Fiddler Fair (anthology)

Now she mounted on Bakro, and arrowed out of cover. Someone on the walls shouted, but she was out of range before they even had time to realize that she was the source of the attack. She clung to Bakro’s back with knees clenched tightly around his barrel, pulling two more arrows from the quiver slung at her belt. He ran like the wind itself, past the walls and around to the back postern-gate before anyone could warn the sleepy townsman guarding it that something was amiss.

She got him, too, before someone slammed the postern shut, and picked off three more injudicious enough to poke their heads over the walls.

Now they were sending arrows of their own after her, but they were poor marksmen, and their shafts fell short. She decided that they were bad enough shots that she dared risk retrieving their arrows to augment her own before sending Bakro back under the cover of the forest. She snatched at least a dozen sticking up out of the grass where they’d landed, leaning down as Bakro ran, and shook them defiantly at her enemies on the walls as they vanished into the underbrush.

Chali’s vengeance had begun.

Kevin was barely conscious; only the support of Pika on one side and Keegan on the other kept him upright. Ehrik was uncharacteristically silent, terribly frightened at the sight of his big, strong father reduced to such a state.

King Howard and his minions had been “generous;” piling as much of the family’s goods on the pony’s back as he could stand before sending the little group out the gates. In cold fact that had been Willum’s work, and it hadn’t been done out of kindness; it had been done to make them a more tempting target for the horse barbarians or whatever strange menace it was that now had them hiding behind their stout wooden walls. That much Kevin could remember; and he waited in dull agony for arrows to come at them from out of the forest.

But no arrows came; and the pathetic little group, led by a little boy who was doing his best to be brave, slowly made their way up the road and into the grasslands.

Chali mindspoke Pika and ascertained that the smith had had nothing to do with last night’s slaughter—that in fact, he was being cast out for objecting to it. So she let him be—besides, she had other notions in mind.

She couldn’t keep them besieged forever—but she could make their lives pure hell with a little work.

She found hornets’ nests in the orchard; she smoked the insects into slumberous stupefication, then took the nests down, carefully. With the help of a scrap of netting and two springy young saplings, she soon had an improvised catapult. It wasn’t very accur­ate, but it didn’t have to be. All it had to do was get those nests over the palisade.

Which it did.

The howls from within the walls made her smile for the first time that day.

Next she stampeded the village cattle by beaming pure fear into their minds, sending them pounding against the fence of their corral until they broke it down, then continuing to build their fear until they ran headlong into the grasslands. They might come back; they might not. The villagers would have to send men out to get them.

They did—and she killed one and wounded five more before their fire drove her back deeper into the forest.

They brought the cattle inside with them—barely half of the herd she had sent thundering away. That made Chali smile again. With the cattle would come vermin, noise, muck—and perhaps disease.

And she might be able to add madness to that—

Bakro? she broadbeamed, unafraid now of ­being overheard. Have you found the mind-sick weed yet?

But to her shock, it was not Bakro who answered her.

Daiv struggled up out of a darkness shot across with lances of red agony. It hurt even to think—and it felt as if every bone in his body had been cracked in at least three places. For a very long time he lay without even attempting to move, trying to assess his real condition and whereabouts through a haze of pain. Opening his eyes did not lessen the darkness, but an exploratory hand to his face told him that although the flesh was puffed and tender, his eyes were probably not damaged. And his nose told him of damp earth. So he was probably being held in a pit of some kind, one with a cover that let in no light. Either that, or it was still dark—

Faint clanks as he moved and his exploring fingers told him that chains encircled his wrists and ankles. He tried to lever himself up into a sitting position, and quickly gave up the idea; his head nearly split in two when he moved it, and the bones of his right arm grated a little.

He started then to mindcall to Dahnah—then he remembered.

Hot, helpless tears burned his eyes; scalded along the raw skin of his face. He didn’t care. Wind—oh Wind.

For he remembered that Dahnah was dead, killed defending two of the trader’s tiny children. And uselessly, for the children had been spitted seconds after she had gone down. She’d taken one of the bastards with her though—and Stubtail had ­accounted for another before they’d gotten him as well.

But Daiv couldn’t remember seeing Brighttooth’s body—perhaps the other cat had gotten away!

He husbanded his strength for a wide-beam call, opened his mind—

And heard the stranger.

Bakro? came the voice within his mind, strong and clear as any of his kin could send. Have you found the mind-sick weed yet?

He was so startled that he didn’t think—he just answered. Who are you? he beamed. Please—who are you?

Chali stood, frozen, when the stranger’s mind touched her own—then shut down the channel between them with a ruthless, and somewhat frightened haste. She kept herself shut down, and worked her way deeper into the concealment of the forest, worming her way into thickets so thick that a rabbit might have had difficulty in getting through. There she sat, curled up in a ball, shivering with reaction.