The Renegades of Pern (37 page)

The newcomer settled on the beach not far from Heth. Then his eyes whirled from placid green to agitated orange, and he emitted a startled bleat.

“Heth just brought Clarinath up to date,” K’van said with a wry grin.

V’line was scrambling down his dragon’s side and came racing toward them, his expression anxious. “Is it true? You’ve been attacked, Jayge? By whom? It’s outrageous. This sort of thing can’t be permitted.”

“Permission is never the issue,” K’van said grimly. “And our hands are tied in such matters.”

“Oh, yes, that’s true, you’re right,” V’line said, belatedly recalling Weyr strictures.

A frantic fire-lizard erupted into the air above Piemur’s head and then wrapped herself around his neck, threatening to strangle him with relief.

“Hold it, Farli, hold it! I can’t understand you,” Piemur exclaimed, protecting his face from her lickings and unwinding her tail from his neck. “Once again, more slowly. Ah, really? Weren’t you a clever one!” Piemur managed a grin as he explained. “She found Alemi, and he’s just beyond the point. He sent her to see what’s happened. Jancis, you got anything to write on? And what do I tell him, Jayge?”

“Alemi had six crew—that gives us twelve.” Swacky looked pleased.

“We can’t wait,” Jayge said. “We’ll have to rely on surprise—and luck.”

“They won’t expect canines to come out of a tree,” Aramina suggested.

Jayge pawed through the weapons, searching for a dagger. Solemnly K’van handed him his own blade.

“They’re heading into the grove now,” Swacky said, cocking his head at the sounds of men crashing through the undergrowth. “We can sneak after ’em, pick ’em off one by one.” He flexed his sword arm, grinning in anticipation.

Jayge caught Aramina’s hands as she hefted a fishing spear. “Oh, no, my love. You will take yourself and our children as far away from here as possible. Do you understand me? There’s no time to argue the point. You’re going.”

“And Heth and I will make sure she does,” K’van said unexpectedly, taking Aramina by the arm. “That much I can do.”

She hesitated one brief moment, then acquiesced, her shoulders drooping. “Just don’t let her slip away again, Jayge. I don’t ever want to be faced with this again!”

Piemur dispatched Farli with the message to Alemi. Swacky fortified himself with one more pull from the wineskin, settled the fishing spears to his shoulders, and looked attentively to Jayge. They were all armed now, bristling with assorted weapons, their manner determined. Under the worried gaze of V’line, the Paradise River Holders jogged east, slipping past the thickets that bordered the holds.

The tree in which Aramina and Jancis had taken refuge with the two children was in the approximate center of the grove that Thella was currently searching. The ancient fellis trees, their massive trunks larger than three men could span with fingers touching, spread densely leaved branches to form a large, dimly lit park. Air vines looped in intricate patterns, further obscuring any sun that tried to penetrate the luxuriant foliage. A thick, deep mulch covered the ground and aided the soundless advance of Jayge and the others as they slipped from the shadows of one wide-boled trunk to another.

“Hey, over here! I saw the branches move,” someone called. “Over here!”

Jayge swore under his breath, praying that the canines would not break until he and the others got close enough to make use of that diversion. Thella’s men—he counted eleven, no, fifteen—closed in on the tree.

Then Thella swaggered forward. Even in the dim light, Jayge realized that the woman who had caused him and Aramina so much pain and anguish had altered considerably since their first encounter on the trail. Though better clothed than her ragtag minions, she was as gaunt, and her close-cropped hair framed a face made ugly by scar pocks and privations.

“Aramina!” She peered up into the branches, and her call was brightly wheedling. “We know you’re up there. Your man and all your other friends are tied up tight and out of their senses. This time—” Thella’s throaty laugh was malicious “you haven’t any handy dragons to help you.”

Jayge edged closer, hefting the spear in his hand, marking a burly man as target, but he was not close enough for a killing throw yet. He checked the others. Piemur and Jancis were on his left. Swacky, on his right, crouched low and darted forward, Temma and Nazer moving like shadows beyond him. They would all have to get closer, if each disabled one man, there were still nine to contend with. Though maybe now that the renegades were confident of their quarry, they would relax their guard and lower their blades. He gestured to catch Swacky’s eye and pantomimed his instructions. The man nodded.

“You—Obirt, Birsan, Glay,” Thella said. “Gather up some of those loose branches. I don’t know how well fellis burns, but we’ll soon find out, won’t we?” She laughed nastily. “It’s one way to get someone out of a tree, isn’t it, men? I can just see the flames crackling, climbing quickly up this hairy bark, thick smoke roiling up, choking the brats, making them lose hold and fall to their deaths. Is that what you want, Aramina?” Thella’s jocularity ended. “Come down out of there. Now! Save your babes from suffocating.”

The three men she named had set aside their weapons and begun to gather kindling. The others continued to peer up into the tree, circling it, oblivious to the holders’ stealthy advance. A fourth man began to kick the dry ground cover into a pile against the trunk and knelt to start a blaze. Suddenly he collapsed across the pile of brush, the flickering flame extinguished by his body.

“What the—” some else declared. “Hey, there’s a knife in Birsan’s back!”

“Attack!” Jayge yelled, and sprang from behind his tree.

He launched his spear at the back of the burly man and swerved to one side to throw one of his daggers at the nearest wood gatherer. A dagger whistled past his ear to thunk into the fellis trunk behind him.

“Attack!” he repeated, hoping the canines would respond.

The upper branches began to shake, and then the canines sprang from above. Jayge heard their snarling challenges as he raced toward Thella. The din of screams, curses, growls, and the clang of metal against metal filled the air.

She was waiting for him, blatantly ignoring the pleas for help from the man on the ground a scant stride away, struggling to keep the canine from tearing out his throat. Jayge saw the arrogant smile on her face—and then her raised arm. As her hand snapped forward, he flung himself sideways and heard the thrown blade whir through the air where he had been standing to hammer into the tree that guarded his back. She flipped a third dagger into her left hand and, grinning balefully at him, drew her sword.

Jayge watched the curved sword and the straight dagger as he edged closer, wishing for another spear and the greater range it would have given him. His own sword scraped from its scabbard, and he twisted it to make the sound as loud and threatening as he could. Thella was not impressed.

“So,” she said, “it seems I was foolish to leave just one guard. How did you escape? I tied you up myself, little trader man.” She was circling slowly, and the point of her sword dabbed out like a feline’s paw, chiming against Jayge’s blade, testing his wrist. “Is all the strength back in your arm?” The blades chimed again, and Jayge’s sword wavered off line as the impact thumped his jangling sinews. Thella grinned more widely still. “It seems not. Even so, I should have followed my own advice and chopped off your hands, but those oafs let your woman escape.”

“That’s been your problem all along, Thella—things get out of your hands. Maybe weapons, too.” Jayge wondered why she was circling that way. Looking for an escape route? Maybe her touted ability with a sword was all bluff, too. “This is your final mistake, Thella. Because this is where it ends. You won’t slip away from me, not this time. Not here. Not
now
!”

The slow circling broke as he thrust forward suddenly, violently—but the blades met with a clash and a grinding sound like huge, murderous scissors as Thella’s defensive sweep became a parry and riposte that licked her sword’s steel tongue straight at his face. Jayge broke ground with a barely balanced backward leap and heard her laughing at him. There was blood on his cheek, from a slice he had not even felt—not until the wet heat dribbled from his chin and the sting of the cut ran from his eye to the corner of his mouth.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, little holdling,” Thella said with a sneer. “First blood’s mine!”

“Only heart’s blood counts.” He slammed his sword’s edge against her knuckleguard, hoping for a flinch, for the weapon to twist in her grip, maybe even for it to fly from her hand. Jayge had no such luck; she let the stroke glissade and expend its force along the sweep of her own blade—and then the dagger in her left fist jabbed at his face, his throat, his belly, three flickers of bright metal that reminded him where her true skill lay.

Jayge smashed the daggerpoint sideways with the guard of his sword, feeling it pluck at his clothing as it came close, far too close. But he refused to make the break Thella had hoped for, and instead forced her back, back, back, until she slammed hard against the immovable trunk of a fellis. Her widened eyes told him that she had not expected to be trapped that way, and Jayge anticipated her attempt to beat her way free with a series of savage cuts. He met them and blocked them, every one, and forced her hard back against the tree again.

“And it’s your heart’s blood that will spill today.” His point flicked through her guard and left a long rip down her left arm. The dagger went flying. “That’s for Armald!” He came at her again, feinting at her weakened arm and then closing, K’van’s knife in play now for all that its lack of a guard might cost Jayge fingers. Their swords ran together at the hilts, a tangle of sharpened metal held crisscrossed by main force as Jayge’s dagger pulled to gash her right arm. “That’s for Borgald’s best team!” Another swift feint led her blade far off its defensive line, swept further by the knife in his left hand as the sword in his right raked across her exposed midriff. “And that was for Readis!”

“Readis?” Her voice was trembling, from surprise as much as from pain. “What was Readis to you?”

“My uncle, Thella. My uncle!” Jayge backed off, seeing the pallor in her pocked face as shock changed to despair. The rage in him abated briefly, and he charged it again to do what was necessary and end it all.

Is it necessary, Jayge? Is it really?
The voice in his head, and in his memory, belonged to Readis—but the voice in his ears belonged to Aramina. “Enough, Jayge! Or you’ll be no better than she is.”

For all his surprise at hearing his wife when she should have been safely away, Jayge did not let his gaze waver from Thella’s face. But hers, startled, went over his left shoulder, and her face contorted with loathing. Eyes blazing, she lunged in a savage futile attack at the girl who had eluded her. Jayge was in the way.

Thrusting as hard as he could, he felt the appalling jolt along blade and hand and arm as his curved sword went into Thella’s flesh, its edge grating against one rib as the point punched through to her hating heart. Stolidly, he wrenched the sword free.

Thella’s sword spun from her hand, thudded deep into the dirt at Aramina’s feet, and stuck there, swaying. With a little sigh, she dropped to her knees, one hand against her breast as if to stem the flow of shocking red that seeped through her fingers. And then she crumpled to the ground unmoving.

The deep hush that settled once again over the fellis tree grove was punctuated by Jayge’s hoarse breathing and the whimpers of wounded men and animals. Gulping air into pumping lungs, Jayge gradually became aware of Alemi and the other fishermen moving about the glade. Aramina, carefully avoiding the dagger, bent down to study Thella’s face. Without speaking, she rose and turned to Jayge, noting the bleeding cuts that his exertions had opened.

“Those will need to be cleaned, Jayge,” she said in a curiously detached tone. “And we’ll have to tend the canines.”

“Go on, Jayge,” Alemi said. “We’ll take care of all this.” His gesture consigned Thella and her dead supporters to oblivion.

Lessa and F’lar arrived two hours later, straight from Threadfall. As K’van had anticipated, he was soundly berated by Lessa for involving himself in a holder dispute.

“I’d have done the same thing even if I’d known what the problem was when Heth shouted at me, Lessa,” K’van said stoutly, although Piemur thought the young Weyrleader was pale enough under his tan. “A rider doesn’t ignore his dragon’s summons.”

“A rider makes certain a dragon doesn’t endanger himself,” the Benden Weyrwoman replied, “much less his entire Weyr! Did you forget your position, Southern Leader?”

“No,” K’van replied. “But neither did Heth.”

“At least, you had the good sense to limit Weyr involvement to the one rescue.” F’lar’s expression was as grim as Lessa’s. “Jayge honorably concluded the affair.”

The Weyrleaders had seen the dead woman where she and the other renegades lay in sacks, prepared for immediate sea burial.

“That’s the end of that,” Lessa said, frowning. Then she began to take off the rest of her heavy flying gear. “Did the renegades destroy everything in the hold, or do we have to fly back to Benden to refresh ourselves?” she demanded petulantly.

She was tired, hot, and at the end of an exhausting Fall, the last thing she needed was another crisis.

“No, indeed not,” Jancis said, taking Lessa’s jacket. “There’s redfruit, juice, klah, some of Jayge’s rotgut spirits, and if you can spare the time, broiled fish fresh from the sea.”

The hospitality brought a smile to Lessa’s face, reluctant at first, but more relaxed as Jancis led them up the porch steps. The first of the evening breezes had freshened the sultry air, and the house was pleasantly cool.

“What sort of casualties did Jayge suffer?” F’lar asked.

“None of the hold was badly hurt—bumps, lumps, superficial cuts, and bruises mostly,” Jancis said, “though Ara had to take a few stitches here and there. She’s very neat.”

“And the renegades?” Lessa asked, sipping the drink Jancis had given her.