Brie sighed. "Well, if Monodnock has anything to say about it, they will be halfway to Tir a Ceol when the battle starts." Then she said abruptly, "You could return to Eirren, you know."
"I know." Collun calmly drank hot cyffroi.
"Queen Aine and King Gwynn ought to be warned."
"Yes," Collun agreed, his expression unchanged.
"You are not Dungalan," she persisted. "There is no reason for you to give your life."
"No more are...," Collun started to say, then stopped, a thoughtful look on his face.
Brie shook her head, nettled. "I do not know for certain that my great-grandmother was from Dungal."
"I was not thinking of Seila."
"Then...?"
"I was thinking of the Storm Petrel, of your dancing for the first time. And fishing the deep waters; shooting the arrow of binding; and even this cyffroi..." He gestured at the cup in his hand with a grimace.
Brie stared at him for several moments. "It is true," she replied slowly. "I was happy for a time in Ardara. But..." She paused, then said deliberately, "I was happy, too, at Cuillean's dun."
Brie thought Collun's eyes widened, but she could not read his thoughts.
"Brie...," he started.
"Excuse me," came Aelwyn's voice, "but Lom told me to tell you there is movement in the gabha camp." The sun was just rising, and the wyll's amber eyes glittered.
TWENTY-ONE
Sago's Net
The battle began, not with a fiery headlong rush into a sleeping enemy camp, but with two armies facing each other across a stretch of turf. One was small, weakened by injury and fatigue, but determined and wildly brave, while the other was enormous and subhuman, led by the cunning intelligence of a monster.
There was an eerie silence as the armies approached each other, no battle horns sounded, no gabha brayed. But then the two armies merged, and the noise grew and swelled as the killing began again.
As before, Brie and Ciaran, with Fara loping at the horse's side, cleaved a burning gash through the gabha ranks, but Brie sensed something different in the goat-men who engaged her. They seemed bolder, reckless even, and she realized that the gabha general Cernu had devised a new strategy. She found herself being pushed to one side by thick bands of goat-men. The more she hewed down the more did Cernu send to take their place. Brie was fast becoming isolated from the rest of the Dungalan army.
Vainly she tried to move toward her company, but clusters of gabha kept appearing, continually harrying her and Ciaran. Her anger mounted, but with it came some measure of despair. She saw that the Dungalans were being driven back, closer and closer to the white stone beach.
Then she suddenly caught sight of the Sea Dyak sorcerer; the last time she had looked, Sago, with Monodnock huddled beside him, had been seated by the same heap of stones. Now he was mounted on his pony and was riding into the gap between Brie and her army. There was no sign of Monodnock.
The frail sorcerer made a ridiculous, startling sight as he trotted along on the broad-beamed pony with the fishlike tail, and Brie heard a sound like a laugh coming from one of the gabha near her. Sago was singing, a nonsense song no doubt, and in one hand he held his little fishing net. Cursing Monodnock under her breath, Brie furiously slashed at the gabha hemming her in, trying desperately to break through to get to Sago. But by the time Ciaran had broken free, Sago had changed course. He was heading for the bulk of the gabha army, which was inexorably pushing the Dungalans toward the beach.
"Sago!" Brie shouted.
But he did not hear her, or chose not to hear her, and she watched, horrified, as he approached the nearest of the rear guard of the goat-men.
"Faster," she urged Ciaran.
A gabha had spotted Sago and turned to hew him down with an enormous ax. The Sea Dyak sorcerer lifted his paper-thin hand, the hand holding the net, and called out in a surprisingly loud voice, "Heva! Heva! Heva!" Brie recognized the words as the cry of the huer, the Ardaran fisherman whose house overlooked the bay, letting the other fishermen know of the reddening of the sea that meant pilchards in the bay.
The goat-man with the ax paused, surprised by the loudness of Sago's voice perhaps, and Brie watched in amazement as the small, ungainly fishing net in Sago's hand began to widen and spread. There was no light coming from the sorcerer, as it had with the sumog, but his face, which was transformed by an uncanny expression of pleasure, seemed to glow white, almost moonlike. The net, which gave off a faint white glow of its own, stretched and extended over the rear guard of the gabha army. The goat-men gazed up at it in growing wonder and fear. The Dungalans, especially the fishermen among them, had begun moving back, away from the net, the moment they heard "Heva! Heva! Heva!" The fishing net kept spreading, floating impossibly several feet above gabha heads, until most of the goat-man army was under its shadow.
Then the net drifted down, settling on their heads and shoulders and arms. Where it made contact with the furred hide of the gabha, it adhered, as though imbued with some sticky, deadly sort of glue. The strings of the net did not stick to Dungalan skin or hair, and those caught under it were able to burrow their way out between the bodies of the trapped and struggling goat-men. The gabha were panicking, braying loudly.
Then Brie noticed that the creatures were clutching their necks, as though having trouble breathing. Some had fallen to the ground, their limbs stiff and wracked by small jerking movements; gagging, choking noises came from their throats. And, in that moment, Brie suddenly realized what kind of fish it was that she had seen in Sago's amhantar. It was called puffer fish, and Jacan had once told Brie that the puffer fish was the most poisonous of the fish that inhabited the waters by Ardara; he had seen a fellow fisherman die in a matter of minutes, his breath stopped and his body paralyzed, from careless handling of a puffer fish.
Brie suddenly heard a powerful braying, and she spun around to see the goat-man general Cernu, astride a swift goat-horse, bearing down on Sago. He had no weapon in his hands, but before Brie could reach them, Cernu had lowered his spiraling horns and plunged them into Sago's thin chest. The sorcerer was knocked off his mount, falling backward onto the ground, the net dislodged from his hand. Cernu jumped off his steed as well and leaned over Sago. For a horrified moment Brie thought the goat-man would lift the featherlight sorcerer up into the air, impaled on his horns.
But he did not. He turned and faced Brie, an evil grin on his grotesque face, blood dripping from his horns.
"Brie!" came a warning shout from Collun, who had circled around toward her. Before she could react, a terrible pain radiated across her back. Brie toppled off Ciaran onto the ground. A goat-man, one of the band she had been fighting earlier, loomed above her swinging his club. With an agonizing upward lunge, Brie struck with the fire arrow and the creature collapsed.
By the time she turned back, Brie saw that Cernu was locked in hand-to-hand combat with a Dungalan. No, not a Dungalan, she realized with a shock, but Collun.
The gabha general towered above the boy. From somewhere the creature had produced one of those lethal clubs, studded with sharp spikes, and he was swinging it ruthlessly at Collun, who danced just out of reach.
But even as Brie moved toward them she saw Collun take a mighty blow to his head. He collapsed, falling to the ground, and lay there, unmoving.
Letting out a shout of pure rage, Brie charged the gabha general. The fire arrow sang in her blistered hand.
Cernu lowered his horns, brandishing his club at the same time. Brie swerved to the side, then rounded back. But he kept her at bay with his horns and his club. Frustrated, she slashed wildly. She could tell Cernu felt the heat from the arrow, but when she gazed up into his bulging, savage eyes she saw no fear.