Tol, dueling with a guard, heard her plea. He lopped off his opponent’s spearhead. The guard brought up his buckler to ward off another blow, and Number Six’s point penetrated the brass shield and stopped a hair’s breadth from the fellow’s right eye. Yelping, the guard abandoned his shield and took to his heels.
Tol freed his blade and closed on Yull. The big man was trying to snag the unicorn’s trailing bonds. He planted one foot on the leather thongs. The unicorn stumbled as its hind legs were caught. Yull raised his heavy axe-
“Stop!” Tol bellowed. “What will your master Orlien do to you when he finds out you killed such a prize?”
The idea was enough to give the angry brute pause. Torn between fear of Orlien’s retribution and the desire to slaughter the insolent beast who’d hurt him, Yull hesitated. For the first time in the entire journey, he spoke.
“You not steal!” he said, pointing from Tol to the trapped unicorn.
“I’ve no intention of stealing anything,” Tol replied, continuing to close the distance between them. “I intend to set him free.”
“No! Valuable! Bring much gold!”
Tol didn’t doubt that. The horn alone had medicinal and magical qualities that would fetch awesome prices in the markets of Daltigoth or Tarsis.
Glaring at the hulking man before him, Tol said, “You’ve no right to hold such a rare creature. Yield now, and I’ll spare your life.”
Yull’s face split in a gap-toothed grin. “Many try to kill Yull. All dead now. You, too, little man.”
Tol jerked his head over his shoulder. “You’re alone.”
One by one, the wagon guards had been slain or had given up. Kiya had a bad gash on her forearm, earned when the bow had been struck from her grasp, but she’d wrapped a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. She and the rest of Tol’s party stood behind him, ready for further combat.
“Let the unicorn go,” Tol urged. “Be free of Orlien, and make your own life.”
Yull’s answer was a powerful sideways slash with his axe. Tol felt the wind from it as he leaped back. Regret flashed through his mind. He would have to kill Yull to free the unicorn.
Before battle could he joined, a chorus of shrill, keening whistles filled the air. Frez, Darpo, and the Dom-shu sisters found themselves engulfed by at least a hundred painted woodland elves. The elves swarmed over them, tearing swords from their hands and immobilizing them with the sheer press of their bodies. Tol, Yull, and the unicorn were likewise surrounded, but the elves did not assault them, merely trapped them inside a living wall of half-naked, painted flesh. More than two score short bows, arrows nocked, were aimed at the two antagonists.
Tol raised his hands slowly. “Peace,” he said loudly. “I mean no harm to you or the young Forestmaster!”
A pair of elves darted forward and freed the unicorn. Yull started to resist, but the collective creak of drawn bowstrings halted him.
A female emerged from the crowd. Her short, spiky black hair was painted with streaks of blue and yellow. She wore a heavy collar of hammered silver beads and carried a tall staff with a forked silver head. From the way her comrades parted for her, Tol took her to be their leader. She barked a few short phrases in her native tongue.
“Miya,” Tol said, “tell her we’re hired fighters, and we mean no harm to the unicorn. Tell her we meant to free it.”
“That’s asking a lot of my poor Elvish,” Miya muttered, then spoke haltingly in the elf tongue.
The female elf studied Tol with a cold, calculating eye, then replied.
“I think she called you a liar,” Miya said. “She says we’re thieves, trying to steal the young Master from Orlien’s men.”
The elf woman spoke again, angrily, and Miya struggled to understand and relay the words to Tol.
Hunters had stolen the unicorn from the forest where the elves dwelt, far to the north of the hill country. They’d sold the rare creature to Orlien for gold. Practically the entire tribe had come south to find the unicorn, which they regarded as their personal godling.
Miya’s command of the language was not up to the task of persuading the elves of her party’s benevolent intentions. The unicorn was led away, and the elves continued to hold the Ergothians and Yull.
Tol thought fast. The elf woman was in command, but she was unarmed; perhaps she was not a chief, but the tribe’s shaman. Her silver adornment and staff lent credence to this theory. With that in mind, he told Miya to propose the elves test him to learn whether he was telling the truth.
The elf woman waved the idea aside. Two score bowstrings tightened.
“Do you care nothing about justice?” Tol cried, and Miya translated as quickly as she could. “I’ve always heard the woodlanders esteemed truth and justice above all other virtues!”
That caused some murmuring in the ranks of elves. Miya told him, “They say, ‘The grasslander is right. Evil will follow us if we slay the just along with the guilty.’ ”
The elf woman lifted a hand, and the murmurs ceased. She stood nose to nose with Tol-they were of a height-and repeated a short phrase four times. He felt a faint flicker of heat across his face, as he did when encountering magic, but the Irda artifact he carried shielded him completely.
The shaman drew back, startled at her failure.
Seeking to press this advantage, Tol said, “Tell her, because I speak the truth, the gods protect me from her spells. None of her magic can hurt me. She can cast any spell she wants, and it won’t effect me.”
Miya only stared at him, and he snapped, “Tell her!” Miya did so.
The elf woman threw back her feather-lined cloak, revealing a close-fitting suit of green-dyed deerskin. Planting her fists on her hips and looking Tol up and down, she laughed and rattled off several comments.
Miya translated: “She says she is Casmarell, the fourteenth descendant of the great Casmarell, first shaman of her people in the time of the Awakening, in the Age of Dreams. She calls you ‘Creekstone.’ ”
“What?” Tol demanded.
“Her exact words were ‘one as smooth and slippery as a flat stone in a flowing creek.’ ”
“Never mind the insults. What about my challenge?”
In answer, the shaman snapped an order to her followers. They seized Tol, plucking the saber from his hand. Kiya, Frez, and Darpo tried to intervene, but Tol ordered them back.
The elves propelled him to an alder tree by the edge of the road and lashed his hands around the trunk behind his back. The elf shaman stalked toward him, parting the ranks of her followers like a plowshare turning turf. Yull and Tol’s companions had no choice but to follow along behind her.
She gestured broadly with her staff, waving its forked silver head in a circle above her. Miya translated her words.
“She will, um, test you with all the spirit power of the woodland race and, um, if you are telling the truth, the gods will protect you.”
Darpo said, “My lord, be of stout heart! We’ll get you out of this-”
“There is no reason to fear,” Tol replied quickly. “Be still.”
Casmarell pointed her staff at Tol, and commenced a low, guttural chant. Again, he felt a weak flicker of heat on his exposed skin but nothing more. She lowered her staff.
Tol smiled cheerfully. Casmarell frowned.
Hazel eyes never leaving his face, she backed away five paces. Throwing her arms wide, she let out a terrifying shriek.
The elves nearest her shrank back, averting their eyes and covering their ears with painted hands. Kiya, Miya, Frez, and Darpo blinked rapidly as their vision blurred, then winced as pain flared in their heads.
This was the Death Shout. According to legend, the greatest shamans among the wild elves could literally scream an enemy to death. Tol did not look away and bore Casmarell’s fury with his eyes wide open.
Beneath her tribal paint, the shaman’s face darkened from the strain of the Shout. Slowly, she brought her hands together, raising the pitch of her scream as her fingers touched. The air itself rang with the concussion, and Casmarell bent forward against the thrust of her own spell. Dust and dry leaves took to the air.
Tol lifted his chin. Although it took effort, he managed to smile.
