Alarm bells were sounding all over the city; if the Prince had thought he was going to be able to carry this off quietly, he was going to get more than one rude surprise. At least the alarms had the effect of clearing the streets entirely; Kantor somehow redoubled his speed, and they shot through the gates going at such a rate that even Alberich was dizzy. And he was not going to think about what would happen if any of them tripped and fell—
There was no finesse in this. Down the road, in at the gates of the Home Farms, riders clutching their weapons in grim silence, hooves pounding like thunder—so loud they couldn’t hear the fighting ahead of them—
—so loud that the ambushers surely thought it was thunder—
And they didn’t even pause as they sighted their target. Just as the team had been taught, just as they had practiced for moons and moons, they crashed in among the milling ambushers, exactly as if it was a Hurlee skirmish. They broke into the mob around Selenay, and their sticks went to work.
In that first and last glimpse, Alberich got the sudden, heart-sinking realization that there were more of them than he had thought there would be, or than he had Seen. A lot more. The odds were roughly two-to-one, in fact.
Hard on the heels of that realization was another—he hadn’t heard about this down in the rough parts of Haven because the Prince hadn’t needed to recruit anyone for this plan. He’d brought them with him, in the guise of servants, of hangers-on, of sycophants.
And last of all—even as he raised his stick and Kantor ran straight into the horse of one of these pseudo-servants, he looked up and saw Selenay lose her sword—
—to Norris. Norris, who had regarded women as mere objects of convenience, and would no more hesitate to kill her than he would hesitate to kill a fly.
There was a bulwark of fighters three deep between him and her. There was no way he could fight his way to her in time.
And that was when he saw the incredible, the miraculous, the totally insane.
Eloran, coming in at full gallop from the side, where there was no one in the way; crashing into Norris’ horse.
Just as Mical rose in his stirrups, pushed off, and with the momentum of Eloran’s charge behind him, flung himself out of his saddle at Norris. Somehow he wrapped his arms around the actor when he hit, pinning Norris’ sword to his side as they tumbled out of the saddle to the ground. Somehow he managed to stay uppermost. They went over the side of the horse and out of sight.
Selenay took advantage of the moment of confusion that followed to get Caryo a little farther into the open, where the Companion’s hooves came into play. That cleared a little more space for her to fight, and as Alberich’s stick connected with the man in front of him, Kantor shoved through to her side.
“Here!” he shouted, and tossed his sword, hilt-first, at her.
“Here! Alberich!” he heard from somewhere below, and as Kantor pirouetted on his hindlegs, Mical thrust a sword up at him from the ground, hilt first, doing so left-handed, holding his right tight to his belly. Norris wasn’t moving, so the blade was presumably the actor’s. Alberich snatched it, and Mical scrambled out of the way. Eloran rammed his way in beside his Chosen, and, even one-handed, Mical was able to haul himself back up into the saddle.
From the way he was holding that arm, however, he wasn’t going to be a further factor in the fighting.
Then it all stopped having anything to do with thought, as the mob closed in around them again, and he and Selenay fought side-by-side against the tightening circle. Kantor kept himself interposed as much as he could between the fighters and Caryo. He was armored; Caryo was not.
Norris’ sword wasn’t much better than a Hurlee stick, but at least it had a pointed end and not a blunt one.
And that was just about all that Alberich had time to think about.
Then, for what seemed like forever, it was all shouting, blow and counterblow, screams and blood and last-minute parries, and far too many people trying to kill his Queen.
Until suddenly the fighting melted away from in front of him, and those who were not on the ground groaning (or dead) were in full retreat, as the reinforcements came pounding up on their Companions with swords in their hands and rage on their faces.
And it was at that moment that he looked down and realized that the last man he had bludgeoned to death with that pathetic excuse for a sword was the Prince.
He had not even known who it was he was fighting.
***
Mical had a broken wrist; there were some slices and cuts to the others, but his was probably the most serious injury. Alberich could have wept with relief; his gamble of putting them into armor had worked, for the Prince’s ambushers had foolishly worn none at all.
Mical had done the impossible, and Norris’ phenomenal luck had run out just before the Prince’s had, for when Mical had hit him and taken him down to the ground, he had not been able to compensate for his attacker’s weight. All of his agility and training had, after all, counted for naught. He’d broken his neck as they hit the ground together.
Alberich limped over to where Crathach was tending to the boy, who looked up at him, too weary and full of pain to care about much of anything. “That, one of your fool play-acting moves was,” Alberich growled. “Yes?”
The boy nodded.
“And practiced it, you have been?”
Mical hesitated. “Um. Sort of. With a straw-man. Eloran and I didn’t think it was really going to work, so we’d kind of given up on it, but when we came up on the ambush and saw Norris with Selenay. . . .” He shrugged and hissed with pain. “I knew I couldn’t fight him; it’s not just stage-fighting he knows and he’s better than me. The important thing was to immobilize him long enough for you to get to her.”
He would have said more, but Alberich held up his hand. “Enough. Good reasoning. Right action. Never do it again. Your neck broken, it could have been, not his.”
Mical turned a bit green, and not from the pain. Alberich didn’t blame him. This was his first kill, and it had literally been with his bare hands; not an easy thing for a boy of fifteen to cope with. Alberich turned on his heel and left him with Crathach, who was better suited to helping him deal with the emotional ramifications than the Weaponsmaster himself was. Alberich went to find the rest of his team, make sure they were all right, and if not, see that they were under someone’s wing before he went looking for the Queen.
He found Harrow last of all; the boy was staring down at one of the ambushers’ bodies, running his hands reflexively up and down the Hurlee stick. Just as Alberich came up to him, he looked at his hands and realized what he was doing. With an expression of repulsion, he threw the thing away.
“I am never playing again!” he said to Alberich, who nodded, understanding all that the youngster could not put into words. That it wasn’t a game anymore; that it would be forever tainted for him. That he could never even think of Hurlee without knowing that he had killed at least one man with his stick.