chris’s blade. The sword caught fast between Mactalde’s weapons and yanked from Chris’s grip.
Chris grabbed at his saddlebow to save his balance and drove his horse forward. He galloped past a Koraudian who was fighting with a Laeler footman, snatched the Koraudian’s second sword from the sheath on his back, and turned.
Mactalde bowed over his horse’s neck. “And so we do battle.” His spurs lanced his horse.
Chris watched Mactalde’s eyes, watched his weapons. He hadn’t really expected to get this far. Now that he had, he had to figure out a way to match swords with a man who seemed fated to conquer, no matter what he tried his hand at.
The two horses swept abreast of each other, and the wind pounded around them. Chris ducked the scythe of Mactalde’s blade and shot up his own sword barely in time to catch the mace. For the second time, the blow nearly destroyed his grip.
“Had rather a difficult time of it since you arrived here, haven’t you, Master Gifted?” The wind howled at Mactalde’s back and catapulted his words into Chris’s ears. He bared his teeth. “Everyone lies to you. Everyone wants to kill you.” He beat his sword and his mace—one, two—against Chris’s upraised blade. “But lately I seem to find you playing the knight-errant every time I turn around.”
Chris fought to breathe. He’d never engaged in swordplay on horseback. Quinnon’s abbreviated curriculum had skipped that lesson, and his body didn’t seem to be remembering anything useful. He caught up his reins and dragged the horse back to place a buffer of space between his inexperience and Mactalde.
“Don’t look so shocked,” Mactalde said. “You asked for this fight, you know. You came hunting for me, not I you.” His horse tossed its head, and Mactalde held its chin almost to its neck. The horse half-reared, hopping on its front legs, refusing to stand.
Chris blinked away his sweat. “You need to listen to me—for your own sake. You being here again isn’t natural.”
Mactalde trotted forward. “Miracles are seldom natural.”
Chris held his ground. “Did you know the worlds are out of balance? Did you know they’re breaking apart?”
A dark ripple crossed Mactalde’s face. “The worlds cannot break. One cannot be without the other to balance it.”
“They’re out of balance because of you. You can’t stay here.”
His eyes glared, unblinking, from his face. He trembled, not from fear, not from exhaustion, but from sheer passionate conviction. “I died so I might stay here.”
Chris held his sword in front of him. In his chest, his lungs burned like a kiln. “You’re destroying Lael.”
“I will rebuild Lael.”
“Look around you!” He pointed to the maelstrom overhead. The wind whipped through the clouds and spun the red dawn back into gray. “Don’t you realize more is going on than just this war?” He pulled his horse back one step, then another. He couldn’t beat Mactalde in a fair fight. He’d missed his opportunity when he’d missed his shot. The only chance he had left was to make the man see reason. From Mactalde’s fevered expression, that choice didn’t offer much hope either. His mind raced. “I could take you back to Chicago. What if I just took you back? It might be like none of it ever happened.”
Mactalde shook his head. “Why would I go back?”
Thunder rent the sky, and rain spattered Chris’s face. “Because you can stop the worlds from breaking.”
“Oh, you are a fool.” Mactalde flexed his fingers around his sword. “I can’t stop the breaking now.”
Chris blew the raindrops from his lips. “Then I have to.”
This time he didn’t wait for Mactalde to attack. He swung hard and fast. Their swords collided again and again. He fought instinctively, reflexively. He had no defenses.
Mactalde’s sword crashed once more into his. His mace’s silver head flicked across the corner of Chris’s vision. He would need only one direct hit to lay Chris open.
Chris flung his free arm to meet the mace, and his forearm smashed against Mactalde’s knuckles. The mace hurtled end over end to land among the bloodstained roses. The wound in Chris’s side stretched and tore, and pain jagged up his ribcage. Choking it down, he turned just in time to meet Mactalde’s boot against his chest.
He hit the ground too hard to remember why he had fallen. When he looked back up, Mactalde’s blade plunged toward his heart.
__________
The wind shrieked in Orias’s ears. He stood on the far wall of the Western Faramore Redoubt and searched for Chris in the meadow’s ominous carpeting of red.
Pitch hoisted himself onto a merlon, one hand on Orias’s shoulder. “You see him? I don’t see him.”
The Searcher led two horses up the stone ramp to the wall that encircled the sunken fort. She stopped beside him and scanned the field. Her hands were bone white around the reins. “If we’d come five minutes later, they’d have taken the city.” On her orders, the city’s troops had charged to meet the Koraudians.
Raz clambered up beside Pitch. “They may take it yet. Then you’ll wish you had gotten here five minutes later and saved yourselves a cartload of lives.”
Quinnon, followed by Worick, clomped up the ramp. “Since when is it that Lael needs the likes of you as a battle advisor?” He pushed Orias’s shoulder. “Move.”
“Wait!” Pitch bounced. “I see him! There he is!” He scrambled up Orias’s arm onto his shoulder and clung to his ear for balance. “See him?”
Orias squinted. The faraway figure of a man in a leather jerkin, running, edged into focus against the field of windswept red. Chris dropped to one knee and raised a handgun. His first shot felled a soldier who hurled himself in front of another. His second shot, with a second pistol, took out a horse. The remaining Koraudians charged, and Chris dragged the front one from his saddle and commandeered his horse. He turned to face the oncoming Koraudian.
Allara exhaled. “That’s Mactalde.”
Pitch yanked at Orias’s ear. “He’s found Mactalde! He’s going to kill him!”
Orias’s innards thickened. Chris couldn’t kill Mactalde. As much as the Gifted had learned since he had arrived, he was inexperienced and untried. Twenty years ago, Mactalde had been a master swordsman. Even the Cherazii respected his skill.
He turned to Allara. “Let me go.”
She stared at him. “I can’t. How can you expect me to trust you? Even after what you did for us last night.”
Quinnon’s hand fell onto Orias’s manacled wrist. “I said move.”
Orias held her gaze. She must realize this was their only chance. Orias was Chris’s only chance. “If you don’t let me go, Mactalde will kill him.”
She looked across the battlefield, and her teeth worried her lower lip. “He can take care of himself.”
“We both know he can’t beat Mactalde in
a fair fight.”
“You see him having another option, do you?” Quinnon asked.
“Change the odds. Nobody says he has to do this by himself. Besides, he’s wounded.”
Her chin came up. “And who wounded him?”
“I need Lael to survive as much as you do.” He twisted his hands free of Quinnon’s grasp.
She darted a look to the meadow. Chris passed Mactalde at a gallop, and Mactalde not only parried his blow but wrenched Chris’s sword from his hands. Her pulse quivered in her temple.
Worick pushed forward to stand beside her. “Let him go, my lady. Somebody has to go. Let him go.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.” She drew a dagger from her belt and turned to Orias. “This isn’t because I trust you. It’s because Chris does.” She freed him with one slash and shoved his weapons into his hands
He looked at the Rievers. “Stay.”
They nodded, reluctantly.
Without a backward glance, he swung onto a horse and clattered across the stone platform that bridged the redoubt wall and the earth outside. He turned the horse’s face toward the meadow and galloped onto the field.
Fire flooded his limbs and his brain. Blood burned beneath his skin. Men either scattered before him or were trampled underfoot. He cared not who fell, be they Koraudians or Laelers. He would justify any casualty, any risk, if it meant saving the Gifted. That was all he had left now.
He watched Chris fight, watched him parry Mactalde’s onslaught with more raw grit than skill. Too occupied with the swordplay, Chris failed to see Mactalde’s mace arcing toward his head. Almost too late, his arm snapped up to stay Mactalde’s hand, and the mace hurtled free.
Orias read Mactalde’s next move in every taut line of his body. He saw the man’s weight tilt to the outside, saw his hand drop to the saddlebow. His foot came free of the stirrup, and Chris turned back to catch the full force of the kick against his chest.
As Mactalde rode forward to loom over Chris, thunder cracked open the ashen skies. Rain pelted Orias’s face like needles of ice. The wind ripped through the blood roses, and petals scattered like drops of blood. Probably some were blood.
He opened his mouth in a roar. The horse gave one more burst of speed, gathered its hindquarters, and leapt a line of fallen bodies. Mactalde flipped his sword in his grip. Its point hovered above Chris’s chest. If he had any final words to offer, they were torn away in the howling duet of wind and thunder.
Pebbles of hail spattered against Orias’s back. He swung off his horse, his feet running before they ever touched the ground. Mactalde’s blade plunged, and, without slowing, Orias bellowed and swung.
His sword hit Mactalde’s and ripped it away, seconds before it would have pierced the Gifted’s chest. Still running, he spun around and fought to bring his balance and speed under control.
With a snarl, Mactalde urged his charger after Orias. Orias sliced the horse’s front legs out from under him in one clean swing. Mactalde hurtled over the horse’s head and rolled to his feet in the blood roses beyond.
On every side, hailstones smashed to the ground, and the roses burst into clouds of black seed. Somewhere at the edge of his senses, Orias recognized Chris collecting his sword and shoving to his feet. But he had no intention of holding Mactalde at bay until the Gifted could get to him. This was his fight now.
Mactalde pulled a dirk from his belt, but they both knew the weapon could be no defense against the length and heft of a Cherazii broadsword.
“You.” Mactalde breathed a harsh laugh. “Why am I not surprised to see blues no longer honoring their covenants? Come, let us end this.”
Orias took one more stride, planted himself, and canted his body for a final blow. His sword swept through the distance between them.
But it never connected.
A hailstone the size of his fist slammed into the blade. He staggered forward, his balance destroyed, and more hail pounded into his back.
Mactalde gasped a laugh and spread his hands. Rain and sweat beaded his beard. “You see? Even Nature protects me.”
A stone struck behind Orias’s ear. Warm blood oozed against the ice.
“Orias, watch out!” Chris shouted.
Koraudians bore down on him. Rotoss rode at their front, his face streaked with blood beneath his brimmed helmet. Orias’s stomach burned.
“Move!” Chris said.
He dove out of the way, and the horses swept past. Hail battered his shoulders. A stone hit the back of his knee, and his toes went numb. He shoved himself up. Blood thumped in his leg, and sparks tingled up and down his calf.
War cries fragmented into screams and confusion as both Laelers and Koraudians swarmed the meadow. The hail thickened and turned deadly. In an instant, the battle became a mass retreat. One of Rotoss’s men had picked up Mactalde, and every Koraudian in sight was running for the lake. The city and its two circular redoubts offered the only protection for leagues.
Chris had reclaimed his mount, and he galloped toward Orias with a second horse in tow. Orias met him halfway, sheathed his sword on his back, and vaulted into the saddle. Soldiers—red and green alike—surged on every side.
A Laeler footman leapt up and grabbed Orias’s saddlebow. “A ride! For the love of all that’s holy, let me ride! We’ll be stoned to death out here!”
Orias pried away the man’s hand.
All around, men staggered beneath the rain of hail, screaming and bleeding and begging the riders to stop. Orias saw them only at the edge of his vision. He charted the field’s swells and divots and natural barriers. Here and there, knots of soldiers still battled, but for the most part, the armies had surrendered all pretext of fighting. All that mattered now was survival.
Ahead, Mactalde slowed and started shouting. The Koraudians in the front columns began to reform. Farther ahead, Guardsmen gathered at the bridge: one thin line trying to defend a city from the retreat of two desperate armies.
A footman ran between Orias and Chris. “Help me! Help us!” He raised his clasped his hands to Chris. “You’re the Gifted! You’re supposed to help us!”
Chris reached for the man and pulled him up behind his own saddle.
Orias snatched his dirk from his belt. “Don’t be a fool! They’ll pull the bridge out from under your feet if you don’t get there in time!”
“We can’t leave them all out here to die!”
Orias snarled. He could leave them, and with right good will. He dragged his horse over, knee to knee with Chris, and shoved his dirk beneath the footman’s chin. “Get off!”
The man’s pupils shrank to almost nothing; his eyes gleamed impossibly white.
“Orias!” Chris’s fist clamped his wrist “Let him go!”
“You can’t afford the extra weight slowing you down! Mactalde’s life may be charmed, but yours isn’t!”
“I can’t save all the men who are going to die out here today. But I can save one!”
Orias slammed his dirk back into his belt. Before either Chris or the man could resist, he hauled the soldier off Chris’s horse and dumped him across his saddlebow.
“You’ve saved him. Now go!”
Everywhere, men fell, screaming, with broken arms and bleeding heads. A stone the size of a Riever’s skull smashed into the eye of a Koraudian’s horse. The horse catapulted to the ground, bowled over three Guardsmen, and rolled over the top of its rider. The soldiers trampled them all.
Chris leaned out of his saddle, grabbed a fallen Guardsman by the hand, and swung the man up behind him.
Orias swore. Did the Gifted have a death wish or was he truly brainless enough to think he could thumb his nose every time Death rode up behind him? Better that half the army should die than the Gifted.
Orias drew his sword and his axe. If the Gifted refused to protect himself, then Orias would have to do it for him.