Aron’s heart beat even faster when he realized a group of guardsmen were bearing down on that same location.
He had two swords and three daggers, but only two hands, and no great years of experience. How could he take on a contingent of fifteen men—no, twenty, maybe more. Some sort of procession. Brother save them all.
The lead horsemen had spotted them, and Aron saw them rein their mounts. When the roar of the wind lessened against his ears, he could hear them shouting along their column, passing word of a winged creature ahead.
Iko’s wings swept upward and held, and the force of their descent nearly jarred Aron free all over again. He had to throw himself forward and wrap both arms in Iko’s mane to keep from tumbling to his death.
Heedless of Aron’s distress, Iko struck the ground so hard Aron’s bones rattled with the thump, then each slowing step. He half slid, half fell to his feet as popping and cracking sounds reverberated from Iko. In moments, the Sabor was back to human form, running beside Aron toward the clearing, daggers already drawn.
Aron’s senses swam from the harsh flight, and his body buzzed from the wind’s abuse. The pain kept him alert, and he quickly counted seventeen horsemen leading a procession of four wagons and a finely wrought yet hardy-looking covered travel carriage. The horsemen remained where they had been. They pointed to Iko and Aron, and more shouting ensued.
Aron didn’t bother trying to discern their words or meaning. “They’re in the trees,” he called to Iko. “Nic and Snakekiller. Can you get them to safety?”
Iko slowed his pace, putting himself between Aron and the woods. “Them, and you as well, unless that Guard contingent has bowmen. Any bird, even gryphons, can be felled by holes in the wings.”
Aron pumped his arms as he sprinted forward with absolutely no idea what he would do when he drew even with the Guard. He hadn’t even figured out if they were friend or foe, since they weren’t wearing colors or bearing any standards. No matter. Instinct—no, graal—told him they shouldn’t be allowed to reach Nic or Snakekiller.
“I’ll stand them off, Iko. Take Nic and Snakekiller to Triune, then come back for me.”
Iko stopped running, forcing Aron to slow, then stop to listen to him as he assumed cranelike battle stance. “You are overly optimistic, and I’m not here to serve you—or leave you to be Guard fodder.”
Three guardsmen had broken away from the rest, and they were slowly edging their mounts toward Iko and Aron’s position. The men wore standard battle armor, leather, copper, and silver, with some iron at the chest and neck, but without rank marks or insignia. Even more confusing, the color of the clothing beneath their battle gear and the blankets beneath their saddles was a mixed confusion of black, red, brown, and even some greens and yellows.
Who were they?
On whose behalf did they ride?
Brother help me, they could be messengers, for all I know.
Aron grimaced as Iko raised his daggers. His stance was slightly off balance, weight on his forward foot, left hand extended. Aron recognized the posture from watching the Stone Brothers who best understood knife throwing, and knew that Iko could shift his balance and hurl his first blade overhand with a force and accuracy he would never want to challenge. Aron decided he would do better with his swords in closer quarters, so he gave Iko room and drew his own blades.
Messengers or no, Aron wanted the mounted men to give ground, at least enough to allow him time to retrieve Nic and Snakekiller, and figure some method of fastening them to Iko for the brutal ride back to Triune.
The soldiers kept coming.
Aron tensed.
They were still many lengths away, but each nervous, sideways step of their horses brought them closer.
Aron knew that even if he and Iko managed to avoid being trampled and dispatch these three, there were the other fourteen to deal with, not to mention wagon drivers and whoever—or whatever—might be in the traveling carriage.
“Use your graal,” Iko whispered. “Send them away.”
Aron almost dropped one of his swords in shock. He glanced toward Iko. “If I harm them with my mind-talents, Lord Baldric will kill me with his own hands.”
Iko’s response was resolute. “I didn’t say harm them. I said send them away.”
“No!” Aron whispered.
Then, desperate to find some other solution, he reached for some plausible way to persuade the soldiers to leave.
“You there,” Aron shouted at the soldier in the lead, doing his best to sound older and confident, and refusing to let his sword waver. “Stand down and return to your traveling party. There are ill and wounded here, having need of Stone’s Mercy. Some may be contagious.”
“A Stone apprentice and a Sabor, loose in Dyn Cobb?” the man called back, his voice low and challenging. Judging by the rasp and timbre, Aron judged him to be in his middle years, though his nondescript clothing and brown hair gave no hint of what dynast he might serve.
Despite the man’s doubting tone, he and the other two soldiers reined their horses, at least for the moment.
Aron gripped his swords tighter. “Even Stone faces hardship in times of war. We send who we can to do the task—and I would advise you not to interfere with our business.”
“We have business here as well,” the lead soldier called back. “As much as you, I think. Illness and wounds, you say. Well, we have two rectors among us. Stand down, and we’ll send them forward.”
From the clearing came a long, pained moan. Male or female, Aron couldn’t tell. He cursed his own stupidity, and wished he had told the soldiers they were battling plague or Wasting, or something that might have terrified them.
“This is no task for rectors,” he said, hoping that would suffice.
A surge of energy made him tremble and raise his eyes to the distant carriage.
Had someone in the covered, reinforced wagon just used graal to communicate? He threw a bit of his awareness toward the Veil and strained to detect a color, a hint, a sign—anything—but found nothing.
As if responding to words Aron had not been able to hear, the three mysterious guardsmen drew their swords,
Aron’s chest tightened, and his insides heaved. His arms felt strong, and his swords felt balanced against his palms as he raised them in answer—but this was no mock battlefield. He would likely die here this day, and fail Nic and Snakekiller in the bargain.
The three men spurred their mounts forward, and Iko let fly with his first dagger.
The lead soldier pitched sideways off his mount, and the horse ran free—straight at Aron.
He shifted out of the animal’s path at the same moment his mind yelped, Move!
The horse veered crazily at his command and shot off toward the open grasslands instead of waiting for its rider’s command, like most trained military mounts.
Iko’s second dagger found its mark even as bits of an idea gathered themselves in Aron’s mind. He quickly focused his mental energy on the third horse and allowed his mind to form a picture of the horse carrying its rider far away. No throwing or biting, no running until the animal collapsed, just inexorable progress away from this spot. North would be good.
Holding tight to that image, he forced his awareness into something like an arrow and imagined his wishes firing straight into the remaining horse’s essence. Now, Aron commanded. Away now!
The horse slowed despite the protests and urgings of its rider. Stamping its feet, it sidestepped, then pivoted and backed up no matter how its rider tried to regain control. The soldier tore his feet from his stirrups, leaped off the horse, and came storming back toward Aron.
Hours and days, weeks and cycles of training kicked Aron’s senses into a state not unlike going through the Veil. He judged the man’s distance, the force with which he would strike as he approached, and held his ground.
Iko was running toward him from behind. Aron judged his distance as well, but knew he wouldn’t arrive in time to break the soldier’s first assault.
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And the first blow would likely be the last, just like on Judgment Days.
The soldier’s face loomed in Aron’s vision, and he heard the man’s battle-bellow as he pummeled the grass with his big, booted feet.
I’m a stone of Stone. Aron blocked the whump and pound of his own pulse from his awareness. He forced himself to breathe, to stand still. No faltering. No flinching.
The soldier drew back his blade.
Aron darted forward under the strike and scissored both of his swords, striking the soldier in the belly.
The man’s momentum drove Aron’s blades up and back, almost into his own shoulders and neck, but Aron let himself be driven off his feet, into the ground. Hot blood and the stink of bowels sprayed over his face and chest as he used his legs to fling the soldier off him.
The man’s sword flew from his grip and slapped into the grass.
The man himself fell heavily with no attempt to use his own arms or legs, as if he were no more than a sack of feed.
Even as Aron staggered to his feet and dropped his swords, he sent mental commands to all the other horses and even the pack mules. Away. Go, but do no harm.
Could beasts understand instructions? Nuances?
Aron hoped they grasped the images he was sharing.
He stumbled toward Iko, who was using his toe to flip the soldier Aron had killed onto his back.
Would the horses be put down because of him?
How many of the soldiers would fight their way out of the saddle and come back?
And how fast?
As Aron’s mind brushed past the reinforced carriage, his vision of what he wanted the animals to do faltered. He had to shake his head to clear his senses from a sudden, bitter dulling, like taking a huge gulp of nightshade wine. Whatever was contained behind those strong wooden walls, it wasn’t something he wanted to encounter again.
Iko grabbed his arm and held him upright beside the soldier.
Aron looked down, then sagged into Iko’s grip.
The soldier’s wide, empty eyes stared up at him. Blood smeared the man’s mouth and covered his battle clothes. He was still twitching, and the stink rising from his exposed bowels was fetid and choking.
Aron shook his head slowly, trying to comprehend that he could have given the man some mental command and sent him away from here, but he had used his blades instead. It had been a fair fight, Stone apprentice against soldier, in defense of innocents, as his guild charter demanded.
He coughed at the stench and tried to stop staring at the fresh corpse.
This—this death—it was preferable to a moment’s loss of free will, being subjected to Aron’s graal?
Iko was shouting at him, calling his name, then shaking him.
When Aron focused on the Sabor’s face, Iko said, “I’ll shift to my gryphon form—but you have to get them on my back if I’m to fly them to Triune. Unconscious, they would slip through my talons.”
Aron could do nothing but stare at Iko now, frozen, his muscles and mind refusing to cooperate with what was left of his will. Iko spun him toward the woods and propelled him forward. “Fate has chosen you. What you choose will shape fate.”
Aron tried to pull himself free, but the Sabor held his arms with fingers that seemed to be made of forge iron as he forced Aron ahead. “You with the graal of ultimate truth, you must begin to find your own truths, not just those dictated to you by those who do not bear your burdens. There are lives to save—and one of those lives you altered long ago, when you used your legacy to order that boy not to die. “
This confirmation that Aron had indeed accidentally used his graal to interfere in Nic’s fate on Harvest rattled Aron so deeply he couldn’t begin to understand the rest of that admonishment. He stared straight ahead, openmouthed, as Iko let him go. When he glanced back, Iko was already beginning to shift from blue to golden and furry as the Sabor began to expand in width and height, reassuming the formidable countenance of a gryphon.
In the distance, the creaking of carts and wagons and the shouts of guardsmen receded, but soon enough, the shouting began to grow loud again. The guardsmen were coming back, no doubt on foot, and no doubt running.
On wobbly legs, hardly able to get a full breath or think through the endless rushing of his own thoughts, Aron approached the trees. Almost immediately, he saw a woman in bloody gray robes propped against a dantha, her head drooping to one side.
Snakekiller.
Though Aron had seen her only once in a vision, he knew her, recognized the feel of her energy, as familiar to him as that of Stormbreaker. Her chest rose and fell, shallow yet even, but her color was that of days-old milk, off-white and fading.
A few paces from where she rested lay a thin blond boy with clawlike hands. From the odd angle of his body, Aron could see that the boy’s spine was misshapen, curved in several places, and one of his legs seemed to turn inward. His breathing was deeper than Snakekiller’s, but his essence seemed somehow more distant.
The sounds of approaching soldiers grew louder.
Aron rushed to Nic and tried to lift him, but found him much heavier than he expected. He would never be able to carry them both at the same time. With a creeping, crushing sense of dread, Aron realized he wouldn’t be able to get Nic and Snakekiller back to Iko and secure them to the Sabor’s back before the soldiers returned.
And his swords—he had left them lying on the grass of Dyn Cobb’s field. When the soldiers returned, he wouldn’t be able to fight them.
Panic flared like fire in his chest, and it took him only moments to make his next choice, though he knew at every level of his being it was the most fateful decision of all. Forcing his own breathing into a steady pattern, he moved his awareness through the Veil with a bleak determination he had never felt before in his life. It took no time for him to locate the red energy streaming off Nic, and the more muted greens and reds of Snakekiller’s mingled legacy. Working part on intuition and distant memory and part on the training he had received from Dari, Aron let his own graal mix with theirs, lending them some of his physical and mental strength.
He sucked in a breath.
The truth of Nic, the reality of him, what he was and who he was, hit Aron in the gut. The rightful heir to the throne of all of Eyrie, and the key to finishing this terrible war.
Aron caught his breath by sheer force of determination, for now there could be no doubt what he must do.
This was it.
This was the moment he had been chosen for—or one of them.
I’m sorry, he said to Nic and Snakekiller, fairly certain they would never remember his apology. What they would remember and respond to, against their wills and against even the demands of their own bodies, was the command he challenged the rest of his energy and awareness into forming.
Wake.
As he spoke the word in his mind, Aron let go of any attempt to control the color and force of his graal. He had no doubt that people as far away as Triune and even Eidolon heard his command if they were on the other side of the Veil, but he hoped it would not touch anyone he didn’t intend.
The effects on Nic and Snakekiller were immediate—and terrible.
As Aron came back through the Veil, Tiamat Snakekiller’s eyes flew open. She let out a scream of agony that threatened to curdle Aron’s essence. Nic moaned and thrashed as Aron made himself stride forward, tears flowing.
To Snakekiller, he said, “Soldiers are coming.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending.
Nearby, Nic was wide-eyed, sweating and panting, and Aron almost folded in on himself as he remembered his long-ago oath.
I’ll meet you, he had promised, at Nic’s insistence.
He had given his vow to meet Nic, to be the one who found him when Nic needed to be found—but Aron had never imagined he would fulfill his obligation in such a dark fashion. Not like this. No, Brother save them all, it shouldn’t have been like this.
Snakekiller screamed again, and Aron wanted to
fall down dead and never hear that sound ever, ever again, but half measures would do no good here. Shaking like a dantha leaf in a powerful wind, he opened his mind and moved through the Veil again, and this time, he commanded, Get up.
Moaning, huffing like beasts in labor, Snakekiller and Nic lurched to their feet. Their limbs moved like wood attached to rope.
Through waves of nausea and guilt, Aron stepped them through each motion.
Walk.
Watching them stagger, hearing them shriek in absolute anguish—Aron knew he would never rid himself of these images, of the nightmares that would come from them.
Then, with his assistance, Mount.
Wrap your hands in the gryphon’s mane.
He put Snakekiller nearest Iko’s neck, and ordered Nic to hold on to her as well as Iko’s mane.
With each movement, they roared with misery. Spittle flecked Nic’s mouth, and Snakekiller bled from her parted lips.
As Aron climbed on behind them, he felt the awful tension in Iko’s muscles and understood it, but he proceeded, because stopping now was as unthinkable as starting down this path in the first place.
As the soldiers thundered toward the clearing on foot, blades flashing in the blue-white afternoon light, Aron sent every one of the men a single command.
Sleep.
He paired it with the mental image of a few minutes passing in the movement of the sun across the sky. He knew that when they dropped their weapons and collapsed in slumber in Dyn Cobb’s meadow, they would be vulnerable to predators, but he hoped the risk would be small. They were, after all, trying to attack him, and maybe even kill the helpless quarry Aron was torturing in his attempts to return them to Triune for true aid.
“Go!” he shouted to Iko, careful to keep the force of command from his tone, holding back his graal as firmly as he gripped the groaning Nic to steady him.
A Prince Among Killers Page 18
