And the Lady of Battles had vanished.
“Come,” he said to the hounds. He began the hike to the top.
“Victory!” sang his soldiers as the horns sounded distantly to announce the king’s arrival on the field.
Eika corpses littered the hillside, but for every Eika who lay dead, one of his own men did, too.
Some few lived, some stirred, groaning, and some few would be dead soon enough, not having been granted the mercy of a quick passage out of life. His hounds pressed round him, Sorrow, Rage, Terror, Steadfast, Ardent, Bliss, and Fear; battered and bloody, they yet lived when so many others had perished, including poor Good Cheer.
He gained the height of the hill at last to find the camp in utter carnage, tents torn down and ripped by the passage of feet and the swell and ebb of uncaring battle, chests burst open, bags whose contents lay strewn across corpses and churned-up ground alike. Nothing remained of Lavastine’s pavilion. Of the rough wooden observing platform, constructed so hastily yesterday, only a few logs still stood. Alain clambered up on them.
From this vantage place at the top of the hill, Alain could see the banners of Henry’s armies, but none from among those which had marched out beside Lavastine at dawn.
“I pray you, come down from there, my lord!” called one of the soldiers. “There are still Eika lurking, and they have bows.”
As Alain jumped down he stumbled on a spear haft. He caught himself, grabbed for purchase and gripped the cloth of a tabard. A dead man rolled limply into view. It was Lavastine’s captain. The Lavas standard lay trampled by his side.
Alain pried it out of the dirt and hoisted it high into the air, but as his men cheered around him, he could only weep.
3
THEY rode like demons, but the vanguard commanded by Duchess Liutgard stayed ahead of them and thus had the honor of thundering onto the battlefield first.
But Princess Sapientia was not to be deterred from her fair share of the glory. After their first awful pass through the battlefield when it seemed that every Eika fell beneath their horses’ hooves with no resistance, Sapientia reined her horse around and for a mercy took an instant to catch her breath and survey the chaos.
For chaos was all that met Hanna’s eyes. She had never seen so many people in one place at one time, nor heard such a din of screaming and howling melded together with the clash of weapons. Sticking tight to Sapientia’s side, she could at least consider herself well protected. Father Hugh as well as certain oath-bound retainers kept close to the princess’ side in a ring meant to protect her from death.
Hanna was not sure at that moment whether it was worse to witness the gruesome work of a battle from afar or to be thrown into its swirling, deadly currents. She would have gladly forgone both and risked another avalanche in the Alfar Mountains instead.
“The ships!” cried Sapientia suddenly and with a sudden gloating triumph in her voice. “To the ships! We shall stop them there!”
And off they went, pounding across the battlefield again. Distant banners marked the line of other units, some faltering, some pressing forward, but Sapientia paid no heed to the rest of the battle. She wanted to stop the Eika from reaching their ships. And, indeed, as they came up alongside the river, they waited well out of the main fighting, which flurried round a distant hill and the flat stretch of plain beyond it, and had only isolated groups of fleeing Eika to contend with. These they slaughtered easily.
Ships lay beached on both the eastern and western shore, but it was the western shore—the one they guarded—which concerned them now. Eight ships were already launched into the water, steadying for the flight downstream. A half dozen bodies floated downstream in their wake.
“Send men to burn any ships they can reach!” ordered the princess, gesturing toward one of her captains.
“Your Highness!” shouted Father Hugh. “Is it wise to break up our formation? And we must not let the horses get pinned up against the river. We’ll lose our mobility.”
“But they are all so disordered,” retorted Sapientia. “What matters it, as long as we outnumber them?” It was done as she commanded. Melees broke out around the ships and, soon after, smoke rose from a handful, fire scorching up the masts.
A warning, the touch of a horn to lips, sounded from the outer ranks. Hanna stood in her stirrups to get a look, but what she saw chilled her and she shuddered despite the heat of the sun over the battleground.
Eika did indeed flee the battle now in disorderly groups—but not all of them, not those who were wounded, dead, or dying, not those who had kept their wits about them in the face of disaster. Pressing briskly and with purpose toward the river’s bank marched a host of Eika, several hundred, in good order and with several standards borne before them. With shields raised in a tight wall and the gaps between bristling with spears, they held off the human soldiers who harried them from behind. Were those bones swaying from the standards? Mercifully, from this distance, she could not tell for sure.
“Form up!” cried Sapientia, but it was too late; in her overconfidence she had allowed her troops to scatter.
“Send the Eagle for help!” shouted Hugh. “If they can be struck from behind while we charge from this side—”
“Nay!” cried the princess, glancing back over her shoulder to see how many riders remained with her. Others hastily mounted and galloped back from the shoreline. One man took an arrow from the ships and fell tumbling down from his horse. “I won’t have it said I begged for help at the first sign of trouble. May St. Perpetua be with us this day! Who is with me?” With sword raised she spurred her horse forward straight toward the Eika line. Battle-trained, it did not shy away from the glittering ranks of spears and stone axes.
“Damn!” swore Hugh as her retainers followed her. He caught Hanna by the arm before she could ride after them. “Go to the king!” Then, sword drawn, he raced after the princess into the thick of the fight.
Already the Eika line had swung north along the river, cutting off Hanna’s escape in that direction. Princess Sapientia vanished into a maelstrom of battle as the Eika host swallowed her troops. Some riders fled the skirmish, abandoning her; others bore down after her into the Eika tide, both sides caught in a desperate struggle—one for life, one for honor. In a moment Hanna, too, would be trapped by the flood tide of the battle as it reached the river’s bank.
She kicked her horse to the south, down along the shoreline toward the ruins of Gent, and as she rode, her spear scraping up and down along her thigh, she began to pray.
4
SANGLANT led them through the streets at a steady jog. Fifth Son had withdrawn his troops, but other Eika scurried through Gent, fleeing the battle now that the drums were silent and Bloodheart, and his illusions, dead.
Under the unsparing eye of the sun, the prince appeared perhaps more pathetic than appalling. Yet he was a shocking enough sight with the five monstrous dogs in attendance as if they were all that remained of his proud Dragons. King’s Dragon he had once been. Now, except for his shape and the princely authority of his bearing, he was scarcely different from those dogs.
But he had not forgotten how to kill.
Their skirmishes were brief, and though Lavastine had lost three men in the fight within the cathedral, he lost none now, not with Sanglant at their head. Eika were as like to run from them, seeing the prince in his madness, as join the fray.
The gates lay open and they found Ulric and most of his party on the bridge, staring at the river plain beyond where the battle still raged. Clouds of dust as well as the lay of the land obscured the fighting.
“My lord count!” cried Captain Ulric when he recognized their group.
“Beware!” shouted one of his men. A volley of arrows showered into them. Two soldiers dropped, one with a hand clasped to his thigh, another pierced in the throat.
Sanglant growled and leaped, dogs after him, into a stand of brush that moments later Liath saw contained four skulking Eika. She made ready to shoot
….
But there was no need. Sanglant struck down two even as his dogs bowled over and rended the others, although one of the dogs was slashed so badly that its fellows immediately turned on it and bit through its throat.
“There!” shouted Lavastine. Liath wrenched her gaze away from Sanglant to see a troop of horsemen riding out of the dusty murk that was the battleground. At once men shouted and waved, and within moments Lord Geoffrey reined up. He had but twenty men remaining as well as some extra horses following along.
“Cousin!” he cried, and he flung himself off his horse to clap Lavastine vigorously on the shoulder. “Ai, Lord! I thought you dead, surely.”
“Any news of those who remained behind on the hill?”
Lord Geoffrey could only shrug. Then, eyes widening, he stared at the apparition that, silent but all the more frightening because of that silence, now commandeered one of the riderless horses and swung up onto it. “Lady have mercy!” he breathed. “What is it?”
The prince flung away the spear and galloped northwest toward the thickest cloud of dust.
“Eagle! Take a horse and ride after him. The king will have my head if he gets himself killed. I doubt he is in his right mind.” With this cool assessment, Lavastine turned back to his cousin. “Has the king arrived?”
“I know not, cousin. It is madness out there, and most of our people long since lost.”
“You’ve done well to survive this long.” But Lavastine did not seem to mean the words as praise, any more than he meant his earlier comment, calling Sanglant out of his right mind, as censure. “Eagle!” His gaze tripped over her where she still stood, gawping, frozen, unable to act. “Go!”
It was easier to obey than to think. She took the mount offered her and left them just as a party of Eika came running and a new skirmish was joined.
Chaos.
Through the streaming battle she rode on the trail of Sanglant, who was himself all movement. Eika fled in confusion or retreated in disciplined groups, and cavalry charged through and reformed and charged back, scattering them, cutting down those who ran and pounding again and again those who held steady.
Sanglant drove his horse wherever the fight was thickest. Certainly he was brave; perhaps he was also insane. After he rallied a group of horsemen who had gotten cut off from their captain, she heard his name called out above the riot of noise like a talisman. She tried merely to keep away from Eika, for in this tempest she had few clear shots and plenty of chances to get hacked down from behind, though most Eika seemed to be running for their lives. It was all she could do to keep Sanglant in her sight.
Through the haze of dust she caught a glimpse of Fesse’s banner. Then it vanished, whipping against the wind as its bearer galloped away in another direction with Fesse’s duchess and troops.
They had come so far over the ground that she did not know where she was. Her eyes streamed from the dust kicked up and the glare of the westering sun. Ahead, a soldier leaned from his horse and struck down one of the dogs following Sanglant and rode on, spear ready to pierce the next which, loping after the prince, was unaware of the threat to its back.
But Sanglant was not unaware. He reined his horse hard around and brought the flat of his sword down against the soldier’s padded shoulder. The man tumbled to the ground and the dogs leaped forward, only to be brought up short. Liath could not hear what the prince shouted, only saw the terrified soldier scramble back onto his horse.
Then, horns. “To the princess! She’s surrounded!”
“To me! Form up!” the prince cried, his hoarse tenor ringing out over chaos. Shining with the heat of battle on him, he was not as frightful a sight as he had first appeared when he was Bloodheart’s prisoner, a wild, chained beast. Men came riding to form up around him, and as his company gathered, they shouted jubilantly, sure of victory. Where Princess Sapientia’s banner had gotten trapped in a strong current of Eika battling their way to the river, Sanglant and the newly regrouped cavalry drove in and scattered the enemy before them.
“The king! King Henry comes!”
Liath could not see the princess, for the entire flank had crumbled. But as the Eika line dissolved into rout, she saw Sanglant struggle free of the crush and ride northwest out beyond the fighting to where neglected fields lay drowsy under the afternoon sun. She fought her way out of the press and galloped after him.
He rode on, not looking back. Three Eika dogs pursued him as he left the battle behind, and she was too far away to shout a warning. At her back she heard horsemen, and she glanced behind to see a dozen or so men wearing the tabards of those he had rallied on the field.
Ahead, a line of trees and scrub marked the course of a tributary. There she lost sight of him as he crashed in among the trees. When she found his abandoned horse, she dismounted and prudently waited until her pursuit came up beside her.
“My God, Eagle!” said the man, a captain by his bearing and armor. “Was that Prince Sanglant? We thought him dead!”
“Taken captive,” she said.
“And survived a year.” Around him, his men murmured. She heard in their voices the melody of awe, composing now the beginning, she supposed, of another story of Sanglant’s courage and cunning and strength. “But where’s he gone?”
They followed his track, made manifest by a litter of filthy shreds of tabard and tunic and leggings, things that had once been clothing but now were only foul rags. He had dropped the sword and the gold torque by the water’s edge. The current still bore sticks and grass and, once, a bloodied glove quickly carried along the far bank, but where a bend in the stream and a fallen tree made somewhat of a pool he had gone headlong into the water.
When they reached him, he was methodically tearing off every last piece of clothing that still hung on him, some of it adhered to his skin. The three Eika dogs had thrashed out after him and now ferociously worried at the odorous remains, such as they could grab in their jaws before it swirled downstream.
“My lord prince!” The captain strode forward, and at his exclamation the dogs howled and made for shore.
Sanglant barked at them. There was no other word for it; it was not a spoken command. They obeyed nonetheless and contented themselves with sitting half in and half out of water on a bank more pebble than sand, growling at any who came too near while the prince took handfuls of sand and scoured his skin and then his hair as if he meant to scrape himself raw.
“Lady bless us,” murmured one of the soldiers as if for all of them, “he’s so thin.”
But as if in the coarse river sand lay the property of truth, something emerged from the scouring, something recognizable: the man she remembered, although he was clothed only in water and that only up to his waist.
“I will never love any man but him.”
Said so long ago, spoken so recklessly, what had she bound herself to when she made that declaration before Wolfhere?
He turned. If he saw her among those who waited for him, he gave no sign of it. He extended a hand. “A knife.”
But the captain stripped off his own armor and his own tunic, and with tunic and knife he advanced cautiously. The dogs nipped at him, but Sanglant waded out of the deeper water and called them away.
Liath could not help but look. Now that he was somewhat clean she could see that although his hair was long and tangled, he still had no beard even after a year without any means to shave it clean. He had no hair on his chest, either, but lower down he resembled his human kinsmen in every respect. She looked away quickly, for this was not like the work she and Fell’s soldiers had done at the river’s mouth, all of them equals in labor and none of them having the leisure to be shy about what needed to be done. He was not a curiosity to be stared at, or at least ought not to be.
When she looked up again he had the tunic on, a plain garment of good, strong weave and stained with sweat along the neck and under the arms, but compared to what he had worn before it looked fitting for a prince. It hung loosely around his frame, thoug
h it was a little short: He stood half a head taller than the robust captain, and despite his thinness he was still a big man. Now, taking the knife, he began to hack at his hair.
“I beg you, my lord prince,” said the captain. He had a kind of weeping plaint to his voice as if he were about to burst into tears out of pity. “Let me cut it for you.”
Sanglant paused. “No,” he said. Then, and finally, as if only when he had scrubbed himself clean of the breath of his captivity dared he acknowledge her, he looked up to where she stood half hidden among the rest. He had known she was there all along. “Liath.”
How could she not come forward? The knife had a good sharp edge and she had trimmed Da’s hair many a time, although this was utterly different.
He knelt suddenly and with a sharp sigh. A tang of the old smell, the reek of his imprisonment, still clung to him and no doubt would for some time, but standing this close was no punishment. Ai, Lady, his hair was coarse and too matted to be truly clean yet, but when sometimes she had to shift him to get a better angle for cutting, she touched his skin and would bite her lip to stop herself from trembling, and go on.
“What is this?” She scraped the back of her hand on the rough iron collar that ringed his neck. Under it, the skin had been rubbed raw countless times and even now began to leak blood.
“Leave it.”
She left it. No one dared go forward to pick up sword and torque, not with the dogs guarding these treasures.
The long rays of the sun splintered into glitters on the rippling current of the stream. Black mats of hair littered the ground as she cut. Made cautious by the noise and the thrashing in the water, the birds had fallen silent, all but a warbler among the reeds who sang vigorously to complain about the disturbance. Far away, a horn lifted its voice and fell silent. Horses shifted and snorted. A man whispered. Another peed, though she could only hear him, not see, for he had faced into the trees to do his business.
“His heart,” Sanglant whispered suddenly. “How did you know he had hidden his heart in the priest’s body? Whose heart lies hidden in Rikin fjall, then? It must be the priest’s.”