The road met the marsh and became a vague silhouette beneath the murk.Low hills rose in shadowed humps, some dense with stands of trees.
Colm shouted a warning, and the first flight of arrows struck.
Frog’s talons tore through Fola’s gambeson as he squawked and took to the air.Her horse screamed and bolted forward.Fola pulled hard on the reins.She seemed to hang in the air for a moment, rising in her saddle, as the panicked horse leapt from the road and plunged into the marsh.Pain burst in Fola’s arm.There was a bestial scream, soon drowned out by the rush of water into her ears.
She kicked free of her stirrups, found her feet, and surged upright, gasping for breath.The water churned with her horse’s thrashing.Another horse bounded past, galloping hard down the First Folk Road.Its rider, one of Ifan’s housecarls, slumped in his saddle with four arrows sprouting from his chest.
Fola reached for her notebook and nearly collapsed as a wave of pain shot up from her left hand.The arm hung at an oblique angle, twisted and broken in her fall.She gritted her teeth, reached across her body with her right arm, and wrestled the sodden canvas of her satchel.Spellpaper, fortunately, did not absorb water, and her thaumaturgist’s pen wrote without the need for ink.
She slapped the notebook down on the bloodstained road, opened to a fresh page, and wrote a spell that Arno had drilled into her for an occasion just like this.She tore the spellpaper free, wrapped it around her broken arm, and wrote the final line.Another jolt shot up from the break as the paper burned away and transformed her sleeve into a stiff lattice, which twisted suddenly, forcing her broken bone back into alignment.
This time, she could not swallow the scream, nor fight through the light that burst behind her eyes.
Gasping, she blinked until her vision was clear, then took stock.Shouts of battle rose from the nearer of the two scrub-forested hills that flanked the road.Arrows still rose from the other, arcing towards the fighting.
This was no time for nuance or mercy.She wrote a spell, finished it, and watched the further hill explode in a torrent of white fire and shattered wood.There were no screams.No time for pain before searing death.She grabbed up her notebook, pressed her broken forearm against her chest, gritted her teeth, and ran towards the sound of clashing steel.
It was over by the time she reached the hill.Corpses littered the stand of trees.Ifan and his three surviving housecarls were standing over two prisoners.One was a young boy, still breathing despite one of Colm’s arrows through his middle.The other was Bryce, the Count of Cilbran.Blood from a wound on the count’s bald scalp painted his face and yellow beard in streaks of red.Colm appeared from the other side of the hill.
‘No one else that I saw,’ he said.He noted Fola and sagged with relief, then glanced at the wounded boy, ashamed.‘Just the one messenger on foot.Ten men here.No way to guess how many were on the other hill unless we wait for that fire to die.’
Ifan kicked a fallen helm into the muck.‘Bloody Stones.’
‘You’re a fool, Ifan,’ Cilbran growled through his red-soaked whiskers.‘Not just a traitor, but a damned fool.Turning to dark magics, for what?To usurp the throne?Your father would weep for shame.’
‘You hated my father,’ Ifan rejoined.‘And he told me all this kingdom’s darkest secrets before he died.’
‘He died a babbling madman,’ Cilbran said.‘Driven insane by the haunting.’
‘He died from grief.’Ifan’s voice shook.‘From guilt, as much as from the ghosts.He told me everything, Bryce.He sparked in me the dream that it could all be better.That it could change.But first it had to be burned down.You can’t plant something new in the shadows of old, rot-infested trees!He grieved it all too deeply.The past.The lies.The pain before a better future.’
‘A weak bastard, then.’Cilbran spat a glob of phlegm and blood.‘Couldn’t stomach the cost of his own power.’
Ifan’s mailed fist crushed Cilbran’s nose.
‘Make him kneel,’ Ifan snarled.
Colm shot Fola a look.She said nothing.Did nothing.Ifan and his housecarls’ blood was running high from grief and anger at the deaths of their fellows.This was not her affair, and she had meddled enough in the politics of Parwys.Her intent, now, was only to save Siwan and escape the whirlpool of violence this place had become, not to save the kingdom from itself.That she would leave to Ifan and Gavron, and the other folk of the Greenwood who saw the sickness and fought for a cure.
Perhaps this was all part of that cure.A fever of horrors to burn out the old infection of brutal history, long denied and left to fester.
A thought that did little to reassure her as Ifan’s sword fell and Cilbran’s head rolled in a spray of blood.
‘This boy is dying,’ Colm observed, almost placidly.
Fola went to the boy’s side.The arrow jutting from his middle could have felled a horse—a thought which drew Fola’s attention to the screams still rising over the little battlefield.Her own horse’s screams, where she lay with a broken leg.
‘Find their mounts,’ she said while she fished a bottle of Frog’s healing salve from her satchel.‘I’ll need a replacement.’
There was little hope for the boy’s survival, but she could ease his passing, at least.At her instruction, Colm deftly broke the haft of the arrow where it protruded behind him, then turned him on to his back.Fola dabbed salve onto the wound, which made the boy wince, then relax somewhat.There was still pain in his face, but it had lessened.
‘Why mount a defence here?’Ifan wondered aloud.‘Leaving a few messengers to keep watch and flee back to Parwys with news of our retaliatory force makes sense, but I can see no logic in leaving an ambush of twenty men.’
Colm nodded at Cilbran’s headless corpse.‘He might have told you if you’d been a hair slower with that sword.’
Ifan scowled.‘We could spare no one to guard him or escort him back to Glascoed.Would you rather I had tortured him for information before killing him?Does he deserve life more than the men who died by his orders, simply as an accident of his birth?Boy,’ he said to the messenger.‘Where were you bound?’
The boy’s head bobbled weakly on his shoulders.
