they galloped down the stony track, past more huge boulders. The ship was coming upriver against the current, further from the ford than they were, and even with all its oars out it-
But someone else was also watching the ship, someone pressed into a chink in the outer wall of the ruined castle, his back to Roric and Karin. He heard them and spun around, yelling as he raised his sword.
More armed men boiled out from behind the boulders. Roric reined in Goldmane so hard the stallion reared straight up, but the men were also behind them. He had led Karin straight into ambush.
CHAPTER NINE
1
These were not Hadros’s men. Karin had never seen any of them before. They bore dented helmets and cracked shields, but their glittering blades were sharp and their war cries ferocious.
Their only advantage was that all the attackers were on foot. Roric bellowed and whirled his sword, and his stallion lashed out with his hooves, felling two men. Roric’s first strokes bounced off helmets, and his third struck a shield so hard the man staggered.
The attackers drew back for a second, and Goldmane sprang forward past them. Roric’s laugh rang out over their shouts, and he grinned as if he could have asked nothing more of life than to die fighting for it.
Karin, on the contrary, felt wash over her all the fear she had not felt for two weeks, as though the powers that had protected and guided them reached no further than the edge of this wide rift. She kicked the spotted mare, staying so close behind Roric that she was almost on the stallion’s heels.
But armed men almost immediately blocked the horses’ path again. The men were more numerous before them than behind them, and more and more sprang out from behind boulders, shouting to each other. The way to the ford seemed jammed with beards, helmets, and steel blades. She looked back over her shoulder to what she hoped was safety, calling to Roric to retreat, but more warriors darted around behind them, and Roric could not hear her over his own yells.
A hand gripped her by the ankle, trying to tug her down, and a grinning face stared up at her. Clinging to the saddle horn, she stabbed desperately at the hand with her knife. The man shrieked and jumped away. Another man ran toward her from the other side, but the mare kicked, and her heels caught him full in the chest.
Goldmane reared again, screaming, and this time the attackers fell back further. The two horses began to run, leaping both fallen warriors and the stones pushed into their path, scattering the men still pouring out from behind the boulders. This wasn’t a group of raiders, she thought grimly. This was enough warriors for an invading army.
Her vision blurred as she tried to stay on the plunging mare. Roric, immediately before her, could have been a mile away. The sun sat on the western horizon, and long, grotesque shadows took the last sense of order from this rift valley.
Somehow they were still moving forward, closer and closer to the salt river, but also closer to the red-sailed ship. Roric’s sword rose and fell with great clangs, blocking a blow, knocking a man back, going for an unprotected throat. She kicked another warrior in the face and heard herself shouting threats and curses. Irrelevantly, she wondered what Queen Arane would do in these circumstances.
There was blood on her gloves, making the knife grip slippery, but she was not sure if it was hers or her enemies’. Roric bled in several places, but no wound slowed his sword-fighting for honor, his life, or for her. She tried, even while fighting herself, to keep her eyes on him, to see him in his final glorious moments before superior force finally overcame them.
But suddenly the way before them was empty of warriors. “We’re through!” Roric yelled to her. “Across the ford!”
Their horses had leaped, scrambled, and kicked their way through most of the band. Even close to fifty men on foot, hampered themselves by the boulders and broken ground, had trouble standing against a stallion of voima and a rider who attacked as though berserk.
But as their horses raced the last hundred yards, the warship with the red sail ran its keel up onto the shallow gravel of the ford, and warriors and dogs leaped over the side. The warriors already had their swords drawn as they hit the water and splashed ashore, giving their war cries. These men Karin knew well. Many were Hadros’s men, and most of the rest her father’s.
The armed men she and Roric had just escaped hesitated. They halted a bow shot from the river, and several ducked behind boulders again. Looking back, she suddenly realized the ambush had not been for their own benefit. Their attackers had been hoping to catch Hadros’s ship by surprise.
The first of the king’s warriors ashore was grizzled and held his sword left-handed.
“Single combat!” Roric shouted to him, tossing back his hair. “This is between you and me, Gizor. Stay back, Hadros, stay back, you warriors, by all the powers of voima! You, Gizor, I challenge to single combat, immediately, on an island here in the river!”
He leaped from the stallion, throwing Karin the reins, and braced himself to meet a fully armed warrior without even a shield of his own. He was grinning again.
But the fight never began. King Hadros was only a step behind Gizor, and he grabbed him by the sword arm to spin him around. “No one touches him!” he bellowed, his face purple. “Not until I have some answers out of him! After that, I’ll take his hide off with my own bare hands.”
Roric hesitated, his sword still at the ready and his shoulders heaving with his breath, but there was suddenly no one before him. Karin, looking past him, saw her father clambering out of the warship, and there, standing at the rail, the last person she had expected to see, Queen Arane.
She jumped down from the mare with a shout for King Kardan. Maybe it would not be as bad as she had feared to be caught. Since Kardan and Hadros had pursued them together, they must not be trying to kill each other. With Arane’s help, she should be able to persuade Hadros that Valmar was safe, that Roric had nothing to do with his disappearance. Maybe they could even help find the Witch of the Western Cliffs who was supposed to know how to reach the Wanderers from these mountains. And her own father looked so happy-
That is when the men on shore attacked.
Coming down toward the river with long leaps, shouting their war cries, they fell on Hadros’s warriors just as the sun disappeared over the edge of the world. Some attackers splashed through the ford toward the ship while the rest of Hadros’s warriors sprang out to intercept them.
Roric whirled around, reaching for his stallion, but Gizor grabbed him from behind. “No flight for you again!” he bellowed. If Roric answered, she could not hear him over the yells and sounds of steel on steel.
Someone pushed her back, away from the fiercest fighting, but she tried to struggle forward. Muscled backs and shoulders were on every side of her, and she could no longer see Roric. The dogs’ wild barking rose above the war cries and the ringing of sword on shield. The gravel shore on both sides of the river churned with knots of men locked in combat, but she had to find Roric among them. He needs me, she said soundlessly between dry lips, he needs my knife to save him.
Men shouted and fell on both sides of her, but she had no time to distinguish royal warriors from raiders. She had to find Roric before the end of the rapidly fading light. He’s gone already, she thought wildly. But maybe he was on the river’s far side. She ran through the ford, soaking her dress to the knees, scarcely noticing the cold water until she came up on the other shore and the weight of the wet wool almost made her lose her balance.
She saw him then, farther away than she had expected. He had somehow eluded Gizor but was still on foot, desperately fighting again against the warriors who had appeared from out of the boulders.
Stumbling, trying to call to him though she felt as though she had no more voice than in a nightmare, she staggered forward. With no attention to give to the men near her she focused on Roric, on her need to reach him while there was still time, to help him if she could, and if not to kiss him again before he died.
She did not reach him. She was suddenly seized from behind and her arms pinned. A hard blow knocked the knife from her hand. “Retreat!” she heard a bellow above her head. “Back to the mountains!” And all of the ambushers, hearing that bellow, hoisted up their fallen comrades and began to run.
She was tossed over someone’s shoulder; she still had not seen the face of whoever grabbed her. She tried
