Owlflight

by Mercedes Lackey

  Now Justyn saw that young Ado Larsh, barely seventeen and the youngest member of the militia, was sitting on the platform beside the stranger; there was a bloody rag acting as a bandage around his head and one eye, and another binding his arm. He looked white, in deep shock, but nodded in confirmation of everything the man said.

  “What about those who didn’t resist?” Widow Clay called out sharply. “What happened to them?”

  Someone else growled, and a few of her neighbors cast her angry looks, but she gave them back look for look. “There are some of us,” she pointed out, “who can’t run. Myself and Kyle, for two. What happened to those who didn’t resist?”

  The stranger shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t wait around to see. But I can tell you that from the smoke that rose up behind me, it looked to me like they put every building on the estate to the torch, and I can only hope there wasn’t anyone in those buildings when they went up.”

  “Th-th-they’re m-m-moving f-f-fast,” Ado stammered. “C-c-can’t b-be f-far b-b-behind.”

  There was silence then, nothing but silence. Clearly, no one knew what to do next, and if no one took charge, in a moment, there would be nothing but blind panic. People would be caught between trying to hide and trying to escape, torn between saving possessions and getting away quickly, and managing only to confuse matters further. If someone didn’t tell them what to do, nothing would be done at all, and they would all die stupidly and uselessly.

  “Right. I’ll take over from here,” Justyn heard himself say into the deathly hush. People turned to see who had spoken, as if they didn’t recognize his voice. Maybe they didn’t; this was the first time he had spoken with real authority in years.

  He pulled himself up as tall as he could, and pushed through the crowd with the aid of his staff until he got himself up on the platform. Their faces turned up to meet his, all of them white and shocked, all of them looking for an answer from anyone—even him. Well, as it happened, he had one for them. A bit of murmuring started, and he quelled it with three sharp raps of the end of his staff on the boards beneath his feet.

  “This is war, and war is what I came out of.” He looked around to see if there was any disagreement. “Some of you may not have believed my ‘war tales,’ as you called them, but they were as true as the fact that I’ve seen how armies operate. I know what’s coming and I know what I’m talking about. The stranger is right—you aren’t fighters, anyone who had any real training here is dead. You have no experience of anything but dealing with a few bandits, and I tell you now there is no way you can defend yourselves, let alone the village, against an army of trained and organized fighters.”

  He had their full attention now, and since the majority of those below him were women and children, not men, there were fewer who were disposed to argue with that assessment.

  Which is just as well, since it’s an honest one.

  “Your best bet is to try to escape, or try to hide. Anyone who wants to take a chance on staying—I’d suggest you go to the riverbank as far from the village as you can and stay together,” he said briskly. “Don’t take anything of value with you; armies like this are paid in loot, and if you stand between them and their loot, they’ll kill you. If you have valuables with you, they’ll kill you to get at them. Let them have what they want—if you all survive this, you can petition the Crown for relief and get it. If you go hide yourselves beside the river, have nothing they want, and look as harmless as possible, once they’re done working out their battle-lust in looting, they’ll get around to finding you and they probably won’t kill you. Probably. That’s all I can promise you out of my military experience—they might just want loot, and they’ll leave you completely alone, never looking for you; or they might decide to make slaves—or something—out of you. If you have young children, take toys and sweets to keep them quiet. When the enemy soldiers find you, grovel, beg, bow your heads to the ground and plead with them and don’t stand up until they tell you to. With luck, they won’t find you at all, with a little less, they’ll let you go, and with a bit less than that, you’ll end up serving them.”

  He didn’t say what else might happen; this was not the time to turn the women hysterical. If they hadn’t already thought of it themselves, there was no point in bringing the subject up.

  “But at least we’ll be alive,” Widow Clay declared, and began to hobble determinedly toward the river. Justyn gave her credit for good sense; she didn’t even look back at her cottage, much less go back to try and save anything. She simply set her sights on the river and in putting as much distance between herself and the approaching trouble as possible.

  “The rest of you do as you were told—take boats or horses if you have them, go afoot if you don’t, and run, now. Don’t stop to take anything with you; every moment you waste packing valuables is a moment when you could be putting as much distance between you and here as possible. Don’t let your jewelry cost you your life. Go to Kelmskeep; it’s fortified, and should be able to hold off a siege.”

  A few moved to follow the widow, and before anyone else could start, he rapped his staff on the platform again. “As for me,” he trumpeted, in a pretty fair imitation of his old sergeant’s parade-ground voice, “I’ll hold the bridge against them. I’ve held bridges before, and this one only needs one warrior—or wizard—to hold it long enough for a considerable delay. The rest of you take the time I buy for you and run for Kelmskeep or put some furlongs between you and here. Lord Breon has a real garrison of veteran fighters, and he also has ways of getting word out in a few hours to the Guard. He can protect those of you who reach him long enough for the Guard and the Heralds to get here, relieve a siege, and drive the enemy out of Errold’s Grove. If you can spare a moment, set fire to your hay and your outbuildings as you run—the smoke will help hide you and might alert others out there that there’s trouble. The fire will confuse the enemy and keep them occupied a little longer. They might stop long enough to try and put it out, or they might run into burning buildings thinking there’s loot and get themselves crisped. Whatever you do, if you get caught, don’t fight back. Fall to the ground and beg for mercy. They’re trained, you’re not—and there will be many of them for every one of you. “Now move!” he finished, in a bellow that startled them all out of their poses of shock. “You haven’t much time! Save your lives! Now!”

  As he had expected, they were all so happy that there was someone who could take charge of the situation and tell them clearly what to do that no one argued with him. They simply scattered—some to follow Widow Clay, some to their boats or for their horses, some headed straight for the woods on foot, perhaps planning to take cover there and follow the river road to Lord Breon’s estate. He walked slowly and calmly toward the bridge, and as he passed the inn, he saw with a mingled sense of admiration and irony that Lilly had her own strategy for surviving. She had loaded a wheelbarrow with a small keg that could only be brandywine, some mugs, and a mattress, and she was headed obliquely toward the river on the upstream side of the village. It was fairly obvious to Justyn that in this situation at least, Lilly was not as stupid as everyone had thought she was. She had a fair idea what an invading army would do with a woman, and she was going to see that the ones who found her had a reason to protect her and keep her out of the hands of their fellows. Able-bodied and used to hard work, she would probably go far enough away from the others that when soldiers found her, there would only be a few of them, and someone who acted like a cooperative, would-be camp follower had good odds of surviving this encounter. She might even find one man strong enough to hold off the others, and willing to act as her protector, which was the best any woman could hope for in a case like this one. He wished her good luck, silently.

  As if she had somehow heard his wish, she turned and looked back at him. He couldn’t hear her completely over the noise of the fleeing villagers, but he read the words on her lips.

  “I know what you mean to do. Gods bless and keep you, Wi
zard Justyn.”

  She turned away, but before her face was completely averted, he saw tears starting up in her eyes. Tears? For me? With astonishment, he felt a kind of weight lift away from his shoulders and a new strength and dignity enter him; he drew himself up and continued his stately progress to the bridge.

  No one else paid him any attention—but no one else even thought to question his plan, to recall that only a few hours before, he had been the unregarded, scorned old fool who couldn’t even manage to discipline a young boy. That was just as well, because he did have a plan, and he knew it would work. He might not have much magic left, but he had enough for one last trick, and it would delay pursuit long enough … long enough.

  Long enough for Darian to get deep into the Forest. Thanks to the gods that I sent him off candlemarks ago! He’ll see the commotion, and he’ll run, like a sensible lad. There’s nothing holding him here, after all, and I suspect that he’s been tempted to run away more than once. This will just give him the excuse he needs. He has his bow; he knows the woods, it’s summer, and he has enough control of magic that his power can help him a little. He knows where Kelmskeep is, if not how to get there. I think he’ll be all right.

  He went to the middle of the bridge—if the people behind him knew it, a good magic place, suspended among three of the four elements: air, water, and the earth that the wood of the bridge had grown out of and was rooted in. He grounded his staff on the wood of the bridge, and began drawing power out of the world around himself. It was a slow process, but he had time—and besides, all that he gathered was only intended to add to the power within himself. Normally, he would not be able to tap into much of that—

  Well, this situation is not exactly “normal.”

  As he began, the old black tomcat ambled up, and sat down neatly at his feet, just as calmly as if he were sitting down at the hearth, waiting for dinner.

  Justyn looked down at the cat, bemusedly. “I wish I knew what you really were,” he told the cat. “I wish I knew if you were just an opportunist, or a real Pelagir familiar. It might not make much of a difference to this situation, but—well, it would to me.”

  Halfheartedly, he tried to shoo the cat away, but it refused to leave his side, and he gave up. Small, aged animals fared poorly in situations like this one; it would be better off with him. The cat looked up at him with one eye, truly a jaundiced look if there ever was one, yawned hugely, and turned his attention toward the road.

  Justyn took his cue from the cat, and saw a plume of dust rising above the treetops. The enemy was coming—whoever the enemy was. And as had been warned, it was coming swiftly.

  Justyn took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, reaching inside himself for calm and certainty. When he opened them again, a heartbeat later, he was ready.

  This will be a very short confrontation.

  Darian was out of breath by the time he reached the village; Justyn wasn’t in the cottage, the flames he had seen were from haystacks and sheds, and when he saw Vere throw a flaming brand into the thatch of his own cottage, he realized that the villagers themselves had set their property aflame. Everywhere, people were fleeing as if for their lives; in the confusion it seemed as if there were hundreds more folk than actually lived in the village, and he wondered if they had all gone suddenly mad. He coughed in the acrid smoke, and stood poised in the midst of the chaos, searching for someone to tell him what was going on.

  Someone seized his arm; he automatically started to wrench away, when as he turned, he saw it was Kyle, the woodcutter. “You gotta run and hide in the woods, boy!” the man shouted over the noise of fire and fleeing people, shaking his arm for emphasis. “There’s trouble on the way, big trouble—fighters, an army, more’n we can handle!”

  He dropped Darian’s arm and hobbled off toward the river, using a stick as a crutch, leaving the boy staring after him, blankly.

  Trouble? More than they can handle? What was that supposed to mean?

  As Kyle had held him, the last of the villagers had left the confines of the town; nothing impeded him but the refuse of what they’d left behind in their wake, and the fires and smoke. Pigs, goats, chickens, geese, and even cattle milled in the street, evidently turned loose by their owners. He ran up the path toward the bridge, jumping over dropped bundles and dodging the confused and panicky livestock and fowl, certain only that whatever was coming, it would be coming from that direction, since it was away from that direction that everyone was running.

  It never occurred to him that Justyn might not have run away with the rest of them until he got around a house and could see the bridge—and Justyn was standing, straight as a post, in the middle of it.

  The old cat sat calmly at his side, and Justyn had grounded his “wizard’s staff” on the wood of the bridge, for all the world as if it was a real magical staff and not just a glorified walking stick. His back was to the village; all his attention was on the road on the other side of the bridge.

  Something was making a very large dust cloud on the road, a dust cloud that approached the river—and it was coming on uncomfortably fast.

  Darian stood stock still, and stared. He felt like a fly in amber—feet frozen where he had stopped, able to observe, but unable to move or speak.

  The dust cloud neared, approached the bridge; now he saw what made it.

  People. People carrying weapons. And Things, also with glittering weapons in their hands. A great many of both.

  They were arrayed in evenly spaced ranks, armed and armored identically and heavily—or at least, more heavily than anyone in the village militia or the Guard that Darian had ever seen had been. The sun reflected brightly off shiny pike-heads and helms, off shields and axes, all very strong and new-looking. They were led by something much larger than Kyle, and quite clearly not human, who was sitting on an animal that was clearly not a horse. The differences between the humans and the Things weren’t subtle; if someone had taken a bear and given it the tusks of a boar, that was what the human-sized Things looked like. They didn’t wear much in the way of a helm, but it didn’t look as if they really needed a helm, which was frightening in and of itself. They had small, red eyes, hairy muzzles, and low brows underneath their helmets. The humans looked—like humans. Only mean, and cold, as if they didn’t much care about anything.

  The large Thing was something of a different order altogether. Where skin showed under armor, it was a sort of flat, dead, greenish color, like mud with river-algae mixed in. Its face was flat, with a wide nose that had slits instead of nostrils. Its mouth was another slit, lipless, and when it opened its mouth, Darian saw that all of its teeth were pointed. Its eyes were a flat, dull gray, with tiny pinprick pupils, as if it preferred darkness to light. The creature it rode resembled nothing so much as a huge lizard with fat, kneeless legs and a long, fat tail. The mount didn’t need armor; it had grown its own.

  The leading Thing halted, and the entire army behind it came to a dead stop as it held up its hand. It looked at Justyn, at the cat, and back to Justyn. Darian expected it to laugh at the temerity of one silly old man trying to stop them all from coming across that bridge, but it didn’t laugh. Instead, it narrowed its eyes and glared at Justyn, without saying a word.

  Justyn simply stood there, calmly, as if he saw such things every day, as if keeping them from crossing the bridge was no great matter.

  Darian’s heart raced; there was a roaring in his ears, and he had broken into a cold sweat. His stomach was doing flips, his throat was knotted, and he shivered like an aspen leaf. He wanted to run to help Justyn, to drag him away, to shout at least—but he couldn’t do anything. Nothing in his body would answer to his will; he could only stand and watch, numb with fear.

  Justyn seemed to grow taller for a moment; and his ragged robes gathered around him of themselves like a royal garment. He looked, at that moment, just like a real wizard, the kind they made songs about and painted portraits of. He looked like Wizard Kyllian.

  Like a her
o—

  The Thing lifted the reins of its mount, and the lizard put one ponderous foot after the other onto the bridge, its head swinging from side to side with each pace, and the first lot of bear-things followed until it and the entire first rank of creatures was crowded six-deep behind it on the bridge. Justyn simply stood there, unmoving, until the muzzle of the lizard was barely the length of his staff away from his face.

  Justyn bowed his head in a momentary nod.

  Then, with no warning, the entire bridge and everything on it vanished into a sheet of flame.

  Darian screamed, but his cry of horror and dismay was lost in the sound of the explosion. The concussion of the blast knocked Darian off his feet and stunned him for a moment; when he scrambled back up, there was no sign of Justyn or even of the bridge, just a roaring torrent of fire stretching over the river that reached from one bank to the other.

  Darian didn’t think, couldn’t think—but his body wanted to live, and knew that the only way to make sure that he lived was to run. So it did, and it carried Darian along with it, even though his heart cried to join Justyn in the flames.

  He jumped a hedge-row and before he’d hit the ground, the hedge disintegrated and blew past him in pieces. He tumbled onto his left side and cried out, but he couldn’t hear himself. Darian’s vision narrowed to what was before him, losing his peripheral awareness, his mind obsessed only with being on his feet again and running for all he could gain.

  He ran as he had never run before, hardly conscious of anything but picking the path in front of him. Bits of flaming debris from the bridge flew through the air and landed in his path, in the thatch of intact cottages, setting them afire. He scattered a flock of chickens before him, as tongues of flame licked at him and smoke blew into his eyes confusing him and making it hard to see as he choked and coughed. He didn’t rightly seem to be in control of his body at all; he was carried along, a stunned passenger in a vehicle that had its own ideas about what it was going to do. It wasn’t as easy running through the village as it usually was—there were fires everywhere now, and debris and more of the things that the villagers had dropped as they escaped littering the usually orderly pathways. He had to double back and circle around obstacles, so that his path through the village to the safety of the forest took on the twisted quality of a nightmare.