"Look… at… me," the man-the priest-in the robe said. "I-see-you."
His other arm ended short of a hand, and it had a rawhide tourniquet bound around it; even then Ritva found a fractional instant to be astonished. An injury like that would leave a man flat on his back with shock for days, at a minimum! And the hand was lying not far off.
"Look… at… me," he said again. "Tell… me…"
The words sounded dark. Not just deep or gravelly; as if they had more weight than words could bear, as if they were suffused somehow, like a man's face when he strained at a heavy load, like a weight that dimpled the surface of the world as a heavy footstep would a sheet of taut canvas. Suddenly the cold wet sapped at Ritva's strength with a feeling of dreary hopelessness. A wrongness that only flight could cure, enough space between her and this thing that she wouldn't have to think about it anymore. She couldn't walk towards that.
Instead she ran to him. "Try looking at me! " she screamed, gathering her will.
The sword flashed down as he turned and released her sister; he batted at the gray-silver streak with his injured arm, but the blade raked across his chest. The wound wasn't instantly deadly, but she could see the skin split and blood well out… and then stop.
And he smiled. He smiled at her.
"I-see-you," he said.
Lord of Blades, be with me! she thought desperately; and the fear blew out of her. Maiden of the sword, aid me!
She set both hands on the hilt of her longsword as he came towards her.
He's like the guy Rudi fought. He doesn't feel pain, her mind thought dispassionately. Or shock. And so he won't faint or go wobbly. Maybe he won't die right away if I stick him through the heart. No point in thrusting. And if he can get that hand on me, I'm dead. Damn slippery wet ground! But he's got to reach for me first.
He did, moving in a jerky series of motions, as if he were being operated by a puppeteer, and not a very skilled one. But the grab nearly caught her arm; he was fast.
Ritva whirled away, and she cut. The tip of his thumb caught against the point of her sword. The man looked down at it, flexing the rest of the hand, then bringing it to his mouth to bite off the mangled bit and swallow it. Then he grinned at her as red ran down his lips, mixing with the rainwater.
"Clever," he said. "You-are-too-clerver. All-of-you."
"Thiach uanui a naneth lin le hamma," she spat, and began a lunge. "You're ugly and your momma dresses you funny."
It was a feint, and the man betrayed himself with a snatch at her sword wrist, ignoring the glittering menace of the point. She cut backhanded…
It became like a fight in a nightmare; cut and back, cut and back, against a figure that would not fall, no matter what she did, that stumbled after her even when she landed a drawing slash on the belly. Once three fingers closed on her left wrist, and the shocking strength in them made the bones creak. She leapt up and drove both her feet against the man's chest and heard bone snap as she tore free and rolled away in three full back summersaults. He was there, raising a foot to stamp the life out of her; she cut at his leg, kicked again and again to pull herself free.
He tried to crawl after her even then, but the leg was hanging by a thread. His body stiffened, and he made a sudden sound-a croaking scream, and life came back into the flat stare, as if the man had been poured back into himself and was suddenly alone in his skull once more, naked before the pain of what had been done to his body. Then he went limp.
Ritva put the point of her sword into the soil, kneeling and holding on to the quillions, breath whooping in and out as she struggled not to vomit or give way. Her vision narrowed in to a dim tunnel that was muddy colored at the edges. When she could stand she went to Mary and knelt beside her. Her twin was lying curled around herself, hands across her face, making small sounds through her clenched teeth.
"Let me see it," Ritva said, pulling at her hands. "Let me see it!"
"I killed him. Then he hit me," she mumbled, and let her twin pull the hands away.
The face turned up to the rain was her own… or it had been. Now there was a slash running down from just above the nose to the left cheek, and the clear matter of the eye was mixed with the blood.
"I'll get the kit," Ritva said, swallowing.
They had some morphine left, though not much. She tried to stand and nearly collapsed herself as she put her weight on her left arm.
The bloodied hands caught at her. "I killed him. Then he hit me."
A dog barked, a wooorugh of greeting and of alarm at the scents of pain and injury. Ritva forced her eyes open, and saw Garbh dancing before her horse, fur bristling.
"Mother of God, what happened to Mary?" Ingolf's rough voice asked.
The sound took a minute to penetrate the fog of cold and exhaustion that wrapped Ritva's mind more thickly than the building snow-storm did the forest around. The Richlander caught at the bridle of her horse; Ritva swayed in the saddle, automatically tightening her grip on her sister who rode before her. The other twin's face was a mass of bandages-that helped keep her warm, too, along with the cocoon of blankets she'd rigged, and Ritva's own body heat, though she was shaking with a chill that seemed to go straight to her gut and spine and into her head.
Their campsite was hidden in a hollow, a set of dome-shaped shelters of tight-woven pine branches; the snow was starting to catch on them, turning them into white curves, and flakes hissed as they were blown sideways under the hood of the same construction that covered their fire. More slanted down out of darkness, like ribbons of white between the tall slim mountain pines. Everyone else came boiling up; some asking questions, Edain grimly silent and moving like a windup toy in the old stories. He silently unslung the quartered deer from the led horse and took it over to the hearth and set to his share of the other chores.
Ingolf lifted Mary out of her arms. Odard and Fred and Mathilda caught Ritva as she started to topple, tended to the horses, half carried her over to the largest shelter and through the low door of blankets and branches. It was warm within-warmer, at least-with rocks heated in the fire and changed as they began to cool. Father Ignatius began to unwrap the bandages around Mary's head; someone helped Ritva pull off her wet gloves and thrust a mug of hot broth into her hands, and she managed to wrap her fingers around it before it spilled. The liquid almost scorched her mouth, but she could feel every drop of it as it made its way down her gullet and into her nearly empty stomach. She'd eaten the deer's liver, raw, but nothing else in the…
"How long?" she asked, through chattering teeth.
Another mug of the broth came, and she was suddenly aware of the salty aroma of the boiled-down jerky and minced squirrel. She forced herself to sip, and help as others got her wet clothes off and herself into her sleeping bag; more of the hot rocks went into that as well, wrapped in her spare clothes. Her mind began to function again as her core temperature rose, enough to be conscious of how weary she was, and even of how the light of the lantern slung from the apex of the shelter jerked and twisted on the anxious faces around her. The pine scent was overwhelmingly strong, like a cool cloth on a fevered brow.
"You've been gone a day past when we expected," Ingolf said. "What the hell happened?"
She described it in short words, ending with: "They're not going to follow us anymore. But the warlock and the lunatic with the badges left a blazed trail to where Mary and I met them. That's only twelve, fourteen miles east. How's Rudi?"
The others remained silent, silent as the blanket-bundled form who lay on his stomach not far away. Father Ignatius said from where he worked:
"He's no worse… well, perhaps not much worse. The antibiotic cream is containing the infection, but the wound in his back in particular doesn't want to heal… of course, the conditions haven't been very good for convalescence."