Realm of Dragons

“If it were up to me,” the guard who seemed to be in charge said, “I’d take you out and hang you right away as an example, but you’re lucky. His lordship wants to know how you found out about his treasure, and after that… well, maybe you aren’t so lucky after all.”

“I’m always lucky,” Renard managed as the guards started to drag him away. “Can’t you tell?”

He forced a smile, but only ended up spitting blood. This was bad, worse than even the time when… well, frankly, worse than all the times. Before, he’d always been able to fight his way out, or talk his way out, or just run away in an act of brazen cowardice that definitely didn’t make it into his retellings of his deeds. Now though, he couldn’t see how he was going to get away with this.

He was going to die.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Erin rode toward the village, not stopping, not able to stop. It was all very well the others saying that they should hang back and wait for more knights, but every moment that they waited was a moment in which the people in the village, the quiet men pretending to be villagers, might leave and get away with the things they’d done.

Erin couldn’t allow that, whatever it might cost.

The possible cost flashed by her on either side as she rode in between the scarecrows they’d formed from the actual villagers. Erin thought about what it might be like to be tied there like that, left out for the scavengers, killed and abandoned. That only fueled her need to do this.

“Come back, you fool!” Til shouted behind her. Fenir was with him, the two galloping along in Erin’s wake. Erin supposed that from the outside, they must have seemed like an arrow wedge of charging knights, rather than one charging princess and a couple of knights trying to catch up to her. She almost laughed at the thought, then remembered what she was charging into and stopped herself.

A couple of crossbow bolts flashed past as Erin charged, close enough that she felt the thrill of fear that came with the near miss. She gripped her short spear tight in an overhand grip, ready to strike down with it as she charged. The supposed “villagers” were drawing weapons now, ready to fight.

“Die!” Erin roared, striking down at the first of them as he was still trying to reload his crossbow. Almost obligingly, he did, her spear plunging deep into his throat and ripping clear again. Erin leapt from her moving horse and it slammed into a group of them, scattering them and crushing one man while Erin was still rolling back to her feet.

They came at her then. One cut with a curved blade and Erin blocked it with the haft of her spear. Another lunged forward with a long sword in two hands and Erin felt it scrape from her chain shirt as she swayed aside. She struck back with her spear, one blow, then another, trying to find a way through.

More of the soldiers disguised as villagers came forward then, trying to encircle her. There were men and women there, armed with a wider range of weapons than Erin had seen. Some had swords, others daggers or axes. One woman had a morning star, the head of which she twirled before swinging it at Erin to try to tangle her spear. Erin let the chain of the thing wrap round the haft of her weapon, then went in with it, launching a crunching head butt into the woman’s face. She fell back and Erin stabbed her.

The others tried to close in around her, but Fenir and Til were there then, slamming into the enemy with all the skill and force of trained knights of the Spur. Til hacked downward from his perch on his horse, while Fenir dismounted on the run, advancing with sword and shield to batter at the nearest foes.

Erin didn’t have time to watch them, though, because she had her own opponents to worry about. The one with the curved sword was coming at her again, with a wicked series of slashes that threatened to catch her out with the slightest misstep. Erin used the sheath for her spear head like a shield, deflecting the blows one by one, but then the one with the longsword was coming at her from the side, weapon raised.

In desperation, Erin threw herself into a ducking roll, thrusting upward with her spear as she came out of it. She felt the head of it slide upward into flesh, and the man gasped, his longsword clattering to the ground before he fell.

Erin tried to pull her spear out of him, and for a moment, it stuck. She felt something slash across her leg and she cried out in pain; then she set her foot on the dead man’s chest and wrenched the spear clear. She turned in time to parry another slashing blow of the sword, then cut back with a swipe of her own weapon at throat height. She tore through the soldier’s throat, and this time, she didn’t pause, but plunged back into the fight.

She could see Til fighting on foot now, his horse down. There was an arrow sticking from his shoulder, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him. Erin saw one of the enemy coming up behind him with a dagger, and there was no time to get there. Erin hefted her spear and then threw it, the weapon plunging into the man’s chest to bring him down.

It left Erin facing her last foe, a woman armed with an axe, armed with only the staff-like sheath of her weapon. She parried the first swing, catching the head of the weapon on the stave, and then the two of them were pressed in close to one another, striking and pushing, trying to find an angle for the next blow. Erin tried to get to her belt knife, but in the tightness of the battle, it was hard to do even that.

Erin felt her foot catch on something, had a moment to register the corpse of the first opponent she’d killed, and then she was tumbling backward to the ground. The woman with the axe was standing over her, her armor shining out now beneath the tears in her peasant’s garb.

“Should have stayed away, girl,” she said, in an accent that was clearly from the south. She lifted the axe, and in that moment Erin knew there was no way to dodge it in time, certainly no way to parry it without a weapon. If she’d still had her spear, she might have been able to strike back, but like this… she was going to die.

Erin found herself thinking of her family. She missed them in that moment. Missed her sisters, even her brothers. She wished they’d been able to understand that she wasn’t like them. She wished… she wished so many things…

Then Fenir stepped in and cut the axe woman’s head from her shoulders, cutting short all of those thoughts. He looked down at Erin.

“Shouldn’t throw your weapon,” he said, terse as always, before turning back to the rest of the fight.

Except that now, there was no fight, because Til was just finishing the last of their enemies, cutting him down with a wet, sticky sound. Erin forced herself back to her feet, gritting her teeth against the pain of the cut in her leg. She wasn’t going to let the others see her weak. She hobbled over to the body with a short spear sticking from it and dragged it out. Cleaning it meant that she had something to do to take her mind from the post-battle shakes that were starting through her, threatening to take over her whole body.

“Should bind that wound,” Fenir said, nodding toward her leg. “Could get infected.”

Beside him, Til was less generous. “What were you thinking?”

“What?” Erin countered. “We won, didn’t we?”

They had won. The three of them against a dozen or more foes, and they’d won. It seemed that everything they’d said about the Knights of the Spur was true.

“And what if there had been more of them hiding in the buildings?” Til demanded. “What if there had been just one more, to distract Fenir while you were nearly dying?”

“Ease off,” Fenir said. “She fought well.”

Til shook his head. “She took stupid risks, almost died, and got herself wounded. More than that…” He returned his attention to Erin. “More than that, you ignored everything I said about the need to wait.”

“What if they’d run?” Erin shot back. “What if they’d left while we were waiting? What if they’d gotten away with it?”

Til must have heard the fury in her voice at that thought, because he took half a step back.

“Do you think I wanted them to get away with what they’d done?” he asked, softly. “I’m as glad they’re dead as you are, but we have to think bigger than that. We have to think about saving the people who are still alive.”

“Well, we’ve stopped them from killing anyone else too,” Erin said.

Fenir spoke then. “Not about that. These are Quiet Men.”

“Which means what?” Erin asked. Maybe it was the pain in her leg, but she didn’t have time for his terseness right then.

“Which means,” Til explained, “that there’s something bigger going on. The Quiet Men are the spies and advanced forces of the southerners. King Ravin sends them out to do specific tasks, or he sends them out like here, as scouts.”

“Scouts?” Erin said. “You mean—”

“I mean that they took this village so they would have somewhere safe to bring more men,” Til said. “There’s nothing special here, nothing valuable, so it’s the only thing that makes sense. They were preparing the ground, opening the way. And if we’d died trying to stop them, no one else would have known. Do you understand?”

Erin understood. If these were scouts, it meant that the rest of an army wouldn’t be far behind. There was an invasion coming from the south, and she’d just experienced the first touch of it.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

Nerra went to the woods, because she didn’t know where else to go. She could feel the tears falling from her eyes as she walked, but they just blended in with the damp and the strangeness of the forest. Her hands trailed over the trees around her, identifying the plants there by touch: fungus and trailing leaves, flowers and bark.

Her dress was torn, because her bleary eyes hadn’t allowed her to move with her usual fluidity through the trees. Nerra didn’t care: fancy dresses were Lenore’s obsession, not hers. No, that wasn’t fair, not when her sister was one of those who had tried to stand up to their father. She and Rodry had done it when their other brothers had stood by, even though it risked their father’s wrath, and that of the nobles around.

That had been part of why Nerra had carried herself away to the forest. If she’d stayed, her siblings would have kept trying to push the issue, and would only have found themselves in trouble for it. Those helping the ones with the scale sickness were reckoned almost as bad as the sick themselves.

“I’ll not see them hurt,” Nerra said. She didn’t want anyone hurt over her. She didn’t want anyone hurt at all. The threats the southerners had made of war seemed worse than anything that could happen to her; bad enough that she knew she shouldn’t be worrying about being cast out like this. What did that matter that she was cast out, when there was something happening that could threaten everyone?

“I don’t matter,” Nerra said, although it still hurt, still felt worse than anything in her life had.

The hardest part of it was the sense of betrayal. All through her life, her father had been there for her. He’d known that she was sick, had known about her sickness. Hadn’t he been the one to ask Master Grey about it? To send for the best doctors that the House of Scholars could find? Yet in the hall, he’d acted as though he had never seen her arms before, as if it were all some great shock to him.

“He had to,” Nerra tried to tell herself, but it was hard to convince herself, so hard. She couldn’t believe that a father would just cast out a daughter like that, would refuse to listen.