The Barrow (37 page)

“Watch your pace,” warned Stjepan. “Worst thing will be an accident with a wagon or coach, or a horse coming up lame, so go fast but stay in control. If you get stuck or lose a wheel, leave the wagon behind and leg it out of the city or to a friend you can trust as fast you can. Make for Araswell in the coming days if you get separated.”

Arduin, now with gauntlets and sallet strapped on, stood nearby, half listening; he was mostly intent on watching as the household's handmaidens helped a cloaked Annwyn into the back of the first coach. He looked at the back of the tower-house, his gaze scanning up the stone walls toward its top.
I wonder if there'll be anything left by morning
, he thought glumly. He started to worry about what his father might say, and then suddenly stopped.
No, you've lost the right to judge me on this, Father; you should have been here to see the end of our line
.

Suddenly Sir Theodras turned at the rear gates and shouted out. “They're coming. They're coming!” Some of the mob had finally figured out there was a back way in.

The rear courtyard burst into frenzied activity as panic set in. Stjepan tossed his extra gear into the back of a wagon and turned to Erim, Jonas, and Sir Helgi. “You've got to hold them off until we can get everyone out!” he said, fierce and quiet. Erim and Helgi glanced at each other, and she nodded and pulled her rapier and dagger.

Sir Helgi hefted a great sword and turned toward Sir Clodin and Sir Holgar and the two young squires, Elbray and Enan. “Stay with your liege!” he barked. “Lead the way out!” They nodded and started to mount their horses, big black-coated war-trained Aurian warmblood destriers for the knights and slightly smaller palfreys for the squires.

Sir Helgi, Jonas, and Erim started moving, gathering men as they hit the rear gates: the knights Lars and Colin Urwed, Theodras, and Theodore, all in three-quarter plate harness; the older squires Herefort, Wilhem, and Brayden Vogelwain, nephew to Sir Helgi; Horne, Little Lucius, and Tall Myles; four sturdy Aurian men from the household with bill-hook poleaxes; and three huntsmen with stout yew bows. They gathered for a moment right inside the rear gate, looking at each other, then Helgi was throwing the crossbars up on the gates and they were pulling them open.

Erim walked quickly toward the middle of the alleyway, rapier and dagger bared in the dim light. The narrow street was flanked on each side by tall stone walls and the backsides of tall stone buildings, for all the world a narrow man-made canyon. To her right, coming up from the south, she could see a large crowd rounding the corner and filling the alley, headed toward the rear gate entrance with malicious purpose. Some in the crowd bore torches, and so she could see priests in their vestments in the mix, a few armored Templars with their white surcoats marked with embroidered gold suns and holding swords of war, and a random assortment of the street rabble that had filled the streets before the house. The rabble bore clubs and pitchforks and here and there she spotted spears or short hanger swords.

The rest of the group took up a line on each side of her, the knights and squires in the front rank and the rest backing them up, and they advanced toward the oncoming crowd enough to give those leaving the gates easy access to the alley behind them. She took a quick read; nine across, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder, and eight behind—enough to look like a solid wall across the narrow alley, decked in armor and bristling with swords and poleaxes. But that was a large crowd coming toward them.

Upon seeing the line, the Templars and priests slowed their advance to a crawl and readied their own weapons while the rabble began to show some confusion. One of the Templars stepped forward into the lead and in a gruff, commanding voice he shouted out to them as they approached. “In the name of the King of Heaven, and by order of the Patriarch Exemplar Oslac the Fourth and the High King's Court, put down your weapons and surrender to us the witch!”

In the courtyard, Stjepan and Gilgwyr were maneuvering a large cart filled with hay, aided by several porters and stable hands. Arduin was seated astride his favorite destrier, Ironbound, caparisoned in a barding that matched his own armor, and he wheeled and approached, the high-spirited horse practically prancing. It could smell fire and fear in the air, and it was getting excited. Arduin looked down at them.

“My Lord, head west,” said Stjepan. “Ride hard, ride down anyone that gets in your way, and follow the path that our man has laid out for us. Don't stop for anything, and we'll be right behind you.”

Arduin looked angry at getting what sounded suspiciously like an order from Stjepan but he turned Ironbound around and went to the front of their slapdash caravan.

“Follow my lead!” he cried out, and put spur to Ironbound's flanks. The warhorse leapt forward, followed and flanked by Sir Clodin and Sir Holgar, both bearing long ten-foot lances, and then the two squires. The teamsters cried out and cracked whips and the coaches and wagons, piled high with provisions and with frightened members of the household, began to lurch forward, one after the other following the horsemen in the lead. Porters bearing torches and armed men from the household ran on foot on each side of the coaches and wagons, and Jonas ran beside the coach bearing the Lady Annwyn.

Erim heard rather than saw Arduin's horse come flying out from the gates behind them, then turn away north, and she instinctively glanced over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of massive figures in steel flowing into the narrow alley. The street felt like it was shaking under the hooves of the lead trio of heavily-barded warhorses, and then horses and coaches and wagons and men on foot started to pour out.
Gods save anyone in front of that lot
, she thought.

The Templar in the lead—she assumed some sort of captain—started to wave his men forward, seeing the column emerging from the rear gates behind the intervening line. “Stop! I order you to—”

“Now!” roared Sir Helgi Vogelwain. Three bows twanged behind her, and she felt something whistle past her right cheek. Screams came from the rabble as the arrows found their marks. “For Araswell!” Sir Helgi cried, and their entire front line charged forward, their weapons raised, Erim amongst them. This seemed to catch some of the rabble in front of them by surprise, and she saw anger and hate rapidly change to shock and alarm as they closed the distance with unlooked-for speed.

“For Orwain!” the knights cried right as they slammed into the first of the Templars and rabble-rousers with a ferocity born from fear and desperation, heavy blades and poleaxes rising and falling to chop and maim or being used, point-first, to pinion men and push them bodily back. Erim couldn't contribute that kind of brute force, so she ran her rapier and dagger straight in front of her and into whatever soft target she could find, which turned out to be the backside of some poor commoner who'd turned to try to run away, only to discover there was no place to run and got her dagger for his efforts; and then, reaching past him, she drove her rapier directly into the throat of a surprised Templar who hadn't seemed to realize yet that people were going to die in this fight.

In truth, Arduin's knights were hardly veteran warriors; they were more like elite sportsmen, their experience of combat and fighting the result of dozens of tournaments and only a handful of actual minor battles. They'd fought by Arduin's side when he'd had to hunt down bandits from the Manon Mole who had raided their tenant farms, conducted a punitive raid against the Lord of Goldwall on a land dispute, and some had once ridden with the Grand Duke against a recalcitrant Baron Avant of An-Ogruth back when he'd been unhappy about a new tax that the High King had levied. But that already gave them at least two advantages over their opponents: they'd been in combat before, together; and most of them had killed men before.

The Divine King faithful, the pilgrims and the street scum that had joined the fight, caught up in the day's riotous energies and expecting to be seizing a witch and avenging their fallen High Priest and not fighting fully armored knights in a back alley, were quickly overmatched despite the crush of their superior numbers; even the Templars were surprised by the knights' stiff resistance and their willingness to kill. Sir Helgi relished the melee, bellowing with abandon as he hacked men down left and right with his greatsword, exhorting his men to fight, laying about him like a man with nothing to lose, and in a sense he didn't, none of them did; they'd already lost everything, and knew it, and all that was left was to take out their anger and fear on the poor fools that had come to collect their liege lord and his sister. As blood splattered everywhere, Erim almost felt sorry for the rabble.

Almost.

“Hurry, hurry!” Gilgwyr cried as he and Stjepan and several strong men finished loading a dozen small barrels onto the back of the large two-wheeled cart.

“That's it, that's all we have!” shouted one of the porters. With a torch, Stjepan touched flame to the hay while another man split the wood of several of the casks with an axe, spilling oil everywhere. As the hay ignited, they all grabbed either the sides of the cart or its pull-shafts and they pushed it toward the entrance, and then out into the street. It took them a frustrating moment to turn it, and then they were pushing the flaming mass toward the melee. “Ho. Beware, behind you. Out of the way!” the porters cried as they covered the last ground, and then bodies and dark shapes were leaping out of the way. The alley suddenly got bumpy as they ran the wheels of the cart, themselves almost five feet high, over the bodies and body parts of men dying or dead upon the alley cobblestones. The rabble, already breaking under the ferocious assault of Arduin's knights, broke completely upon seeing the flaming cart hurtling toward them, and fled en masse. One of the wheels jammed in a torso and suddenly it was overturning and spinning out of their hands, flaming hay and barrels of oil flying and smashing into the ground, and a great
whoosh
went up as flames filled the alleyway.

Erim looked up from where she had sprawled after jumping out of the way of the wagon, and then toward the roaring flames. The spilled and burning cart had effectively cut the alley in half, throwing up a barrier of fire across the narrow street between them and the retreating rabble.
Couldn't have planned it better
, she thought to herself, until she glanced to her right and realized that the man on the ground next to her, also looking back dazedly at the burning cart, was an armored Templar. They looked at each other in shock for a moment, and then she started stabbing him in the side of the face with her punch dagger as he screamed. The first couple of stabs got her into his cheek and an eye and some teeth and tongue, and the man was screaming and scrambling trying to roll and crawl away from her, and she had to pin him down until she could get the dagger into his throat.

When she was done killing him she staggered to her feet. Several of the knights were finishing off a few other stragglers caught on their side of the fire, while Jonas' men and some of the porters and huntsmen were hauling off two of their own wounded, one of their archers with a ruined leg and then one of the young squires. She winced as they passed; the squire looked pale and wan, blood pouring from a head wound.
He's not going to make it
, she knew at a glance.