The Wayward Knights

Chapter 11

Sirbones stared at the clouds piling up on the northwestern horizon. Their tops were still foamy white, but lower they were shot with gray, and toward the bases some of them had turned black.

And was it just his imagination, or did he see flickers of lightning in the lower blackness? It would not be long before he could he sure, as the clouds seemed to have grown taller, closer, or both even in the little time since their appearance. Or was that, too, his imagination?

Sirbones turned to his companion, an Istaran priest of Majere, and said, "Has anyone tested those clouds to see if this is some magical storm conjured up to blow on us?"

The priest looked at Sirbones as he might have at a rip in a new robe. He was sweating, and his face was so round that Sirbones doubted that the other lived as simply as was expected of those who served Majere. "Why don't you do it yourself," the priest asked tersely, "if you've reason to fear?"

Sirbones smiled. "Mishakal seldom gives her servants serious weather magic, or even magic-detection spells," he said. "Healing demands too much strength. Majere allows one to cultivate the mind more widely, or so I have heard."

"Not widely enough to tell cloudbursts from chaos," the Istaran said. "At least not in this land. I've heard that it rains about every other day, except in the seasons when it rains every day. If you couldn't face that, why did you come?"

Clearly the Istaran had no fear that the god to whom he was sworn would condemn him for insulting another cleric. When younger, Sirbones might have envied the other how that freed his tongue. Age, however, had given discretion to Sirbones's tongue as well as aches to his bones. He smiled again and said, "Well, as long as the rain does not wash anyone away, it matters little whence it comes. I am too old to plunge into torrents and snatch people from their jaws."

The Istaran shrugged, uttered what was less than a word if more than a grunt, and walked away.

Left alone, Sirbones had a moment to look forward, at the slope up which the humans would soon be advancing. Fifty paces in front of him stood the vanguard, two bands of well-armed men.

The men on the left looked like a dozen brawlers abducted from the waterfront of Istar, but they had good swords and knives, sound helmets, and a double-bitted felling axe for every third man. Also, two of them had bows, and Sirbones doubted that he was the only man who wondered where they had come by those bows, if they knew how to use them, and where the arrows would go if they flew at all.

A dozen men and women from Red Elf held the post of honor on the right, as they well deserved to. Torvik himself led them. Sirbones would have been happier if Torvik himself had remained aboard ship. The young captain had not wholly recovered from his ordeal. But Torvik was adamant, resisting not only Sirbones's persuasion but Tarothin's blandishments and the next thing to a direct order from Sir Pirvan.

Oh, Sirbones thought. To be young enough to have that much strength to sacrifice in the name of honor! Two years' rest in his home temple had restored him as much as his years would allow. He feared that might not be enough to see him through to the end of this-battle? Quest? Expedition?

Before he could decide on a word, he noticed that a second, longer shadow had joined his. Then an unmistakable smell made his nostrils wrinkle of their own will.

"Can't stand the smell of honest work?" Fulvura said. She was doubtless trying to whisper, but a minotaur whispering could be heard in a blacksmith's forge chamber.

"Thinking of what we're about," Sirbones said politely.

"Finding out who wants both men and minotaurs dead," the minotaur said, not so quietly. She spoke Common well, although with a pronounced accent.

Heads turned in the vanguard. They, at a glare from Fulvura, turned back to look ahead to where the ground began to rise and tangles of brush, vines, and scrubby trees covered more of it. Even without magic, Sirbones suspected they would lose people to the serpents that brush undoubtedly hid.

"Then I'd best be well up toward the front," Sirbones said.

"I'll guard your back, if I may," Fulvura said. Sirbones looked at her, decided that the offer was serious, and knew that it could not be refused.

"I'm grateful," Sirbones said. "But don't turn your back on those Istaran bravos."

Fulvura snorted. She sounded remarkably like a bull about to charge.

"They had better watch theirs," she said, loudly enough for Sirbones to see Istarans flinch. He looked at her weaponry and decided that she could well be right.

She carried a bundle of three shatangs (minotaur throwing spears) across her back, and a double-edged battle-axe in her right hand. On a metal-studded leather belt she wore several katars (minotaur daggers), with blades of varying length and elaborately decorated hilts. She also wore spiked metal wrist guards on both arms, and a tunic of sharkskin sewn with steel disks. Sirbones suspected that the tunic alone weighed more than he did.

Altogether, he would wager that the humans would be glad Fulvura was with them, and their enemies would regret it. Any humans attempting treachery against the minotaurs would also regret it, if they lived long enough.

Drums rolled-at first only a few, then a dozen, then too many to count. A trumpet blared, but the bellowing of two hundred minotaurs drowned it out almost at once.

The ground seemed to shake as the minotaurs surged forward, toward the foot of the trail to the Green Mountain. The sun sparked fire from the weapons all of them carried, from the helmets a few of them wore, and from the great banners clustered at the head of the column.

Sir Darin Waydolsson hoped that the standard-bearers would not be so zealous in competing for the lead that they fell to fighting among themselves. This was not a contest in the arena; today no minotaur should make himself enemy to any other. He also knew that to ask this of minotaurs, one needed to be a god, not a mere Knight of Solamnia.

The standard-bearers did not come to blows. Axes and clabbards, the saw-edged minotaur broadswords, had widened the path enough to let the whole band of them strike the slope at once. There they halted, while warriors flowed forward to either side of them to take the lead.

More axes and clabbards danced in the warriors' hands, and at least one tessto. The great spiked club with a thong at its hilt was the one minotaur weapon even Darin had not been strong enough to learn well, and it seemed in any case more suitable for the arena than for the battlefield. But again, only gods could safely give a minotaur unasked-for advice about fighting.

Darin felt his wife slip her arm through his and rise on tiptoe to whisper in his ear: "The minotaurs seem a mob rather than a war band. Is this their way?"

Darin nodded. "They train mostly to fight in the arena," he told her, "where even melees take place on level ground, or ships' decks. Also, a minotaur is not at ease submitting to discipline in ways that give another authority over him.

"Much as I honor Waydol's memory, I always thought that was as important as any other reason he had for fleeing south. But do not judge too soon, or by the minotaurs you may have seen as slaves in Istar. The minotaurs do not call themselves the 'Destined Race' or the 'Chosen Ones' for their prowess at berry picking or lute playing!"

Rynthala's grip tightened almost painfully, and Darin remembered that she had never been to the Mighty City in her life, nor seen much of its settled lands except Tirabot Manor. Minotaur slaves were rare in Solamnia, and Sir Pirvan would no more have kept one than he would have made a human sacrifice of his wife or daughter.

"You can see Istar for yourself when this is done," he said. "I have some honor time coming to me."

"If we can trust the Istarans to be good hosts," Rynthala murmured. "But we go together there, too. Guard each other's backs again."

Darin smiled. "It was not always at your back where you wished me close," he said. Then he looked at the sky. Half of it had now vanished behind the oncoming clouds. He had not voyaged far enough to see such a warm-seas storm for himself, but Waydol had memorably described them.

The question tonight might not be guarding one another's backs from minotaurs while they slept. The problem might well be sleeping at all.

The clouds had begun to blow wind on the marching column. Darin and Rynthala had nearly closed with the vanguard when the first attack came. The humans were close enough to see the minotaur with the tessto whirl it, and see something fly into the air, caught in the hilt loop.

It was a snake, easily twice as long as a man. Darin had just time to see that before lightning flashed from the clouds above. The bolt split into a dozen spears of raw yellow fire, and half of them lashed the ground. Sand turned suddenly red hot and flew in all directions; minotaurs bellowed as pain seared even their tough hides.

Most of the other bolts seemed to strike where Darin could not see the results. All except one.

That one took the flying snake in midair. The blaze of fire briefly dazzled the knight. When he could see again, he saw fifty, a hundred, perhaps more snakes flying through the air where there had been only one.

They were not as large as the first snake. They didn't need to be. What they lacked in size, they made up for in viciousness. Also, in the length of the fangs that flashed in the sudden twilight as they opened their mouths to bite.

Darin felt something slap his shoulder, then a whick of disturbed air as steel flashed within a hairsbreadth of his neck. He turned to see Rynthala, face the color of a snow-field, stamping on the two writhing halves of the snake she'd slashed off his shoulder.

Before it could bite? He felt his neck and looked at his upper arm. Rynthala interrupted him. "It didn't bite you," she said. "Let's go help our friends."

Darin wanted to laugh at his wife pulling him out of a battle-daze. But she was right. Minotaurs had thick hides and thicker clothing, but that did not mean they had no vulnerable spots for a snake to thrust its fangs.

He drew his sword and prayed to Kiri-Jolith that the island's wizard had not used this same trick on the human column on the other side of the island.

One arm of the storm had advanced faster than the others, bringing rain down on the human column by the time the magical attack began.

The snakes here wriggled out from under bushes rather than sailed through the air. The shadows, particularly under the trees, made it hard to see the dark-scaled creatures, as long as a man's arm, attacking in a frenzy.

The humans fought back in an equal frenzy, but they had thinner skins than minotaurs, and not everyone wore boots or heavy clothing. Fangs sank deep and human fighters screamed and clawed at flesh turning purple-black or red-orange around the twin fang marks.

Some people slipped on the wet ground and fell in the path of the snakes, to be bitten on the face. They did not scream as long as the others, but nobody could look at what had been their faces after they stopped moving.

Pirvan was fighting in as close to full armor as he ever had. Past fifty, he was still faster than most warriors, and preferred to rely on that speed. He wore boiled-leather breeches and a boiled-leather tunic almost as rigid as steel, but a good deal lighter and nearly as proof against fangs and thorns. What else he might have to face, he would worry about when it came at him.

He also wore a leather helmet that protected most of his head and face but let him see to either side. That kind of vision had been life or death to a thief in the streets of Istar. It was the same to a Knight of Solamnia in a battle against who knew what sort of evil on a strange island in the hot northern seas.

His hands held a shield, with the edge sharpened for striking, and a short, heavy-bladed sword. He had been offered an axe but knew he could use any sort of sword better. He had never been muscular enough to wield armor-chopping weapons anyway.

A man ahead clutched at a bush that Pirvan half-expected to attack him with writhing, thorn-studded branches. The man fell into the bush and managed to entangle himself as thoroughly as any foe could have wished. A snake lurking under the bush attacked. It struck first at the man's booted foot, then at his leg, loosely garbed in sailor's trousers. The fangs missed flesh both times.

Foiled in its early attacks, the snake started crawling up a branch. Pirvan saw that the man might not untangle himself from the bush before the snake reached striking distance.

"Don't move!" Pirvan shouted. The man struggled more frantically. Branches waved. The snake fell off, nearly at Pirvan's feet. He stamped down, and felt the spine snap.

Good. The snakes might have magically-enhanced poison, but they were still of the same flesh and blood as nature had made them. Pirvan leaped back, dragging the man with him. The man howled as broken branches ripped his skin.

He stopped howling when he saw the writhing snake. Instead he drew his own curved sword and slashed down. The snake stopped writhing as its head flew from its body.

"Thanks, Sir Pirvan," the man said. He rushed on ahead, vanishing in the murk before Pirvan could reply.

Scorpions followed the snakes, but the rain seemed to slow them until they were almost easy prey. A few men were stung, however, by scorpions perched on branches at face level. They did not die-the scorpions being less poisonous than the snakes-but only wished they could die. Some of them begged for friends to kill them, and one or two found friends who were willing.

But even Istaran healers were equal to the scorpion stings-when they came up and started to work. Pirvan wondered if they would refuse to heal "sea barbarians," Vuinlodders, or others without virtue. He thought the best cure for that reluctance would be a foot or two of steel fed to enough Istarans to improve the manners of the rest.

But that would take the approval of Sir Niebar and Gildas Aurhinius, at least, not to mention his own conscience. The two senior leaders were well back in the column by now, as speed came to mean survival and youth, in most cases, meant speed.

Pirvan decided to catch up with the vanguard before his seniors caught up with him. He really wasn't supposed to be that far forward, but in for a piglet, in for the sow.

He took two steps, and a branch above dumped a bird's nest onto his face. He wiped dead leaves and bird dung out of his eyes with the back of his hand, then held his face up to let the rain wash it clean.

A hand clutched his arm.

"Where do you think you're going without me?" Haimya said.

"Forward."

"To the lead?"

"I'm not going back to Eskaia and tell her that I didn't try to be at her son's side," Pirvan said.

"Then I have an older right to go up there than you do."

Pirvan spat his mouth free of foulness and grinned. "I don't think we have time to argue," he said, looking at her. Wrinkles and crow's-feet, gray hair and thickening waiste vanished in the rain, and he saw again the battle maiden, Haimya.

"Pity you don't have a shield," he said. "We've never gone into battle with shields locked."

Haimya kissed him. "It's not as useful a way of fighting as you think, against most opponents," she said. "Now let's waste no more time arguing."

They did not lock shields, but they took their first few uphill steps hand in hand.

Sirbones was using only his staff for healing those stung by the scorpions. He had enough different potions to fill several cups, as well as many pouches of herbs. He did not want to expose any of these to the wind and the rain for anyone not already sliding into the Abyss.

The staff did not completely heal the scorpion-stung; they walked haltingly and with pain written large on their faces. But they could walk, away from the battle if they had the sense the gods gave lice, and back to more potent healing.

If the Istaran healers honored their vows to those not of Istar. Sirbones had heard too many tales of the kingpriest demanding that healers and others violate their vows, to have full trust in those who lived where the kingpriest held sway. He also had too much work at hand keeping his own vows to spend much time worrying about those who would break theirs. Indeed, Sirbones had so much work that he did not see the new attack before he had become its first victim.

Twenty paces ahead of the vanguard, consisting of two of Torvik's fighters and an Istaran, all apparently at peace with one another as they fought the common enemy, a stout tree branch bowed upward. It went on bowing upward until it snapped, to dangle by strips of bark and a few fibers of wood that seemed to glow in the storm-murk.

Then the lower portion of the branch, closest to the trunk, reared back. It hurled the broken portion forward like a plains rider's throwing spear. In midair, the broken portion spun end over end, until the jagged end was foremost.

It was this jagged end that drove spearlike into Sirbones's chest. It struck with enough force to knock him off his feet, but as it had pierced his heart as well as driving shattered ribs into his lungs, he felt no pain from the fall.

Indeed, he had only time to feel surprised, before he lost the power to feel at all.

Fulvura was not quite up with the vanguard of the human column. She did not entirely trust her back to this many humans in a battle so confused, deadly, and dark. It would be far too easy for someone to slip close in the rain, the wind, and the rest of the battle-din, and hamstring or even kill her.

She wished to avoid this, although not out of fear, being of a line that had never flinched from battle, raid, or arena, and produced at least one emperor they were willing to acknowledge. She was instead loyal to her brother's plans, which hung on some measure of peace with the humans, at least until they could all quit Suivinari Island with their work done.

Those plans would go sadly awry if Zeskuk had to avenge her death or wounding. Of course, he would also be without her help if she were killed or wounded in an ordinary battle, or merely fell overboard and drowned. But he would have no blood-duty of vengeance.

It was as Fulvura considered these matters that Sirbones died. Indeed, his body landed almost at her feet. Two long writhing tree roots snaked across the rich soil, gouging the leaf mold, reaching for the human healer's body and for the living man he had been trying to heal.

Fulvura stepped over Sirbones's body and chopped down with her battle-axe. The wounded man screamed, convinced that the axe blow was for him. He was still screaming when the descending blade hacked through the first root.

The minotaur jerked the man to his feet with her left hand and sent him stumbling toward the rear. Then she stamped hard on the other root, as it groped for either Sirbones or his staff. She could not be sure which was its intended prey.

The root stung her exposed foot, as if its sap were an acid. She smelled even in the storm the reek of scorching hoof. She was bending over to snatch Sirbones clear of immediate danger when the root brushed against the dead healer's staff.

There were legends of how the priests of Mishakal bound into their healing staves secret spells that kept anyone else from using their magic. Whether the legend was true, or whether the collision of healing magic and killing magic was simply too violent for matter to endure, Fulvura had the sense of standing on the lip of an erupting geyser.

Wood of every kind and in every form from whole trees down to splinters, mixed with sand, mud, hot water, steam, dead creatures and bits of creatures that the minotaur neither could nor wished to name-a mighty column of all these and more towered an arm's length from her. It soared into the treetops, then started to collapse.

Before a ship-long and minotaur-thick tree trunk fell where she had been standing, Fulvura had leaped backward, with agility more like a leopard's than a minotaur's. She had Sirbones's body firmly clutched under one arm and the battle-axe was still in the other.

"Hope I won't have to do that again, to prove anything to anybody," she muttered. She did not dare look about her for humans who might relieve her of her burden, but she hoped they would not be long in coming.

She would not leave the healer's body prey to twisted magic, but this was no battle for even a minotaur to fight burdened and one-handed!

Pirvan saw Zeskuk's sister standing with Sirbones's body under one arm about the same time as he noticed three other things.

One was Hawkbrother and Young Eskaia hurrying to catch up with him and Haimya.

The second thing was a quivering in the ground, not far from Fulvura.

The third was a misshapen form crashing through the undergrowth, ready to burst out of the trees. What it had been before magic transformed it, Pirvan did not know. He was only sure that it was no friend to anyone in the column.

Lightning flared again. This time it flung no snakes or anything else. It nearly dazzled Pirvan, but the remnants of his vision let him tell what was coming at him.

Once it had been a wild boar, or at least a wild pig. Now its snout was a razor-sharp spur of bone, its tusks were barbed, its teeth were pointed like a shark's, and its hooves left red smoke curling up where they touched. Pirvan rather hoped that its hide had not been turned to armor as well.

" 'Ware!" he shouted. Fulvura turned, and so did Hawkbrother, who had a throwing spear in one hand, which gave him the readiest weapon. The spear flew. It struck the once-boar in the left eye and stuck in the socket. The boar outbellowed a minotaur and charged the nearest enemy, who happened to be Fulvura.

The quivering ground flew apart in a shower of dirt and things too long dead to be looked at, let alone smelled, without revulsion. Fulvura reeled backward, nearly losing her balance. The monster boar turned aside and caught sight of Pirvan.

As the glaring yellow eye steadied on him, Pirvan wondered if Wilthur the Brown's magical creations were falling afoul of one another. This would not save him from the boar without some further exertion on his part, however, so he leaped, slashed, fell, rolled, and sprang to his feet again in a single flow of movement, knowing as he did that he had been as fast as he had ever been. He had also hamstrung the boar, but it seemed to be quite as fit to charge on three legs as it had been on four. Pirvan, on the other hand, doubted that he could death-dance with the boar for as much as another minute.

He did not have to. Before Fulvura could fall, Eskaia and her mother caught the minotaur and steadied her. She rumbled something that did not seem to convey gratitude, but then being rude to lesser races was sometimes a point of honor with minotaurs.

Meanwhile, Fulvura flung the axe down, all but threw Sirbones's body at Hawkbrother, unslung the shatangs from her back, and snapped the finger-thick leather thongs binding them as if they were pack thread. Then she put one shatang between the boar's ribs. As it staggered around to face her, she put the second into its throat. It fell too quickly to need the third.

Fulvura and Pirvan met, facing each other over the boar's body. They fell somewhere between shaking hands and glaring at each other, until at last Fulvura jerked her head. Pirvan saw, and wondered how he had escaped noticing it before, that one of her horns was painted in spirals of red and gold, and the other in purple and green.

"Well struck," she said, looking back at the trio grouped around Sirbones's body. "Stop gaping and either get out of the fight or find someone else to oil and wrap him. I'm done with scavenging this thrice-cursed battlefield!"

Then she stared, as if she could not understand why Pirvan was shaking with laughter, and many more than three humans were shouting her name as if it were a war cry.

Tarothin wished he could shout louder than the storm and the battle together. Then this Istaran witling might listen to him!

Instead he turned away, to nearly run into a medium-sized, sharp-faced woman wearing a robe that sun and salt air had faded from black to a dubious gray. The Red Robe almost made a gesture of aversion. Revella Laschaar, the oldest and most powerful Black Robe woman with the fleet, had come to the battlefield.

Karthayan by birth, she now lived in Istar. It was said that she was much in favor with kingpriests over the past twenty years, and Tarothin suspected this was true. She would never have risen so high otherwise.

"Tarothin, friend of the wayward and the unvirtuous!" she called.

"I do not answer to those titles, O servant of Nuitari," he said.

"So be it," Revella replied. "Waste my time, waste your time, waste the lives of those who need our help."

Tarothin bit down on another sharp reply, so hard he thought for a moment he had broken a tooth. Well, there was Sirbones to put it right if so. Meanwhile, no one ignored Revella Laschaar without paying a price.

"Reverend Lady Revella," he hissed, "do you wish to speak, or may I?"

"Answer a question first, then I will listen."

"I will tell all that I know."

"All?" The Black Robe laughed, throwing her head back so far that Tarothin half hoped something would fall into her mouth and choke her. Then she pierced him with an arrow-swift glance.

"We have no time for that much," she continued. "Only tell me this: When you and Rubina fell out with one another-was that feigned or real?"

Tarothin groped for his scattered wits, trying to throw them back across the years to the Black Robe who had been his lover during Waydol's War. As he groped, he looked more closely at Lady Revella. It seemed now that something about her features echoed Rubina's, or perhaps the other way around. Almost certainly a blood tie, somewhere.

But that was a mystery whose answer could wait. An answer to Lady Revella could not.

"It was all an act," Tarothin said. "Well, perhaps not wholly on her part. She did take another lover, until we met again. After that…"

Briefly, Tarothin was glad that it was raining. Otherwise someone might have noticed that his eyes were wet.

"Ha!" Revella spat. "That is the answer I hoped for. Now I can help you."

"Help?"

"You haven't changed your mind about needing some magic worked for more than healing, have you? And stop gaping as if you didn't have a mind to change!" The lady's tongue certainly lived down to rumor.

"We certainly need all the help against Wilthur we can find," he said. "What is your price?"

"Already paid. You made Rubina happy. Darin trusted her. Pirvan honored her with his youngest daughter's name. Gildas Aurhinius would have saved her. Your stand at Belkuthas avenged her."

Tarothin's memories had now caught up with the Black Kobe's babble. It had been the unlamented Captain Zephros who killed Rubina at the end of Waydol's War, and met his own end in the siege of Belkuthas.

"She wished us no ill, and helped us when she could. More than we would have asked," Tarothin said. "Why should we not honor her?"

"Too many people these days give reasons or excuses why not!" Revella snapped. Then, without waiting for permission as wizardly custom required, she touched her staff to Tarothin's.

He neither sprouted wings, fell senseless, nor began to speak in the tongues of the gods. But Rubina's old spell for linking his magic to another's thundered back into his mind, like rampaging minotaurs. He pressed hands to his ears, in a futile effort to fight a noise that was trapped within his skull.

"Hold Rubina's spell, and let me give you one of mine, that we can cast linked," Revella said. "Well, what are you waiting for? Is your brain so soft Rubina's masterpiece has sunk out through the bottom of it?"

Tarothin shook his head and was surprised when it did not fall off his shoulders. "No," he said. "But-I won't ask why you do this. I will ask that if we are not enough by ourselves, will the rest of Istar's magicworkers follow you?"

"They had cursed well better," Revella snapped. "Or have a good explanation. Now, put your staff across mine just there…"

Sir Darin was not the first to notice the break in the storm. The minotaurs had thrown out scouts to the flanks as well as to the front, and in between hacking at maddened vegetation and poisoned monstrosities of animals, they felt the wind and rain ease.

Then they saw breaks in the clouds, and began bellowing the news, loudly enough to be heard over the last of the storm and the battle. They had to outbellow the battle for quite a while.

Darin had never fought side by side with Rynthala in such a deadly fight. He found that it was a curiously intimate experience, in which he could feel as close to her as when they were wrapped in each other's arms.

It did not, fortunately, affect the iron detachment Waydol had taught him to bring to war, and which helped make him almost as formidable as a minotaur. Minotaurs might be stronger, but they fought, too often, in hot fury.

It was in that hot fury that the minotaur column set about clearing a path to their comrades high on the mountain. Some minotaurs fell, past healing; others fell and were carried to momentary safety. The enemy's magical creations gave way before trampling hooves and flying steel. Darin even saw minotaurs using their horns, to hook animated branches away from comrades, or gore sorcerous beasts trying to leap down from above.

Darin and Rynthala had armor, while the minotaurs often relied on their tough hides, so the humans kept well to the forefront. It was just behind the head of the column, indeed, that they saw an obscenity with wings and teeth swooping down on a minotaur.

Rynthala had long since shot off all her arrows, retrieved none, and found no far-striking weapon lying on the battlefield. Minotaurs, of course, were not much for archery, except sometimes at sea-which Darin thought just as well. He did not want to think of the power of an arrow shot from a bow that a minotaur could honorably wield; it would go through plate as if it were cheese.

But a shatang lay near, the head bent but otherwise serviceable. Darin snatched up the fallen weapon, hefted it to judge its balance, then threw it.

The bent head sent the shatang a trifle awry and the winged creature had time to claw at the minotaur's eyes before the shatang transfixed one wing. Darin ran in and chopped off the other wing with his sword, then jerked the shatang loose and pinned the creature to the ground with it.

Meanwhile, Rynthala was trying to wrap an herb-steeped dressing around the minotaur's bleeding, blinded eyes. It was her last one, but Darin judged the risk was fair. The battle must be close to a lull, if not an end, regardless of who would claim victory.

The herbs were supposed to bring calm, ease pain, and stop bleeding. It was a formula handed down from Rynthala's parents, and Darin had seen it save lives before.

It nearly cost him his.

It had not occurred to him that the winged creature might have a mate or at least a companion. He only thought of that in the moment after claws ripped at his exposed cheek and hand, leaving both feeling as if they had been branded and set aflame.

Rynthala cut the creature out of the air with her sword a moment later. It screamed in dying, and Darin wished the scream would go on long enough so that he himself could cry out without being heard. Instead, he bit his lip until blood came, then tried to force out sensible words that would keep Rynthala from lamenting her ill-timed generosity.

"As long as it's not-poison-" he said, feeling as he spoke a chill that gave the lie to his words.

"It is," a voice rumbled behind him, in the minotaur tongue. Darin wanted to turn, but knew he would faint if he tried, so only stood, swaying gently, until the speaker came around to his front.

The minotaur wore sandals, an apron with many pockets, and a sleeveless vest hung with pouches. In his prime, he must have matched Waydol's height, but now that his muzzle was gray and his russet hide speckled with white, Darin could almost meet his eye.

One eye only-the healer wore a patch over the other, taken by some injury beyond his powers to heal.

"Hello, Grimsoar," Darin said. "I always knew you were too big to be human."

The minotaur healer looked from Darin to Rynthala, and Darin was vaguely aware of having spoken without making sense. Rynthala made an imperative gesture; Darin wanted to remind her about not ordering minotaurs about.

For a moment he thought his reminder had come too late, as the minotaur drew a katar from an apron pocket. Then the minotaur jerked a pouch off his vest and let its contents-some sort of pinkish jelly-ooze over the katar. It was when the minotaur thrust at Darin's cheek with the katar that the knight became sure his wife had doomed them both with a mortal insult to the healer.

Then Rynthala clutched him, holding him motionless, and for a moment rage and pain nearly drove him to smashing her jaw with his good hand. In the next moment there was no room in him for rage, only pain. He was certain that the minotaur had driven the katar clean through his head, and wondered if the point would erupt through the other cheek.

Then the pain in Darin's cheek was gone. Rynthala was still holding him, and the minotaur was running the katar along the wounded hand, so the knight had no way to feel his cheek. Even when the minotaur stepped back and Rynthala released him, he did not quite dare to use his wounded hand to feel his cheek.

He was sure it would fall off if he used it.

But the left hand brought no pain from the wounded cheek, only brushing fingers over a ridged scar. He would have a barbarian's look to him if that scar did not heal, but now he was content that it did not hurt.

And his sword hand was only stiff from its scar, not painful at all. He flexed his fingers; they all moved. No muscles torn, or at least none left unhealed.

He looked around for the minotaur healer. He saw only the backs of two minotaurs, one with bandaged eyes, walking down the hill. He also realized that the storm had died completely that he heard the last rain dripping from the trees and little else. No, he heard distant moans, too deep to be human. Minotaurs did their best to die in silence, but some pain no being of flesh and blood could endure.

He now knew that better than ever before. He hoped that somewhere beyond the world, Waydol also knew that those he had left behind had some care for the human child he had fostered.

Then Rynthala was embracing him, so that his ribs creaked and might have broken had he not been wearing armor. As he bent to kiss her, the last thing he saw above was a flock of seabirds soaring in from the ocean.