Adrienne Martine-Barnes - [Sword 01]

by The Fire Sword (v0. 9) (epub)

  Some of the Reavers hesitated, for the fire leapt into their fur with the aid of the wind. A pair of boars, braver or stupider than the rest, charged Arthur while a bear lumbered toward Eleanor, curved claws slicing the air. She did not dare use her power to cast more fire, for fear the wind would bring it back into her face, so she shoved her staff into the oncoming form. A huge paw pushed at the staff. Then the beast shuddered, stiffened, and fell backward. The rest of the pack seemed to lose their enthusiasm and began to depart as best they could through the spreading fire.

  Eleanor caught her breath against the buffeting wind and saw Baird striding toward her across the flames. He seemed enormous, the fire reflecting in his golden hair and beard. Then she saw the ugly scars below his missing eye where the griffin’s eagle claws had raked the flesh, and she wondered for a moment how much more she would mar him before the end.

  Arthur turned and saw him, and the light in his eyes darkened. Baird smiled, twisting the scarred portion of his face into a hideous mass, and drew something from a shabby sheath at his side. It was a sword, the blade as black as pitch. It did not reflect at all in the firelight. Baird’s sword was shorter by several inches than Arthur’s, but his greater height and arm length evened out the disadvantage.

  "I have come for what is mine, cur. The woman and the sword.”

  "Eleanor belongs to herself,” Arthur replied, eyeing his adversary, a man he had not killed in a stream months before, now returned larger and somehow monstrous.

  She considered this liberated and unloverlike statement with half her mind as she tried to decide how to put out the fire with the balance. The idea of being cooked alive was not appealing, and she regretted that her immediate response to danger was to incinerate everything in sight. What would Doyle have expected her to do? As she thought this, the low-comedy aspect of the two males squaring off before her struck her. They were, in one sense, fighting over her, and she was not only not complimented, she was also annoyed. Neither of them was the man she wanted, and she did not deceive herself that their motives were either honorable or noble. An excess of male hormones seemed a stupid reason to kill a man.

  Then the very real seriousness of the situation struck her. Short of teleporting one of them to the dark side of the moon, there was no way to stop the confrontation. One of them would die. And it would be her fault, just like Doyle’s death. She forced her attention back to the fire, for it presented a greater danger at the moment than two men shouting insults at each other. In that instant, she "saw” Arthur again, outlined only by his aura against the darkness, swinging the bright sword under the black sky while the pipes screamed. There was no fire in her vision.

  Eleanor was torn with indecision. Put the fire out? Let it burn? As the two men circled each other warily, she decided that the fire had to go. With a clumsy gesture of her staff, she pointed at the slope of the tor, and a few cubic feet of earth tumbled outward. It was an unwieldy mass to manage in the ripping winds, but she got it to crash down on a patch of heather burning nearby. Twice more she tore out parts of the ancient hill, until she had a modest firebreak.

  Perhaps a minute had passed and Eleanor stopped, for she lacked the strength to continue flinging dirt around indefinitely, and she looked at Baird and Arthur. The exchange of insults was over, and the ritual sizing-up about finished. Baird had the disadvantage of only one eye, and Arthur of being the smaller, but they were probably well matched in skill and stupidity. All she knew was she wanted it to stop.

  The heroines of romantic novels, she knew, would have thrust themselves in between the combatants and almost certainly gotten unkind cuts from both sides. So she screamed at them instead. "Will you two stop being a couple of pricks!” She was surprised at her own vulgarity, but the wind tore the words away, and neither of them acknowledged her existence.

  Frantic now, Eleanor tried to think of something useful to do, but there was nothing. The swords came up and crashed together, though there was no sound. The wind shifted suddenly, sending dirt and ash into Arthur’s eyes and fanning the fire behind him. Baird gave a great shout, leapt forward, and found his dark blade slicing empty air. Arthur had sprung sideways, toward Baird’s blind side, and he wiped his own eyes and kept moving.

  Baird swung around with his blade raised again, and Arthur sent the edge of his sword deep into the muscles under the right arm. Then he leapt aside again as Baird brought his sword down where Arthur had been a moment before. Arthur struck at the exposed thigh, and blood spurted into the wind as he pulled away. Baird bellowed above the gale and charged again. The wounded leg gave way and he stumbled. The fire sword came down on his right forearm, severing the hand away completely.

  The pipes on the tor gave a mind-searing wail as the golden man fell to earth. Arthur lifted the sword as if he would behead his foe. Then the energy seemed to leave him, and he let the sword hang from limp hands.

  Eleanor was frozen for a second. Then she knelt beside Baird and took his head into her lap, smoothing dirt and smuts off the scarred skin and out of the sun-colored hair. Hot tears welled from her eyes and fell onto his face. "Baird, I did not wish you dead.”

  "Mother told me not to come. I did not listen. Tears for me? She’ll give me no peace. She never does. Why couldn’t you have loved me?”

  "I don’t know, Baird, I don’t know.”

  He caught her hand in his remaining one. "How will you remember me?”

  "Golden and whole and... laughing.”

  "Then kiss me once before my mother takes me home.” Eleanor bent forward and kissed his mouth, feeling the soft, golden beard under her lips. She felt the shudder as the life passed from his body and caught the trembling of the earth under her knees as the earth serpent came to claim her child. Putting his head gently off her lap, she crab-walked away slightly as the ground began to open. Baird slid away, and then there was nothing but the wind, the fire, and the maddening scream of the pipes on the tor.

  Eleanor and Arthur struggled up the tor, slammed by fiercer winds with each step. They could not speak, and it often felt as if they took two steps back for every one forward, so that they were both gasping and exhausted when they achieved the summit. The near-dark moon cast slivers of silver onto the rocky earth.

  A frame of wood stood on the top and, hanging from it, an object no bigger than two hand-widths held up with leather thongs. It looked like a miniature raft, and Eleanor was astounded at how much noise it made. It took her a moment to realize it was a pan pipe, or syrinx, not the bagpipe she had expected.

  The sounds it made made bones ache, the skin crawl, and the eyes tear. She wanted to run away down the tor and into the steady beat of the flames. Arthur, beside her, was shaking, and his brow gleamed with sweat. He forced a hand up and reached forward. The wind

  shrieked, and the pipes wailed more loudly, though Eleanor would have thought that impossible. He snatched his hand back as if burned, and screamed.

  Eleanor probed with her staff and found a sort of force field. It sparked where she touched it. She moved the staff around, seeking the perimeters. Arthur stopped screaming and looked at his hand in the faint moonlight. It was black as ash. He flexed his fingers cautiously.

  Eleanor had discovered that the resistance to her probing did not extend beyond the middle of the leather thongs holding the pipes aloft. She started to move toward the nearer one and discovered her legs were frozen in place. That was too much. She panicked, clawing at herself and whimpering.

  Arthur lunged at her, grabbed her shoulders, shook her, and finally struck her. In the pale light, he seemed to be Baird, reborn somehow, and she fought him. He seemed then to be a skeleton, a bunch of burned bones, and she struggled to get away from his touch. A clenched fist moved toward her face in slow motion, and she felt its impact on her jaw. Everything went a murky gray before her eyes.

  When her vision had cleared, she found herself looking up from the hard ground. Arthur stood above her with the sword over his head, straining every muscle so
the cords stood out in his neck. He was on the balls of his feet, and she flung an arm across her face to resist the blow she was sure would come. The wind snatched the cry away from dry lips.

  Inch by inch, he lifted the sword. He leaned his torso forward slightly from the hips and stretched so the muscles knotted along his bare forearms. The tip of the sword wavered as he grunted and strained. Finally, it rested on one leather thong. He gave another grunt and forced his weight downward. The thong snapped, and the sword, so slow before, crashed to earth a few inches from her head.

  The pipes and the wind redoubled their fury, so that Eleanor could do nothing but cover her ears and cower. Then one of the wooden uprights of the frame snapped like a matchstick, pulling the thong on it apart, and the pipe arced on the remaining tie, swinging down with a dying squawk, like the dissonant moan of drones when putting a bagpipe down. The wind faded, and Arthur tumbled onto his backside.

  He sat there, his legs splayed out like a child’s, the fire sword on the ground between them. He forced himself onto his knees and crawled over to where the pipe hung murmuring to itself in odd harmonies that made the skin shiver. Arthur yanked it free with a vicious gesture, then wrapped it in his tunic.

  The silence was incredible. Both of them sat breathless, appreciating the absence of sound as the desert dweller looks at the oasis. After a time, they both rose and started down the slope, still wordless. The fire was burning itself out as they picked their way out onto the heath.

  The wagon stood where they had left it, the placid ponies either too stupid or too phlegmatic to dash away from the excitement. But the fire had burned in a different direction. They tumbled onto the back of it.

  Eleanor rubbed her jaw tenderly. "You have a mean right cross, Arthur.”

  He extended his arms. "And you have sharp nails.”

  She looked down at his hand, still black, and touched the skin tentatively. It felt fine, warm and pliant. "Does it hurt?”

  "No. It is sort of cold, but nothing more than that. I wonder what happened to Sable? I saw him in griffin-shape when those beasts attacked, but he seemed to vanish... along with Baird.”

  Eleanor flogged her weary brain into motion. "You said you had a premonition you would do something terrible, and I think you did. You killed summer, Arthur—sort of. But if that is true, then Sable stopped, too, because he was part of that time. I am too tired to try to explain it tonight. But I think we let the... cat out of the bag.” She gave a half-chuckle, snuggled down in her filthy, torn clothing, and was asleep almost immediately.

  Arthur sighed, pulled off her boots, and drew the covers up around her. He stepped down out of the wagon, picketed the horses, watering them and feeding them a handful of grain. Then he washed the sweat off his face and upper body, turning the dark hand back and forth in the light of the sickly moon. The air still smelled of the fire, but it carried a damp chill on it, too, which made him rub himself dry quickly and pull on his other tunic.

  He got back into the cramped confines of the wagon and looked down at the sleeping woman. Her spirit’s light shone in the darkness, so he could trace the tracks of tears across the dirty face, the tiny upright lines between her eyebrows and the slight creases at the ends of her mouth. She showed the strain of the quest only in these small ways, but Arthur realized as he gazed at her tenderly that she was doing it all with no thought of reward. She just went on. No wonder she shone brighter than anyone he had ever seen. No wonder she nearly blinded the eye.

  Arthur tugged off his boots, lowered himself carefully onto the narrow bed, and slid under the covers. Eleanor murmured in her sleep, stroked his cheek with her hand, then turned on her side with her back against his chest. He held her, his hand resting on the curving belly, feeling the fishy movements of the unborn child, and wished that he could say to her the words that filled his heart. But he would not. He had but the briefest memory of the great, dark man who had died releasing him, but it was enough to know that no living person could compete with her reminiscence. But he was determined that if he survived to claim his throne, she would never again suffer more discomfort than having to decide whether she wanted to wear a green gown or a blue one. With that pleasant thought, he drifted into sleep.

  XXXI

  It was perceptibly colder the next morning, as if the autumn had vanished in the night. They woke stiff and chilled, except where their bodies pressed together, and went about their morning tasks briskly. Eleanor got a voluminous gown out of the chest scavenged from the encampment and belted it around her. It was as drab as the day, its original color faded to a grayish brown, but it was wool, and that was all she cared about.

  There was no sign of the panther. She mulled that over as she bent her hands over their small campfire. She wondered if Wrolf would return to her, for winter was his time, but she was not sure he could. She worried, too, over the consequences of killing Baird out of season, but it was too late to do anything about it. They smothered the fire, hitched up the ponies, and turned their faces southward.

  It seemed to Eleanor that the following weeks were an endless repetition of the same day over and over again. The wind blew from their backs, icy and knifing through cloaks and tunics, and the rain fell with dreary consistency. Their boots were permanently damp and caked with mud. They passed Hadrian’s Wall where she had slumbered a week, exploring the infinite in a chilly mist, and continued onward.

  The mild barrier of the Cheviot Hills was broached, and they were in Albion, though it was not too different from the land they had just left. There were more people, a few hamlets, and then the somber bulk of Norman keeps on rises of land. Flocks of sheep dotted hillsides, and a few fields lay fallow but clearly bearing the mark of human hands by the hedgerows that delineated them.

  Passing through the small villages was nerve-racking to Eleanor, for she had grown unaccustomed to the yap of dogs, the lisping accents of toddlers, and the harsh voices of adults. Their thick dialect was almost unintelligible, and they were a dour, suspicious kind of folk, eyeing the worn wagon and the shaggy ponies cautiously. But they did not seem hostile, just wary, and she saw few who were touched by the Shadow, as if the mixture of native and Viking blood was more resistant to the pestilence than their southern relatives. Still, she preferred to keep to the inside of the wagon when they passed a town.

  They entered the North Riding of Yorkshire in a fog of wet snow, and she knew it though no signpost marked the arbitrary line between it and Durham. But a sense of uneasiness she carried in the weeks since the Tor faded suddenly, as if she sensed the presence of her mother’s people, her own tribe. On their northern journey, she and Doyle had passed around the county, traveling, by her guess, through Lancashire and Cambria.

  The town of Richmond seemed like a metropolis after months in the wild, though it was little more than a small keep and perhaps a hundred dwellings nestled on a hill. A tall, fair man studied Arthur for a long minute, then turned and strode briskly away toward the castle.

  A few minutes later he returned with several leather-armored men-at-arms who broke into two ranks flanking the wagon. The fair man caught the ponies’ harness, and Arthur clucked the steeds to a halt. The man smiled and nodded. The wind gusted and sent a swirl of mushy snowflakes into the grinning face. He just laughed and swiped at the moisture.

  "My lord, my mother would be most pleased if you would pass the night with us.” He waved a slender hand toward the castle.

  Arthur was unsure how to treat this friendly reception. "Milady,” he hissed.

  Eleanor had been resting in the back, for she found herself tired a great deal now. She sat up and came to the front of the wagon, took in the smiling man and the armed escort in a quiet glance, and nodded graciously. "If I did not know better, I would say we were expected,” she said quietly.

  The fair man apparently possessed very acute hearing. "You are, my lady, you are.”

  Since he seemed disinclined to offer further explanation, they did not ask for any hut followed hi
m up the rather windy street to the thick walls of the keep and through them. Arthur pulled the wagon to a halt inside the courtyard, leapt down, and turned to assist • Eleanor. She felt awkward under the weight of the child, shabby, worn, and terribly tired. Her right hand on the shaft of her staff trembled a little. Arthur supported her against his chest for a moment while the fair man watched curiously.

  Eleanor realized no names had been exchanged, and she wondered why. Then a groom appeared to draw the wagon off to the stables, and she had a mild panic for its contents. Arthur smiled, patted her arm, and said, "Do not worry, milady, I will see your good gown gets to you. Now, go inside out of the cold.” With those words, he turned to follow the wagon, and she gave a silent thank-you to the kindly deities who had endowed him with a quick mind as well as a strong body.

  The fair man offered his arm, so Eleanor took it, the cobblestones being somewhat treacherous under her worn boots. She felt the strong muscles under her fingertips and wondered what the devil was going on. Who was he, and why were they expected? Then, more important, could she get a hot bath? She chuckled to herself at the odd order of her priorities and felt almost lighthearted for the first time in weeks. Or was it months?

  The hall was long and dark-beamed with two huge fires roaring on each sidewall. It smelled of straw and cooked meat and babies and dogs, a combination she would have found distasteful a year earlier but which simply had a homey feel to it now. Several toddlers were rolling a ball back and forth between their fat, outstretched legs, supervised by a plump servant holding a sleeping infant. A puppy of the mongrel kind kept darting into the circle to grab the ball, sending the children into giggles.

  A tall, grave-looking woman rose from a high-backed chair and moved toward Eleanor. The sweep of her high brow beneath still-golden hair and the long, narrow