The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [176]
Berwynna saw him racing toward her through the grass, his sword in one hand. Behind him a rider was galloping, a Horsekin rider, swinging down with his deadly saber.
“Dougie, ’ware!” Berwynna yelled at the top of her lungs.
Dougie twisted around a moment too late—the saber swung down and caught him full in the back. He pitched forward, and the rider turned his horse and galloped off, heading toward the forest. Yet he never reached it. As he passed one of the few muleteers who was still standing, the man swung his quarterstaff with the full weight of his body behind it and cracked the horse across a foreleg. The horse went down, tumbling his rider into the road. The muleteer swung again and struck him on the side of the head.
Sobbing under her breath, Berwynna ran to Dougie and flung herself down beside him. He was already dead, his back split open, the spine broken, blood and flesh, so much blood, and a glimpse of shattered bone—Berwynna staggered to her feet to see Laz running toward her, holding a quarterstaff at a clumsy angle in both maimed hands. Out on the road, the battle was over. Men lay scattered across it, dead or dying, both Cerr Cawnen men and Horsekin. Wounded horses sprawled in the dirt or tried to get to their feet. A few hobbled mules huddled together.
Berwynna barely saw any of it. The sight of Dougie’s shattered body filled her mind and her eyes. She would see it forever, she knew, no matter how long she might live, at the merest thought or mention of him. It seemed horribly unjust, that all her memories of loving him would be stained forever by that sight. Laz glanced in the general direction of the body.
“Wynni!” Laz said. “For the sake of every god, come away!”
She nodded, let him grab her arm and lead her back toward the road. The survivors from the caravan and the rescuers, Laz’s men, she assumed, since he’d brought them, were trying to gather themselves and their wounded. Richt knelt in the dirt by Aethel’s body and wept. Two of the muleteers had tied the man who killed Dougie hand and foot; they dragged him along, then threw him down like a sack of offal.
Mic came running toward her, Kov’s staff in hand. “Thank the gods,” he kept saying, “thank the gods you’re safe.”
“But Dougie’s dead,” she said.
“I know. I saw. I thought you’d died with him.”
“I wish I had.”
“Don’t say that,” Mic’s voice shook badly. “Please don’t say that.”
“I won’t, then.”
Laz was giving crisp orders in the strange language that, she abruptly realized, had to be Horsekin. Only then, still stunned as she was by grief and fear, did it occur to her to wonder where Laz had come from. He just dropped out of the blue sky, she thought. And remembered the raven. She caught Laz’s arm as he walked by.
“That was you,” she stammered. “The raven, I mean. That was you.”
“You are clever, aren’t you?” Laz gave her a lopsided grin. “No time to talk now, alas. We’ve got to get ourselves out of here. If those bastard swine return—”
He let the sentence hang there.
“True enough,” Mic said. “Let me see if I can get Richt back on his feet.”
“We can’t leave Dougie here,” Berwynna said. “We’ve got to bury him properly.”
“We will.” Laz turned and looked out toward the meadow. “Faharn took a couple of the men out to fetch him. We’ll bury our own dead and leave the others here for my compatriots.”
She stared, puzzled.
“The ravens,” Laz said. “You’re in shock, Wynni. You’ll be able to think again in a bit. Mic, do you know who these men were? Gel da’Thae cavalry, that’s who. Those tattoos are their regimental numbers and notice: they’re wearing identical shirts, all cavalry issue. Not that it matters to our dead, I suppose, but bandits they weren’t. This bodes more than a little ill.”
“True spoken,” Mic said. “Bandits would keep running. Cavalrymen won’t.”
Laz hurried off. Numbly Berwynna turned toward the meadow and saw a pair of men approaching, carrying someone wrapped in a blanket. A third man was leading a Gel da’Thae horse, unharmed except for a scratch along its neck. While she watched, they slung Dougie’s body