Kestrel said one curse word, looked at the offending bush that had betrayed him in the soft earth, then gave a whoop of joy, as he saw that a nest of crickets had been exposed by the opening of the roots and the decaying leaves that had covered them. His hands swooped in and grabbed a multitude of the insects, and he had a momentary sense of appreciation for Stillwater’s excitement over the mushrooms.
It was time to quit traveling for the night, he decided. He ate the trove of crickets he could find, then he climbed into a tree and settled in for the night. He closed his eyes, and opened his mind and soul to prayers, wishing that he could communicate with the goddesses who had given him so much direction, advice, and assistance. There was no response, and he fell asleep feeling a deeper loneliness.
Kestrel awoke before sunrise, and he sat up in his tree limb perch, listening to the chorus of birds that were greeting the pending dawn; springtime was further advanced in the southern mountains, and he heard a nest full of baby birds calling for breakfast. He slid down from the tree, and cautiously started to pick a path upwards, moving slowly in the murky darkness at the bottom of the steep ravine that sliced downward.
Within a half hour there was dim light starting to penetrate the shadows around Kestrel, helping him to move more quickly, and an hour after that he was able to see into the distance, to see that there was no end in sight when he looked upward at the trail before him. He sighed as he examined the path ahead, then continued to climb. His walking staff was a valuable tool, helping him pull himself, brace himself, and stabilize himself, even more than it had been when he had been traveling through the Water Mountains with Hampus. That memory made him wonder how Hampus was, how he had been received in Center Trunk, and when he would marry Princess Elwean. And the musing about Center Trunk soon sent his mind meandering towards Oaktown and Putienne; he was desperate to hear something, anything, about the girl.
And so, distracted by such thoughts and longings, he climbed upward. By mid-afternoon he found that the grade of the ravine was lessening considerably, and he was able to move faster, at a pace that started to approach the speed he wanted. He wondered where Stillwater was, and where Wren and Woven were. He was, he suddenly comprehended, on the side of the river he needed to be on, on the side closest to the mountain lake that was his goal; before long he would be on the road towards the lake, and he would need to be watchful for signs of the Viathins that were returning to the lands of the Inner Seas.
Kestrel reached ground that was nearly level, and he walked in the very headwaters of his gully, at a place where it was merely a knee-high swale among the tall trees of the mountain lands, when he heard the not-too-distant sound of weapons, shouts, and conflict.
He stopped and strained his ears, trying to hear better, to understand and detect what was happening. The noises were still too faint however, so he started running in the direction of the battle, anxious to get closer and find out what was happening.
Kestrel had visions of Wren and Woven beset by Viathins, and he was fearful of the harm they might suffer without his abilities to protect them. He dodged among stones and trees and crevasses, drawing closer to the battle noises, and then he heard a sound that made him screech to a stop – a human voice, or at least a voice shouting in the human tongue.
He was very close to the battle, and he heard humans shouting commands and oaths and pleas. They were on the defensive it sounded like, and he was astonished at the discovery. He drew closer to the sounds, sounds that were on the move, from an apparently running-battle. Kestrel looked at the trees around him, a mixture of deciduous and pine trees, and then leapt up into a chestnut tree and started jumping from tree branch to tree branch, approaching the battle from above, circling around troublesome pine trees and their prickly needles while he made progress towards the scene of the conflict.
He climbed into the branches of a particularly tall and august oak tree and ascended higher into the limbs, then found that he had a view of the battle at last. A force of a score of soldiers, dressed in the red colors that Uniontown had sported during its days of dominion under the Viathins, were attacking a smaller force, a group that wore yellow and green, and which was trying to retreat in an orderly fashion as they suffered the pressure of near envelopment by their attackers. They were on an unusually wide road for such a desolate region, the road that Kestrel was sure must be the one he had traveled upon in his previous journey to the lake.
It was not his fight, but it was not a fair fight, and it did have forces who might be potential allies against the resurgent Viathins. Without a moment’s further hesitation, Kestrel slid his staff down across two branches, then pulled his bow and quiver of arrows off his shoulder, and began to fire a hasty rain of bolts down at the attacking forces. He aimed at the soldiers who were attacking the victims on the side closest to him, trying to open up an escape route for the green and yellow forces, one that would let them escape into the woods on his side of the road.
His shots were unerringly accurate, and a half dozen of the presumptive Uniontown forces fell in a nearly simultaneous motion, making both sides of the battle pause momentarily. Kestrel had picked out the commander of the red forces, and he threw Lucretia at the officer, then fired another pair of arrows at the attackers.
He saw one of the yellow and green men point upward at his position in the oak tree, showing that he’d been spotted. The red forces were in disarray, not yet aware of where the attack was coming from, and the victims of the attack took advantage of the confusion and fear in the attackers – they broke towards Kestrel, running as a group through the open left side.
Kestrel began to drop rapidly, hopping down from one broad branch of the oak tree to another, trying to reach the ground to rendezvous with the fighters he had adopted as allies for the moment.
“Lucretia, return,” he called as he descended.
The yellow and green forces were nearly beneath him as he took the last jump down, so that he landed on the soft forest loam between two of the men, and then raised his hand to grab the arriving knife just as he landed.
“Good lord, you’re a savior,” one of the warriors said. “Whoever you are. Do you have a place we can retreat to? Where are the rest of your men?”
“I’ve got no place to retreat to – I’m just a traveler passing through,” Kestrel answered.
“Great heavens, he’s an elf!” someone said, and Kestrel realized he had not spoken in the human language.
“My apologies,” Kestrel said. There was the noise of pursuit coming from the road. “I was heading the same way you were, shall we return to the road and head for safety?”
“Gates, Hermes, take the strong flank; let’s head to the stranger’s safe place,” a man spoke, giving orders crisply, the obvious leader of the group. The warriors instantly obeyed with a discipline that Kestrel admired, and he fell in among them as they started to curve to their right, circling back to the road.
They evaded their pursuers and reached the road, then started jogging forward to open up a safe space. “I’ll join you in a minute,” Kestrel told the man next to him, then he reversed course and started to run back to the scene of the battle. He reached it just a minute later, easily spotting the dead and wounded men who still lay where they fell in the road; Kestrel retrieved his arrows from the bodies, then started running at full speed back to find his new companions.
“Look at the bugger run!” he heard one of the yellow and green fighters say to another as Kestrel loped back into the group.
“How far are we going to reach your place?” the leader of the green and yellow fighters asked him.
Kestrel turned to the man, and happened to make eye contact with the fighter closest to him. He stopped before he answered, shocked to discover that the fighter was a female. And then he realized he recognized the girl’s face – he had seen her before.
She stared at him, and suddenly her hand shot up to his face, delivering an open-handed slap that was vicious and effective, knocking his h
ead back as it made his cheek sting.
“What did you do that for?” Kestrel shouted. He rubbed his cheek, then realized that the other fighters had stopped moving, and were gathered around him.
“I remember you Hiram!” the girl said heatedly. “You with your pretty purple eyes! You didn’t look like an elf when we met before, but you had those purple eyes.
“You nearly got us killed in the palace at Uniontown,” she said heatedly.
“The duke!” Kestrel blurted out. “You’re the daughter of Duke Listay!” Her face was nearly the same – thinner than it had been, and her hair was cut extremely short, and she had grown taller. She was dressed like a man, in the same uniform as the men around her. She had appeared close to still being a little girl when Kestrel had encountered her before, he recollected. Now she appeared to be a young woman, and a pretty one at that.
“Of course I am,” she answered. “And after you attacked the stage and stole the hostage, the Viathins and the king were outraged.
“If Stuart here hadn’t gotten us out of the palace before the alarm was raised, we would have been killed,” she said.
“He was fighting the good fight, my lady. Your father himself even said so,” Stuart said.
“He said so later,” she corrected him. “He wasn’t so forgiving while we were running out of the palace gate.”
“I’ve saved your life twice now, three times if you count the fact that I killed all the Viathins with the protective water,” Kestrel replied. “So let’s keep the count in order.”
There was a shout down the road, as one of the red soldiers caught sight of them.
“We need to go. We’ll discuss this later,” Stuart said. “Which way do we need to go?” he asked Kestrel for direction.
“Go up the road,” Kestrel nodded. “Stillwater!” he shouted. “Stillwater, Stillwater!” he repeated.
“What was that?” Stuart asked, as the group of men started moving.
“I was calling for my friend,” Kestrel answered. “I got separated from the others in my group, and I need to get back together with them.”
“We’ll keep going until we meet them,” Stuart told Kestrel, and they fell silent as the small squad trotted south along the mountain road.
Kestrel’s eyes looked upward at the heavens, searching for signs of Stillwater. He expected the imp to find him at any moment, and he hoped that Wren and Woven would be close by. Helping the humans might turn out to be a problem, he realized, as the red forces were likely to keep hunting and fighting until the battle was decisively settled. Kestrel didn’t have time to get enmeshed in the fight going on, when he expected to have problems of his own ahead, involving any Viathins that might be at or near the lake.
“Company halt!” someone shouted from the front of the group, and then a man cried in pain, as he was struck by an arrow.
Kestrel looked ahead, and saw that a large squad of more men in red were positioned in a line across the road, and a movement in the woods showed him that the forces of Duke Listay were being flanked. The men in the woods unleashed a volley of arrows, and in a panicked reaction, Kestrel waved his arm through the air over his head, and called upon the powers he held to erect a protective blue dome over all the yellow and green forces.
His shield abruptly sprang into existence, and as it did, the volley of arrows struck it and bounced away.
“What in blazes is that?” one of the men in green and yellow screamed.
“Our friend has saved us, Gates,” Stuart answered, as Kestrel pulled his knife out of his belt and threw it at one of the wooded archers. The squad to the north was forming up as they pursued Listay’s forces, while the force that had intercepted them from the south also formed a line, boxing Kestrel’s party into place.
“You really were the Destroyer, weren’t you?” Stuart asked Kestrel softly.
“I never called myself that,” Kestrel answered.
“What do we do now?” Gates asked.
“If you’ve got these mighty powers, destroy our enemies – set us free,” the girl commanded.
“Lady Lark, allow the great one to work his own magic,” Stuart advised.
Kestrel tuned their chatter out as he tried to decide what to do. He was growing adept at using his powers for defense, but he was uncertain about his ability to use the energy effectively in a battle. He turned to face the forces that had originally been fighting and chasing Listay’s men from the north, but as he did, he heard one of his fellow defenders scream in a tone that conveyed real fear.
Kestrel spun around, and felt his own heart skip a beat. One of the soldiers in the southern squad had stepped forward from the rest of the fighting force, and as Kestrel watched, the man underwent a horrifying metamorphosis; his uniform shredded as he began to swell up, and his skin darkened, while his nose and mouth thrust forward and his ears and hair disappeared. In only seconds of time, the soldier had changed into a Viathin, one of the walking, evolved, dangerous forms of the monsters.
“We might have known that you’d come down here, trying to stir up trouble again, meddling where you don’t belong,” the monster said to Kestrel. It continued to stride forward, as Kestrel maneuvered his way around and among the others inside his dome, so that he was closest to the monster, facing it directly as it approached.
“Why did you come back to our world? You know that death awaits you here, death for you and for that depraved god you worship,” Kestrel spoke loudly. “If you and all your kind will turn and run and leave us now, I will not kill you.”
‘Why should we leave when we’ve discovered the key to winning the battle so that we can stay here? This is the ripest land we’ve ever found, one that will feed us well, for a long time, and let us rebuild our strength to recover from the terrible damage you inflicted on us,” the Viathin was very close to Kestrel now, only paces away. The rest of the Uniontown squad had cautiously walked towards Kestrel as well, though several yards behind the monster.
“Your foolish gods – so jealous of one another, so reckless in their actions – they gave us the opportunity to come back. Ashcrayss was a pathetic shell, barely existant in the next land, until Krusima came through the portal and fell into our trap,” the Viathin told Kestrel. “All because he wanted to find more worshippers, to match your precious goddess and the statute you created for her.
“And then the foolish elven god came through, curious to the point of foolishness, just as Ashcrayss was learning how to siphon power away from Krusima. Thereafter, Ashcrayss persuaded Krusima to move the water skin aside, so that our people could return, such of us as were left after your genocide of our race here!” the Viathin’s voice rose to a shout of violent anger. As he ended his scream at Kestrel, just a few feet away from the elf, the Viathin raised his hands and pointed at Kestrel, then unleashed a brilliant bolt of red energy that struck Kestrel’s protective dome and deflected upward.
The monster roared in rage and fired another shot of power, one that spread out as it struck the dome, red fragments flying evenly in all directions, and causing the blue dome to turn green where the impact occurred. The Viathin struck again, and the whole dome turned greenish, then yellow, and Kestrel felt the damage to his edifice feed back into his own soul, making him stagger backwards. Two of the men in the group grabbed his arms to hold him upright.
“Are you okay, my lord?” Gates asked.
“Tell your men to get ready to fight,” Kestrel answered. “When my shield fails, we’ll have to fight our way out of here.”
He focused all his attention on the power he held, willing more of his energy to strengthen the shield, and he saw it grow a shade bluer in response.
“You’re at your limit, while I am not,” the Viathin said. “I’ll destroy your shield, and then take you back to be Ashcrayss’s plaything for a time. He’ll enjoy that.
“You will not enjoy it,” the monster told Kestrel, then it flung another bolt of red energy at Kestrel and the overwhelming attack made his shield begin to
dissolve.
Kestrel flinched, and fell to his knees, then stared at the monster, just in time to see an arrow suddenly emerge out of the front of its neck, and then another one point out of its chest.
“Or maybe you won’t!” Kestrel heard Wren shout defiantly. “Kestrel, get your men out of there – go south!” she shouted, speaking in elvish.
“Go south,” Kestrel told Gates, staggering back up to his feet, as he ceased maintaining his shield. As Kestrel and the humans looked south, two of the red-cloaked men there fell to the ground suddenly, struck by large rocks that hit them violently.
One of Wren’s arrows struck another of the southern guards. “Go! Start running south!” Kestrel shouted. He threw Lucretia towards one of the men in the southern squad as well, then turned as he pulled his bow off his shoulder, and started firing arrows at the men who were advancing from the north, trying to hold off the pursuit.
“Kestrel, come on!” Wren shouted, as she dropped down from her tree limb and landed near him.
He turned and fired an arrow over the yellow and green men to strike down another of the other Uniontown squad members who were still on the southern front. Then he started to run.
“Thank you,” he told Wren as the two of them gained ground on the others. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through that battle,” he said. “That monster was strong.”
“Stillwater lost track of you when he went mushroom hunting again this morning. He finally found you just in time for us to improvise a way to rescue you. And it looks like you needed it,” she observed, “judging from the monster, not to mention that bruise on your cheek.”
An Unexpected Deity (Book 7) Page 10
