Ceinion loved her even more, then, than he had before.
Not the only one, he saw. Brynn bent down and kissed his wife on the cheek. “We hear and obey you, my lady,” he said.
“You are bleeding like a fat, speared boar,” she said. “Have yourself attended to.”
“Am I permitted the slight dignity of trousers and boots first?” he asked. “Please?” Someone laughed, a release of strain.
Someone else moved, very fast.
Siawn, a little tardy, cried out, following. But the red-bearded Erling had torn free of those holding him and, seizing a shield from one of them—not a sword— crashed through the ring around Brynn and his wife.
He turned away from them, looking up and south, raised the shield. Siawn hesitated, confused. Ceinion wheeled towards the slope and the trees. Saw nothing at all, in the black night.
Then he heard an arrow strike the lifted shield.
“There he goes!” said the Erling, speaking Cyngael very clearly.
He was pointing. Ceinion, whose eyes were good, saw nothing, but Alun ab Owyn shouted, “I see him. Same ridge we were on today! Heading down the other way.”
“Don’t touch the arrow!” Ceinion heard. He spun back. The big Erling, not a young man, grey in his hair and beard, set down the shield carefully. “Not even the shaft, mind.”
“Poison?” It was Brynn.
“Always.”
“You know who it was, then?”
“Ivarr, this one’s brother.” He jerked his head towards the one on the ground. “Black-souled from birth, and a coward.”
“This one was brave?” Brynn snarled it.
“He was here with a sword,” said the Erling. “The other one uses arrows, and poison.”
“And Erlings should be much too brave to do that,” Brynn said icily. “Can’t rape a woman with a bow and arrow.”
“Yes, you can,” said the Erling quietly, meeting his gaze.
Brynn took a step towards him.
“He saved your life!” Ceinion said quickly. “Or Enid’s.”
“Buying his own,” Brynn snapped.
The Erling actually laughed. “There’s that,” he said. “Trying to, at any rate. Ask someone what happened inside.”
But before that could be done, they heard another sound. Drumming hooves. An Erling horse thundered through the yard, leaped the fence. Ceinion, seeing the rider, cried out after him, hopelessly.
Alun ab Owyn, pursuing a foe he was unlikely ever to see or find, disappeared almost immediately on the dark path that curved around the ridge.
“Siawn!” said Brynn. “Six men. Follow him!”
“A horse for me,” cried Ceinion. “That is the heir of Cadyr, Brynn!”
“I know it is. He wants to kill someone.”
“Or be killed,” said the red-bearded Erling, watching with interest.
THE ARCHER HAD a considerable start and poison on his arrows. It was pitch black on the path among the trees. Alun had no knowledge of the Erling horse he’d seized and mounted, and the horse wouldn’t know the woods at all.
He cleared the fence, landed, kicked the animal ahead. They pounded up the path. He had a sword, no helmet (on the ground, in mud, beside Dai), no torch, felt a degree of unconcern he couldn’t ever remember in himself before. A branch over the path struck his left shoulder, rocked him in the saddle. He grunted with pain. He was doing something entirely mad, knew it.
He was also thinking as fast as he could. The archer would come out and down from the slope—almost certainly—at the place they had reached earlier today, with Ceinion. The Erling was fleeing, would have a horse waiting for him. Would anticipate pursuit and head back into the trees, not straight along the path to the main trail west.
Alun lashed the horse around a curve. He was going too fast. It was entirely possible that a stump or boulder would break the animal’s leg, send Alun flying, crack his neck. He flattened himself over the mane and felt the wind of another branch pass over his head. There was a body behind him, on the churned-up earth of a farmyard far from home. He thought of his mother and father. Another blackness there, darker than this night. He rode.
The only good thing about the moonless sky was that the archer would have trouble finding his way, too—and seeing Alun clearly, if he came close enough for a bowshot. Alun reached the forking trail where the slope came out on the path south-west. Remembered, only this afternoon, climbing up with Dai and then both of them coming down with the high cleric.
He drew a breath and left the path right there, not hesitating, plunging into the woods.
It was impossible, almost immediately. Swearing, he pulled the horse to a stop and listened in blackness. Heard—blessed be Jad—a sound through leaves, not far ahead. It could be an animal. He didn’t think it was. He twitched the reins, moved the horse forward, carefully now, picking his way, sword out. A semblance of a trail, no more than that. His eyes were adjusting but there was no light at all. An arrow would kill him, easily.
He dismounted on that thought. Looped the reins around a tree trunk. His hair was slick with sweat. He heard sounds again—something ahead of him. It wasn’t an animal. Someone unused to being silent in a forest, an unknown wood, far from the sea, amid the terror of pursuit, a raid having gone entirely wrong. Alun gripped his sword and followed.
He came upon the four Erlings too quickly, before he was ready for them, stumbling through beech trees into a sudden, small space, seeing them there, shadows—two kneeling to catch their breath, one slumped against a tree, the fourth directly in front of him, facing the other way.
Alun killed that one from behind, kept moving, slashed away the sword of the one leaning by the tree, gripped him and turned him with an arm twisted behind his back, snarled, “Drop blades, both of you!” to the kneeling pair.
A triad, he thought suddenly, remembering Rhiannon held, then Brynn. Third time tonight. The thought was urgent, sword-swift.
He remembered what had happened to the other two men who had held their captives this way, and even as the thought came he broke the pattern. He killed the man he was using as a shield, pushing him hard away to fall on the earth, and he stood alone to face two Erlings in a clearing in a wood.
He had never actually killed before. Two now, in moments.
“Come on!” he screamed at the pair before him. Both bigger than him, hardened sea-raiders. He saw the nearer one’s head jerk suddenly, looking past Alun, and without any actual thought Alun dove to his right. The arrow from behind flew past him and hit the Erling in the sword arm.
“Ivarr, no!” the man screamed.
Alun rolled, scrambled up, turned his back on the two of them, sprinting immediately east into the thicket where the bowman would be. He heard him running through to the other side, then mounting up. The horse was there!
He wheeled back, running hard, swearing savagely. The fourth of those he’d surprised here was running the other way, towards the