Sasha (72 page)

He staggered slowly, agonisingly, to his feet. The mail seemed impossibly heavy and his right shoulder guard was slashed in two. He could feel the bruise on his shoulder beneath. How the hells was he still alive? Far off toward the valley was a huge mass of riders, a dark and silver line against the fading gold of the fields. Behind them were scattered many stragglers, picking amongst the fields. If Sasha had lost, Jaryd realised, the armies would be south instead, toward Ymoth. They must have won.

Dark shapes littered the torn and mangled fields. Dead men, and the occasional horse. He staggered around the dead horse, but could not find its rider. Another dead man lay near, a Falcon Guardsman. Jaryd bent, painfully, and took up the man's sword. The face was not one he recognised.

Some instinct convinced him to walk east, away from the river, toward the broken folds of forested land that ran down from the mountains. The stiffening wound on his left leg throbbed painfully…Jaryd guessed he'd probably torn the muscle once more.

In the gloom ahead, faded of colour, he saw the shape of a banner, leaning on the body of a dead horse. He limped over and found a tangled mess of bodies, Hadryn and not. One of the Hadryn was gasping, trying to live, propped against the dead horse's side. Most of his entrails were in his lap. A sergeant in Yethulyn Bears colours lay with his head split open. Jaryd limped past them, searching the bodies with his eyes. The desperate story of their fight revealed itself in their final, fallen forms. Here a desperate, heroic defence. There a defiant charge. Men had fallen from their horses and fought on the ground. One of the dead Hadryn had deep bite marks through his hand and glove, the familiar curve of human teeth. Desperate fighting indeed.

Another dead horse, a dappled grey. This one, Jaryd saw as he limped around the dead animal's head, had a rider trapped beneath it, caught by the right leg. The horse's head was half severed by a single blow. The horse must have fallen hard and taken its rider down with it, even harder. The rider had that look, splayed on his right side, an arm outstretched, twisted and half conscious. Like a man who had fallen from a great height onto hard ground. His clothes were lordly, over his mail, with decorated stitching on his leather gloves and silver embroidery on his belt.

Banners. He'd charged this way, seeking banners. Lordly banners. Jaryd took another two steps. The half-conscious man seemed to register the boots before him and looked up, his helm askew. “Help me!” demanded a thin, anguished voice. “Help me, I'm hurt!”

A northern accent. A familiar, petulant tone. Now he remembered. “There's many hurt, Lord Usyn,” said Jaryd, hoarsely. “Help yourself.”

Usyn stared up at him. Perhaps the darkening overcast remained bright enough for silhouette, because the Great Lord of Hadryn's eyes seemed to widen with recognition. “Jaryd Nyvar!” He sounded almost relieved. “Master Jaryd, you must…you must help me up. My father was on good terms with your own. You are heir to the great lordship of Tyree. Great lords should always conduct themselves with honour, even in battle.”

“And with what honour have you conducted this battle, Lord Usyn?” Jaryd asked. In the distance, trumpets blared again. “I saw the bodies in Ymoth. You attempt the slaughter of an entire Lenay people, and you speak to me of honour?” The fury was with him again. They were all the same, these nobles. His so-called peers and comrades. Everything he'd ever aspired to be, it was all a lie.

“You would stand there and snarl at me, while I lie wounded?” Usyn looked about, desperately, and found his sword on the ground nearby. He snatched it, and tried wriggling free from the horse's weight…and nearly screamed. “Have you…” he gasped, desperately. “Have you no honour?”

“My father and brother are dead,” Jaryd said tonelessly. “Family Nyvar is no more. We were betrayed. If that is the honour of Verenthane nobility, then no, Lord Usyn, I have no honour. I reject your honour. I am a man already dead, and I have no fear of anything any longer.”

“You would kill me?” Usyn asked. There was fear in his voice, a high, thin quaver. “Like this? Defenceless? I am not your enemy! Why…why do you ride with these…these people! You have the blood of the chosen in your veins! The nobility of Lenayin! The masters of the land!”

“The nobility of Lenayin slew a ten-year-old boy for daring to be frightened. Your honour is horseshit. Or worse. At least horseshit has uses.”

“I didn't do it!” Usyn screamed. “I didn't kill your damn brother! You can't…you can't accuse me of…”

“Of vanity? Of power lust? Of murder? Of massacres and hatred? I know only too well what you are, and what you've done, Usyn. I know because I was once of your kind. I've been so stupid, and so blind, that I didn't realise what they'd do until it was too late. For that, I deserve death. And if I do, I'm quite certain you deserve worse. Look about you.”

Some men were groaning, amidst the tangles of wheat. A little further, someone was sobbing. Torchlights now moved across the fields, riders searching for wounded.

Usyn was crying, Jaryd saw with surprise. He'd thought him many things, but not a coward. Yet it did not surprise him too greatly. They were all hypocrites and fakes, all the nobility.

“I just…” Usyn sobbed, his face contorted, “…wanted to be worthy of my father! I…I wanted to be a great lord of Hadryn! I wanted him to be proud of me, and…and I want to see my sister again, and…”

He lashed his blade in sudden fury at Jaryd's leg. Jaryd leaped back, with the barest moment to spare, and hurled his sword point first for Usyn's throat. It struck, and Usyn died with a horrid gurgling, drowning fast in his own spurting blood.

Jaryd turned away, unable to face the sight. He put his good hand to his head and stared across the battlefield, to where the tips of the northern mountains continued to glow, long after the light had fled the land below.

In a clump of wheat nearby, he heard a man coughing. He walked and found it was a Goeren-yai villager, with a bloodied face and a sword thrust through his side. Not deep, though. He might yet live. Jaryd sheathed his borrowed sword and managed to haul the man upright with one arm, long enough to dump him over one shoulder. Then he stood, muscles, ribs and leg shrieking protest, and began limping toward the river.

Dusk was falling as the army reformed behind a defensive line. No counterattack came, and masses of riders began falling back to rest their horses and water them at the river. Others searched for fallen comrades. Sofy helped with the wounded, and Sasha joined her, being horseless for the moment.

The wounds were terrible. Soldiers bound bloody gashes with rolls of coarse cloth, stripping spare shirts for further bandages. Men bore terrible, disfiguring injury with a courage that defied words, biting back screams. Goeren-yai recited spirit chants, and Verenthanes holy verses. Others acted as healers, administering herbs and pastes for wounds as were available. Others brought full waterskins from the river. Men died upon the ruined fields of grain. Others lived, and suffered.

When Errollyn arrived Sasha felt horribly guilty at the relief she felt to be summoned away from that patch of bloody, hellish ground. She climbed up behind him, leaving Sofy to attend the wounded amidst the lines of flaming torches men were planting in the ground to ward the approaching night. Her little sister moved from man to man, holding each hand in turn, assuring those in delirium that it was indeed the Princess Sofy who attended them, and that they would not die alone. Errollyn then touched heels to his horse, asking nothing more than a walk of the weary animal, heading for the masses of horses by the river.

Sasha rested her cheek wearily against his back. “I thought perhaps I'd lost you,” she murmured.

“And I you,” Errollyn replied. Torchlight lit the fields, sentries standing with light aflame, guiding the way. “I didn't see you fall, there was too much happening.” Sasha felt him heave a deep breath. “I hope to never have to do anything like that again.”

A Lenay man would never admit to fear. It did not surprise her that Errollyn would. He was so…straightforward. For a serrin, anyhow.

“Take this sword,” he said then. “We cannot have a commander without a sword.”

He pulled a serrin blade in its scabbard from a binding alongside his saddle and handed it to her. Sasha pulled the blade a short way from its sheath and examined the edge. It was every bit the deadly, unblemished edge that her old blade had been. Even without fully drawing it, she could see that its balance would be perfect.

“Whose is it?” Sasha asked.

“It's Tassi's,” said Errollyn.

“But…oh no, I couldn't just take her…”

“Aisha insists she would wish you to have it,” said Errollyn.

“Me? Why? These things are expensive, Errollyn. It should be passed on to her family, and then on to their children…”

“Not so expensive in Saalshen,” Errollyn corrected. “Only here. That steelwork is not a technique we share with humans. In Saalshen, it's no rarer than any other blade.”

“But even so…”

“You don't understand,” Errollyn told her. “Tassi rode all this way because she had some hope that there were old and ancient ways amongst humans that were worth saving. She had hope that humanity itself was worth saving, and that in the saving, there would be good for serrin as much as humans. If the uma of Kessligh Cronenverdt, the greatest Nasi-Keth of Lenayin, does not represent that hope, then no one does. Tassi gave her life for that hope. Allow her blade to continue to serve, even as she cannot.”

Sasha gazed at it for a long moment. “If you wish to return it to her family one day,” Errollyn added, “you may do so in person. But I suspect they shall tell you exactly what I have.”

Sasha undid her own empty scabbard and replaced it with Tassi's. Her shoulder hurt—more wrenched than damaged, she thought. She'd been lucky. Unbelievably lucky, when she recalled her blade breaking. If that had happened a moment earlier, she'd be most likely dead. Serrin steel was not supposed to break. But her blade had been old, she knew. Everything broke sometime.

She found Peg amongst the horses by the riverside, drinking knee-deep in the flowing waters of the Yumynis. He whinnied as she dismounted, and came to the riverbank to greet her. Sasha stroked his nose and hugged his neck. Errollyn had found him wandering, sniffing fallen riders, searching for her. But he had recognised Errollyn and Errollyn's horse, and allowed himself to be led to the riverbank. Sasha took off her boots and waded into the cold water to give him as much of a rubdown as she could, without daring to remove his saddle lest some emergency happen.

Two of her vanguard riders were also present, haggard but desperately apologetic for having lost her in the confusion. Sasha waved their apologies away, commended them on their valour and asked after the missing two. One was dead, she heard, and the other wounded, but expected to live. She could not internalise so much suffering so quickly. She found her mind wandering to thoughts of Kessligh, his reactions when faced with memories of the Great War, and his occasional, unbridgeable distance. All this time, she'd been living with a stranger. Only now was she coming to understand him.

She was leading Peg ashore amidst the mass of riverside activity in the torchlight, when Captain Akryd arrived and embraced her.

“You were right,” he said apologetically. She could see his face properly for the first time with his helm removed. It was a homely face, round and ruddy, with only the tracings of spirit symbols about one brow and temple. The face of a farmer, or a husband, or a good father. “Forgive my opposition, M'Lady. We'd have suffered far worse than this had we stayed in Ymoth, with the outcome yet uncertain. This has been a glorious victory, and it is truly yours.”

“No,” Sasha said quietly. “It's theirs.” Nodding to the men about, particularly back to where the wounded and the dead lay.

“Aye, M'Lady. We found Lord Usyn slain on the battlefield. Several senior lords, also. Hadryn is severely wounded, no wonder they retreat in such disorder.”

Sasha blinked. Usyn dead. Just like that. She did not know who would be in command now. He had a younger brother, she recalled…but too young to be on this ride. The great Hadryn army was leaderless. “They'll fall back into the valley now,” she said quietly. “They'll know we have suffered losses, and will delay. They'll know that Prince Koenyg will ride behind us and they'll hope to hold out long enough for Koenyg to rescue them.”

“Aye.” Akryd nodded. “They have little other choice. Does M'Lady wish to make camp here?”

Sasha shook her head. “This is too exposed to the rear. The moon rises. We'll ride tonight, force the Hadryn far up the valley. We can rest when we're camped.”

Akryd bowed. “I shall make arrangements.”