[Firebringer 03] - The Son of Summer Stars (23 page)

“Surrender, Lynex,” Tek roared. “Give up this fight. Swear never to return, and I will let your folk depart.”

“Never!” the white wyrm shrieked. “Not while I live will I allow my people to retreat.” He struck at her again with one massive forepaw. Nimbly, she dodged away.

“Your bodyguards desert you! How long can you hold them to certain death?”

“Where is your mate?” the king of wyverns snarled, his huge, main head darting to snap at her. Tek ducked and sidestepped, avoiding the clash of needle-like teeth.

“On errands more pressing than pricking at you, wyrmking,” she answered. The unwounded maws of the great wyvern laughed. He slithered after her.

“Jan, who killed my queen—was he too great a coward to come himself, but must send his mate to face my wrath?”

“One warrior mare among my race is more than a match for you,” Tek spat, lunging after one of two midsized heads flanking the main one, champed it by the gill ruff.

She got one foreleg over it, compressing its windpipe in the crook of her knee. With a squall of terror, Lynex tried to wrest his second-most-ancient head from her grasp. The pied mare held on with teeth and limb, her other legs braced. Ses saw the wyvern’s near forepaw pinned against his body by the taut downward stretch of the captured pate’s neck. His free paw tore at Tek but, too stubby and short, it could not reach around his scarred and bony breast. Tek dragged the head down, bowing her own head and leaning all her weight onto the forelimb that pinned it.

“Surrender,” the pale mare heard Tek grate. “Yield, wyrmking, or you lose this head as well.”

The huge white wyrm began to scream. His massive body rocked, trying to shake the pied mare free. Ses saw Tek let her standing limbs buckle, setting her down hard on the ground. The wyrm’s secondary head remained pinned in her folded forelimb, gill ruff held fast in her strong, square teeth. Maddened with fear, the three auxiliary nobs as yet unscathed flung themselves high and wide, shrieking, while the main head swooped, attempting to catch Tek in its jaws. Teeth still clenched about the captured pate’s gill ruff, the pied mare pointed her horn at the main head, keeping it at bay.

Off to one side, Ses became aware of flashes of copper and yellow-grey. Ryhenna and Dagg had seen Tek’s danger. As Calydor and she herself did, they, too, were struggling to reach their shoulder-friend. Beyond, Ses caught another glimpse: Teki and Jah-lila also fighting toward Tek. The maroon-colored leader of the Scouts of Halla battled hard at the edge of the ring of bodyguards. All strove to converge on Tek’s contest with Lynex—yet none, Ses feared, would be able to reach her. The crush was so great, finding space to plant a hoof, much less wedge one’s body, proved nearly impossible. Beyond, pied mare and wyvern king fought in an open space. The sky above blazed like burning grass.

With a roar like stormwind, Lynex heaved. His massive body undulated, then torqued. With a powerful wrench, the wyvern king rolled. The force snapped the neck of his own head captured in the pied mare’s teeth. Unable to loose her grip in time, Tek was jerked through air and slammed hard to the ground. She lay a moment, motionless and stunned, as the wyrmking pulled free of her, three of his seven heads now dangling uselessly. Slowly, he reared up, paws raised, his dozen saberclaws bristling.

Ses heard the red mare shouting her daughter’s name. Tek stirred groggily. Clearly the breath had been knocked from her, perhaps even ribs cracked. Hissing, Lynex swayed above her, savoring victory. The pied mare rolled painfully to her knees, shook her head, then struggled up. She stood unsteadily. Ses whinnied, barreling forward in Calydor’s wake. To one side, Dagg’s battle yell rose above the tumult, echoed by Ryhenna’s. Ses saw the pair of them plunging toward the pied mare at desperate speed. Beyond, the pale mare glimpsed Tek’s foster father, Teki, vaulting over the fallen, her dam, Jah-lila, charging alongside.

Ahead of them all, at the battle line, the Scouts’ maroon-colored leader chanted orders to his troops. On every side, bodyguards toppled, pulled down. Unicorns hurtled toward their injured leader like a thunder of forkhorns spooked by storm. And none of them, Ses knew suddenly, with certainty, would reach her in time. She saw that Lynex understood this. The congestion of fighters and the piling of bodies around him was too great. The pied mare was his. He was sure of it.

“Another moment, mare, and your flesh becomes my feast,” he crowed.

Ses saw blood trickle from Tek’s nostril and stain her beard. Head slightly lowered, she gazed up at Lynex. She stood three-legged, favoring the forelimb she had used to pinion his second-eldest head. Ses saw her snort blood in a fine scarlet spray. Her limbs tensed, braced, almost crouching. Her mouth moved. The pale mare was never sure after if she had heard the words, or only understood them from the framing of Tek’s lips and teeth and tongue.

“Well enough, wyrm,” the pied mare snarled at him, green eyes leveled in a gaze of pure hatred, without a hint of resignation or surrender. “Try to take it, if you dare.”

The wyrmking lunged. The black-and-rose mare reared to meet him. The sun set. Evening sky was the color of fading roses. A shrill cry halted everything. Or rather, nothing halted. It only seemed to halt. Ses felt herself frozen in time, still struggling forward like all her companions, the wyvern bodyguards falling around her, swarmed on and skewered by the Scouts of Halla. The high sound that had cut—was still cutting—the air was not a scream, the pale mare realized, but a whistle, a wild piercing battlecry shrilled by one younger and smaller than any other warrior on the field.

Turning—so slowly, it seemed as in a dream—Ses caught sight of her long-leggèd amber filly with the mane pale as milk galloping full-tilt down the cliff side above with a burning brand clutched in her teeth. The white limestone cliff rose nearly vertical. Showers of scree cascaded from Lell’s hooves. The brand in her teeth flashed and crackled, its flame orange, its buds so newly lit that Ses could still discern their shapes: hearts and rounds and crescents for the leaves, five-petaled roses for the flowers. The milkwood’s resinous sap popped, fizzing as it flamed, the smoky mingles of white and grey, smelling at once milk-sweet and tart as pitch.

Halfway down the precipitous slope, Lell sprang. The milkwood blazed as she hurtled, seemed almost to fly, sailing down toward Tek and the wyvern king. She came to earth far short, but she had gauged her leap to land her not on hard limestone but atop a heap of slain wyverns. The next instant, she sprang again, for the packed crush of living unicorns this time. Still piping her warcry, the amber filly dashed across their jostling backs, pounding hard for Lynex, milkwood brand flaming in her teeth.

Surprised, momentarily distracted, the wyrmking hesitated, turning his central head’s gaze from Tek toward Lell. To one side of him, Dagg and the leader of the Scouts dragged down the last defender blocking their path. Ryhenna thundered after them. To the wyrmking’s other side, Jah-lila broke through the wall of fallen bodyguards, her black horn slicked with wyverns’ blood. Teki vaulted in her wake. Just ahead of Ses, Calydor struggled over the motionless form of another fallen guard. It lay within their power to reach Tek now, the pale mare realized.

The king of the wyverns seemed to reach the same surmise. He turned back toward the wounded mare. She ramped and feinted before him. Heaped bodies ringed them like a barricade. Ses saw that with her injured foreleg, Tek could not flee, could not hope to climb that mound of dead unaided. She could only stand defiant, pawing the air. With a howl, the huge white wyrm lunged. Ahead, as she scrambled upward in Calydor’s wake, Ses saw Lell spring over the barricade of the slain, past Tek, swift as wind, light as wings, the firebrand blazing above her head. Full gallop, she scaled the belly and scarred breast of the king of wyrms and flung the firebrand in his face.

The wyvern leader roared, arching, knifelike nails clawing at his main head’s eyes. The other three remaining heads screamed and strained as if hoping to tear free of the wyrmking’s massive body, which tumbled backward, writhing. Lell plummeted to the ground as the scaly slope on which she had stood abruptly snatched itself away. Gaining the crest, Ses observed Jah-lila below seize the nape of her daughter’s neck in teeth and haul her bodily away from thrashing Lynex as though Tek were a weanling filly. Teki shouldered from the other side, helping the red mare drag her daughter up over the fallen bodyguards. Dagg and the leader of the Scouts sprinted across to lend their strength. Among the four of them, they managed to half-lift, half-herd the injured mare to safety.

Lell, sprawled on the limestone near Lynex, was already scrambling to her feet. Ryhenna tried to go to her, but the furious thrashing of the wyvern’s tail between them drove her back. The wyrmking keened and rolled, scattering the resinous firebrand into a thousand flaming shards. These were strewn by wind and the wyvern’s looping, sweeping tail into a broad arc.

“My eye! My eye, you little, cursèd wretch,” the king of the wyverns howled.

Sparks flew within the open space where he and Tek had lately dueled. Flames caught the wisps of summer-dry grass that sprouted in the crevices of the wyvern shelves. A semicircle of fire sprang up along the periphery of the open space. It stretched from far to Ses’s left all the way to where Tek and the others had disappeared over the mound of the fallen. Spreading fast, the two ends ran around behind the wyrm as though seeking to join. Barely in time, Ryhenna sprang out of its path.

On the far side of the open space from Ses, beyond Lynex and Lell, the two running trails of fire met, completing a ring. The dance of fire, low enough in its initial seconds for a unicorn to have sprung over, rose almost instantly to above head height. Within its circle, the wyrmking flailed, his cries subsiding. Panting, he rose, collecting himself, tail coiling, one eye of his great head wizened shut. The other heads whimpered. He turned his one-eyed gaze toward Lell. With a cry, Ses plunged toward her filly. A curtain of flame roared before her, blocking her path. The pale mare pitched to a halt, ramped helpless on the mass of wyvern dead, gazing into a ring of fire in which Lynex and her daughter now both lay trapped.

“I’ll see you rue saving your queen,” the white wyrm snarled.

Lell backed away. “Not till you wyrms rue that ever you stole our lands from us.”

The amber filly’s voice was steady, her expression wary, but unafraid. Ses tried to call to her, bid her flee, but the crackling flames drowned out her voice. Lynex lunged at Lell. She dodged, sought to skirt him. Behind him the ring, newly joined, had not yet flared unleapable. The wyvern’s tail swung, lashing, driving her back. The amber filly struck at the stings, but they were far too swift and powerful. She had to spring away to keep from being bowled over. Lynex swept his tail in a leisurely arc, herding her. One badger paw extended to intercept her as she rounded the fire ring’s inner curve.

Instead of dodging, Lell ran straight for the paw, then veered suddenly inward. Ses saw Lynex, lunging, lose his balance as he missed. His broad paw dipped into the fire. Howling, he snatched it out. Again Lell scaled the scarred slope of his breast. All four of his remaining heads bent to gape at her, but instead of fencing with her horn, she wheeled and kicked like a mountain calf, striking one of the smaller skulls smartly in the jaw. Shards of teeth fine as fishbones flew, glinting by firelight.

Sky above was the dark of flushed, sweet grapes. The burning ring lit the wyvern shelves in a yellow blaze. To one side, Ses saw Tek shouting, fighting to break past Jah-lila and Teki, Dagg and the leader of the Scouts, all of whom held her back from going to Lell. Within, the wyvern’s newly wounded head slapped and flailed, preventing his other maws from striking. Lell flew like a woodshare away from Lynex. A woodshare with nowhere to go. All around burned the impassable wall of fire.

With a savage bellow, Lynex crushed his own wounded pate in the jaws of his largest visage. The little head ceased writhing. The great one opened its jaws. The smaller fell nerveless from its grasp. With a howl, the wyvern sprang, both paws extended. Lell ran for the wall of fire, as though she meant to dash headlong through it. The wyvern’s tail swung round to prevent her. The amber filly skidded, avoided it, and leapt. But as she entered the wall of fire, the seven flails of wyrmking’s tail coiled about her, plucking her back.

“Lell! My child!” Ses screamed as she saw her filly’s coat catch fire. The pale mare sprang toward the flames. Calydor vaulted to block her path.

“Nay, my love! Don’t sacrifice yourself. To save her would take wings!”

He would not let her by. Ses fought him, bit, pummeled wildly with her hooves. To no avail. He held his ground. She could not get past. Ryhenna had joined him. They were holding her back. Above the din, she heard Tek’s desperate cries. Beyond Ryhenna and Calydor, beyond the curtain of fire, Ses saw her filly struggling to free her legs from the wyrm’s long, twining tail, which only tightened, dragging her closer to Lynex’s daggerclaws and gaping jaws. How much time had elapsed, the pale mare wondered—a heartbeat? Two? Was it possible Lell did not yet feel the fire? Her mane and coat blazed. The amber filly arched suddenly, a cry breaking from her. Ses cried out as well, as though she herself burned.

A sound that was like none she had ever heard before, half pard’s roar, half eagle’s scream, cut the night. From the darkness of fading sky above, a figure dropped, lit up by firelight, its great wings green as new-sprung grass. They beat about the wyrmking’s heads, boxing, buffeting them. Ses saw the tercel’s golden-furred paws slash into the wyvern’s shoulder and breast. His eagle’s claws closed about the throats of the two still-living smaller heads.

One of the wyvern’s huge forepaws struck at Illishar. Powerfully thrashing wings kept it at bay. With a yell, the gryphon struck at the wyrmking’s one remaining eye. The wyvern shrieked, contorted. Illishar leapt free of him and snatched Lell from his thrashing tail. She shouted, writhed, flame spreading from her to his feathers and pelt. His talons bit into her shoulderblades. Ses saw his pard’s claws dig into her flank. She was nearly half-grown, at the very edge of his ability to carry.