‘No sorceress, eh?’she said.‘Tell me, little twig man, where she went.’
Another figure, tall, slight and wan—younger than the woman, with wild hair and a darker complexion—appeared behind her.He was armoured in much the same way, though his robes and mail hung looser on his frame.A single point of white fire burned from his forehead.He pointed to Llewyn with his shortsword and said something in a foreign tongue.
An eagle’s scream, high and piercing, sounded from the window.Siwan’s call for Fola’s aid.Poorly timed.
Llewyn tightened his grip, feeling the ghostwood deform to fit his fingers.The swordswoman smiled, wolfish and greedy.
‘Good,’ she said, an excited hum in her voice.‘Torin, you’d best go after the rest of them.If this one’s half the fighter that woman in Parwys was, I may be here a minute.’
A third figure appeared in the doorway.No light burned around his head.He wore no armour, only a clerical robe of pure white, stained below the knees, marked at the breast with the emblem of the Mortal Church.Llewyn knew it well, from the Grey Lady’s warnings, and from run-ins with the rare churchman in Afondir while in her service.The man flexed his hands and muttered something in his own tongue.The words rose in volume and intensity until flames whirled to life around his head.He issued an order and made a sudden, sharp gesture with his right hand.
The air burned, as it did some nights in the north of the Greenwood, when green and blue flame danced with the stars.First, in the trail of the churchman’s hand.Then, around Harwick’s shield, tracing the iron rim.
Metal screamed as it tore.The shield exploded, needling Llewyn with splinters.Harwick tumbled onto the floor, dazed, still clinging to his hatchet.The younger churchman stepped towards him, shortsword poised for a killing thrust.
In a fight like this, someone who fell was as good as dead.
Llewyn gritted his teeth, moved his will through his ghostwood blade, and attacked.The swordswoman roared and swung her sword.It hummed and blurred through the air.Llewyn ducked under its arc and felt the thud as her blow bit the floorboards.While she wrestled it free, Llewyn stabbed at the younger church-man, driving him back a step towards the door, buying Harwick enough time to recover to his feet.
‘Get out of here!’Llewyn snapped, pushing Harwick towards the window.His gaze danced, moving between the three templars.He was fast enough, he thought, to keep them occupied for a few moments.The room was small, and crowded with three beds along the walls.Not much room to manoeuvre, but enough, so long as he kept himself between his attackers and the window.With luck, he might buy time for Fola and Colm to arrive—assuming they yet lived and the battle had not cut them off from this side of the keep.Harwick’s presence, and death, would buy little more.
Harwick shook his head, gripped his hatchet with both hands, and planted himself in front of the window.‘They’re my family, too, Llewyn,’ he snarled.Blood dribbled down his chin.He spat out a tooth.
The swordswoman denied Llewyn the chance to argue.She gripped her massive sword high on the handle, one hand wrapped around the base of the blade.She lunged and thrust.Llewyn dodged towards the window.The tip of her sword caught the mattress on the left-hand wall, sending up a shower of fabric and straw.Llewyn lashed out as she shifted her balance for another attack.He felt his ghostwood bite into flesh.She grunted, then laughed as blood poured from her thigh to spatter the floorboards.
‘A good start, tree-devil,’ she snarled.The flames around her head flared.A shudder worked through her, a tension like a coiled spring.‘Now, faster.’
The younger knight moved behind her, closing on Harwick, but Llewyn had no attention to spare.It took everything just to keep the swordswoman at bay.Her blade cut flashing arcs through the air as she surged forward.Llewyn dodged as often as he could and deflected when he could not, but there were too many blows, falling too quickly, too powerfully.He kept her between him and the doorway, denying the robed templar a chance to join the fray, but every backward step cost him the space he would need to dodge the next blow.Breath came slow and shallow as exhaustion took hold.
He slipped past a downward slash.Instead, it hewed a leg from one of the beds.She threw her shoulder into him.He stumbled, and she whipped her blade up from a low guard.The tip caught his ribs as he tried to dodge away.Pain flared across his chest.The sharp heat of the cut, then the slow, smouldering burn left by raw iron.
The swordswoman paused to study him.‘Is that all?No spells?No glamours to trick my eye?I might have found a better challenge on the battlefield.’
The enrobed templar snapped an order.
With a sneer, the swordswoman attacked again.Three blows hammered at Llewyn.He caught the first.The second batted his blade aside.The third carved through his shoulder.He screamed and lurched backwards, his blood seeping, his flesh blistering.
Have I bought enough time?Moments grew slippery in a fight—stretching and compressing.Siwan could have made the wall by now.Maybe even the treeline.
He hoped so.There could be no knowing.
Run, girl.His thoughts reached for her, as once they had reached for the Grey Lady.Keep running.Find a place where Parwys isn’t even on the bloody maps.
He shook himself.Brought up his blade.Willed it to become broader, more flexible.Better able to absorb the swordswoman’s blows.His chest burned.His right arm had gone numb, save the searing pain in his shoulder.It still moved when he willed it, albeit sluggishly.Strength drained from him with every pulse.No matter.A few minutes more, and Siwan would be free of these people.Free to find her peace.To live the life she wanted.Freed of the fiend, with Fola’s help.If the sorceress survived.
For that, he could give up his own freedom in these last moments of life.
He stepped back, moving towards the window, sweeping his blade with one hand to menace the swordswoman and the enrobed priest in turn, who was moving past her, his blazing hand outstretched.
Llewyn reached for his pocket.
The ring slipped on as easily as breathing.As though his thumb had longed for it all these years.A hateful thought.Not one to linger on.
She was there at once, her mind settling onto his like a sheen of oil on a pool of water.
the Grey Lady said.
‘I need strength,’ Llewyn snarled.
