A metallic click cut the quiet. The scout just sent off reached a distance of fifty paces then pitched in a spinning fall, a crossbow bolt through his neck.
Arithon broke free and flung Jieret violently behind him. ‘Boy, stay out of this, as your sovereign, I command you.’ His sword whistled up to guard-point, while he backed behind the thickest tree to hand, an old beech raked rough where bucks had shed their summer velvet. He pinned Steiven’s heir with his body as shield, while the clan scouts fell in around him to enclose the boy.
Their rush to reach the beleaguered women could have drawn them to spring the perfect trap. Hidden troops could lie anywhere in ambush. The crossbows were their greatest liability; shadows their surest defence. But Arithon dared not try his gift openly lest he pinpoint his presence to Lysaer, and invite an uncontrolled confrontation with the compulsions of Desh-thiere’s curse.
Three clansmen armed with recurves and full quivers began to climb the tree to snipe for the crossbowman. Arithon gave the shortest one a boost. Fast and furiously thinking, he said, ‘They have quarrels, why wait? Why don’t they drop us where we stand?’
‘They’re bounty-men.’ Madreigh showed a grim flash of teeth. ‘Arrow kills make fights over scalp claims.’
Quite probably the headhunters’ best marksmen would still be stationed on the rimrocks, or deep in the chasms of the grotto, where orders would shortly recall them.
‘The bolt had red fletching,’ Jieret added.
‘It’s Pesquil’s league that’s against us,’ another scout picked up explanation. ‘We’ll be surrounded already. They’ll attack us with numbers, hand to hand.’ He jerked his stubbled chin toward the exquisite weapon held steady in his liege lord’s grip. ‘I hope you’re good with that.’
‘We’ll know in a moment.’ Arithon withheld encouragement that his sorceries might offer them salvation. Any ward against combined assailants required time and concentration to arrange. No moment was given for response. From the glen that led toward the rimrocks, shadows flitted, and occasional chance gleams of metal. These fits and starts of movement resolved into a wave of charging foes. The instant before they closed, Arithon noticed worse: shouts, then the distant clash of steel as a skirmish broke out in the river gully farther downstream.
‘Caolle’s men?’ Alarmed, Madreigh added, ‘Ath, what could press them to strike openly? Etarra’s garrison’s still behind them. They’ll be engaged on two fronts and torn apart.’
Inarguable fact, as Arithon knew. But even Caolle’s blunt savvy could hardly stay fathers just come from discovery of the scalped and slaughtered bodies of their sons; clansmen who tracked the reivers upstream to find headhunters awaiting them in force, and who attacked without the knowledge that their families in the grotto were past saving.
‘If you pray, beg Steiven’s division won’t be with them,’ Arithon said.
Then the enemy was upon them. A rough face, a sword and a fouled set of gauntlets absorbed all of Arithon’s attention. Alithiel whined once, twice, in flurried parries. His opponent was large and heavy handed. Arithon lunged, then blocked another thrust. His riposte was controlled, an understated springboard for the feint which followed. A disengage on the next thrust finished the attacker. Arithon yanked Alithiel clear, sidestepped the headhunter’s dying thrash, and in speed that blurred, caught the next man behind in a stop thrust.
Hard-pressed himself, the adjacent clansman turned his shoulder to cover Arithon’s extended body through the moment of recovery. ‘Elwedd’s wasted a wager, I see. How’d the Masterbard know you were gifted at bladework?’
‘Escape this, and we’ll ask him,’ Arithon said.
Though joyless, the scout’s grin gave endorsement that his liege was capable enough to be entrusted with full share of Jieret’s defence.
Which fine point would shortly mean nothing, with the headhunters too thick to beat off and more of them coming by the second. Arithon saw this. Braced against the tree, forced to close-quarters, his style was cramped. Crushed moss and roots hampered footwork, and fallen enemies were adding to the hazard. The archers up the tree were less encumbered, but one of them already dangled head-down and dead in the branches. The headhunter crossbowman was still busy. Arithon could not see past the heave of the fighting to approximate his location. Another bolt whacked through green leaves and torn shreds of foliage spiralled down.
Inevitably more crossbowmen must arrive; and Caolle’s men could hardly drive a foray through to rescue Steiven’s heir since they could not know he was pinned down. Arithon beat aside a blade that thrust at him and fought a slipping stance in wet leaves. A friendly arrow from above dispatched the brute in the conical helm who shoved in to grapple, and Arithon escaped with a bruise and a graze. Behind him, Jieret had out his dagger, determined to enter the fray.
‘Not now,’ said Arithon. ‘Jieret, this isn’t your fight.’
Three swords came at him. He ducked one, felt the flat of a second jar his cut shoulder and met the third in a screaming bind. Locked steel to steel with an enemy, and exposed on his left side to fate, he saw his choices reduced to the one that, in Karthan, had undone him.
He must use magecraft to kill, or allow Jieret and Steiven’s grief-crazed clansmen to die as victims of Desh- thiere’s curse.
Arithon turned the wrist above Alithiel’s guard, felt his steel catch his opponent’s crossguard.
The headhunter anticipated the wrench that would leave him disarmed. A burly man, and well trained, he gave with the pressure, then grunted in surprise as Arithon’s right-footed kick added force to his counter-move and staggered him sideways. He crashed across other headhunters who thrust through an opening no longer opportune. Slashed and half-skewered through the side he went down, two men’s steel mired in his fall, and a third man bashed off balance into the tight-pressed advance of his fellows.
While the knot in the fighting swirled momentarily backward, Arithon dropped his blade, leaped and caught a treebranch, then swung hard. His boot lashed another attacker and upended him over the foeman who engaged Madreigh. ‘Guard Jieret,’ ordered Arithon. ‘What needs to be done, I can’t accomplish from here.’
‘You’ve got spells for a miracle?’ grunted the clan scout, his blade busy. He sidestepped into his prince’s vacated position, feinted low, and cut. Blood pattered down, filming the leaves, the tree-trunk and Jieret, buffeted and jostled by his defenders as he watched his liege lord hoist himself after the archers who were now, all three, dead of crossbow bolts.
Another quarrel snicked bark by Arithon’s head. He ignored it, gave a quick smile downward to Jieret which
