11. Blood Ties #3
Maise hit the flanker on the left before he could circle behind me. Her bandaged fists were forgotten as she drove a knee into his groin and followed with an elbow to the temple. He went down in a heap. She was already moving toward the next target, that hungry light burning in her eyes.
Perrin screamed from somewhere in the darkness, a high wordless shriek that sounded like a dying animal.
Then he screamed again from a completely different direction, and one of Torvald’s boys spun in confusion, trying to track a threat that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Grit appeared behind that one and opened his throat with a single clean strike.
Blood sprayed black in the moonlight. The boy clutched at his neck, trying to hold the pieces together, and sat down heavily in the leaves. Four left now. Torvald and his remaining crew, one already down from Maise and starting to stir groggily in the underbrush.
“Kill them,” Torvald bellowed. “Kill all of them!”
He came at me again, cudgel swinging in wide arcs that forced me to keep my distance.
I was faster, more precise. But he had reach and weight.
I could feel my arms weakening with every parry.
This body wasn’t built for prolonged combat, and four years of training in seven-year-old muscles didn’t measure up to fourteen years of growth and brutality.
I needed to end this quickly, or I wasn’t going to end it at all.
He swung overhead, committed too hard. I saw the opening. Instead of dodging back, I stepped forward, inside his reach, where the cudgel couldn’t build momentum. My shoulder drove into his chest as my blade came up toward his throat.
His free hand caught my wrist, stopping the blade inches from his neck.
His forehead came down on the bridge of my nose with a crack that sounded like breaking ice.
Light exploded behind my eyes. Blood filled my mouth.
I staggered backward, sword arm pinned, unable to breathe through the ruin of my nose.
His boot caught me in the stomach before I could recover.
I hit the ground hard, all the air driven from my lungs, and his cudgel came down on my sword hand with a sound like snapping kindling.
The blade tumbled from fingers that wouldn’t close anymore, and pain whited out everything except the knowledge that I needed to move or I was going to die.
I rolled sideways as his next strike hammered into the earth where my head had been. Dirt and leaves sprayed across my face. I kept rolling, creating distance, trying to get my feet under me despite the agony in my hand and the ringing in my skull.
“Stay down,” Torvald panted, advancing. His thigh wound was bleeding freely now, dark stains spreading down his leg, but he barely seemed to notice. “Just stay down and I’ll make it quick.”
“Not how I’m built.”
I found a rock with my good hand. Not big enough to kill, but heavy enough to matter.
When he swung again, I threw it at his face.
He flinched, just a moment, just long enough.
My boot caught him behind the knee of his wounded leg, and he went down with a grunt.
I was on top of him before he could recover, fingers scrabbling for his eyes, teeth snapping at any exposed flesh I could reach.
No technique now. No training. Just the desperate animal violence of someone who refused to stop breathing.
He threw me off like I weighed nothing, which to him I probably did. I hit the fallen oak hard enough to crack wood, and I felt ribs shift from bruised to broken.
The cudgel caught me across the back as I tried to rise. Down again. Across the shoulders. Down again. Across the legs. Down.
“Should. Have. Stayed. In. Your. Crib.” Each word punctuated by another blow, each blow landing harder than the last. My left arm wouldn’t move anymore, my legs wouldn’t cooperate, and blood dripped from somewhere above my eyes, turning the world red and dark .
I reached for my sword with my broken hand, knowing I couldn’t grip it, knowing it didn’t matter, knowing that I needed to die with steel in my fingers or I’d learned nothing from the life I lived before.
The blade lay inches from my outstretched hand.
I dragged myself toward it, even as his boot pressed down on my back.
Torvald laughed, a breathless sound that had nothing to do with humor.
“Still fighting. Gods damn you, you’re still fighting.” He kicked the sword away, sending it into the darkness. “Fine. We’ll do this the hard way.”
He grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me upright. The pain was so vast and all-encompassing that I barely felt it anymore. I was going to die here, and I’d accepted that. But I was going to cost him something first.
I bit down on his wrist hard enough to feel bone.
He screamed and dropped me, blood flowing from the crescent of my teeth marks, and I used the moment to drive my head into his groin.
Ugly, desperate, and exactly the kind of fighting that Rulfen would beat me for in the training yard.
But it worked. Torvald doubled over, gagging, and I got my legs under me despite everything telling me to just lie down and die.
Torvald and one other were still standing. The one Maise dropped was crawling away toward the treeline, no longer interested in the fight. The one Grit cut was making small wet sounds in the leaves, unable to talk.
The two survivors looked at each other. Looked at me, swaying on my feet with blood sheeting down my face and one arm hanging useless at my side.
Looked at Maise, who’d taken down another one somewhere in the chaos and stood with her back against a tree, knife in her bleeding hand, grinning with the wild abandon of someone who’d forgotten how to stop.
And Grit, who’d simply appeared among them without anyone seeing him move, his blade dripping with the lives of two boys who thought they were the hunters.
“We didn’t sign up for this,” the last one standing said.
“Shut up and help me,” Torvald snarled, straightening despite the damage. “There’s four of them and we can still—”
“There’s only two of you mobile,” I corrected him, and my voice sounded wrong, thick with blood. “There’s going to be fewer if you don’t walk away right now.”
“You can barely stand.”
“I can stand long enough.” I met his eyes and let him see what lived behind mine.
The mercenary who led the Wolves for twenty years.
The man who died with a blade in his hand and a curse on his lips.
The soul that crossed the River of the Dead and bargained with gods for another chance. “The question is whether you can.”
For a long moment, nobody moved.
Then the last boy standing broke, turned, and ran, crashing through the underbrush toward the estate. His companion rose from the ground and followed a heartbeat later. Their footsteps faded into the darkness, leaving only the sound of labored breathing and the quiet moans of the dying.
Torvald stared at me with something that sat close to hatred, or maybe respect. His face was pale from blood loss, and his wounded leg was shaking, barely able to support his weight. We were both wrecked, both moments from collapse .
“This isn’t over,” he said.
“It’s over when one of us stops breathing.”
He nodded slowly, as if I’d confirmed something he already knew. Then he raised his cudgel one last time, gathering whatever strength he had left for a final charge.
And Maise’s knife took him through the throat.
Torvald’s eyes went wide. He reached for the blade jutting from his neck, blood pumping between his fingers in thick red gouts, and then he toppled sideways. The cudgel tumbled from his grip, landing in the leaves beside his head.
Maise stood behind where he’d been, breathing hard, her bandaged hands empty and dripping red that wasn’t all hers. “Told you I wasn’t sitting this out.”
The remaining boys realized what had just happened and scattered.
I used the moment to retrieve my sword and get my feet under me, despite the screaming of my broken ribs.
Torvald dead. Cren dead. Another dead by Maise, the one she’d caught during the chaos.
The one Grit cut was crawling away toward the treeline with his hand pressed to the ruin of his neck.
Grit stepped out of the darkness behind the crawling boy and put him down with a clean thrust through the base of the skull. Quick, quiet, merciful in its way.
The remaining survivors looked at each other, then at us, then at the bodies bleeding into the forest floor.
They ran a little faster, and I let them.
“They’ll talk,” Maise said. “Tell everyone what happened.”
“Good.” I spat blood into the leaves, watching the survivors crash through the underbrush toward the distant lights of the estate. “Let them tell everyone. Let them explain how six of them came to kill one bastard and half of them didn’t come back at all.”
Perrin came out from behind a tree, his face pale in the moonlight.
“That was a lot of blood.”
“Going to be more if we don’t move.” I tried to take a step and nearly fell, my legs refusing to cooperate with the commands my brain was sending. Maise caught me before I hit the ground, her arm around my waist, and Grit appeared on my other side to take some of my weight.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Going to have to.”
We left the bodies where they lay. The instructors would find them tomorrow, or the crows would find them first. Either way, there was nothing we could do for the dead that wouldn’t make things worse for the living.
The forest swallowed us as we limped toward the marker stone, because the exercise wasn’t over and we still had a finish line to cross.
◇ ◆ ◇
Henrik de Blaise stood in the darkness of his private balcony, watching the forest with eyes that saw further than any natural vision should allow.