Prince of Outcasts (50 page)

Blue eyes met brown, and shared love and concern as they spoke the words of fealty and command. Ceremonial words, yet speaking to a deeper truth.

Mother still looks drawn,
Órlaith thought with concern.
And she gets tired so easily. She needs more rest than she allows herself.

Her fifth and last labor was only a month past and it had been hard; there had been heart-stopping moments of fear, though in the end mother and babe had come through. The child—a girl named Juniper Sandra Arminger Mackenzie—was thriving; in fact, she was kicking and gurgling in her small woven-wool suit, in the arms of a Mackenzie nurse not far away. With her grandmother-namesake occasionally sneaking glances at her out of the corners of her eyes, beneath formal dignity of arsaid and carved staff and Triple Moon headband.

And Mother knows I'm going to war,
Órlaith thought.
I've got the responsibilities, and the Morrígu knows they're heavy, but I can be excited and look forward to doing something. All Mother has to look forward to is waiting for word from half a world away—and worrying about me and John.

She turned and held out her arm, and her mother leaned on that armored strength. This close together the Sword linked them somehow,
and she could feel the older woman's response to the complex of emotions that ran through her, the feelings that turned to:

You bore me, and nursed me and held me close to your heart all my growing years. You fought for my life against men serving evil when I was as baby Juniper is now. Lean on my strength today, because that strength is the gift you gave me.

And in return:
I will.

She handed her mother up into the State carriage, with the six black horses waiting in as near to stillness as their kind could, their coats gleaming and the dark plumes tossing on their headstalls. A score of lancers on barded destriers sat their horses before and behind. The rest of the Royal family followed.

“Look after Mother, and the Mother-of-all and the Lord bless you, brother,” she said softly as the next figure stepped in. “She's going to need you. It won't be a short war.”

Her brother Faolán was fifteen now, a handsome if gangly lad despite the few spots and many freckles that marked his milk-white skin, shooting up towards their father's height. He wore his fox-red hair down his back in a clansman's queue and a kilt and jacket and plaid and Scots bonnet with raven plumes in the clasp—he'd been very Mackenzie for the last few years, the more so since the news of Father's death came north. Right now she judged he was half consumed with envy that she was going, and half still floored by her little lecture last night on how if she and John didn't come back he would be next High King.

“That I will, sister and Lady, by the Lady and Her Lord,” he replied gravely, his voice wobbling a bit.

“And remember me in your prayers every night, eh?” Órlaith said to the last figure before the nursemaid. “When I come back you'll be bigger, but no fairer.”

Vuissance was ten, black-haired, clad in a child's wimple and surcote and simply sad that yet another fixture of her life was departing for God-knew-how-long, but controlling her tears with a desperate earnestness that showed in the white-knuckle grip on her rosary.

“I will. I'll ask St. Joan of the Bow to protect you!” the girl said.

“A strong shield, my darling,” Órlaith said, hugging her and kissing the top of her head.

She held the baby for a moment and kissed it too before handing it up and stepping back.

Vuissance leaned down. “And find Johnnie. Please!”

“I will. I promise. And he'll have a song to sing for us all.”

Then she stopped, stumbled, gasped as she turned to her own mount.

Heuradys was at her side instantly, a hand under her elbow.

“What's wrong?” she said sharply.

Órlaith turned her head to look at her knight, and saw by the shock on her face how pale she must have gone.

I have to pull myself together!
she thought.
Too many are watching.

“John,” she whispered, her hand going to the hilt of the Sword. “Something's happened to John. Something terrible.”

*   *   *

“Órlaith and Montival!”
John shouted again.

The space between the Carcosan fort and the Baru Denpasaran lines had been in tall grass and brush. Now it was burnt and pockmarked with rocks and a bristle of arrows nobody had been suicidal enough to try to retrieve. More bundles of rock bound in flaming rope went by overhead, and John was acutely aware that if one burst prematurely the stones within would pulp his head, helm or no. The streams of catapult shot and prang-prang bolts would kill him just as surely. You were supposed to forget such things in the heat of the moment, but so far that wasn't happening.

And I'm glad it isn't. I'd hate to be in danger
and
crazy too,
he thought as he knocked his visor down; it was time to start worrying about stray arrows coming his way.

The storming parties with the ladders were within a hundred yards of the fort's battered wall now. Suddenly men showed there, archers. Bolt and ball and prang-prang and arrows tore into them, but enough shot that the ladders staggered. Men ran forward from behind to take the place of those who fell, and suddenly they were at the edge of the moat. They let
the base of the ladders fall—the legs there were sheathed in metal, like big spades—and the tall contraptions toppled forward. More men appeared on the ramparts as they fell forward, trying to fend them off with long poles with Y-forks at the end. One scaling ladder went sideways into the ditch, but most of the two dozen thumped home—and they had long slightly curved iron spikes beneath to bite into the target, raven-beaks they were called back home. The Baru Denpasaran archers had lowered their trajectories to sweep the ramparts too, and the slender bamboo shafts were going overhead uncomfortably close; he hoped they had the fire discipline to stop when the assault troops, who included
him
, were up there.

Then they were at the foot of one of the ladders, just in time to see a man with two arrows through his body topple shrieking off to land and drown in thin stinking mud of the moat. The wailing sound of agony and despair was lost in the roaring crush. Thora and he hit the first step side-by-side, their shields up. Despite the unpleasant springiness of the construction beneath his feet, this he
did
know about, having run up more scaling ladders than he cared to recall during his squire training. The storm of shot going by overhead lifted, which was one worry out of the way, but immediately men who'd been lying flat behind the crest of the earthwork sprung up and started shooting frantically.

One lead bullet from a sling made the edge of his helmet go
ting
with a wrenching force that nearly punched him off the ladder. Arrows cracked into his shield and Thora's, hard enough to stagger a man at this point-blank range. All he could see through the vision-slit was a narrow strip of men trying to kill him.

Admiring their courage didn't mean he didn't feel an overwhelming flash of hatred at their
existence
at this precise moment.

There were feet pounding the ladder behind them; he couldn't tell who, and would have bet on Sergeant Fayard, until he and the Bearkiller leapt the final few feet, tucked behind their shields and desperate to punch the waiting crowd back from the head of the ladder to make space so more attackers could join them. He landed on broken wood and earth and
staggered and a man with a spear poised to thrust at his eyes . . . then snapped backward as if he'd been kicked in the face by a horse. It was a crossbow bolt that had done it, and Fayard was one of the best shots in the Protector's Guard and he was less than a hundred feet away. Eight more men attacked him and Thora, all there were room for, and three of them died with crossbow bolts in their heads and chests in the next few seconds—the rest of the squad must be handing their weapons to Fayard as they reloaded. Two more went down with Mackenzie ashwood shafts driven through their bodies—that would be Ruan shooting. Those two he trusted to support him so, and few others.

He slashed a bare-chested man with a parang and threads of spittle hanging from his lips, and then hacked him again with frantic haste when he ignored the wound. Nobody ignored a half-severed neck, or at least he hoped they didn't, and this one fell. Thora cut into a thigh, punched the boss of her round shield into a face and then stabbed over it with economical precision. Blades punched at him, banging into his shield and squealing off the steel plates that covered him, making him stagger and bruising him even though they didn't penetrate. The two Montivallans' armor and size and the fire support was giving them . . . moments of extra life facing so many opponents.

“Thor with me!” Thora grunted.

They took advantage of the gaps and stepped a long pace forward, relying on
someone
to slide in beside them before they were flanked. People did; Deor was there beside his oath-sister, Evrouin's glaive snaked out and caught an ankle with the sharpened hook on the reserve of the blade. Toa's huge spear flashed to his shield-side, and Pip was behind him coolly firing her slingshot from point-blank range behind the first line with eye-punching accuracy.

The fight swayed for an instant, and then John was standing and sobbing in breath and coughing and knocking up the visor to bite for air again. Baru Denpasaran fighters streamed past him, down into the open court of the fortress where the garrison had gotten up out of its dugouts just as the
storm of trebuchet fire broke over their heads. Fayard and his crossbowmen were around him now, glaring as they leveled their weapons.

“We've done enough,” he wheezed, leaning on his shield and fumbling at his sword until someone took it away and wiped it for him—he thought it was one of the Guard crossbowmen. “Let them finish their own fight.”

Someone thrust a canteen into his mouth and he pulled in water and choked and coughed and shot it out his nose and then drank again anyway.

“You've got it,” Thora said to him.

“What?” he sputtered.

“The
Baraka
, the thing that pulls others after you. Your father had all there was to have, and your sister has plenty, but you've definitely got some. It's a magic, the Gods and the
alfar
give it or they don't.”

They moved along the wall top, ignoring the bodies tumbled in the graceless ungainly sprawls of death and found places to sit. The air was thick with stinks and smoke; the haze from the burning keep lay like water in the enclosure of the fort's walls, a patchy cloud of dirty brownish-white. Pip moved off a little to see to one of her men who needed first aid, but stretcher-bearers would be coming forward soon. He was very tired, and let his head sag back against a snag of broken timber as he sank to his heels and then let his legs splay out in front of him.

“Watch out!”
a voice screamed.

That started him awake. What he saw froze him for long seconds. The burning tower had . . .

Broken apart,
he thought, as the crackling, banging rumble grew with rushing speed.
Broken apart and most of it's falling at
me
. God, you're not playing fair!

He made it halfway to his feet and then was knocked over backward as several men threw themselves over him.

Blackness.

*   *   *

For a moment John heard two voices overlapping: one was Pip's:

“He's not bloody dead! Dig! They were on top of him, he's got to be there some sodding where!”

Another was speaking, and he didn't understand it. Then realized it was in another language . . . French, and an archaic dialect at that. Few living men could have followed it, but he'd studied that tongue for his art, and not only the book-version but scholarly writings on how it had sounded. The clangorous syllables assumed meaning, a version still harsh and nasal, closer to Italian than the langue d'oil, and closer still to the Latin bones of the speech.

Who the hell is speaking the way someone from Toulouse would have seven hundred years ago?

“My lady is most kind, of a certainty,” it said.

He blinked his eyes open and wished he hadn't, because with consciousness came pain. It took moments to realize that the pain was in his shoulders, and that he was being carried on a pole—one run behind his shoulders, then in front of his elbows, which were tightly bound to it. The pole flexed again, and his toes touched the ground lightly and agony lanced through his joints. The path he was on had ended before what looked like the side of a hill in the gloaming just before sunset. Then he saw that it was a temple, though of no faith he knew, a tall gate heavily carved and even more heavily overgrown, with fallen statues on the steps leading to it. The air was mildly cool, full of a smell of moist rock and things growing and rotting, perfume and decay.

I'm dreaming,
he thought.
That's it, I got hit and I'm dreaming.

“What is the world but a dream?” the same voice said; to him, this time.

He could see the tall, robed, hooded figure turning to address him over his . . . its . . . shoulder. His eyes went wide in fright, meeting those lambent yellow slits and he frantically looked aside. It was the same . . . not a man, but something that walked upright . . . that he'd fought on the harbor. The mask was inhumanly beautiful, in a way like a sketch of humanity, and it made him want to pound his head against a rock so that he wouldn't have to
see
it. Listening was worse, but he couldn't do anything about that.

A shorter, lumpier figure was beside it, carrying the longsword he
remembered. The fingers that held the weapon's scabbard were unpleasantly puffy and soft-looking.

The mask spoke; somehow he couldn't tell if the carved lips moved, or not: