"Zaranda, what seems to be the difficulty?" the priest asked.
She pointed. A sunflower of smoke was growing rapidly in the sky to the northwest, pale gray against pale blue.
The priest clutched his Ilmater medallion. "Merciful heavens," he said.
Zaranda turned Goldie sideways on the wagon-rut path that wound its way through short spring-green grass. "Balmeric! Eogast!" she shouted to her sergeant of guards and her dwarven drover-in-chief. "Get the mules off the road and the men into a defensive circle around them. If any armed strangers come within ar-balest range, drop them!"
"Must it then be raiders, Zaranda?" Farlorn asked in his lilting baritone, riding up on his gray mare. "It could be some farmer's been dilatory about cleaning the chimney of his cot and set his thatch alight."
"This is Tethyr," she said grimly. She turned Goldie and booted her after Stillhawk, who was already riding at a slant up the ridge to their right. The ranger had unslung his elven longbow from his shoulder. Farlorn shrugged and spurred his mare to follow.
"What of me?" the priest called.
"Stay and watch the caravan," Zaranda called back over her shoulder.
"Be careful, Zaranda!"
"You're wasting your breath, good father!" Farlorn shouted cheerfully back.
She charged for a quarter mile across country that had not entirely settled from the Snowflake foothills into Tethyrian flatland. The ground rolled like gentle ocean swells. Zaranda crested a rise and saw a prosper-ous farmhouse of at least three rooms. The walls were stone, but the insides and most of the thatch roof burned fiercely.
A woman ran toward Zaranda, rough brown home-spun skirts hiked high, round cheeks flushed with fear and exertion. As Zaranda watched, a horseman in blood-sheened leather armor rode up behind her and drove a lance into her back. She uttered a despairing wail and pitched forward on her face.
Zaranda gave forth a wordless falcon-scream of fury, whipped her sword from her scabbard, and spurred Goldie forward. Blue witchfire crackled along the saber's curved blade.
The mounted man had his back to her, tugging at his lance and laughing at the way it made the woman's body move across the ground. Intent on his game, he had no hint of danger. Three rough-clad men in the hen yard, though, spotted Zaranda and loosed a volley of ar-rows at her from their short bows.
It was a fatal mistake. Like the elves who had raised him and trained him, Stillhawk was no horse-bowman. He had already dropped to the grass without reining in his bay, and was running off his momentum with his long brown lean-thewed legs. Even as he ran, he nocked an arrow and released, then, running, reached into his quiver for another.
The arrows that struck the second and third short bowmen down were already in flight when the two men turned their heads to gape at the broad-headed arrow that had transfixed the first one's throat.
The short-bow volley fell wide, arrows hissing into the grass like snakes. "Randi, they're shooting at us," Goldie panted. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
They were almost upon the horseman, who still hadn't freed his weapon from his victim. Ignoring her mare, Zaranda screamed, "Look me in the eye before you die, you scum!"
The horseman was quick on the uptake. He let go his trapped lance immediately, and was drawing his broad-sword even as he turned. He saw Zaranda charging not twenty feet away, bared yellow teeth, and flung his sword high for a downward stroke.
Zaranda dug her heels into Goldie's flanks, urging her into a final surge of speed. As the mare dashed past the larger horse, Zaranda slashed forehand beneath the upraised arm. Her magic-imbued blade sliced almost effortlessly through stained leather, meat, and bone with a humming, crackling sound.
The raider fell, his final expression one of bewilderment. "I hate that sour-milk smell," Goldie complained as Zaranda reined her in, almost in the burning cottage's yard. "Why did you have to get a magic sword imbued with lightning? It's not as if it actually throws bolts or anything... . Uh-oh."
The last remark was elicited by the fact that, in spite of being well and truly on fire, the cot was disgorging ma-rauders, half a dozen of them, casting away loot bundled into pillowcases in order to draw
their blades. They were dirty, unkempt, and unshaven, dressed in rags and tag ends of armor, and their weapons were in as dire need of cleaning as their teeth. The armaments looked service-able enough, despite their lamentable condition.
Three more horsemen came drumming out from around the far side of the burning house. One of them had two wing-fluttering hens, one black, one white-and-black checked, tied by the feet to the pommel of his saddle. He brandished a sword, as did one of his mounted fellows. The third swung the spiked, fist-sized ball of an aspergillum-style morningstar on its chain about his helmeted head.
Zaranda winced; they were devilish things to defend against.
The riders showed cunning. Rather than rushing straight at the mounted interloper, they spurred their horses wide, hoping to pin her against the house and the semicircle of footmen. Zaranda just had time to wheel Goldie about and dart for safety.
But that was never her style.
"Head down, babe," she murmured to her mare, and nudged her hard with her heels.
"You don't want me—"
"Go!"
The golden palomino mare put her head down and lunged forward—straight for the doorway of the flam-ing cottage. Zaranda laid her magic saber about her, looping left and right so that the blade formed wings that shimmered silver gossamer in the morning sun. Utterly astonished by her mad forward rush, the foot-men broke to either side. She felt Crackletongue's en-chanted steel bite flesh gratifyingly as she passed.
Then she laid her body forward along Goldie's arched neck, and the mare lunged into the building, trailing a despairing cry of "Za- ran-daaa!" Smoke drooled upward over the lintel of the doorframe, caressing Zaranda's nose and eyes with stinging fingers. Then they were inside, hooves thumping on earth packed hard and soaked with beasts' blood in classic Tethyrian country fashion, dried into a smooth hard maroon surface like glazed tile and covered with rush straw. Flames ran like dancing rat spirals up the ornately carved posts that upheld the roof, and wound about the roof beams a handspan above Zaranda's unarmored back. She felt their heat, heard their lustful crackle, felt embers fall on the back of her neck, smelled her own hair start to burn.
As she hoped, there was a kitchen door. They burst through into the relative cool of open. Woman and mare released the breath they had been holding and filled their lungs with blessed clean air. Zaranda let go the reins, which she held only from long equestrian habit, to bat away the sparks lodged in Goldie's mane and her own hair.
"Aren't you getting too old for this, Randi?" gasped the mare.
Zaranda threw back her hair and laughed like a schoolgirl. "No!"
Two horsemen appeared around the stone corner to Zaranda's left. Zaranda brought Goldie round to meet them. Then the sudden backward pivot of the mare's long ears alerted her that the third one had circled to take her from behind.
"Not so fast, buster," Goldie said as the third horse, a white stallion, ran up on her. "We hardly know each other."
She launched a sudden savage kick with both rear feet. The stallion screamed and shied back as a steel-shod hoof gouged a divot from his shoulder. His rider, the man with the mace-on-a-stick, groaned and sagged, clutching his thigh. Goldie's other hoof had caught him square, with luck breaking the femur or at the least giving him a deep bone bruise and an excellent set of cramps.
With one foe out of the fight, however temporarily, Zaranda charged the other two. The rider on Zaranda's left sat a stubby little pony a hand shorter than Goldie, who wasn't as dainty as she effected to believe. Zaranda put her mare's shoulder right into the smaller beast's chest, rocking the pony back on its haunches and foul-ing its rider's sword strokes, while Zaranda traded ringing cuts with the man to her right.