The Shield of Daqan

by David Guymer

  “I need to save my strength where I can,” said Andira. “Hamma understood that and it cost him his life. You can serve me with one arm, but I cannot have a scout who can’t walk.”

  The Greyfox gave an uncertain grin. “Can I have a bow too?”

  Sibhard shoved her.

  “What was it that attacked us?” Andira asked.

  “I don’t know,” the Greyfox admitted. “There are many creatures who call the forest home. Not all of them are consciously evil, and not all of them wholly a part of the mortal plane. It would be a task beyond the lifetime of a pure-blood Eolam elf to know them all.” She turned west, what the elf assured them was west, studying it for a long time. “My guess would be that they are fleeing before the Uthuk, just as the human folk of Kell will be by now. We just had the bad luck of being in their way.”

  “Because I allowed us to rest,” said Andira.

  “My lady, no–” Sibhard began.

  Andira closed her runehand into a fist and covered it with the other, shrouding the majority of its light, and looked upwards. “You are right,” she said. “What is done is done.”

  Meanwhile, one of the pilgrims approached Sibhard and whispered something in his ear. “My lady,” the boy began again. “We lost three in the attack. Another is injured, but not seriously. Two are still unaccounted for. There’s a chance they’ve been taken by…” He glanced at the Greyfox. “By whatever it was.” He waited a while for an answer. “My lady? Shouldn’t we go after them?”

  “It is nearly dawn,” Andira decided at length. She hefted her poleaxe and oriented herself north again. “It is time we continued on.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Kurt

  The Whispering Forest, South Kell

  Andira and her company had passed this way. Kurt was no scout. He was less of a woodsman. But lucky for him it didn’t look as though Andira Runehand was either. Her small army had left a clear enough sign of its passage that they might as well have stopped and paved it. He could well imagine Yorin cussing the lot of them for blundering fools. Kurt crouched to examine the flattened ground cover and bent flowers, wondering where in all this mess Sarb had been. Somewhere to the front of it, he didn’t doubt.

  While he was low to the ground, the flutter of something wispy and white caught his eye. He reached out a finger and touched a bit of wool that had been snagged on the rough bark of a tree. It pulled in the occasional breeze like an injured bird, or a moth stuck in a spider’s web.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, and smiled despite himself. “He actually found the sheep.”

  He let it go, pulling at the stiff collar of his jacket. It was hot, given how dark it was. The trees were uncomfortably close too, and strange sounds – not so chilling as a flesh ripper in the night, but bad enough – echoed through the rustling wood. Whatever it was making them might not have troubled a hero like Andira Runehand, or a host as big as the one she had been travelling with, but they sure as hell troubled him.

  He swallowed the urge to call out for Sarb.

  Elben muttered something from the back of the horse.

  Kurt had needed to tie him to it to keep him from sliding off. That tiny little nick that the Uthuk arrow had put across his shoulder was sweating like a slice of old bacon on a sunny window and the boy’s whole upper arm had gone black. Kurt had done his best to mask the smell, using the crushed petals of the flowers he’d been able to pick from along the trail, but the corruption was still there, still getting worse. While Kurt was struggling to loosen his collar, Elben was shivering, and clearly in pain despite approaching consciousness only in spells. Kurt didn’t know what else to do. The Charg’r poison was quite beyond his own meagre herb lore. The thought occurred that he should have somehow found a way back to his steading to recover the arrow that had cut Elben’s arm. That was surely what an experienced Darklands fighter or battlefield healer would have done. Wasn’t it? How he was supposed to have gone about that or what he would have done with the thing had he done so he did not know, but the thought, once there, nagged him with guilt and refused to be sent away.

  Again, he had to bite his tongue to keep from yelling Sarb’s name into the wood.

  Only Andira Runehand, or a fortunate encounter with a very lost runemaster, could save Elben now.

  “Father?”

  Kurt wiped the sting from his eyes and looked up. “Elben. Go back to sleep.”

  “Are we almost there?” the youth whispered. “Listred is tired.”

  Kurt smiled unbidden. “You named my horse?”

  “He wanted one, I think. Why did you never name him?”

  “I suppose it never felt important. He always answered to horse.”

  “Well, I think he’s a Listred.”

  “He looks a bit like one too. There was a cook in my garrison called Listred, a highland lad, and we used to…”

  He trailed off.

  Elben was already unconscious again.

  The boy didn’t want to hear that story anyway. Kurt sniffed. For months he’d not spoken a word to his sons about his time in the army. However much they had pestered. Now, he’d gladly tell his youngest any tale in exchange for a few more hours.

  He ground his teeth lest he start to cry.

  Damn it.

  “Sibhard!”

  The shout echoed through the wood.

  From somewhere ahead, something gave an inquisitive growl.

  Kurt drew his battered old sword and rustled towards it. The forest billed him step for step with scratches. He only felt the deepest of them. Panic seemed to have inured him to the rest. Better than a stiff drink.

  After a little way he came to a fallen tree and dropped down beside it. The tree itself had been dead for an age and then some, but it seemed to have fallen only lately and lay in its neighbors’ arms like a large drunk being dragged home after several too many. The fall of leaves was enough to obscure Andira’s trail, but he could see from the scuffed pile how the tracks became scattered there, as though at this point they had ceased to march in the same semi-orderly fashion that had brought them this far.

  He looked up.

  The trails led on to a clearing.

  He could see sunlight, and vicariously felt wind on his skin.

  “Wait here,” he murmured to the horse that had followed behind him and was now nosing at his shoulder. “I’m going to take a look.”

  He stood up.

  Leaf fall and undergrowth rustled as they clawed at his leather. He squinted, covering his eyes, staggering into the brilliance of an uncovered sun. The chill of it grew on him slowly as his vision cleared, exposing the sun’s cruel lie. The day was as gray as an undyed fleece. Bodies littered the clearing. Dead men. Slaughtered animals. Hummocks in the grass made by bits of both. The crows were busy about them, too much so to raise so much as a croak until Kurt stumbled out to disturb them. Even then, they showed no inclination to leave their feast, certainly not for this old man’s sake. They pecked and cawed and ruffled their feathers. Those nearest stuffed their beaks with stringy bits of red meat before taking off in an angry fluttering of black, calling harshly from the bowers of the watching trees. Larger scavengers moved about further away. A pair of gray-coated timber wolves prowled around the lightning-smote stump of the downed tree, while a large black bear snuffled alone around the far edge of the clearing. They regarded each other warily, like lords across some arbitrary border, and occasionally at Kurt too: the less-than-nobody whose land they had decided to carve in half.

  Kurt switched from covering his eyes to covering his nose and mouth against the smell.

  “Sibhard!”

  The bear issued a low growl. The two wolves turned and slunk into the woods.

  “Sibhard!”

  The bear rose up onto its hind legs and gave another threatening growl.

  Kurt h
ad the unmistakable sense, too, of other things close by. Watching. Lacking the bear’s wariness of humanity and human steel. But content to watch even so. For now at least. The forest had the feeling of a garrison town whose army has been mobilized to some foreign war and left its walls standing empty. It was a skeleton that stood behind as castellan, an embittered token that would have gladly rent him limb from limb for this trespass had its might been just a little greater.

  Satisfied with its display, the bear dropped back onto all fours, gave another growl, and turned from the clearing.

  Kurt let out a relieved breath.

  Listred, the horse, crunched through the undergrowth behind him.

  Kurt didn’t turn.

  His years in the baron’s purple had been spent mostly playing cards. He’d drunk quite a bit of bad ale too, and sung a lot of songs of the sort that Katrin would have disapproved of had she been alive to hear them. He’d stood on a high wall and complained about the cold and the wet to folk that his late wife would have approved of no more, looking out east when by all rights they might have spent the time much better had they been looking back west.

  He shook his head at the memory of his wife.

  Again, his eyes began to sting.

  He grunted it off.

  What kind of a man was he, crying over a wound as old as that one?

  Kell’s army was meant to be the biggest and best in all Terrinoth. That’s what everybody always said, so there had to be some kind of truth in it. Couldn’t they have guarded against the Uthuk Y’llan and the Greyfox? Instead they’d ended up doing neither. No one up on that wall at Bastion Tarn wanted to fight. Except the odd bully that every company had one of and the would-be heroes like Sarb. But it was what they’d all been there for. They’d have fought in a second if it could have stopped half the things Kurt had seen and those he’d had the hard luck to have only imagined. But Fredric had sent them home.

  The short-sighted, soft-hearted fool.

  “Worst plan in the whole damned world,” Kurt muttered to himself. “I couldn’t fight the Greyfox on my own.”

  “Da…”

  Kurt wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and looked up.

  Elben was looking glassily across the clearing. “What’s that over there?”

  Kurt turned and walked, picking his way slowly between the bodies, in that direction.

  Then he saw it.

  He dropped to his haunches and picked it up between both hands.

  He held it numbly. It was his flatbow. Or it had been before Sarb had taken it on his way to running off with Andira’s warband in Gwellan. The wood was split. There was blood on one limb. The string had been cut. Had the latter not been the case then the tension on the limb would have surely wrecked it as a bow by now. As it was it would probably manage a few more shots before the damage to the wood made it snap. He gripped the limb in one hand, looked again around the clearing, and took a breath so deep it hurt.

  “Sibhard!”

  He got stiffly to his feet and turned over a body with the same short dark hair as his son. A woman’s pecked sockets stared up at him.

  He felt no relief.

  “Sibhard!”

  He ran to a stockier man that looked nothing at all like Sarb.

  Desperation made him blind.

  He went to another.

  Another.

  The body he ran towards kicked out before he got near, took out his legs and put him on his back. The wind flew out of him, surprise as much as the blow, and the body got to its feet.

  It was an old man, gray-haired and grizzle-bearded, haggard and pale as an old bird and clad in battered mail with half an arrow sticking out of his chest. He hissed at Kurt, something unintelligible, spittle flying from his clenched teeth as he stumbled drunkenly sideways, corrected, and then hacked down with his sword.

  Kurt rolled out of the way.

  The blade chopped into the clod where he had been sent sprawling.

  He cursed himself again for leaving his shield on the horse.

  Some soldier he was.

  “You’ll not pick at this corpse, brigand,” the old man snarled as Kurt backed hurriedly away and got his sword up between them. The man swayed. Kurt felt himself smile as the initial shock turned to something like relief. An old man with an arrow in him was about his level.

  “I’m looking for my son. I don’t want a fight.”

  “When Fortuna throws arrows then sometimes a man gets hit.” The old warrior gave a guttural cry and hacked out with his sword.

  Kurt raised his own sword: a passable drill yard counter to a downswing from on high.

  The old knight shifted his footing at the last moment, dragging his blow an inch left and forcing Kurt into a hasty adjustment of his own. He overcompensated, all his weight on his left, and the gray-haired warrior pivoted, turned, sword blinking as it changed direction again. Kurt couldn’t keep up. He gave ground, the other man’s sword chopping methodically away at his earlier confidence and his guard. He’d faced off against better swords than his own on the training yard, plenty of times, but the feeling of being so utterly and ridiculously outclassed was a new one.

  “You’ve had a little training.” The old knight pushed Kurt’s sword this way and that until his hands were numb. “But not nearly enough practice.” There came a brief flurry which Kurt blocked about half of and retreated from the rest, the routine finishing up with Kurt’s sword quivering point-down in the earth and the knight’s pressed against his neck. Kurt gave way, stumbled over a body, and fell. The old man kicked the rusty sword over before Kurt could get any ideas about it. “Pathetic,” he grunted. “If Highmont and Forthyn hadn’t stood between you and my old castle then I might have conquered Kell myself and done Lady Runehand and Terrinoth a mighty favor.” He swung his sword up high, ready to chop down.

  The point glinted red where the stained metal caught the sun.

  “No!” Kurt wailed. “Please no.”

  “Stop begging. You made your choices, brigand, now die with some dignity.”

  “I’m not with the Greyfox! I’m not! I’m looking for Andira Runehand.”

  The old man bared crooked teeth. “You said you were looking for your son.”

  Kurt shut his eyes.

  The warrior grunted in pain and Kurt opened them again. He gasped in relief, the painful rush of life pushing through his veins to every part of his body. The old knight’s sword arm buckled and the man himself soon folded after it, descending to one knee. His breath shuddered out through clenched teeth, one hand to his side near to where the arrow had entered his chest. Kurt didn’t need a second invitation. He scrambled to where his sword lay and snatched it up. He took it up two-handed and swayed to his feet like a drunk holding a chair. The old knight glared up at him, hurt and self-loathing written in gray across his hard face, and made no effort to defend himself.

  “Kill me then, if you’ve the stomach for it.”

  Kurt glanced over his shoulder to where Elben lay slumped against Listred’s neck. His eyes were vacant. Kurt couldn’t even be sure he was awake. He lowered his sword with a grunt.

  Damn the boy and his belief in heroes. Damn them both.

  “No wonder one little elf girl took half your country,” the old knight panted.

  “Shut up,” said Kurt, and peered more closely at the warrior’s face. Now that he had time to think about it, he realized it was one he recognized. The dragon rune drawn into the skin in burnt flesh was as singular as a true knight’s heraldry.

  “Brodun?” he said.

  The old man’s eyes narrowed, almost perfectly mirroring Kurt’s. “The yeoman. The archer who shot at Andira in Gwellan.” He laughed roughly, then grimaced at the pain it brought him. “No wonder you’re so bad with that sword. I’ve never seen a bowman that knew what to do with a real weapon. Sibhard is
your son, isn’t he?” He glanced towards Listred and Elben. “Your other son?”

  “Yes.”

  Hamma grunted, a little empathy in his dark eyes. “I see why you’re looking for Andira.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  The old knight winced, then nodded.

  “Is Sarb alive?”

  “When I last saw him. But that was heading north with Andira Runehand, and I can’t think of more dangerous company for a boy that dreams of being a hero. Believe me…” Levering his weight against the upright of his sword, he pushed himself back to his feet, pain digging ever deeper lines into his thin face. “I know. Let me share your horse with your son for a while, yeoman, and I will lead you to her. Maybe she can mend us both.”

  “What happened to dying with dignity?”

  The old knight gave a bloody grin. “I’m a knight of Roth’s Vale. That is what we tell the peasants.”

  He took his sword by the blade and offered it up to Kurt.

  Kurt thought for a long moment.

  Then he sighed and took it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Greyfox

  The Whispering Forest, South Kell

  Greyfox studied the prints in the ground. She lowered herself to her knees, her hands still tied behind her back, to sniff around them and mutter. They were booted and she could see the deeper indents left by hobnails or rivets. The earth underneath them was cracked as if by heat, the undergrowth similarly wilted. If it was a forest creature that had made them then it was certainly not one of the forest, nor one with any great love of the wood. But she was close to where she wanted to be. She stuck out her tongue and licked the soil.

  Sibhard made a disgusted look. “What are you doing?”

  “More of the creatures that attacked us passed this way, I think,” said Greyfox.

  “Are they still headed west?” asked Andira.

  West-ish.

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “Then leave them. We are bound north.”