"Now, if I was trying to make a gang of bandits more effective, what would I give them?" she mused aloud.
Eilir was back. She and John Hordle began to speak simultaneously, in Sign and aloud, then looked at each other and grinned. Alleyne answered instead.
"Weapons, and in this season, shoes. A man with chilblains can't fight very well."
The lookout she'd posted called down from his perch high in a Douglas fir. "They're coming back! More of them!" Then, after an instant: "I think someone's after them. They look like they're running! Running hard!"
"Positions!" Astrid said. "Kevin, you stay with Sadb."
She joined Alleyne behind his boulder this time; there weren't as many good positions, with their numbers more than doubled. He was chuckling as she settled in. At her arched brow, he leaned his head towards the trail.
"Eilir is reusing the rope," he said. "I like that girl's spirit, damn me if I don't."
Astrid chuckled herself as she saw the trip-rope deployed; covered in mud, it would be nearly invisible while lying slack. There wasn't time for anything fancy, just a knot around one tree and a half hitch around another.
"Eilir's lawar," she agreed happily.
The first of the bandits came around the bend again, running hard. The rope snapped up, and three went down like puppets with their strings cut. A clash of metal and war cries sounded from behind them; somebody was chasing them. And then she noticed another figure with the outlaws; this one had a white-and-brown camouflage surcoat over his mail hauberk; both were knee-length. Similar cloth masked his kite-shaped shield, and a conical nose-guarded helmet, his blade was a double-edged longsword.
The rest of the Dunedain stood as she did, and the outlaws screamed in despair at the sight of better than thirty bows drawn to the ear. A few tried to run on the Dunedain bows snapped, and nearly every one of the slashing volley struck.
"Surrender!" Astrid called, carefully not adding any promise of quarter. "Throw down and kneel!"
Most of the survivors threw down their weapons and knelt in the mud, hands clasped on top of their heads, silent amid the moans and screams of the wounded.
The man in the knight's hauberk didn't; he just shouted wordlessly and charged, blade up and shield covering his body from knees to nose. Hordle's bow snapped; the bodkin point slammed into the shield and the shaft punched through the metal and wood, stripping its feathers to flutter to the ground as it did. The man pivoted as if he'd been hit in the shoulder with a sledgehammer, and it must have felt much like that. At close range, a heavy bow could smash a bodkin point right through even the best armor. This went through shield and arm and hauberk, snapping the links of the riveted mail like cloth, then through the shoulder bone and out the other side of the hauberk as well. He pitched over backwards and lay writhing.
The pursuers behind them came into view, and stumbled to a halt at the sight. There were two dozen of them, armed with broad-bladed spears and crossbows or pre-Change compound hunting bows, shortswords and daggers and bucklers. All were clad with rough practicality for a foray in the winter woods, but the leader drew her eye. He was a stocky man in a black robe over mail-and-lamellar armor, with a poleax in his hands and a heavy broadsword belted at his waist. He wore a helmet with a neck flare and an eyeslit visor, now pushed up; on the brow of it was a black cross in a white disk, and the face below it was covered in a close-cropped brown beard. When he handed the long-hafted ax-spear-warhammer to a follower and pulled off the helm, it showed bowl-cut hair and a tonsure in the center of it, the artificial bald spot gleaming with sweat. He passed a gauntleted hand over it.
"Bind them," he snapped to his followers, and then waved at the Dunedain as the arrows were returned to their quivers.
"Hello, Lady Astrid," he went on genially, climbing towards her, puffing like someone who'd come hard and fast for miles with fifty pounds of steel strapped to his body.
The men behind him worked in pairs, one holding a spearpoint to a bandit's neck, the other pulling cords from his belt to bind the robbers' arms behind them, tight-cinched at elbow and wrist. Those badly wounded were given the mercy-stroke. There was no point in letting them suffer until their inevitable execution.
"Mae govannen, Brother:?" Astrid said.
"Father Andrew," the man said, smiling broadly; he was about her own age. "Ordained priest, and also a humble brother monk of the Benedictine order. I don't think you noticed me, my child, but you were with Lord Bear when he visited the abbey two years ago, for the treaty talks."
That meant he was one of Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski's men, from Mount Angel. The abbey had organized survival around the town and governed its own small state there now; it was a thumb thrust into the Protectorate. There was absolutely no love lost between Dmwoski and the Protector, either, or between the abbot and what he called the blasphemous Antipope Leo, the prelate Arminger sponsored in Portland. Anathemas as well as arrows had flown over that border.
"I'm with the border guards," he went on. "We had a report of livestock missing from a farmer with an outlying steading, and tracked them well past our usual patrol range. We spotted these scum crossing the creek south of Scott's Mills."
Astrid's brows went up. That was about twenty miles north; deserted country, which made boundaries a bit theoretical.
"We thought they might be trying to slip down over the Santiam and into the Mackenzie country," the soldier-monk said. "So I called out some militia and gave chase. We lost their tracks for a day. But when we found them again, they came straight south and into your territory. I hope you don't mind our pursuing onto your land, but it seemed a shame to give up. Particularly when they hadn't spotted us."
"Thank you very much, Father Andrew," she said. "We appreciate the help. They'd have scattered if you weren't behind to corral them. Chasing them down might have cost us lives-probably would have. An ambush is one thing, but a running fight is something else again."
He shrugged robed and armored shoulders. "Just doing our job, my daughter, looking after the flock. And there were a few too many for us to tackle comfortably ourselves. It's a comfort to have you Dunedain taking up residence in this stretch of forest. They're too cursed convenient for woods-running swine like these otherwise."
Alleyne called to her. "This one's no bandit," he said, as he stripped off a man's sword belt and tossed it aside.
It was the man Hordle had shot. Blood welled out around the broken arrow-shaft, but he clutched it and glared hatred at her. Another young face, a little younger than her own, but neatly shaved; when Alleyne pulled off the coif-a mail-covered, tight-fitting leather hood-his light-brown hair was moderately long in front, cropped like a crew cut behind the ears. A blunt face with an old scar on one cheek, and gray-blue eyes. Beneath the armor he was broad-shouldered and thick-armed, not skinny-scrawny like most of the outlaw gang. It was the body of a man who ate well but worked sweating-hard with sword and shield and lance while wearing full armor.
"False priest and devil-worshipping whore," he rasped, and tried to spit at her. "Kill me now!"
The sword that lay a little distance away was a broad double-edged slashing type, though with a respectable point, the classic Norman sword that most of the Portland Protective Association's men used. She looked down at his feet. Good boots, but no golden spurs. Stilclass="underline"