Spellbreakers (20 page)

The sun was shining.

The forest was totally silent around them.

This should have been a warning, but they were too
sleepy to take it.

****

They rode on in silence until mid-afternoon. They must
have made more than twenty miles since the cottage, and they were beginning to
look for signs that they were getting close to the river when a long thrilling
bird-call went up to their right, far up into the woods. They were not too far
from the Venta’a, they knew that, because the little brook had swollen to a
full, fast stream, and they were now riding into a deep, green dale, covered
with lush greenery on both sides. They were going due west and had the sun in
their eyes. The bird call was answered from their left, a bit further on. Daria
would not have taken any notice of it if the forest had not been so quiet
before. Suddenly she shook her head to chase the sleepiness from her eyes and sat
straight up in the saddle.

“Leal!” she called with some urgency.

“What?” said Leal catching
up.

Gods, that mare is slow
, thought Daria suddenly anxious.

“I don’t know. But stay close. Let’s get to those
fords. I don’t like this place.”

They spurred on, down the grassy path. It was wider
here, almost like a country lane, and it was getting stonier by the minute. Not
cloven mountain rocks, but round pebbles buried in sand and weeds.
We are
almost there,
thought Daria with some relief. She let out a long breath.

And then, dark horsemen shapes emerged in the sun
dazzle ahead.

“Oh damn!” said Daria, reining in her gelding. Leal’s
mare rode right into his butt, and both horses pranced, pawing the air. There
were whooping calls behind them, and the troom-troomp of more horses galloping
out of the valley.

“Bandits?” asked Leal, breathless from the effort of
holding her horse in.

Daria scanned the valley behind them, then the path
towards the river again. She could see the silvery gleam of rippling,
sun-kissed waters through the trees.
We were so close, so close!

She stared hard against the sun, shading her eyes with
her hand. There were four riders ahead. Not an army. She looked back again.
There were maybe six or seven more behind them. She could see them now.
A rag-tag band on small, long-maned ponies.
Not real
bandits. More like wood cutters with a side business of petty thieving.

“Come on,” shouted Daria, spurring down towards the
river. “Follow me! Like the blazes! Ride hard and never
look
back!”

Leal followed her. The four riders ahead stood square
on the path on their stocky ponies, and Daria rode down at a full gallop like a
knight in armor. She had no lance, but her horse was half as tall and heavy as
any of these little Kalevan screws. He was a brave boy. She trusted him like
she had never trusted any horse.

“Ride hard, my love!” she called, whether to the bay
gelding or to Leal behind her, she could not say. The riders had bows, and
nocked arrows, but they didn’t shoot. The Escarran horses were the most
valuable thing they had ever seen, Daria realized. They would not shoot. They
would not risk damaging the goods.

Ride hard, my love, don’t balk now.

The gelding sped on down the path like lightning,
faster and faster. The bandits stood their ground to the last moment. Perhaps
they didn’t believe she would go through with her reckless assault.
Perhaps
they are just thick-witted, inbred idiots.

“Down, you dogs!” she screamed at the last moment.
Then the impact came, an almighty crash as the gelding, not balking at all,
galloped straight into the second pony from the right. The others scattered,
squealing, grunting and bucking. One rider was unhorsed and fell on the path,
swearing. A wild arrow shot past, but Leal rode on, unharmed. Her mare jumped
over the fallen rider, overtaking Daria’s gelding while he negotiated his own
obstacle, a crazed knot of flailing hooves and human limbs. The pony and rider
had gone bodily down under the shock of a full sized horse thrown at a gallop
down a grassy slope at them.

“Good boy, good boy,” cried Daria wildly as the horse
staggered, snorted and jumped over the struggling pony. There was a crunch and
a shout of agony. They had trodden on the fallen rider, but Daria could not say
how bad the damage was. On, on, on!

On, across the river.
That was all that mattered. They had broken through,
but they still had the others behind them.

Leal was well ahead. Daria spurred and galloped after
her. They were almost there! The river ran fast and full. It was hard to judge
how deep it was, but there was no going back now, no turning south on the
uncertain path to the bridge.

“Cross!” she screamed, seeing Leal’s mare shying on
the edge of the stony bank. “Go on! She’ll swim if she can’t run!”

They went down the last slope, skittering on loose
pebbles.

The horses danced on tiptoe on the edge of the river
for a moment, and then Daria gave an angry shout that brought her gelding round
to discipline. He arched his neck, snorting, and walked in, somewhat sideways,
still dancing. For a few steps he was in to his pasterns, then his knees, and
then he lurched as he took the full strength of the stream on his flank, cold,
foaming water up to the saddle skirts. Daria felt him scrambling for footing on
the loose bottom of the river. For a moment they were afloat. Then his hooves
found a purchase, and he was out of the deep channel and clambering up again.
Leal’s mare followed somehow, and in a matter of seconds they were across, with
water spraying from the horses’ tails and fetlocks as they climbed the opposite
bank. Daria’s heart went out to this brave horse in infinite gratitude.

But the outlaws were just behind them now.

Daria peered over her shoulder as they rode up the
bank. The sturdy ponies, although slower on the flat path, had no hesitation
whatsoever on the steep stony ford. They were as surefooted as goats, and
rushed down without missing a step. They forged through the water, even deeper
down than the taller horses, flared nostrils and white-ringed eyes staring. The
current took them downstream for a little before they could find footing on the
near side of the river. Even so, they’d be across in an instant.

“Ride on,” yelled Daria, reining in her horse. “I’ll
hold them as long as I can! Just ride!”

****

That’s brave, and crazy,
thought Leal, as her mare shied, undecided between
fleeing and sticking with Daria’s gelding.

And exactly in that moment, as Daria spurred her long
legged horse headlong down the ford’s path and Leal wrestled with her mare, the
dark bay gelding stumbled on the steep downhill track. For a second it looked
as if he would recover, but then his hooves skidded on the loose stones, his
front legs buckled under him, and he was bodily down, chin down in the gravel.
There was a scream almost human, but it came from the horse. Daria’s own howl
was more like a wounded animal’s. The horse turned bodily over, rider and all,
and ended up in the shallow water at the edge of the stream, flailing his back
legs in the air.

“Daria!” shouted Leal, turning her mare round, but
right then a furious Daria emerged from the wreck of horse, saddle, saddlebags,
and scattered gear, shouting wrathfully.

“Ride on, damn it!” She waved her arms frantically,
trying to scare the mare up the path, but Leal resolutely spurred her towards
the river again. The mare pranced again in exasperation and confusion. Leal, or
what little part of her was still able to think, was sure that this was the end
of them all.

In that very moment Leal felt, rather than heard,
something hard and fast and sharp whizzing past her ear. It was so close that a
lock of her short hair flapped in the wind of it. She brought her hand to her
cheek and flashed round, and another hiss passed over her head.
Arrows,
she
thought
. They are shooting at us!

There was a shout behind her, and she turned again,
but it was not Daria.

One of the bandits had a long arrow sticking out of
his throat and was toppling from the saddle of his pony into the river. It was
a strangely slow fall, or maybe her sense of time was warped by fear. Daria was
laboring up the path of the ford, and the foremost bandit, still mounted, and
oblivious to his companion’s fate, was almost on top of her. He had a
rough-hewn mace in his hand. Even on such a low mount, slowed down by water and
the climb, he’d deliver a fatal blow. Leal cried out with anguish while her
mare balked on the edge of the river’s bank.

There was another arrow and then another. The bandits’
leader was shot through the shoulder. He screamed, and his mace fell down, and
suddenly all the outlaws were in a terrible hurry to turn their horses, and
cross back to the other side of the ford as fast as they could, leaving behind
their friends, loot, and ponies without any compunction. The wounded bandit
wheeled his pony round and made to follow, but he was swept off his saddle in
mid-stream and disappeared down the river, while his pony swam across on its
own and trotted away unhurried up the path they had all come from.

Daria scrambled to the top of the bank staring hard
against the sun at the forest behind Leal.

When Leal turned again, dizzy with all the pirouetting
of the mare, she just managed to make out the archer on the path behind her. He
was dressed in such a way that his silhouette melted in the hues and shifting
patterns of the forest behind him, and until he came much closer, it took an
effort to focus and see him properly. Leal walked her mare up the path to meet
him, with a vague foreboding.

He was coolly walking down towards them, one arrow
still nocked in the bow, but aimed at the ground in front of him.

“Well met, my lady,” he said in a low, slightly
rasping, slightly breathy voice when he was half a dozen yards from her.

“Well met, and thank you,” she said, a bit
uncertainly. “I stand in your debt.”

He nodded, acknowledging the debt.

“Uhm ... lady?” asked Leal, recovering her wits. “I … my
name
is
Gabriel, and I am certainly not a lady. I am a
squire in Castel Argell, in Escarra. And that’s Lorenç, my brother.”

“Oh, well, fancy that.
My bad.
I’d better call back those wretched boys and tell them they can keep you, after
all. I was hoping I had just saved the smooth white hide of Princess Leal of
the royal house of Escarra. Well, never mind.”

He let out a high pitched whistle as if to call back a
dog. But instead of the bandits riding back, it was a huge pale falcon which
answered the call, swooping down from above and landing on his leather bracer.
It was a gyrfalcon. Back home, only her father hunted with a gyrfalcon.

Leal looked at him, astonished. “Who are you? And how
do you know my name?”

“Ah?
So, not a squire after all?”

He sent the falcon to perch on a nearby dead tree,
where the bird sat preening her feathers and occasionally watching her with
some disdain.

The archer put his head to one side and studied her
with a vague smile on his lips.

Leal stared at him. There was something infinitely odd
about him, although right there and then she could not say exactly what.
Perhaps it was just the structure of his face, which had very high, wide
cheekbones, and deeply set almond-shaped eyes under prominent brows. He had
rather wild dark hair, shoulder length, some of it done in braids, some hanging
loose. There was a grizzled streak in the black, and yet he didn’t move like an
old man. Rather tall, with wide shoulders. He was dressed in a strange mixture
of grey-green cloth, soft brown leather, scraps of silvery and golden silk,
with odd bits of feathers, fringe or fur dangling here and there. It was hard
to say if the dangling bits were part of the clothing or rather some bizarre
form of jeweler. In any case they contributed considerably to the camouflage
effect of his garment. It might have been impossible to see him if he had
stayed put under the forest’s canopy.

All this she took in in a brief instant, but she could
not register more details there and then, because in that moment Daria came
hobbling up the path screaming, to plant herself bodily between the stranger
and the chest of Leal’s mare. She was wet and muddy all over, there were tears
of pain, grief and rage in her eyes, and she was bleeding from a cut on her
forehead and half a dozen scratches, but she stood there with her dagger
unsheathed and the fury of a wild cat in her voice and stance. It was
irrational, beautiful, absurd, and moving all at the same time.

It was Daria at her best.

“Whoa, sir!
Not a
step further.
Your name and business, if you please!”

Much to Leal's astonishment the newcomer did not
bridle at Daria’s fierceness, nor laugh at the incongruity of it, as well he
might have. Daria’s dagger was not much of a match for his quick, well-aimed
arrows. Instead he looked startled and even pained, as if he had been hit in
the face by an invisible blow.