Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1) (26 page)

She put her hand on his neck and felt for a pulse, trying to concentrate as arrows rained down around her. Were they getting closer? More accurate?

She felt a faint throb. His heart was dying, but not yet dead. He wasn’t breathing. He was turning blue.

How to get him breathing again, how to get the water of his lungs without stripping of his only protection? In a flash, she had it.

She pulled his body so his head was facing downhill, rolled him onto his stomach and pushed down on his back under his pack. Water gushed out of his mouth. She did it again and this time there was water and a sound, like vomiting.

An arrow slammed into her, just under the ribs. It came in from just under her right elbow, and protruded several inches out from her stomach. She looked down at the sharp obsidian arrowhead in shock. There wasn’t much time. She’d been hit by arrows before, but never while so defenseless.

The urq shouted a triumphant war cry that carried sharp and clear across the water.

With Heden now recovering, Aderyn said a prayer over him and rolled him over. He coughed, more water came out of his mouth, but he wasn’t breathing normally.

Another arrow pierced her right calf pinning her leg to the ground.

“Ugh!” she grunted, and worked to pull herself free. She snapped the arrow so she wouldn’t be pulling the muck-covered head through her leg.

The urq shouted again, this time a different shout. A battle cry. They began leaping into the river. Their quarry would be wounded, and they now had a chance.

She looked down at Heden, his lungs working to draw in air, and was gripped with a wave of nausea.

She looked down at the arrow still protruding from her stomach and felt the tip. There was no need. She wouldn’t be able to tell by feel with it covered in her own blood, more pouring down it every moment, but she could tell by the blood in her veins. She should have known.

Poison.

The arrows had stopped, but the urq were coming. She slumped forward, losing control of her muscles. She put her hand next to Heden’s head and looked down at him, trying to stay upright, trying to stay conscious.

His seemed to be breathing, but he was not yet conscious. Her prayer had worked, but not fast enough.

Aderyn collapsed on his unconscious form, and the river, clogged with madly swimming urq bodies, roared behind them.

Heden opened his eyes, and felt paralyzed. His arms and legs would not obey him. It took him a moment to realize this was because they were pinned under a weight.

Aderyn.

She was lying on top of him, still breathing but unconscious. He blinked a few times. His mind was clear now. He felt like a tree had fallen on him, but the attack that took his mind from him was over.

He gingerly pulled her off him, and surveyed the area. He saw the urq. He didn’t remember what happened, but seeing Aderyn’s naked body and the arrows sticking out of it, and them back on the other side of the river, he reached a quick conclusion.

He sat up, and held Aderyn in his arms. He surveyed her body and saw the problem, knew she’d been poisoned. This was no matter, as Brys would say. He unceremoniously ripped the arrow from her torso and cast it aside. Pulled the broken arrow out of her leg.

He heard a sound, like the sound of the running river, but louder, rougher. The urmen were getting closer.

He stood up, the naked woman in his arms. There were something like two hundred urq swimming across the river, shouting and goading each other on, the closest only a moment from shore. This was a small army in itself, and this was only a scouting party. Only one scouting party, there would be at least two.

“Black gods,” Heden said with dread marvel.

She’d single-handedly saved his life. He wasn’t going to let her down. But he needed time to think and room to maneuver.

He carried her to the tree line, placed her body against an oak, and turned to see how much time they had. The urmen climbed ravenously out of the water and laughed at the frightened man and the naked women.

Heden’s problem was his experience. It had been so long since he’d fought urq, since he fought anyone, he suddenly couldn’t remember any prayers. Or rather, could remember too many, and most useless.

Then he remembered his pack. It had many easy solutions within. The leather was wet, but waterproof.

He prayed over Aderyn, a more potent prayer than the one she’d said over him, and her wounds closed, the poison purged from her veins. Her eyes flashed open, instantly awake and aware.

“Heden,” she said.

“Hello,” he said smiling.

They could both hear the urq coming toward them. They could be quiet as flying owls when they wanted to, but this time they wanted the humans to know they were coming. It was a terror tactic.

She tried to cover her nakedness. She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Are the urq dead?” she asked.

Heden reached into his pack and pulled out the long thin blade of
starkiller.

He turned his back on her, wanting to give her some privacy, and faced the urq company with the dwarven artifact blade in his right hand. There was no eerie light, no alien hum, just the grayish-purple metal and the crossguard a riot of geometric shapes.

“Not yet,” he said.

The urq were loping toward them now. They bristled with weapons.

He raised
starkiller
to the sky, and spoke a single word.

“
Starfall
,” he said in Elemental. His sword flared violet, and he and Aderyn saw the blue sky above turn instantly black, revealing a night sky studded with stars.

The urq stopped, some still crossing the river, and looked up in awe at the darkness. It was the last thing any of them would ever see. The stars above began to rain down like small white comets, making a hissing, slashing sound in the sky. Each unerringly striking a single urq. Each urq evaporated by the impact, leaving only a scorched and smoldering crater, and the smell of burnt flesh.

The starfall lasted a while. There were a lot of urmen to kill. Eventually Aderyn stood up to get a better view, and still the stars came down. She looked up in awe at the black sky and the falling stars, and then looked at Heden, sword upraised to the heavens, summoning their power to earth.

Once the spell was done, Heden looked around, the sky still dark. It would slowly lighten, was already lightening. He had no real understanding of how it worked, and whether the knights at the priory or even the people at Ollghum Keep saw the night sky.

The river was choked with urq corpses, the ground before them sizzled, hot with cooking meat and fat. Satisfied that the urq were all dead, and feeling a little self-congratulatory that he had remembered what the sword could do and so did not need to call on his god or saint, he smiled to himself and then turned to Aderyn.

She didn’t smile back. She was still naked and looked at Heden with open fear. He turned away. He fished into his pack and pulled out some of his clothes. He held them over his back. He heard her walk up to him, and take the clothes.

“If you can do that,” she said as she dressed, “you could save everyone at the keep.”

He shook his head. Everyone looked to him to do the impossible.

“It doesn’t make that much of a difference,” he said, referring to the sword. “It just saves me from asking Cavall for more help than he’d give.”

He could feel her eyes on his back.

“I could bring down a few hundred before I was done. They have
five thousand
.” He quoted Baed. “’It takes men to hold the field.’”

There was silence as she considered her next question.

“What happened to you at the river?” she asked. “Was it the wode?” The wode, they both knew, could pervert perception.

The question gave him goosebumps. He didn’t like to remember, but knew he had to talk about it. Not talking about it gave it power over him.

“Just me,” he said, coughing. He didn’t turn to look at her. “Just me.”

He thought he must have seemed a fool. Unmanned. Completely unmanned there at the river facing the urq. Impotent and useless.

He sensed she was dressed and turned. She had tied his too-large shirt tight around her, and had rolled up the legs of his leather pants.

“This…this happened to you before?” she asked.

“Any time I leave the city,” he said, looking at her. She was pretty. She affected him. He couldn’t help it.

“Are you…” she started. She was confused. “What possesses you?”

“Just fear,” he said. “And memory. I can’t always control it”

“What memories?” she asked, fear and awe mixing.

“This place,” he said. “The wode. Any forest. It’s difficult for me,” he said. “I spent a lot of time, years, in places like this. A lot of terrible things happened.”

“Nothing will happen while I am here,” Aderyn urged. Hearing her say that, hearing this young girl trying to comfort and assure him made him reel. It was like intoxication, the reality of her presence conflicting with the unreality of his memory.

He didn’t want to look at her, his face was twisted with shame and a wry smile as he pictured himself from her point of view. “You don’t see anyone but knights for years and then me. What you must think of me.”

“I think: I wish I had been there,” she said, “when these things happened to you.”

Heden coughed and laughed at the same time. What kind of women would say that? Then he reminded himself. The kind who’d been a squire for thirteen years.

He was overwhelmed with emotion. This often happened after an episode. Though there was not usually anyone there to see it. Thankfully.

“I…” she said, and turned away. “I must go find my armor,” she said, as though recovering from a dream. “It is not seemly for a knight to be seen thus.” It would be a while before she could talk about what just happened. Probably she would feel better with her armor.

As he heard her walked away behind him, Heden tested something.

“You will be a knight,” he said, his back to her. It was not a question.

He could hear she’d stopped. Had no idea what she was doing.

“Aye,” she said quietly. And went back to find her things. Heden put
starkiller
, for which he had no scabbard, back into his pack. He left the river behind, not wanting to see the ruin of the urmen any longer, and walked back into the forest at a leisurely pace.

By the time Aderyn found him, it was broad daylight again, thick pillars of sunlight streaming down from the tops of the trees, as though the sunlight itself were holding up the canopy of leaves.

He heard her, striding toward him through the wode. He turned and saw her and whatever had passed between them before the urq, seemed to be gone. He relaxed. She, on the other hand, did not.

“We’ve got to get back,” she demanded.

“What’s wrong?” Heden asked. They had found what they were looking for, had known the army was there and where it was going before they even left the priory.

“They’re too far south,” she said, “too fast. Someone must be told.”

Heden did some quick mental calculation. The scouts usually kept a day ahead of the regular army. Sometimes ranging farther afield, but usually a day. Farther meant any situation they came upon would be changed by the time they reported back

They had just obliterated several units of urq scouts. This would blind the army for a little while at least. But where were they?

“How far from Ollghum Keep are we here?”

Aderyn looked to the south. “A day for us,” she said.

That meant the urq army was at best two days away from the keep. Heden had no idea they were that close. He’d lost all sense of direction as they ran through the evening. And because of the way he’d found the priory, had no real understanding of where the priory was in relation to the keep.

“I’ve got to go back,” Heden said.

Aderyn nodded. “The knights must be told. We leave immediately.”

“No,” Heden said. This brought her up short. “You go tell the knights. I’m done wasting my time with them. I’m going to tell the people of Ollghum Keep that the Green Order has abandoned them. I don’t care what the baron says,” he said mostly to himself. Aderyn had no knowledge of Heden’s argument with the baron. “I’ll start a riot if I have to, but someone’s got to do something.”

Heden turned to walk away. Aderyn grabbed him.

“If you speak the ritual,” she said, looking up at him pleading. He found it hard to return her gaze. “The knights will be free to act. To stop the urq.”

“I can’t,” Heden explained. “It doesn’t work that way. The ritual doesn’t absolve them,
I
do. I have to know what happened. I have to
believe
Kavalen didn’t die in violation of his oath. Then the ritual can be affected.”

“Then there will be no order,” she said, pulling back and looking at his breastplate blankly. “And I will be no knight.” He didn’t know what she meant. They were talking about one knight, their leader, but still only one dead knight. He grabbed her shoulders. She could have stopped him, pulled away, but she let him.

“Then tell me what happened to Kavalen.”

“I was not there,” she said, looking at the ground. “And what I know, I cannot say.”

“Even if it means those people die?” he asked. He realized she probably never met the people of Ollghum Keep. They were an abstraction to her. And now it was too late.

“If you were right about our oaths,” she said, looking up at him. “Then I cannot tell you.”

Heden pushed her away. He rubbed his temples. This place and these people were going to drive him mad, everything was intertwined with everything else. It was a huge knot. There was no thread he could pull at that could unravel it. Everything he said and did seemed to make it tighter.

She stepped closer to him.

“Take me with you,” she said.

He swung about, trying to disguise his horror. She had not given up the war, only the battle.

I underestimated her again
.

“I can’t,” he said.

“If we spent more time together, away from this place,” she began.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

She didn’t disguise her anger this time.

“I saved you,” she reminded him. “And you saved me.” He saw it in her eyes and realized what was going on. She had lost faith in the order, but found it anew in Heden.

Heden could not bear the burden of being responsible for destroying Aderyn’s knighthood. He knew if he stayed here any longer, she would say the right thing, or he would talk himself into something.

She would hate him for it, but maybe she needed to hate him to get on with her life. “Tell the knights,” he said. “Don’t tell the knights, I don’t care. I’m going to Ollghum Keep, and then home.”

He wasn’t that good a liar. She could tell he cared and it pained her to see him lie to protect her.

He turned away and darkly said: “You’re on your own.”

He forced himself to walk away. Leaving her alone in the forest. Whatever her answer was, he knew he wasn’t it. And she would have to find it here.

He found he was furious at the baron, at Sir Taethan—for reasons he didn’t exactly understand—at Gwiddon and the bishop. But most of all, angry at himself.

He tromped through the forest, trying to put some distance between himself and Aderyn before wrestling the carpet out of the pack. He wanted a good clearing to take flight from.