Return of the Dragon (The Dragon's Champion Book 6) (11 page)

She stood and went back into the house, though she was
not going to stay for dinner. She moved into the drawing room where she had
left her bow. She grabbed it and began gathering her daggers and sword as well.

So as not to be seen, she left the house through a
side window and jogged stealthily out from Stonebrook and into the night.
Neither the dwarves nor humans saw her cross the chasm and make her way across
the field.

The stars above her winked in and
out of the clouds and haze from the forest.
There was no sign of the
orcish army. If not for the many bodies
lying
in the
grass it might have been possible to forget the orcs had even attacked earlier
in the day. There were no campfires, no forward scouts in the field, nothing.
Large boulders littered the field, giving her easy cover as she made her way to
the burnt forest. She crouched low behind a particularly large boulder and
scanned the area. Once she was sure it was clear to proceed, she darted out to
the nearest tree.

Lady Arkyn nearly toppled the burnt oak trunk by
touching it. Black soot smeared across her palm and gray ash shot up from her
footsteps. She leaned around the trunk and scoured everything around her. She
sprinted to another trunk fifty yards away, pausing just long enough to scan
for movement before running to a large mound of dirt and ash and hunkering down
near it.

This time instead of peering around the side of her
cover she closed her eyes and listened. Her half-elf ears strained for the
slightest sound. The slight breeze, which she had only faintly noticed a moment
ago, now seemed a mighty gale as her ears amplified every sound around her. She
heard a rustling sound and looked up to see a pair of carrion birds resting on
the sole branch left on a tall, mostly burnt pine tree. Still, none of the
sounds alerted her to any enemy presence.

Satisfied now that the orcs had made a full retreat,
she jumped up and made her way through the burnt forest. She ran for hours in
the night. Her feet fell lightly upon the blanket of ash, making no sound as
they stirred up little gray clouds around her ankles. Eventually she came upon
a forward camp of orcs. There were only twenty of them, so she knew that the
orc chief would not be found among them. A pair of goargs slept peacefully,
each tied to a sword stabbed into the ground. It was a common sight with orcish
scouts.
One goarg per ten orcs.
That left nine orcs to
hold off the enemy while one used a goarg to warn the main camp. Using a sword
to anchor the goarg made it all the faster to release the goarg from its tether
and escape before an enemy could attack.
Having twice the
number of orcs and goargs as a regular scouting party meant that they expected
to be chased when they routed.

Lady Arkyn entertained the temptation of killing the
scouts. She knew that she could easily take five plus the goargs before any
could raise an alarm. She pushed the notion out of her mind. She was not after
a scouting party. She wanted that chief.

Even now she could still feel his smug, fierce eyes
upon her. Goosebumps formed along her forearms just at the thought. She cast a
glance back the way she came. If Lepkin had known what she was doing, he would
have stopped her. Still, she felt confident. Where a group might fail, she
could slip in undetected.

She pressed on, beyond the scouting party and deeper
into the burnt forest. She walked for another two hours before arriving at a
place where the majority of the tracks in the ash diverged from the southern
direction. She studied each imprint, each indentation around her. There was no
way to know which way the chief had gone. Hundreds, no—thousands, of tracks
peeled out to the east while thousands more went due west.
A
third column of tracks double-backed south.

She looked specifically for goarg tracks, but that
didn’t help. There were several sets of those in each direction as well. Lady
Arkyn sighed and sat upon the gray ash on the ground. Her ears twitched with
the slightest of sounds as she closed her eyes and focused on the orc chief. In
her meditation, she tried to imagine his march northward from Ten Forts. She
conjured up the image of thousands of orcs before her. In her mind she watched
them get pummeled by the catapults and scatter before her. A group of warriors
slew a few officers, adding another layer of chaos into the commotion and
through the chief’s eyes she watched herself fire an arrow. It wasn’t real of
course, Lady Arkyn had no way to read minds, but she found the practice of
imagining the enemy’s perspective useful. It helped her arrive at a better idea
of what the enemy might do, and where the chief may have gone.

“West,” Lady Arkyn whispered aloud. “The pig-faced orc
went west.” Where else would he go? The fastest and best path around the chasm
that held the brook was to the west. The chief must have taken a large force
that way so he could circle back and flank the catapults. The other two massive
groups were likely positioned defensively, hoping for a pursuit.

She rose to her feet and was about to take a step when
a strange sound caught her attention. It was slight, almost inaudible even to
her half-elf ears. There was a soft wheeze on the air accompanied by
pit-pf-pf, pit-pf-pf,
pit
-pf-pf.
She readied her bow and turned left. A gray wolf
slowed to a stop ten yards before her. Its head hung low. Its body expanded and
contracted quickly with panting, wheezing breaths. One leg was up, held
defensively. The wolf looked at her with its yellow eyes and then began slowly
limping toward her. It was then that Lady Arkyn saw the blood on its right
foreleg. Still, despite its injury the wolf did
not growl nor
show hostility.

Lady Arkyn called out to the wolf softly.
“Trouble with orcs?”

The wolf hung its head low to the ash. Before her eyes
the wolf grew, expanding to the size of a large man. As the body transformed it
lost its fur. Fingers grew out where the paws had been. The tail shortened. A
man
lay
face-down in the ash.

“Peren?”
Lady Arkyn gasped.
She went to him and knelt next to his shoulder. The man’s right arm had a deep
gash though it down to the bone.

“My name is Rjord,” the man said as he rolled to his
left side and looked up at her.

Lady Arkyn’s excitement was dashed when she saw that
the man before her was not her friend. Still, she set her bow down and reached
for a small pouch where she kept her bandages. “Be still and I will help you,”
she said. “Where are you from?”

“Ten Forts,” Rjord said. “I am from Ten Forts.”

Lady Arkyn screwed up her face. “I don’t recall any
werewolves stationed at Ten Forts,” she said.

“Of course not,” Rjord replied. “I am a shapeshifter.
I have the ability to change my form into that of a wolf at times, but I am not
a werewolf. I keep my mind at all times, and I choose when to transform.”

“Shouldn’t you be at Stonebrook then?” Lady Arkyn
asked.

Rjord reached up and placed a weak right hand on her
forearm. “There isn’t any time. The orcs who found me are coming. They will be
here soon.”

Lady Arkyn looked out to the east. “How many follow
you?” she asked.

Rjord shook his head. “After one of them hit me with
an axe I didn’t exactly stop to take count. I ran.”

“They saw you transform?” she pressed.

Rjord pushed up and nodded.

Lady Arkyn peered into the darkness. Her senses didn’t
detect anything yet, but she knew that would soon change. “Orcs hate magic,”
she said. “They’ll surely follow you. Wait here.” She grabbed her bow and moved
away from the wounded man, leaving a roll of bandages with him so he could tend
to his arm while she moved to a better position.

She didn’t have to wait long before a trio of orcs
came into view. They were running at full tilt through the ash, stirring up
great clouds of gray around them and breathing heavily. She let them get close
enough to see Rjord on the ground. They redoubled their pace and sprinted in
with their weapons ready. One of them whistled sharply.

That was what she was waiting for.

A large goarg galloped up from a little farther south.
The rider upon its back held a great spear in his hands. Lady Arkyn jabbed four
arrows into the ground with one more already against the bow string. In a
matter of seconds all five arrows took flight. The first coursed through the
goarg rider’s neck. The second pierced the goarg’s eye, sinking deeply into the
animal’s head and dropping the beast to crash through a thick layer of ash. The
third tore through an orc’s chest. The fourth and fifth arrows, however, sunk
into the sides of the remaining orcs’ knees. They fell to the ground crying out
in agony.

Lady Arkyn sprinted toward them as quickly as she
could. One of the orcs pushed up, but an arrow pierced his right shoulder and
he fell back to the ground. The she-elf leapt over the first and landed on the
second orc before he could move. Her boots drove the orc’s face deep into the
ash, muffling his shouts. She followed that with a quick strike to the back of
the orc’s head with the heel of her right boot,
then
she leapt over to the first orc, taking hold of the arrow shaft running through
the orc’s shoulder and jamming her knee into the small of the orc’s back. The
orc jerked upwards, arching his back. He opened his mouth to yell, but Lady
Arkyn grabbed a hold of his throat and squeezed on the orc’s windpipe. It
wasn’t enough to kill the orc, but it was enough to silence him.

Out came her dagger. The blade went up to the orc’s
neck and she whispered into his ear. “You chief is a coward. He ran from the
field of battle.”

“Foggd be!” the orc grunted.

“You will all die,” Lady Arkyn said.

“Foggd be!” the orc repeated.

She knew then that this orc did not speak Common
Tongue. If he did, he would have responded to the insults directly. She plunged
her dagger into the orc’s neck and dropped his now lifeless head back to the
ash.

Lady Arkyn moved back to the unconscious orc. She
grabbed his left arm and twisted it up behind his back as she positioned her
knee directly in the center of the orc’s spine. She used the dagger in her
right hand to poke the orc’s cheek until he woke up.

“Your chief is a coward,” she told the orc.

“You are coward,” the orc said. He wasn’t fluent by
any means. He struggled to find each word, but they emerged from his mouth with
all the bravado and false confidence the orc could muster while the point of
Arkyn’s dagger pressed into his skin.

“Your chief fled the field, running home as fast as he
could while he left all of you to
die
.”

“Graa!” the orc shouted as he tried to squirm free.
Lady Arkyn’s grip on the orc’s arm was surprisingly tight given her slight
frame. The orc wiggled and wormed, pushing this way and that, but nothing
worked. She held him pinned to the ground. “You die soon.
Chief
no run home.
Chief go east around your coward catapults. Chief destroy
human home.” The orc then started laughing.

Lady Arkyn slit his throat. “East then,” she said as
she rose and cleaned her blade. “That saved me a lot of trouble.”

“You’re going after him?” Rjord asked.

Lady Arkyn nodded her head. “The snows will be here in
a couple of weeks. If I can cut off the head before then, the orcs will be
forced to turn back.” She situated her bow onto her person and then beckoned
for Rjord to join her. “Come with me.”

Rjord shook his head. “I have no intention of going
back. I barely escaped.”

“There are some scouts up north,” Lady Arkyn said as
she gestured behind herself with her head. “You might want to go back into your
wolf form. They have goargs.”

Rjord huffed. “I’m not going north either,” he said.

“You’re leaving?” Lady Arkyn asked pointedly.

Rjord nodded his head.

Lady Arkyn’s hand reflexively moved up to her quiver.
There was only one punishment for desertion. Rjord’s dark eyes pleaded with
hers silently, but he didn’t move to run. He held his breath, staring at her.
Lady Arkyn’s fingers grasped the cold, smooth shaft of an arrow. She knew what
had to be done. Her arm pulled and the arrow slid free of its place. Rjord
closed his eyes. She put the arrow to the string and pulled it back to the
corner of her mouth. She stared down the arrow at the man. She drew in her
breath and held it. Then she released her hold on the arrow.

No sooner had the string twanged into place than the
arrow embedded itself deep in the ash and dirt next to Rjord’s face. The man
twitched, and then slowly opened his eyes. He slowly turned his head away and
put a hand up to the red line where the arrow’s fletching had scraped him. His
eyes again looked up to her, but this time there was no pleading, only
puzzlement.

“I guess I missed,” Lady Arkyn said coolly. “Go on,
get out of here.”

“Why?” Rjord asked. “You owe me nothing. Why didn’t
you do it?”

Lady Arkyn sighed. “I fight enemies of the kingdom. I
am not about to start shooting scared countrymen on the field. Go on.” Lady
Arkyn motioned with her chin out to the east. “If you see any able-bodied men,
send them out here to us.”