The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [111]
Nearby, the king saw another familiar knight. The Earl of Fairheight, wielding his huge, two-handed sword with deadly precision, stood between two large oaks, anchoring a good portion of the line. The sister knight of Synnoria fought at his side, making certain two razors of sharp steel met any firbolg or troll foolish enough to try to press through.
Finellen moved back and forth along the line of battle, at times lunging forward to help out one of her hard-pressed countrymen, or else carrying flaming brands of dry timber to stack on the temporarily slain corpses of the trolls.
"Need some fire here?" grunted the stalwart dwarfwoman as Tristan carved a deep wound into the leg of a troll, crippling the beast. The monster dropped like a felled tree, scuttling crablike away from the fight.
Gasping for breath, the king shook his head. Already half a dozen troll corpses lay motionless around him, and in the lull, Tristan grinned at Finellen's look of astonishment.
"Good sword," was all she said as the High King raised the weapon to face another push, this time three trolls rushing him together.
Fortunately the tangle of trees kept two of them from coming fully to bear, and the third one danced quickly backward to avoid a thrust from Trollcleaver. As one of the others darted in, Tristan's blade chopped into the beast's arm and Finellen's axe carved a deep wound into its thigh. The monster fell, and Tristan stabbed it once in the skull, driving the tip of his blade deep into the fetid brain; the creature wouldn't menace them further. Ranthal, meanwhile, held the third troll safely at bay.
"Nice work," grunted the dwarfwoman as the ebb and flow of battle momentarily gave the pair a berth of space.
But then came a deeper sound, a growing roar of hoarse triumph from firbolg throats. At the same time, dwarven voices hollered in alarm. The scene of the commotion was perhaps twenty or thirty paces to their right, though the humans could see nothing in that direction because of the screening forest.
Finellen, however, didn't need to see in order understand the significance of the alarm.
"That's bad news," she said, starting toward the noise at a jog. "It means that the giants have breached the line!"
* * * * *
The sounds of fighting came to Brandon and Koll through the trees, and their ragged force of northmen and Ffolk broke into a jog, quickly emerging from the forest into a field of trampled grain. Across the broad expanse, they saw the source of the noise-a seething chaos of bloody melee, where the army of the trolls and firbolgs attacked some foe concealed in the woods across the field. The backs of the humanoids faced Brandon and Koll's men, and that was all the incentive that the two veteran warriors required.
"It's them-the trolls, I mean!" barked Knaff the Elder, pacing at his prince's side. "But who are they fighting?"
"Whoever it is, they can use our help!" Koll barked.
"Charge!" the two captains bellowed in unison, and the men who had been driven from the battlefield of Codscove loped steadily into the field. Voices rose in lusty courage, and many an axe and sword blade gleamed in the midday sun as its wielder brandished his weapon overhead.
To an onlooker who purported neutrality, their onslaught seemed like madness. Though they couldn't know what force they aided, their own numbers equaled but a fraction of the foe's. Yet their defeat on the field at Codscove had branded all of these men with a burning desire for vengeance.
As the humans sprinted and shouted and jeered, dozens of trolls broke from the mass of the attackers, drawn by the sounds of the fresh attack. Many firbolgs, too, hoisted their clubs toward the new threat, lumbering at the heels of their green-skinned comrades.
Loping back into the field with their deceptively speedy gait, the trolls met the men of Brandon and Koll's force with savage tooth and rending claw. The human