Chapter Seventeen #2
grabbed a stick. “Tracking the wildcat, T,” he scrawled in the dirt
beneath the wagon. Those who needed to would know what it
meant.
***
Lara
Lara, Gaea, and Wolf stood panting at
the edge of a meadow over three leagues up the mountain. The sun
approached the western peak, and Lara figured if they made the
meadow’s far side before Lothair, Fulrad, and their other two
riders chasing them caught up, they could disappear into the woods
and make good time and distance in the dark of night. They were
only half a day’s ride from the Hollow, and the woods grew denser,
the paths nothing more than game trails on the other side of this
meadow. With the cover of night, she was fairly certain she could
lose them by doubling back in circles and covering her
tracks.
“Come on, girl.” She
patted Gaea’s lathered neck. “One last run across the meadow, and
then we’ll disappear into the woods, and you can walk the rest of
the way.”
They reached halfway across the open
meadow when the first arrow whizzed by Lara’s head. She hunkered
low over Gaea’s neck, biting her lip to keep from crying out as
another arrow barely missed Wolf. Glancing over her shoulder, she
saw the riders advancing, two of them notching arrows to their
bows.
An arrow whistled overhead and sunk
into the earth in front of Gaea, who shied to the right. Lara
clasped her thighs tighter around the mare’s heaving belly and
leaned them both to the left, the right, and the left again.
Another screaming whistle, and Lara felt a searing pain as an arrow
grazed her right shoulder. She cried out without meaning to and
jubilant shouts came off the men. Another cry, loud, fierce, and
fearsome, rent the air. Lara looked over her shoulder as the Black
came crashing out of the woods to her back, Talon standing in his
stirrups, holding his longsword high.
“Ride, Lara,” he yelled as
the men swung their horses around to meet him. “Ride.”
“Get the witch,” Lothair
shouted, and Fulrad headed straight for her. “We’ll take
Guiscard.”
Lara glanced at the woods she’d been
riding for. She had a good chance of disappearing into them before
Fulrad caught up to her, but she couldn’t leave Talon to fight this
battle alone. She wouldn’t. Drawing her waist knife, she swung Gaea
around and rode straight for Fulrad with a feral snarl.
Fulrad raised his short sword, and
Lara grinned like a crazy woman, thinking it was a good thing she’d
destroyed his knee, else he’d be wielding a longsword. Gripping her
knife tight, she hunkered over Gaea’s withers, intending to leap
from the mare’s back onto Fulrad and knock him off his horse—when
Wolf surged ahead and grabbed Fulrad by the calf of his leg and
pulled him off his saddle and onto the ground. Lara never slowed or
looked back as the screams ended. She kept riding for Talon as Wolf
finished what he’d started in the keep’s stables.
She rode past one man lying on the
ground, his arm severed from his shoulder, as another man, sword
drawn, circled Talon. The arrow sticking out of Talon’s thigh
almost had her stilling. But then Lothair sat his horse twenty
paces from the fight, setting an arrow to his bow, and Lara pressed
Gaea forward, willing her breath into the exhausted mare as the
Black charged the other horse chest first, sending it stumbling
back. Talon stood in his stirrups, and holding his sword with both
hands, clove the man’s head from his shoulders.
Lothair let his arrow fly.
“Talon.”
Her warning was too late. The arrow
hit Talon in the belly and jerked him back in his saddle. He
grabbed at his side, and Lara’s scream stuck in her throat as he
slumped forward over the Black’s neck, looked over at Lara, then
slid sideways off his saddle and fell to the ground.
“No,” Lara cried as Lothair set another arrow to his bow.
“Please God, no.”
“Praying to God won’t
help.” Lothair pointed an arrow at her. “Your man is dead, and soon
you will be too.”
“Then you had better shoot
true, you spineless bastard.” Lara hunkered down over Gaea’s neck
as they thundered toward him. “Because if you miss me, I will kill
you.”
Lara rode straight for him as Lothair
took his time aiming, sure of himself, grinning with anticipation,
but he hadn’t anticipated Wolf, who was no more than ten paces from
him when he saw the hound and shot, too quick and too wide. With no
time to set another arrow, he jerked his horse’s head around and
made for the woods with Wolf snapping at his boots.
Once she’d jumped off Gaea, Lara ran
to Talon and kneeled by his head. Blood pooled the ground from his
wounds, and his eyes were half-open slits of gray. A keening moan
rose from somewhere so deep inside Lara, she thought she’d never
draw breath again as the nightmare plaguing her for months came to
be.
“No. Not you. Please God, not you.” She cradled Talon’s head,
rocking back and forth on her knees. “Please don’t leave me.
Please, please don’t leave me. Not like this.”
“Not a chance.” His voice
a rasp, his eyes fluttered open and focused on her. “I thought… I
told you…you to ride.”
“I thought they’d killed
you.”
Talon tried to smile but grimaced.
“They damn near have.”
“No.” Lara had seen him
fall. She’d seen him lying in a pool of his own blood, just as
she’d seen him in her dreams. But unlike in her dreams, he was
still alive. “They’ve not killed you yet, and will not. Not as long
as I’ve anything to do with it.”
“I’m all yours.” Talon
coughed and his eyes rolled back as his lids shuttered.
Lara sucked her breath in, held it,
then let it out in a rush when his chest finally rose and fell,
slow and shallow—but he was breathing. A loud whinny from the
wood’s edge sent her scrambling for Talon’s longsword, and she
stood with it gripped firmly in both hands as Lothair’s riderless
gray came crashing into the meadow, Wolf snapping at its hocks.
Lara gave a short, sharp whistle, and Wolf came loping over, his
tongue lolling out of his bloody muzzle. He sniffed at Talon, then
looked up at Lara.
“Right,” she said, looking
around. The sun touched the mountain’s western peak: it would be
dark soon. “First things first.”
After making sure Talon was still
breathing, she approached the Black with her hand out and told him
what she was doing as she stripped him of his saddle and blanket.
She covered Talon with the blanket and searched his saddlebags,
where his flint, an extra tunic, and a vial of love potion brushed
her fingertips. Whether it was the vial Sophie had given him or one
of the sister’s, she neither knew nor cared.
Sending prayers out to her Tante, to
God, to the setting sun and the rising moon, she cut and tore the
tunic into strips and packed them around the shafts of both arrows.
The bleeding from his thigh had slowed to a seep, but he still bled
copiously around the arrow in his right side: dark blood, liver
blood.
She stood and glanced around the
meadow again. Four horses, including Fulrad’s bay and Lothair’s
gray, gathered together near Gaea and the Black, forming their own
little herd in the growing dark now their dead masters’ bodies lay
strewn across the meadow. She stripped the closest man’s body of
his tunic, waist knife, and short sword, then dragged him into the
woods, where she gathered kindling and small logs, laid them in a
pile next to Talon, and repeated her motions with the second man
and then Fulrad, adding their tunics, short swords, and one
longsword to her growing stockpile. She eyed the horses’ gear and
removed a skin of wine from a sorrel gelding’s saddle.
She had a good fire going by the time
the sky had turned from dusk to night, and a nice pile of tunics
cut into strips and squares.
Pushing with all her might, she rolled
Talon onto his left side, placing his saddle blanket over his chest
and shoulders. She removed the bloody packing from around the
arrows’ entry points, took a big swig of the wine, then poured some
over his wounds, worried that he hadn’t so much as stirred during
her ministrations. She laid her knife in the fire, grabbed the
shaft of the arrow in his thigh with both hands, and started to
pull. Talon shot his hand out and grabbed her wrist with a viselike
grip. His eyes were open and staring at hers. Recognition filled
them, and he loosened his grip.
“I have to pull the arrows
out,” she told him, her voice shaking almost as much as her hands.
“Then I have to cauterize the wounds.”
He dropped his grip from her wrist,
licked his chapped lips, then nodded. “Do it.”
Lara’s lips felt as parched as Talon’s
looked as she pulled the vial of love potion from her pocket.
“Here.” She held the vial to his lips. “Drink this.”
“Are you offering me a
love potion?” His grin was even more lopsided than usual but ended
with a grimace.
“Just drink it,” she
commanded, and he obeyed, drinking all but a last
swallow.
“Now you,” he said,
raising Lara’s brows. “You know it was meant for you, my beautiful,
thorny wildcat.”
He gave her another lopsided grin as
she swallowed the last of the potion, then she wiped his brow and
hers, flipped the blade in the fire, propped his calf up on the
saddle, and used Fulrad’s knife to cut a slit in his legging around
the arrow.
“Ready?” she said. He
grunted, and she gripped the shaft of the arrow with both hands and
pulled with all her strength. Talon’s body stiffened, and she
thought his teeth might crack he clamped his jaw so tight. She
continued to pull, slow and steady, until the arrow came out with a
sucking sound. She gave the shaft and arrowhead a once-over to make
sure it was intact, that no bits had broken off inside Talon, and
then laid it on the ground, careful not to touch the arrow’s head.
Lothair was known to dip his in poisons or dung, bragging that if
his arrows didn’t kill a man right off, they would eventually from
infection, a thing she wouldn’t mention to Talon. Fresh blood
flowed from the hole in his leg, and Lara let it. “You’re lucky,”
she told Talon. “The arrow missed your bone and
arteries.”
“Somehow…I don’t feel…so
lucky.” His face had gone from pale to ashen, and they hadn’t even
gotten to the worst of it.