The new King regained his normal coloring. “Only the boy,” Howard pouted, calming. “The girl managed to get herself killed. Damn! I wanted that little bitch! I thought about having the boy gelded and sold—”
“Good, do that. We’ll put it out that it was the horse barbarians that killed the traders—and that the smith conspired with them to raid both the traders and the town. We’ll have it that the boy confessed. I’ll have my men start passing the word. Then, by afternoon when the story is spreading, we’ll put this fool and his family out of the gates—banish them. The barbarians aren’t likely to let him live long, and they certainly aren’t likely to give an ear to any tales he might tell.”
Howard nodded, slowly. “Yes—yes, indeed! Willum, you are going to go far in my service.”
Willum smiled, his eyes cast humbly down. From his vantage point on the floor, Kevin saw the balefire he thought he’d glimpsed leap into a blaze before being quenched. “I always intended to, my lord.”
Chali crept in to the remains of the camp in the gray light before dawn and collected what she could. The wagons were charred ruins; there were no bodies. She supposed, with a dull ache in her soul, that the murderers had dragged the bodies off to be looted and burned. She hoped that the mule would haunt their killers to the end of their days—
There wasn’t much left, a few bits of foodstuff, of clothing, other oddments—certainly not enough to keep her through the winter—but then, she would let the winter take care of itself. She had something more to concern her.
Scrabbling through the burned wood into the secret compartments built into the floor of every vurdon, she came up with less of use than she had hoped. She had prayed for weapons. What she mostly found was coin; useless to her.
After searching until the top of the sun was a finger’s length above the horizon and dangerously near to betraying her, she gave up the search. She did manage to collect a bow and several quivers’ worth of arrows—which was what she wanted most. Chali had been one of the best shots in the kumpania.Now the Gaje would learn to dread her skill.
She began her one-person reign of terror when the gates opened in late morning.
She stood hidden in the trees, obscured by the foliage, but well within bowshot of the gates, an arrow nocked, a second loose in her fingers, and two more in her teeth. The stallion stood motionless at her side. She had managed to convince the creatures of the woods about her that she was nothing to fear—so a blackbird sang within an arm’s length of her head, and rabbits and squirrels hopped about in the grass at the verge of the forest, unafraid. Everything looked perfectly normal. The two men opening the gates died with shafts in their throats before anyone realized that there was something distinctly out of the ordinary this morning.
When they did realize that there was something wrong, the stupid Gaje did exactly the wrong thing; instead of ducking into cover, they ran to the bodies. Chali dropped two more who trotted out to look.
Then they realized that they were in danger, and scrambled to close the gates again. She managed to get a fifth before the gates closed fully and the bar on the opposite side dropped with a thud that rang across the plain, as they sealed themselves inside.
Now she mounted on Bakro, and arrowed out of cover. Someone on the walls shouted, but she was out of range before they even had time to realize that she was the source of the attack. She clung to Bakro’s back with knees clenched tightly around his barrel, pulling two more arrows from the quiver slung at her belt. He ran like the wind itself, past the walls and around to the back postern-gate before anyone could warn the sleepy townsman guarding it that something was amiss.
She got him, too, before someone slammed the postern shut, and picked off three more injudicious enough to poke their heads over the walls.
Now they were sending arrows of their own after her, but they were poor marksmen, and their shafts fell short. She decided that they were bad enough shots that she dared risk retrieving their arrows to augment her own before sending Bakro back under the cover of the forest. She snatched at least a dozen sticking up out of the grass where they’d landed, leaning down as Bakro ran, and shook them defiantly at her enemies on the walls as they vanished into the underbrush.
Chali’s vengeance had begun.
Kevin was barely conscious; only the support of Pika on one side and Keegan on the other kept him upright. Ehrik was uncharacteristically silent, terribly frightened at the sight of his big, strong father reduced to such a state.
King Howard and his minions had been “generous;” piling as much of the family’s goods on the pony’s back as he could stand before sending the little group out the gates. In cold fact that had been Willum’s work, and it hadn’t been done out of kindness; it had been done to make them a more tempting target for the horse barbarians or whatever strange menace it was that now had them hiding behind their stout wooden walls. That much Kevin could remember; and he waited in dull agony for arrows to come at them from out of the forest.
But no arrows came; and the pathetic little group, led by a little boy who was doing his best to be brave, slowly made their way up the road and into the grasslands.
Chali mindspoke Pika and ascertained that the smith had had nothing to do with last night’s slaughter—that in fact, he was being cast out for objecting to it. So she let him be—besides, she had other notions in mind.
She couldn’t keep them besieged forever—but she could make their lives pure hell with a little work.
She found hornets’ nests in the orchard; she smoked the insects into slumberous stupefication, then took the nests down, carefully. With the help of a scrap of netting and two springy young saplings, she soon had an improvised catapult. It wasn’t very accurate, but it didn’t have to be. All it had to do was get those nests over the palisade.
Which it did.
The howls from within the walls made her smile for the first time that day.
Next she stampeded the village cattle by beaming pure fear into their minds, sending them pounding against the fence of their corral until they broke it down, then continuing to build their fear until they ran headlong into the grasslands. They might come back; they might not. The villagers would have to send men out to get them.
They did—and she killed one and wounded five more before their fire drove her back deeper into the forest.
They brought the cattle inside with them—barely half of the herd she had sent thundering away. That made Chali smile again. With the cattle would come vermin, noise, muck—and perhaps disease.
And she might be able to add madness to that—
Bakro? she broadbeamed, unafraid now of being overheard. Have you found the mind-sick weed yet?
But to her shock, it was not Bakro who answered her.
Daiv struggled up out of a darkness shot across with lances of red agony. It hurt even to think—and it felt as if every bone in his body had been cracked in at least three places. For a very long time he lay without even attempting to move, trying to assess his real condition and whereabouts through a haze of pain. Opening his eyes did not lessen the darkness, but an exploratory hand to his face told him that although the flesh was puffed and tender, his eyes were probably not damaged. And his nose told him of damp earth. So he was probably being held in a pit of some kind, one with a cover that let in no light. Either that, or it was still dark—