First Test (21 page)

Lord Raoul explained how each rank would use weapons, magic, and the torches. Once everyone understood precisely how he wanted things done, he said, "My group will enter the valley from this end, along this branch of the stream." Lord Raoul nodded to the rushing water that ran by the spot where they had gathered. "Lord Wyldon's group will come down that rock stair by the fall and hit them from the opposite side. We meet and push them back on that cave. You lads, we're taking a chance on you, but your training master says you're all up to it."

Even me? Kel wondered.

"I listen when Lord Wyldon speaks, so don't prove him wrong," finished Lord Raoul.

"The third rank, to me," Wyldon said coolly. As the pages and the two men who'd been assigned to help them gathered around, he said quietly, "The torches in your charge are important, but more important still is your task as lookouts. Your eyes must not be in front, toward the fighting, but toward the back. Keep an eye on the trees, the stream, and the open ground. If spidrens are outside this valley when we strike, they may attack from behind and roll us up. Do not let that happen. If you see movement, yell, 'At the rear.' The bowmen will listen for it, and cover you."

He looked at them all for a moment, then continued. "The first two ranks will go forward, pressing the spidrens into the cave. You stay put. We need you spread out, to give you the best chance to see any surprises." He paused, then said, "What is the warning call?"

"At the rear," they chorused.

"Very well." He looked at each of them, then put his palms together. The pages did the same. "Lord Mithros, grant us victory; if you are merciful, grant it at not too high a price. So mote it be."

"So mote it be," murmured the pages.

"Take a spear, all of you," he ordered. "I don't care what else you're holding, if a spidren comes at you, drop it and get that spear up."

When he went to speak to Lord Raoul, Neal murmured to Kel, "Trust the Stump to have a cheerful outlook. 'Not too high a price,' indeed!"

Kel shook her head at him. "You think we'll get out of this without a scratch?"

"No, but he doesn't have to put the idea in people's heads."

The men were signaling for quiet. The mages were about to remove the wards that kept them hidden. They all gathered weapons and supplies and separated into their groups.

Gods of mountains and the rivers, Kel thought in Yamani, please don't let me bring dishonor to my teachers and my family. She collected a spear.

The local guide led them to the woodcutter's road and onto the waterfall stair. It was cut deep and narrow in the rock beside the fall, which meant Kel never had to look down from a height, only to the next few steps. One thing helped on that slippery descent beside the roaring water: the full moon lit the way. Kel thanked the Goddess, whose lamp the moon was, when she nearly stepped on a section of rock polished like glass by the water's passage. The light showed her the danger just in time.

The bottom of the stair was screened by a tall stand of lilacs. The leafy branches hid them from view in the valley. As they waited, Kel saw Lord Wyldon murmur into the spelled pendant he wore. He raised a hand. The men and older pages of the first rank prepared themselves.

Lord Wyldon's arm dropped, and he led the first wave of their attacking party forward. They ran in silence to fall on the spidrens that lazed around fires by the stream. Something bright exploded high overhead: a ball of the sticky black paste called blazebalm, set off by a human mage. That was the signal for the second group of warriors, archers, and spearmen to run onto the open ground. Behind them came the third rank. All of them, including Neal and Kel, had bundles of torches on their backs and a torch in their free hands. As they ran, they held their torches out to their sides.

When spidrens began to charge from the cave, human mages called on their power. The torches held out by the pages burst into flame.

The two groups of humans came together once more and lined up with their backs to the stream. Now there were human shouts as counterpoint to the shrilling of the spidrens. The boom and crack of magic and the clang of metal against metal added to the racket. A loop of web shot high in the air, glowing yellow-green as spidren webs did at night. Kel saw lattices of the gleaming stuff, potential traps, to her left and to her right. She watched the flying ropes of web until Neal shouted in her ear, "We're lookouts, remember?"

"Oops," Kel said.

Following her orders, she thrust her bundle of unlit torches into the ground end-first, so those in the second rank could grab them at need. She lit them all from the torch she carried, then passed that torch to the soldier in the second rank who reached for it. Turning her back on the torches and the fight, Kel settled her spear in her grip and began to watch the gold-splotched darkness in front of her. The night blindness that came from looking at burning torches took a few moments to fade. Once it did, she saw the ground and trees on the other side of the water clearly. Glancing to her side, she noticed that Seaver watched the fight, not the water or the trees. She nudged him with a booted foot. "Seaver!"

He looked at her.

"We're sentries," she reminded him.

He looked around, gulped, and nodded. Quickly he placed his load of torches, and nudged his neighbor Quinden. He too had forgotten his orders.

Kel had to fight the urge to turn and see how the battle went. Every time her curiosity was about to win, she envisioned the spidren that ate kittens and kept her eyes where they belonged.

From the shouts of the fighters, she knew the first two ranks were pressing the spidrens back toward their cave. The creatures fought desperately, many armed with swords or axes in powerful forelegs. There would be no surrender; this was a fight to the death.

Kel scanned light-dappled water and shadowed trees. The stream shifted, then bulged. A spidren leaped from the water onto the stream's bank. It carried twin axes.

"At," she squeaked, her throat bone dry. Four more spidrens climbed onto land in the wake of the first. Kel found her voice and shouted, "At the rear! At the rear!"

Seaver turned—he'd been watching the fight again. He gasped when he saw the leading spidren just yards away. His face hardened and he cried, "You killed my father!"

He charged the enemy. The spidren reared on its hind legs to clear its spinneret. Kel knew that move: she had seen it at Mindelan.

"Neal, Merric!" she cried to the boys on either side of her and Seaver. She reached with her spear to knock Seaver's feet from under him. He went sprawling as a loop of web lashed at the spot where he'd been. Glancing to Merric's far side, Kel shouted, "Quinden, all of you! Three steps forward!"

She ran up beside Seaver. The leading spidren dragged back its web, letting it catch on the fallen boy. Kel sensed Neal and Merric come forward as she did, their spears pointed at the foe. Quinden, for all he didn't like her, was just half a step behind.

He and Merric screamed, "At the rear!" when they saw five spidrens were coming at them.

The sight of not one page, but four in a steady line, all armed with spears, made the spidrens hesitate.

Seaver wept in rage as he used his belt-knife to hack at the web that clung to him. He didn't see five crossbow bolts sink into the spidren that had thrown it. The spidren lurched back and reared again, trying to shoot more web at the short line of pages. The tilt of the ground betrayed it, making it tumble back into the stream. Seaver cut himself free just when the spidren's web could have dragged him in after its spinner.

"On your feet!" Kel urged him, kicking his spear closer to him. "Come on!"

Seaver grabbed the spear he'd dropped and lurched to his feet as the other four spidrens charged the pages' line. Kel watched the closest, her pulse hammering in her ears. It came at her with a raised axe in each foreclaw, screeching its fury.

Kel promptly forgot her staff lessons. Holding the spear as she would her glaive, she cut with it in a sidelong arc. The weapon's slim razor point sliced through the spidren's chest and arm, releasing a spray of dark blood. Kel reversed the spear and cut back, dragging the blade down. It bit into the spidren at the neck and stuck there as crossbow bolts riddled the immortal.

Kel had to let the spear go. She looked to either side to see how her friends did. Three attackers lay dead, crossbow bolts sticking from their hides like quills in a hedgehog. One had dragged Quinden's spear from his hand. Merric had cut off the foreleg of another spidren before the archers killed it. One spidren had fallen just a foot away from Neal, its curved sword touching his boot. Neal's spear transfixed the thing, entering at the chest and emerging through its back.

"Neal," breathed Kel, impressed. "Pinned it like a beetle on a card."

"I'm going to be sick," croaked Neal, and was.

"Back into line!" roared Lord Wyldon from the far end of their row. "Get torches if your spears are gone!"

Kel, Neal, Seaver, Merric, and Quinden obeyed.

When the fight was nearly over, the soldiers found they had one more job. Inside the cave was a clutch of more than thirty young feeding on the body of the village woman. None were taller than eighteen inches, but when they saw humans, they rushed to the attack The men and pages kept them back with their swords until they could roll a barrel of blazebalm into the nest. A mage whispered, and the blazebalm roared into flames.

Hearing the young shriek as they burned, Kel found it was her turn to vomit.

Two days later they returned to the palace, a quiet and weary group. They had packing to do, and one final supper in the mess hall. To the pages' surprise, they were joined by the Shang warriors and the men of the King's Own who had been on the hunt. They all stood by their seats, wondering why Lord Wyldon had not said the prayer and allowed them to sit.

The answer came when the king arrived. As he'd done on the first day of classes, he said nothing before they ate. He dined with Lord Wyldon, Lord Raoul, the two Shangs, and Captain Flyndan at Lord Wyldon's table. No pages were asked to wait on them. Servants performed that task while the pages and the men of the Own relaxed over their food. There was a treat, pies made from the first berry harvests of the summer. Only when they could eat no more did the king rise to stand at the lectern.

"You've had your time of fire," he told the pages quietly. "Lord Wyldon reports that you all did well."

Did he? Kel wondered tiredly. Or did he say the boys did well?

The king went on, "I am glad not to have to tell your parents you will not be coming to help with the harvest."

Soft chuckles passed around the room. King Jonathan waited for them to fade.

"You and these warriors did important work, as bloody, dangerous, and frightening as it was. It is the kind of work knights must do in our modern age. You may get thanks only from me, but I hope you know the value of what you did. Go home, now. Laze in the sun and steal apples. Try not to get too out of practice. The realm needs your arms as strong, your hearts as steady, as when you faced those spidrens." He nodded to them and left so quickly that they were still trying to rise as the door closed behind him.

Lord Wyldon came to the lectern. "I know you all wish to pack. Get to it. Keladry of Mindelan, report to my office at the next bell."

"I'm sorry," whispered Merric. He got up awkwardly and fled the room.

"You saved my life," Seaver added, his voice cracking. He hugged her one-armed around the head as if she were one of the boys, and followed Merric out.

When none of her other friends moved, Kel forced herself to rise and pick up her tray. "Have a good summer," she whispered, and took her things to the servants for the last time.

She had thought she'd resigned herself to being packed off for good. From the way her food turned to a lump in her belly as she trudged back to her room, she hadn't done it as well as she thought.

There was a letter from her mother on her bed. With all the preparations needed for Kel's older sisters Adalia and Oranie to be presented when the court social season began that fall, her parents had come to stay at their Corus town house for the summer. They looked forward to seeing Kel there. As Kel read the letter, her gloom deepened. She could not stay in town with her parents and sisters. She might encounter people she knew from the palace. How could she live in the city, watching knights come and go, knowing she would never be one of them?

I'll ask them to send me home to Anders at Mindelan, she thought sadly. They'll understand. It was a good idea, but the thought of the "I-told-you-so's" that her sisters-in-law would hurl at her made her cringe.

Her sparrows were nowhere to be seen as she entered her room. They had rejoined the flock-mates who had stayed behind, whirling around the courtyard to celebrate their return. Now they chattered as they perched in the small tree in the courtyard.

"I'll miss you," whispered Kel. She would ask Daine if she could still take Peachblossom. With two daughters to present at court, her parents would be hard pressed to also buy a warhorse.

Thinking of the birds and Peachblossom, she felt her eyes sting with tears. I am not going to let Lord Wyldon see I've been crying, Kel told herself. Fetching her glaive, she did a pattern dance to pass the time.

The dreaded bell finally rang. Kel put her glaive down, combed her hair, and washed her face. Then she walked to Lord Wyldon's office, feeling like a prisoner on the long walk to the gallows.

The servingman bowed to Kel, then opened the door and announced her. She entered the office, listening to the door as it closed at her back.

Lord Wyldon stood with his back to her, staring through a window that opened onto a palace rose garden. Was he looking at flowers, she wondered, or maybe at the nobles who walked there as the skies grew dark?

"You sent for me, my lord," she said.

Lord Wyldon sighed and turned. "Sit down, girl."

Kel hesitated, then sat.

Wyldon absently massaged his right arm. "I want you to listen to me. I speak to you as I would to my daughters."