The Dark Ferryman

by Jenna Rhodes

  “What is this?” Diort stared at the grisly remnant.

  “Raymy,” Bistel answered him distastefully. “Unless I am greatly wrong.”

  “Quendius landed an army of thousands. Raymy and Ravers. I was there, I saw it,” provided Bregan from behind the lancer’s back.

  Bistel eyed Oxfort. “I see one.”

  Diort made a noise at the back of his throat as if in agreement.

  Bregan shook his head. He dropped his hands, frustration choking his words. Lara said smoothly, “They travel the trails under the mountains, the old Pathways of the Guardians, and they’re on our heels. They will overrun us. Our only hope is to call truce and fight together. It took four of us to bring this one down.” The admission colored her face, but her eyes flashed in defiance as she finally lowered her hand and the silk of her undergarment flowed softly from her fingers.

  “You ask us to meld the armies.”

  “I do.”

  Diort’s jaw tightened. “The easier, then, to stab us in the back. This is a war you insisted upon. Why should I trust you?”

  She stared at him. “We have a quarrel, but I won’t see us lose every last fighter to such as this!” She toed the Raymy’s head. Its eyes glinted ferociously, death not having leeched that from it yet.

  “You thought to bow my head quickly and bring me to my knees at the bargaining table.”

  Lara answered slowly, “I did.”

  “You could have sent an envoy.”

  “Would you have listened to one?”

  The corners of his jade eyes crinkled a bit. “Probably not.”

  “Then I decided a slap would get your attention.”

  “The dead and wounded were not slapped.”

  “No.” Lara took a deep breath. “I planned other. I was delayed. I have the price of their deaths on me. But I would not accept more, unless there isn’t any choice.”

  What Diort would have countered with was cut off by high-pitched screaming and yelling far behind the lines, and Lara knew they had run out of time.

  Sevryn saw the battle part as if a tide had turned. Even on the stony hillside, he recognized Lariel’s armor and helm and her upturned hand with the color white billowing from it. Tranta rode pillion a horse or two behind her, distinctive for his bare head of blue-green hair. Bistane held her flank. The sight took him by surprise as did the tenor of the trumpeting and the change of the Galdarkan drummers. They called for a cessation. His pulse quickened.

  Too far away for details, he still saw a circle open up about Lara and a bundle drop on the ground. He could not see what it was when opened, but he knew. Knew it as if he had been the lancer who had done the deed. He took a step backward at the realization.

  Nutmeg clutched at his arm. “What is it?”

  It was the end of all he valued. It was the last battle. He could see Bistel and Diort facing one another on either side of Lara, their hands empty for the moment, a transient truce holding. What did she ask of them? Could she bend her pride long enough to hope that Diort would join them?

  He had no ears to listen to their words, but he could hear the sounds of battle rejoined again, up on the stony paths, near a gaping hole at the peak. He could hear a hiss boiling out of the depths like hot iron being plunged into salt baths at a forge. He could smell fresh spilled blood on the dirt. He knew why Daravan had taken him to the salt bay to fight that morning not so long ago, so that he would know the true enemy. He had not the eyes of the Vaelinars, but as he looked down into the river valley and over two armies poised on the brink of warfare and annihilation, he saw the threads of all the lives spilled over the lands. Find the astiri, the way, Gilgarran used to pound at him. It had never been easy for him to use what pure-blooded Vaelinars took for granted. It had been near impossible for him to look at the elements of the world about him and see what composed it and how it might be touched in the most minute manner so that it could be perceived better and perhaps even manipulated. No, he did not have the multicolored eyes of his lineage that gave the sight so easily, but he did have its Talent.

  How do you blend two armies together and then turn them as one against the true enemy? What bugling could signal to turn from one army and merge to fight a third? What drumbeat could send the complicated rhythm for all to know what to do know, what was needed? He could hear fresh drumming from the Galdarkan front and saw the soldiers mill uneasily, uncertainly. He could hear the bugles and banners go up for Bistel and Lariel, and the Vaelinars assemble no less unsure. Word would be passed, but would it be clear enough and in time?

  Nutmeg pulled at him again. “What’s happening?”

  “Raymy are attacking. Ravers with them, I think.”

  “Raymy?” Her voice shook in disbelief. “I thought it was just smugglers. Brigands. Quendius with outlaws.”

  “No. Quendius brought the most dire enemy he could find.”

  The two armies drew apart in confusion. They no longer attacked one another but they had no understanding of what poured out of the mountain after them. They would be plowed under. The disciplined ranks that had faced one another began to crumble in chaos.

  “They have to fight!”

  Slaughter if they did not, he knew that. Nutmeg threw herself down the hill, running. “I have to tell Jeredon to fight!”

  They all had to be told. He did not have their eyes, their sight, but by all the Gods he had their Voice.

  He pulled the winter wind to him, off the ridges, off the sharp-edged peaks and crags about him. He took a deep breath, felt the ice in that wind, its sharpness deep in his lungs prickling at him. He gathered up all the power of his ability, his soul, the threads of what he knew and what must happen and then, and only then, he Spoke. Fire and power stroked his throat.

  The wind roared down off the mountains. Bistel turned as it did, touching him, and it said to him, “The Raymy come. Turn to the western peak and make your stand.” It left no doubt in his mind as to the truth and urgency.

  Diort raised his chin as the wind shivered past him. “Who is that who speaks?”

  “That is the Hand of the Queen.”

  “Badly named, I think, Lariel.” Diort gave her a half bow. He could see the dark forms of fighters already engaged halfway up the great western peak. “I have a way to stop them, I think.” He pulled his war hammer from his back. Rakka growled softly in his hands as he tightened his grip about it.

  “Close the pass.”

  “Aye. I can bring the rock down on them, I deem.”

  “If you can get close enough.”

  Diort met Bistel’s eyes. “True.”

  “Then you will. Queen Lariel, I think your guidance is needed here. I might suggest you drive a spearhead through that—” and Bistel nodded to the severed head on the ground, “—and use it as your banner. Bistane, with me.”

  Rivergrace felt her heart warm as she heard Sevryn speak, ignoring the dire message, knowing only that he lived. She came out of the small tent as its canvas rippled in the stiffening breeze and Rufus joined her there.

  “He live,” Rufus commented with a knowing look in his eye. He smelled of fire and iron and charcoal, and grime covered his hands.

  A healer had wrapped her with fresh bandages, but she still carried pain with every movement. “I need to go to him.”

  The Bolger blocked her body. “He come to you.”

  “What if he can’t?”

  “Then too late.”

  “I can’t wait until it’s too late.”

  Rufus stayed immovable. She clenched and unclenched her hands until he patted her on the shoulder and turned her to face the west. “We wait.”

  Nutmeg saw the sturdy little mountain pony tethered among the fine tashya. She threw her spotted head up with a knowing eye as Nutmeg grabbed her bridle to yank her loose. “I don’t know whose mount you be, but you’re mine now,” she told the shaggy little horse. She threw a leg over the bare back and touched heel to the small mare. She ignored the soldiers scrambling to answer the
wind’s summons and steered her pony across the lines to where she had seen Jeredon last. She found him in his cart, his chariot, loading quivers with arrows from a supply wagon and shouting orders at his archers. He looked up startled as she called his name.

  “Nutmeg!”

  “The western slope . . .”

  “I know, we’re called there.” He tossed a quiver to a waiting archer before filling his fingers with new shafts.

  “You’re facing Raymy.”

  His hand stopped in midair. “Are you certain?”

  “Do apples grow on trees?”

  His hand unfroze long enough to continue loading the arrows into a new quiver. Jeredon looked about and yelled “Tressandre! I need to be on my feet!” Nutmeg watched him as if she had never seen him before, and in a way, she had not. Not like this. There was blood and grime on his dark green battle leathers and the amber glints of his soft green eyes matched the red gold that streaked his dark brown hair here and there. The teasing curve to his mouth had disappeared into hard lines as he yelled again. “Ild Fallyn! Come bring me my legs!”

  Tressandre ild Fallyn did not come to answer. Nutmeg’s little pony stamped her feathery leg.

  “I can get you up there. I know where to hit them from.”

  Jeredon looked to the western peak and its jagged base. “I can’t drive the cart up there. I need my legs, curse it, Nutmeg, don’t you understand?”

  She slid off the pony and put the reins in his free hand. “Get on.”

  “My feet will drag.”

  “Your feet dragging or your ass, it’s your choice.”

  A pulse along his jawline that she knew well ticked once or twice before he tightened his hand about the reins. He could do that much, and they both knew it. With a grunt of effort, he swung off the cart and with Nutmeg’s steadying hand on his hip, he got onto the pony. His feet did not quite touch the ground. She took the headstall as he pulled two quivers over his shoulder and two bows.

  “One for me?”

  Jeredon snorted at her then, much like a mountain pony. “Lead me in and then I want you on your way to safe shelter.”

  “There is no shelter in this valley,” she told him quietly and tugged the pony after her. The two of them, as agile as any creature climbing the slope, found a path straight into the heart of the new fight.

  Baring his teeth at the day, Quendius tied his horse and moved upslope, among the small evergreens that grew twisted and spare among the rock. His army met with pitched effort at the tunnel’s exit but they pushed out determinedly, over the bloody and broken bodies of Vaelinar and Galdarkan alike. He savored the carnage. He knew the heroes would come to bolster the dam, but it was a tide they could not stop. It only mattered to him that they came. He had two arrows left that would answer to him. Quendius shook his vest out and took a position on a slab of rock, one that had caught a few slanting rays of the sun and held a slight measure of warmth. He waited.

  And behind him, in jagged long shadows cast by stone, Narskap moved silently. He knew his master had made a deal with the Raymy. He knew of only one below who would be saved from the slaughter, the one a part of himself wanted to call kin, and that one would be saved not because Quendius had any mercy in his body but because she carried the touch of the River Demon in her and his master was greedy. That part of himself would rather see her dead than in the hands of Quendius.

  Barely breathing, he crept along gravel and slate, rock and sere weed, sigh by sigh closer. Narskap knew his master’s mind as well as he knew his own. Better, perhaps. He had always been able to hear the thoughts running thinly through his own. Quendius was not the ghost who haunted him, but he was the faithful hound because he knew his master’s every inclination.

  Quendius showed no inkling of his stalking. He watched as his master flexed his longbow and drew an arrow from a belt quiver, an arrow with the head chiseled from flame-red gemstone, and eyed a target below.

  There were three actually. One rode a small pony that stubbornly hopped and jumped along the rockfall like a goat, led by a woman hardly taller than the pony, but on his back, oh, yes, they knew that visage well. The Warrior Queen’s brother, quiet but deadly Jeredon Eladar, son of the Anderieons, himself a master of earth, of forests and their creatures, and of death from the air. The small woman neither watcher counted, not Quendius nor Narskap, even though it was she who helped the Eladar from his mount as he moved stiff-legged over the terrain. When Quendius settled, it was on a line with the opening and farther, on a line with the two other targets in sight: Diort and Bistel. The Eladar would block any shot Quendius might have in mind unless he moved, but moving now would likely draw attention to his presence, for the mountain boiled with Raver and Raymy leaping from the tunnel and fighting their way downslope.

  Narskap did not think the Eladar’s positioning to be accidental. He was poised to give cover to the two warlords whether they knew he was there or not, and he had two full quivers with which to do so.

  Quendius put his arrow to string and began to draw it back slowly and carefully. Narskap crouched, weighing his decision in his shattered mind, biting his lip until his mouth ran with blood to keep the howls back, the howls that always plagued him when he tried to reconcile one life within his body with another, always failing. His mouth filled with the coppery taste.

  Quendius moved a foot to better brace himself, longbow ready. He stepped on a twig. Here, where little existed but shale and granite and dirt, a scrub pine had gamely pushed its way up and died, leaving a brittle reminder of its fight for life. The twig snapped with a sharp crack that echoed.

  Nutmeg’s head came about with a cry, and Jeredon threw himself in front of her as he saw the archer standing in position. The arrow flew. Its ruby point sparkled in the graying day. She struggled against his hold to move him, too late, his weight too ponderous for her as the shaft hit home. It struck his broad chest, and Jeredon sank, blood spilling from his mouth as he fell. The arrow dug its way deeper as he gave a yowl of pain. He clawed at the shaft, and she wrapped her hands around his and they pulled it loose together, jerked it free as the thing itself squealed and keened, denied in its attempt to burrow its way through his heart and body. She picked up a rock and smashed it, smashed it as she would a viper, smashed it like a vicious thing until its ruby head was nothing but sparkling powder. A cloud leaked from it, dark and oily, a smear upon the day and sunlight until it dissipated.

  “Nutmeg.”

  She gathered him in, hopelessly trying with her embrace to quench the font of blood his chest had become. “Don’t talk, don’t move. Someone’ll find us. Someone will come. Don’t talk. Just breathe for me. Just keep breathing!”

  “No use. I hear it calling for me. Home. Trevilara.” He managed to get one arm about her, curving her body to his. His voice came with agonized effort, gasping, wheezing. “I didn’t mean to leave you this way.”

  “You’re not leaving me! I won’t have it.”

  “There’s no other way. I’m bleeding inside, I can feel it.” His arm tightened around her. He pressed her tightly to him, and inhaled deeply of her scent, her hair, stilled her mouth with a small kiss that he broke away from, and his hands drifted down to her waist. A strange smile of wonder then passed across his face. “Why . . . Nutmeg,” he breathed. The light faded from his eyes, but not the smile, not the expression of joy and contentment overshadowing one of pain. She did not see it for long moments until she realized the blood had slowed, and she could not feel him moving against her. She pushed back to see what was wrong.

  It was then she began to cry.

  Quendius scrambled back with a muttered curse as both Bistel’s and Diort’s attention swung their way, but they could not see him or the fallen Eladar either, through the few shrubs that clung to the hillside, nor did they hear the small woman crying as if her heart would break, the clamor of the battle below filling the air. He heard it, and he would have taken her life, too, for destroying his arrow, but there would be time for that.
He had at least one more shot he wanted to take before retreating to let his army do their bloody work. Moving downhill stealthily, he found a new pinnacle and knelt in place. Bistel had his hands full as Ravers swarmed. His horse kicked and tossed at least two aside to writhe on the gravel in their shattered carapaces. Diort hefted his hammer.

  Narskap moved with him. He filled his hand with his dagger. Quendius straightened and lifted his bow.

  Narskap sprang. “Haviga aliora!” he cried and plunged the dagger in the back, up under the rib, straight and deep to where his master’s heart lay.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  QUENDIUS JERKED. The longbow fell from his hand, and the arrow clattered to the stone in front of him. He coughed and a fine red mist sprayed the air. He swept the arrow up and turned in one smooth move to bury it deep into Narskap. Narskap dropped on his back.

  They looked into one another’s face. Quendius’ mouth drew to one side. “If I had a heart where Vaelinars have a heart, you would have succeeded. ” He screwed his arm around with a grunt and clawed at the dagger hilt. He pulled it free. “Alas for you, my hound, I have a heart where Galdarkans carry it. A little higher and to the center. Thanks to my mother. You, I fear, are not so lucky.” He watched as the arrow ate its way into Narskap’s emaciated body as his back arched and his heels drummed in agony. “Like all hounds, we knew the time would come when you would snap at me. Your teeth hurt.” He coughed and showed pain, but not pain enough. Death did not ride his face. Narskap stared up into flint-black eyes with no heart in them at all.

  The arrow churned and ate until it stopped where the rock slab at Narskap’s back halted its progress. Quendius grabbed Narskap by the shoulder and pulled the arrow through with a wet, slurping noise accompanied by a Demon squeal of satisfaction. He dropped Narskap’s body slumped on the ground. He watched as blood pooled slowly.