Kanwy went through the guard like a bludgeon, scattering unready pikemen, shouldering horses aside as Cefwyn laid about him with sword and shield; with a shove of his hindquarters as if he were climbing a hill, Kanwy broke through the last screen of defense, trampled a man, kept going. The clangor of engagement was at Cef-wyn’s back: his guard was still with him, shouting for the gods and Ylesuin; and the crowned man, realizing his danger, reined full about and swept a wild blow at Cefwyn’s head.
Cefwyn angled his shield, shed the force of it, and dealt a blow past the opposing shield. Kanwy shouldered a horse that hit them hard, bit another. Cefwyn cut aside at the encroaching guard, veered
Kanwy full about as he bore, in time to intercept another of Tasmôrden’s attacks, this one descending at Kanwy’s neck.
The sword grated past the metal-guarded edge of his shield, scored Kanwy’s shoulder. Kanwy stumbled, recovered himself against another horse, and blows cracked like thunder around them. One numbed Cefwyn’s back, but as Kanwy regained solid footing he had Tasmôrden in sight and drove his heels in, sending Kanwy over a fallen rider and through the mistimed defense of two pikemen who tried to prevent him. A pike grated off Kanwy’s armor. A man cried out and went down and Kanwy bore him past, and up against his enemy.
Tasmôrden flung up his shield, desperately choosing defense: but Cefwyn’s strike came from the side, with Kanwy’s impetus behind it on a wheeling turn. The blade hit and hung, needing force and a twist of the arm to free it, and when Cefwyn freed the blade, Tasmôrden toppled from his saddle, helmless, a black-bearded and bloody face disappearing down into a maelstrom of horses and men.
“Majesty!” Cefwyn heard a man shout, and saw Lord Maudyn across an ebbing rush of Tasmôrden’s forces.
Suddenly the air thickened. The hairs of his head and Kanwy’s mane alike stood up.
Wizard-work, he thought. A trap.
And force and light and sound burst from the heart of the enemy.
Lightning broke above the towers, ripped across the sky, and even at a distance the air shivered with it. “Gods bless!” Uwen said, yet to Tristen’s knowledge not a man behind them turned back.
The child and the Lady still went before them, and still that inky flow ran along the edges of the woods, but the lightning flash had for the blink of an eye seemed to illumine men and horses, gray as morning mist, that moved where the darkness flowed.
“I see men,” Crissand said, while above them and near at hand the towers of Ilefínian now seemed to flow with inky stain in the cracks and crevices. The darkness flowed, too, in the ditch beside the road, and between the stones of a ruined sheep wall. It wound itself among the thin, straggling branches of blackened, bare trees, and drifted down like falling leaves, to coalesce and run like dark fire along the ground.
It became footprints, and the next flicker of the heavens showed ghostly riders in greater numbers.
“Haunts,” Sovrag said, and Umanon blessed himself. Ahead of them all moved the lady of Emwy, but now it seemed banners had joined theirs, banners in great numbers, and a handful of ghostly gray riders, heedless of the trees, paced beside them toward the looming gates.
“Lord Haurydd,” Aeself said in a muted voice, and Tristen, too, recognized the man and the banners, dim as he was under the flickering heavens. The walls of the town seemed manned, but it was uncertain whether with living Men or Shadows.
Behind his banners, the Elwynim, the Lady’s sparrows, had come to take back their town; and the south of Ylesuin had come to defend their land against Elwynor’s wars of succession.
Tristen turned in the saddle and looked back over the host that had come to this place, men who had left their own lands for a comfortless camp and the risk of sorcery out of the stones of walls that had known too many wars. The earth itself seemed to quake, and the gray place held no comfort.
—At my very doors, the Wind whispered. Mauryl’s precious hatchling. Have we known one another at some time, disagreed, perhaps?
He swung about. It was not only that voice. There was another presence, far more familiar, that drifted around the perimeter, one that taunted and mocked him and still dared not come close.
He recalled the courtyard at Ynefel, and Mauryl’s face within its walls, as all the others had been imprisoned, all the lost, all the defeated.
So might Ilefínian stand, as haunted, as wretched in its fall.
“The gates are barred,” he said to Uwen, for the Wind told him so.
—Ylesuin’s down, it said. Folly. Great folly. Will you help him, I wonder?
In the unstable clouds of the gray space he saw a field where lightning had struck, and the dead lay all about, men and horses, and Cefwyn… yet alive, within reach of him, if only he reached out to rescue him.
He turned his head suddenly and looked up at the walls, seeing the lure it cast him, its intention to have Cefwyn’s life and his as surely as he turned that direction, and he would not do as it wished.
He struck at all of its presence he could reach within the gray space, he struck desperately and hard, and failed. His hold on the world weakened. His strength ebbed. It was the wards that drank it away from him.
“Uwen,” he said, “I have to go in there. I have to open the gates.”
“Not alone,” Crissand said. “No, my lord!”
There was no debate. The way was plain to him for an instant, the blink of an eye, and he cast himself into it, alone, knowing only that there was within the fortress of Ilefínian a room where a banner had hung.
And that his enemy, bent on destruction of all he loved, invited him.
Lightning had hit, and only the fact he remembered that told Cefwyn that he had survived. He remembered Kanwy falling sidelong and pitching him to shield-side. He recalled the impact on his shield against a carpet of metal-clad bodies, and after that was uncertain whether Kanwy had risen or not: all the world was a noise in his ears and a blinding light in his vision, so bright it might have been dark instead.
He lay an instant winded and uncertain whether he felt the sword in his hand or whether it was, like the fall, only the vivid memory of holding it.
But his knee moved, and his elbow held him off his face.
And if he would live, his father had dinned it into him, no matter how hard the fall, no matter the pain, if Ylesuin would survive, he had no choice but cover himself and find his guards and his horse.
He gained one knee, levered himself to his feet with his sword, proving he did indeed hold it. He stumbled erect into a blind confusion of wounded men and horses, a morass of tangled bodies and shattered lances that turned and shifted underfoot, to a second fall and a third.
A distance along, his eyes began to make out moving shadows, but he thought others must be as dazed by the bolt. No one attacked him, no one seemed aware of any color or banner, and he had no idea at the moment where the lines were. He had lost his helm, his shield was in two pieces, and he shed it as an encumbrance, staggering on uneven ground, but aware at last that downhill was not the direction of his own men.
In front of him a fallen horse raised itself on its hindquarters and began to gain its feet, like a moving hill rearing up before him: his gloved hand found its shoulder and its neck and he seized the reins and tried to hold the stirrup, but the dazed horse tore away from him and veered off on its own way across the field, trampling the dead and the dying in its course.
Damn, Cefwyn said to himself, holding an aching side and recovering with difficulty from the blow the horse had dealt him. A second time brought to a standstill and having no other sense to help him, he listened past the roaring in his ears, trying to make of the sounds he heard any known voice, any sign of his own guards or any surety of his enemies. Men moved and called to one another near him, voices lifted over the distant clangor of battle, but his ears could not distinguish the words from sounds that might be wind or thunder.