because of the bolt in it. He screamed something at Shy as she rode up, and she hit him across the face with her sword and sent him tumbling.
Temple spurred down the slope after her and slid from his saddle near Leef. One of the boy’s legs kicked as if he was trying to get up. Shy leaned over him and he touched her hand and opened his mouth but only blood came. Blood from his mouth and from his nose and from the jagged leavings where his ear used to be and the knife-cuts in his arms and the arrow wound in his chest. Temple stared down, hands twitching in dumb helplessness.
‘Get him on your horse!’ snarled Shy, and Temple came alive of a sudden and seized Leef under his arms. Crying Rock had come from somewhere and was beating the Ghost Shy had shot with a club. Temple could hear the crunching of it as he started dragging Leef towards his horse, stumbled and fell, struggled up and on again.
‘Leave him!’ shouted Sweet. ‘He’s all done, a fool can see it!’
Temple ignored him, teeth gritted, trying to haul Leef up onto the horse by belt and bloody shirt. For a skinny lad he was quite the weight. ‘Not leaving him,’ hissed Temple. ‘Not leaving him… not leaving him…’
The world was just him and Leef and the horse, just his aching muscles and the boy’s dead weight and his mindless, bubbling groan. He heard the hooves of Sweet’s horse thumping away. Heard shouting in no language he knew, voices hardly human. Leef lolled, and slipped, and the horse shifted, then Shy was there next to him, growling in her throat, effort and fear and anger, and together they hauled Leef up over the saddle horn, broken arrow-shaft sticking black into the air.
Temple’s hands were covered in blood. He stood looking at them for a moment.
‘Go!’ shrieked Shy. ‘Go you fucking idiot!’
He scrambled into the saddle, fumbling for the reins with sticky fingers, hammering with his heels, almost falling off as his horse—Lamb’s horse—leaped into life, and he was riding, riding, wind whipping in his face, whipping the garbled shouting from his mouth, whipping the tears from his eyes. The flat horizon bounced and shuddered and Leef jolted over the saddle horn, Sweet and Crying Rock two wriggling specks against the sky. Shy up ahead, bent low over the saddle, tail of her horse streaming, and she snatched a look behind, and he saw the fear in her face, didn’t want to look, had to look.
There they were at his heels like messengers from hell. Painted faces, painted horses, childishly daubed and stuck with skins, feathers, bones, teeth and one with a human hand dried and shrunken bouncing around his neck and one with a headdress made of bulls’ horns and one wearing a great copper dish as a breastplate, shining and flashing with the afternoon sun, a mess of flying red and yellow hair and brandished weapons hooked and beaked and jagged-edged all screaming furiously and fixed on his most horrible murder and Temple went freezing cold right into his arse.
‘Oh God oh God oh fuck oh God…’
His brainless swearing drumming away like the hooves of his horse—Lamb’s horse—and an arrow flickered past and into the grass. Shy screamed at him over her shoulder but the words were gone in the wind. He clung to the reins, clung to the back of Leef ’s shirt, his breath whooping and his shoulders itching and knowing for sure that he was a dead man and worse than dead and all he could think was that he should have ridden drag after all. Should have stayed on the hill above Averstock. Should have stepped forward when the Gurkish came for Kahdia instead of standing in that silent, helpless line of shame with all the others.
Then he saw movement up ahead and realised it was the Fellowship, shapes of wagons and cattle on the flat horizon, riders coming out to meet them. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the Ghosts were dropping back, peeling away, could hear their whooping calls, one of them sending an arrow looping towards him and falling well short and he sobbed with relief, had just the presence of mind left to rein in as he came close, his horse—Lamb’s horse—quivering almost as much as he was.
Chaos among the wagons, panic spreading as if there had been six hundred Ghosts instead of six, Luline Buckhorm screaming for a missing child, Gentili all tangled up with a rust-stained breastplate even older than he was, a couple of cattle loose and charging through the midst and Majud standing on his wagon’s seat and yelling demands for calm no one could hear.
‘What happened?’ growled Lamb, steady as ever, and Temple could only shake his head. No words in him. Had to force his aching hand open to let go of Leef ’s shirt as Lamb slid him from the horse and lowered him to the ground.
‘Where’s Corlin?’ Shy was shouting, and Temple slithered from the saddle, legs numb as two dry sticks. Lamb was cutting Leef ’s shirt, fabric ripping under the blade, and Temple leaned down, wiping the blood away from the arrow shaft, wiping the blood but as soon as he wiped it there was more, Leef ’s body all slick with it.
‘Give me the knife,’ snapping his fingers, and Lamb pushed it into his hand and he stared at that arrow, what to do, what to do, pull it out, or cut it out, or push it through, and trying to remember what Kahdia had told him about arrow-wounds, something about what the best chance was, the best chance, but he couldn’t fix on anything, and Leef ’s eyes were crossed, his mouth hanging open and his hair all matted with blood.
Shy scrambled down next to him and said, ‘Leef? Leef?’ And Lamb gently laid him flat, and Temple stuck the knife in the earth and rocked back on his heels. They came to him then in a strange rush, all the things he knew about the boy. That he’d been in love with Shy, and that Temple had been starting to win him round, that he’d lost his parents, that he’d been trying to find his brother stolen by bandits, that he’d been a good man with oxen and a hard worker… but all that now was hacked off in the midst and would never be resolved, all his dreams and hopes and fears ended here on the trampled grass and cut out from the world forever.
Hell of a thing.
Savian was roaring, and coughing, and pointing everywhere with his flatbow, trying to get the wagons dragged into some kind of fort with barrels and clothes-chests and rope coils stacked up to hide behind, the cattle corralled inside and the women and children to the safest place, though Shy had no notion where that might be. Folk were scrambling about like the idea of Ghosts had never been discussed before, running to do what they were told or exactly what they hadn’t been, to tug at stubborn animals or find stowed weapons or save their gear or their children or just to stare and clutch at themselves like they were stabbed and their ears off already.
Iosiv Lestek’s big wagon had run into a ditch and a couple of men were struggling to rock it free. ‘Leave it!’ shouted Savian. ‘We ain’t going to act our way out o’ this!’ And they left it colourfully advertising the world’s finest theatrical entertainment to the empty plains.
Shy shouldered her way through the madness and up onto Majud’s wagon. Away to the south, across the waving, shifting grass, three Ghosts rode around in circles, one shaking a horned lance at the sky, and Shy thought she could hear them singing, high and joyful. Sweet watched, his loaded flatbow propped on one knee, rubbing at his bearded jaw, and it felt like there was a small piece of calm around him she gratefully squatted in.
‘How’s the boy?’
‘Dead,’ said Shy, and it made her sick that was all she had to say.
‘Ah, damn it.’ Sweet gave a bitter grimace, and closed his eyes and pressed them with finger and thumb. ‘Damn it.’ Then he trained them on the mounted Ghosts on the horizon, shaking his head. ‘Best fix ourselves on making sure the rest of us don’t go the same way.’
Savian’s cracked voice shouted on and all around folk were clambering onto the wagons with bows in unpractised hands, new ones never drawn with purpose and antiques long out of service.
‘What are they singing of?’ asked Shy, pulling an arrow from her
quiver and slowly turning it round and round, feeling the roughness against her fingertips like wood was a new thing never felt before.
Sweet snorted. ‘Our violent demise. They reckon it’s near at hand.’
‘Is it?’ she couldn’t help asking.
‘Depends.’ Sweet’s jaw muscles worked under his beard, then he slowly, calmly spat. ‘On whether those three are some of Sangeed’s main warband or he’s split it up into smaller parties.’
‘And which is it?’
‘Guess we can count ’em when they arrive, and if there’s a few dozen we’ll know we’ve a chance, and if there’s a few hundred we’ll have our profound fucking doubts.’
Buckhorm had clambered up on the wagon, a mail shirt flapping at his thighs that suited him even worse than it fitted him. ‘Why are we just waiting?’ he hissed, the Ghosts chased his stutter away for now. ‘Why don’t we move?’
Sweet turned his slow grey eyes on him. ‘Move where? Ain’t no castles nearby.’ He looked back to the plains,
