Patricia Briggs (16 page)

“You'll do,” he said. “When we get to the bridge, we'll let your horse return to his stable, and then you and I'll take care of the raiders.”

That caught my attention. I looked incredulously at the top of his hood as I ran through his words again. I thought of several questions, but discarded them before they touched my tongue. “The two of us,” I said finally.

He made a noise that could have been agreement, laughter, or both.

T
he hob made little noise threading his way through the trees. I tried to imitate him, but the thin yearling growths of willow snagged at my clothing and rustled as I moved past. Not that I couldn't move quietly in the woods, but
I
did it by avoiding dry leaves and dense growth like the stuff we were currently wading through.

I was so busy grumbling to myself that when Caefawn dropped to hands and knees, I almost tripped over him. I crouched and followed the motion of his chin to see a small group of raiders talking among themselves not much over a stone's throw away.

They were using the garbled language Wandel called the patois, so I couldn't tell what they were saying. If they'd been quieter, they would have heard me scuttling through the leaves.

The hob drew a hollow reed from a pocket of his cloak and slipped a dart made from a porcupine quill into the reed. Placing the tube against his lips, he blew, propelling the dart toward the raiders. I lost sight of it as it traveled through the air, but one of the men jumped and rubbed his thigh. Battle-roused, the others dropped low and looked for their unseen foe.

I held my breath and tried not to rustle.

The man who'd jumped first shook his head, laughing a little. “Just a bug,” he said in the king's tongue.

The others relaxed—so did I. Then the man hit by the dart collapsed in the grass.

Eight of the men remaining held their weapons at the ready and crouched, each looking in a different direction. Both the hob and I held still. The ninth man dropped to his knees next to the hob's victim. From the relief on his face, I could tell the fallen man wasn't dead.

After we'd crouched there long enough for my feet to fall asleep, the raiders relaxed.

“Must have gone,” said one, a big man with graying brown hair who seemed to be their leader.

“Or it really was a bug,” commented another.

“What do you suppose it was?” asked the man who still crouched on the ground.

The leader shook his head. “How should I know? We've got people what disappear, leaving behind nothing but blood and weaponry. We've got horses lame from bug bites nastier'an anything I've ever seen—not even when we worked the swamps a couple of years back. Food goes foul too fast, and something's been robbing our supplies and scattering them. Now there's some freaking berserker lurking in the woods. Maybe the same bugs what got the horses got Henwit, too. I don't know.”

Hmm
, I thought,
if their leader is that spooked, the men mustn't be far behind
.

“What we going to do about him?” challenged the man on the ground. “I ain't leaving Henwit behind to get chewed up by whatever happens upon him.”

The big man threw up his hands. “Take him back, then. You explain to the captain what happened.”

The raider tried his best, but the unconscious man weighed more than he did. It was obvious he couldn't carry the limp body very far. Had Caefawn chosen the heaviest man on purpose?

Finally two of the raiders took the heavy man and staggered off with him. The rest of the party headed away from where Caefawn and I crouched. Almost a third of this bunch was out of the fight, without our killing a soul.

I twisted to look at the hob. He grinned back. It still looked rather alarming when done with fangs, but I was getting used to it. When he began backing quietly out of the brush, I followed.

I decided I needed to be armed with something better than a knife. Kith said by the time you could use a knife, you were too close. Even an idiot could kill you. Especially if you were fighting someone bigger, stronger, and better armed. Most of the people we'd be encountering would be all three. When we came to a tree with good stout branches, I stopped.

“You're too serious,” Caefawn said, watching me hack at a solid branch of oak. “This should be fun.”

I stopped hacking and turned to stare at him.

“Of course,” he said, “it never hurts to be prepared.”

He reached over and took the branch, breaking it off the tree as if it were a twig. Holding it in both hands, he fell to one knee and presented it to me, his tail curled around his feet.

“Your tree branch, my lady.”

As he'd intended me to, I laughed as I took it from him—though for some reason his actions brought back that last morning with Daryn. I stripped the branch of its leaves and thought,
This one's for you, my heart's desire
.

The hob shook his head at me. “So sad.” He reached over and touched my cheek with one black claw. “Come, let's find some more raiders to tease before you make me weep.”

The second group we came upon had ten men in it as well. This time the man Caefawn chose wasn't big enough to take two men to carry. When the rest of the group headed out, the direction they chose was right over the top of us.

Caefawn erupted from the underbrush before they knew we were there. The sight of him—ears, fangs, and tail—stopped them where they stood. I knocked one unconscious with a clout of my stick before any of them started fighting.

Satisfaction lent strength to my blows and speed to my reactions. I'd been waiting all spring and half the summer for this. While I swung my branch, I remembered Daryn defending my father's body with a walking stick.

These were lowlanders not much bigger than I was, but I wasn't as strong as a man my size would be. However, they were startled and off balance, whereas I…I jammed the end of the staff into the diaphragm of the man who'd tried to take me from behind. If Kith knew what rage I was feeding into my blows, he'd have my head. Anger might make me careless, but it felt really good.

The man I fought was not as good as Ice but better than Manta. If I'd been a man, I would have lost because he was better than I was, too. But he underestimated me. He brought his sword at my staff, thinking I'd be stupid and try to block it. Instead, I let it slide past and pushed his sword farther from his body, stepping into the opening I'd made. It worked just the way it had in practice.

Neither my staff nor his sword was usable in such close quarters. I dropped the branch and drew my knife. It was so easy, so smooth. I jammed the knife under his ribs and touched his heart.

His body took my knife as he fell, but I bent down and snatched up my staff. There were only two raiders left on their feet, and they were concentrating all their efforts on the hob, seeing him as the larger threat.

As I watched, Caefawn's tail caught the foot of the man to his left while he bashed the head of the other with his staff. He spun around in a jingle of beads and feathers and tapped the head of the man still tangled in hob tail. He did it without effort. So much stronger and faster than the men he was fighting, he could choose to let them live. None of his moaning foes were dead. I was the only one who'd killed.

I waited for the flood of exultation, for release from the anger that had dogged my every step since that morning when I beat my hands bloody on the trapdoor of my cellar. I waited for triumph.

The hob turned to me, though I noticed he kept one ear cocked behind him to keep track of his victims. The man I'd hit in the diaphram continued to struggle for breath, making the other man, the one I'd stabbed, seem all the more quiet.

His face serious, the hob looked at me. I wondered if I'd violated some taboo by killing the raider, but after a moment he stepped to the dead man and took my dagger, cleaning it on the bottom of the man's shirt. Though he did a thorough job, the knife he handed to me was hard to take back.

I'd wanted to kill the raiders, all of them, ever since they'd destroyed my family. I dreamed of it at night, how it would feel to avenge their deaths. Instead, I felt sick and guilty.

“Come,” said the hob, giving me another speculative look. “We need to leave before the rest of them recover.”

I followed him into the woods. The next group we found were even easier than the first one. Not only was the man Caefawn brought down was the biggest of them. The rest of the party were lowlanders, three of them little more than boys. The leader sent all three of the youngsters off with their unconscious comrade. Swearing bitterly, the leader took four fewer men with him as he continued on.

The fourth group we came upon was very close to the manor. The woods had begun to thin out, and the place we'd found to hide wouldn't conceal us from any kind of determined search. That didn't seem to bother the hob.

The leader of the raiders wore a horn around his neck, and a bit of gold cloth, battered and bedraggled, dangled from his belt. After the hob's quill had done its magic, the man knelt over his fallen comrade, drew his knife, and slit his throat. The rest of his men were silent.

The hob shook his head in disgust. “The fool. Let's teach him a bit of a lesson, shall we. Here, take this and follow me.”

The underbrush where we crouched was dark, and I was distracted by what had happened. I took what he handed me and scuttled behind on my hands and knees as he approached the stone-faced mercenaries. Their leader said something short and curt, and one of the others nodded.

We edged closer…closer. The soft, velvet-covered rope I held in my hand twitched, and I realized what it was. I banged my head on a low tree limb. It's hard to pay attention to things like tree limbs when distracted by the…well, the
peculiarity
of holding on to someone's
tail
.

Caefawn kept going, though the cover was so thin now that if someone chanced to glance our way, they couldn't help but see us. Bright red feathers don't exactly blend into the landscape.

“Hush, now, and mind you don't lose your grip.” The hob's voice was soft. The mercenaries, as jumpy as they were, didn't hear him.

Caefawn wove some magic and dropped from the sight of my eye sometime between one instant and the next. The only way I knew he was there was the reassuring pressure of his tail in my hand. I couldn't, quite, see myself either.

When the mercenaries started out, we did, too. I held my breath as we broke from cover. One of them looked right at me, but he called no warning. The dead man glared accusingly at me as we passed.

Their progress disguised any sounds we made. Caefawn tugged me forward until we were so close I could hear the last man muttering angry swearwords under his breath as he guarded their rear. And I'd thought Kith could curse.

When we reached the first of the manor gardens, the hob whistled softly. The swearing man turned to see who had made the noise, but the mercenary beside him cuffed him lightly to get his attention.

“Nawt but t'bird—
Look!
” The last word was drawn from the man in a shout, calling everyone's attention (including mine) to the edge of the garden.

Nearly half again as tall as a normal deer, the kindred deer, nearly twice the size of any other kind of deer, posed motionless, as if to say “Here I am, worship me.” I'd seen a kindred deer a time or two, but they were rare here. I'd never heard of one that was white like this one was. His great golden antlers shimmered in the sunlight. Eyes blue as the sky settled first on the hob, then on me.

For a moment I thought they twinkled with the same mad humor the hob's did, but his gaze moved on. When it was through looking us over, the stag darted into graceful motion. The mercenaries, freed from the spell of surprise, dropped their weapons and ran to follow.

When we were alone, I released my grip on the hob's tail. I'd been holding it so hard that my hand was stiff.

“The white beast,” I said in awe.

“If I find a safe place for you, will you stay there?” Caefawn asked abruptly. “The stag is a little too contemptuous of humans to watch out for his own safety.”

“Fine,” I agreed. I think that if he'd asked me to stake myself out as bait, I'd have agreed to that, too.

T
HE TREE LIMBS HAD LONG SINCE CEASED FEELING PRECARIOUS
and had slipped into flimsy when the hob, climbing behind me, quit urging me farther up the ancient oak that dominated the grounds of the manor.

“There, now,” he said, his voice a toneless whisper. “Without that thrice-damned road the oak listens to the mountain and will hide you from notice. The raiders are moving this way, so be careful.” He placed my hands at apparently random places on the swaying branches. “Stay here until I come for you.”

“Mmm,” I said, which was as much of an agreement as I was prepared to make.

He apparently thought it agreement enough because he slipped down. I watched him leave, then put my forehead against the tree.

“Oh, Gram,” I said out loud, “hobs, hillgrims, sprites, the white beast…and the day is not over yet.”

I'd killed a man today, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I thought about it and decided I could live with it. But I also decided vengeance was for fools. If I'd killed him only because I'd had to, I wouldn't be feeling nearly this bad.

His death hadn't made Daryn less dead. Instead, I wondered if the raider'd had friends who'd mourn his passing.