Sauce was wrestling with her reins. When her palfrey stopped and reared, Sauce rolled over the horse’s rump-in armour-and landed on her feet. She turned.
The adversarius was forty feet away, twice her height, and glowed with arcane power.
Sauce had a fortune in wards on her harness-one from Mag and one from the Red Knight himself.
His blue-white fire struck her in the chest.
And dispersed.
“Fuck me,” Sauce said, and charged.
The daemon shaman hesitated, obviously disconcerted by her attack and the failure of his sorcery. It gathered power-Sauce saw that much.
A gob of white fire travelled across the shaded glade like a ball thrown by a grown man. It struck the daemon low, on the hip, and the daemon’s belt of what appeared to be emeralds burst into fire.
The thing stumbled, looked wildly around, and another ball of white fire struck it in the torso just as Sauce’s sword cut at the thing’s outthrust, scaled leg. Blood and fire sprayed in every direction, the axe flashed at Sauce and she slipped her lead foot and made a two-handed cover. The axe slammed into her blade and snapped it, and the point of her own sword cut into her left hand right through a heavy gauntlet.
But she was otherwise uninjured, and when a third gout of fire struck the daemon, it shuddered and said one word, and was-
– gone.
Count Zac was not badly hurt. Spiro, on the other hand, was messily dead. The captain’s post-mortem that night was highly complimentary to Sauce. He ended by saying, “Let’s try not to lose any more.” He shook his head and looked at Mag.
“I hit the damned thing three times,” Mag said. “It had a layered protection and some serious skills.”
The captain had a cup of watered wine in his fist and he was sitting in a camp chair with most of his officers. Zac was still in Father Arnaud’s hands.
“What was it doing out there, alone?” the captain asked. He looked around. “We’re still in the circle.”
Tom, who was grumpy because he’d missed a fight and grumpier because everyone was praising Sauce, spat. “Wild’s got to have young fools as much as folk,” he said.
“You’d know,” Sauce said.
The captain laughed. “I thought you two were sick, or something. I suspect that we are watched. My sense of the arcane in the air is that our daemon came the way he went. That’s why it was so clever of Sauce to understand.” He looked at Mag.
Mag nodded. “That’s consistent with what I felt-pulses of potentia. If it was powerful enough, it came-and then went.”
“The outriders surprised it,” Sauce said. “It didn’t expect resistance so far out from the column.”
Ser George rolled his eyes. “Once again, the omnipotent captain reads the enemy perfectly.”
Ser Danved laughed and pounded his saddle. “He does posture on and on…” He looked around.
Ser Francis Atcourt slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, he loves being told when he’s posturing,” he said.
Instead of rising to the quip, Ser Gabriel smiled. “In fact, Master Smythe warned me pretty carefully. I cannot claim this one, and thus I’ll try not to be insufferably glad that a powerful mage-warrior couldn’t even get a view of our column.” He was silent a moment. “We’ll bury Spiro in the morning, and then, I’m afraid, we’ll march the whole company over his grave.”
Ser Bescanon had fought the Wild most of his youth, but he was shocked. “That’s desecration!” he said.
The captain shrugged. “Less a desecration than having something dig his corpse up and eat it,” he said. “We’re in the Wild. Let’s keep that in mind.”
“I miss Morea already,” Ser Michael said. “Everyone remember how we said fighting in Morea was dull? We were fools.”
The next morning arrived earlier than anyone wanted. And Sauce began to see that Ser Bescanon might have talents in Bad Tom’s direction after all. He had the entire quarter guard out and moving through camp, waking everyone. The captain’s trumpeter sounded the call every minute for ten minutes, and the woods rang with his trumpet. It was freezing cold; wooden buckets had a rime of frost, and the horse lines were horse-huddles.
It was not their first day on the road, but it was the earliest start with all the new recruits. Tents were slow coming down. Ser Gavin, temporarily in charge of his brother’s household, had trouble finding enough spare bodies to get his brother’s great pavilion packed, and Mag had to shriek like a hen wife to get her wagons packed. The sun climbed in the sky, and Count Zac emerged from Father Arnaud’s tent pale and shaken.
Sauce threw her arms around him. “I thought you were fucking dead,” she said.
“Me, too,” Zac admitted. “I owe Kostas the shaman. Big time.”
Father Arnaud smiled at them both. And then they sensed his attention leaving them, and they both turned.
A flight of faeries emerged out of the morning mist. They flitted about the clearing, moving rapidly from point to point like cats sniffing out a new house.
Eventually they gathered into a cloud of colours, a ball of darting and moving shapes. The ball moved cohesively across the clearing.
No one moved.
Bad Tom was standing while his squire-Danald Beartooth-laced his byrnie.
The faerie swarm floated to a stop in front of Bad Tom.
“We were Hector,” they said. “We remember. We do not forget.”
Tom flinched. “Hector?” he asked.
Just for a moment, the swarm took the shape of the dead Drover, Hector Lachlan. “We remember,” they said.
Bad Tom watched them. “I remember, too,” he said.
“We wait for you,” they said. “We remember. You are the sword.”
Tom drew the great sword by his side with a ferocious fluidity, but as quick as he was, the whole cloud of faerie folk was faster.
His sword glowed in red and green and blue like the shimmer of a peacock. “I’ll be right here waiting for you,” he said. “Come and try me.”
The faeries seemed to sigh. “The day cometh, man. You are the sword. We remember.”
And then they flitted away, each one going in a different direction, exploding outwards into the new day.
One faery, bolder than the others, circled close. But, alone, its voice was so quiet that only Tom could hear it.
“We will be there for you,” he said, and flitted away.
Mag looked at Sauce. “I used to love them, as a child. I cried when I realized what they are.”
Sauce was still locked in an embrace with her lover. “What, then?” she asked.
“The soul vultures,” Mag said grimly.
The captain had to ride out and direct the turn-over of the camp-guards to the outriders himself-too many new officers and too many new people. He, too, missed Gelfred.
A league farther on the road, they passed Gilson’s Hole, a break in the road. The road here had once crossed the wetlands of a large marsh on a causeway, with the upper waters of the Albin to the east, out of sight and farther down. Years and years ago, something had blown a forty-foot hole in the fabric of the road, and a combination of ill luck and botched maintenance attempts had created a hole that filled with water and wouldn’t drain, surrounded by forty bad paths around it through what was increasingly a rank and fetid swamp, not a freshwater marsh-and a settlement had grown on the high ground just to the west and south, where a low ridge offered good air and good grazing, and a higher ridge offered safety. The settlers had specialized in getting cargoes across the hole. There’d been talk of building a bridge. They’d built a small fort on the higher ridge.