Chapter 33 #2
Astryx snapped into motion, discarding the mantle of her fatigue. Nigel’s steel whipped in a flashing arc, and the verdigaunt howled as a line of black blood appeared along its thigh. The greenlings might not have been mortal, but this beast certainly was.
Mouth yawning and breath smoking, the antlered beast swiped at the elf with one arm, and she narrowly evaded by falling to a knee. Its bony fingertips dug a trench in the earth. The Oathmaiden caught the underside of its arm with a shallow slice as she rolled inside of its reach.
“What do we do?” said Fern, seized by a mad impulse to run toward the battle.
“I don’t think a torch is gonna help this time,” replied Breadlee.
The verdigaunt dropped its hands to the road and charged on all fours, the wicked tines of its antlers advancing like a phalanx of spear points.
The bottommost points carved squiggling furrows in the road.
Astryx lunged to the side, but not fast enough.
One outer spike caught her in the right shoulder and spun her off-balance.
She did not cry out, but Fern thought she saw a fringe of blood cast into the night from the impact, and she clapped both paws to her mouth.
The creature sensed the strike and dug its digits and hooves into the earth, skidding to a stop and wrenching its head, still held low, in her direction.
Astryx tossed Nigel to her left hand and continued the motion into a vertical spin of the blade that lopped the ends off half the verdigaunt’s antlers. The tines spun away into the darkness like severed fingers, trailing ribbons of dark fluid.
It bellowed, bunching its shoulders to lunge again, but the Blademistress dashed forward, sprinting up its lowered skull, between the tangled thorns that flanked it, and onto its back where she brought her blade up in both hands, point downward, and drove it between the verdigaunt’s shoulder blades.
With a reverberant roar it threw itself upright. Astryx crouched to maintain her footing, both hands still on the blade, but her eyes flew wide as her fingers slipped from his hilt and she was hurled away.
As the Oathmaiden hit the dirt and rolled, Nigel remained buried in the verdigaunt’s back. It bayed with pain, flailing its blunt-fingered hands at its shoulders, trying to reach the steel planted next to its spine, and shifting its prodigious weight from hoof to hoof.
Astryx moaned, pushing herself to her feet with her hand once more at her side.
Fern reached her in seconds. “Come on, come on, you’ve got to get back!” she cried, putting her shoulder under Astryx’s unwounded one. Fern could see a dark stain leaching through her jerkin where the verdigaunt’s antler had caught the elf.
“You shouldn’t be here,” grunted Astryx. Then she hauled herself the rest of the way to her feet, blowing out a pained breath at the end.
“Neither should you!” retorted Fern, glancing up at where Nigel still stood in the back of the flailing monster.
Then, a flash of patchwork color in the torchlight.
Zyll scurried out of the darkness, leapt, and caught her fists in the shaggy hair of the verdigaunt’s back.
Astryx and Fern stared agog as the goblin scrambled up to the Elder Blade. The beast seemed not to perceive her.
At least, until Zyll flung herself into the air, snatching hold of Nigel’s grip as she went. Her weight and momentum dragged him free with an awful tearing sound, and then the blade cartwheeled over her head as she released him at the forward point of his spin.
Nigel whickered through the air, shedding black blood, until he thudded, point-first, into the ground.
Zyll disappeared once again into the darkness.
The verdigaunt cast about, bewildered and huffing in pain.
Astryx pushed off of Fern’s shoulders and ran, curving her path past Nigel’s still wobbling length. Without stopping, she jerked him from the ground and veered toward the towering beast.
It noticed her at the last, snarling and lowering its head again.
The Oathmaiden screamed, raw and ragged, and drove Nigel like a spear directly into the center of its skull.
Her momentum carried through and she slammed into its head with one shoulder, bounced back, and tumbled to the roadway as, with an awful groan, the verdigaunt dropped like a wagonload of boulders.
“Take this, Oathmaiden,” said Finny, pressing a cup of something hot and fragrantly nasty into Astryx’s hands.
“Oh, leave off, woman. That mend-all of yours is like to kill her as soon as cure her,” groused Booth.
Astryx accepted it anyway, bemused and ensconced in a wooden chair draped with what seemed like every blanket the villagers could find.
Her shoulder had been thoroughly bandaged and Nigel leaned, unsheathed, against the arm of her chair.
The old woman in the raggedy dress fretted over a pair of cushions which she kept trying to jam behind the elf’s back.
The Elder Blade tutted in annoyance every time she bumped into him.
They had parked the Oathmaiden before the hearth, now loaded with logs that burned cheerfully.
Fern thought that while the elf looked rightfully exhausted—her cheeks and neck still smudged with soot, hair a messy tangle—there was something in her expression she hadn’t seen before.
Her quiet, steely reserve had been replaced by something simpler and more open.
The tired smile on her face was disarmingly genuine.
That is, until she took a sip of whatever it was that Finny had prepared, at which point her mouth twitched in disgusted surprise.
From her own, less-padded chair nearby, clutching a mug of hot, watery wine, Fern couldn’t help but note how thoroughly the tavern had been transformed.
With the windows unboarded, the fire roaring, and lanterns and candles scattered throughout, it was downright cheerful when compared to the dour, hopeless ruin it had seemed earlier in the day.
The tables had been drawn back from the walls, and the chairs and stools replaced in a semblance of order. The goats were also now outside, and the floor had been swept, which improved the smell tremendously.
Staysha chattered animatedly with the three gnome sisters, while Booth fussed with a round of cheese, summer preserves, and cured meat that he’d retrieved from one of the other buildings.
He was determined to assemble something resembling a feast, even if they didn’t really have the stores to support it after the past weeks of privation.
The stone-fey couple sat quietly and watchfully with their daughter.
The man and woman looked just as gaunt and underfed as before but, every once in a while, evinced the ghost of a smile.
Their daughter stared with open wonder at Zyll, who was parked in a corner murmuring to a bunch of forks she had appropriated from somewhere.
Nobody seemed inclined to ask for them to be returned.
The bustle and noise continued, and Fern sipped her wine dreamily. Every muscle in her body ached, and all she’d done was dash around and throw things. She couldn’t imagine how Astryx must feel. Still, those aches were sublimating into something like peace.
Finny cleared her throat, raising her hands for silence. She stared around the room, or appeared to. Her eyes never really seemed to open behind her cracked spectacles. The silver knitting needles in her bun flashed in the firelight.
“Oathmaiden,” she addressed Astryx, with great solemnity. “We owe ya a great debt. Can’t pay it, leastwise because we sent all that silver with Lem, Eight rest him, but t’wouldn’t be enough even if we had it.”
Astryx listened, but didn’t speak. Which was all right, because Finny wasn’t done, anyway.
“Our lives are little things in the Territory,” she continued in her reedy, wavering voice.
“We know that. But you’ve made us feel a touch bigger.
Didn’t have to stop for us. Didn’t have to bleed for us.
We thank ya, and though these words feel as little as we are, we’ll remember ya.
And we hope that knowin’ it makes ya feel a touch bigger, too. ”
Astryx went to drink from the cup again, to give herself time to marshal a response, but thought better of it at the last moment. Fern saw her struggling and realized that this was territory the elf was uncomfortable with.
She never sticks around for this part, it dawned on her.
“I . . . Thank you for the kind words, mother,” said Astryx, despite the fact that she was the old woman’s senior by centuries upon centuries.
Then she looked from one face to the next, appearing to mark them in some way.
Fern thought the elf’s eyes were shining with something other than lamp-glow, but couldn’t be positive.
Finny approached and patted Fern on the shoulder, whispering, “You picked a good’un to squire for.”
Then Fern was lost for words, too.
Staysha wasn’t, though. The dwarf stepped away from the gnome sisters, already slinging her lute over her shoulder as Booth laid out a meager spread on the table beside her.
“I knew I chose the right star to follow,” said the Silver Sparrow. She grinned brightly at all of them. “What’s a celebration without music, eh? Hearing about great deeds is all well and good, but seeing them? Well, the words have never come easier.”
“Oh, geez,” muttered Breadlee.
“Hear, hear!” cried Nigel.
Then Staysha burst into song, strumming up a storm, while Astryx did her best to disappear into all the blankets.
“Oathmaiden, Oathmaiden, silver and true,
Forged in the shadow and—”
The bard broke off with a discordant chord as the door banged open, and all eyes turned to the man framed within it.
He was strong-chinned and clean-shaven, hair cropped close. He wore stained quilted armor, with a shortsword belted at his waist and a white ferret curled around his neck. The creature regarded them all with beady eyes.
“That’s a dead verdigaunt,” said the man, eyes wide as he cocked a thumb at the road behind him. “I’m Haber. Sorry we’re late, but we—”
He started, and his mouth flattened into a suspicious line. “Staysha?”
Fern glanced back to the dwarf, who laughed nervously and seemed to want to hide behind her lute. “Oh. Um. Hi?”