The boldness of his reply astounded Elansa. His dozen outlaws grumbled against this journey daily, they grumbled against each other, and one threatened to break the band asunder while another planned to leave. Yet Brand spoke as though he were a general in the field, and all his troop loyal to the last heart.
I have enemies, and they will not take me.
Is he mad? She wondered. It might be he is.
A sudden cry shattered the moment-Chaser's shout of terror. Elansa turned but didn't see what hit her, what crashing weight bore her to the ground. She didn't know it was Brand on top of her till she smelled his breath and felt his beard on her neck.
The cavern erupted in a howling so terrible she thought the stone would break.
Chapter 12
In the darkness, Char's voice bellowed, "Ogres!"
As though the warning cry had conjured it, the stench of ogre filled the cavern, the reek of rotting meat, filth, and unwashed flesh. And blood. Under it all ran the thick coppery smell of blood. She didn't see Swain anywhere, but Chaser lay flung against a stone wall. He looked like a broken toy, his neck twisted and an arm ripped from the socket. Blood poured from where his arm had been, running like a river. The high keening Elansa yet heard in her ears was the echo of his death scream.
Cries of rage filled the cavern. Brand dragged her to her feet as arrows flew, bowstrings twanged, and a thundering voice roared in a language Elansa had never heard before. Ogre-speak, words that made her think of oaths and curses and ugliness, raged around her like a storm.
Unarmed and defenseless, Elansa looked around. She searched for a place to rim to, a way out. Four ogres, hideous creatures half again as tall as a human, had the ground between the outlaws and the entrances to the cavern. They seemed to have no weapons but clubs, and those looked like no more than stout tree limbs. A fury of hounds stormed around the knees of the ogres- Fang and his brethren tearing at the legs of the monsters. One hound died shrieking, and another flew through the air and smashed against a wall, its bones broken. Ah, but the rest held, furious and changed into creatures as fierce as wolves. Five harried one ogre, ripping calf muscles, exposing veins to bleed their turgid greenish blood. By the time the third hound died, the ogre was on its knees, laying about with its club and screaming. An arrow pierced its neck, and another followed so close to the mark that they vibrated against each other, shaft and shaft. Thick greenish blood sprang from a tapped vein, and Elansa heard Ley shouting, "Again, "Tianna! Again!"
The half-elf shouted a gleeful war cry, and two arrows flew as one. Now four pierced the ogre's neck, and the great creature wavered on its legs.
All this Elansa saw in the instant of her panicked search for a way out. Ogres before and behind an icy stream and a stone wall….
Where to go?
"Nowhere to go," Brand said. "Nowhere but where you are. Only crazy people fight ogres, or desperate people."
Brand thrust a dagger into her hand, and her fingers closed round it as though she'd know how to use it. In his own right hand Brand held his sword.
"Defend yourself," he said as the curses of ogres and the oaths of humans raged in the cavern. The stink of blood and bowels loosed in death fouled the air. Brand leaped up the steps, the lily stairs, and Elansa followed as though pulled.
"Fight!" Brand roared, his voice like thunder bounding off the stone walls. "Fight to the tunnels!"
Arawn swung his sword above his head, whirling it in a silver wheel of light, calling men to him. Brand did the same. As though they'd done this a hundred times-had they not?-the outlaws sought a commander. Half went to Arawn and half to Brand. In this way they divided the two remaining ogres.
In the middle ground, the outlaws engaged, and they were like hounds themselves, harrying the foe. The light of the distant moons glinted off steel blades and the polished iron of arrowheads. Cold as a pitiless glance, the light slithered on blood-slick stone. Into this Elansa plunged, clutching Brand's dagger as though it were a lifeline. She'd not gone three long strides when something hit the ground at her feet, something that sounded like a cabbage flung down.
Her gorge rose, and bile burned a fiery path up her throat. A broad hand fell to the stony floor, severed at the wrist, fingers spread as though to grip. When she looked up, she saw Brand. Wearing his own blood and the blood of an ogre, his eyes blazed, his face contorted with battle rage. Just in the moment their eyes met, someone hit her from behind, and she fell to her knees onto hard stone. Her elbows crashed on the ground, and her fingers went numb as outraged nerves refused to feel. The dagger-useless metal!-flung from her hand, skittered over the ground and got lost in the darkness and the The breath jolted from her, Elansa tried to rise. A weight bore her down, the two hands of an ogre closed around her, squeezing as it lifted her from the ground. Muscles screamed, and she felt her ribs groan from the pressure of its grip. Stinking spittle dripped into her hair, onto her neck. Breathless, her heart crashing against ribs, her sight began to fail, to fade at the edges and turn black.
Elansa had no breath to scream, hardly the sight to look for help.
And then, the ogre's blood spilled out of its neck and onto her arm and her hands. It burned! Like acid, like fire, it burned her flesh. She fell from the ogre’s grasp and hit the floor.
"Get up! Get up!" It was Char shouting at her, the dwarf just pulling his axe out of the back of the ogre's neck. "Get up and run!"
But where? The battle had surged to the walls where the passage out gaped. In between, the cavern was littered with the dead-one ogre’s corpse, the bodies of five hounds, and poor broken Chaser.
She moved, stumbling, and then flung herself aside. Char shouted something, and through the madness a yellow blur launched.
Fang!
Slavering, the hound hurtled past Elansa from the side, eyes like fury. He sank his great fangs into the ankle of an ogre, then changed grip and leaped to clamp on the monster’s wrist. The ogre stiffened, reeking foully of pain. With its other hand it grasped Fang’s neck, thrust a thumb through the hound’s windpipe, and flung the beast against a wall.
Running, weeping, Elansa lost her footing on blood-slicked stone, and she fell. She scrambled up again, and only when she saw what had tripped her did she stop. Brand lay on his side, motionless. She saw him, and she saw-in one bright moment of clarity-the sapphire phoenix spilled out of his shirt.
She could have healed a blight with that phoenix. She could have called up the power of the god who is the ruler of all nature and all the world around would have become as a living being to her-earth and sky, fire and wind and water. She would have spoken to them as she would to kin.
Elansa reached down and took the sapphire phoenix in her hand. It throbbed beneath her fingers. It knew her. How not? In her veins ran the blood of the generations of woodshapers who had used this talisman to heal.
"My Phoenix," she whispered.
Brand groaned, his eyelids flickering as the stone hanging round his neck quickened, as the blood in Elansa’s veins began to sing. He opened his eyes, and it seemed to her, looking into the brown depths, that he saw her from a far place, as though they stood with a vast plain separating them. The roar and the rage of battle faded, and she knelt in a quiet place. Not a place of safety, no, not that. Danger howled all around, but now, for this moment a sheltering wing had dropped between her and death.
In silence, she began her prayer. O my Blue Phoenix, give ears to the earth to hear me. Give wit to the stone to know me. Give courage to the rock to break and fall and-