A soldier feathered with flaming arrows fell headlong into a campfire. Another flung down his sword and raced toward Rathe, wide eyes blind with panic, his fear-tightened face spattered with blood. The man took two steps before a hurled spear drove through his back and burst from his chest. He stumbled to a halt, trying to withdraw the deadly splinter with grasping hands. His lips parted, a crimson flood welling over his teeth instead of words, and he toppled facedown.
Unable to choose a single target in the spreading melee, Rathe sprinted into the storm of death. Before he reached the fight, a slouching shape covered in a patchy fur cloak slammed into him. Thrown off balance, Rathe hacked his sword into the bestial face. The plainsman lurched back with a yowl, spear held at the ready, his bearded cheek laid open to the bone.
Rathe regained his footing and feinted, provoking the plainsman to block. Rathe feinted again, found his desired opening, and reversed his stroke mid-swing. Sword flashing in from the side, steel met flesh and bone with a sickening crunch. The plainsman’s arm parted at the elbow, and the brute howled. Rathe whipped around in a tight circle, and the plainsman’s cry ended abruptly.
Rathe bounded over the headless corpse, caught up a discarded buckler, and drove between a scattered line of six soldiers. “Reavers! To me!” he shouted, rallying men to his side as a lodestone will draw iron. Others took up the cry, making a fearsome, cohesive racket in the maelstrom of butchery.
Where a foe loomed, Rathe ended him with bloodied sword, or smashed his face with the buckler. As the chaos of battle increased and the stench of blood and spilled bowels filled the night, Rathe’s mind grew keen and cold. Where an enemy’s blurring speed and skill unmanned his fellow Reavers, Rathe saw predictable, clumsy attacks.
Like a demon of death, Rathe slaughtered his way free of the Hilan men, the constricting wagons and tangles of dying men, until he stood apart, a lone slayer, black eyes burning with bloodlust. Even as the assaulting plainsmen scrambled clear of his deadly blade, the gap closed behind him. Hilan men initially roused by his attack, now shouted for him to fall back, even as the plainsmen cursed him in their barbaric tongue. From both soldier and wildling, the words came to Rathe as senseless gibberish. Beyond the confines of his peers, he was free to labor as he would, and labor he did.
A trio of plainsmen swept in, hunched shapes barely human, wielding clubs and spears half again the length of a tall man. Rathe crushed aside a spear thrust, drove his sword into a plainsman’s belly, grinding the point against the man’s spine. Without slowing, Rathe shoved forward, then jerked back, dislodging steel from the man’s guts. Even as the brute tripped over the ropey spill of his innards, Rathe dove low, knocking the feet from under the second attacker.
An instant later Rathe came up, whirled, and crushed the man’s neck with an overhead blow of his buckler. Crippled, the plainsman crawled on his belly, squalling like a heretic doused in boiling oil. Stalking the third attacker, Rathe reversed his grip on the sword as he went, and drove the blade into the back of the downed second plainsmen, skewering his heart.
He dragged his blade free, spun the hilt against his palm, and launched an overhand strike at the growling plainsmen still standing. Blood flew from the blade in a scarlet arc, and the sword cleaved through the third plainsman’s blocking club to pulverize his skull. Rathe sent his boot into the gaping face, freeing his sword once more.
His solitary charge had galvanized the Hilan men, and the barely held defense became an assault. Within the camp, the Maidens of the Lyre had armored themselves in gilded corselets and caught up bows, quivers, and long-hafted pikes from hidden compartments in the bellies of their strange wagons. More maidens climbed rope ladders to the decks of their shiplike conveyances, hauling sloshing buckets of water to quench fire arrows. Capstans spun and, with a clatter of chain and whirling cogs, double rows of six-foot spears tipped with serrated steel thrust out below the rails, creating deadly phalanxes.
Standing tall on her war galleon, a goddess of snow and silver, Lady Nesaea bore a buckler with a spiked silver boss. She raised a wicked trident overhead, shouting commands as crisply as Rathe had ever heard. A conical helm sporting wings of snowy ostrich feathers covered her dark tresses. Her legs flashed under a kilt of studded pale leather, and a sculpted cuirass of burnished silver protected her torso.
“Have no fear,” Nesaea called, lips turned in a fetching grin. “I will watch over you.”
“I could ask for no greater comfort,” Rathe answered, feeling alive and whole for the first time since Thushar had stood over him in Lord Osaant’s chambers.
“Down!” Nesaea shouted.
Before Rathe could register the gravity of her warning, a flaming arrow singed his cheek. He gave a last look at Nesaea, who shook her head in mock disapproval, then he put his mind back to the battle, and melded into the darkness beyond camp.
Stealthy figures rushed forward with him on all sides, silent and grim as specters. The occasional fire arrow arced back toward them, but the plainsmen had quit the fight. Rathe, the Hilan men, and the outcasts gave chase, mercilessly dispatching any fallen wounded they found.
Sensing the skirmish was ended, Rathe came to a halt. The Hilan men also came to rest, all looking to him for guidance. “You have fought well,” he said simply, earning a triumphant cheer.
Farther away, Loro issued a taunting challenge to the retreating plainsmen, then rapidly degenerated into a rant of such offensive oaths that the grinning Hilan men looked from one another with expressions of unease. Rathe could only smile at a trueborn warrior purging the last of his fury.
A feminine cry pierced the gloom. Rathe spun, horrified to see how far he and the others had chased the plainsmen. “To camp!” he bellowed, sprinting back the way they had come.
As the gap narrowed, he spied hump-backed figures harrying the wagons, firing arrows and throwing spears. The Maidens of the Lyre answered arrows with arrows, but the savage brutes were too eager to be driven off. Cries of alarm entwined with the gurgling screams of men dying with blood in their throats.
Rathe stretched his legs, feet flying over the uneven ground. He looked for Nesaea, but could not find her atop her galleon. In her place stood a man holding a beaked maul. The plainsman slammed the weapon against the false decking, shattering wood.
With a shout, Rathe hurled his sword like a dagger. Pommel and tip traded ends, throwing off glints of firelight, hissing as it cut air. The bestial man twisted aside at the last instant, allowing the sword to soar past his ear. Eyeing his new adversary, the figure leaped down with a roar and ran at Rathe.
The two crashed together. Stunned by the impact, Rathe went down, buckler soaring free of his arm. Dazed, he bounded to his feet, pawing for his dagger and looking for the vanished plainsman. Shadows danced beyond the fires, the Hilan men fell on other wildlings with clashes of steel, but of Nesaea’s attacker, there was no sign.
A noise alerted him a heartbeat before a stony fist slammed against his chin. Rathe reeled and fell. Before he could draw his dagger, his foe pounced, sending them into a rolling knot of flying fists and kicking feet.
Rathe came out on top, his fingers curled around a thick neck. Snarling, the plainsman drove his knees into Rathe’s chest, flinging him off. Rathe slammed against the ground, and an instant later the man’s smothering weight pressed down on his torso. The cloying odor of old sweat and rank meat poured off his assailant, stealing what little breath he had found. The ragged fingernails of one powerful hand throttled Rathe as the maul climbed above his face, the deadly iron beak poised for a killing blow.