“Would that I had Ethelbert’s head on the ground before me,” Milwellis growled.
“But you do not, though take heart in that you have surely wounded him more profoundly than he you.”
Milwellis looked up from the body of a Palmaristown knight-Erolis, he recalled, though the carrion birds had done too much to disfigure it for him to be sure-and offered a thankful nod to his honest companion.
“What can we do to sting Ethelbert one last time before we turn?” he asked. “What can we do to make him know that we are here, right before his wall, and that he daren’t come forth?”
Harcourt grinned and nodded.
Under the cover of darkness, on that cloudy and moonless night, every archer in Milwellis’s force crept down from the hill to the field before Ethelbert dos Entel’s north wall.
They couldn’t see their target any better than any defenders might see them, of course, but then, their target was the size of a city.
A hundred bows lifted to the sky and let fly. Then again and again and many more times after that until at last cries came from the city as Ethelbert’s people realized they were under attack. The last volley was flaming arrows, five score streaking through the night sky to cross over the wall and seek further fuel within.
A response finally came, but by then the Palmaristown archers had turned and fled.
Several fires erupted within the city wall, Milwellis and Harcourt saw from the hilltop. Perhaps a few people had been injured or even killed, perhaps those fires, though surely quickly attended, would cause some damage. But none of that was the point, after all. Milwellis had just told Ethelbert that he was here in the dark within striking distance of the desperate laird’s last refuge.
The next morning Milwellis’s army moved back to the north, driving livestock and villagers before them, destroying the gardens and the fields.
And dragging with them the twenty-three brothers of Chapel Yansin bound for Chapel Abelle.
TWENTY-FIVE
Worthy
They’re running,” Jameston remarked to Bransen. “Like deer before the wolves.” The pair stood looking to the east from opposite branches of a tree. Something was happening there, some fighting or other commotion, but they couldn’t make out what, exactly, for a line of hills blocked their view even from the high perch. That was the nature of this ground along the southernmost Honce coastline, as if the towering mountains just south of their position, the great Belt-and-Buckle, had collided with the sea in days long lost to the world and had strewn great broken mounds all about the region.
Suddenly soldiers were scrambling past the trees as if the demon dactyl itself was close on their heels. Not far before them, one spearman stumbled as he headed down a slope, nearly thrown from his feet as the back quarter of his spear shaft collided with a tree. Finally orienting himself, he just threw the spear to the ground and continued his desperate run.
Bransen got Jameston’s attention and pointed up above.
“Too thin,” the scout replied, meaning the branches.
Bransen shook his head and started up anyway, falling into the malachite in his brooch. He lessened his weight greatly, his hands easily propelling him skyward. Within only a few moments he had climbed nearly twenty feet to the tree’s tiny top (which wasn’t bending under his weight in the least). He looked back to see Jameston gawking at him and shaking his head in disbelief.
Bransen suppressed his smile and looked to the east again. Though he still couldn’t see as widely as he had hoped, the view proved enough to make out the pennants flying over a large force.
“Palmaristown,” he muttered, turning his gaze south. The structures of Ethelbert dos Entel, built on steps up the mountainsides, were in clear view only a couple of leagues away. Was the war nearing its end? And what might this mean for his quest to find the Jhesta Tu? Bransen danced his way back down to Jameston and relayed the information.
“So these are Ethelbert’s men,” Jameston remarked, glancing down at the fleeing force. “They’ll run all the way to the city, I’m guessing.”
“Not all of them,” Bransen determinedly replied. To Jameston’s gasp of surprise, he leaped from the tree and floated-floated, not fell!-to the ground. He was running as he landed, scrambling through the thick copse to intercept nearby soldiers.
“I’ve got to get me some of them damned stones,” he heard Jameston mutter as the man carefully and painstakingly worked his way back down to the ground.
The Highwayman slipped into a grove of pines, sliding silently through the dense branches. He followed a movement out of the corner of his eye to his left, and he glided as a shadow to intercept.
The man ran before him; the Highwayman’s foot thrust out to strike the trailing foot of the fleeing soldier, kicking it behind his other ankle. The man tripped and tumbled forward, landing awkwardly in a skid on his knees and hands. Apparently still oblivious to the source of his fall, he started to scramble back to his feet.
A fine sword blade atop his shoulder, its sharp edge barely an inch from his neck, froze him in place.
“Please, sir, I’ve a family,” he begged.
The Highwayman retracted the sword, grabbed him by the collar and hoisted him to his feet, turning him as he stood to look him in the face. The soldier gasped, eyes widening as he considered the black clothing and the unusual gemstone brooch.
“Affwin Wi?” he asked.
The Highwayman paused at hearing that name yet again. “You know Affwin Wi?” he asked.
“Of her all do,” the terrified soldier replied.
“Let him go!” came a cry from the side where a pair of soldiers appeared, swords in hand. They advanced slowly toward the Highwayman, their blades raised threateningly.
“Oh, I’m not thinking that you’re in a place to be telling him what to do,” came an answer to the side of the newcomers, who both looked and blanched at the sight of Jameston Sequin, his bow drawn, arrow leveled.
“Easy,” the soldier with Bransen instructed his companions. “He’s one o’ Affwin Wi’s boys.”
The other two certainly did relax at that.
“Praise the ancient ones,” one muttered while the other gave the sign of the evergreen.
Bransen and Jameston exchanged glances, both of them noting yet again that curious combination and juxtaposition of the major Honce religions. The ancient ones were Samhaist gods, the evergreen the sign of the Order of Blessed Abelle.
“If ye’re to sting him, then now’s the time or never’s the time,” one of the newcomers remarked.
“Him?” asked Bransen.
“Prince Milwellis,” the other newcomer clarified.
“Aye, that one came back mad because you and your friends stung him so hard the first time,” said the first. “So stick him again, we beg, and this time stick his own body, if ye’re getting me point.”
“He’s a dog what’s killed a thousand mothers and more than that o’ children,” said the man standing beside Bransen.
“To see his blood staining the waters o’ the Mirianic would do our hearts good when we come from Entel, and don’t ye doubt that we’ll be back,” said one of the others.
“Where is Affwin Wi?” Bransen asked. “Has she returned to the city?”
The three soldiers exchanged shrugs.
“She’s still out, I’m thinking,” said the one near Bransen. “Not far from here, last I heard.”
“Be gone,” Bransen told his prisoner and the others, and they were happy to oblige.
Bransen fixed his gaze on Jameston, who nodded solemnly and slipped back into the thick grove of pines, with Bransen close behind.
Two other sets of eyes watched the exchange between the strangers and the soldiers, all the more carefully when they took note of Bransen’s sword.
Merwal Yahna motioned to Pactset Va, and the two men slid away from the scene, no less silent than the black-clothed stranger carrying a sword he should not possess.
“Jhesta Tu,” Merwal reported
to Affwin Wi soon after. “There is no doubt.”
“He wore our clothing,” said Pactset Va, a young and strong specimen with small dark eyes and his hair bound in a topknot. “And carried a sword as your own traced with vines.”
Affwin Wi drew her broken blade and rolled it over in surprisingly delicate hands that had many times driven right through the throat of an opponent. She looked to Merwal Yahna with an expression that was not hopeful. The Jhesta Tu had hunted them in Behr, but they had thought their mercenary stint with Laird Ethelbert would allow them reprieve from their continual trials against Affwin Wi’s former masters. Had they found her again?
Affwin Wi took some solace in the likelihood that this new mystic would be acting mostly alone; the Jhesta Tu considered the adjudication of the matter of a rogue like Affwin Wi to be a personal challenge for their disciples, whereas the Hou-lei traditions Affwin Wi had come to follow, much more forceful and warlike, called for as many warriors as needed, and then some more, for any given task. In simple terms, Hou-lei didn’t fight fairly. Three times before the great warrior had helped her fend off Jhesta Tu.
Since the Jhesta Tu’s companion in the woods earlier was surely not of Behr or Jhesta Tu, Affwin Wi had no reason to believe this time would be different.
Well, you do look like a southerner,” Jameston quipped as he and Bransen made their way to the southwest, tracing a wide perimeter of Ethelbert dos Entel. “You’ve got the skin for it.”
Bransen could only shrug. Though Jameston was teasing, his words were true enough. With his brown skin and jet black hair, the black clothing and his exotic sword, the Ethelbert warriors had thought him from Behr. And they understood the significance of his dress. “Affwin Wi,” he mumbled, and he found it hard to breathe. They were close; the Jhesta Tu were close.
“And what are you planning to do when we find these folk?” Jameston asked as if reading his mind, which was probably not a difficult thing to do at that moment.
“Learn from them,” he replied. “You cannot understand, but I am trapped in an infirm body.”
“Are you, then?” the scout asked, his eyebrows rising along with the sides of his mouth as he put on an incredulous grin.
“Without this,” Bransen explained, pointing to his brooch, “I am a helpless, babbling fool, the one you saw being dragged toward the glacier after the troll fight.”
“Wasn’t it a knock in the head?”
“A knock in the head that dislodged the gemstone,” Bransen explained.
Jameston nodded and smiled. “I wondered on that. I saw you walking-being dragged, actually-and thought you knocked silly beyond any chance of regaining your senses.”
Bransen lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you for the assistance.”
“Told you not to fight the damned trolls.”
Bransen let it go with a laugh, not willing to recount all those earlier questions at this pressing time.
“You think these strangers we’re hunting will free you of that stone?” Jameston asked.
Bransen saw that the scout didn’t understand. He was simply too edgy at that moment to go into great detail. “They will,” he replied.
He turned to glance at Jameston and ensure that the explanation would suffice just as the scout froze in his tracks, his eyes locked.
“Looks like we’re going to find out,” Jameston whispered out of the side of his mouth. Following his gaze to a pair of thick pines across a small open patch of ground, Bransen saw a warrior, lithe and strong with tightly wound muscles. His brow, furrowed and pronounced with the dark, thin lines of his eyebrows, made his black eyes seem even angrier, fiercer, an imposing appearance that grew only more so for his shaven head. He was dressed in black silk clothing akin to Bransen’s own and casually swung a strange weapon at the end of one arm, a pair of forearm-length solid wooden poles secured at their ends by a short length of leather.
“Nun’chu’ku,” Bransen mouthed as he considered the very deadly weapon he recognized from his lessons reading the Book of Jhest.
The warrior said something in a strange tongue, and Bransen tried to unwind the words. He knew the language from the book his father had penned, but he had never heard it spoken before. The warrior repeated his phrase, a demand from the insistent tone.
“You know what he’s saying, boy?” Jameston whispered.
“Something about Jhesta Tu,” Bransen answered, shaking his head. “Asking if I am Jhesta Tu, I think, but I cannot be certain.”
“Act certain, then,” Jameston replied.
“Jhesta Tu,” Bransen said loudly.
The warrior’s dark eyes narrowed immediately, and he began to walk slowly to their left, putting himself more in line with Bransen.
“Wrong answer,” Jameston said.
“Jhesta Tu?” Bransen asked this time, and he pointed at the warrior. That stopped the man in his pacing, and his expression turned more to curiosity.
“Who be you?” the warrior asked in the common tongue of Honce, though heavily accented in the dialect of Behr, a rolling and bouncing singsong effect of consonants bitten off and vowels exaggerated.
“I am Bransen Gari-” Bransen started, but he changed direction and said with confidence, “I am the son of Sen Wi of the Jhesta Tu and of Bran Dynard, trained at the Walk of Clouds.”
“But you have de sword,” the warrior said, his accent thick.
“I wield the sword of Sen Wi.”
“You be Jhesta Tu.”
Bransen shook his head, and the warrior snickered.
“You give me the sword.”
Bransen shook his head again.
“You give me the sword now, and you go.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then I take the sword from your body, yes.” As he finished, the warrior sent his nun’chu’ku into sudden motion, spinning the bottom length in a fast rotation at his side, then snapping it across his chest so that it wrapped under his upraised arm and slapped flat against his back. It came back in front of him and to his right for another spinning display before going under his upraised arm and around his back. When he brought the wooden pole humming before him once more, he set it into a furious reverse spin before him, then worked it back and up beside his right ear. He slapped his left wrist across his vertical right forearm and caught the flying pole in his grasp, immediately tugging it across back to his left while letting go with his right hand so that the other pole now flew freely.
Back and forth he worked the amazing weapon, changing hands and perfectly moving the momentum from one pole, through the leather tie to the other pole, reversing the spins.
It ended as suddenly as it had begun, the man somehow turning the nun’chu’ku so that its spin tucked it neatly under his right arm.
“Awful lot of bluster for so few words,” Jameston quietly remarked.
“Give me de sword now,” the warrior said.
Bransen drew his blade in a fluid and powerful movement, snapping the sword before him, angled diagonally to the sky. He slowly folded his elbow, bringing the back of the sword blade in against his forehead. After only a very short pause he snapped the blade down and to the side with such speed that it cracked through the air. He ended, as the practice demanded, with the tip of his blade a hair’s breadth from the dirt, angled down and slightly away from him.
Bransen kept his expression purposely grim, although he was beaming inside in confidence, bolstered by the Behr warrior’s expression, which confirmed to him that he had executed the sword salute perfectly.
“I think not,” he said, taking a slow and deliberate step forward. Jameston faded away from him a couple of short shuffles to the side, bow in his left hand, right hand positioned to grab an arrow from the quiver strapped diagonally across his back.
The warrior paid no heed to Jameston, his dangerous gaze locked on Bransen. He moved his right arm just a bit, the nun’chu’ku dropped free of his hold and unwound to its full length at the end of his grasp. He slid into a crouch, left hand comin
g up before his chest in a blocking position, his right arm sliding back just a bit. He gave a brief shout and stood from his pose. He never blinked and never stopped staring at Bransen as he took a couple of steps farther to the left and fell once more into that ready posture.
“What’s that about?” Jameston asked.
“He is showing me that he is unafraid,” Bransen explained.
“Should I just shoot him?”
“You wouldn’t hit him.”
“Hmm,” was Jameston’s doubtful response.
The warrior’s eyes narrowed, and his lip twitched into a snarl as if the chatter was an insult to him, which Bransen realized it probably was.
The Highwayman saluted crisply with his sword again then slowly walked his left foot forward toward the warrior, falling into a widestance, forward-diagonal crouch. He crooked his right elbow and turned his right wrist so that his arm looked like a serpent as he brought it back up high, his sword pointing forward past his head. He gracefully lifted his left hand before him, palm out. The warrior from Behr sent his weapon into a spin and strode forward a step.
The Highwayman dropped his arm, stabbing his sword forward in an underhand movement as he stepped closer to his opponent. He came up fast, handing the blade to his left hand and striking a mirror-image of the pose from which he had started.
They were barely three strides apart and then only two as the warrior from Behr gave a shout and came forward, his weapon working a dizzying blur of spins before he caught it in both hands. He turned them so the poles snapped vertically, the leather tie drawing a horizontal line before his face.
The Highwayman tried to sort out a counter. His next movement would likely end the posturing and begin the actual fighting. He tried to remember everything he had read about nun’chu’ku and the techniques involved, tried to somehow link that book knowledge against the minimal display he had witnessed from the Behrenese warrior.
He simply wasn’t sure of what he was up against here, of the limitations and strengths of this exotic weapon. A mischievous grin came to his lips and he thought himself very clever as he began to shift again very slowly.
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