Heart of the Forest (Arwn's Gift Book 1) (16 page)

“Now you have me jealous of the sun,” he whispered as he wrapped his arms tighter around me and stood, taking me with him. He carried me to the horse and set me atop the saddle.

“You would have hated me as a child. I’d have put a frog on your head and made you eat mud. I was awful.”

“When you were a child I was… How old are you?”

“Old enough,” I grinned lazily at him. Fatigue had slowly started to worm its way into my joints. He mounted the horse and steadied me once again. There was something about the touch that was amazingly simple and intimate.

“If you say so.” He kissed my cheek and heeled Ys back on. “Here, we’re going to catch up to Islwyn. Rise up a little.” I squeezed the horse with my knees and lifted myself off the saddle. Aneurin slipped his hips under mine and pulled me tighter against him. “Have you ever ridden hard before?”

“What sort of question is that? Have I ridden hard?” I scoffed and leaned over the horse’s neck.

“Well, all right.” I could hear the smirk in his voice as his body loomed over me and his hips lifted mine. I squealed as he heeled Ys’s flanks and the horse took off like a streak of white lightning across the fields. The sensation of the wind fluttering my hair out over our shoulders was amazing. My long inky tresses caught the wind, rippling like a sail as our bodies moved as one.

The smile on my lips was smug as the inn—and beside it, the massive gnarled tree with its fingerlike branches reaching for the sky—came into view. I could see figures walking around the base of the tree. Aneurin yanked hard on the reins. Ys squealed and reared up. Aneurin balanced both of us expertly as the massive white stallion lowered itself. In silence, he unsheathed his sword and jumped off the back of the horse.

“Take Ys back the way we came and wait at the crossroads. This shouldn’t take more than an hour.” Aneurin’s voice took on a hard quality as he said those words.

“Wha—” And then I saw it. Swaying from the limbs of that massive leafless tree were bodies that I could barely make out as they still twitched.
They clearly haven’t hung someone from a tree before.
“All right.”

“I-if I’m not back in an hour, just”—he furrowed his brows and nodded a little—“know that I love you.”
Wait, what?
He didn’t give me time to react. He smacked Ys’s hindquarters, and the horse bolted. I had no choice but to turn the massive white stallion in the opposite direction or risk riding right into whatever Aneurin was trying to keep me safe from. By the time I had Ys turned around, Aneurin was already at the tree with its limbs filled with twitching, dying people.

The sound of steel ringing against steel drifted faintly on the air, but I couldn’t sit still. I wasn’t the sort of woman to sit back and let someone save me. Oh, I was far too stubborn for that, and deep down I was still a healer. I couldn’t let those still-twitching people die if there was a chance I could save them.

Yanking hard on Ys’s black reins, I pulled him to a stop and dismounted. He snuffed at me in protest, but I grumbled under my breath as I dug through the saddlebags for my dagger. I slipped it into my belt and pulled up my hood, tucking my hair away. From firsthand experience I knew it took the better part of an hour to kill someone from a botched hanging. The first execution I ever saw was a thief with a strong neck. He was up on the scaffold struggling for an hour before a guard had the decency to yank on him and break his neck. It was a horrible way to die, and I refused to let whoever was on the tree die in that same way.

It took no time at all for me to reach the fighting at the base of the tree. Aneurin was outnumbered seven to one, but he was clearly an expert swordsman. Slavers were easy to spot a mile away; there was something about those who traded in unwilling flesh that made them putrid beings. Their garb and the dirt on their clothing marked them as what they were, as did their lack of heavy armor. Roadside bandits tended to be better armed.

Islwyn’s horse loitered under the tree, but Islwyn was nowhere to be found. I could taste every beat of my pulse as I skirted the edge of the fighting. I could deal with fighting if I had an advantage. But as I was a rather small woman, scarcely bigger than most pixies, taking on a full-grown man in a fair fight would end poorly for me. I had no misgivings about my chances in a fair fight. And that was why it took all the strength I had not to squeal when, after I’d jumped to pull myself onto the lower branches, someone grabbed my foot and pulled me back down.

I hit the ground with a grunt, and I could almost feel that adrenaline surge as my hood fell back and my hair spilled over my shoulder. The slaver laughed at me. He was filthy with layers of grime covering his skin and clothes. He wore a blood-spattered dark cap and shirt. I glared up at him, my eyes flashing fiercely as I scrambled to my feet. He seemed startled when I unsheathed my dagger and lunged for him. He dodged me and grabbed my hair.

“Pretty thin’, boss don’ wan’ no human bitches. Buh’ we can ’ave a spo’ o’ fun wit’ chu ’fore. After we collec’ your lit’le frien’.” I let him speak in garbled common as I tried to struggle free.

Never once did it occur to me to grab his hand. Oh no, I thought of the most vulnerable spots on a man. I elbowed him in the groin as hard as I could, and he went down like the worthless sack of shit he was. While he grabbed at his loins, I unsheathed my dagger and sliced him from ear to ear before he could recover. His blood was on my hands as I watched him die. Again I felt nothing, and I was only a bit disturbed when I jumped for the tree again and pulled myself up on the lower branches. Oh, they’d break bones on the way down when I cut them free, but better a broken bone or two than death.

I was so focused on cutting the seven choking humans down from the tree that I didn’t notice what had happened until it was too late. Three of the humans Aneurin fought remained alive, and Aneurin was covered in gore, his hair dripping with blood. He was moving slower than before, those lithe limbs seemingly having lost their lightning quickness. One human grabbed the collar of his jerkin, pulling him in close. Aneurin head-butted him and staggered backward. And that was when the other two set on him. One of those dying men hit the ground with a hard thud as I quickly covered my mouth to stifle my startled scream. The tears that blurred my vision threatened to slip down my cheeks as I watched the man he’d head-butted stagger over and hit him on the side of the head with the pommel of his sword.

“Might have to take this one’s teeth, but he’s almost prettier than that girl,” one of the men exclaimed as he held Aneurin’s unconscious body up by his blood-drenched hair, and then he dropped him like a heavy sack. “Bind him and shove him in the cart with the other feral piece of shit.”
I’m going to kill you…slowly and with my bare fucking hands.

My jaw set as I watched the three men carry Aneurin to a nearby cart with a cage atop it. They threw him in, and I could almost make out Islwyn in there with him. I bit into the pad of my thumb to keep quiet as they started moving two carts away. I cut the remaining men down and slipped from the tree. Once on the ground I heard the faintest gurgling wheezing sound. I knew that sound. It was the sound of a life with maybe an hour left—someone slowly drowning in their own blood. Wiping my dagger on my trousers, I followed that sound until I found a wounded man with about five teeth in his mouth leaning against a tree.

“That’s a very slow death.” I grinned at him, setting my teeth into my bottom lip.

“Help me, Miss! My mates an’ I! Elf cunts set in on us!”

“I’m a Cunning Woman. I can help ease your suffering. I just want to know where they are going. Your friends looked wounded.”

“They went to the Ruby Finch. Damn, it hurts,” he wheezed. I turned from him and started walking away. “W-wait! You said!”

“I need herbs to treat you. I’ll be back.” I walked toward the rickety inn.

The door was in splinters. Inside, the bodies of the patrons who either had tried to resist or had inconvenienced the slavers littered the floor. It didn’t take long for me to find the medicine to ease the man’s suffering. It was a little oil lamp. The glass bowl on the bottom was full, and the flame danced on the wick to the tune that I whistled as I returned to the man. His eyes went wide when I stopped a few feet from him. He knew. I let him get a good look at me before I threw the lamp at him as hard as I could. The glass hit his chest and shattered, and he burst into flames. His desperate screams filled the air as I walked back to Ys. I wasn’t exactly sure where the Ruby Finch was, but I knew what it was. It was a brothel, and those were usually close to a city but not too close. Gathering Islwyn’s dapple, I fixed both horses to the hitch outside as the humans started to sit up, rubbing their throats and coughing. Not all of them sat up. Part of me wanted to help them, but a much larger part of me wanted to catch up with the slavers.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew I couldn’t take on three warriors on my own. I had never swung a sword before. I knew the concept of it—you stab them before they can stab you—but beyond that I didn’t have any delusions about my prowess in battle. So the fight wouldn’t be fair at all.

Walking back into the inn, I went straight for the larder. I sniffed the baskets of herbs they had on a shelf. Everything was standard culinary fare. I had everything I needed to make the fire mixture from before, but I hesitated. It could easily burn out of control as it had in Heves, and I couldn’t live with myself if Aneurin burned alive while I tried to save him. I screamed in frustration and threw a basket of lavender sprigs across the small storeroom. My face and neck were hot with impotent rage. Pacing nervously, in my peripheral vision I eventually spied a dust-covered cask.

Working the cork from the barrel, I was almost knocked off my feet by the smell of ammonia. I quickly recorked it and blinked a few times as tears spilled down my cheeks from that caustic odor.
Someone cured leather in the fall.
My smile grew as I set to work on what was going to end up being a bomb—or rather, bombs. I set their biggest cauldron on the fire and mixed in the ammonia from the barrel with their meat-curing salts. Then I slowly added sugar and poured the mixture into four jars. While waiting for it to set I walked up into the guest rooms and retrieved a linen sheet that I ripped into strips. There was one lone man behind the bar when I returned, I recognized him as one of the few I had cut down. He nodded to me and forced a smile but didn’t say a word.

I flipped one of the chairs back upright and sat in it as I braided the scraps of linen from the sheet into wicks for the bombs. I plaited the linen deftly, my attention only half-focused on the task. I had used this type of bomb before. But then it was to blow up a gopher hole. It had worked, and all I needed, this time, was to create a distraction.

“Do you have a bow?” I asked, glancing up at the innkeeper from the four thin, tight linen wicks I had created. He held up a finger before disappearing up the stairs, and then returned with a bow and quiver full of arrows. He set them on the table in front of me and went back to the bar. He pointed to a slender body on the floor, not much older than a boy. “It was his?” I asked, and the innkeeper nodded.

“My… son,” he choked out, holding his throat. Rhosyn’s husband was scarcely older than she was. He barely had peach fuzz on his chin.

“Well…those sheepfuckers will regret all of this. It won’t bring him back, but he’ll be avenged.” I sighed. I wished I could have said or done more. It was my fault. Maybe not the boy’s murder, but Aneurin and Islwyn’s capture certainly was. With a ragged breath, I walked back into the larder and finished setting the bombs, with their close-fitting caps sealed with wax around the edges.

All my preparations took somewhat less than four hours, but four hours in a cart was the equivalent of an hour on horseback. I’d reach them before sunset, which would give me plenty of time to wait. After wrapping the bomb jars carefully in linen and placing them into my bag, I tied the reins of Islwyn’s dapple to Ys’s saddle and mounted the massive white stallion. I nudged him on with my heels, and he took off like he knew Aneurin was in danger. With a quick glance behind me, I could see two dark-clad riders heading up the road. One was so large I actually felt sorry for the horse that carried him. It was clear to me that it was Yorwrath and Grwn. No one was as big as Grwn. I urged Ys faster as I leaned over his powerful neck and pressed my face against his flowing silver mane.

I reached the slavers’ camp quicker than I’d anticipated. I dismounted when the light of their fire came into view and the caged carts were barely visible. I grabbed the striking stick from the saddlebags and pulled the bow over my shoulder and tied the quiver to my belt. Nearing the camp, I carefully watched the three men mill about the campfire before I chose the spot for the bombs, as the placement had to be perfect. Close enough to gain the attention of the men, but far enough that any rocks freed by the explosion wouldn’t accidently kill one of the captives. Admittedly I was guessing on all of it. It wasn’t something I had a great deal of knowledge on or experience with. I was a Cunning Woman, not a military strategist. I buried three of the bombs, staggering their placement, and then I set one slightly closer to the camp on top of the grass. One bomb was to bring them close; the three I buried were to do damage to whichever was stupid enough to fall for it.

Once everything was in place and darkness set in, I took out the striking stick and lit the fuse. I watched for a moment to make sure the wick was burning properly. Then I walked around to the opposite side of the camp and waited with an arrow in my hand and the bow at the ready. I had shot a bow before, and I didn’t figure shooting stupid sheepfuckers like the slavers was much harder than killing a doe, rabbit or squirrel—except a squirrel wasn’t likely to try and kill you if you missed. When I found my perfect little hiding spot, I knew I didn’t have much time left. And sure enough, a few seconds after I knelt in the brush and steadied my elbow against my knee, the first explosion rocked the earth. A shrill, excited cry sounded from the cages after the blast, a cry high pitched with youth—I’d almost had said it was that of a child. Sheepfucker-I-was-going-to-kill-slowly had the pliers in his hand and was on his way to the cage, but when the explosion sounded he paused, dropping the tool to the ground.