without your goon squad.”
“Don’t you turn your back on me!” Agravaine screeched. His sword flashed in the sun as he raised it over his head.
I grabbed the hilt of Hoel’s sword with my left hand and snatched it from its scabbard. Before he knew it, I’d transferred it to my right and snapped it into the cast. I closed my fingers around it; they hurt a little, but not as much as the day before. I swung it low at the backs of Hoel’s legs as he turned and felt it bite through the muscles and tendons of his nearest calf. He screamed and fell.
Then a lot happened quickly.
Agravaine spun in midswing, finally realized who I was, and came at me spitting like a rabid wolverine. I could imagine how terrifying he was in battle. Still, he was out of control and I wasn’t. I parried his wild blow and grabbed his hair with my good hand. I brought his face down and my knee up, and they met with a satisfying thud.
As he fell, I spun toward the still-mounted Cador. He’d drawn his sword but his nerve failed him. Hoel’s ongoing high-pitched screams helped a little, I’m sure. He threw his sword away, turned the horse, and spurred it toward the road.
He never made it. As he rode along the edge of the clearing, something rumbled and roared in the forest. A blast of steam shot from the ground diagonally across his path. If Kern hadn’t told me its source, I’d have thought it was a dragon, too. Cador’s already skittish horse reared again.
Then there was a loud twang, and an arrow struck deep between Cador’s shoulder blades. He fell, arms and legs wide, and his horse fled. I turned and saw Amelia standing with a bow in the cottage doorway. Her face was streaked with blood, but her expression was calm. When I looked back, Cador hadn’t moved; I knew he never would again.
Agravaine rose on all fours. My knee had split the skin between his eyebrows and blood ran down either side of his ruined nose like red tears.
“You’re deb now,” he hissed wetly. “You kibbed a Knibe of de Dubba Tawn.”
Kern grabbed Agravaine by the back of the neck and yanked him to his feet. The cords on the old man’s forearm stood out as he dug in his fingers; the giggleweed softness was gone. He held him so high only Agravaine’s toes reached the ground. “Dave, you little pissant, you really should learn some manners. And don’t pretend you’re doing any of this out of loyalty to Marcus. Now tell me who sent you here and why.”
Agravaine said nothing. The red streaks on his face, along with the purple-and-yellow lump where his nose used to be, made him look like a war-painted savage. His breath hissed through his teeth.
Without releasing him, Kern bent and picked up the knight’s dropped sword. He put the blade against Agravaine’s throat. “You punched my girlfriend in the face, Dave. I’m not feeling charitable. Answer me.”
For a moment everyone was silent except for Hoel and his high-pitched whimpering. I’d seen enough men hamstrung in battle to have an idea of the pain, and I wished I’d done it to Agravaine, too. I flexed my fingers around the sword hilt: even with the cast, my grip felt strong and solid.
“What’s all the shouting about?” a new sleepy voice said.
Jenny stood beside Amelia in the doorway. She wore a robe that dragged the ground and clearly belonged to the taller woman. Jenny looked giggleweed-addled and confused. “What happened? Who are these people?”
Agravaine made a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard, a kind of childish, disappointed whine distorted by his broken nose. He legs went limp, and his dead weight dropped from Kern’s grasp. He landed on his knees and lowered his head at once.
“Your Majesty,” he whispered.
Jenny blinked a few times, looked at him, and said, “I’m sorry… do I know you?”
“Go back inside,” I said an instant too late.
With a wet shriek of rage, Agravaine exploded from his crouch and sprang at her so quickly none of us could stop him. He yanked a dagger from his belt and drove it into Jenny’s midsection with enough force to knock her back into the doorjamb.
Amelia grabbed him by the collar and shoved him away. He held on to his knife as he flew back; it left an arc of blood through the air. He landed on his butt and slid in the grass. He slapped the ground and screamed, “You know me now, you bid?” like a little boy having a tantrum. “Do you?”
Amelia caught Jenny as she fell. Jenny’s eyes were open wide and she stared down at the wound, which had just begun to bleed. Amelia slapped her hand over it and said with reasonable calm, “Cammy!”
Agravaine was still screeching, “Do you know me? Do you know me?” He switched his grip on the knife and started to get to his feet.
He never got the chance. I whacked him in the side of the head with my bad hand, using the weight of cast and sword for added impact. He fell back flat, and I straddled his chest. With my good hand I snatched the knife away and tossed it out of reach.
“I stuck it in her,” he hissed with a crazed smile. “Did you see that? I gabe it to her good.”
His hateful bloody grin caused something I’d thought long extinguished in me to flare back to life. I raised Hoel’s sword above my head and repeatedly pounded Agravaine’s face with the heavy pommel. My voice rose to an unintelligible screech of rage and fury. I saw in Dave Agravaine every bullying, smug, ignorant soldier I’d ever met. Or ever been.
I stopped when the cast on my hand cracked and fell away, except for a cup-shaped piece pinned between my palm and sword hilt. I sat there breathing, which seemed at the moment to take all my strength. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been hitting him, but not only was Agravaine dead, his face was pounded to unrecognizable red mush with pieces of white bone around the edges.
I’d felt like this before in the heat of battle, but always at a professional distance; this was the first time I recalled this level of rage directed at someone for personal reasons. I stared at the ruin of Agravaine’s face; one lifeless eyeball suddenly popped up from the blood pooled over its socket. I almost threw up.
Instead I got to my feet. “Always pay the insurance,” I hissed to myself, and decapitated Agravaine for good measure. Watching his head roll over while his body stayed in place felt better than it had any right to feel.
The smell hit me then. I choked down another surge of bile. I’d forgotten the coppery, raw-meat odor of violent death.
Hoel sat on the ground clutching his injured leg, his fingers soaked with blood. He stared at me as if I were some supernatural monster. Now that was something: my battle rage had scared a Knight of the Double Tarn.
I pointed the sword, his sword, the pommel still dripping Agravaine’s blood, at him. “You.”
His words tumbled out as he tried to scoot away. “Wait, it was all Dave’s doing, we were just following orders, we didn’t know the queen would be here-”
“Shut up,” I said. I wasn’t sure it was audible, but it must’ve been because Hoel did it.
I felt a droplet of Agravaine’s blood drip from my sword hand to the grass. My arm did not waver. “I have,” I said quietly, “some questions for you.”
“I think they can wait,” Kern said from the cottage door.
TWENTY-FOUR
My bad hand, even without its cast, felt plenty strong. I tied Hoel’s wrists to one of the wagon wheels, his back against the spokes. When he protested that the ropes were too tight, I tightened them. Then I put a tourniquet around his injured calf. I stuck his sword, the hilt still dripping Agravaine’s blood, into the ground between his legs. He couldn’t reach it, of course, but I wanted him to try. He shouted desperate, high-pitched curses after me.
Kern had carried Jenny into the cottage bedroom. Amelia sat in the living room, a bloody rag to her nose. She looked up at me as I closed the front door to muffle Hoel’s cries. Without a word she handed me another rag to wipe the blood from my hands.
“Are you okay?” I asked, hoping I sounded reasonably normal. The rage still quivered just below my sternum.
She nodded. “It’s just a bloody nose. Had lots of ’em. The little fucker blindsided me, that’s all.”
