The Wicked Day (52 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE RIDER'S FATE

Perhaps it was the raucous noise of the wind, or perhaps it was the sunlight that fell over the battle. Perhaps it was something entirely different, such as the whisper of someone dreaming in the darkness. Whatever it was, both the black horseman and his steed looked up. Declan looked up as well. The blue sky arched over him. He saw the tiny figure falling from the sky. Saw the even smaller figure of the hawk beside him. His sword felt lighter in his grasp.

“Now,” said the fish butcher beside him. “Now’s our chance. The tide’s changing. It’s rising, and we’ve work to do.”

The pearl pulsed in agreement on Declan’s chest. He could smell the sea again, stronger than ever before. Salt and water and the tar of ships, the sweetness of long, summer days on the shore, of anemones flowering in the dim depths. He could hear the surf roaring in his ears.

Now, Declan Farrow.
The voice of Liss whispered in his mind.
Now.

The black line in front of him dissolved in a welter of blood. He could hear the fish butcher bellowing alongside him, the cleavers hacking through armor. The fishermen surged forward around him. He was the point of their spear. Declan’s sword leapt faster than thought, slamming against steel, taking life and bleeding it out on the cobblestones. The day spun sickeningly around him and there was only death under the shining sun. He was edging nearer to the black horseman now. The rider stared up at the sky, faceless behind the helm. The horse’s head was lifted up as well. Flame guttered around the beast’s neck.

“Jute!”

The sound was raw, violent, shivering with hatred. It echoed up into the sky. It came again, but it was the horse’s mouth that moved. Flame gouted out from between its teeth. The air snapped with magic and dreadful heat. The closest ranks of enemy soldiers around the horseman stumbled away from him. Their armor seemed to glow red, as if they had been plunged into a raging furnace. Cobblestones cracked and shattered beneath the horseman.

“Jute!”

It was a scream this time. A scream ripped raw with fury from the horse’s throat. There was sorcery in the sound. The voice rang out again, but this time it uttered words in some strange language. The air thickened. The light wavered around the horseman.

Hurry!

The voice of Liss was tense in Declan’s mind. A soldier stumbled to his knees before him, dead before he hit the ground. Declan yanked his sword free. An axe blade caught the sunlight as it arced toward his head. He ducked. His attention was not on the enemy fighting in front of him. His gaze was locked on the dark horseman. The air trembled with the horseman’s words. Something was strange about the light. It was dimming. No, it was bending. Darkness bloomed around the horseman. And Jute was diving straight down into the middle of it. Declan could see him much more clearly now. The boy’s face was set and strained. The wind whipped his hair back. He was falling straight down through the air, faster and faster. The sky sparkled around him.

“Jute!”

The sound of the name rolled through the sky. The sound of it was ragged, unraveling. It was as though the speaker sought to unmake the name. Declan, fighting ever closer through the enemy ranks, saw all too clearly now who was speaking. The horse. Not the horseman. The horseman sat in silent stolidity in the saddle, head tilted back to watch Jute, but there was only passivity in the body. There was no life there. But the horse screamed its fury. Flame gushed from its throat. The air bled darkness around the horse. Declan could see its mouth working, words forming. The sound of them rolled into the air. They were a shock to all that was, like a hammer slamming against an anvil. Vision and being shook. Nothing in those words was familiar. Nothing in them even resembled a language. What the horse spoke was more ancient than that. The light was bending more. Sunlight folded in on itself. Shadows grew and warped and stretched across buildings and walls and the bodies of the dead. The battlefield seemed to subside into stillness. Soldiers moved in slow motion. They retreated and advanced as if each second had gained the duration of an hour. And then the opposing armies were no longer men but statues. Bloody and bruised statues locked in frozen combat.

But Declan was not affected. The pearl burned desperately against his skin. He could hear the waves of the sea pounding in his veins. He ran forward. His sword cut through shadows. The darkness bled around him. He stumbled over the body of a soldier, a city Guardsman from the colors of his uniform. Blank eyes stared up at the sky, already seeing something beyond it. The voice of the horse shuddered in the air. Nearer and nearer, Jute hurtled down through the sky.

And then Declan was in front of the horse. Flame burned him. The air smelled of magic. The horse’s head whipped around. It lunged at him with bared teeth and bright eyes rolling in their sockets. An iron-shod hoof lashed at him. He lurched out of the way. His sword came up without him thinking, old reflexes bred into his bones. The blade slammed into the horse’s side. But instead of slicing into flesh, the sword rebounded like he had smashed it against stone. Agony jarred up his arms. He couldn’t feel his hands. Declan staggered back and the horse reared above him. It was a monstrous thing of darkness and fire, not resembling a horse anymore. The air around him ignited into flame. He could not breathe.

The rider. Not the horse.

Her voice was quiet in his mind, but there was desperation in it. The rider towered above Declan. The figure did not move, but still gazed up, the helm tilted back toward the sky and Jute’s rapid advance. There was a strange rigidity about the rider. Declan had the dreadful thought that the black armor held a dead body, shrouded in cobwebs, dusty with stillness. The horse slashed at him with its teeth. Flame sheeted from its mouth. Declan stumbled back. One spurred boot was nearly above his head, jammed into a stirrup forged of iron. He dropped his sword and grabbed the boot. The horse bucked, jumping away from him. Declan hung onto the boot. He was knocked off his feet, but he hung on desperately. His hands were on fire. No, his whole body was on fire. The pearl pulsed cold as the ocean depths on his chest.

The horse bucked again, screaming with fury. Declan fell. He couldn’t keep his feet under him any longer. His strength was gone, but his hands were still clamped around the rider’s boot. He couldn’t feel his fingers. He fell heavily. The rider toppled over, pulled down by Declan’s weight. The enormous bulk of iron armor crashed to the ground and the horse sprang away. Declan staggered to his feet. He groped for his sword. Dimly, he was aware of the horse rearing up behind him. Its hooves were about to strike. The gaping mouth reached for him. Flames raged in the beast’s ragged mane. The air shuddered with magic.

Declan’s sword whipped down, slicing down quicker than thought, straight for the iron neck of the fallen horseman. No iron could stop the edge of that blade. But then the pearl stirred against his skin. A gentle touch. He stumbled, somehow, his thoughts pushed off-balance by the pearl. The point of the sword slammed down into the cobblestones, inches away from the horseman’s neck. The black helmet rolled free with a clang.

“Declan.”

His sister’s face stared up at him from the ground. Giverny.

“The earth,” she said. “Let me touch the earth.”

Declan fell to his knees, blind to the horse behind him, to the iron hooves about to dash his head in. He did not hear the roar of the battle around him. He groped for the iron gauntlets and stripped them away. His sister’s hands were cold in his. Earth. He stared around him wildly and then saw it, right before him. There, where his sword had dashed against the cobblestones, lay a shattered stone. Beneath the shards was the muddy earth. He pressed her fingers into the mud.

As if from far away, he could hear the horse screaming. It was a raw, ugly sound of hatred that echoed through the distance as if it sought to reach the stars or even something further beyond. And then, as Jute fell from the sky in a fury of wind, closer and closer, the horse abruptly vanished. But Declan no longer cared about any of this. He crouched on his knees over his sister. There was stillness and silence around them, though the battle raged on around them. Giverny’s face was thin and white. Her eyes changed color as they gazed up at him. First an almost colorless gray that slowly deepened to brown and then a green full of darkness and depth. Declan blinked. For a moment, he thought he saw something different in his sister’s eyes. Something ancient and alien. But then she was just his sister again. Almost.

“Thank you,” Giverny said. Her hand clenched in the wet earth and came up with a fistful of mud. “I’m more myself now.”

“No, you aren’t.” He felt his throat ache. “You never will be again.”

“This is who I am, and yet I still remain Giverny Farrow.”

Declan helped her to her feet. Her hand felt fragile in his. Her legs trembled, but as the fighting raged on around them it could not touch them, and they walked in slow and careful step away from the battle. She stopped, then, and turned.

“Look,” said Giverny. “Look past the battle, past the ruins of the city wall. You’ll see a thing to strengthen your heart.”

At first, Declan could see nothing that gladdened him. There was only the unending fray. More and more black-armored enemy poured over the stone rubble, forcing their way into the city. The battle lines lurched across the court of the Guard, lapping up against the bloodstained stairs of the tower. It seemed as if he gazed out across a never-ending sea of clashing steel. But then he saw something. Beyond the tumbled ruins of the city wall, past the ranks of the enemy, he saw movement blurring on the far bank of the river. A troop of horsemen galloping toward the stone bridge. He was not sure of their numbers, perhaps a hundred or more, but he could see them now. The nearest flank of the enemy was not far. Surely they could hear the horsemen. Declan knew what it would sound like: the thunder of hooves on the ground, the earth shaking at their advance. But then the soldiers did hear them. The army’s flank wheeled around in confusion, trying to form up a line. But they were too late. The horsemen poured across the bridge, bunching together, arrowing across the frozen ground like a spear. The tip of the spear slammed into the soldiers. The horsemen sliced through them. They galloped on, scarcely slackening in speed, cleaving their way toward the ruins of the city wall. The enemy soldiers collapsed before them. At the front of the charging cavalry, a rider was visible, hair shining near white, his lance streaming blood and his sand-colored cloak fluttering behind him like a flag in the wind. The prince of Harth.

Declan shouted out loud. He could hear others calling in sudden triumph. The deep, hoarse voice of Rane Lannaslech rallying those around him. The men of Harlech and their cousins from Dolan fighting on with renewed vigor, driving into the center line of the enemy and finding them uncertain and retreating before them. On the far right flank, the men of Vo charged forward with the fishers and the butchers of Fishgate. Owain Gawinn and his Guardsmen, buttressed by the spears of Thule and Hull, fought their way, yard by bloody yard, out of the courtyard of the Guard. The black-armored line of the enemy crumpled before them and there was only a confusion of steel and death under the cold sky.

“Don’t leave me,” said Giverny. Her voice was no more than a whisper, her hand weightless on his wrist. “Stay by me a while, for I’m weak still. I need time to know the earth once again.”

He was obedient to her wish, though it was a hard thing for him. He wanted nothing more than to join in the battle. Surely the day was theirs. The cavalry of Harth did not slacken in their attack but cleaved through the enemy like a harvester scything down wheat. Scores fell under their lances, and the soldiers of Mizra fled before them in confusion. The ground shook under the drumming hooves of the horses of Harth. With such encouragement, the defenders of the city pressed forward in good cheer. Blood was on the ground, ice in the air, and the wind was at their backs. Arrows hissed down from the tower of the Guard and found their homes in the hearts of Mizra. The enemy broke and fled. And so it was that the prince of Harth came to the city again, his horse leaping over the tumbled stones of the wall. Owain Gawinn was there, leaning on his sword.

“My lord Gawinn,” said the prince, bowing from his saddle. “Forgive my late arrival.”

“You are welcome,” said Owain.

“More than welcome,” said another. It was the duke of Harlech. His face was lined with fatigue, but he looked warmly on the young prince. “I dread to think how this day might have ended without the aid of your lances.”

They looked around them and there was nothing but the bodies of the dead thick upon the ground and the sudden quiet of the surviving defenders. The black horse was nowhere to be seen. The men of the duchies and the city stood in weary amazement. The scene was one of ghastly devastation, of broken stone and the startling view down across the valley, once blocked by the wall of the city. The slopes and meadows before them were trampled into mud and slowly reaming over with ice. A few clouds drifted by in the afternoon sky, chasing after the sun. The early moon gleamed far off over the eastern horizon. High overhead, two bright spots of reflected sunlight flew through the air, Jute and the hawk.

“Is this day ours?” said someone in disbelief. “The black horseman is gone, and his army is vanquished!”

“Aye,” said Owain. And then he said it again, louder and stronger, his head raised. “Men of Tormay,” he shouted. “This is our day!”