The sun was halfway up the sky when sparrows came back to warn them of the approach of twenty-five enemy soldiers. Owen, the scout on Kel’s right, on the far side of the road and well ahead, came right behind the birds. He risked a dash across the open road to reach Kel.
“We’ve got company,” he said, eyes blazing with excitement as he reined in beside her. “They’re hard men, fighters. Five carry shields. Weapons are armed long-axes, spears and swords. I think they’re bound for Mastiff, right, Happy?” The stallion, scenting battle, snorted and pawed at the earth.
“Don’t let him do that. Brush it away - people will be able to tell we were here,” Kel said absently. Owen tugged Happy away from the spot and dismounted to sweep the mark away with a branch.
Kel looked at her men. All together, they outnumbered the enemy, but barely. A fight seemed unwise; she might lose some of her people. They could hide from the oncoming scouts - there had been another road a hundred yards back that would keep them away from the warriors.
If they avoided the enemy, where did that leave them? This war party and their supplies might turn the course of battle in the attack on Mastiff. She’d bet her shield the Scanrans were on their way there. She owed it to Wyldon to reduce the Scanran numbers if she could. Moreover, if she and her men found her refugees and freed them, they would have to ride back this way, with this Scanran war-party between them and the Vassa.
If they fought the Scanrans, they’d have to kill all of them. They couldn’t risk one man getting away to cry the alarm. They dared not take prisoners who might escape. But surely it would be murder, if a man lay on the ground and begged for his life.
Her lips trembled. She had not set out to kill every man in a group simply because they were in her way. What did that make her?
She realized she was rolling something between her fingers: the red yarn she’d taken from the bush not so long ago. That settled her mind, though what she was about to do would haunt her all her life. So much thinking and feeling for so few breaths of time, she thought, knowing that it had only been that long since Owen brought his news.
She hand-signed the men to prepare to fight. “Jump,” she whispered. The dog trotted over to Hoshi. Kel dismounted, beckoning for Tobe to take the mare. She knelt and looked into Jump’s tiny, triangular eyes. “I hope you really do understand what you’re told,” she remarked. “There are enemy scouts riding in the woods on either side of the road. You and the others must take them. Hamstring the horses if you must, but don’t let them escape. Get their riders on the ground. Kill them if you can, or fetch one of us. Understand?”
Jump whuffed quietly, his agreement-noise. He turned and trotted into the brush, a cluster of dogs and cats at his back. Kel straightened. The men had gathered around her. She checked the fit of her armour as Tobe waited, holding her glaive and helm. “The animals will tend to the scouts, I hope,” she said, keeping her voice low as she tested each strap and buckle. The other knights did the same. “Dom, you and your boys get behind the men on the road, like yesterday. Esmond, go with them to hold the enemy at the rear. If you don’t mind, let Dom give the orders - he’s been fighting longer than either of us.” Esmond and Dom nodded. Kel went on, “Wait till you hear noise from the front before you start shooting. Don’t let the horses get away -“
She gulped, then continued, “And don’t let a man get away. Not one, do you understand? Get the dead off the road as soon as you can. Nari, Quicksilver?”
The sparrows fluttered over to Kel. “Take some of the flock. Get in front of Dom, further down the road. Warn him if anyone else comes.” The sparrows darted away. Dom and his men mounted and rode off after the birds. “Uinse, take your lads to the far side of the road, get into the trees with your bows. Seaver, you’re with them.” The six men didn’t wait; they hurried to get across the road before the enemy came in view. “Owen, Neal, Merric,” said Kel, “you’ve got this side of the road. Neal, do not heal anyone. Do you understand me?” She met his gaze until he lowered his eyes.
“I understand,” he replied huskily.
“I’m sorry,” Kel whispered, resting a hand on his arm. The two knights and the squire mounted up. “Tobe, stay with Neal, do as he tells you,” ordered Kel. “I don’t know if you can call the enemy’s horses to you once their riders are off them, but now would be a good time to see if you can.” Kel looked at Connac. “Your boys and I will hit them from the front. Duck, Arrow?” The two male sparrows sat on Peachblossom’s mane. Both regarded Kel with black button eyes. “Let us know when the enemy’s three horselengths back from that rock.” She pointed out the rock at the bend in the road: it was just visible through the trees. The birds left. Connac’s men were already riding towards the rock as quietly as they could. Kel mounted Peachblossom. Tobe passed her helm up. She settled it on her head, then flipped up the visor to keep the stench of oily iron and sweat-soaked padding from overwhelming her. She accepted her glaive from Tobe, then set out after Connac.
It seemed like forever before Duck and Arrow came shrieking around the curve in the road, but the sun had barely moved. “Charge!” Kel shouted to Peachblossom and to the men with her. Peachblossom leaped forward, hooves digging into the packed dirt of the road. The big gelding hurtled into the mass of men just around the bend.
Chaos erupted as arrows flew from the woods behind and on either side of the Scanrans. Horses reared, throwing off their riders, then trotting into the woods. Kel barely noted their departure. She was too busy fighting. She clung to Peachblossom’s back as the gelding wheeled, striking out with his front hooves. Down he went on to all fours. Kel wrenched her glaive free of a Scanran and grabbed the saddle horn one-handed as Peachblossom kicked out to smash whoever had come up behind him.
It was a short fight. The Scanrans, relaxed and comfortable behind their own border, were not prepared for an attack. Those who cleared their weapons to deal with Kel’s small group in front of them barely lived long enough to realize that more enemies harried them: archers and knights boxed them in while sparrows darted at their faces, pecking and scratching, distracting them enough for a fatal blow or shot.
Stormwings circled overhead as Tobe returned to the road with packhorses and mounts, the Scanrans’ as well as their own.
Kel wiped sweat from her eyes and looked at the boy.
“Would they stay here if you asked them?” she enquired, curious. “In case we need them on the way home?”
“It’s better over by the river,” replied Tobe. “There’s grazing and water.”
“Do that, will you, please?” Kel asked. As he led the horses away she called for the sparrows, twisting the stopper from her water flask. Two birds she didn’t recognize immediately came to her. “See if the road is clear ahead.” Off they went.
Kel drank almost all of her water, her mouth and throat caked with road dust. Someone took it from her to refill it. She looked around. Neal was fixing a shallow gash on a convict’s forearm as the man gulped the contents of his water flask. Here came Dom, Esmond and the men of Dom’s squad, some with cuts or scratches, all on their horses. She counted her knights. All were present.
Owen had a long cut across one cheekbone. He demurred when Neal reached for him with a green-glowing hand: “I want a scar to impress the girls,” he informed Neal. “They like a man who looks dangerous, and my face needs all the help it can get.”
“At least let me clean it,” Neal growled. “Unless you think you’ll look really dangerous with your face rotting off.”
Owen submitted. Kel looked around. “I want their weapons, all of them,” she croaked. Someone shoved a full water flask into her hand: Jacut. She thanked him, then gulped another bellyful. I’ll need to stop behind a bush before we ride on, she thought ruefully, but at the moment she didn’t care. She was alive, and so were they.
“Strip them of their weapons and supplies. Put it all under canvas, hide the whole mess behind that rock,” she ordered. “You never know when a cache of supplies will come in handy. Let’s drag the bodies into the woods, so it’ll be a few days before they can be smelled.”
“Spoilsport!” jeered a Stormwing from above as the men got to work to hide the dead.
Kel, who had joined the effort to get the Scanrans out of sight, dropped the legs of the body she was hauling. “Tobe, my bow and arrows,” she called. By the time he reached her with the weapons, the Stormwings had fled.
After she’d helped to strip the dead of their weapons and hide the bodies, she washed her hands. Silently she apologized to the men they had left in a graceless heap. I am sorry to leave you without proper burial rites, she told them. Maybe you leave enemy dead like this, but I hate doing it.
Kel squared her shoulders and walked over to Peachblossom. “We’d best mount up,” she said. Tobe came to her with her helm and glaive. Kel donned the helm - she would feel very foolish if she were shot in enemy country because she had left it off - and accepted the glaive. Tobe jumped into Hoshi’s saddle. Kel sent her human scouts out, two forward, two to her rear, and led the way once she could no longer see them in the trees.
They met a second party of ten warriors around noon and dealt with them just as they had the earlier enemy party. When the first Stormwing appeared, Kel shot at it, not particularly trying to hit it. She missed. At the same time, she’d come near enough that the creature swore at her and fled. She didn’t want the presence of Stormwings to alert Scanrans that battle had come to their side of the Vassa.
As they rode on, Kel thanked Mithros and the Goddess for her animals and for Tobe. Without them she and her men might well have been caught; with them no enemy soldier or horse got away to warn the local people. She also thanked all the gods for the two farmsteads they found later, both abandoned weeks ago.
“Well, of course,” Dom remarked when the scouts reported that the second cluster of buildings was empty. “Smart people - they decided maybe they could live with Grandmother’s belches and Brother’s sharp tongue if it meant getting clear of the war.”
“Smarter than Maggur,” Owen muttered as they rode on.
“You think he’s stupid?” Neal demanded. “He’s just united a country of men who live to take chunks out of one another. What better way to keep them from rebelling against him than by starting a war with us?”
“And they’re hungry,” the convict Uinse added. “Their lords tell them how rich we are, and they want to be rich, too.” He smiled thinly. “I can understand that.”
“Understanding that is what got you hard labour to start with,” Jacut pointed out.
“Hush,” Kel told all of them softly. A scout was coming in, one of Connac’s men.
“Lady, have a look,” he said, offering her a blob of horse dung in a gloved hand.
Kel poked it, and discovered it was soft yet, only dry on the outside. “We’re close,” she whispered. She glanced at the sky, judging the angle of light coming through the trees. “Where are we?” she muttered, opening a map.
“I’d guess about here.” Dom leaned across to tap a spot on the map below the joining of two rivers. From that point the Smiskir flowed north-west; the second river was the Pakkai, flowing down to the Smiskir from the north-east. “It’s almost dark; they’ll pitch camp.”
“Where the rivers meet?” suggested Owen.
Connac shook his head. “Too damp. But close, for the water.”
“I want three scouts, on foot,” Kel said. “Dom, Connac, Jacut -” she had noticed the other convict soldiers followed Jacut’s lead - “your quietest people, right now. Send them forward along the road, with care, mind. I need to know where the refugees’ camp is and where the guards are positioned. We’ll be there.” She pointed to the woods to her left, where a few fallen trees gave them something to duck behind.
The foot-scouts were chosen. Kel sent Jump, his dogs and his cats to call the mounted scouts in. They returned to eat cold sausage, bread and cheese with the rest while the horses were fed. The sparrows returned for the night on their own, settling drowsily on packs, saddles and manes. Kel envied them the ability to stop for the day and leave the work to others. She wished she could do as much. Instead she tended her weapons, cleaning her glaive thoroughly, then sharpening the edge on it, her sword and her dagger. She was checking the straps on Peachblossom’s armour when the foot-scouts returned. The sun gilded only the tops of the trees when they arrived, shadows thick in the low ground between the foothills and mountains.
Everyone but the four men on watch gathered around the scouts. The men scraped a square of ground clear of grass so the scouts could draw a map for them. Tobe produced a lantern and lit it so everyone could see as the scouts drew the enemy camp with sticks.
“Here’s the ford,” said Dom’s chief scout. “The two rivers, and this level patch. Then there’s a rise on the far side of the road, our side. That’s their camp.”
“There’s about two hundred fighters. Only a hundred are soldiers, and sloppy ones at that.” Uinse had scouted for the convicts. The silver mark on his forehead shimmered in the dark like a pale moon. “I got close enough to hear their talk. They had two hundred more soldiers, but they rode west on the Vassa road after they crossed back to Scanra. These civilian slavetakers was waiting here. They took charge of our people. It don’t look like they expect trouble. I saw one guard nodding off, and it not even dark.”
“They’ve set the wagons in a circle on the west side o’ camp.” That was Connac’s scout, Weylin. He drew lines to indicate the wall of wagons. “Horses are picketed here. Our folk is chained inside the wall. I heard a couple of the slavetakers say they’re never takin’ unbroke slaves again, however cheap. Seems they’ve lost wagon wheels, their horses keep goin’ lame, an’ even using the whip it takes forever to move out or make camp.”
“They whipped our people?” cried Tobe, furious.
Dom clasped the boy’s thin shoulder with one big hand. “That’s what slavers do. Like some whip a horse to break him to bridle.”
Tobe’s hands clenched.
Kel grinned for the first time in what felt like years. She knew her people would not go tamely or quickly. They could fight even without weapons. She looked forward to putting real weapons into their hands once more. “Uinse, did you see the other squad of convicts? Gil’s squad?”