by Ellyn, Court
Rhoslyn ducked from under the pavilion and wrapped an arm about the girl’s shoulders.
When she saw who consoled her, Aisley gasped as if she’d been caught peering through a keyhole. She fled into the shade under the pavilion and busied herself with a crate of supplies, pointedly not looking at the duchess.
Either Rhoslyn terrified the poor girl or she was … what? Embarrassed? Why?
She gazed up at the ravens as if they might offer her a clue. And they did.
~~~~
Alyster waded through broken flesh. Cooling blood soaked into the knees of his trousers. Blades of axes and swords had fallen on edge, forcing him to step slowly through the casualties, shifting the weapons aside with a boot-toe.
The shrieking, clanging music of battle had faded as morning swelled toward afternoon. All that remained was a stunned, groaning eulogy on the wind.
The sun glared high and white, splaying each indignity, each inglorious moment of suffering for all to see. One man had died holding his own bowels like a babe its umbilical cord. A jug-jug noise rose from a convulsing boy whose skull was broken and whose eyes stared at the white sun.
Once Kelyn had given the nod, the Miraji had swept over the hills, a racing shimmer, a glimpse, a nightmare unseen. Sand and scorching dry air gusted with them, overtaking the hillsides, barreling down into the troughs where the ogres milled, waiting for the chance to charge over the last of the humans clustered out of reach.
The warning had come late. By then, swaths of ogres were falling before Miraji blades.
The War Commander had confined Alyster to the command hill. Watching the battle, unable to slake the hunger of his hatchets, was worse than having an itch he couldn’t scratch. He had paced the hilltop while the dwarves and humans swept in from the wings. The sun had edged up the dome of the sky, and finally the ogres relinquished their stranglehold on the ridge where the Evaronnans had taken refuge.
Miraji guardians relieved at last, the veil had shifted like water running down a plate-glass window, revealing a shattered knot of Elarion and Evaronnans among crushed heather. Orderlies had materialized as if from the rocks. A wagon juddered. The wounded were loaded into the bed.
Alyster had begun his search, picking his way through dismemberments, disembowelments, slick puddles of best-not-look-too-close. All around the Hill of Last Stand, from the summit to the root, bodies were draped, twisted, contorted around one another, a macabre sculpture, human sprawled over ogre, ogre crushing human.
His shoulders ached with the shifting and turning of bodies. How to tell one face from another? Too much red, and it all the same. Worse, the dead who had lain on the hillside for the past two days had begun to discolor. So he looked first for finer plate armor on shoulders, forearms, thighs, then for the flaxen hair.
The bloodshed here had yet to draw the ravens. The birds still bickered over the older offerings, and the south wind carried the reek and the squawks with nauseating piquancy. Alyster dreaded searching among the heat-bloated dead. Would the Evaronnans have fought so long, so fiercely if their lord had fallen in the first few hours of battle? Surely they would have fled. Which meant Kethlyn’s body was nearby, among newer casualties.
Even while he searched, Alyster kept an eye on the western hills. The bogles hadn’t gone far. Only withdrawn out of arrow range and beyond the interest of the Miraji. Neither Elarion nor dwarves pursued, but commanded a series of hilltops between the ogres and the valleys of carnage.
Why did the bogles stay? Why not flee back to their holes in the ground? Alyster’s belly fluttered with the promise of inevitability. If Lothiar himself led the bogles, they would not retreat easily. They were regrouping. Soon they would come charging back. Today’s battle was only the beginning.
The hospital wagon came trundling back for another load of wounded. Alyster glanced over each man, woman, and boy being lifted into the bed before giving up. If Kethlyn was among the dead, he wasn’t going anywhere; best report his lack of findings to the War Commander.
Kelyn had moved forward from his command hill to the Hill of Last Stand. He stooped to search a few of the bodies himself.
Lord Daryon loomed nearby, his metal beasts gathered around him, thingamabobs bobbing at his shoulders. Orange-tinted ogre blood dried on iron fangs, copper blades, rust-tipped claws.
When the Miraji had engaged, Alyster had overheard the War Commander ask, “Can you build a wall of fire, as Thorn does?”
The avedra had huffed. “Don’t insult me, Commander.” With that, he’d closed his eyes, swept his arms, and his contraptions had charged down the slope ahead of the Miraji and in among the startled ogres. The iron dragon lunged, knocking ogres off their feet, and tore armor and flesh with razor-sharp jaws. The wolves, copper and tin, had worked together, biting through ankles and wrists and throats. The flying devices had ripped through the soft parts of ogres’ bellies. And all the while Daryon, seeing through the glowing glass lenses of each device, gestured and hissed and grinned—wildly grinned—commanding them from afar.
He seemed hardly taxed as Alyster passed him. Only fished a kerchief from some hidden pocket and began dabbing blood from Basi’s jaw like a mother fussing over a drooling baby. The tin wolf lay in a crumpled heap, crushed by an ogre’s mace. Daryon had carried the mangled gears and curls of metal from the field as though they were the bones of his brother.
The War Commander saw Alyster approaching and straightened from his search of bodies. “Well?”
“No luck, sir. Not among the immediate dead.” Disappointment weighed upon him. He realized he searched as much for himself as for Kelyn. My brother … little brother. Brave and stupid. Bled out and bloating under the sun. How would Alyster recognize him after the ravens had gotten to him? And why should he care? Ach, curse myself for giving a tinker’s arse.
“My lord!” The hot reeking wind tore at the summons. Captain Tullyk limped up the hillside, leaning heavily on a walking stick. Kelyn had named the former city watch captain his aide for running and fetching. Ironic, given that the man couldn’t run. He was grinning. “I found him!”
Excitement sparked like an ember inside Alyster’s chest, and quickly died. The man following Tullyk was not Kethlyn.
“Leng,” Kelyn said, stepping forward to take the man’s hand.
The grip made Leng wince. His hands were bandaged with strips of someone else’s uniform. He must’ve grabbed a blade in both fists. His uniform was splashed with darker red, crusty and stiff. Behind the thick black beard, his face was battered. He walked as if he’d pulled himself from under a stampede.
“Never happier to see anyone in my life, I tell you,” Leng said. “Another few hours and...” Eyes flat with too many terrors gazed over the casualties strewn on the hillside. “Damn, but damn, this better have been worth it.”
Alyster scowled at the man. Was anything worth this waste?
“Lothiar himself is across that field,” the War Commander said. “We could end this here and now.” He turned to Daryon. “Use one of those … things … and find out where that son of a bitch is hiding.”
The avedra stopped polishing his contraptions. “I doubt he’ll be hiding long.” He plucked a spinning device from the air, one with an exceptionally large lens, and whispered sweet nothings to it. Then he tossed it aloft, and off it whizzed over the summits of hills and the heads of men.
“Leng, listen, I don’t need your report,” said Kelyn. “I just need you to tell me where my son fell.”
Leng stared, not comprehending. “Fell? He was taken to hospital. I saw him halfway there myself.”
Kelyn’s hand darted out, clenched onto Alyster’s shoulder, startling him. Raising eyes to the sky, the War Commander breathed as if for the first time in days. “Is he bad?”
Leng shrugged. “Bloodied and exhausted. Like the rest of us. We had to toss him into the cart. He wouldn’t go willingly. When he saw you’d arrived, sir, he … he just collapsed.”
South of the battlefield, the camp and the s
urgeons’ tents hunched out of sight. The wagon jounced over stones, full again with the wounded. Kelyn started after it, a single-minded daze sapping the sense from his eyes.
Alyster put an arm across his chest. “I’ll go. I’m the scout.”
Kelyn glanced about the hilltop, at the tasks waiting for him, preparations to make before the ogres came hurtling over the hills again. He nodded. “Thank you, son.”
The word put the fight in Alyster. His shoulders tensed with it. He wanted to argue, but Kelyn was already shuffling off, calling for Tullyk and Sha’hadýn and the rest.
Anyway, it was just a word.
~~~~
32
Kethlyn rolled out of the wagon, every muscle and joint protesting. With the cessation of battle-frenzy, sensation returned. It came in waves, and the waves were increasing. Screams throbbed in his ears, but they were the screams of dead men. He helped the living slide out of the wagon after him, slung the arm of a man around his neck and led him to one of the pavilions. Someone directed him to the right place, someone in a white apron, but Kethlyn was too weary to raise his eyes and see if the face was familiar.
That Da had come … that Da was here! … part of him, the part that hadn’t slept in four days, still believed he’d been hit on the head and was dreaming it. He was supposed to die on that hilltop, he and all his men. Once Kethlyn had come to terms with it, a stillness had fallen over him and he’d met each ogre expecting this struggle, this struggle, this struggle to be the last, yet each ogre fell and he did not, and he did not understand why.
A voice rang in his ears, near at hand. “Leave him with me, m’ lord.” Someone took the weight of the man from his shoulders.
Inside his right glove, his fingers were sticky. Something hurt, near his elbow. His face was stiff with crusted blood; his cheek, the bridge of his nose, his temples all throbbed when he mustered the strength to make an expression. “Stand on your own, can ya? This way, m’ lord. I’ll take you to a station.” He followed knotted apron strings from shade, to sunlight, to shade. “Here you are, m’ lord. Sit yourself down. We’ll get you patched up.”
Strong hands lowered him into a wobbling camp chair; bruised muscles clenched trying to steady it; he hissed as pain came alive. It was a luxury, he realized. Pain. Took the luxury of rest and stillness to let the claws sink deep.
He glanced at the nurse across the table; it took a moment to realize who he was looking at. “Mum … what are you doing here?” She was miles and days away, wasn’t she? Aye, surely he’d been struck senseless.
The duchess glanced between him and the orderly who had delivered him, an orderly who had no idea he’d done wrong. What was it Kethlyn saw in her face? It looked like revulsion. Had she wanted him to die? She pushed herself away from the table, frantic to be away from him.
He longed to call her back, but hadn’t the strength to raise his voice, to chase her down.
The nurse at the next station leapt to her feet, planted herself in Rhoslyn’s path. Familiar face, black hair braided over a shoulder. There was a numb place in Kethlyn’s brain where her name resided. Why couldn’t he remember her name?
He remembered the slate color of her eyes as she glanced at him, at the duchess, at the archer she’d been tending. All the while she pressed a militant smile onto her face.
Mum’s whispers were so strangled that Kethlyn couldn’t understand what she was saying.
“Trade with me, then,” the girl said, her forced smile budging not one fraction. A firm hand tugged the duchess, and the duchess allowed herself to be tugged and sank down into the girl’s vacated chair. “Keep those stitches straight.” The girl turned the smile to anyone who might’ve witnessed the exchange—all is well, move along—and sat down across from Kethlyn.
“Aisley,” he muttered before he realized he’d remembered.
“Apologies, on behalf of your mother,” she said, unable to hold his eye for more than a blink at a time. “She can’t … it’s not that she … she’s afraid of interfering.”
If that was the case, couldn’t Mum at least talk to him, show kindness, something?
Over the girl’s glossy black head and beyond the broad shoulders of the wounded archer, Kethlyn glimpsed half of his mother’s face. One hazel eye darted up from needle and thread, gazed on him and grew bright. The corner of her mouth turned with the most secret of smiles.
She was happy to see him, happy that he had escaped the Goddess’s blade, even if she couldn’t say it. A weight that Kethlyn didn’t realize he was carrying sloughed off his shoulders.
“Let’s see what we have.” Aisley unbuckled Kethlyn’s armor. Sword belt, shoulder guards, vambraces, grieves clattered onto the ground beside him. He raised his arms by slow degrees and the chain hauberk was raised over his head, and suddenly he was weightless. He swayed in the chair, gripped the sides of the table to anchor himself. Had he any skin left? Despite the quilted underclothes, the breeze cooled patches of skin worn raw from grime and sweat chaffing beneath the weight of the armor.
Aisley reached for the place on his arm that stung, spotting at once the difference between splashes of ogre blood and stains from a wound. The blood had bloomed along a gash in his undershirt.
So that’s why his fingers were sticky. Kethlyn tugged off his gloves with his teeth, blood and grit, dropped them into the pile with the rest.
Aisley squeezed a sponge over a bucket of water, sopped the blood and dirt away from the wound. A narrow blade appeared to have stabbed into the meat of his forearm, though he had no idea which blade of the hundreds it might’ve been.
“Must’ve happened today,” he said, watching the needle and thread drag the flesh closed. Decided that was a bad idea and looked away. “I wasn’t bleeding there yesterday. I don’t think.” Days and nights blurred into one, all of them stained red, by blood or moons. He took stock of the rest of his skin, found claw marks scored behind his knee, remembered a sudden flare of pain and severing the hand of that dying, vengeful ogre. The creature had squealed and bled out at his feet, but Kethlyn was already raising a shield for an axe arcing toward his face—
—he flung up his arm and a phantom shield.
Aisley startled, quickly caught the bottle of unguent he’d knocked over.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Must’ve nodded off.” But he hadn’t.
The girl’s eyes were solemn with a knowing. “I wish we could stitch those kinds of wounds too.”
In his head, men shrieked, torn apart at the joints, clutching open bellies, crawling underfoot. And the fewer men there were, the dearer each one had become. The clearer their faces. In the brief moments of rest that the veil had afforded them, he’d even learned a few of their names. Moments later those men were dead, taking their names away with them.
Would these memories haunt him for the rest of his life? He’d heard of such happening. Minds shattered with memory. Soldiers driven to the bottle to drown them out. He’d been there already; he couldn’t go back.
“Well, if it’s any comfort,” Aisley said, “I don’t think you’ll be using your sword arm for a while.” A hint of a smile told him it was a comfort to her. Aisley preferred to see him laid up in a hospital tent? And for what? If he were sane, he’d find her concern endearing. But this battle wasn’t over. The idea of sitting it out angered him. Could she understand that?
“Damned if I won’t.” He snatched his arm from her grasp. The needle and thread flew from her fingers. He tried to rise, but now that he’d stopped moving, his limbs couldn’t get moving again. The chair turned under him, dropping him on his arse in the grass.
Aisley scrambled to raise him up, arms locked around his chest. Between the two of them, Kethlyn found his way into the chair again.
“In the least you need rest.” Ferocity, like a storm rising, nestled in Aisley’s eyes. “You’ve earned it, you fool. Now sit still and don’t try that again.” She grabbed his arm, reclaimed the needle dangling from it, and resumed stitching him up.
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After a while the anger in her face softened. “Don’t … please don’t be stupid.” She knotted the last stitch and snipped the thread free. “I shouldn’t even bother talking to you.”
“Because I’m stupid?”
“Because you might—” She stopped herself, made accidental eye contact, broke it off. Hastily she claimed a bottle of ointment and dabbed the smelly stuff into the gash on Kethlyn’s cheek, across the bridge of his nose. Was it broken? She found other cuts, bruises, and abrasions that his skin hadn’t begun to acknowledge. His eyes watered from the fumes and the sting.
“When we arrived and those ravens…,” she whispered, a tear spilling from those stormy eyes. “I’ve lost everyone. Everyone.”
What was she implying? That she hadn’t the strength to mourn anyone else? That she would mourn if an ogre tore his head off? After several hours of sleep, Kethlyn might be able to puzzle it out. As it was, he stared at her, confounded.
She shook her head, disgusted with herself. “I’m daft to burden you with it.” Donning a nurse’s objective mask, she nodded at Kethlyn’s leg. “You should bathe, clean those claw marks thoroughly, then we can see to those too.” She indicated the reedy banks of the Blythewater. “Go downstream from where we’re drawing water.” That fast, her attention turned to the next soldier waiting in line.
Dismissed, Kethlyn gathered himself from the chair, inch by groaning inch. He left his armor on the ground, reclaiming only his sword belt. Buckling it on, he hobbled into the sunlight.
In the shade at his back, a man on the surgeon’s table was screaming. Ravens screamed overhead. He covered his ears and made his way to the riverside. Orderlies directed soldiers to deeper pools, helping those who could barely walk. His men hailed him, happy to see him on his feet; red oozed into the water around them, shedding from their clothes, their skin, their wounds.
He put on a brave face for them, raised a hand in greeting. Then kept walking until he could no longer hear the screams. He was alone by then. Birch trees swayed in the wind, green hands arching over the water. He waded into the shallows. Cold water seeped into his boots, shocking and magnificent. There was a tension behind his eyes, in his belly. He might retch or sob, he didn’t know. Neither, I forbid it.
