Gate to Kandrith (The Kandrith Series)

by Luiken, Nicole

  The legionnaire captain refused. “And now Madam, I must warn you to step back as any person still within twenty paces when I count to ten will receive an arrow to speed them on their way. One, two…”

  “We have the men to take them if we charge,” Donal advised the Protector.

  She shook her head. “No. We’ll take too many losses.” She raised her voice. “Move back!”

  Lance stayed on the fringes of the silent crowd, not wanting his mother to notice him. He glanced back at the field of stumps, but Sara had yet to arrive. And he looked, in vain, for another brown vest. He saw a few elders in red vests; even if they did make the sacrifice their abilities would be much weaker than his own. Grimness filled him, but he knew he could not leave the army with no healer at all.

  Someone suggested burning the cottage, but his mother quickly overruled that. “There are children inside.”

  “I can get the soldiers out,” a voice rasped. The crowd parted to let Olwydd through.

  The Protector regarded the horned shandy thoughtfully. “There’s a back window they’ve shuttered. If you go in through there, they’ll spill out the front.”

  Olwydd nodded, then took off in a shambling run.

  Lance couldn’t see what happened inside the cottage, but the noises were easy enough to follow. A loud crash as Olwydd burst through the window. Screams and swearing. The high-pitched shriek of a child. Lance prayed the sound was born of terror, not pain. Olwydd was enough to scare a grown man.

  “Stand and fight!” the legionnaire captain called, but it was too late. Five men poured out of the house—to be charged at the Protector’s signal.

  But in the length of time it took the howling mob to cross the yard, the captain came out with a bloodied sword in hand. “Shields down!” he bellowed.

  And suddenly a shield wall sprouted between the Kandrithan army and the legionnaires.

  Thereafter the battle turned grim. Man after man was cut down without getting through.

  Lance darted forward and pulled out an injured man, healing the bloody gash in his throat. Then another and another, until he was using both hands at all times, heedless of the pain from his broken fingers. Once a third man with a gutted stomach crawled up and laid a trembling finger on Lance’s arm. A torrent of power rushed through him, more than he’d ever handled before, enough to burn. Lance gritted his teeth and endured.

  It gave him great satisfaction to see wounded men get up and rejoin the attack. “You!” a legionnaire exclaimed as a pitchfork stabbed him through the shoulder. “I already killed you.”

  A gap appeared in the shield wall. Men howled and threw themselves forward until the wall shattered. In moments, the skirmish was over. For the combatants. The wounded, including Olwydd, kept Lance busy for awhile.

  Of the six legionnaires, only two yet lived when Lance wearily finished. One legionnaire, a brutish man of forty, had a row of nasty punctures in his shoulder. The clean-shaven captain lay curled around a deep belly wound.

  Lance beckoned the woodcutter and his plain-faced wife closer. Lance had healed the man of a broken arm already, and the woman of worse hurts, but their two little girls were physically unharmed. The children clung to their mother’s skirts, pale faces peeping out.

  “I need you to stand as Justice,” he told them. “Should I heal their wounds?”

  As the new Farspeaker, the woodcutter was necessarily mute, but he shook his head vehemently.

  His strong-jawed wife hesitated. “I don’t know. The captain is dangerous. The others would have surrendered without him, and they—” she pointed out the row of five Kandrithans laid out for burial—men Lance hadn’t reached in time to save, “—would likely be alive. But he stopped them from killing Liam.”

  Her husband shook his head, obviously disagreeing.

  “Yes, I know,” she said to him. “He only did it so’s to claim the slave price, but you still live. We all still live. He let the others rut on me, but he didn’t take a turn himself and he kept them off of the girls. Maybe his reason for doing so was greed, but I’m still grateful. As for the other pig—” The woman spit on the bearded legionnaire and walked away.

  Lance made his decision. He put his hands on the legionnaire captain and let the Goddess heal through him. The other man, the rapist, could live or die without his help.

  * * *

  “Get out of there,” Sara whispered, uselessly, because Lance was too far away to hear and wouldn’t have listened anyhow. Not while there were still wounded to heal—even, apparently, his enemies.

  But at any moment the next person in the steady stream of the Moved could bear the news of Sara’s resurrection. She’d thought the tidings had arrived earlier when Donal drew the Protector aside and spoke to her urgently, but Lance’s mother had merely directed him to the place where the food and supplies were being organized. Their luck couldn’t hold.

  And now the Protector had moved to stand beside her son and probably question the two prisoners.

  Sara thought she could guess some of the answers. The woodcutter must have stumbled across one of the legionnaires and so the cottage would have been garrisoned to prevent the inhabitants from spreading news of the invasion. And who knew when more legionnaires would come to relieve this bunch, or if one of their number had sent out a warning.

  “Make some excuse and go,” she pleaded from behind the screen of pine trees.

  “There is no excuse for treason.” A deep growl sounded beside her as a shandy stepped out from behind some trees.

  Vez’s Malice. It was the nightmare, Olwydd. Sara had seen him from a distance during the attack on the cottage. He must have circled around behind her. She stood very still. “Lance’s mother knows?” She was surprised she could talk; her legs had turned to water.

  “Yes. She sent me.” Olwydd prowled closer.

  Sara found herself noticing how peculiar his gait was with the two bear paws in front and the horse hooves behind. Olwydd had been the slowest of the three shandies, but Sara harbored no illusions. He could run her down in the blink of an eye. Which begged the question: Why wasn’t she already dead?

  “Am I to have another trial?” Sara’s hands clenched on the wish that they held a pitchfork, a club, anything to defend herself. All she had was a moderately sharp belt-knife with a short four-inch blade. Olwydd’s horns would impale her long before she could stab him.

  Olwydd made an odd grunting sound—his laugh. “You’re already dead. Dead dolls don’t need trials.”

  “And Lance? Are you to kill him too?” Sara tried to think of a lie that would keep Lance from being dragged down with her.

  “No. I am not so ungrateful. He wears the Brown and is too valuable during a war. His mother will hush up his part in this.” He took another step forward, crowding her so that pine needles jabbed her arms, and grunted again when she flinched.

  His laughter made her angry. Her spine straightened.

  Olwydd didn’t like that. “Shall I gore you with my horn?” he asked. “Or rip out your throat with my tusks?”

  Olwydd expected her to act like a noblewoman, to cower and scream until he finished toying with her. Sara hadn’t survived having her head cut off just to die now. But if she was to have a chance, she had to force him off balance.

  She made her voice supercilious. “If the Protector means to hush up my death, then we should move farther away from here.” Without waiting for a reply, she turned her back on him and started to walk—uphill because the Republican camp probably lay that way.

  Olwydd growled, but stalked after her instead of charging. She’d gained a little time.

  Sara let the blanket-shawl slip down to her shoulders and cleared her too-tight throat. “Tell me, Olwydd, were you handsome when you were a man?”

  Olwydd blinked, an eerily human gesture in a beast’s face. He seemed bewildered by the change of topic. “What?”

  “Did you draw women like flies the way Julen does?” Sara cocked her head to one side. “No, I
don’t think so. I think you were maimed in some way.”

  Olwydd snarled. “Who cares what you think?”

  As they walked, Sara folded the blanket over one arm as if too hot. “Were you burned? Was your face scarred?” With her other hand, she drew her belt-knife and held it concealed beneath the blanket.

  “You’re talking nonsense. Shut your mouth.” But Olwydd avoided her gaze as if uneasy.

  Sara kept at him. “Dyl and Rhiain are just as deadly as you, but their new forms are beautiful. Why did you choose to be a monster?”

  Olwydd snarled in reaction.

  Was she pushing too hard? Sara’s heart thudded. “When you became disfigured did your master call you that? Monster? Is that why you became one in truth?”

  Tension coiled in Olwydd’s muscled body. He was watching her face not her hands on the blanket.

  “You killed your master, didn’t you? You showed him what a true monster looked like.”

  “Her, not him. I ripped her throat out.” Olwydd bared his fangs. “Just like I’m going to kill you.”

  * * *

  “If you’re looking for that woman,” his mother said coldly, “don’t bother.”

  Lance stilled. She knew then. “Her name is Sara.” A quiet challenge.

  “No, it’s Lady Sarathena Remillus—or it was. I set Olwydd on her trail a quarter hour ago. I imagine she’s long past your ministrations by now.” Savage satisfaction darkened her eyes.

  Olwydd. Lance grabbed his mother’s arm, his fingers digging into flesh. “Tell me you didn’t do this. Tell me you didn’t kill the woman I love. Again.”

  She inhaled sharply, face stricken. “She can’t mean that much to you. Think who she is!”

  “You don’t know her,” Lance began. A few weeks ago he’d had the same low opinion of all noblewomen. If he could just make his mother see Sara as a person…

  “I know her kind,” his mother said dismissively.

  Lance felt as if they were standing across a gulf from one another. “Her kind?” he repeated. “That’s how they talk about us, you know. As dirty barbarians, all alike, so stupid they deserve to be enslaved.”

  His mother looked affronted. She missed his point.

  “I know exactly who Sara is.” His mouth twisted. “It’s you I don’t recognize.”

  * * *

  Sara whipped up the blanket and flipped it over Olwydd’s head to blunt his tusks, teeth and horns. As Olwydd roared in rage and tossed his head, she stepped in close and stabbed blindly with her belt-knife.

  The blade didn’t go in, and she had to stab again, using both hands this time, desperate. Blood spurted across her knuckles.

  Grunting, Olwydd wrenched himself backward and away. The blanket had fallen to one side, snagged on one of his horns. The knife, Sara saw, was lodged in his neck. It looked tiny there. Impossible to imagine the wound was more than an annoyance to him, an insect bite.

  Olwydd’s red eyes found her and lit with hate.

  Sara ran.

  On this side of the mountain the trees grew right up to the top of the peak, but the shade from the tall pines had thinned out the undergrowth. Sara had room to run, but no place to hide.

  Every second she expected Olwydd to break her spine with one swipe of his claws.

  A roar came from almost directly behind her. Olwydd was playing with her. Sara willed herself not to slow, though her lungs were heaving and her thigh muscles burned.

  A two-foot-deep ditch loomed in front of her. If she tripped and fell, she would never get up again… Panting, she jumped into the small stream and then scrambled out again and on, her feet wet.

  Branches scraped her arms. Her foot skidded in a patch of mud; she barely caught herself before falling.

  Crashing noises came from behind her. Sara looked back and saw Olwydd clear the gully in one jump. The knife still stuck in his neck, the wound running with blood, but if it slowed him, it wasn’t by much.

  Loma have mercy. Sara ran between two closely growing trees. She gained a few seconds, as Olwydd was forced to go around, but her foot came down wrong, twisting. Pain spiked up from her ankle. She ran on anyway, achieving a hobbling gait. She felt like a deer hamstrung by wolves.

  And then she tripped over a root and fell. Her face was suddenly only inches away from red pine needles—and the muddy imprint of a legionnaire’s sandal.

  “Help,” she tried to scream, but couldn’t get enough wind. Her breath tore at her throat.

  Olwydd closed in on her, stalking her. He laughed, and this time there was a disturbing, bubbling sound underneath the grunt. The wound she’d inflicted might actually prove fatal, but not until after he’d killed her. “Lance can’t hear—” An arrow buried itself between his eyes. The great shandy faltered, slumped like an avalanche, fell.

  Sara pulled herself upright with the help of a tree and stared down at Olwydd. “It wasn’t Lance I was calling,” she told his dead body.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sara shook. Olwydd was dead, undeniably dead. The danger was past, but she couldn’t stop trembling. He’d tried to kill her. She should be relieved, but regret dragged at her. Olwydd’s life had been a cruel one, and his death had been no different.

  “What kind of beast is it?”

  The voice startled her. A dark-haired legionnaire carrying a crossbow emerged from the woods. His nose had been broken once, but he was young and not ill-looking.

  He walked up to Olwydd’s body and toed it with his foot, his expression both spooked and fascinated.

  Olwydd isn’t an it, he’s a him. Sara swallowed back the words. Even though she and Lance had become separated, Sara was determined to keep her promise to save his sister. To do that she had to make it back to the capital with all speed. Step one was to convince the legionnaire of her identity and not give away her Kandrithan sympathies.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she lied, “but it almost killed me. You have my deepest thanks and the thanks of my—”

  He interrupted before she could tell him her House. A roguish twinkle appeared in his blue eyes. “Think I deserve a reward?” He set down his crossbow and hauled her into his arms.

  Sara didn’t even think. She slapped his face as hard as she could, taking satisfaction in the cracking sound. She only wished she could do the same to Claude and Nir and all the others who’d grabbed her.

  Outrage hardened his face. “There was no call for—”

  Before he could grab her again, Sara drew herself up to her full height. “I’m Lady Sarathena of House Remillus. You will take me to your commanding officer at once.”

  “House Remillus? Aiming a bit high, aren’t you?” He cocked a skeptical eyebrow at her modest Kandrithan dress.

  “Don’t be fooled by the rags I’m wearing,” Sara said with a contempt she didn’t feel. She was going to miss the convenience of her split skirts. “General Pallax will be able to vouch for my identity.”

  Her stab in the dark paid off. “How do you know General Pallax?”

  “I almost married his son,” Sara said tartly. “Now come on, we need to hurry.”

  “Why?”

  Sara pointed at Olwydd. “In case there are more of these out there.”

  “Ah, right,” the legionnaire said, grimacing. After that he didn’t argue.

  * * *

  Lance hurried toward the woods beyond the field of stumps where Sara would have hidden. His gaze was so fixed on his destination that he almost plowed Cadwallader down.

  He absentmindedly yanked the Seer up and started to step around him, but Cadwallader clung to his arm. “Have you seen Dulcima?”

  The question shocked Lance like a splash of cold water. Dulcima was a legendary shandy, a winged horse, also known as Kandrith’s Need. She’d allegedly given her Lifegift to appear when Kandrith most needed her. He supposed Kandrith might be in need right now.

  “Have you seen her?” Cadwallader repeated. His fey eyes shone silver.

  “No.” Impatient, Lance
moved past the older man.

  “Is Dulcima coming?” He heard his mother ask anxiously—he hadn’t realized she was following him. Hoping Cadwallader would delay her, Lance picked up his pace.

  “I suppose she can fly someone into battle, but I’d hate to see her cut down by an arrow.” His mother’s voice grew fainter.

  “Lance will heal—”

  Lance reached the woods. “Sara?” he called. Receiving no answer, he looked around.

  There. There were both clawmarks and hoof imprints in the muddy ground where Olwydd had tread. “Sara?” He was vaguely aware of his mother following him, but the fear roaring in his ears shut out everything but the uphill path in front of him.

  Long minutes later, he saw the blanket he’d stolen for Sara hanging from a tree. Blood stained it. He hurried on, eyes searching. And then he spotted a dark shape at the foot of a tree—

  Goddess, no. “Sara?” His voice came out half-strangled.

  But the body was too large. Olwydd lay there, a crossbow bolt between his eyes. Lance put his hands on the shandy, but his flesh was cooling already, dead and beyond the Goddess’s mercy.

  “What does this mean?” His mother sounded bewildered and out-of-breath.

  Lance pulled out the arrow and studied it. The crossbow bolt was Republican made. “It means Sara’s with the Legion.”

  “She’s betrayed you.”

  “No.” Lance stamped down hard on the niggle of doubt he felt. He faced his mother with new calm. “The Pact is broken. You’ve failed, Mother.” He gentled his voice. “It’s my turn to try. Let me bring Wenda home.”

  He thought for a moment tears would break through his mother’s composure, but she blinked them back. If she’d cried he might have comforted her, but her control made him furious. Even now, when they were alone, she couldn’t stop being the Protector. The rage he felt over her attempt to kill Sara burned like a wall of fire between them.

  “Cadwallader would remember if your help was needed,” she said coldly.