Without their horses or shields, beaten and dazed by the hail, the knights fell before the assault. Led took great pride in slicing Stip-pling's pompous head from his shoulders.
When the fight was over, the smashed and broken bodies of the knights and their horses were mingled together on the narrow road with the hulking carcasses of slain ogres. An unfortunate survivor of the hailstorm whimpered pitifully
through its tusks, watching in horror as a tremendous pool of blood pumped unstoppably from its mutilated thigh. Led stepped up behind the doomed creature and cut its throat to end its suffering. The remaining ogres didn't object, merely clutched more tightly at their own bleeding sword cuts or licked their wounds like animals.
Watching from the fringe, Onyx caught a glimpse of move shy;ment out of the corner of her right eye. She swung her head about. A distance down the road, a knight was struggling to his knees. His armor was scorched black, helmet gone, hair singed nearly off. It was the young knight she'd set on fire. Assuming he would burn to death, she'd forgotten about him in the heat of battle. Blood ran freely down the dented plate mail at one shoulder. His awkwardly twisted leg also bore the signs of a clubbing. The young knight staggered with a clumsy gait down the hill, toward the thick woods on the east side of the pass.
'Hey!' she shouted. 'One of them is getting away!' Onyx looked frantically back toward the scene of the fight. The ogres were stripping the corpses, dividing up the dead men's possessions. Led stared into the shattered wagon, shaking his head sadly. Onyx called again, but no one seemed to hear her.
Swearing under her breath, Onyx touched the knife in the top of her boot and set off at a dead run after the wounded knight. Rounding a boulder, she entered the forest and stalked through the brush, looking for signs of the man's passing. She stopped suddenly and held her breath, listen shy;ing. In the distance she heard the clanking of his heavy plate armor.
Onyx spied a bloody trail in the leaves and snow and fol shy;lowed it toward the sound of the jangling armor. She could hear the knighf s ragged, labored breathing as he struggled to run. Eyes ahead, she nearly tripped over the shield he had dumped along the way. At last she caught sight of him, half running, half crawling, dragging a leg.
He looked frantically over his shoulder, his brown eyes wide with alarm. Seeing how quickly the woman was closing
the gap, the knight pulled himself up to run faster. In his haste, he lost control of his wounded leg. The foot twisted to the side and caught on a sapling. He fell to his face on the ground. Cursing, the knight rolled over and tried to struggle to his feet again. Onyx launched herself in a flying leap and knocked him back to the cold ground.
Straddling his stomach, Onyx looked into his face. The knight's eyes were the deepest brown she'd ever seen. His soot-streaked cheeks were ruddy with burns. His Solamnic mustache had been singed to stubble above smooth lips. To her annoyance he showed no fear, and was, in fact, similarly evaluating her.
'How'd you put out the fire?'
'I dropped and rolled. You forgot about me.'
Scowling, Onyx reached back, raised the knife from the cuff of her boot, and swung it down in an arc toward his face. The knight wrenched his head to the side and batted at her arm. The blade bounced off the young man's mailed sleeve and recoiled out of Onyx's hand. The knife landed in the underbrush several yards away.
'You're going to die, you know,' she said coldly, reaching out to squeeze his throat with her bare hands.
'Eventually.' He tossed her easily from his stomach and onto the ground. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg, the knight rolled onto his knees and pivoted to face her. His own knife was now in his palm. He waved it before him threateningly.
'Please run away,' the knight invited in a patronizing tone. 'I've no wish to compound my transgressions by killing a woman today.'
'Transgressions?' she repeated, though she knew from the little Led had told her about the Solamnics that the knights valued honor above all else. 'You mean bolting from a battle and leaving your dead friends to be mutilated by ogres?' she asked archly.
His eyes narrowed in anger. 'My comrades were all good men and true, but my dying won't help them now.'
'That doesn't sound very chivalrous,' she said. 'Won't you burn in the Abyss for your cowardice?'
The knight winced perceptibly at her choice of words. 'I believe honor and chivalry must be tempered by wisdom and discretion. I'll be rewarded in the hereafter for the bal shy;ance of my good deeds.' The young man shrugged and gave a rueful smile that made him tense in pain. 'But who really knows how one will be judged when the time of reckoning comes? Today I chose to put that day off, so that I may live to avenge my friends.'
'Oh, will you?' Onyx lashed out with her nails and raked his face, drawing three thin lines of bright red blood on his left cheek.
Scowling, the knight lunged toward Onyx with the knife. The cold blade bit into her shoulder, bringing an involuntary yelp of pain to her lips. She looked up at his young face in angry disbelief.
The knight shook his head almost sadly. 'You can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady. Stick to your spells, witch. You aren't very good at hand-to-hand fight shy;ing.'
Humiliation made Onyx's blood boil like molten metal in her veins. Her fingers came upon a fist-sized stone. Scarcely moving a muscle, like a cat creeping up on a field mouse, she closed her hand around the cool rock. Onyx swallowed an evil smile, smelling revenge.
Suddenly, the young knight raised his forearm and his fist shot forward in a quick, effortless, bone-snapping punch to the bridge of Onyx's nose. The rock dropped from Onyx's fingers.
'Not much good at all,' she heard the knight say distantly. As daylight spun into darkness, her last vision was of the young man's face. She would never forget, nor forgive, the pity in his brown eyes.
Chapter 9
The cold air brought Onyx back to consciousness. There was no sound around her but the wind whispering through trees. Her arm and face throbbed. Even her eyes ached. She lifted her cheek off the wet leaves and wrenched her swollen lids open. What was she doing in the woods? Where was every shy;one? And what was the matter with her face?
Onyx touched a finger to her nose, then winced from her own touch. Her entire face was swollen and tender and caked with blood. The knight's final blow came to mind all too vividly. There was no sign of him now. She had no idea how long she'd been out cold. The light filtering through the trees was dimmer than she remembered. Led would be look shy;ing for her.
Dragging herself up, Onyx painfully followed the knight's bloody trail back to the pass. Earlier, she had sprinted through
these woods like a deer; now it hurt just to walk slowly. Cresting the hill where the ambush occurred, she blinked in disbelief.
The bodies of the dead knights and their horses lay in the pass, plucked clean of their gear, some half-eaten by ogres. The smashed wagon remained in its place. The area where Onyx's magical hailstorm had pounded down was still cov shy;ered in shards of ice. But Led, the ogres, and their two horses were gone.
Only a blind man could have missed the bloody trail left by the knight and Onyx's charge. Led could easily have fol shy;lowed it to her, if only he had looked.
Which could only mean that he hadn't bothered.
The human had abandoned her with less thought than he had his lieutenant, though Toba's mysterious disappearance coupled with her own might have spooked the man. Perhaps he thought there was something sinister prowling the woods, stalking his little group. That wasn't beyond the realm of possibility, especially since he was, or had been, transporting a kidnapped faerie creature.
Still, the thought that he had abandoned her so easily angered and humiliated Onyx at the same time. Her hands curled into fists. Before she could decide what to do about either emotion, she sensed more than saw a presence nearby and whirled about
'Who's-Kadagan!' Like a feather, the nyphid drifted down from the cliff face. His brown hair had lost some of
