Kerowyn's Ride v(bts-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  :The Hawkbrothers call it a “spirit-sword,”: Warrl reminded her, as he stopped at a crossroads to cast around for the scent. :I have often thought it to be more than a geas-blade. But your Star-Eyed bound you two, despite Kethry’s previous link to it, so I presume it isn’t inimical, only—hmm—stubborn?:

  Tarma grimaced at the kyree’s choice of words. Maybe. Whatever, I’m glad now that the damn thing does have a mind of its own. The only two females in peril for leagues around are Kero and her brother’s bride. There’re no women in that bandit group, right?

  :I have not scented any,: the kyree confirmed, loping off on the fork to the west.

  Tarma urged her horse to follow. Then the goal and the target are clear. There’s nothing to confuse the issue. And Kero is going to need all the help she can get.

  :We two are not precisely useless.: The path was leading off into the hills, and presently vanished. Warrl continued to follow with his nose along the bare ground, swiftly and silently.

  It was as dark as the inside of a cat with the moon down. Tarma relaxed, rested, trusting to the senses of her mount and Warrl.

  :Halt.:

  Tarma reacted instantly, and so did her mare. She peered into the darkness ahead of her, and could barely make out a moving blot against the lighter expanse of scrub grass and dirt ahead.

  What’s up? she thought at him. She could not speak mind-to-mind, but he could and did read her thoughts. They’d used that little talent of his on more than one scouting foray.

  :Interesting. She dismounted here.: Tarma eased herself down out of her saddle, and winced a little when she put weight on her bad leg. She led the mare up to Warrl as quietly as she could to keep from distracting him. He raised his head and sniffed the breeze just as she got there.

  :Fascinating. We are somewhere near the bandits’ camp. I can scent smoke and many humans, and weary horses. And old blood, and I think, Dierna. Which means the girl Kerowyn somehow knew they were nearby... :

  He put nose to ground again. :The sword, I presume, alerted her. Or possibly is guiding her.:

  Or controlling her, Tarma thought sardonically, thinking of times past.

  :Perhaps. I think she led her horse off—there—:

  Tarma dropped Hellsbane’s reins, ground-tethering her, and carefully moved off in the direction Warrl’s nose pointed. Within a few feet of the trail, behind a low rise, she found a creekbed with a trickle of water running through it, trees on both sides of it. Where the trees were thickest, she found Kero’s mare tethered with enough rein that she could eat and drink.

  Satisfied—and pleased that the girl had thought to provide for her horse—she tethered Hellsbane there beside the girl’s riding mare, and returned to Warrl.

  If it’s controlling her, she’s at least holding her own. Now what? she asked him.

  He moved forward a few feet at a time. :Ah. Here she dropped to hands and knees. A crawling stalk.: He raised his head to look at her. :I would advise the same, based on the strength of the scents :

  Tarma shook her head in admiration. Brightest Goddess—the damned blade is finally doing something right. All right, Furface, let’s see what you and I can do about cutting around to the other side of the camp.

  Kerowyn halted her horse; she could just barely make out the dirt road ahead, and the fact that this was a crossroads. She stared at the trail and tried to remember what the stories she’d heard had said about her grandmother’s geas-blade. There was something about Kethry fighting as if she were a master swordswoman even though she was entirely untrained—which might mean the thing gave her unusual abilities. Could it make one a master tracker, perhaps?

  She touched her hand to the hilt, and felt a kind of tingle, as if her hand had a mild case of “pins and needles.” There was something there, all right, even if she didn’t know what it was.

  On the other hand, she wasn’t too certain she wanted to find out while she had other options available.

  She settled herself carefully in her saddle and opened the protections on her mind. Slowly, this time. The last thing she wanted was to let that slimy thing know she was behind them. She caught a lot of stray thoughts, full of violence and not very clear or coherent; and when she opened her eyes, she found she was facing westward. Very well, then, west it would be.

  Each time she lost the trail, she found it again by cautiously lowering her protections, and “listening.” But then the road she followed turned into a path, and the path itself dwindled away to nothing, and it was too dark to try and track the bandits by ordinary means.

  Now she had no choice. Reluctantly, she eased the blade halfway out of its sheath, and relaxed.

  The darkness about her began to lighten, and soon she could see as well as if it was near dawn. For a moment, as she looked around herself in astonishment, she thought she might be having some kind of fit—there were little sparkles of sullen light leading off over the hills. Then she pulled her hand away from the hilt of the sword, and she realized that the little sparkles vanished, as did her ability to see so clearly, the moment her hand left the sword.

  So this means, what? She dismounted and put her hand back on the sword. The sullen light reappeared, and as she examined the hard ground, she saw the faint traces of hoofmarks there. This, then, was the direction the bandits had taken.

  And the moment she found their trail, the light disappeared, although she could still see as well as before.

  It’s letting me do what I can do. It’s—playing tutor, I guess. But the moment I’m in a position where my own abilities can handle things—then it just sort of steps back and makes me take care of myself.

  She took the blade in her right hand, the mare’s reins in her left, and followed the trail until—something—told her to stop. It just didn’t seem right to go on farther.

  Maybe it’s about time to see what they’re up to. She opened her mind, leaning against Verenna’s warm, sweaty neck and closing her eyes to do so, and went “looking” for bandits.

  She found them all right. An entire encampment of them, with sentries posted all around the little valley they’d taken for their own. Drunk, most of them. Wild, disconnected thoughts. Dierna was there, and still alive—and relatively unharmed. But with her was—

  Kero slammed her protections shut, convulsively. He was there with her, that cold, slimy, evil presence she’d felt before. This time he hadn’t sensed her presence, but that was because he was preoccupied. But she had inadvertently come a lot closer to being detected than she really wanted to think about.

  She looked around, assessing the possibilities; there was a tiny creek not far from where she was standing, with trees lining both sides. It wasn’t much cover, but to all eyes other than hers the night was deep and dark enough to hide just about anything. With the cover provided by the bushes, Verenna would be just about invisible. Now if she could just do something to keep her from making a fuss—Well, the mare probably hadn’t fed terribly well, what with all the confusion for the feast, and then the upset of the raid. If she left Verenna tethered loosely so that she could get at browse and water, that might keep her occupied and quiet.

  She led her mare into the copse, right up to the waterside, and tethered her in a tiny clearing right next to the creek. The clearing was surrounded by bushes and trees, and may itself have been part of the creekbed until something changed its path.

  Verenna should be safe—and if I don’t get back, she’ll probably be able to free herself.

  She left the little mare tearing up grass hungrily, and proceeded cautiously, afoot at first, then on her hands and knees; opening her mind for brief glimpses of her enemies, until she knew that the farthest sentries were little more than a hill away. She dropped down beneath the bushes, and crawled forward in their shelter.

  All this time her sight had been dimming; was the sword taking away her advantage, or losing its power? Or was it that too much profligate use of magic might be somehow visible to the unknown mage? Now her vision was about e
quivalent to what she’d have under a full moon.

  Well, that’ll do—she thought just as she heard the careless footsteps of one of the bandit-sentries, and the rattle of the bushes as he pushed through them. She flattened herself under the cover of the brush with her sword still in her hand, face pressed into the gritty dirt, her heart pounding with sudden fear, and waited for him to pass.

  He did; making no attempt at quiet. He stalked within an arm’s length of her, armor creaking and jingling, and never knew she was there.

  She didn’t start breathing again until he was well out of hearing distance; didn’t get her nose out of the sand and wipe it on the back of her hand until long after that.

  All right, I know where the sentries are, she thought, her right hand toying nervously with the hilt of the sword as she peered out from under the branches. So how do I avoid them? They seem to be stationed pretty closely together. Maybe I shouldn’t avoid them.

  It was hard to recall the stories—the tales the old mercenaries told when she was supposed to be out of earshot, not the bardic lays. The recollections of old battles, ambushes, things that would be useful to her now.

  Dent—he told Lordan once, about how he had to get into an enemy camp. He said the sentries were posted all around, but they weren’t used to working together and weren’t checking in with each other, so they wouldn’t know if one of them had been taken out until his replacement came looking for him. So he got rid of one, and brought his entire company in through the hole in the lines....

  Somehow all the fear and grief was behind her now, now that she was confronting her own life—or death. It was easier to think; the pain was far away and nothing was important but the next moment, and the strange excitement that sharpened all her senses.

  If I slip past them, they’ll still be at my back, and dangerous. I could forget that they’re there, and one of them could get me from behind. I can’t just slip past them. I’ll have to get rid of one.

  No sooner had she made the decision than she was crawling forward after the sentry that had just passed her. She had no real plan, it was just that this particular man seemed the most careless. She followed him with the sword still in her hand, able to move with relative silence through brush that she could see and he could not.

  Maybe if I can come up on him from behind, I can hit him in the back of the head with the pommel like Dent showed me—

  She was within a length of him; half a length. He started to turn—

  And suddenly she was no longer in control of her body.

  As if she was a passenger behind her own eyes, a puppet in the hands of an unseen manipulator, she felt her muscles tense as the man started to peer through the dark toward her. She found herself ducking down and crouching behind the cover of a bush. She hadn’t even noticed the bush beside her, much less that it was big enough to hide behind. He even moved a couple of steps in her direction, but couldn’t see anything, and she stayed as still as the disembodied puppeteer could hold her. Then, when he turned away, she sprang up, sword-hilt clasped in both hands; and as a wild excitement filled her, drove the blade through his body, between his ribs, using all the momentum of her leap. The edges of the blade scraped against his ribs; he arced, and made a kind of strangled gasp, dropping his own blade. She seized him around the neck with her free arm, and shoved the blade completely through him, up to the quillons.

  They stayed that way for a moment, then he fell; she braced herself and pulled at the same time, and the blade came free of his falling body. He never even made another sound.

  Then, just as suddenly as she had lost control, she regained it. She was the one who staggered two trembling steps away from the carcass, mouth open with shock, heart thudding against her ribs. She was the one who very nearly turned and ran, ran all the way back to the copse where she’d left Verenna to take her and ride home at a gallop—

  Only the knowledge that if she did, they would probably hear her and kill her, kept her from doing just that.

  I’ve killed a man, she thought, legs shaking, sour taste of bile in the back of her throat. Her gorge rose. I’ve killed a man, myself—

  Except that she didn’t know the blow that had killed him. If it had been her doing, she’d have just hit him from behind with the pommel. Nothing like that was in anything Dent had taught her.

  It was the sword. It had to be. Only a magic sword would have been able to manipulate her like a puppet. And Need was, of course, a magic sword, and had been described as giving Kethry the same power it had just apparently given Kero.

  I never thought it would happen like that—just take me over like that. I thought—I thought it would just sort of show me how to do things—

  This wasn’t what she’d planned at all. She looked at the blade in her hand and the blood on it with revulsion. She wanted to drop it right there—

  But then, just before she did, another thought occurred to her.

  I was going to ask Grandmother for a weapon, or a demon. Would this bandit be any less dead if I’d hit him with a lightning bolt, or let a demon eat him? What makes it any better if I kill him with my own hands, or do it from a distance?

  It wasn’t better, of course—

  And he hurt and killed my people. Maybe even somebody I knew. She steeled herself, steadied her hands, and forced herself to clean the blade on his tunic. He could have chosen an honest living. He’s helping keep Dierna captive. He had a choice, he made it. And I’m making mine.

  She went back on hands and knees and eased through the brush toward the camp, making as little sound as possible. Her hands were getting full of stickers, and her knees were bruised by rocks—but it was no worse than some of the injuries she’d picked up berrying or training Verenna. So far.

  So far, thanks to the sword, she’d been lucky.

  Thanks to the sword. It still made her skin crawl to think how it would probably take her over again. She didn’t have a choice, not if she was going to rescue Dierna, but she didn’t like it at all. It just takes over with no warning. And what else does this thing do that I don’t know about? What if it turns me into some kind of monster?

  But her grandmother trusted it.

  There’s no reason not to trust it, I guess, she thought, as a cramp seized her leg. She stopped and eased her leg out straight, waiting for a moment until it went away. But I can’t help but wonder how much Grandmother really knew about it. Maybe it hid things from her, too.

  A cheerful thought.

  Just then she reached the edge of a drop-off, with a screening of brush at the edge. Bright yellow firelight silhouetting the bushes warned her that the camp was just beyond them. She wormed her way under the shelter of one of the biggest (and prickliest) of them. It was not an easy job. Tiny twigs caught in her hair and scratched her face; exposed roots caught on her belt and tunic-lacings and held her back.

  Finally she reached the edge. The branches of the bushes drooped here, down over the drop-off, making a kind of screen of leaves and twigs between her and the fire. Lifting one branch out of the way, cautiously, she peered down at the camp below, blinking against the sudden light.

  Closest to her and about a length below her were a half-dozen men, roaring drunk, playing some kind of game with dice or knucklebones. Two were standing; the rest were sitting or kneeling in a rough circle, watching one of their number cast and cast again. They had tossed their armor aside in a heap right below her, up against the side of the low bluff she hid on. They were filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a motley collection of clothing, some of which had probably been very fine at one time, all of which was now stained, tattered, and so dirty she wouldn’t have used it to clean the stable floor.

  Beyond them was another collection of similar scum sprawled at fireside, sharing the contents of a wineskin, and squabbling over a heap of loot from the Keep. Then came the fire—badly built, part of it smoking, part roaring—and beyond the fire—

  Dierna.

  Her bright scarlet dress made a brilliant
splash of color that attracted Kero’s eyes immediately. She lay half on her side, her pretty face a frozen mask of fear, tumbled at the feet of a tall, thin man in long red robes, the skirt of his robes split fore and aft for riding. He sat on a boulder, sharpening a knife, paying no attention to the antics of his men. Nor, strangely enough, to Dierna, although her legs were exposed to the thigh by the way her dress had torn and fallen open when she’d collapsed (or been flung) at his feet.

  He reached down, as Dierna shrank away from him, and grabbed a lock of her long, unbound dark hair. He yanked her back toward him with it tangled cruelly in his fingers—Kero watched her clench her teeth and wince—and cut the lock off with a single stroke of his knife.