He knew other soldiers were coming, that those nearest could not have missed the sounds of fighting, but he knew also that such a wound, ignored, would sap a man’s strength and kill him as surely as an axe to the throat. So he took a moment, ripping a strip of fabric from his sleeve and using it as a makeshift tourniquet, pulling it as tight as he could and holding one end with his teeth as he tied it into a knot. That done, he tried flexing his left hand into a fist and couldn’t manage it.
The arm was useless to him then. Still alive, perhaps, but it was a sign that his time—and therefore, the time for his friends—was running out. He was left with a decision then, try to flee the village—and inevitably get killed as those troops his brother would have posted outside of it surrounded him—or do the unexpected and work his way back toward the inn. In such a situation, anyone would expect him to flee, to try to make it to the village’s edge and so would position the majority of their troops around the village to make such an escape impossible, which meant that their numbers would be weaker toward the village center. Or so he hoped.
At least if he went that way he might still be able to offer some help to the others or they might, in turn, be able to help him. Assuming, of course, that they were still alive. A big assumption considering the forces arrayed against them, perhaps a vain one, but he decided that he would rather believe in his companions than bet against them and so, taking a slow deep breath, he flexed his useless hand, trying and failing to work some feeling back into it, then he turned and started back toward the inn at a run.
It did not take him long to reach it, and his decision seemed to be confirmed as the correct one as, the closer toward the center of the village he got, the quieter and quieter were the sounds of soldiers until, paused on the edge of where, so recently, Ferrimore’s living had burned their dead in a great Sending, he could hear nothing but his own harsh breaths. And the wind, of course, a wind which seemed to cut through his clothes with ease and which carried the smoke from the dying pyre lazily into the sky. In fact, it was almost too quiet.
He frowned, thinking. He could turn back around, could try to work his way toward the inn from another path, but to do so would cost him time—time he could ill afford, for if he didn’t see to the wound on his arm soon, blood loss would steal his brother’s chance at revenge. Already, crimson droplets were running down his arm, dripping off his fingertips and onto the cobbles of the street. And even assuming he somehow survived long enough to make it to the inn by a circuitous route, there was the other concern, namely that he would increase his chances of being discovered, and wounded as he was, dizzy from cold and blood loss as he was, he doubted he would survive another fight.
Only a short distance separated him from the front of the inn, which he saw had no soldiers there, but several corpses, the arrows protruding from them marking them as Priest’s kills. A reassuring sight, at least, that they had taken out some of the soldiers, yet the bodies scattered at the front of the inn did not account for nearly all the soldiers he had seen or that he suspected his brother would have left to deal with the villagers. Where had the others gone, then? Were they even now fighting his companions? No, that didn’t sound right, for he heard no signs of fighting, heard nothing at all but his own labored breathing and the wind whistling through the burned out skeleton which was all that remained of the village of Ferrimore. That and the steady plop of blood from his fingers onto the ground. He frowned at the inn, wondering. Had the people been inside when it burned? Had they all died horribly despite his and the others’ efforts?
There was no way of knowing for sure—none, of course, except the macabre task of checking the still blazing inn for corpses, and even if he was so inclined, he simply did not have the time. He had left the others at the back of the inn, and with any luck they would still be there. Less than a hundred feet separating him from his destination then, but a hundred feet which he would have to take in open ground with nothing to conceal him from any hidden watchers.
Not that they would need to have tried very hard to hide, for there were a dozen alleys leading into the center of the village, any one of which could conceal soldiers waiting in ambush. But there was no time—he could only hope that Feledias would have spread his troops around the village.
Stifling a grunt of pain as he rose from his crouch, Cutter started forward in a limping shuffle, his axe already drawn and held down at his side in his good hand. He reached the center of the square, near the still-smoldering pyre, when he heard a noise, a slight, almost imperceptible rustle. Another might have attributed such a sound to nothing, perhaps just his nerves, or the wind rustling fabric, but Cutter knew better, knew, in that moment, that he had made a mistake.
He turned to look around
