The Sleeping King (57 page)

The lizardman girl stood only a few feet beyond the fallen creature. She nodded briefly and whirled away, seeking more targets.

Will spun around as he heard Rosana shout some incant that involved burning blood and curses. That orc dodged the spell from Rosana easily enough in the heavy brush but pitched forward seconds later with a trio of arrows sticking out of his back. He took several staggering steps and plowed into Will, knocking him over and landing heavily on top of him. His staff trapped between them, Will shoved in desperation at the orc.

The Boki grinned at Will, showing sharp, yellow teeth, blackened along their edges. He opened his mouth wide as if to bite Will's nose off. Rosana shouted something about weakness above them, but he could not count on her to hit the broad side of a barn, let alone an orc in battle.

Will had to escape, now. Otherwise, he was in serious trouble. No sooner had he thought it than he thought he felt a slackening in the orc's hug of death. Rosana must have managed to hit with her weakness spell. A look of confusion entered the orc's eyes, and Will heaved for all he was worth. He put enough distance between them that he was able to jerk his knee up sharply.

The orc wore some sort of hard codpiece to protect his privates, but the awkward angle at which Will struck it seemed to drive the cup sideways, its hard rim pinching something soft and imminently pinchable. The orc squealed, jerking up and away from Will. Which was enough to free Will's left hand. He smashed his fist into the Boki's ear once, twice.

The orc bellowed and rolled away. Will kicked his feet up into the air, arched into a backbend, then whipped his feet down, snapping his torso upright. He slashed down and back with his staff and sparks flew as its iron tip scored across the orc's blade. But the blow held the beast in place for the instant Will needed to wrench his dagger out of his belt and plunge it into the orc's neck. A spurt of hot blood sprayed him.

Will looked up. One of the Boki had Rosana pinned against a tree and held a knife to her throat. Will's impulse was to lurch toward her, but he would never reach her in time. He prayed her magic was sufficient to the task of defending herself. She commenced incanting something about disarming a weapon. He hoped it worked.

Will locked gazes with another orc who looked like the leader if the quantity of battle scars on the beast was any indication. Hopeful that his companions could take care of the rest of the orcs, Will closed on the leader.

The big orc snarled, and an answering smile curved Will's lips. The consciousness of the other being within him surged forward, and Will let it run free within his veins. He relaxed his mental guard and gave himself over to it. He hardly recognized his own voice when it emerged from his throat, deep and rough. Shaggy. “You think you can take me? Why don't you try, then?”

“Du'shaak!” The challenge in the orc's voice wasn't nearly so certain this time.

Will's eyes widened when the alien wildness within him made him laugh … and throw the staff onto the ground almost halfway between him and the orc. He threw his body forward in a jumping, pivoting step, then flung himself backward onto his hands in an acrobat's handspring. It was a trick he'd performed for his buddies back in Hickory Hollow a thousand times.

His right hand landed on the staff as his feet flew over his head. He landed on his feet, rebounding high into the air, executing a 180 turn midair. The handspring had the effect he'd hoped for. The Boki stared, openmouthed, at the mad youth now charging him.

Calling upon all the training his father had ever drilled into him, Will attacked the orc with every ounce of his strength and speed. He incorporated Kendrick's advice to aim for joints and the Boki's head. Will got in a couple of solid blows, enough to slow the beast a tiny bit. But the orc was stronger and bigger than Will and forced him back until his feet tangled in brambles and brush. He tripped. And started to go down.

Without warning, the tip of his blade poked forward through the orc's chest. The creature toppled over, and Kendrick stood behind him, withdrawing his sword smoothly as the orc fell.

“Thanks be,” Will panted. Using his staff, he pulled himself upright and turned to face the next threat.

It was over.

A circle of bloody bodies lay around the spot where Kendrick and Eben had made their stand. Cicero and Sha'Li panted side by side, a giant tree at their back, a pair of dead orcs before them. Will stepped forward to check the orc down at Rosana's feet, but she whipped out her own dagger and brandished it.

“Don't kill it, Rosana,” Will said wearily. “You should not kill anyone, not wearing those colors.” Not to mention it was not honorable.

A reptilian voice hissed from the far side of the fire, “Kill him, gypsy!” Eben nodded in agreement with the lizardman girl, and Will turned to Kendrick for support. As he was a noble, however minor, his opinion was the only one that ultimately mattered beyond the Heart member's.

Kendrick shrugged. “They attacked us. I say we kill them.”

Sha'Li interrupted, “Never do they randomly strike a target. Around this camp they could have gone just as easily. Why attack us do they?”

Had the Boki attacked here for the same reason they'd attacked Hickory Hollow? Was there something, or someone, here that they wanted? What could this motley bunch possibly have that any Boki would want? Surely these orcs had no way of knowing Will carried his father's blood in his veins.

This pack of orcs had been carrying barely more than the hides on their backs and a few supplies. Which meant this was likely a scouting party, come south out of the Forest of Thorns. Why would the orcs have scouting parties outside of their traditional territory unless they hunted something or someone specific?

Rosana shrugged. “I know not why they attack us, but that one intentionally spare me. It was my Heart colors.… Will, we cannot kill this one.”

She turned her dark, pleading gaze upon him. How could he say no to her big, sad eyes, her compassion? Her innate kindness? And yet these were the monsters who'd decimated Hickory Hollow. They deserved to die, did they not?

He turned to Kendrick. “What would we do with a Boki prisoner?”

Sha'Li snapped, “Kill him you must. Vicious foes are these Boki. Do not let the gypsy girl's fluttering eyelashes out of common sense talk you!”

Will drew breath to answer when, without warning, the disk on his chest went searingly hot against his skin.
A warning, perhaps? Against what? Or to do what?

“They are enemies of the Empire,” Kendrick declared as if that answered everything.

“Bah!” Will burst out.
Inperial law be cursed.
He had no will to kill a defenseless creature. He stepped away from the unconscious Boki.

But before Will had taken three steps back, the lizardman girl leaped forward and, with her claw, slit the orc's throat. Nausea and rage rolled through Will so thick and hot he could barely remain on his feet.

Rosana glared at the lizardman girl in fury. “I cannot believe you did that!”

Sha'Li stared back implacably. “What had to be done, I did. This world is kill or be killed.” Rosana continued to glare in righteous fury, and Sha'Li added defensively, “Resurrect he will. Strong spirits have orcs, and close enough to Forest of Thorns we are for his spirit to reach shamans.”

Will wasn't used to living near enough healers or Heartstones for death to be such a casual thing. In his experience, death was permanent and something to be feared, not a causal inconvenience.

He surged forward to confront Sha'Li. “Pull another stunt like that, and the next time my blade is at your throat I'll show you the same mercy you just showed that orc.”

Kendrick jumped forward to pull Will back from the hissing lizardman girl. “Hey, now. No need for threats. She did what she thought was right. I can't say as I entirely disagree with her. The Boki did attack us first. We've the right to defend ourselves with lethal force.”

Will was too conditioned not to cross nobles to argue with the young man. But that orc had been defenseless, and killing a downed foe was different from killing in the heat of a fair fight against an armed enemy. Shock that he was taking a Boki's side in any dispute rolled through Will … along with a vague sense of … approval.

Sha'Li turned away from him and Rosana with a shrug. Eben grunted in what sounded like support of the lizardman girl, and the two of them traded grimaces that might pass for smiles.

Raina spoke up. “Eben, how can you side with her? She just murdered that orc in cold blood! Killing greenskins makes them hate humanoids and kill us in retaliation. Violence only begets more violence.”

“You're not White Heart until you put on the colors,” Kendrick defended his friend.

“That orc was going to murder
us
in cold blood. Good riddance, I say,” Eben added. The basso humming undertone of his race was more pronounced than usual in his voice.

“Angry you be at him, why?” Sha'Li interjected. “I did the deed.” She slid over toward Eben's side as he nodded his agreement with her.

Will looked back and forth between the two. A jann and a lizardman allies? Now
there
was an unlikely pair.

A foreign rumble of humor bubbled up within him at the notion and Will jolted. How much was the entity within the disk manifesting himself? Was that why Will's senses had been so extraordinarily sharp recently? What else would the thing do to him? Would the entity drive him mad? Take over his mind … or worse?

The thought chilled him to the marrow of his bones.

Sha'Li spoke into the heavy silence in a low, urgent murmur. “Go we must. Now. The noise of battle Anton's men will have heard. Investigate they will.”

Only now, after the heat of battle faded, did Will feel remorse for harming the orcs he had in the fight. He would never grow used to killing any living thing. As it should be, he supposed.

There was a brief argument while Cicero and Sha'Li disputed who could best erase their trail, and it was decided that both of them would cover the party's tracks. The group set out with Will in the lead, the countertrackers bringing up the rear.

For the first few minutes their only goal was to get away from the site of the skirmish. But then Rosana murmured from behind Will, “How do you know where to go at night?”

Will did not. But he closed his eyes for a moment, probing within his mind for Bloodroot, who lay quiescent at the moment. Then a single, overwhelmingly joyous thought suffused Will.
Home
.

Dead certain of his course all of a sudden, Will angled slightly to his left and strode confidently into the blackness. Toward a home he'd never seen before, which was not his, but in which he knew every stream and stone and tree and could picture each as clearly as if he stood beside them. He could all but smell the familiar sweet-sharp scent of pine sap and oak tannin.

His steps lengthened until Rosana called out for him to slow down, and even Sha'Li complained that she and Cicero could not erase their trail that quickly.

Impatient with his frail human body, Will's urge to race for home was nigh unto uncontrollable. But when he promised that other, foreign part of him that he would get him home as soon as humanly possible if he would but let Will set the pace and manage his own body, the tree spirit relented. Will slowed to a more reasonable pace and that other awareness retreated, only reasserting his presence to make minor course corrections now and again. Exhausted without Bloodroot to goad him, Will stumbled along on sheer willpower.

Soon now. Soon he would be home, and all would become clear. The human boy would understand why he'd been dragged halfway across the northern colony and endowed with skills few mortals ever mastered. The human would also understand what was required of him in return. No matter that it would likely cost the boy his life. Given what was at stake, the boy was entirely expendable.

 

CHAPTER

23

Will grumbled as a twig or mayhap a root poked him in the back, and he shifted in his bedroll. It had been a long, cold hike, and he was delighted to be hunkered down, warm at last, in his bedroll. Something poked him again. It felt like a finger jabbing in his ribs. Okay, he hadn't been moving. If that was another dryad—

Something slithered past his nose, fast, and he lurched upright, grabbing for his staff.
Where is it?
The weapon was not at his side where it had been when he lay down. He groped frantically for it as another something long and sinuous, the thickness of his wrist, whipped past his head. The flying thing impacted something large behind him, wrapping around it with a solid thwack.

“Oww,” someone complained.

“Who goes?” Will bit out sharply. Curse it, he still hadn't found his staff! His dagger came to hand and he scooped it up as he leaped to his feet to face the intruder.

“Call off your blasted weeds,” the voice complained again.

“Sha'Li? Is that you?”

“Yes!” the lizardman girl hissed. “Off me get them!”

Will stepped forward in the gloom, peering at what confined her. Vines. Thick and green, they looked like the giant serpent his father had shown him once in the Southwatch market. The vines constricted around her much like the snake had around the hapless rabbit its handler had tossed it.

“What happened to you?” he asked the lizardman girl.

The others were rousing, sitting up sleepily in their bedrolls behind him. Kendrick charged back into camp from where he'd been sitting watch a little ways out in the wood.

Sha'Li snarled something unintelligible, sibilant and angry.

Although he didn't understand the words, that other awareness within Will reacted with sharp caution. Will circled around her to have a better look at the twining vines. As he moved behind her his foot kicked something hard. He glanced down, startled to see his staff. He bent down and scooped it up. How had that gotten way out here behind Sha'Li?