Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey [210]
"Harald." My hand was trembling, holding the dagger so near his vitals, hidden behind the shield bound so awkwardly to my left arm. Pinned against him, I could feel his warmth. He had given me the fur cloak I still wore and been the first to sing songs about me. My vision was blurred with tears. "Let me go, or I swear I will kill you."
Intent on the battle, he shouted a warning to the last mounted Skaldi, who narrowly avoided having his horse hamstrung by Joscelin. It was a measure of our desperate straits, that he would attempt such a thing.
As was what I did.
"Forgive me," I whispered, and pushed the dagger into Harald with all my strength.
I do not think, at first, he knew what had happened; his eyes widened, and his arms fell away from me. He looked down, then, and saw between us what the shield had hidden. With a gasping sob, I forced the dagger upward toward his heart and let go the hilt. Harald took a step backward and looked up at me, his eyes quizzical as a boy's. What have you done? they seemed to ask of me. What have you done?
I gave no answer, and he crumpled to the ground and lay unmoving.
The last Skaldi rider saw, and gave a cry. Turning away from Joscelin, he spurred his horse toward me, looming through the snow. With nowhere to run, I waited, dumb and silent. In the distance, Joscelin dispatched the lone unmounted warrior and raced for a horse, any horse.
In dreams, things happen slowly. It was like that still, this unending frozen nightmare. I could see the Skaldi's face, distorted with rage, shouting curses I couldn't make out in the rising wind. Selig wanted me alive, Harald had said; I could guess his second choice. He would take me dead. At twenty yards, I saw the Skaldi cock his arm, spear at the ready. At fifteen, he cast it.
I closed my eyes and lifted Trygve's buckler.
The impact jarred my arm to the bone, knocking me off my feet. Opening my eyes, I saw him above me, blotting out the winter sky atop his horse. Still strapped to my arm, the shield was useless, cracked beneath the force of the blow, the lethal, leaf-shaped tip of the spear gone clean through to the inside.
If he had had a second spear, I would have died then. I know this. But what spears he'd had, he had already cast. He dismounted and drew his sword.
"No!" Joscelin's shout split the air, and the Skaldi turned, hesitating at the now-mounted Cassiline's approach. I struggled to free myself from the useless shield, scrambling backward through the snow. Face grim, Joscelin lashed his borrowed horse forward, nigh on us.
Too hard, too fast. The horse stumbled, slid, losing its footing; it went down hard, head low, the mighty body crashing to the snow-covered earth. Sword in hand, Joscelin was flung free and fell no less hard, some distance from the thrashing horse.
The Skaldi looked back at me and grinned, the fierce, savage grin of a warrior with nothing left to lose. "You first," he said, and raised his sword high above his head, preparing to bring it down two-handed upon me.
"Elua," I whispered, and prepared to die.
The blade never fell.
It slipped, instead, falling away from his nerveless fingers to fall with a soft thump into the snow. The Skaldi stared down at himself, where the bloody tip and a handspan of Joscelin's sword protruded. No one, I think, fails to be surprised at the death-blow when it comes in battle. He turned about slowly, his hands going to the blade's tip. I saw the hilt and the rest of the blade standing out from between his shoulders. Joscelm was still down, propped on one arm; he'd thrown it from where he'd fallen. The Skaldi stared at him in disbelief, sinking slowly to his knees. Still clutching the tip of the sword lodged in him, he died.
It was quiet then, but for the wind and snow. Joscelin got painfully to his feet and came toward me, staggering. I saw when he drew near that he had a cut on one cheekbone, already frozen, and runnels of blood in his hair. He turned the