“They stopped here.” Tully pointed ahead, as Garth, then the Duke, gained his side.
Fairchild sensed deception here, and slowly scanned the area. It was still too open for an ambush, he decided. Nevertheless, he drew his sword quickly from its scabbard.
“Ready your bow,” he ordered Garth. Something in his guts was telling him to beware. “Tully, go search the area around us and tell us what you see.”
There were only three of them, Mikahl saw, with a flood of relief. He would soon have an easy shot on the one with his arm in a sling. The man was off of his horse and moving closer, as he inspected Loudin’s mocked-up camp.
If Loudin could take out one of the two still on horseback, then Mikahl felt certain that he would have time to draw and loose on the other one before he could get too close. Ironspike was leaning against the tree nearest him, but he didn’t want to have to draw it from its sheath and use it unless he had to. He was already going to have to explain why he had it to Loudin. The hunter had been struck speechless when he’d seen the jeweled hilt. Then, he had grown angry thinking he had conspired to help a common thief elude the sword’s proper owners. Only after Mikahl had sworn a blood oath that the sword wasn’t stolen, and had promised vehemently that he would tell the whole of his situation to Loudin if they survived this encounter, did the old hunter relent.
[_
p.
_]
The fargin bastards are nearly standing on top of me
, Loudin thought to himself. He hoped they weren’t too close for him to attack. He had heard the sound of steel ringing free from its scabbard. There is nothing else that even resembles the ringing hiss of quality steel being freed, and the sound electrified something in his blood. The other had a bow, he heard them say. That’s the one he would go after. He wished he knew how many of them there were. Even though he felt as if the boy had betrayed him somehow, he would do his best to keep these people’s arrows out of him. Just then, he heard the unmistakable thump of Mikahl’s arrow hitting the first man. A heartbeat later, Mikahl yelled, “THREE!”
For an instant, Mikahl felt wrong about putting an arrow into an unarmed, and unsuspecting man, but a glance at King Balton’s sword steeled him to the task. He stood up as calmly as you please, loosed his arrow at the startled fellow, and then yelled, “THREE!” so that Loudin would know how many they faced. The arrow he’d loosed, he saw, had gone most of the way through the wounded man’s chest.
Loudin burst from his shallow leaf covered grave, startling the swordsman’s horse, so that it charged right at Mikahl. The tattooed hunter’s spear drove up at Garth’s side, but only grazed him.
Mikahl’s heart was exploding in his chest. A wild-eyed destrier was almost on him, and its semi-armored rider was, of all people, the infamous Coldfrost Butcher. Mikahl recognized him, and panicked. He threw away the bow and grabbed Ironspike, and then dropped to the ground behind the lizard skin blind, and rolled. It was a foolish gamble of a move, made in haste, and Mikahl realized this as soon as he was committed to the action. The Duke’s horse wouldn’t try to leap the blind. It was too high, and the color and texture would confuse the animal. Mikahl could only hope that he rolled to the side opposite that which the horse chose to take around it. If they went the same way, then he was sure to be trampled. It was too late to stop when he saw that he had chosen wrong. All he could do was clinch his eyes closed, and wait to feel the battle horse’s steel shod hooves crushing into him.
By some stroke of luck, or maybe divine intervention, when Mikahl rolled into its path, the heavy horse leapt completely over him, instead of trampling him. He barely had time to get to his feet and draw Ironspike from its sheath. The terrifying man that King Balton himself had nicknamed, “The Butcher,” was already turned, and about to run him down.
Loudin managed to dodge the single arrow Garth loosed at him, but the man had the advantage of being mounted, and quickly spurred his horse out of Loudin’s weapon’s range. Rather than try to dodge the next arrow that Garth was already nocking, Loudin launched his weapon at the horse, and charged. The blade of this spear hit the horse in its rump, and sunk deep enough to make it buck, and scream. Garth was thrown from the saddle, and ended up landing badly. Before he could get himself up, Loudin was there to deliver a running boot to his face. The kick had enough force behind it to render Garth unconscious, but Loudin took no chances and pounced on the fallen man. In one fell swoop, Loudin drew his dagger, and cut Garth’s throat wide open.
Duke Fairchild’s eyes gleamed with murderous intent, as he casually spurred his horse into a slow trot towards the squire. He would have to wound him, and then kill the other man. Lord Brach, and the wizard, Pael, wanted the boy alive, and at least able to speak. The man on top of Garth would die though. The Duke recognized him as one of the many poachers that plagued the Reyhall Forest. He wasn’t the unknown conspirator that his lord wanted to find, he was just a hunter the boy had come across in the woods. The squire would get to watch the slow death of his companion. It would go far towards deterring any attempts the boy might make to escape. Fairchild would enjoy the slow kill, and watching the boy’s will break.
When Mikahl pulled the sword free from its scabbard, he felt its perfectly balanced weight in his hands. He had brandished it before, in the privacy of the King’s Royal Weapons Closet, while he was cleaning it, but he hadn’t unsheathed it since King Balton had died. Dropping the scabbard, he took the leather wrapped hilt in both hands, and got into the proper stance for fighting a mounted attacker from the ground. For all its familiarity, the sword somehow felt different. A strange vibration was coming from deep inside the blade. He could feel it in the bones of his wrists and arms. It had never done that before. He nearly dropped the weapon, as the strange sensation grew into a visible tremor. He tried to ignore it and gripped the hilt even tighter. Was it his own fear that was causing him to tremble so? He didn’t think so, but he was terrified. The Duke was almost on him now, and Mikahl couldn’t see even the beginnings of fear in the Coldfrost Butcher’s eyes. The man was one of the most ruthless killers in the entire realm, and Mikahl knew that he was in serious trouble.
When Duke Fairchild saw that the terrified boy was holding Ironspike, he hesitated. Surely, Lord Brach and Prince Glendar would’ve told him that the squire had stolen it. Unless they didn’t know that it was missing. With all the worry over Balton’s death, it must have gone unnoticed. The idea that returning it to the new king was far more important than keeping the squire alive, flashed into his mind like a whip crack. Convinced now that sparing the boy was no longer a priority, and that Ironspike was, he dug his heels into his horse’s flanks, and charged.
The moment of indecision that Mikahl saw in the Coldfrost Butcher’s eyes, coincided with the brilliant surge of energy that shot through his entire body. Suddenly, his blood felt charged, and his skin prickled, from head to toe. It was as if he were trapped inside a bolt of lightning. The world around him began to move in slow motion, and he was compelled to step to his right. The Duke’s sword was slicing downward at his left, and realizing that it was a committed stroke, Mikahl waited until the last second, and spun across the charging horse’s path. Deftly, he ducked under the horse’s chin, and came twisting up on the Duke’s unprotected, left hand side. Riding the momentum of his spin, as if it were a tidal wave, he continued around again. Ironspike was humming now, the sword’s razor sharp blade was glowing a pale pastel shade of blue. Mikahl could feel, and hear its power, coursing through him, electrifying his body, filling his head with an angelic symphony of glorious music. He, and the sword, for that moment at least, had become one.
As Duke Fairchild’s sword went slicing through the air where Mikahl had just been, Mikahl came around swinging with all his might from the other side of him. Ironspike’s magical blade cleaved into the Duke’s back, just above the waist, with little or no resistance at all. Plate mail, padded leather, and then flesh and spine alike, were sheared through. Mikahl barely had time to pull the blade tip in as it came out of the Butcher’s belly. If he hadn’t, it would’ve hacked right into the back of the Duke’s horse’s neck.
Mikahl tried to run away from the top half of Duke Fairchild’s body as it tumbled away from the terrified horse. An exposed root caught his boot, and he half stumbled, half fell to the ground. He ended up on his knees, right in front of Ironspike’s scabbard. The rush of power that had just consumed him so completely, the electric tingle, the harmonic symphony, and the sensation of the world around him moving at a snail’s pace, was quickly abating. Where the magic of the sword had just filled him, he was now left with an empty hollowness. He was more than a little afraid. It was all he could do to get Ironspike back in its sheath, before he collapsed to the ground in a trembling heap.
It took a few, long moments for Loudin to move from where he was standing. He was in sort of a shocked daze, a trance, brought on by awe, fear, and more than a little disgust, at what he had just seen happen. What held his attention at the moment had his stomach in his throat. The bottom half of the man Mikahl had just cleaved, was still sitting in the saddle. Booted feet were still in the stirrups, and the horse was walking in a nervous circle, as if the legs and the arse of the dead man were still somehow guiding it. Blood and entrails were everywhere. It took all of Loudin’s willpower to keep from vomiting. He knew he had to go after the horse. They needed the horse too badly to let it go. Even if they didn’t need the beast, he would’ve gone after it. With half of a man’s weight of raw meat riding on its back, the horse wouldn’t last the night out here in the deep forest. The archer’s horse was as good as dead, he knew, and he felt sorry for wounding it to kill its rider. He had done what he had to do to stay alive though, and he reminded himself of that fact when the guilt of harming the beast crept up on him.
He couldn’t help but think, as he motivated himself to go after the bodiless horseman, that the scavengers would eat well this night. Three men and a dead horse would draw a crowd. The crowd, in turn, would probably draw a big lizard. Under normal circumstances, he would’ve wanted to take advantage of the carnage and try to trap it when it came, but these circumstances were as far from normal as any he could imagine.
When Mikahl finally sat up and looked around, he couldn’t see Loudin anywhere. He immediately looked for the blind. It was still there. He took a deep breath, and let out a long sigh of relief. He knew that the old hunter wouldn’t leave his precious lizard skin behind. There was a horse tethered near the blind. It was the one that belonged to the man who had gotten his arm caught in Loudin’s trap, the man Mikahl had killed with an arrow in cold blood.
Another horse was snorting and limping badly. It was out in the forest a little ways and obviously scared. When it turned, Mikahl saw that its hind quarters were covered in bright, red blood. He sat Ironspike against one of the trees that formed the blind, and found his bow. He put an arrow to the string and made his way toward the injured animal, talking gently to it as he went. When he had a sure shot, he loosed. The horse bolted deeper into the woods, but fell headlong into a thicket, after only a few dozen strides. Mikahl was glad that his arrow had struck true. The beast had surely suffered enough already.
On his way back toward the blind, he saw the bottom half of the Duke’s body lying at the edge of the camp. He was forced to take a knee, when the sheer magnitude of what he had done, and the power that he had felt while doing it, came back to him. He made a decision then and there not to use Ironspike again unless he had no other choice. As glorious as it made him feel, the idea that he had somehow violated the memory of the King he loved so much, was stronger. He felt as if he had taken something that wasn’t his. He decided to take the Coldfrost Butcher’s sword. If he could manage to get the scabbard unbuckled without vomiting, he could use it. It was obviously quality steel and would do just fine if the need arose again.
He had just gotten the body turned over, and was gagging his way through the gore to get at the buckles, when Loudin called out his name from the distance. The sound startled him so badly, that he nearly fell over backwards from his squatted position. The belt had been broken, or more accurately, it had been nearly sheered through. As quickly as he could, he collected the blood soaked sheath and stumbled away.
Loudin was on his own horse, and had Windfoot and the Duke’s big destrier in tow. The bald headed hunter didn’t look pleased as he approached. His whole head was as red as an apple, and it made his tattoos all the more menacing.
“Tell me again that you’re not just a thief of noblemen’s swords!” He reined his mount to a stop in front of Mikahl. “Make me believe you boy, or I’m done with you.”
Mikahl looked down at Duke Fairchild’s bloody scabbard in his hand, and let out a sigh of frustration. He was a man of his word, and he had sworn to tell Loudin the whole of it. He would keep his word. He just hoped that he wouldn’t live to regret doing it. He had to let this good-hearted hunter know what danger the knowledge would put him in though. It was only right to do so.
“I owe you the whole of it friend,” Mikahl spoke seriously, with his eyes looking directly into Loudin’s. “It’s a tale that comes with more than words though. Your life will be at risk for just knowing it.”
“Aye,” Loudin nodded.
He was already sure that the boy was more than a common thief, and he wasn’t so sure that he wanted to hear the story behind all this mess. He was a known poacher, and he had already helped Mikahl kill a Westland nobleman, he reminded himself. The halved man’s rank was as obvious as night or day. If he had a lick of sense to himself, he would just kill the boy, and ride away. Nobody could ever tie him into this treachery. He would have enough horses to carry his lizard skin to Summer’s Day too. The animals would blend in there and draw no ill attention at all. He could probably sell them for a bit of coin to a Valleyan breeder who would know how to cover the mark they bore.