But nothing happened.
He pulled in great shuddering breaths of air, sobbing with fright, while his body finally stopped shaking with exhaustion and began shivering with cold. And still nothing happened.
He levered himself up out of the snow, and there was nothing in sight; no enemies, not even a bird. Only the snow-covered bushes he had fallen into, blue sky, bare tree-branches making a pattern of interlace across it, and the churned-up mess of snow and dead leaves of his backtrail through the undergrowth.
He listened, while fear ebbed and sense returned, slowly. He heard nothing, nothing whatsoever.
And finally thought returned as well. Van! Dear gods - I left him alone back there -
He struggled to his feet, and fought his way back through the bushes, staring wildly about. Still there was neither sight nor sound of anything.
Dearest gods, how could I do that -
Once again he ran, this time driven by guilt, along the swath his flight had cut through the snow and the forest undergrowth. He burst through a cluster of bushes onto the road, and literally stumbled onto the site of the ambush.
There was blood everywhere; blood, and churned-up snow and dirt, and bits of things that made Stef sick when he saw them - bits of things that looked like they had belonged to people.
Then his eyes focused on the center of the mess, on something he had first taken for a heap of snow.
Yfandes. Down, lying in a crumpled heap, like a broken toy left by a careless child, blood oozing from the stump where her tail had been chopped off.
No sign of Vanyel.
No -
Stef stumbled to Yfandes' side, afraid of what he would find. But there was nothing, no body, nothing. Yfandes had been stripped of her harness and saddle, and a trail of footprints and bloody snow led away from where she lay.
No -
His legs wouldn't hold him. His mind could not comprehend what had happened. In all the endless things he had imagined, there had been nothing like this. Vanyel had never been defeated - he never could be defeated.
No, no, no -
His heart tried to deny what his eyes were telling him; his mind was caught between the two in complete paralysis. He touched Yfandes' flank with a trembling hand, but she did not move, and Vanyel did not reappear to tell him that it was all a ruse.
His heart cracked in a thousand pieces.
NO!
He flung back his head, and howled.
“Damen!”
The boy started, fear so much a part of him that he no longer noticed it, and looked up from the pot he was tending on the hearth across the smoke-filled hall to the doorway.
The Lord. He cringed into the ashes on the hearthstones, expecting Lord Rendan to stalk over and deliver a blow or a kick. The men had gone out every day for the past two weeks on the orders of Master Dark, and had always come back empty-handed. Tempers were short, and Damen was usually the one who bore the brunt of those tempers.
But nothing happened, and his fear ebbed a little; he coughed and took a second look, raking his hair out of his eyes with a greasy hand and peering through a thicker puff of smoke and soot that an errant breeze sent down the half-choked chimney. Lord Rendan stood blocking the open doorway, arms laden with something bulky, a scowl on his face. But it wasn't the scowl Damen had come to dread these past two weeks, the one that told of failure on Rendan's part and punishment to come for Damen -
The boy scrambled to his bare feet, slipping a little on a splash of old tallow, and scuttled through the rotting straw and garbage that littered the floor to the lord's side. “Here,” Rendan growled, thrusting the bundle at him. Damen took it in both arms, the weight making him stagger, as Rendan grabbed his shoulder and turned him toward the hearth. “Put it over there, on the bench,” the lord snapped, as his fingers dug into Damen's shoulder, leaving one more set of bruises among the rest. The boy stumbled obediently toward the bench and dropped his burden, only then seeing that it was a saddle and harness, blood-spattered, but of fine leather and silver-chased steel.
A saddle? But we don't have any horses -
The lord threw something else atop the pile; white and shining, a cascade of silver hair -
A horse's tail; a white horse's tail, the raw end still bloody.
Before Damen could stir his wits enough to wonder what that meant, the rest of the men crowded in through the keep door, cursing and shouting, bringing the cold and snow in with them. Damen rubbed his nose on his sleeve, then scuttled out of the way. He stood as close to the fire as he could, for in his fourth-hand breeches and tattered shirt he was always cold. He counted them coming in, as he always did, for the number varied as men were recruited or deserted and may the gods help him if he didn't see that all of them had food and drink.
One hand's-worth, two hands, three and four hands - and five limp bodies, carried by the rest. One cut nearly in half; Gerth the Axe -
An' no loss there, Damen thought, with a smirk he concealed behind a cough. One less bastard t' beat me bloody when 'e's drunk, an' try an' get into me breeches when 'e's sober.
The others dropped Gerth's hacked-up body beside the door. Two more bodies joined his, bodies blackened and burned; Heverd and Jess. Damen dismissed them with a shrug; they were no better and no worse than any of the others, quite forgettable by his standards.
A fourth with the face smashed in was laid beside the rest, and Damen had to take account of the other faces before he decided it must be Resley the Liar. A pity, that - the Liar could be counted on to share a bit of food when the pickings were thin and there wasn't enough to go around, provided a lad had something squirreled away to trade.
But there was a fifth body, white-clad and blood-smeared; certainly no one Damen recognized. And that one was thrown down beside the pile of harness, not next to the door. An old man, he thought, seeing the long, silver-threaded hair; but that was before they dumped him unceremoniously beside the bench. Then the face came into the flickering firelight, and Damen blinked in confusion, for the face was that of a young man, not an old one, and a very handsome young man at that, quite as pretty as a girl. He was apparently unconscious, and tied hand and foot, and it occurred to Damen that this might be what Master Dark had set them all a-hunting these past two weeks.
He didn't have any time to wonder about the prisoner, for a few of the men set to stripping the bodies of their fellows and quarreling over the spoils, while the rest shouted for food and drink.
Damen gathered up the various bowls and battered cups that served as drinking vessels, and balanced them in precarious stacks in his arms. He passed among the men while they grabbed whatever was uppermost on the pile in his arms and filled their choice from the barrel atop the slab table in the center of the hall. Drink always came first in Lord Rendan's hall; sour and musty as the beer always was, it was still beer and the men drank as much of it as they could hold. Damen returned to the hearth, wrapped the too-long sleeves of his cast-off shirt around his hands and grabbed the end of the spit nearest him, heaving the half-raw haunch of venison off the fire. It fell in the fire, but the men would never notice a little more ash on the burned crust of the meat. He staggered back to the table under his burden of flesh, and heaved it with a splatter of juices up onto the surface beside the barrel, on top of the remains of last night's meal. Those that weren't too preoccupied with gulping down their second or third bowl of beer staggered over to the table to hack chunks off with their knives.