Firethorn (53 page)

Galan sheathed his smallsword, for he'd found his scorpion again. The man he'd speared with it was still alive. He'd driven it into his belly through the mail hauberk and it had stuck fast in his girdlebone. The man lay between two horses, curled up around the weapon, his hands gripping the shaft. I slid across his body when Galan stood between him and the Sun. The armiger was taking a long time to die. He whimpered with every exhalation. His helm had a plain visor with one long slit for the eyes and many holes pierced to let in air. I slipped into the shadow under the helm. His features were stretched and twisted in his agony.

And I was in the shadow over Galan's face, under the silver mask of his visor, and I felt his grimace and tasted the sour tang in his mouth. He stepped on the man's chest and pulled hard until he freed the scorpion and a quantity of blood. It made an end to that terrible whimpering.

Galan stood still for no more than ten or twenty heartbeats, out of reach of his enemies, and he pushed up his visor and looked around and caught his breath. I took refuge in the hollows under his cheekbones and brow, between his parted lips.

And I looked too, from the shadow under his eyelid. He was not alone. His uncle was there. And Sires Guasca, Meollo, Erial, Lebrel, Pava, Alcoba, and most of their armigers. They were all around: his kin, his friends. They'd cast a circle around him.

In an eyeblink I saw more men of both clans riding his way, or maybe I saw that from the hill. But almost all of me was in shadow now. I no longer heard the rumormonger, only the roar of the crowd and the din of battle: the clang of metal on metal, thuds, grunts, shouts, screams, neighs, hoofbeats, the creak of leather.

The battle had come to Galan; Crux contested with Ardor as if he were the prize. I was glad, thinking his clansmen had come to save his life. So when the Crux shouted, “'Ware, Galan!” and lifted his sword to let a cataphract of Ardor ride past him, I didn't understand why.

Galan's pulse never jumped and his breathing was steady. He, at least, was not surprised.

The cataphract was on a huge stallion. I saw what Galan saw, how the painted leather barding flapped against legs of a dirty dun color, with white fetlocks. The courser lumbered toward us like a drafthorse. But I also saw the shadow around the man, how the darkness had the color of fear.

Galan snapped down his visor and smiled under it. “My thanks, Uncle,” he said under his breath.

Then I knew. They did him honor to leave the killing to him.

As his enemy rode toward him, before Galan moved, I felt the hair rise on his neck and scalp. The skin tightened across his forehead. He trembled. There was a humming in his ear. I knew this feeling: it was the presence of a god. He said a word:
“Hazard.”
Not Chance or Peril or Fate, not any one aspect, but the whole. I didn't taste fear now. Something else. Exaltation.

He started to run over the backs of the fallen horses. Though he was surefooted, he stumbled when barding gave under his weight, slid when a saddle turned around a girth. He didn't hesitate. Every slip became a leap, every mischance the next chance. This was Hazard's gift to one who hazarded all: the ability to balance on the sharp edge of the blade that divides life and death.

Hazard had him, he was possessed. Yet never was he more in his own possession, in command of all that he knew and all that he was. As if the god did not ride him—the god was of him.

A grin was fixed on his face. How right the scorpion felt in his grip. How long it made his reach, our reach. I was the shadow of the weapon and the arm that held it. The ribbons danced as he swung and I streamed over the ground. I felt the haft shudder in Galan's hands as the sickle-shaped claw bit into bone. The horse careened and fell, hamstrung. The man without the horse was nothing.

There was recklessness in him, to take some harm if it would get him what he wanted. Or maybe he was reckoning all the while, with the ruthless judgment of a man who has set aside fear and hope, that if he tarried to ward a blow, he'd miss his chance to strike faster, to strike first. I couldn't know for certain, his thoughts were then beyond my ken, and yet I knew every blow that he received, for I was between their weapons and his flesh: how the skin split and the bruises spread on his back, his thigh, his inner arm, his shin. I didn't feel pain, because he felt none. He was heedless of his wounds.

Galan shouted, “Send me another!” and Sire Alcoba sent him two, a cataphract and his armiger. The armiger rode his courser straight at the heap of dead horses and men as if he'd overleap it, but the horse balked and the man was half over the pommel already and his neck was bare, for he had no neckguard. As Galan struck, the muscles of his belly clenched and his breath pushed out in a hoarse bark:
Ha!

The cataphract hit Galan from behind and knocked him facedown over a fallen horse. There was blood in his mouth and he swallowed it. Before his eyes, tufts of mane braided with bright ribbon. I was under Galan and I wrapped myself around him as he rolled and jabbed at the underbelly of his assailant's mount. The stallion reared, his hooves above our heads. The cat-aphract leaned over with his mace, looking for Galan in the darkness under the horse, and Galan brought him down.

He moved faster than I could think, and yet I moved with him, for a shadow must keep pace. And I battened on his swiftness and force. I tasted his want and it was my own: to overthrow his enemies, to grind them down. It was not their deaths we craved so much as their devouring.

Time lurched, now racing, now lagging; I began to lose moments.

Galan broke a rider's leg with the shaft of his scorpion and pulled him from his horse and stood upon his arm and punched holes in his helmet and skull with the venom, the scorpion's spike. And we were screaming.

I crawled into the open mouth of a dead man, across a glazed and sightless eye, and felt satisfaction. Yet we were not sated.

A horse was disemboweled and ran away tripping on his own guts. Galan must have done that. I don't remember. He had his fortress of dead horses. They had to clamber to us now. They couldn't reach us on horseback. Two teeth were loose and wobbling in his jaw. His cheeks were stiff. His grin had become a snarl. There was a longsword that had belonged to some one else in his hand. The scorpion and buckler were long gone. We struck and the metal sang; struck again and found the true spot on the edge where the sword cut without jarring. Some fool left himself open for a thrust and we shoved hard, all those layers to reach the flesh, grunting as the blade went home, ripping it out sideways to finish him fast. Every man was the same man, faceless in his helm or with a face of fear or pain or anger. The same enemy over and over, and we were growing weary of it. One leg shook. Exaltation had soured to impatience, the taste of wrath.

The blood spilling from the enemy had been warm, but it was cool against Galan's skin. He burned so hot he scorched even me, his shadow, and in feeling this I knew myself apart from him again, for a moment. Time enough to feel fear.

If any god rode him now, it was Rift, who sows fear and reaps destruction, who gathers the dead like so many sheaves. It was a thought too great for me to hold, for I was diminished, a scrap of self.

There was a gorgeous shadow streaming around Galan, as if his shade had grown too large for his body to contain. His heat consumed me, and I was the smoke of his flame and our shades commingled.

A cataphract climbed up the mound of fallen men and horses. He carried the insignia of the Ardor's own house on his banner, the smith's forge with a fire burning in its heart, so it was fitting that he wore the finest plate armor I'd ever seen, with overlapping bands at every joint so that he could move with ease. His visor was smooth and inlaid with a pattern of flames in gold and copper.

The armor was useless as a prize; the man was tall and thin as a sapling and it could never be remade to fit. That was Galan's thought and mine. By then there was no difference.

All that was left of me was a flaw in his eyes, a throbbing in his bloodstream.

I saw everything doubled, shadowed. There was a black nimbus around the enemy, and by its tinge I knew he was too calm. I hoped the heavy plate would make him clumsy, but his attack was audacious and fast. A flare of darkness warned me it was coming. I huffed and scrambled out of the way.A breath or two, while I eyed him. Where had he been hiding, that his armor was so clean, not yet besmirched with mud and gore? His freshness was a jape. He mocked me with it. I'd sully that perfect armor and trample him like the others.

He came in high and I swept his blow aside with an armored hand while I thrust low. When my sword hit his thighguard, it jarred my arm. His blade darted back to slice through the padding of my left sleeve and into the flesh above the elbow. That stung me; it was the first pain I'd felt since the battle began.

Then fear nattered at me, fear wavered on the point and edge of his blade. I blinked away the sweat and drew my mercy dagger. My left arm had been weakened by the cut, but I could still grip. Another blink, and I lunged.

We might have been laboring alone on the field, for I heard no sound but our panting and groans, our blows. He was well schooled, his elegance only a little marred by the uneven footing of dead men and horses. He pierced my thigh; he tried to bleed me to death with little pricks, aiming where I had least protection. Blood ran down my leg and arm, making the linen under-armor bind like swaddling clothes. I waded through air thick as water.

But I knew his moves, every one. By the way he combined one form with another, by his very precision, I knew his swordmaster, I knew his name. The Ardor's son. They'd kept him safe that he might find me when I was weary. A ferocious glee was rising in me. He hadn't killed today and that would be his downfall, for I was bent on his death and he—though he didn't know it—hesitated at mine.

And his shadow reached for me first and I knew where he meant to go. I knew I could kill him. He was beginning to understand. His shadow flickered and changed hue.

Now he was forgetting half of what he'd been taught, and all I had to do was follow my sword's lead, slide from counter to counterattack along the length of the blade. And I struck and struck again, but my sword rang against his armor. They'd used the best steel and I could hardly dent it. There were so few chinks. I studied them all. My fury burned cold now, and measuring.

A blow against his shins weakened his leg. I tried to get under his neck-guard and my sword nicked on his cuirass. Two more blows and the blade shivered. I dropped it and he lunged and I caught the blade of his sword in my gauntleted hand and pulled him close and drove my dagger into the small gap where his steel prickguard was laced to his mail leggings, and left it there. I wrested his sword from him and bashed him so hard with the pommel that I stove in his helmet and rocked him back on his heels. He raised his arms to fend off the blows, and I turned the sword and jabbed him in the armpit. He fell to his knees and I hammered him across the visor, cursing every time I struck. The visor flew off, and I drove the hilt into his nose and he toppled over.

And that should have ended it, but the man trapped my legs between his and brought me down. I fell on him, and we wrestled for the sword in a close embrace. His nose was broken and his breath bubbled and blood ran down his cheeks. We rolled and I was wedged between two horses. He loomed over me. But I found my mercy dagger lodged in his groin and I pulled it free with my left hand. I saw fear widen his pupils before I drove the blade under his chin, to the hilt. A spray of blood got through the eye slits of my visor.

I pushed him off me and saw his shadow seethe and roil away like smoke, and so his shade departed.

What was left had been more boy than man, with a downy beard.

I climbed to my feet and looked for the next enemy. The palms of my gauntlets were sticky with clotted blood. I picked up the man's sword. There was pain from the old belly wound; maybe I'd torn it again. I was gasping, hot as a hearthstone and thirsty. I licked my lips and tasted blood and salt.

To stand still was to know these things. To collect myself, to slip into shadow again, to hide underfoot. The Sun was high overhead. It gave too much light and we shrank from it.

And we looked for the next man we must kill, and the next, but there was no one at hand. The locus of battle had shifted and left us stranded on our fortress of corpses. We began to search among them, among the dead.

And I, on the hill, began to fall. Sometimes I've dreamed of falling only to start awake, heart racing. This was worse: I plummeted from a great height or a great distance and woke to find myself still falling. For a perilous moment I didn't know who I was, where I was. The eyes were filled with sun splotches and shadows. And all those pains—at the groin, across the back, around the neck and down the throat, into the bellows—and the pricking in the limbs, the burning skin—surely those pains and those limbs were none of mine. The sap of strength was gone and there was nothing inside but weak and brittle pith that couldn't bear me up. The legs were giving way.

I was truly falling. It was no dream. I'd been pushed from my perch on the boulder. A strong hand grabbed my arm as I went down. Flykiller pulled me up and saved my life.

The spectators had begun to move toward the tourney field, and we were in the midst of them. As those nearby pressed against us, so were they pressed. There was no contending against that force. A grain of sand might as well defy the tide.