Owlflight

pleasure in ridding the world of creatures so depraved and sadistic. And perhaps it was wrong for him to feel pleasure in killing even something as vile as Ancar’s toadies, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to regret taking even one of them out of the world.

And fighting was a great deal more exciting than grinding herbs, lighting campfires, and sealing wounds. When the archery-sergeant had halfheartedly given him the option to go back with his old group, he’d declined.

And, to be honest, I felt more like a man. I was actually doing something, and other men, other fighters, praised me for it. How could I go back to work among the cooks and the mule-drivers?

It wasn’t only the members of the Pack who praised him, either. He’d met several of the Valdemarans in the form of some of the Guard when they’d picked up a stray squad or two along the way, the sadly-depleted remnants of a Valdemaran Company that had been holding the line before the Pack came to reinforce them. They thought he was a fine soldier, and said as much as they all shared exhaustion and the rare hot meal between engagements.

Heady stuff for a young fool, I suppose.

“Wonder where the boy went?” Harris said idly, interrupting Justyn’s thoughts. Justyn had the needle clamped between his teeth and couldn’t answer, but the question was rhetorical, for the man answered it himself. “Probably ran off into the woods. My boy’s seen him running off there before. I’m telling you, Justyn, there’s bad blood there, and you’d better do something about it before he gets more than himself into trouble.”

Justyn really wasn’t paying much attention, lost in his own thoughts as he was, and the half-conscious grunt he made in reply seemed to satisfy the man. At the moment, he really didn’t want to think about young Darian, though he was getting an increasing number of complaints from the villagers that he wasn’t keeping the boy under firm enough discipline.

No, his thoughts were in the past, at the moment, drawn there by the task of stitching up something that could have been a wound made on purpose, rather than accidentally.

If I hadn’t been so young, I would have realized from the state of the Valdemaran Guard and the fact that my own commanders were willing to risk a mage in the front lines that something was very, very wrong.

What had gone wrong was that they were all trapped on the wrong side of the enemy lines, and only the fact that they had good commanders had gotten them as far as they had gone. He had learned later that the Guard and Pack Captains had agreed on a last-ditch dash for the Border at a weak spot in the enemy lines, hoping for a combination of surprise and overconfidence to bring them all through. And the ploy worked -

Except that for it to work, someone had to hold the rearguard, and the most logical group was the mixed archery squad guarded by a handful of swordsmen.

They fought their way back toward Valdemar, step by step, until the only barrier between them and safety was a river with a single wooden bridge. One man with a bow could hold the enemy off long enough for everyone else to get across - and by that time, he was considered the best shot in the group.

So, of course, like a young hero who hasn’t quite grasped his own mortality, I volunteered.

That was when he learned the great and vital truth about being a bowman.

When you run out of arrows, you can do virtually nothing against a man with an ax.

He had fended off attacks for a few moments with his bow and knife, getting some painful wounds in the process, and the last thing that he remembered was watching the flat of the ax blade descending in strangely-slowed time toward his head.

He had awakened in the infirmary tent; after his heroic efforts, there hadn’t been a man in the decimated ranks willing to allow him to go down without trying to rescue him.

But his skull had been cracked like a boiled egg, and it had only been good fortune and the fact that Wizard Kyllian was present at that very site that had kept him alive to thank his rescuers.

Kyllian himself was too old by then to take part in any battle-magics; he had confined himself to instructing the new Herald-Mages and to helping the Healers when their own ranks grew too thin, for Fireflower was a School that produced mages who were equally versed in Healing and mage-craft. Reputed to be a great friend of Quenten, the head of the White Winds School at Bolthaven, Justyn really didn’t know why he’d chosen to come North when the Valdemarans sent out a call for mages through Quenten. Perhaps it was some need of his own that drew him there, or some urge to leave the sheltered confines of the Fireflower Retreat. He didn’t confide his reasons to Justyn, who was just one among many of the patients that he pulled back from the soon-to- be-dead and into the land of the living.

It was obvious almost at once that Justyn was not going to be any good for fighting anymore; the blow to his head addled his vision enough that he would never be able to accurately sight an arrow again, and he simply had never had the strength of body to be a swordsman. Nor did he ride well enough for the cavalry.