Trianal sobbed for breath as the rolling-thunder onslaught crashed past him. It seemed in that moment as if there were literally thousands of armsmen in Balthar’s blue and white and Glanharrow’s gray. There weren’t, of course. There were only the other six troops he’d brought from Hill Guard and the seven more in Lord Festian’s service. Only thirteen troops—scarcely two hundred and sixty men—all told. But they might as well have been a thousand as their fresh, tight formation smashed into the men who’d pursued Trianal for so long behind a hurricane of arrows.
“We did it!”
It took him a moment to realize that that exultant scream of triumph had come from his own throat, and when he did, his face blazed with humiliation. But even as he cursed the outburst as a sign of his own youthful lack of maturity, he heard someone laughing uproariously. He turned his head with a glare, and found himself face to face with Sir Yarran. Somehow, the older knight had managed—along with Trianal’s standard-bearer and bugler—to cling to Trianal like a cocklebur, and now his face wore an enormous grin.
“Aye, we did, lad—you did.” Yarran shook his head. “Truth to tell, lad—I mean, Milord—I thought you’d maybe one chance in three of pulling it off. But you did. You actually did!”
Yes, I did—we did, Trianal thought, gazing back the way they’d come at the swirling cloud of death as the relief force rampaged through their exhausted pursuers like a battering ram. He brought the stallion down from a hard gallop to a walk, and he could hear bugles, screams, even the crash and clash of steel.
We did it. But we only managed it because of the carrier pigeons, and my own estimate of the odds was lower than yours, Yarran. Gods, how I wish they’d been some way for Lord Festian to tell us he’d received the message in time!
“Let’s get the men together and the horses cooled, Sir Yarran,” he said, meeting his mentor’s eyes, and the older man nodded with almost paternal pride.
“Aye, Milord,” he said. “Let’s be doing that.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Bahzell stepped up onto the mounting block and clambered into the saddle on Walsharno’s back.
He still felt ridiculous.
Someone his height wasn’t supposed to need a mounting block—an outsized mounting block—just to get him high enough to cram a toe into the stirrup. And a champion of Tomanak wasn’t supposed to heave himself into the saddle as if he had only the vaguest notion of how it was supposed to work. And, to top it all off, Bahzell Bahnakson wasn’t accustomed to looking (and feeling) clumsy, whatever he might be doing.
<If you think this is embarrassing for you, think about what I’m going to go through in the field when you don’t have your precious mounting block,> a mellow voice said in the back of his brain. <Now stop worrying and start concentrating on staying put up there.> The voice was much deeper than Brandark’s, but it carried an acerbic tartness that reminded Bahzell strongly, one might almost say painfully, of the Bloody Sword.
“And aren’t you the fine one to be giving advice?” he muttered. “You, with all four feet on the ground! I’m after being a hradani, not a blasted sideshow acrobat!”
<Really? A hradani? Perhaps I should be rethinking this partnership.>
“You’ll be finding more than enough to agree with you there, my lad,” Bahzell assured him even as he settled fully into the saddle. “But while we’ve the topic of staying put before us, it’s happier I’d be if I were after having more to hang onto up here.”
<You have the saddle horn, the cantle, and—if you really feel the need for security—the fighting straps,> Walsharno said tartly. <You do not need reins, as well.>
“All very well for you to be saying!” Bahzell shot back with a grin, knowing Walsharno could taste his humor as if it were the stallion’s own.
<Besides,> Walsharno continued, <it’s going to be years yet before I’d trust you to steer a horse, much less risk distracting me at a critical moment.>
“Ah, well, it might be as there’s a mite of sense in that,” Bahzell acknowledged with a chuckle. “But seeing as how you’re the one who’s after doing the steering and all, would you be so very kind as to be moving off sharpish now?”
Walsharno snorted, and Bahzell felt powerful muscles twitch under him. That deliberate, preliminary twitch was the only notice he received before the courser bucked … playfully, he thought. At least it was sufficient warning for him to tighten his knees, grab the high cantle of his war saddle with both hands, and hang on as the stallion landed with sufficient energy to jar his teeth. The sight of two tons of “horse” arching its back and kicking up its heels was one which had to be seen to be believed, and his spine felt an inch shorter when Walsharno finished with him.
<I trust that was sufficiently “sharpish” for you?>
“Oh, aye, you might be saying that,” Bahzell assured him, still clinging to the cantle like grim death, just in case.
<Good,> the stallion said silently, then moved off as sedately as a child’s first pony.
The hradani heard the courser’s silent laugh somewhere deep in his mind, and shared it. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to do, although he’d never imagined he might be that close to another living creature. He understood now why every wind rider called every other wind rider “brother,” regardless of birth or rank, for anyone who had shared the intensity of communication with a courser had been forever set apart.
In Bahzell’s case, his conversations with Tomanak had, in an odd sort of way, provided a kind of preliminary training for the bond with Walsharno. It wasn’t the same, of course, and yet there were undeniable similarities. More importantly, perhaps, Tomanak had accustomed Bahzell to the idea that he wouldn’t always be alone inside his own skull.
<And a good thing, too,> Walsharno agreed sardonically, following Bahzell’s thoughts. <There’s so much empty space in here you’d probably get lost without a roommate. Or possibly a little boy with a lantern to lead you about by the hand.>
“You just be keeping your comments to yourself,” Bahzell told him, and Walsharno snorted another laugh.
Bahzell laughed with him, despite the grim reality behind their departure from Warm Springs. He couldn’t help it as he tasted the stallion’s vibrant personality and strength and felt the way they fused with his own. He knew how desperate a struggle lay before them, yet he had never felt more magnificently alive, except perhaps, in a very different way, in those rare moments when a portion of Tomanak’s power and personality flowed through him. And with that sense of shared strength and power came the knowledge, the absolute certainty, that he would never face this danger—or any danger, any loss—alone again.
“So, you’re ready, Longshanks,” a familiar voice observed dryly as Walsharno carried him out of the stable yard.
Bahzell looked across at Brandark, whose warhorse looked oddly shrunken, almost toylike, from the Horse Stealer’s perch. Even he wasn’t accustomed to looking down at a warhorse.
“Aye, so I am, if you’re all still after being daft enough to be coming along,” he said, his eyes sweeping over the others assembled with Brandark.
“We are,” Kelthys said before Brandark could reply, speaking for himself and the fourteen wind riders who had arrived in Warm Springs over the last two days. Hurthang, Gharnal, and the other members of the Order didn’t bother with even that much. They only looked at Bahzell, waiting, and beyond them were the thirteen courser stallions who had accompanied Walsharno, Kelthys, and Walasfro to Warm Springs.
“Well then,” he said, and Walsharno turned without another word from him and headed away from Warm Springs along the track the Warm Springs herd had taken on its doomed journey north.
“I don’t suppose,” Brandark said, as his horse trotted along beside Walsharno, looking like a yearling frisking beside its sire, “that you’ve developed a more, ah, sophisticated campaign plan since you and I last talked?”