Chapter 18 Ambush

The birds stopped.

That was the first thing. We'd been in the Hollin Gap about an hour. It was a narrow road, like Rusk had said, cut down through a ridge of old forest, with banks either side higher than a man on a horse, and big grey beeches leaning in over the top so the light came down green. There'd been birds the whole way. Finches and some sort of jay and something that went tock, tock, tock up in the high branches.

Then they stopped. All of them at once.

You hear that on a farm and you know what it is. It's the chooks going quiet at four in the morning. It's something come up through the floor.

I stopped walking.

"Sergeant!" I called back. "Rusk!"

He'd heard it too. I saw his hand go up, and the column started to slow, and that was when the tree came down behind them.

* * *

It was a big beech, cut nearly through and pushed. It came down across the road behind the supply wagon with a crack like the sky splitting, and the mules screamed, and every horse in the column went up on its back legs at once. Then a second tree came down in front of me, about twenty paces ahead, and blocked the road that way too.

Then the bolts came.

They came at me first. I'd known they would, that was the job, but knowing a thing and having a dozen crossbow bolts come at you out of the trees at once are two different matters. They came from both banks, high up, and they came fast. Faster than Haines's lot. These weren't cheap crossbows.

I got my arm up and the warrant case round. Four bolts went into the case, thock thock thock thock, and pinned it to my back like a pincushion. I caught one going past my face. One went through Hal's coat at the shoulder and took a strip of skin with it. The rest went into the road round my feet, or past me, and hit nothing.

Then the second volley went into the column.

It wasn't aimed at me. It was aimed at the guards, and it hit them. I heard it. You don't forget the sound. A man screamed, and a horse screamed, and someone shouted orders, and then there were men coming down the banks on ropes, a lot of men, in grey and brown with cloths over their faces, with short swords and hooked axes.

These weren't bandits. They moved together. They knew what they were doing.

I unslung the cleaver.

* * *

The next part is hard to tell in order, because it didn't happen in order. It all happened at once.

Two of them came at me from the bank. I put the first one down and the second one's sword broke on the cleaver and he ran. Back down the road, the guards were fighting in a crush round the princess's mare, horses rearing, men falling. A light flared up on the far bank, orange and roaring, and a ball of fire as big as a cartwheel came down off it towards the princess.

It didn't reach her.

It hit something in the air above her, about the height of a man, and spread out flat over a curved shape I couldn't see, the way rain spreads on a window. Then I could see it. A dome of light, gold and green, over the princess and her mare and Miss Quill's wagon and three guards. The princess was standing in her stirrups with one hand up, flat, and her face white and fixed, and her lips moving.

The fire ran off the edges of the dome and set the road alight on either side. The dome held.

Under it, Miss Quill had pulled a guard down behind the wagon wheel by his collar, and was kneeling on his leg, and had both hands pressed hard on the side of his neck. There was blood all down her grey coat. She didn't look up.

Behind the felled beech at the back of the column, someone was roaring.

It was Brakka. Her lot had been a quarter of a mile back, singing, and now they weren't singing. I saw an axe the size of a cartwheel come up over the top of the beech trunk and come down, and the trunk split, and she came through the gap with her warband behind her, roaring, and hit the men on the north bank like a bull hits a hedge.

And Sir Gareth's stallion bolted.

I saw it go. It had been trying to get away from me since the palace yard, and now there was fire and blood and screaming, and it had had enough. It went sideways up the bank with Sir Gareth hauling on the reins, slipped, and came down on its side in the ditch with him under it.

Then I heard the chain.

* * *

It was up ahead, past the felled tree in front of me. A chain, being dragged. Then a growl that went through the ground and into my feet.

The thing that came over the felled beech was a dog.

That's what I thought, first. A dog. It had a dog's shape, a long jaw and pricked ears and a deep chest. It was the size of a haywain. Its hide was grey and bare, and there were plates of bone grown up through it along its spine, like the plates on a big rat but jagged. Its eyes were red. It had a heavy iron collar round its neck, and set into the front of the collar, glowing a dirty yellow, was a pretty rock.

It wasn't looking at me.

Readers can find the author's published chapter on the NovelPhoenix site; this copy was taken without permission and reading there supports the writer.

It came over the tree and down into the road and it went straight past me, wide, the way animals do, and it went for the dome. For the princess.

I don't remember deciding to run.

The column was fifty paces back. Rusk swore that night that I covered it before the dog did, and the dog had a head start of ten. I don't know about that. I just know that I got there. I came round the side of the dome as the dog hit it, and the dome flared bright gold and cracked across like ice on a puddle, and the princess cried out and nearly came off her mare. The dog drew back to hit it again.

I got in front of it.

It didn't rear, the way the rats do. It went low, the way a dog goes for a fox, head down and jaws open, coming in under. That's harder. There's no soft seam to show you. There's just a lot of teeth coming at your legs very fast.

So I did what you do with a dog that's going for your legs. I didn't step back. I stepped in, and put my left knee into its jaw to turn its head, and brought the cleaver down behind the collar, where the skull meets the neck, with everything I had.

It went through.

The dog's legs kept going for two more strides, and then folded. It slid along the road past me on its chest and stopped against the wagon wheel. The collar split. The pretty rock in the front of it went from yellow to grey, like a coal going out, and cracked down the middle.

It was very quiet after that.

* * *

The men in grey were running. All of them, up the banks and into the beeches, the way they'd come. The orange light on the far bank went out. Brakka chased them twenty yards into the trees, roaring, then came back carrying one of them under her arm like a sack of potatoes. She dropped him in the road and sat on him.

The dome over the princess flickered and went out. She sat down on her mare's neck, hard, with her face grey and her hands shaking, and stayed there.

I went to Miss Quill.

The guard she was kneeling on was young, maybe twenty. A bolt had gone through the side of his neck. She had her hands pressed on it and her face was set like stone, and she was talking to him the whole time in a low, steady voice, the way you'd talk to a frightened calf.

"Hold still. Hold still, Dannet. You're doing very well. Hold still."

"Let me," I said. I knelt and put my hands over hers. She took hers away. I knew how to do this. I've had a cow open her leg on wire, and the blood came the same way. You press and you don't stop pressing. I pressed. Miss Quill tore strips off her own petticoat with her teeth and handed them to me, and I packed the wound and bound it, and Dannet held still, and after a while the bleeding slowed.

He'd live. Probably.

Two others didn't. A guard called Mattock, who'd had a bolt in the chest in the first volley, and a lad called Feeney, who'd gone down under a horse. Rusk had a sword cut along his ribs and was sitting against the wagon wheel holding it together with both hands, swearing steadily and inventively in a low voice.

"Fucking Hollin Gap," he was saying. "Told them. Every fucking time. Fucking forest."

"You'll be right, Sergeant," I said, and went to look at his ribs.

* * *

I was still at Rusk's ribs when Sir Gareth came back.

He'd got out from under his horse. His white and gold armour was covered in mud down one side and there was a long scrape on his cheek. He'd lost his helmet. He came down the road with his sword drawn, past the guards, past the princess on her mare, and stopped beside the dead dog against the wagon wheel.

He looked at it. Then he looked round at the guards, the ones who were still standing, the ones who'd been fighting in the crush at the back while all of it happened. None of them had seen. They'd been busy.

He put his boot on the dog's shoulder. He drove his sword into its side, where there wasn't any blood yet, and pulled it out red.

"It is slain," he said, loud, to the whole road. "The beast is slain."

Some of the guards cheered. Not many. They were too tired.

Sir Gareth turned, and saw me kneeling by Rusk, and his eyes went narrow.

"The farmer," he said, to the guards, "had the good fortune to be knocked under the beast as I struck it. He's lucky he wasn't crushed." He looked straight at me. "Weren't you, farmer?"

I thought about it.

I'd been fifty paces off when the dog came over the tree. It had come in low, at my legs, and I'd got a knee in its jaw more by habit than anything else, the way you would with any dog. Then it had run onto the cleaver, really. It had been going for the princess, not for me. I'd just been in the way, with the blade in the right place, at the right angle. That's luck. You couldn't do that twice.

And Rusk was bleeding. And Dannet was lying in the road. And two men were dead.

"I suppose I was," I said.

I went back to Rusk's ribs.

Behind me, Miss Quill made a sound like a kettle. She stood up with her hands covered in blood to the wrists and her grey coat soaked, and she started towards Sir Gareth, and she'd got three steps before I caught her wrist.

"Leave it," I said.

She turned on me. Her eyes were wet and furious. "Leave it? He..."

"It's not worth it. Not today." I let go of her wrist. "There's men hurt. Help me with Rusk."

She looked at me for a long moment, breathing hard. Then she knelt down on the other side of Rusk and started tearing more petticoat, very savagely, without looking at anybody.

On her mare, at the edge of the road, the princess was sitting up again. She hadn't said anything. She was watching Sir Gareth, who was having his sword cleaned by a guard. Then she looked at the dead dog, and the cracked grey pretty rock in its collar. Then she looked at me.

She didn't look away for a long time.

* * *

The man Brakka had sat on died before anyone could ask him a question.

He'd had something in his mouth, in a hollow tooth. He bit down on it while Brakka was still sitting on him, and by the time she'd got off him he was blue. Brakka was furious. She stood over him and shouted at his body in her own tongue for a while.

The princess knelt and went through his clothes herself. No papers. No badge. Nothing to say who he was or who'd sent him. Only a purse on a cord round his neck, and in the purse, twenty gold crowns.

New ones. So new they still had the shine on them.

The princess held one up to the light, and turned it over, and looked at it for a while. Then she put it in her coat with the drawing she'd taken off the spy, and stood up, and said nothing at all.

* * *

We buried Mattock and Feeney at the mouth of the Gap, on a bit of high ground where you could see out over the grazing country to the east, towards the Greywild.

I dug the graves. There wasn't a proper spade, just the trenching tool off the supply wagon. It took a long time. Nobody offered to help and I didn't ask. It's a thing you do properly, digging a grave. My dad taught me that, when we buried Grandad. You dig it square and you dig it deep, and you don't hurry, because it's the last thing you'll do for them.

Brakka's warband stood round the edge, bareheaded, the whole time.

When it was done, the princess read their names. Mattock Tenney, of the Harrowgate Palace Guard. Robin Feeney, of the Harrowgate Palace Guard. She read their ages and their home towns. She'd got them from Rusk. She read a short prayer, then stopped, and stood there with the paper in her hand, and didn't read the rest of it.

"I'm sorry," she said to the graves. "This was my commission. I'm sorry."

Sir Gareth wasn't there. He was at the far end of the camp, by his tent, telling the story of the beast to the guards who'd listen.

I stood by the graves with the trenching tool in my hands and the red warrant case on my back, still full of bolts. I'd forgotten to take them out. There were four of them in it, and a hole through Hal's coat, and a long scrape on my shoulder that had stopped bleeding hours ago.

Fifty paces in front. That was the job.

I'd done the job. They'd come for the red case, like the princess said they would.

They'd come for it knowing exactly where it was.