Getting too old for that! she told herself, following in Rowan's wake with the banner bearer at her side. The green-and-silver flag flapped in the wind of their passage, the crescent moon cradled between antlers.
The gate was of iron bars, welded into a diagonal lattice with openings palm-broad; the bars themselves were twisted from lengths of rebar heated and hammered together. A crossbow bolt flashed out and a clan warrior fell with a shriek of pain, but an instant later a Mackenzie arrow fired from behind him struck the crossbowman in the small of the back. He dropped; boots trampled across him in the darkness, and bones broke. Then the foremost Mackenzie rank was up to the iron, a murderous scrimmage with swords and short-gripped spears and dirks used at close range through the openings. The gate heaved and rattled against the bar that held it against the weight of many strong bodies, but it held.
"Room! Give me room!" bellowed the man who was a blacksmith in peacetime.
They did, and the hammer side of his ax struck once, twice, and again. Sparks blasted out where it hit on the outside of the rightward edge, over the hinges. One blow and it sagged; another, and the upper corner came free. A dozen Mackenzies launched themselves at it then, some recklessly feetfirst. The iron grille fell inward, taking men down with it and beneath it.
Screaming, the warriors of the clan surged across it and into the narrow lantern-lit space beyond. There had been two dozen of Baron Molalla's foresters here, and as many ordinary soldiers. She had watched her folk do well against odds; with surprise and numbers on their sides, they were terrifying. The Protector's men tried again and again to form in ordered lines as they'd been taught, but the Mackenzies were all around them, fighting three on two or two on one, each a leaping, dodging blur of stabs and chops and smashing blows with the buckler. Everyone was too close-packed for distance weapons, and the sound was like a dozen loads of scrap metal falling on a stone smithy floor, with the white-noise surf of human voices thrown in.
Then the men-at-arms came out of the commandant's house; it took time to put on that gear. There were only four of them, but they were armored from neck to ankle, their kite-shaped shields broad and heavy and strapped with metal, held up face-high until nothing showed but the glaring eyes on either side of the helmet's nasal bar. They formed up in a blunt wedge and trotted forward in a jingle of steel and pounding of boots. An eddy of combat erupted around them and the Mackenzies drew back, one clutching a slashed arm, two dragging another more seriously wounded. Protectorate survivors elsewhere fought their way towards them, and a knot of civilians followed, including babes in arms. It would be difficult to shoot them down without injuring the noncombatants, but they couldn't let them escape either-and swarming them under would cost gruesomely.
And behind them, a glimmer of flames through the windows of the house; they must have set a blaze before they left. We've got to get that fire out! she thought.
She opened her mouth to make a call for their surrender. Rowan forestalled her, loping forward with his teeth showing in a fixed rictus of bloodlust amid the gorgon menace of his painted face, helmet gone and flaxen hair blowing wildly, a beacon in the dimness that drew clansfolk after him. And fighting, he shrieked, an ululating wail like fingernails on slate.
"Haro!" the knight shouted, sloped his shield and cut downward with the Norman longsword.
Rowan's headlong rush had been a trick. His ax met the other's blade in midair and steel crashed on steel, sparks and clamor; sheer battering and mass swept the lighter weapon aside and nearly out of his opponent's hand, and the armored man staggered. His wrist and arm must have been numb with the impact, robbed of strength for a moment. The ax looped up overhead in a deceptively graceful motion, held at end and middle, and then Rowan's hands slid together at the end of the shaft as it slammed down again with all his better than two hundred pounds of muscle and bone behind it. The edge bit through the good riveted mail, through flesh and bone, and the knight dropped to the ground with a metallic crash, thrashing and bleeding from an arm half-severed at the shoulder.
Cynthia had been holding the man on her brother's unshielded left in play with her battle spear, using it like a bladed quarterstaff, the head and butt cap like streaks of light in the darkness, booming on the shield, sweeping towards his face, stabbing down at a foot. The baron's trooper was so fixed on it he never noticed the hammer side of Rowan's ax until it crashed into his neck below the flare of his helmet. Bone snapped, and the others were falling:
"Scathach!" Rowan shrieked in terrible exultation, whirling the weapon up again.
Then Juniper was moving, faster than she thought was in her, leaping before him. She spread her arms wide and met his eyes; there was an almost palpable shock as green met blue-although the pupils of his had expanded to almost swallow the iris, like windows into night.
"No!" she said, driving her will forward like a spearpoint of her own. "These aren't fighters, Rowan!"
For a moment she thought that dreadful ax would come down on her, and then humanity flooded back into the younger Mackenzie. He staggered, mouth loose and slack; well she knew that weakness which flooded in when you returned from beyond the world of common day.
"Get the fire out," she snapped. An order will help him come to himself. "Quickly, before it shows at a distance."
The fight was over-nothing left but pursuit and killing amid the shadows, and the long scream of a man who'd chosen the cliff over the red blades and painted grinning faces running behind him. Juniper grimaced as she slid her own unmarked sword back into its sheath.
Then, very softly, she murmured to herself: "What is it we've brought back, to run wild once more on the ridge of the world?"
Sixteen hours later and twenty miles to the west, the Mackenzies turned to watch stars appearing over the Cascades as night came towards them like a moving wall of shadows. They were encamped on an island of firm ground in a new swamp; the smells of evening were abroad, woodsmoke, cooking, horses and cut grass over by the picket line. Other stars appeared against the mountains now-great fire beacons burning in the gloaming, distance-shrunk to trembling candle flames dancing against encroaching night; first one north of Table Rock, then more to either side, and racing past them to the northward, heading west.
Juniper shivered as she looked at them. Like the old days, she thought. Very old days, along the frontier between England and Scotland; half her ballads came from there, from the ancient tales of her father's people-the folk who'd given the words blood feud and unhallowed hand and black mail to the English language.
There had been nights like this there, when the balefires burned from hilltop to hilltop, from the North Sea to the Irish Channel. Warning laird and crofter that the great reiver clans were out, swarming from Liddersdale and Teviotdale and a dozen other nests, riding a thousand lances strong to break the Border.
And now the Mackenzies are out, she thought mordantly. Granted we're on foot and carrying longbows, but the principle of the thing:
"They've twigged," Sam Aylward said, coming to stand beside her with a piece of sausage in his hand, his prosaic matter-of-fact tone doubly welcome. "Probably those prisoners got loose-well, we knew they'd not stay tied up forever. Everything gets harder now."