She opened her eyes, and saw fear and pride warring in her friends' faces, and it was Jadrek who looked up at Jadrie, and said, "Very well. Because you swore an oath, you can go."
Jadrie had the good manners not to cheer, but the twins didn't. And Jadrek cut them off.
"But you two didn't swear any oaths, and you are staying here!" he barked.
"That's an order," Kethry added in a voice of steel.
"And if you dare to try and follow, you lose the use of your horses for the rest of the year."
That was more than enough threat to keep them safely behind, as their stricken looks proved. Crestfallen, the boys slid off their horses, and meekly led them back into the stable.
Kethry turned to her daughter, and still using that same cold voice, addressed her in a way that made her turn a little pale. "I am not pleased with this," she told the girl. "I am not particularly pleased that you decided to use an oath that serious without thinking of the consequences. You have a chance to redeem yourself if you follow every order we give you to the letter, with no argument, and no hesitation. If you cannot keep up, you will return home on your own; we won't have time to take you back. This is going to be the hardest thing you have ever done, and there will be no room for thoughtless acts. I am not your mother on this trip; Tarma is not your foster mother. We are your commanders, and if you make a mistake, it could be fatal, not just for you, but for all of us. If there is fighting, you will stay clear unless otherwise ordered. If you bring danger on us, we will save you if we can, but it is not only possible but likely that we cannot. Is that understood?"
Clearly this was a side of her mother that Jadrie had never seen before. She was as pale as a spirit, but her chin was set firmly, and she replied in a voice that was as steady as Tarma could have wished. "Perfectly, commander."
Now Kethry looked at Tarma. "Let's get in the saddle and get moving; we'll meet Warrl on the way, and save him a little running. We need all the daylight we can get."
"Right." Tarma heaved herself up into Hellsbane's saddle, and Kethry got herself in place on Ironheart, leaning down to kiss her husband when she was secure.
"Go-" he urged. "I'll take care of things here -- as soon as the rest get back, I'll send Ikan up to Tilden; better this comes from a friend than a strange messenger."
She needed no more urging than that, and neither did Tarma; lifting the reins, the two battlesteeds loped out into the gray light of afternoon, followed by a much subdued Jadrie on her mare.
* * *
Kira had created plenty of daydreams about bandit raids and kidnappers, and had imagined herself being heroic and triumphant in all of them, but when attackers really struck, it wasn't anything like her daydreams.
It was all so sudden she barely had time to react, much less act in a heroic fashion. The guards were all calm, talking and joking, and no one was at all wary and watchful. She had the impression that this had been considered a "soft" job, and the men with her were very much envied by their peers. There was no indication that there was anything to be worried about.
The very first sign that something was wrong was when one of the more nervous horses stopped, snorted, and twitched his ears forward.
There was no other warning. Before even the horse's rider had a chance to do anything, a guard at the front of the escort suddenly screamed and fell off his horse.
For all of her reading, this was the first time that Kira had ever seen a man die, and this one was dying right in front of her; at first, it didn't seem real. Before she could do more than stare stupidly at the arrow in his back and the spreading scarlet stain in the snow as he writhed there, two more of the guards made horrid gurgling sounds and fell off, too, with arrows sticking out of their throats.
She sat there on her fat little pony, paralyzed with a mixture of fear and horror, wanting to throw up and run away at the same time. The only thing that came into her mind was that there was never any blood in her daydreams....
Meri screamed, startling her out of her shock, at about the same time as chaos erupted all around them.
Their ponies were shoved aside by more of their guards, as the men made a wall of themselves around their charges. But that wall didn't last long; ignoring armored men, the attackers cut down the horses with their arrows, sending screaming animals to drop under their riders. Behind the volley of arrows came a charge, then there were frantically running men and horses, screaming and shouting, and swords cutting everywhere. Confused and frightened, the pony only thought to flee; he bolted between two screeching, bleeding horses into the first open space he saw.
Suddenly she was sitting on her pony in the middle of the open road, and there wasn't anybody standing protectively between her and a rough-clad man who was riding straight for her.
She thought, belatedly, of her knife at her belt -- her pony tried to bolt as she gave him confused signals -- then the stranger was right on top of her. He snatched her out of her saddle with an impact that drove all the breath out of her and made her see stars.
He paused just long enough to rob her of her knife, then dumped her across the front of his saddle, facedown -- as the horse galloped off, she thought she was going to be sick. The pommel of his saddle jolted into her stomach, and she had a terrible time just getting a full breath between jolts. The whole world was reduced to lashing hair and snow-covered ground, and the pain of an ever-increasing number of bruises.
The next thing she knew, he'd stopped as abruptly as he'd started. He grabbed her under the arms before she got a breath, and threw her toward a -- wagon? Whatever, she was flying through the air, straight for it. Before she had time to brace herself, she landed inside a darkened boxlike structure, and hit her head against the wooden floor. Meri landed on top of her in the next moment, then something bulky and heavy flew in after them. The door they'd been tossed through slammed shut, there was the sound of a bar dropping in place over the door. Before either of them could move, the box began jolting around, bouncing and bruising them both unmercifully to the sound of wheels and galloping hooves.
We're in a wagon. A prison-wagon, or a treasure-wagon, they're about the same-
That was all the tiny, still-sane part of her could think, as she and Meri clung to each other, and screamed and cried until they were hoarse, sore of eye and of throat, as well as battered and bruised.
Eventually they managed to brace themselves so that they weren't bouncing around quite so badly, and long after they'd cried themselves out, the wagon finally slowed to a reasonable pace.
"What happened?" Meri asked tearfully, in a hoarse whisper.
"I th-think we've been kidnapped," Kira stammered back.
"But-why?" Meri wailed. "Who would want to kidnap us?"
Kira ignored that question; obviously their father was under the impression that someone would want to, or he wouldn't have sent guards to escort them home for the holidays. She knew, beneath her own fright and nausea, that somehow she would have to come up with better questions than that. You had to have questions before you could have answers -- and oh, she needed answers now!
A voice out of memory interrupted her chaotic, fear-filled rambling.