Act of Will

SCENE XLV Flight

It wasn’t just Maia’s family I had to worry about. Once we had been joined by her neighbors, another family from the last house on the street, and a straggling handful who had just been milling about, there were about twenty-five of them, mostly children. There were three who looked like they might die of old age before we reached the forest, and a handful of women, one of whom was shrieking with grief and terror. Maia’s mother-a woman with a hard, tear-streaked face-took the woman’s hand, but she just got louder. Her husband had been killed in front of her, and one of her children was missing. There really wasn’t much you could say, but her screaming was like a beacon in the night, telling the raiders exactly where we were.

There were only four men who looked capable of putting up a fight should the raiders catch up with us, and, apart from Maia’s father, who still cradled the crossbow, they boasted no more than kitchen knives and a pitchfork, weapons-wise. I was the only one on a horse, and all that seemed to do was make us conspicuous. I dismounted, gave the reins to Maia, and told her to lead the women and children along the track towards the woods. Once they reached the last farmhouse, they were to get off the path and make for the tree line. I called Maia’s father over, and gathered the other three men at the back of the slow, wailing column.

We were hidden behind the houses of the main street, many of which were burning. I could hear that there was some fighting going on at the far end, but it was only a token resistance, and the raiders would be on us soon enough.

“When the raiders come,” I said, “they’ll have to go through us.”

The men nodded, and I found myself listening to my voice as if it had come from someone else: someone like Orgos or Mithos who knew what he was doing and had organized tactical retreats like this dozens of time. I pictured the Cresdon audiences gazing up at me in this new and unlikely role and almost smiled.

One of the men was only a teenager with a blond wisp of a beard. His eyes looked scared. Maia’s father, a burly man whose name was Grath, put a heavy hand on his shoulder as if to pass a little courage his way, and then started walking backwards behind the women, his eyes on the village’s blazing silhouettes. I cocked my crossbow and tried to stay low, scuttling backwards like a crab.

The first horseman appeared behind a sprawl of low buildings with chimneys that I took to be a smithy. He had a torch, or I would not have seen him. Another joined him, flashing blackly into view as his horse cantered past a wall of flame. Then another. They were looking for me; I could feel it. They seemed to talk and then wheeled to face me, peering into the darkness.

We were a good 150 yards away and we had no torches or lanterns. There was a hawthorn hedge slanting across a field between us and them, not enough to obscure us completely, but enough to demand rather more of their eyes. We might have made it, had it not been for the crying of the bereaved.

The raiders caught their keening on the wind and their attitude shifted, grew tense and alert, like dogs. Then they began to move. They approached slowly at first, but you could feel their pace increasing with their certainty. Yes, there were people out there running away, and yes, they could reach them and kill them.

But there were still only three of them.

“Keep moving,” I called to the column of refugees as they trudged along the track towards the trees. “They are coming.”

The cries of grief slipped into a higher, more panicked register.

“Grath,” I said to Maia’s father, “hold the middle of the path.” I pushed into the hedge on one side and gestured for the kid with the crossbow to do the same on the other side.

There wasn’t time to think, and that was probably just as well. In a moment the three horsemen would be upon us.

Our two crossbows seemed to shoot simultaneously, but I couldn’t see what happened. One of the horses snorted and reared, and his rider crashed to the ground. I drew my sword and tried to block the downward slash of one of the other raiders’ scyaxes, but the force of the thing was too much for me and I fell to the road, those great hooves stamping around me. The kid was grappling with the fallen raider, rolling on the ground and grunting with pain and anger. Grath was using a pitchfork to stab and parry at the third horseman. Then his pitchfork fell to the road, and Grath slumped back, kicked hard in the stomach by the raider’s great chestnut mount, and I looked up to find a bronze face looming over me.

I struggled to my knees to block his scyax with my sword, but my strength had gone, and his blow put me on my back again. The raider stooped low in the saddle and raised the scyax above his head to strike. I looked over at Grath, but he was lying where he had fallen, and the kid was still locked in battle with the other raider. He might win, but it would take about five seconds too long.

So, I thought, with sudden clarity, this is it.

I tried not to shut my eyes.

And then there was silence. Real silence. The silence of a shocked, spellbound audience, when you can’t even hear the creak of the stage or the crunching of nuts in the pit because everyone, every living soul in the place, is momentarily still.

Then there was a swish of air, a thud, and the raider above me rocked quietly out of his saddle, the pitchfork embedded in his chest. I rolled and looked for Grath, trying to gasp out my thanks, but Grath was still lying on the road, winded and groaning. Maia’s mother stood in the center of the lane, slender and pale, her eyes streaming, her right hand still raised and open.

The third raider reined his horse to a stuttering halt and turned back to the village. He wasn’t about to take us on alone, and he would return with more, but for a moment, it was over.

As Maia’s mother crumpled to the road, giving way completely to her grief and horror, I realized something. Until now, our mission had been about obligation, a way to make some money and stay alive. The only emotion my duties had instilled in me so far had been fear. Now there was something else: outrage. I didn’t know that I could do anything to stop the raiders, but the party was the only force I had encountered so far that might even come close. I needed to get back to them.

So we kept moving. We took the two horses and the raiders’ weapons. In three more minutes we were off the lane and in the lee of the Iruni Wood. I stayed at the back, watching, but they didn’t come after us. Not this time.

We walked through the woods for about an hour, and then, when exhaustion was starting to get the better of the older villagers and the smallest children, we stopped and slept as best we could in the rain. When we rose at first light we had no food or water, and the villagers had nowhere to go. I wanted to press north towards Verneytha, but if we stayed in the forest, we would eventually get dangerously close to that stone circle, and that was not a chance I was prepared to take. After a couple of hours of walking through the trees, we pulled east and were out of the woods altogether by lunchtime. Not that we had any lunch, of course. But it had stopped raining, and that was something.

As we walked, I tried to make sense of what I had learned in the last day or so. It was odd, but the villagers treated me like a soldier who knew what he was doing, so I started thinking in those terms: Will the specialist, the tactician, the man with secret knowledge about the raiders and their methods.

I thought about the maps we had looked over in Adsine, the ones showing the location of the raider attacks. I now knew how they got from place to place unseen, and I had started to wonder if there was a range limit to the power that moved them, or if they could appear only in certain places. Clearly the pale rock in that underground chamber was the source of their power. A smaller version of the same opalescent crystal had been in the center of the Iruni stone circle, and the fact that the raiders had walked there with their coffins suggested that they couldn’t just vanish and reappear anywhere. But when the raiders had massed to assault the village, I had seen no such stone circle where we had appeared, nor had there been anything similar near the road when they attacked the coal wagons.

That scary raider with the horned helm was also a factor. He had been with them when they assaulted the convoy, and had seemed to move us from the circular cavern to the village, but the raiders at the stone circle had not required his presence to take them to the stables. Unless they could call on him, somehow, from the stone circle. Perhaps he could then bring them to the underground chamber. That made a kind of sense, and would suggest that all the other stones (including the ones in the helms themselves) were receptors: it was the crystalline base of that underground chamber that did the work. Surely, that was it.

The attacks, as I recalled, were clustered in the central downs, ten or twelve miles south of Verneytha, in the borderlands of Shale and Greycoast. Some had been farther west, around Adsine, and some had been along the shores to the south. Ironwall, which was the easternmost city, had never been attacked, though the roads linking it to Seaholme to the southwest and Hopetown to the northwest had. Could it be that Ironwall was too far from the underground chamber? Or maybe the lack of attacks close to the city was just a way of pointing suspicion elsewhere. The raiders could be nestled snugly under Duke Raymon’s palace for all I knew.

There was the Razor’s now-ransacked keep, of course, right in the middle of it all. And we hadn’t searched the place for a chamber in the bowels of the castle. But if the raiders could materialize in the keep itself, why appear in the woods outside to attack the place?

My mood worsened as the slow march progressed. We needed food, supplies, and a clear sense of where we were going. I figured that the rest of the party, after examining the farmhouse by the stone circle and giving up on my returning, would make for Verneytha’s capital city, Harvest, and check in with Treylen, the governor. I should try to meet them there, I decided. I mentioned this to Grath and he passed it along as if everyone was invited. They seemed to think this as good an option as any and trailed after me like I knew what I was doing. It was all fairly bizarre, frankly, though not comically so.

Part of me wanted to just ride off. Even as poor a horseman as I was, I would reach Harvest in about a third of the time if I hadn’t been dragging this string of starving refugees. But I couldn’t leave them.

The families stuck together and enfolded the orphaned and lost to their collective bosom. I walked my horse slowly along, not talking to anyone and avoiding their eyes, keeping my distance in every way possible. The woman who had lost her child had found him alive and well just outside the village, but she then had to explain that he would never see his father again. They seemed lost and desperate, infected by terror like it was a disease. Of course I couldn’t leave them.

By midafternoon we reached a scattered hamlet with a mill and a rustic tavern, and it was like finding an oasis after weeks in the desert. The kids shrieked with delight and danced, jumping into the stream, while the adults hugged each other and cheered and wept. I went inside and bartered with the tavern owner for bread and cheese and a few draughts of ale.

A few of the villagers stayed at the inn, but most, including Maia’s family and the teenaged kid with the crossbow, who seemed to have aged about ten years since I first met him, stayed with me. We bought a broken-down cart and a couple of horses to pull it, or, rather, I bought it and the others threw in the few coppers they had left. We covered a few more miles, but it was painfully slow, and once it got dark we had to stop and make camp. Again, I kept myself to myself and slept fitfully, getting up several times to make sure there was no sign of the raiders. Everyone was still treating me like some kind of military expert and savior, and though I could play the part well enough, it was exhausting and terrifying. If the raiders caught up with us.

I couldn’t wait to meet up with the party, if only to hand off the responsibility for these people to someone who would know what to do with it.

The next day we reached Verneytha. It was all I had heard and more. Golden wheat fields spread to the left, and dairy herds, plump and shiny, grazed on the right. We were stopped by a unit of Verneytha’s light cavalry and asked about our destination. Everyone looked at me, so I did the talking.

The soldiers were armed with lances and wore light brass-scaled hauberks. Capes of green silk fluttered in the sun behind them. I explained very briefly the history of my sad little entourage, but you could tell that the officer didn’t really care one way or the other. I told him who I was anyway, made it sound like Governor Weasel and I had been in short pants together, and told him we would need a military escort to the city.

The officer’s attitude changed as soon as I mentioned Edwyn Treylen, becoming more helpful and attentive. I asked what they were doing, riding around like this, wondered even if they had been looking for me. It was standard procedure, they said: fast, mobile policing. It gave the governor eyes all over the state. I asked him what the crime rate was like, and he gave me a blank look, like I’d asked him which part of the moon served the best beer. There was no crime, he said, slightly offended, committed by Verneytha subjects; there were only “malefactors from abroad.” Recently the raiders had taken to hitting patrols like his, he said. Three units had been lost in as many weeks. Now speed was also safety. In fact, if I would saddle up and ride with them, we could get back to Harvest and the rest of the party in no time.

“What about them?” I asked, nodding at the villagers.

“They’ve come this far without an armed escort, and through much more dangerous country,” said the officer.

I stared at him, then said simply, “No. You watch them all the way to the city, or the governor will hear about it.”

He agreed readily enough, though I don’t think he really got it.

I took Maia and her parents aside. “I have to go on ahead,” I said. The little girl’s face fell and she clutched my hand, small and tight. “I’ll let the governor know you’re coming,” I said, a little too lightly, avoiding those vast brown eyes. “You’ll be looked after when you get there. You’ll be safe.”

Would they really? I didn’t know. If the raiders could smash one of Verneytha’s mounted patrols, they could get to the villagers easily enough; I just hoped they saw no reason to bother. As for what Edwyn Treylen would make of these poor and exhausted refugees, I couldn’t say, and preferred not to speculate. But the place looked like it could use still more field laborers, and that couldn’t be too bad a life, could it? I watched the farmhands as they worked by the road, their eyes cast down as if to look at us would be the height of rudeness, and I had an odd sinking feeling. For all its wealth and fertility, Verneytha might not be the paradise I had hoped. The laborers all had something of a haunted look and couldn’t wait to get back to their vegetable picking, staring intently at the ground; it was as if they were afraid, but it was a muted, familiar fear. A legion of raiders in full armor could have ridden right by them and I don’t think they would have seen them, unless they were dressed as asparagus.