Outside, he still heard the belling of hounds. Mykkael cursed their ill-starred persistence. He tipped back his head, rubbed sweat from his brow, and pitched his crawling nerves to endure. He had suffered far worse in his past. No risk undertaken to ease his distress would excuse the mistake if the citadel’s searchers should trap him.
Time fleeted. He measured the cost of each second passing, and wrestled to bind his fraying awareness to the immediate present. Weariness defeated him. Or else the attrition of stress let in chaos, and witch thought sucked him under again.
The cries of the pack hunting near at hand melded into the yelps of another, far distant…
Her efforts to circle behind her pursuit had led to disastrous failure. Again and again, the steep gash of the ravine forestalled any chance of escape. Though she tried, she could not flee down the back of the ridge. Her shins were scraped and bruised, from the tumbling fall she had suffered the desperate time she had tried. Old rock slides had scoured the unstable slope. The scarred rubble left behind was a precarious trap of loose scree, dead trees and smashed boulders.
Her hag-ridden flight had pressed her too far up the mountain. The scant cover provided by storm-ravaged evergreens could not hide her from mounted riders. The huntsman in charge of the pack at her heels knew his grim trade too well. He worked his hounds with unshakable patience, undeterred as the sun and wind leached away the moisture binding her scent. Each time the dogs circled in baffled checks, he whistled encouragement to his lead couple, and cast his seeking pack wider. Patiently thorough, he covered each hollow and patched scrap of shade until her path was unravelled again.
On bare rock, where the trail had gone cold, her pageboy’s shoes had crumbled the dry lichens. The tracker’s diligence found those faint signs, and the hunt dogged her heels without let-up.
She sweated, wrung by exhaustion and crushed hope. While the hounds relentlessly zigzagged up the ridge, hied on by shouts from the riders, she faced the futility of trying to run. The scoured rocks of the peaks held no haven. While she panted, pressed to tears of trapped rage, she glimpsed furtive movement on the slope down below her.
A boy in brown homespun slipped out of a thicket, dragging what looked like a bundle of stained hide over the ground with a pull rope. Too young for a beard, he moved like a wild thing, blending into the minimal shelter of tree and stone and dry gulley. His towhead stayed attentively turned, as though he gauged the cry of the hounds and measured their closing distance.
At the crest of the ridge, where the scars of the slides had savaged the flank of the mountain, he paused and rolled his bundle over the brink. Then he bolted, dodging towards the ravine, perhaps agile enough to clamber down, or else aware of a hidden cleft with the saving grace of a footpath. She watched him go, and considered the risks of attempting to follow his footsteps.
Yet before she could act, the hounds burst upslope. Scattered and questing to trace a cold trail, they struck the fresh line the boy had just dragged across their path of pursuit.
The lead couple nosed the hot scent. Their wild tongue rallied the pack like a torrent. Seized by primal instinct, they swerved and ran riot.
The huntsman frantically sounded his horn. His shrilled call was ignored. The dogs plunged away in hysterical frenzy, straight for the rim of the scree slope. Running flat out, they charged over the brink, nose to ground in yapping, full chorus.
‘Powers of hell, they’ve picked up a deer!’ the huntsman yelled in frustration. He spurred through the scrub, too late to head off the disaster.
Before his eyes, the hounds plunged ahead. Intoxicated by the scent laid to trap them, they streamed through a rattling fall of loose stone. Rocks and boulders shifted, turned over, and rolled. The pack scarcely faltered. Their belling changed pitch to shrill yelps as they tumbled, milled head over heels as the unstable footing let go with a ground-shaking roar.
More riders pelted out of the woods. These wore guard surcoats, polished helms and mail byrnies, and with them were Taskin’s crack archers.
‘There!’ cried the huntsman. He pointed towards a disturbance that shivered the brush. ‘That could be the two-legged quarry we’re tracking!’
‘Bring him down!’ snapped the officer leading the company. ‘Whether or not he’s the man on crown warrant, he’s run interference on behalf of a criminal and destroyed the king’s favourite hunting pack.’
At his order, four men reined up short and nocked arrows. They bent their bows, aimed, and released a tight volley after the fleeing boy…
The flight of the shot arrow snagged the thread of his dream, and consciousness plunged into darkness. The tug of blind instinct let Mykkael sense the choked-off cry that Sessalie’s princess stifled to silence.
‘Your Grace, stay still!’ he gasped in warning, as though the fierce will behind whispered words might pierce through to her distant awareness.
Anja’s peril was desperate. If she gave in to fear, if she moved or called out, the armed party of hunters who chased down the boy would resume their diverted pursuit. Deprived of their dogs, they still had a skilled tracker, and hours of remaining daylight.
Mykkael thrashed in his sleep, his oath-sworn charge to defend her safety granted no outlet for release.
‘Anja!’ he whispered.
Frustration tore through and broke the connection. The princess’s lingering anguish remained, seared through his being, heart-deep. Remembrance of another woman’s suffering woke his past, and unleashed the dire force of his nightmares.
Crammed in the dank straw at the back of the kennel barrel, Mykkael rode that slipstream of horror. Again, he experienced the rolling grass of the steppe, where a camp-circle of painted elkhide tents slapped in the tug of the breezes. The harmonic chanting of Sanouk shamans lapped him under layer upon layer of raised power. Their quickened conjury crackled over his skin, and that of the woman he cradled. Song swelled and subsided, all to no avail. No shimmering ward of unbinding could lend him the foothold to speak her name and be heard. Try though he might, all the love he possessed could not lift the fires that raged through her violated mind. Again he beheld the mad, silver eyes of Orannia, whose days and nights framed a prison of agony, lost to the torment of Rathtet spell lines that no power he knew could release.
Crushed by helpless despair, Mykkael caught her hands. He subdued their blind fight. As he had, countless times, he fell back on endurance and constrained her reasonless thrashing. When she finally wore herself down to a state of limpid exhaustion, the shamans broke their circle again. They laid quiet hands on his shoulders, dusty and bronze and streaming with sweat from the throes of his adamant striving.
He remembered, unwilling. The sun had poured down like liquid gold, as the silenced Sanouk singers filed out one by one, and left him with their defeat.
The dream ended, as always: Mykkael buried his face in the warmth of his beloved’s tangled black hair. Wrung mute in every language he knew, he yielded to grief, and begged that blank darkness to drown him…
An unknown interval later, Mykkael wakened, jerked back through the focus of barqui’ino trance by the vibrating thrum of his sword hilt. He tossed off choking straw. The darkness framed a punched circle of twilight, and the kennel barrel rocked, slammed by the mastiff’s snarling lunge as she hit the fixed end of her chain.
Spurred by a flooding jolt of adrenaline, Mykkael erupted on lethal reflex and launched out of the barrel behind her.
The cottage windows glowed orange, unshuttered and spilling soft light through the shadow of dusk. Five horses stood tied by the melon patch, dismissed in the stream of stripped-down perception, rote-trained to seek only targets. Two guards in Devall’s livery lounged by the door, engrossed in idle talk with a leather-clad fellow, bearing a huntsman’s bone-handled skinning knives.
Naked, and shedding a flurry of straw, Mykkael charged. If the knee slowed his pace, his bare feet scarcely rustled the dew-drenched grasses.
His sword rammed the huntsman point blank thr
ough the kidney. The low thrust angled upwards to pierce through the diaphragm, and emerged just under the heart. The killed man slammed into the right-hand guard, and knocked him half-senseless into the door jamb. The sword’s out-thrust tip pierced him, also. His cry was ignored. Mykkael used the first victim’s dead weight as fulcrum, jerked upwards, and widened the damage. He followed through with a twist of his wrist, and a wrenching yank sideways. The bound blade struck bone, ripped the nerves of the spine, and the paralysed huntsman dropped, gagging. Mykkael stomped the air from the expiring corpse, foothold for a leap that hurled him into close quarters. A blow to the standing guard’s wristbone slapped his drawn sword wide, and laid him open for a hammering punch to the larynx. The blow crushed the cartilage. He reeled away, choking blood.
Mykkael spun, cleared his blade from the downed huntsman’s body, and finished his whirling pivot. The spinning force of his cut slashed the punctured guard at the waist. The body collapsed, spilling entrails, while the desertman bore through on his unspent impetus and smashed shoulder down through the doorway.
The mastiff’s ongoing, hysterical racket obscured the groans of the dying. Warned by the crashed door, allowed a blurred second in which to react, the lowcountry guard posted inside the threshold died first, of a chopping stroke to the neck.
Mykkael hurtled over the falling remains. Sluiced in the rained jet from a severed artery, he felt the warding tattoo at his nape come alive with a razor-edged tingle. Light flared through his aura. Made aware he had blundered across the proximity of a sorcerer’s active spell lines, he let the burst run to ground through the ward’s sphere of shielding. The fact the effect momentarily blinded him was not going to make any difference. The glimpse as he entered had already mapped out the lay of the room. Barqui’ino reaction drove him ahead on the flow of subconscious awareness.
While the whine of shed sorceries hazed his nerves like live fire, he relinquished his mind, let go of identity, and gave his schooled instinct free rein.
His hands encountered live flesh, and killed, before thought could track the result.
Stopped, hard-breathing, Mykkael blinked through the glaring blaze as the disrupted spell line shredded away. Then the shivering force of barqui’ino backlash broke over him. He held still, hurled into the wrenching shift as the sluggish process of reason re-engaged, then laboured to sort the meaningful aftermath written into his spattered surroundings.
The man who had carried the sorcerer’s power lay, neck broken, under his feet. Catspaw, not minion: the cold link had severed with death. The wasp hum from his sword had faded to silence, leaving the mastiff’s outraged barks, and a woman’s hysterical weeping.
Mykkael looked up from his scarlet hands. Five horses, five kills; all threat seemed dispatched. He dismissed the odd fact he was naked. Then he noticed the victim stretched prone on the settle. The man’s stubbled face seemed familiar. He lay stretched out and strapped at wrist and ankle with the twine a trapper might use to bind otter snares. Mykkael sucked in a shuddering breath. Another layer of deep training let go. Recognition seeped back, followed by the clumsy recovery of speech. ‘Benj? Are you lucid?’
The gaunt poacher shut his eyes, which spilled over with helpless tears. He answered, voice quaking, ‘Hell’s fury, you’d best ask yourself that.’ He swallowed, and turned his head with strained anguish. ‘Help Mirag. See to the boy’
Mykkael followed his glance. He saw the arrow-shot child sprawled on the floor, then the matron, knelt over him, keening with grief.
Full cognizance slammed back. Sorrow and regret flooded into the emptied expanse of his mind, leaving Mykkael winded and speechless. Next moment, thought came, and his battle-trained senses recorded the fact the boy’s stillness was not unbreathing. He lay gravely wounded, not dead. The frenetic, bright tint of foamed blood at his lips suggested that he had been lung-shot.
‘What happened?’ Mykkael raised his clogged sword. While he pressed his gimping step over the splashed floorboards, Benj flinched, jerked short by the cruel restraints.
Mykkael read the fear inspired by his movement. He stopped still; waited. While his friend recoiled in stark fear from his presence, he recovered the requisite gentleness.
‘Benj, what happened?’ he repeated.
The distraught poacher continued to stare as though he confronted a stranger. At length, he managed to frame words. ‘Timal turned the king’s pack as you asked, and they caught him.’
Mykkael surmised the rest out of heartsick conjecture. ‘Since he couldn’t be questioned, they brought him back here? Then tried to pry answers from you?’ Shown a terse nod, the desert-bred forced a taut grip from his blood-slippery fingers. He acted fast, to shorten distress: two neat cuts slashed the ties holding the captive. ‘Benj, I’m your friend. Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘No chance,’ gasped the poacher, still trying to conceal the embarrassing fact he was shivering. ‘And anyway, the damage was done. Timal was already grievously hurt. Mirag saw the risk. If they captured you here, the crown might see us hang as collaborators.’ He shuddered, the lingering shock of his panic still darkening his distended pupils. ‘We didn’t guess we’d be tried by a sorcerer.’
‘A catspaw, borrowed as puppet, no more. Rest easy, he’s now destroyed.’ Mykkael braced the goodman’s quivering shoulder, and allowed the firm contact to restore reassurance. ‘Let’s think about Timal. I’ll need the remedies you keep for the dogs. Also any herbals you have that I might use to make compresses.’
His firm tone let Mirag recover a semblance of her shattered poise. ‘Devall’s huntsman already dug out the arrow.’ She raised reddened eyes, wiping her wet cheeks with the back of a palsied hand. ‘The point had wedged between ribs, so he said. He assured us the puncture was shallow.’
‘The boy’s still bleeding,’ Mykkael stated, his urgency carefully tempered. ‘Keep him warm, Mirag. Above anything, don’t try to move him.’
The desert-bred helped to prop her husband erect, and wisely withheld the unpleasant prognosis that too often attended a lung wound. Instead, he called on his field experience and urged the stunned household to regroup and take needful action. ‘Benj? Build up the hearth. Then shove the fire tong under the coals. We’re going to need it for cautery. I have to attend a brief errand outside. Fast as I can, I’ll be back to assist you.’
The poacher rubbed the chafed skin at his wrists, and gamely struggled to rally. ‘Unshackle the mastiff as you go by, before she breaks her damned neck.’
Mykkael nodded, already going. As he bent to clear the hacked dead from the doorway, he noted the face of the sorcerer’s catspaw, a hapless victim claimed and used by an evil compulsion, who had almost succeeded in channelling a spell line to break old Benj in submission. A split second only, the desert-bred paused, regarding his kill in fierce irony. Naked and dirt-smeared, still reeking of the poacher’s rank potion of fox piss, and with the blood of five men unwashed from his hands, he vented his barbaric thought.
Three stripes marred his back for drawing his steel in the presence of Devall’s crown advocate. ‘But what laughable penalty will I have earned for snapping the man’s neck with bare hands?’
‘A scolding,’ carped Benj, thrust back to his feet, and desperate to restore balance to a world turned hideous with crawling shadows. ‘Yon advocate, there, he’s passed beyond suffering. But you’ve tracked a right mess of dog dirt and blood all over Mirag’s clean floorboards.’
Mykkael’s labour outside took a handful of minutes. He sluiced off at the well, stripped the horses of trappings, and fashioned makeshift hackamores of rope to tie them out of sight in a fir copse. When a foray to the midden failed to unearth his clothes, he thrashed through the brush, swearing and slapping at midge bites, and shortly turned up at the cottage, his arms loaded down with cut cedar.
He re-entered the burst door, too spent to duck as a bundle of hyacinth-scented cloth struck him foursquare in the face.
‘Put that on, you rank savage!’
shrilled Mirag from the hob. One hand on her hip, she stood pouring water from the kettle into her battered wash tub. ‘The girl is upstairs, still, but when she comes down, I won’t have her exposed to your scars and your outlandish nakedness.’
Mykkael tipped his head past the greenery. He surveyed the maroon cloth of the advocate’s cloak puddled on freshly mopped floorboards, and stated, ‘I won’t wear that.’
‘You will,’ Mirag argued. Her puffed eyes saw red.
‘She’s convinced the child will take fright at the sight of you,’ Benj apologized, coarse-grained with tiredness. He sat on the floor at the side of his son, who now whimpered in fretful pain. ‘Bend foreign pride and cover yourself, will you?’
Mykkael limped around the offensive garment, crouched down an arm’s length from Mirag, and tossed his cut greenery into the fire. He spoke with his back turned, dark skin marked across by the well-soiled strips of Jussoud’s resin dressings. ‘No. I will not. Fetch back my surcoat and trousers. I don’t care a damn if they’re reeking of garbage.’
Mirag’s glower suggested her ire on the subject was not going to be placated for any man.
‘That cloak has a hood,’ Benj pleaded, reasonable. ‘The disguise could help your survival.’
Limned by the haze of plumed smoke as the evergreen sparked into flame, Mykkael shot to his feet. His eyes glittered, wide open and wild, and the set to his shoulders stayed adamant. ‘I won’t wear that, I tell you, though I died this second! The cloth bears the taint of a sorcerer’s touch, a fine point that’s lethal to compromise.’ He moved, snapped up the fire tong, and used the glowing hot tip to jam the offending garment into the cedar-laced flames.