The Lady of Toryn Anthology (Lady of Toryn trilogy) (41 page)

When she managed to quiet the
horse and saw Drake again, he was on his feet, and his eyes were glowing
brighter than she’d ever seen them. His lips curved in a snarl, and he was
hunched over, fingers curled like claws. He stalked around Kou like a wolf
circling its prey. There was something animalistic and feral about him,
something she’d never seen before.

It was then that she realized Kou
had cut the cord that held the
resist
stane.

She’d never seen Drake without
resist,
but she’d heard enough stories
about vampires to know that her situation had just become infinitely more
dangerous.

Skye emerged from a cloud of
smoke to her right exactly at that moment, dragging a soldier who had
apparently tried to strike him using a whip, and Ashlyn shrieked his name.
Without looking up, Skye opened a cavern in the ground directly beneath the
soldier and sliced through the whip with his sword in the same moment. The
falling ninja’s screams somehow reached Ashlyn’s ears through the din. Skye
urged his horse towards her.

“What’s wrong? Get out of here!”
he told her, using
earth
to ripple
the ground by the cavern he’d just created, sending several other soldiers
falling into its depths.

“Drake lost
resist,”
Ashlyn said to him, feeling dizzy from all the circles her
horse was turning. Her father was slumped in her arms, unconscious.

“What?” Shock registered on the
swordsman’s face, and he followed Ashlyn’s gaze to Drake, who was on top of a
screaming Toryn ninja, tearing at the other man with his teeth. Kou was nowhere
to be seen.

“We’ve got to get it back to
him,” Ashlyn pleaded, and almost before she’d finished her sentence, Skye was
rushing forward. Ashlyn’s infuriatingly spastic horse followed after him, the
sudden movement throwing Ashlyn off balance and forcing her to grab at its mane
as she struggled to keep both herself and her father upright.

It seemed like things were moving
in slow-motion as Ashlyn felt herself falling to one side, losing grip on the
saddle as her horse darted and leaped around fallen soldiers in terror. When it
became obvious that she wasn’t going to be able to recover her seat, Ashlyn
clutched her father to her chest and kicked her opposite foot out of the
stirrup, turning so that Lord Li fell on top of her.

The impact knocked the wind out
of her, and she found herself skidding in fresh, moist dirt before coming up to
rest against the body of a soldier. Ashlyn struggled to sit up, still keeping
an arm around her dad’s waist, and watched as her horse galloped off into the
woods.
Crap,
she mouthed as her lungs
screamed for air. Trying not to panic, she glanced down at her dad and saw the
resist
stane, still threaded on its
cord, lying in the dirt next to his head.

She grabbed it and struggled to
stand up. Her father was still too heavy to lift, so she rolled him off her as
gently as she could. She had to get back on a horse somehow. Could she even
find a horse? Her eyes came to rest on Drake’s horse, standing quietly exactly
where Drake had left him as battle raged around the poor animal. Ashlyn gritted
her teeth and shoved the
resist
stane
into her pocket, then grabbed her dad’s arms and tried to drag him. First
things first…she had to get her dad back on a horse…then she could help Drake.

Something slammed into her from
the side, knocking her to the ground and rolling her over twice, and Ashlyn
gasped in pain as her shoulder hit a rock. She brought up an elbow, striking
her attacker in the nose. He snarled and rolled off, and Ashlyn scrambled up,
yanking her sword off her back.

Drake stood in front of her,
furious and growling and very
un-
Drake-like.

“I have
resist,”
Ashlyn said unsteadily. “Let me put it back on you,
Drake.”

Drake lunged at her, and she
flipped backwards, kicking him in the chin on her first flip and landing in a
sideways crouch on the second, ready to leap aside at any second.

Behind Drake, Ashlyn saw Skye
grabbing her father, lifting Lord Li into the saddle.
Please go,
Ashlyn willed him silently.
Please take him and go.
But Skye barely managed to prop the
unconscious Toryn on top of the horse before another ninja attacked him.

Drake leaped at her again, and
this time Ashlyn sidestepped and spun in a leg sweep. Drake jumped over it and
snatched the front of her tunic, dragging her forward. Ashlyn swung her sword
down, slicing across his knuckles. Rather than yanking away from him, she
advanced, swinging with the sword, driving him back furiously with a series of
blows that were blocked by his glove. Ashlyn had never fought Drake before and
had never wanted to. Despite his preference for long-range weapons, his
vampiric strength made him a formidable opponent in hand-to-hand combat. She
didn’t want to give him a chance to hurt her.

At last she retreated, fists
raised, her legs trembling and angrier than she could remember being in a long
time. “Find the will, you moron!” she snapped. “Vampirism doesn’t control you
any more than the
resist
stane does.
Fight it!”

Her words fell on deaf ears, and
the vampire lunged a third time. This time Ashlyn fell backwards deliberately,
bringing up her feet to catch him in his midsection and propel him over her
head, sending him tumbling behind her.

Ashlyn jumped up, sheathing her
sword, and ran to Drake’s horse. She slammed her foot into the stirrup and
pulled herself up, but was just swinging her opposite leg over when someone
grabbed a chunk of her hair and yanked. Ashlyn yelped, but grabbed the saddle
and barely managed to avoid falling, and there was a harder yank and then-
suddenly she was free. She clambered up onto the horse, looked over and saw
that Skye had plowed into Drake with his horse, slicing off half the length of
her hair with his sword.

“Run!” Skye yelled at her. He
circled around and cast an
earth
spell
that flung Drake backwards into a throng of soldiers that had just managed to
make their way around the dirt barriers.

Wordlessly, Ashlyn jammed her
foot into the other stirrup and wheeled Drake’s horse around, galloping for the
forest with her father slouched in the saddle in front of her.

Chapter 5

Control

The wind whipped Ashlyn’s newly-short
hair into her face, and she shook it out of her eyes impatiently, fighting to
stay focused even as her joints protested their ongoing abuse. Her legs were
exhausted and cramping from being clamped against her horse’s sides for so
long, and her arms were aching from straining to keep her father on the saddle
in front of her. He didn’t weigh much, which was both frightening and
fortunate, because Ashlyn was terrified for his weakened state but she knew if
he had been any heavier she wouldn’t have been able to support him.

With some effort, she managed to
shift her grip on the reins, cueing the horse to angle west, away from the
coast. Although the route she’d taken to get here was a straight path back to
Toryn, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to risk the lack of cover on the beach.
Already, Drake’s horse’s neck was lathered with sweat, his breathing harsh and
labored. She didn’t know how much longer she could force the animal to run.

They leaped over a small log and
galloped into the forest, the moon above blotted out in an instant as they
entered the cover of the trees. Ashlyn racked her brain for the layout of the
island, simultaneously cursing her faulty memory and her own stupidity for not
returning to her homeland more often over the last three years. From what she
could recall, the forest thinned out closer to a small lake, and on the other
side of the lake were The Barrens, where her mother was buried. From there it
was an easy enough trek to Toryn.

The gelding faltered, a slight
stumble, a skip in the rhythmic run, and that was the only warning that Ashlyn
had before the poor creature went down. Suddenly Ashlyn was tumbling forward,
head over heels because she hadn’t had time to prepare herself for it, and she
felt the crunchy leaves jump up to bite into her shoulders as she rolled. She
came to an unceremonious stop against the trunk of a tree, hard enough to hurt
but not enough to injure, and lay there for a moment, trying to catch her
breath.

“Dad!” She bolted upright,
belatedly remembering that she hadn’t been alone in the saddle.

Her father was lying face-down a
few feet away. Ashlyn crawled to him and gently pulled at his shoulder, turning
him over. He was still unconscious, and far too frail and light, his cheeks
sunken, his normally tanned skin pale and drawn. One arm was bent at an odd
angle below the elbow, obviously broken.

“Oh Dad,” she muttered, tears
springing to her eyes. She hastily untied her belt and looked around. There was
a stick close by that was a bit too thin and long, but would still work for
now. She snapped it over her knee to make it a more suitable size, then gently
picked up her dad’s arm, straightening it very slowly. She prodded the skin
with her fingers, feeling the bone within. It seemed like a clean break, but
she didn’t want to try setting it herself. Instead she placed the stick against
the arm and wrapped her leather belt around both the arm and the stick as many
times as she could, tying a knot to secure the makeshift splint. At least she
could prevent it from being injured any further until they got back to Toryn.

Lord Li’s breathing was steady
but light. Ashlyn looked over at where Drake’s horse lay, its sides heaving.
She couldn’t force the animal to move, and they’d already run so far. She bit
her lip, wondering if anyone had followed them. No one had confronted them yet,
so maybe she was in the clear. What should she do?

The plan was, if they got
separated, to meet up back in the city, but that would be a difficult trek to
make without a horse. Maybe if she waited a bit, the horse would recover enough
to take them back, even if it was just at a walk. If not…Ashlyn supposed she
could probably drag her father, although she’d have to construct some kind of
stretcher that she could pull behind her. It would be very slow going.

Right now the most important
thing was to get under some kind of cover. Ashlyn sat quietly, listening to the
sound of running water. She knew she wasn’t close enough to the beach to hear
the ocean, so she was probably close to the lake. Was there a cave behind the
waterfall there? She frowned, trying to remember. It had been so long.

Drake’s horse startled her by
lifting its head at that moment, stretching its upper lip out comically as it
tested the air with its nose. Ashlyn got to her feet, wincing at a slight pain
in her ankle, and walked to the gelding. One foreleg was stretched out in front
of it, and she ran a hand down the coarse hair, noting that the leg was already
swelling, but did not appear to be broken.

She didn’t know if
heal
worked on animals or not, but she
wasn’t very skilled with the magic anyway and it would be very risky to attempt
to heal a patient who couldn’t say what was wrong or where it hurt. Ashlyn
sighed, chewing on her lower lip as she debated what to do. Her father wasn’t
very heavy and the horse could probably handle his weight, even with the
injured leg. If she could somehow manage to get her father on the horse, they
could at least get to the lake and seek out shelter. The issue would be getting
her dad on and then convincing the horse to get up.

She looped her hands under her
dad’s arms, holding at the apex of his arm and shoulder, and grunted as she
tried to drag him towards the horse. The first attempt only moved him a few
inches, and Ashlyn gritted her teeth. She dug in her feet, bent her knees and
hauled as hard as she could. As thin as he was, her dad was still much bigger
than her. “Your bones are heavy, old man,” she groused as they moved along,
inch by painful inch. “I’m never letting you give me a hard time about my
weight, ever.”

Her stomach grumbled loudly when
she finally got her father to the horse, and she realized suddenly that she
hadn’t had anything to eat in more than a day. Well, plenty of time for that
later. With some effort, Ashlyn managed to prop her dad up against the side of
the horse, soothing the animal when it seemed a little bothered by what she was
doing. Eventually she was able to get Lord Li’s leg over the saddle, and from
there she pushed him up so that he was lopsidedly lying on the horse’s back, as
much on the saddle as she could get him. Now it was just a question of getting
the horse up without her dad falling off.

Ashlyn picked up her makeshift
weapon harness where it lay next to a tree, noting that it had torn when she’d
gone flying. She’d have to fix it somehow. Sighing, she picked up the reins off
the ground and moved back to stand beside the horse’s belly.
How is this going to work?
She held the
reins in her left hand and hooked the weapon harness over her right wrist so
she could grab her dad’s leg with that hand. “Okay, mister,” she muttered.
“Time to give me a hand here.” She tugged upward on the reins.

Fortunately, Drake’s gelding was
nothing like the horse that had almost gotten Ashlyn killed in battle less than
an hour before, and the black steed obediently gathered its hooves underneath
it and tried to stand. As Ashlyn expected, the animal rose to its feet
unevenly, and the saddle listed off to one side, but fortunately she was able
to grab onto her dad’s uninjured arm and maintain her hold on his leg to keep
him from falling off. One of the saddle bags came loose and fell to the ground,
but she figured she could come back and get that later.