A couple more hard-faced guards came up from behind me and charged into the suddenly hesitant attackers waiting on the edge of the firelight. I dodged past them and grabbed Halice around the waist, hauling her out of the fray. She cursed, startled.
“Stuff it, Halice, let him help.” Livak came with us, tense and alert, her face turned to the dark and the danger, a dagger glistening with oily smears held well clear of her body.
I dragged Halice bodily backward; hopping to stay upright, she swore at me with all the fluency of a long-time soldier.
“I was wondering where you’d got to,” I said to Livak with some difficulty.
She shook her head in disgust. “When did you last get into a fight in Caladhria? All my poisons were in the bottom of my belt pouch, double-sealed with wax and lead!”
“Are you hurt?” I looked around to find Shiv at my shoulder.
“What have you been doing? How about some useful magic for a change?” Livak spat at him.
“Just who do you suggest I immolate?” he snapped back and I saw a measure of my own frustration with the two women reflected in his eyes.
I paused to let Halice regain her balance and the three of us looked around to see the guards driving off three different attacks.
“I don’t know who we’re traveling with—how am I supposed to tell friends from foes?” Shiv turned on the spot with a sharp gesture; with the flickering half-light and dodging shadows thrown by the ring of fires, I had to agree with him.
“To me!” Nyle’s bellow would have put a rutting bull to shame and I saw his square head leading the guards as a last desperate rush by the bandits threatened to break through the cordon at the final gap still under attack.
1 sprinted across the grass, dodging loose animals and panicked merchants. A ragged wretch with raw sores running down his arms dashed out from under a cart and nearly tripped me with a rusty scythe but, before I could deal with him, a spear of blue fire dropped him to the ground, face blackened and hair smoking. I waved my gratitude to Shiv without looking back and stepped in to hold the line when a merchant stumbled back, clutching at a bloody gash in his guts.
I could see Nyle sweeping a massive blade around in a deadly arc, wrists rolling in a two-handed Dalasorian grip. Blood sprayed across him as the shining steel ripped up under an opponent’s chin and carried off half his face, but Nyle didn’t even blink. Eyes white-rimmed as he poured his fury into his sword strokes, he lunged into a gap and dropped another bandit into a howling welter of blood and entrails. The stupid bastard evidently had some training in swordplay, but it betrayed him now he had no militia armor to save his guts. Nyle pressed forward with each hint of advantage, nailed boots secure on the slippery ground, kicking aside anyone unable to regain their feet. Fighting shoulder to shoulder put heart into all of us and we formed a wedge behind Nyle’s cutting edge. We began to mesh with the instinctive moves common to most militias and started to force the bandits back to the stream.
A long-faced man with a cattle thief’s brand twisting down his cheek came at me. He parried one stroke, then another, but an old Formalin move that I’d been practicing all winter sent his notched sword twisting up out of his grip; I got him between the neck and the shoulder. That broke the nerve of the vagabond next to him and, as he ran, the courage born of drink and desperation deserted the rest. Their line collapsed like a child’s game of sixpins, those too slow on the uptake paying for it as they were cut down trying to turn and flee. The faster ones made for the shelter of the stream bed, but as they reached it a flare of magelight drove the night out from under the trees. Yells of panic mingled with derisive laughter from the guards who had pursued them and odd, cracking noises snapped out along with the screams of dying men. I stood for a moment then turned back to my own companions. I wasn’t going to risk myself unnecessarily; the men getting paid for it could do that. My responsibility ended with driving the bandits away, I judged.
“Come on, come on.” Halice was calming our horses with soft words and dried apple while Livak was rummaging in the gig for something to clean her daggers with.
“You know, Ryshad, I’ve heard of Arimelin sending people off walking in their sleep but I didn’t know she could make them fight.” Her green eyes were wide in the firelight.
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know they were coming?” Halice looked over, now dealing efficiently with her own wound, her teeth holding one end of a bandage as she knotted it tight. She spat a fragment of lint from her mouth. “What were you saying when you woke me, my Formalin’s not that good in the middle of the night?”
I blinked but Shiv arrived at my shoulder and interrupted before I could ask what the two of them were going on about.
“That should save the Lords’ foresters a task.” He was looking extremely pleased with himself, brushing what looked like frost from his gloves though he had blood oozing from a long gash in his forearm.
Halice rolled back his sleeve and stripped the shirt from the wound with impersonal strokes of her belt knife. “This needs stitches,” she warned briskly and turned to the gig.
“Saedrin’s stones!”
I had my dagger out within half a breath as Halice started backward, but it was only Viltred, unwrapping himself from his enveloping cloak like a tiggy-hog unrolling its spines.
“Have you been there all the time?” I asked incredulously.
“I am no warrior,” he said with threadbare dignity. “I thought it best to stay out of the way so I made myself invisible.”
No one could find a reply to that, so I turned to Shiv as Halice held a curved needle in the flame of a brand from the fire.
“What did you do, exactly?”
“Most of them tried to leave along the stream bed, I’m not sure why. Anyway, I froze the water, which held them pretty much fast for Nyle and his men.”
Shiv’s laugh caught on a gasp of sudden pain and Livak passed him a flask.
“What’s that?” asked Halice.
“White brandy. I picked it up in the last camp, but we never got around to drinking it.” Livak looked under her lashes at me. “I got a set of the latest engravings about the Duke of Triolle’s love life, as well.”
Those promised to be ripely entertaining, if not downright obscene. I looked over toward the trees, the darkness hiding the carnage beneath them. I couldn’t decide if I liked the idea of trapping men like that, to be killed like snared vermin. I shook it off. Dead is dead and Shiv had probably saved a few of the guards from injury or worse.
“Do you know these stars?” I asked Livak. “What would you say the time is?”
She looked up. “Halcarion’s crown’s just beyond zenith so it won’t be long until dawn at this season.”
I wondered if Poldrion would charge the dead bandits more or less for their ferry fare on account of them striking on his side of midnight. Halice soon finished with Shiv’s arm and made a neat job of it.
“I’ve seen worse stitching by Messire’s surgeon,” I commented. “Not many soldiers learn that kind of skill.”
“I grew up five days’ walk from the arse end of nowhere,” she said in a matter of fact tone. “I learned to turn my hand to most things before my tenth year.”
The beasts were still refusing to settle with the reek of fresh death all around and everyone turned to trying to restore some sort of order. I opted for helping drag the nearest corpses outside the ring of wagons. It wasn’t a pleasant task, but a dead robber can’t do you harm whereas a nervous horse stamping on your foot can ruin a good few days, a lesson I learned good and early in Messire’s service.
I looked the bodies over, just in case any of them had the flaxen hair of the Elietimm, but I saw none. I didn’t bother looking any closer; these men had drawn their runes and would have to put up with the spread they threw the same as the rest of us. The only one to give me pause for thought was a scrawny boy I rolled over to get a better grip on his tattered jerkin. He had long lost half a hand and most of the meat of his arm, probably to a beast-trap, the sort farmers set along a wildwood margin for wolves and the like. If he’d had a livelihood, he would have lost it along with his fingers. Whatever his tale—thief or peasant, vicious or honest—someone’s sword had sung the last verse when it ripped into his ribs, chips of bone gleaming white among the ruin of his gaping chest as I dragged him over the blood-soaked ground. Stupid bastard.