Steel flashed in both fists. He had drawn his knives: the curved dagger Anja had seen him use to skin game, and another one, smaller and thinner, yanked from a concealed sheath that must have been masked inside the laced seam of his belt. The cutting edge of its blade did not shine. The glint of the metal seemed oddly dulled, as though coated over with varnish.
Anja’s heart all but stopped as Stormfront bore in. She pulled in her shallow, raced breaths through an onslaught of choking fear. Pressed to chill rocks, she watched Mykkael’s stand, wrenched by the punishing cost of her idiocy, and on fire with hope that his left-hand weapon might have been treated with poison.
Barqui’ino-trained, surely he stood a chance.
Yet the odds appeared insurmountable, as his monstrous adversary surged in pursuit of the haplessly tiring horse. While Stormfront approached the base of the rise, Mykkael dug in his toes. Anja had observed the same gesture before, as he made sure of his footing. Aware the slight motion foreran his first move, she tracked his poised figure, unblinking.
Mykkael waited until the inbound gelding was almost upon him, then shouted the familiar command string. ‘Stormfront, whoa! Hold hard! Stormfront.’
Ruled by drilled habit, the black dropped his hindquarters into a braking slide. Gravel scattered under his scrabbling hooves. Through the stopped second as his pounding run slackened, the fledgling kerrie launched into a soaring spring.
The instant its talons left the ground, Mykkael threw out his arms, and hazed the oncoming horse off.
Stormfront shied. Already settled on to his hocks, he reacted on reflex and spun hard to the right. The young kerrie yawed its wings, head turned and scrawny neck extended in an awkward effort to compensate. Mykkael followed through with a flicked throw of his knife. The blade flew at short range, its hurled impact augmented by the speed of the predator’s charge. Keen steel impaled the fledgling’s exposed fire sac, then drove on through into its throat.
Volatile fluid spewed on to the ground, gouting flame; and also, seeped into the knife cut sliced between the cartilage bands of the monster’s windpipe. The influx dribbled a caustic stream over sensitive internal tissues. The kerrie gurgled a bellow of surprised pain. Its tumbled crashlanding ploughed over Mykkael, who had dropped into a protective crouch to avoid the uncontrolled slash of its talons.
As the warrior was milled under, the fledgling squalled murder. It flapped and thrashed in wild agony. Its distressed cries raised deafening screams from above, as its mother folded her wings and hurled down in vengeance-bent fury.
The Princess of Sessalie blinked streaming eyes. Whipped by gusting wind, she sighted the man, his surcoat entangled in the blind clench of a talon. Locked in a struggle to spare his frail life, he fought to drive himself into precarious shelter underneath the stricken fledgling.
‘You once slew a roc,’ she whispered entreaty. ‘You told me yourself that you hazed off a dragon to salvage a critical supply train.’ Surely the desperate tactics used then could assist with this lethal predicament.
Anja swallowed, her mouth dry as dust. Against hope, she pleaded, ‘Don’t let my stupid, childish pique become the mistake that will kill you.’ The profligate waste of a gifted man’s valour tore her wide open and shamed her. She had truly learned nothing from Taskin’s sage counsel concerning the unjust punishment that might befall through her arrogance as a royal. ‘Mykkael,’ Anja gasped, ‘whatever happens, survive this!’
Then the dread shadow fell. The female kerrie alighted to defend her wounded young. Her evil head snaked, and the gaped beak slashed down in a harrowing strike. She darted and stabbed, missed and missed yet again. Her vision was repeatedly obscured by the battering wings of her offspring. Mykkael still fought, unscathed. Caught like a burr beneath the fledgling’s scaled belly, he offered too small a target.
The balked mother shrieked her rage and frustration. A sidewise swipe of her head bowled her squalling youngster over. As the flailing fledgling toppled, topsy-turvy, the warrior was left exposed. He clung, one fist clenched to the taloned leg’s pin feathers, and the other one glued to the haft of his smaller blade.
The female kerrie raised hooked claws. Her lightning-fast snatch plucked him away. As her talon closed over him, Mykkael jabbed in the knife. Her mailed clasp recoiled. Instinct ruled her reflexive reaction. Her attempt to stamp down, or apply crushing pressure, would just serve to drive his steel deeper.
Anja damped back her screams, knuckles jammed to shut teeth. She dared make no sound. Whatever befell now, she must not add to her tragic mistake: any shrill outcry might draw in another inquisitive predator. Stormfront had fetched to a halt to one side. His thin flanks heaved and his distended nostrils showed linings of red. Foam spattered from his dripping muzzle. He was utterly spent; momentarily safe, as long as he did not move.
Saved, as her human protector was not, trapped in closed battle with an enraged, adult kerrie. Where another man in his straits would have seized on the monster’s flinching hesitation and snatched the opening to batter his way free, Mykkael wrapped his arm around the beast’s armoured leg. Undaunted, he bore in, and hacked with the knife. His effort sawed past tendons like cables, then thrust razor steel into the tissue between. Anja shared his grim concentration. Bound by willed purpose, he sought the pulse of the deep artery.
The female kerrie howled her pain. Thrashing her wings in a battering storm, she raised her maimed talon and clashed her beak to pluck out, or burn, the verminous creature whose stinging persistence lit her nerves to searing, bright agony.
Mykkael must have sensed her oncoming strike. He let go and rolled clear, just as her flame-spewing jaws snapped and bit in vain effort to free his jammed knife blade.
Awing slammed the ground, whipped up flying stones that near crushed him. The captain wrenched himself sideways. In the maelstrom of torn brush and loosed fire and smoke, he was a scrap of tossed flotsam, wrapped in a bloodied surcoat. The kerrie’s wing battered his tucked frame again. The whoosh of the pinion tips slapped down and tumbled him head over heels towards the rise of the hillock.
Through her stifled terror, Anja realized the monster was dying. Whatever fell poison Mykkael used on his blade, its effects unstrung the predator’s co-ordination. Yet the shuddering tempest of the female’s death throes only redoubled their peril. Rival kerries would soon be descending to prey on her weakness and feed.
Her fledgling had also shuddered into collapse, internally burned by its volatile secretion until it succumbed to suffocation. Its ejected faeces flecked the ground in rank spatters as it twitched and rolled in extremity. Anja shoved upright on quivering knees, alive to the imperative danger. She snatched up Mykkael’s sword and scrambled downslope, knowing she had scarcely minutes to roust up her wounded protector and find a secure cranny for shelter. The reek of fresh carnage dispersed on the breeze, added to the enticing scent of a lathered horse run to exhaustion. The ravenous kerries prowling the cliffs by the rookeries would quickly catch wind and take notice. They would wheel and converge, fighting each other with fire and beak and savage claw, crazed beyond caution with bloodlust.
Anja sprinted downslope. Sliding through gravel, uncaring whether her rush threw her down in a headlong tumble, she dropped to her knees beside the tattered bundle of cloth and scraped limbs fetched sprawling amid the low brush. ‘Mykkael!’
He was up on one elbow, and struggling to arise. Blood seeped through the front of his surcoat. The small, spreading stain was low on his belly, result of a puncture or claw cut. The wound’s position was desperately grim, Anja knew at first glance.
Tears flushed her lids. She blinked them back, furious. ‘Mykkael, bright powers forbid!’
Jaw clenched with agony, he raised his eyes to her face, the set to his drawn features obdurate. ‘Catch Stormfront,’ he grated. ‘I have trap scent still left. The flask’s in my scrip. Get it out. Use what’s left. Anja, hurry’
As she drew back, unwilling to risk her fumbling hands too near the hu
rt on his abdomen, he barked with impatience. ‘Princess, do it!’ His eyes pleaded. ‘I’ve been mauled, but there’s still the chance the result won’t be fatal.’
When her choked gasp denied this, Mykkael muttered an incoherent phrase concerning Sanouk dragons, and Jussoud’s gift of a sash.
‘Captain, don’t speak.’ Anja bent at his side, sought with shaking hands to carry out his bidding. As her seeking fingers unfastened his scrip and sorted the disparate contents, she glimpsed a scarlet-stained edge of bright silk beneath the rent in his surcoat. The tissue-thin cloth had been driven deep into the puncture.
‘Seasoned soldiers wear silk to draw embedded arrow points,’ Mykkael informed her with desperate clarity.
This time, Anja grasped his obtuse meaning. If the kerrie’s talon had not pierced the fabric, the gash would be clean. He might not succumb to the wasting death from wound fever induced by the tainted claws of a predator.
‘We can’t know if we don’t survive.’ Mykkael hazed her on, adamant. ‘Go. Call back Stormfront. Work quickly.’
Anja searched out the phial. She squeezed his clenched hand and left him the sword, aware he would need the blade as a prop to assist his pained effort to stand.
Stormfront came at first call. He was wretchedly limping. Anja checked his bad leg, and wept to discover that he had injured a tendon. If he walked far now, the tear could grow worse, until at last, the exertion crippled him. She doused him with trap scent, then tore off her belt, binding his hot fetlock and foreleg in leather to support the damaged tissue.
Mykkael’s halting step arrived at her shoulder as she buckled the makeshift wrap tight. Anja shot straight, appalled to discover he could move at all with the gravity of his injuries. He had retrieved his curved knife. The dropped scrap of wing leather trailed from his shoulder, and his streaming face looked like death.
‘Get on,’ snapped Anja. ‘I’ll brace your knee as you mount.’
‘Stormfront’s lame,’ Mykkael whispered. ‘To ride would be cruelty.’ The stark alternative haunted, that the merciful choice would be to use a dart, and put an end to the brave gelding’s suffering.
‘No!’ Anja rubbed her wet chin with the back of her sleeve, while her eyes brimmed and spilled all over again. ‘No, Mykkael! Please. Stormfront will bear you. Lacking your instincts, he would already be dead. He’s your horse. Let him help your survival!’
When he drew back, either dizzy with shock, or suspended in agonized hesitation, she seized the front of his surcoat. ‘Mykkael, I beg you, get on! If you don’t stay alive, I won’t find the will to keep breathing!’
XXXVIII. Circle
IF NOT FOR THE DIVERSION OF TWO DYING KERRIES, ANJA COULD NOT HAVE BORNE MYKKAEL AWAY ON THE BACK OF THE EXHAUSTED, LAMED gelding. The best Stormfront could manage was a ragged walk. The slow pace felt like torture, with the dregs of the trap scent scarcely sufficient to mask the redolent sweat that steamed from his coat.
Anja wended her wary way through the scrub, stumbling over roots and small stones. One step to the next, she sensed each of Mykkael’s rasped breaths like a knife blade scraping her nerves. He rode with his elbows clamped to his sides, wrists braced against the horse’s high crest, and his hands knotted into black mane.
‘I’ve killed you,’ said Anja.
His laboured whisper came back reproachful. ‘You haven’t. Princess, I’m not close to dead.’
Yet the inexorable, spreading stain on his surcoat belied the assurance that he could stay upright much longer.
Ruled by his oath, Mykkael addressed the stark points of survival forthwith. ‘We have to find some sort of shelter, your Grace. The scent of my blood could draw kerries. Turn Stormfront out of the riverbed.’
Anja stared at his sweating face, horrified. ‘Go towards the cliffs? Mykkael, that’s madness!’ How could they seek refuge beneath the high ledges infested with active rookeries?
Yet the captain insisted. ‘We have to try. This time, a rock pile is not going to serve.’ The river bank was too flat and barren for the cave they required to spare Stormfront. There, Mykkael at last bowed to sound sense. He could no longer walk. Although sadly lamed, the black horse provided his sole chance to stay upright and moving.
Anja dared not indulge in disheartened fear or trepidation. She measured the captain’s insecure seat, afraid as he swayed, and the impaired reaction of his swordsman’s balance barely snatched him short of a fall. Such misfortune could end only in disaster. If he lost consciousness and tumbled off Stormfront, the princess realized she lacked the strength to drag his limp bulk back astride.
Worse yet, his seasoned gaze touched upon her and read every looming fear. His expression reflected wretched distress as he gathered himself for another strained effort to speak.
Anja cut him short. ‘Don’t say you’ve seen worse, Mykkael!’
The forced ghost of his former smile twisted one corner of his mouth. ‘This is almost as bad as it gets.’ He shifted cramped fingers, shut his eyes, then compelled himself to complete a sweep of their immediate surroundings. Ahead, the river meandered between vertical stacks of stone, the weathered flanks of the lower slopes mottled dun with tattered stands of scrub woodland and spiny vegetation. ‘Turn east, just a bit. Yes, I ask, trust my instinct. Anja, please. Do not stop this horse! For your life’s sake you have to listen.’
Scoured by the cut of the wind, the princess did as he bade her. The necessity drove her to flinching remorse. Each of Stormfront’s jolting, hitched strides dealt the warrior an unmerciful jostling. He was streaming cold sweat. Internal bleeding and the relentless loss of fluid would be causing his reeling dizziness.
‘You need to drink water,’ the princess informed him.
Well aware the suggestion framed an imperative, Mykkael said, ‘Soon. Listen first.’
The decision chilled Anja. She doused her fierce protest. Too experienced not to recognize the limited reach of his resources, the captain must know and would gauge to the fine, bitter edge, just how long he could trust himself to stay aware. Since obedience was the only relief in her power to grant him, Anja faced firmly ahead and placed one aching foot after the next. As Mykkael mustered the strength to instruct her, she held stalwart, unable to bear the desperate sight of his suffering.
‘Anja. Record what I say into memory. The warding sung into my sword is Sanouk, from the eastern steppelands. The connection will have meaning to the viziers in Tuinvardia.’ At her sharply turned head, he nodded encouragement. ‘You’ll get there. Just listen. Your brother’s remains must stay guarded at all costs. Perincar’s pattern tattooed at my nape will still function, whether I’m living or dead. The older lines done by Eishwin will not. They are tied into my ancestral heritage, and they must fade if my spirit should leave the flesh.’
Anja’s grief was too savage. ‘Mykkael! No. I won’t drag your dead carcass!’
His dark eyebrows arched. In a tortured effort at humour he said, ‘I rather thought you should flay off the skin. I salvaged my knife for the purpose.’ When her choked silence threatened to devolve into dispirited misery, he fell back upon searing honesty. ‘You can count on my will to stay living, your Grace. Yet I must consider my duty foremost. No matter how dedicated, the best warrior born can still fail.’
‘Then stop talking!’ snapped Anja. ‘I don’t have your knowledge of sorcerers and war. Alive, you can help me. Dead, you’re no use. Mykkael.’ She paused to contain her relentless anxiety. ‘Sessalie’s people, and I, still depend on you. Just stay alive. If you insist I must find a cave under the rocks of a kerrie roost, you’ll hear my request, and not nag me with cruel distractions.’
‘Your Grace.’ His whisper emerged too complacent.
Her anxious glance found him slumped against Stormfront’s neck, his eyes wide open and fixed, as though his sight faded with faintness. ‘I forgive you,’ he added. ‘Stormfront’s life was well worth the risk taken with mine.’
Which words woke her fury. ‘You will not leave me, M
ykkael. Nor will you shame the gift of this fine horse, whose courage will bear you for as long as it takes. Together, we will see you through to Tuinvardia and into the care of a healer.’
‘Your Grace,’ the captain said faintly. ‘On reaching safety under the charge of my sword, you already carry my oath.’
Anja walked. Stormfront limped alongside her. Mykkael’s sawing breaths came and went. The promise of help seemed a distant, vain dream, with the horizon rolling away into featureless haze. No sign of habitation broke the desolate terrain. Overhead, the scud of grey cloud was still massing. The river rippled with ominous whitecaps, snapped up by a rising breeze. Anja folded her arms, huddled into her filthy jerkin. She matched her step to Stormfront’s plodding stride, while the air silvered under the first veils of drizzle, and the rocks glistened pewter with moisture. Against the pall of the oncoming storm, the cliffs rose like dull iron, with the wheeling kerries over the rookeries reduced to knifing, swift shadows.
The princess paused only once, to drape Mykkael’s slack form with the salvaged tatter of wing leather. His skin was damp and too warm to her touch. Hoping the gravid sensation of heat was provoked by her own chilled hands, Anja laid her palm on his forehead. There she encountered the scalding flush that presaged the onset of wound fever. Whether the captain had succumbed from the initial sword puncture, or yesterday’s neglected gashes, or the disastrous bout with the kerries, did not matter. Mykkael was sinking, with no skilled hand within reach to offer him comfort or succour.
Anja could do nothing else but keep moving. The stricken crown officer left in her care seemed the last life in the world, while her past experience as Princess of Sessalie seemed a dream whose importance had vanished. What shaped the meaning of a man, or a people, or a horse, if the devouring hunger of a sorcerer’s lines could destroy joy and laughter, and rob the last hour of hope?
No answer arose. Only sere desolation. Anja stroked Stormfront’s sodden forelock. She made no more empty promises concerning mashed grain and comforts. As the weeping, cold rain soaked into her clothes, and dripped from the bedraggled ends of her hair, the trap scent must slowly rinse off. Scavenging kerries would track their damp warmth. Hunting and hungry, they would soon descend, and the end would be swift and terrible. Anja slogged ahead anyway. She gimped on sore feet, while the afternoon started to fail, and her borrowed shoes stretched from the puddles. Slipping, trudging, pummelled numb by fatigue, she moved with her arm braced on Stormfront’s shoulder. She kept time to the draw of Mykkael’s tortured breath, and the horse’s irregular hoofbeats.