Noble Beginnings (24 page)

The second knot of fighters, they came across
five minutes later, only a few hundred yards away from the castle.
These men turned their back on the castle and focused on rebuffing
their advance; they had the advantage of picking the area of street
on which they fought, even if they were not as familiar with it as
Dorran's fighters, so his progress was immediately slowed to a
crawl. Dorran had not yet had much experience with being on the
attacking side of a conflict, but found himself learning quickly.
Whenever his strength flagged or his vision flickered, he reminded
himself that his mother and likely one or more of his sisters were
on the other side of his enemies, and found his strength renewed
enough to cut one more man down.

Dorran realized that he had not heard the
single horn for several minutes, and did not know whether to be
relieved or more frantic than ever. But there was nothing to do now
but wait for the fighting blocking his way to disperse.

He was saved again from his own impatience by
the clattering of hooves behind him. This time, he waited only for
the instinctive recoil from the enemy before he pressed the
advantage, leading a small wedge of men through the enemy ranks and
opening a passage for both his fighters and the cavalry behind
them. Dorran, on the other side of the enemy, took a quick look
around for Goldwood and found him leading the charge. He raised an
arm in greeting, and the man wheeled around, waving a hand in
return.

"Dorran!" he called. "No luck so far?"

Dorran shook his head. "Thanks for the help!"
he yelled, and started to run in the direction of the castle,
yelling orders to the others to follow him as he went.

The minutes it took to find Thea were easily
the most tense of Dorran's life. He ran first to a point from which
he could see the place that had been her vantage point in the
castle a high balcony well out of the range of arrows and all but
full-sized trebuchets, only to find it empty. Approaching the
castle's front gate, he saw clear signs of a struggle, including
oil in puddles on the ground and bodies in varying poses of death.
He scanned quickly for injured, and, finding none, surmised that
the battle in the area had finished hours ago. The question was,
which way had they gone?

Shaking his head, Dorran sent half of his men
down the streets and took the other half into the castle himself.
He almost hoped for another horn call at this point, and was
beginning to worry that he could find no sign of where the Queen
had gone.

There had, indeed, been at least one struggle
inside the castle. Dorran followed a trail of bodies and
bloodstains down several halls and into several passageways,
eventually abandoning his comrades as they fanned out and rising
higher and higher towards what had been the Queen's vantage point.
When he arrived there, though, he saw only an empty platform, with
no indication of which way she had gone.

He took a moment to survey the battle. From
what he could see, the King's forces appeared to be dwindling;
there were a few fast-moving blobs that he recognized as horses
harrying a band to the east, and a fairly entrenched fight between
foot soldiers near the main gate.

It was as he leaned forward, trying to
ascertain more clearly who was gaining and losing ground in that
skirmish, that he heard the horn once more shaky, petering off
quickly, and coming from somewhere below him.

Dorran cursed inwardly and took off down the
stairs. The signal wasn't much to go on, but it had vaguely
suggested that the Queen was trapped somewhere near the underground
passages that led to the capital outside the castle. It made a
certain amount of sense from the perspective of defensibility, but
by the same token, if things went wrong, Thea would be stuck in the
tunnels, as trapped as a fox being chased by terriers.

On his way down, Dorran's toe caught on a
step, but he used his other foot to launch himself blindly upwards
and forwards and landed on his feet with only a twinge of his ankle
to remind him to be more careful.

On the way down he met more of his own...and
then more of the enemy, which he and his comrades, who had appeared
following the same noise he was, quickly cut down.

Then they were at a crossroads near the
ground floor of the castle, between two paths, and he wasn't sure
whether Thea would have tried to escape from the ground level or
through the underground passageway that he thought emerged
somewhere in the middle of the capital.

Then he heard the dim echoes a cry and the
clash of metal against metal, and tore down the left-hand passage
on instinct.

And there was his mother, at last. Garbed in
armor that had been intended mostly for show, with a plain circlet
on her head in place of a crown, she was being protected by three
faltering guards from at least five assailants on a small flight of
steps down from a side door. There wasn't even time to shake his
head at his luck Dorran dove in, stabbing one of the men through a
gap in the side of his armor, then barely yanking his sword free
while maintaining his grip on it before turning his attention to
the second of the five men.

After striking down the second and rounding
on the third, however, he faltered; he was never sure what it was
in hindsight, but suspected that a misplaced drop of sweat in his
eye mixed the wrong way with the uneven cobblestone footing beside
the castle. But in any case, instead of neatly sidestepping the
man's blow, it caught him hard in the ribs, crashing noisily and
painfully against his mail. He thought he heard a hoarse cry from
Thea, but had no time to concentrate; sweeping up his sword, he
managed to disarm the man with a single blow, then lifted the tip
of his sword to the man's neck. He danced carefully away, and
Dorran took a wild swing at him, taking a chunk out of his arm and
then lunging once more for good measure. When the man was sprawled
and bleeding on the ground, Dorran forgot him and rounded on the
last two of his mother's assailants.

These, however, were already being taken care
of by his mother's two guards, so instead he hurried over to Thea,
taking her arm.

"Are you all right?" he asked harshly, and in
that moment, it didn't matter that she was the Queen and a woman he
had always lived in fear and respect of; she was his mother,
standing several inches shorter than he, with her hair tied back
from her face in a no nonsense braid and looking slightly
ridiculous in armor she was wholly unaccustomed to and could barely
move around in. Dorran shook his head at himself, held his mother
up by the elbows, and checked all he could see of her.

"You're unhurt?" he added, his voice gentler
this time.

"Yes. Yes, Dorran, I'm fine," she said, and
she couldn't seem to decide whether to sound offended or relieved.
"We were attacked…oh, the first wave must have been an hour ago,
and they just kept coming."

He shook his head, taking her arm and
indicating the direction they would move in. "You'll probably be
safest at the main camp for now," he said. "You had dozens of
guards with you, didn't you?"

"Yes," Thea admitted, "but there were too
many men. We ended up splitting up to provide decoys, and then the
rest of my guards started getting killed." She frowned, and he felt
her try to suppress a shudder. "The man with the horn when they
figured out he was the one that had it, they targeted him. One of
my younger boys tried to get it back, and succeeded, but shortly
after that…"

"Don't worry about it now," Dorran said
automatically. "The most important thing is to get you back to
safety. I got a good glimpse of the goings-on on from the balcony
while I was looking for you from what I saw, the battles actually
almost over, so far as I can tell."

"It is?" Thea asked breathlessly. "Who's
winning?"

"I'm fairly certain we are," Dorran said.
"But then, who wins and who loses is more often decided by Queens
and Kings after the fact, isn't it?"

Thea gave him a halfhearted smile.
"Perhaps."

They were quiet after that, continuing at a
steady pace in the direction of the tents in the square. They
almost ran across a few more skirmishes on the way there, but
Dorran quietly guided Thea around these, and soon enough they
arrived back in the camp.

It was still deserted except for the healers,
the injured, and those dragging the latter to the former. Seeing
this, Dorran escorted Thea to the safest place he could think of
the center of the healers' tent and made sure she was
comfortable.

"You're going to be safe here, Your Majesty,"
he said. "I'm going to go see if I can help finish up with the
fighting, with your leave."

"Of course," Thea said quickly, but as he
turned to go, she placed a quick hand on his shoulder.
"Dorran."

He paused and turned around, but was shocked
when she suddenly put her arms around him.

"My brave, brave boy," she whispered, voice
low and quick. "My son, I am so very proud of you, and it would do
your father proud to see you fighting for Farlan and for me."

After a moment, Dorran returned her embrace,
quick and tight, and then knelt before her. "I'll be back when the
fighting is over. Stay safe, Your Majesty."

He clasped his mother's hands one last time,
then turned around and departed.

As much as the battle had seemed close to
ending from the high vantage point of the castle, from the ground
the fighting seemed endless. Dorran quickly lost track of the hours
as he hacked and stabbed and parried. Three days of this had worn
him down farther than he would have believed possible. He couldn't
imagine how his father and grandfather had survived this for
years.

Soon enough, the haze of exhaustion, lifted
temporarily by his encounter with Thea, came back with a vengeance,
and Dorran imagined himself as nothing more than a puppet moving
his arms and legs in a preconceived dance, leaving death and injury
behind him wherever he went. Evening began to creep over the
capital, but Dorran simply corrected for the drop in visibility and
continued on.

When the first man lowered his sword to the
ground and knelt with his hands atop his head, Dorran was only
dimly confused, but instinct kept him from attacking anyone who
didn't appear to be an immediate threat. Soon, though, all the
enemy soldiers were kneeling in this nonthreatening position. Even
then, it took Dorran several more seconds of staring blankly at his
fellow soldiers to realize what it meant.

"Bind their wrists!" he heard someone
yelling. "The Queen orders that no man who surrenders be killed or
injured! Bind their wrists and add them to a line!"

Indeed, Dorran could see, such lines were
already forming strings of haggard-looking men with everything from
bandages to bootlaces binding their wrists shuffling off toward the
dungeons. Dorran was certain they had not seen so much use in
generations.

He miraculously found a clean spot on his
under tunic and cleaned and sheathed his blade for the first time
in hours. Then he looked down disbelievingly at his own grimy,
scraped, bloody hands.

They had won. The King's men had just
surrendered. They had won!

Something deep inside Dorran felt like
jumping up and down and yelling in exultation, but his body had no
energy left for such an exercise. Indeed, he could barely bring
himself to meet the eyes of his comrades as he began the long walk
back to the main camp at the front of the town. As he walked, part
of him kept a sharp eye out for any signs of yet to be captured
prisoners or still armed enemies, but he found no evidence of any.
Instead, as he made his slow way along, he found that something
inside him he had not even realized was wound tight began to
loosen. He became consciously aware of aches and pains for the
first time, those of multiple days stacked atop each other, and
most annoyingly of all, the world took on a slow, unbalancing spin
as he continued. The second time he barely avoided colliding with a
wall that seemed to loom up out of nowhere, he stopped and examined
his body with his eyes and hands as best he could. Aside from a few
bruises and a cut or two that were too deep for comfort, he found
nothing alarming, so he eventually put the dizziness down to
exhaustion and continued stumbling slowly back to camp.

However, he was waylaid on his way back.
First Marcus, then Iain, found him and insisted on supporting him
and lending him their water skins for the rest of the short trek.
He found their help mildly irritating at first, but as the water
took effect and the world began to clear slightly, he became
slightly amused by the awe on their faces. He found that their joy
at their victory helped to awaken his own.

And the closer he came to the healers' tent,
the more familiar faces he saw. There was Kell, looking for the
most part unharmed and wandering like a caged animal from person to
person, looking for something to do; there was Tam, with a bandage
wrapped around one ear and engaged in an animated argument with one
of the Queen's old unmarked guards about what was to be done with
the prisoners, judging by their gesticulations; there was Lord
Goldwood with his arm in a sling, clapping a hand on the shoulder
of his young nephew in greeting while Lady Aiken, apparently
visiting in celebration of their victory, fawned over them both. He
caught a glimpse of Den, the boy who had been injured during the
initial assassination attempt on Thea, swinging around the tent
with a pair of crutches, running errands for Berta. There were many
faces missing, too, ones that he felt as a roiling hollow in his
gut more than he consciously considered he noticed, dimly, a group
of soldiers, young and old alike, standing around the unmoving body
of Vernis with stern faces but every living face he saw, filled
with sorrow or joy alike, helped to rekindle something in his soul
that the siege, without his knowledge, had begun to put out.