The Outskirter's Secret (32 page)

"I have to stay with you." Then a motion back
at camp caught his eye, and he spun, throwing out one fist in
helpless rage. "Outer ten is down!"

Rowan looked back. The camp was unchanged,
but for three warriors approaching at a run. She turned to
Fletcher. "If I can't go to the outer circle, then you go." He
looked down at her, speechless. "Go on, do what you need to," she
reassured him. "I can take care of myself."

His mouth worked twice, and he made a small
sound, almost a laugh. "I'm not here to protect you. I'm here to
protect us—
from
you!"

Rowan said nothing. The approaching warriors
passed, fanning out into separate directions.

Fletcher drew a shuddering breath and
expelled it with difficulty. "You'll have to sheathe your weapon,"
he told Rowan. His eyes were wild, his voice was forced flat, and
he trembled from the need to run to his comrades' aid. "Either
that, or give it to me."

She looked at the sword in her hand, then
looked up. "I don't understand." But he had stopped watching her;
he was reading the relay, and she read its message mirrored on his
face: that out on the veldt warriors were fighting and failing, and
that enemies were working their way inward, toward the heart of the
tribe. "What are they saying?"

He kept his gaze on the signals. "Lady,
please don't ask me that." He slipped into the form, and the
deference, of an Inner Lander.

"Fletcher—"

"I'm not supposed to tell you!"

She forced him around, violently. "Bel is out
there somewhere!"

"I know. That's the problem."

A scout had found signs of strangers. Bel had
gone out to talk to them. Now the tribe was under attack. "No,"
Rowan said. "No, she didn't bring them here."

"I know. I believe you." He could not meet
her eyes, "But it doesn't matter. Put your sword away."

She did so. "If the enemy comes this far in,"
she said stiffly, "I hope you'll tell me in time to defend my own
life."

"If they come this far in, I'm supposed to
kill you myself."

They had been walking most of the morning,
sharing observations, jokes, reminiscences. She stared up at him,
appalled. "Would you actually do it?"

His pose shattered. "God, I don't know!" he
cried out. "Don't ask me, Rowan, I don't know!" And behind him the
wavering ripples of redgrass tops suddenly evolved three straight
lines of motion, approaching fast.

"Eight, six, and five by you!" Rowan shouted,
and shoved past him, running toward the endpoint of the nearest
line, drawing her weapon.

The line on the grass vanished.

She stopped. Shaking with urgency, she stood.
She thought.

Wind from the north; if the enemy was moving,
it was at the wind's pace, in its direction. Angling now to the
right.

She shifted, ran. There were sounds of
pursuit behind: Fletcher, coming either to aid, or to carry out his
duty.

Another line changed direction, doubling back
toward her. A trap. They thought she would go for the visible
target.

Fletcher called to her, cursing in the name
of his strange god. There was a dip in the grass tops to her left:
she spun, struck. The impact of her blade on bone sent a shock
through her arm. The approaching second line arrived, and a figure
burst from the redgrass, reeds chattering. She swept with her
sword, high: a tanglewood club fell to the ground. The enemy dove
for it. She struck down at his skull, sliced down his scalp,
severed his neck.

She turned back to the first man. Her metal
sword met metal and wood. She had wounded him before; he fought
with his body angled away, his left side glittering red in the
sunlight.

Nearby, Fletcher made a sound—a choked cry of
battle. He was about to kill someone. She wondered if it was
herself.

Her adversary fought with vicious speed, but
clumsily. He gave her a dozen openings, recovering each time too
quickly for her to use them.

Fletcher had not killed her yet. Someone
else, then.

She disengaged, pivoted, took two steps, and
struck again at her enemy's wounded side. He took the blow without
a sound as her sword cut deep into him. He writhed and made a
desperate sweep at her own undefended left, then changed direction
to meet a second blade: Fletcher's. Sword stopped sword. He stood a
moment so, with Fletcher's blade against his blade, and Rowan's
inside his chest. Death overtook any further moves.

Fletcher turned away as the man fell,
scanning the veldt for more action. Rowan pulled her sword from the
corpse and did the same. Instinctively they halved the duty and
found themselves back-to-back.

"At four by you, I've got three of ours
against two of theirs, right by Sim's tent. And one more
approaching from eight."

"I have five approaching at ten by me, some
heavy engagement at twelve, too far to see clearly."

"Anyone heading for that five?"

"No."

"Let's go."

The enemy was making no effort at
concealment; that time was past. Rowan did not know how to conceal
herself like an Outskirter, did not know if Fletcher had that
skill. They approached in the open. The two nearest adversaries
first sped to flee, then wheeled about to engage.

Rowan's man had a club he hefted high to
swing down; she struck beneath it, two-handed, waist-level, left to
right, with as much speed and force as she could muster.

He dodged back, she dodged aside; both blows
missed. She swung up to the left, grazed his head. He brought the
club up, a weak move that struck her right forearm. Her arms were
thrown back, right hand free of her hilt. With her left she swung
down on the side of his neck. Her enemy choked, spraying blood from
mouth and wound, and collapsed.

Fletcher was fighting against a metal sword,
with difficulty. His enemy was half his size, twice his speed.
Fletcher dodged back, trying to use his longer reach and greater
weight. His opponent escaped each blow nimbly, recovered
ferociously. Rowan moved to assist, but found a new enemy; she
downed him with a fast low stab to the abdomen, then took on the
next man who rose behind him.

He was less quick than the others; Rowan
entered into Bel's drill. She slid her sword up his, twisted,
pulled back, struck, slid, twisted. He lost his rhythm for the
briefest moment when he saw what was happening to his weapon. She
took the instant to gather force for one great blow that shattered
his sword at the root. He stepped back in shock, staring at the
hilt.

He was smaller than Rowan, wiry, his brown
hair short as a woman's. His clothing was a tattered fur motley,
his legs bare. He looked up in helpless horror. She drove her sword
into his blue eyes, and his face became a thing of blood and
bone.

She turned toward the ringing sounds of
Fletcher's fight, found his enemy with his back toward her. She
struck below one shoulder. Ribs broke; then she saw Fletcher's
point swing high, trailing an arc of blood as the man fell back,
his stomach and chest opened to his throat.

In the lull, the redgrass roared like surf.
Fletcher and Rowan exchanged one wild glance, went back-to-back
beside the corpse.

She was facing the camp, he the veldt.
"There's something going on in camp, I can't tell what. Nothing
between here and there." He did not reply. "Fletcher?" Silence.
"Fletcher!" She turned to him.

He stood looking out. "Sweet Christ . .
."

A troop of figures, at least a dozen: a full
war band approaching fast, with no other defenders between them and
Rowan and Fletcher. And beyond, the rippling grass showed a
complexity of contrary motion, lines too confused to be counted: a
second wave moving below the grass tops, hard behind the first.

"We'll have to fall back," she said, then
knew that there was no time. "We'll have to stand." They were two,
alone. "Fletcher?" She looked up at him.

He had not moved. He stood with his body
slack in shock, hilt held loose in his left hand, the point of his
sword dropped to the ground, forgotten. His right hand gripped the
Christer symbol on its thong, fingers white with strain. A dozen
emotions crossed his face, each a separate variety of terror; then
Rowan saw them all vanish, fall into a pit behind Fletcher's eyes,
and he stood expressionless, empty, blank.

"Fletcher!" His face was the same as when he
thought of his walkabout, of Mai, of death. "Fletcher, not now!"
She pulled at his arm. He resisted. She tried again, harder, and
swung him around.

He looked at her with dead eyes, then looked
at her again; Rowan saw him see her twice. He saw, and Rowan felt
herself being seen: a woman alone under blue sky, standing on
crushed redgrass, a corpse at her feet, blood on her clothing and
her sword, the home of Fletcher's people behind her, the enemies of
Fletcher's tribe approaching, now near—

And it was in that direction that he turned,
suddenly, and if he had not released his cross it would have been
flung into the redgrass by the wild swing of his arm as he threw
his body forward. He ran ten long strides and was on the first
enemy, spun with his sword double-handed at the end of his long
reach, and the first of the attackers dropped like a tree, the
second fell back spilling entrails, the third stood howling with a
sword deep in his abdomen—

Rowan hurried to join the fight.

Two men skirted Fletcher to rush toward camp.
Rowan met them. The first raised a club to strike, and Rowan
shattered his arm at the shoulder, continued across his throat,
then abandoned him. The next man had a steel sword, and she used
the force and moves that only her sword could take, slithering and
pressing forward in seemingly impossible maneuvers, then with one
singing flicker disarmed and slew him.

Across the veldt, from position seven, six
warriors were approaching at a run; friend or foe, Rowan could not
tell which.

She turned back in time to stop a club with
her sword. She struck it again, sending black chips flying, dodged
madly, took a step, turned, and severed her opponent's backbone
from behind.

She stopped one more who had come around
behind Fletcher, stopped another trying the same, and found herself
at Fletcher's left side. He fought left-handed; she shifted to his
right, met a wood sword, turned into her fight—

And then she and Fletcher were once again
back-to-back, this time in battle. But Fletcher seemed unaware of
her; he fought with such flailing fury that once her sword met his
as he dropped the point low behind his head before delivering an
overhand blow.

Beyond the remnants of the first war band,
the redgrass erupted with warriors: the second band had arrived.
Rowan shouted something, some words to Fletcher, the contents of
which she could never remember afterward.

The new fighters seemed all to have swords,
seemed all to be shouting, seemed to enter the battle with
something like glee—

— attacking the first war band.

Rowan returned to her opponent, and when she
looked back again, half of the remaining opponents had been downed;
when she looked back at her foe, he was dead, by the sword of a
huge, red-haired man, a stranger.

Fletcher was still in action, against a
small, muscular man who defended himself wildly, stepping back with
each blow, disbelief in his eyes. "No!" he shouted. Fletcher
ignored his cry, and one of the man's comrades, a woman, made a
sound of fury and started forward to assist.

"Fletcher, wait!" Rowan called.

One of the strangers cried, "Bel sent
us!"

Fletcher fought on, oblivious. "Give us her
names!" Rowan shouted. And it was the man on the other side of
Fletcher's sword who replied, desperately, "Bel, Margasdotter,
Chanly!"

Rowan clutched the back of Fletcher's vest
and pulled him back. He fell to a sprawling seat on the ground.

In the sudden quiet, Rowan looked around at
the faces: a dozen strangers. "You're here to help?"

"That's right."

"Good. We need it."

The group who had been approaching from
position seven arrived: half of Orranyn's band. Rowan recognized
Jann and Jaffry and laughed with joy, thinking how like a warrior's
that laugh sounded. "We have assistance," she called to them, "sent
by Bel."

"Bel? Where is she?" It was Jaffry who
asked.

One of the strangers grinned admiration for
the absent Bel and shrugged eloquently. "Somewhere."

"You're not dead," Jann observed, arriving at
Rowan's side.

"Not yet." Rowan scanned the group, counted.
"We're twenty." She turned back to Jann. "Where's the action?
Should we split?"

Jann took a moment to consider the corpses
scattered about: perfect evidence of the new war band's good
intentions. "Split," she decided. She addressed the strangers.
"Three groups, and each should have some of our own, so our people
don't attack you by mistake. You split yourselves, you know best.
Jaffry, Merryk, take one group, go to twelve. Cal, Lee, Lyssanno,
take another the same way, then swing off to position three; we
don't know what's going on there. Last group into camp with me,
Rowan and Fletcher." She looked down at him, still on the ground.
"Are you hurt?"

He was a moment replying. "No." He clambered
to his feet.

They set off at a jog toward camp, where
there were cries, flames. When they had crossed half the distance,
Jann asked Rowan, "Why aren't you dead?"

The steerswoman felt a rush of Outskirterly
pride and insult. "You fought me yourself," she said through her
teeth. "You know how I fight. That is why I'm not dead."

It was only when they reached the tents that
Rowan realized: Jann had been asking why Fletcher had not killed
Rowan as ordered, why he had failed in his duty.

Then they found their battle and set to
work.