Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin (39 page)

Despite my errands it was still early morning,
with just enough winter light to make it safe to canter. I let
Sooty out, allowing her to choose her pace and express her spirits,
and letting her warm herself without allowing her to break a sweat.
There was broken cloud cover, and the sun was slipping through it
to touch the trees and banked snow with glistening fingers. I
pulled Sooty in, pacing her. We would be taking a roundabout way to
get to the creek bed; I did not want to leave the trodden paths
until we must.

Verity was with me every second. It was not that
we conversed, but he was privy to my internal dialogue. He enjoyed
the fresh morning air, Sooty's responsiveness, and the youth of my
own body. But the farther I went from the Keep, the more aware I
became of keeping a grip on Verity. From a touch he had initially
imposed on me, the sharing had changed to a mutual effort more like
clasping hands. I wondered if I would be able to maintain it. Don't
think about it. Just do it. Even breathing becomes a task if you
pay attention to every breath. I blinked my eyes, suddenly aware
that he was now in his study, carrying on his normal morning tasks.
Like the humming of faraway bees, I was aware of Charim consulting
with him about something.

I could detect no sign of Nighteyes. I was
trying not to think about him, nor look for him, a strenuous mental
denial that was fully as demanding as keeping Verity's
consciousness with me. So quickly had I become accustomed to
reaching out for my wolf and finding him awaiting my touch that I
felt isolated, and as unbalanced as if my favorite knife were
missing from my belt. The only image that could completely displace
him from my mind was Molly's, and that, too, was one I did not wish
to dwell on. Verity had not rebuked me for my actions of the night
before, but I knew he regarded them as less than honorable. I had
an uneasy feeling that if I allowed myself time to truly consider
all that had happened, I would agree with him. Cowardly, I kept my
mind reined away from that, too.

I realized I was putting most of my mental
effort to not thinking. I gave my head a shake and opened myself up
to the day. The road I was following was not well traveled. It
wound through the rolling hills behind Buckkeep, and far more sheep
and goats trod it than men. Several decades ago a lightning fire
had cleared it of trees. The first growth of trees on it was mostly
birch and cottonwood, now standing bare but for snow burden. This
hilly country was ill-suited to farming, and served mostly as
summer pasturage for grazing animals, but from time to time I would
catch a whiff of wood smoke and see a trodden path leading from the
road to a woodcutter's cottage, or a trapper's hut. It was an area
of small, isolated homesteads occupied by folk of humbler
persuasions.

The road became narrower, and the trees changed
as I entered an older part of the forest. Here the dark evergreens
still stood thick and crowded close to the road's edge. Their
trunks were immense; and beneath their spreading branches snow lay
in uneven hummocks on the forest floor. There was little
underbrush. Most of the year's snowfall was still up above, resting
on those thickly needled limbs. It was easy to turn Sooty aside
from the trail here. We traveled under the snowladen canopy through
a grayish daylight. The day seemed hushed in the dimness of the
great trees.

You are seeking a specific place. You have
definite information as to where the Forged ones are?

They were seen on a certain creek bank, eating
from a winter-killed deer. Just yesterday. I thought we could trail
them from there.

Who saw them?

I hesitated. A friend of mine. He is shy of most
folk. But I have gained his confidence, and sometimes, when he sees
odd things, he comes to me and tells me.

Um. I could sense Verity's reservations as he
considered my reticence. Well. I shall ask no more. Some secrets
are necessary, I suppose. I remember a little half-wit girl who
used to come and sit at my mother's feet. My mother kept her
clothed and fed and gave her trinkets and sweets. No one ever paid
much attention to her. But once I came upon them unawares, and
heard her telling my mother about a man in a tavern who had been
selling pretty necklaces and armbands. Later that week the King's
guard arrested Rife the highwayman in the very same tavern. Quiet
folk often know much.

Indeed.

We rode on in a companionable silence.
Occasionally I had to remind myself that Verity was not here in the
flesh. But I begin to wish I were. It has been too long, boy, since
I rode through these hills simply for the sake of riding. My life
has become too heavy with purpose. I cannot remember the last time
I did something simply because I wanted to do it.

I was nodding to his thought when the scream
shattered the forest quiet. It was the wordless cry of a young
creature, cut off in midshriek, and before I could control myself,
I quested toward it. My Wit found wordless panic, death fear, and
sudden horror from Nighteyes. I sealed off my mind to it, but
turned Sooty's head that way and urged her toward it. Clinging low
to her neck, I nudged her along through the maze of banked snow and
fallen limbs and clear ground that was the forest floor. I worked
my way up a hill, never getting up to the speed I suddenly so
desperately wanted. I crested the hill, and looked down on a scene
I shall never be able to forget.

There were three of them, raggedy and bearded
and smelly. They snarled and muttered at each other as they fought.
They gave off no life sense to my Wit, but I recognized them as the
Forged ones that Nighteyes had shown me the night before. She was
small, three perhaps, and the woolly tunic she wore was bright
yellow, the loving work of some mother's hands. They fought over
her as if she were a snared rabbit, dragging on the limbs of her
little body in an angry tug-of-war with no heed to the small life
that still resided in her. I roared my fury at the sight and drew
my sword just as one Forged one's determined jerk on her neck
snapped her free of her body. At my cry, one of the men lifted his
head and turned to me, his beard bright with blood. He had not
waited for her death to begin feeding.

I kicked Sooty and rode down on them like
vengeance on horseback. From the woods to my left, Nighteyes burst
onto the scene. He was upon them before I was, leaping to the
shoulders of one and opening his jaws wide to set his teeth into
the back of the man's neck. One turned to me as I came down, and
threw up a useless hand to shield himself from my sword. My blow
was such that my fine new blade half severed his neck from his body
before wedging in his spine. I pulled my belt knife and launched
myself from Sooty's back to grapple with the man who was trying to
plunge his knife into Nighteyes. The third Forged one snatched up
the girl's body and raced off into the woods with it.

The man fought like a maddened bear, snapping
and stabbing at us even after I had opened up his belly. His
entrails hung over his belt, and still he came stumbling after us.
I could not even take time for the horror I felt. Knowing he would
die, I left him and we plunged off after the one who had
fled.

Nighteyes was a befurred gray streak that
undulated up the hillside, and I cursed my slow two legs as I sped
after him. The trail was plain, trampled snow and blood and the
foul stench of the creature. My mind was not working well. I swear
that as I raced up that hillside I somehow thought I could be in
time to undo her death and bring her back. To make it have never
happened. It was an illogical drive that sped me on,

He had doubled back. From behind a great stump
he leaped at us, flinging the girl's body at Nighteyes and then
leaping bodily onto me. He was big and muscled like a smithy.
Unlike other Forged ones I had encountered, this one's size and
strength had kept him fed and well clothed. The boundless anger of
a hunted animal was his. He seized me, lifting me clear off my
feet, and then fell upon me with one knotty forearm crushing my
throat. He landed atop me, barrel chest on my back, pinning my,
chest and one arm to the earth below him. I reached back, to sink
my knife twice into a meaty thigh. He roared with anger and
increased the pressure. He pressed my face into the frozen earth.
Black dots spotted my vision, and Nighteyes was a sudden addition
to the weight on my back. I thought my spine would snap. Nighteyes
slashed at the man's back with his fangs, but the Forged one only
drew his chin into his chest and hunched his shoulders against the
attack. He knew he was killing me with his strangle. Time enough to
deal with the wolf when I was dead.

The struggle opened up the wound on my neck and
warm blood spilled out. The added pain was a tiny spur to my
struggle. I shook my head wildly in his grip, and the slipperiness
of my own blood was enough to let me turn my throat a tiny bit. I
got in one desperate wheeze of air before the giant shifted his
grip on me. He began to bend my head back. If he could not throttle
me, he would simply break my neck. He had the muscle for
it.

Nighteyes changed tactics. He could not open his
jaws wide enough to get the man's head into them, but his scraping
teeth found enough purchase to tear part of the man's scalp from
his skull. He set his teeth in the flap of flesh and pulled. Blood
rained down on me as the Forged one roared wordlessly and kneed me
in the small of the back. He let go with one arm to flail at
Nighteyes. I wheeled around in his arms, to bring one knee up into
his groin, and then to get a good knife thrust into his side. The
pain must have been incredible; but he did not release me. Instead
he cracked his head against mine in a flash of blackness, and then
wrapped his huge arms around me, pinning me to him as he began to
crush my chest.

That is as much of the struggle as I can
remember coherently. I don't know what came over me next; perhaps
it was the death fury some legends speak of. Teeth, nails, and
knife I fought him, taking flesh from his body wherever I could
reach it. Still, I know it would not have been enough had not
Nighteyes also been attacking with the same boundless frenzy.
Sometime later I crawled from under the man's body. There was a
foul coppery taste in my mouth and I spat out dirty hair and blood.
I wiped my hands down my pants and then rubbed them in clean snow,
but nothing could ever cleanse them.

Are you all right? Nighteyes lay panting in the
snow a yard or two way. His jaws were likewise bloodied. As I
watched he snapped up a great mouthful of snow, then resumed his
panting. I rose and stumbled a step or two toward him. Then I saw
the girl's body and sank down beside it in the snow. I think that
was when I realized I was too late, and had been too late from the
instant I had spotted them.

She was tiny. Sleek black hair and dark eyes.
Horribly, her little body was still warm and lax. I lifted her to
my lap and smoothed the hair back from her face. A small face, even
baby teeth. Round cheeks. Death had not yet clouded her gaze; the
eyes that stared up into mine seemed fixed on a puzzle beyond
understanding. Her little hands were fat and soft and streaked with
the blood that had run down from the bites on her arms. I sat in
the snow with the dead child on my lap. So this was how a child
felt in one's arms. So small, and once so warm. So still. I bowed
my head over her smooth hair and wept. Sudden shudders ran over me,
uncontrollably. Nighteyes snuffed at my cheek and whined. He pawed
roughly at my shoulder and I suddenly realized I had shut him out.
I touched him with a quieting hand, but could not open my mind to
him or anything else. He whined again, and I finally heard the
hoofbeats. He gave my cheek an apologetic lick and then vanished
into the woods.

I staggered to my feet, still holding my child.
The riders crested the hill above me. Verity in the lead, on his
black, with Burrich behind him, and Blade, and half a dozen others.
Horribly, there was a woman, roughly dressed, riding behind Blade
on his horse. She cried out aloud at the sight of me, and slid
quickly from the horse's back, running toward me with hands
reaching for the child. I could not bear the terrible light of hope
and joy in her face. Her eyes seized on mine for an instant and I
saw everything die in her face. She clawed her little girl from my
arms, snatched at the cooling face on the lolling neck, and then
began to scream. The desolation of her grief broke over me like a
wave, sweeping my walls away and carrying me under with her. The
screaming never stopped.

Hours later, sitting in Verity's study, I could
still hear it. I vibrated to the sound, long shudders that ran over
me uncontrollably. I was stripped to the waist, sitting on a stool
before the fireplace. The healer was building the fire up while
behind me a stonily silent Burrich was swabbing pine needles and
dirt out of the gouge on my neck. This, and this aren't fresh
wounds, he observed at one point, pointing down to the other injury
on my arm. I said nothing. All words had deserted me. In a basin of
hot water beside him, dried iris flowers were uncurling with bits
of bog myrtle floating beside them. He moistened a cloth in the
water and sponged at the bruises on my throat. The smith had big
hands, he observed aloud.

You knew him? the healer asked as he turned to
look at Burrich.

Not to talk to. I'd seen him, a time or two, at
Springfest when some of the outlying trade folk come to town with
their goods. He used to bring fancy silverwork for
harness.