She kicked the stool at him as she rolled under the bench and came up on the other side. He kicked it out of the way, slammed the door shut behind him, and dropped the bar; a few heartbeats later, the door shuddered as Gwena hit it with her hooves.
Now I wish this place wasn't quite so sturdy-The stranger turned with another knife in his hands. Gwena shrieked and renewed her attack on the door. He ignored the pounding and came straight for Elspeth.
With her lesson so fresh in her mind, she flung the first thing that came to hand at him-the half-cleaned doll's head. It didn't do any damage, but it made a hollow popping sound which distracted him enough so that she could get clear of the bench, get to where he'd kicked the stool, and snatch it up. Using it as a combination of shield and lance, she rushed him, trying to pin him against the abused door with the legs.
But the battering the stool had taken had weakened the legs too much to hold; his single blow broke the legs from the seat and left her holding a useless piece of flat board. Or almost useless; she threw it at his head, forcing him to duck, and giving her a chance to grab something else as Gwena's hooves hit the door again.
That "something else" proved to be one of her better pots, a lovely, graceful, two-handled vase. But she sacrificed it without a second thought, snatching it off the shelf and smashing it against the wall of the shed, leaving her with a razor-sharp shard. A knife-edge, with a handle to control it.
She took the initiative, as he started at the crash of shattering crockery, and threw herself at him.
He wasn't expecting that either, and she caught him completely off guard. He tried to grapple with her, and she let him, sacrificing her own mobility for one chance to get in with that bit of pottery in her right hand.
He grabbed her, but it was too late to stop her. Before he realized what she meant to do with that bit of crockery, she slashed it across his throat, cutting it from ear to ear, as Gwena's hooves hit the door and it shattered inward.
"Are you going to be all right?" Kerowyn asked, as she wiped Elspeth's forehead with a cold, damp cloth. Elspeth finally finished retching and licked her lips, tasting salt and bile, before she nodded shakily.
"I think so," she replied, closing her eyes and leaning back against the outer wall of the shed. The others had arrived to find her on her hands and knees in the grass, covered in blood-not her own-with Gwena standing over her protectively as she emptied her stomach into the bushes.
Her stomach still felt queasy, as if she might have another bout at any moment. No matter that she had seen death before-had even killed her share of the enemy in the last war with Hardorn-she'd taken down Lord Orthallen with her own two hands and one of Skif's throwing nives. that wasn't close, not this close. I was dropping arrows into people from a distance. I threw a knife from across the room. Not like this, where he bled all over me and looked up at me and Her stomach heaved again, and she quelled the thoughts. "Who was he?" she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to get her mind on something else. "How did he find out where I was?
And how did he get past the guards?"
"I don't know the answers to your second and third questions," Kero replied, as Elspeth closed her eyes and concentrated on the coolness against her forehead. "But I can tell you the answer to the first. There's a spider-web brand on his palm. He's one of the followers of the Cold God. They hire themselves out as assassins, and they're very expensive because they don't care if they get caught. He was either providing a legacy for a family, or doing penance for some terrible sin. If you hadn't killed him, he'd have killed himself." Kero dropped the cloth and sat back on her heels, and Elspeth opened her eyes and gaped at the older Herald, her nausea forgotten.
"I've never heard of anything like that!" she exclaimed.
Kero nodded. "Not too many people have; the Cold One's advocates come from farther south than anyone I know has been except Geyr. He's the one who told me about them, after the last try at your mother, and told me what to look for. Said that if Ancar really got desperate and knew how to contact them, he might try hiring one of the Cold Blades." She frowned. "I didn't take the threat seriously, and I should have-and believe me, it won't happen again. Frankly, you were lucky-they usually aren't that careless. And there is nothing, nothing, more dangerous than a suicidal fanatic."
"But-how did he get in here, in the gardens?" she asked, bewildered. "How could he? We have guards everywhere!" Kero frowned even harder. "If Geyr's to be believed, by m-m-m-mmagic," she said, forcing the word out around the compulsion that seemed to overtake all Heralds when discussing anything but the mental Gifts and the Truth-Spell. "There're m-mages among the Cold Ones that give them a kind of invisibility. My grandmother could do it-make people think that when they looked at her, they were actually seeing someone they knew and trusted and expected to be there. Works with the mind, like Mindspeech, but it's set up with a spell. Dangerous stuff-and now the guards are going to have to double-check everyone they think they know. There're going to be some unhappy folks, unless I miss my guess... " He either underestimated me, or he was inexperienced, she thought soberly, as Kero left her to talk quietly with some of the Guard who were dealing with the body. And-I don't think we're ever going to find out how Ancar found him because I have the funny feeling that he used magic.
She shivered and stood up, her knees shaking. Her Whites were ruinednot that she'd ever want to wear this set again. Magic again. Whatever had protected Valdemar in the past, it was not proof against Ancar anymore.
*Chapter Two DARKWIND
Darkwind k'sheyna balanced his bondbird Vree on his shoulder, and peered out across the sea of grass below him with a touch of-regret?
Envy? A little of both, perhaps. From where he stood, the earth dropped in a steep cliff more than a hundred man-lengths to the floor of the Dhorisha Plains-a formidable barrier to those who meant the Shin'a'in and their land any ill. It took knowledge and skill to find the paths down into the Plains, and from there, intruders were visible above the waisthigh grass for furlongs.
His bondbird lifted narrow, pointed wings a little in the warm, grassscented updraft that followed the cliff. "Prey," Vree's thought answered his own, framed in the simple terms of the bondbird's understanding.
Not so much a thought as a flood of images; tree-hares, mice, quail, rabbits, all of them from the viewpoint of the forestgyre as they would appear just before the talons struck.
Prey, indeed. Any would-be hunter attempting to penetrate the Plains without magic aid would find himself quickly turned hunted. The land itself would fight him; he would be visible to even a child, he would never guess the locations of seeps and springs, and without landmarks that he would understand, that intruder would become disoriented in the expanse of grass and gently rolling hills. The guardians of the Plains, and the scouts that patrolled the border, had half their work done for them by the Plains themselves.
Darkwind sighed and turned away, back to his own cool, silent forest.
No such help for him-other than the fact that the eastern edge of k'sheyna territory bordered the Plains. But to the south and west lay forest, league upon league of it, and all of it dangerous.