There was movement at the edge of his field of vision.
No - not all had fled to the woods. From around the corner of the barn came a man; limping, painfully, slowly, but moving so quietly that the snow didn't even creak beneath his boots. He was stalking the drake. A new set of thoughts invaded Vanyel's mind, fragmentary, but enough to tell him what the man was about.
It was an old man, a tired, old man; it was the woman's grandfather. He'd been caught in the barn when the thing attacked and knocked the stockade flat, and he'd seen his granddaughter's husband walk into the thing's jaws. He'd recognized the drake for what it was, and he'd armed himself with the only weapon he could find. A pitchfork. Ridiculous against a colddrake.
The colddrake was paying no attention to anything except the prey right before it. The old man crept up behind it without it ever noticing he was there.
The old man knew, with calm certainty, that he was going to die. He knew that his attack was never going to do anything more than anger the creature. But it would break the thing's concentration; it would make it turn its head away for one crucial moment.
His attack was suicidal, but it would give his granddaughter and her children a chance to live.
He came within an arm's length of the colddrake - he poised the pitchfork as casually as if he were about to stab a haybale - and he struck, burying the pitchfork tines in the colddrake's side with a sound like a knife burying itself to the hilt in a block of wood.
The drake screamed; its whistling shriek shattered the dreadful silence, and nearly shattered Vanyel's eardrums. It whipped its head around on its long, snaky neck, and it seized the old man before he even let go of the pitchfork. With a snap of its jaws that echoed even above its shrill screeching, it bit the old man's head neatly off his shoulders.
Vanyel screamed as he felt the old man die - and the oldster's desperate courage proved to be too much of a goad for him to resist.
Anger, fear, other emotions he couldn't even name, all caught him up, raised him to his feet, drove him out into the open and exploded out of him with a force that dwarfed the explosion he'd caused when Starwind had tried to make him call lightning.
He was thinking just enough to throw up a shield around the woman and her children with one shouted word. Then he hit the drake with everything he had in him. The blast of raw power caught the drake in the side and sent it hurtling up over the roof of the house - high into the sky - and held it suspended there for one agonizing moment while Vanyel's insides felt as if they were tearing loose.
Then the power ran out, and it fell to the earth, bleeding in a hundred places, every bone in its body shattered.
And Vanyel dropped to his knees, then his hands, then collapsed completely, to lie spent in the open field under the pale winter sun, gasping for breath and wondering what he had done.
Savil surveyed the last of the colddrake carcasses, and turned to Starwind, biting her lip in anxiety. 'Where's the queen-drake?''
'No sign of her,' he replied, shortly, holding to his feet with pure will. He'd taken the brunt of the attack, and he was dizzy and weak from the effort of holding the center while Savil and Moondance closed the jaws of the trap about the colddrake swarm.
'I have not seen her, either,' Moondance called up the hill. He was checking each carcass in case one should prove to be an immature queen. It was unlikely to see a swarm with a juvenile queen, but it wasn't unheard of, either.
Yfandes had consented to carry the Tayledras double - the need to get to the place where the drake swarm was before the swarm reached inhabited areas was too great for any other consideration. Starwind had then served as the 'bait' afoot, while Moondance on Yfandes and Savil on Kellan had been the arms of the trap.
'No queens,' he said, flatly, having checked the sixth and final body.
The fight had stripped the snow from the hilltop, exposing the blackened slope. The six drakes lay upon the scorched turf in twisted silver heaps, like the baroque silver ornaments of a careless giantess strewn across black velvet.
'Ashke, are you well?' Moondance asked anxiously, leaving the last of the bodies and climbing the hill with a certain amount of haste. Starwind looked as if his legs were going to give out on him at any moment, and Yfandes had moved up to lend him her shoulder as support. He leaned on it with a murmur of gratitude as the Healer-Adept reached his side.
'I will do well enough, once I have a chance to breathe,' the elder Tayledras replied, as Moondance added his support to Yfandes'. 'I am more worried that we did not find the queen.'
'Do you suppose,' Savil began -
Then all three of them felt an incredible surge of raw, wild power - and it had Vanyel's 'presence' laced through it.
'M'lord?'
Someone was tugging at his shoulder. Vanyel lifted his head from his arms; that was just about the limit of his capabilities right now.
'Gods,' he said, dazedly, as the stocky young cloak-shrouded woman at his side tried to get him to sit up. 'Oh, please - just - don't do that right now.'
'M'lord? Ye be hurt?' she asked, thick brows knitting with concern. 'Ye bain't hurt, best ye get inside fore 'nother them things comes.'
'Aren't… anymore,' he replied heavily, giving in to her urging and hauling himself into a sitting position. The sun seemed very bright and and just on the verge of being painful to his watering eyes.
