"Oh. Well. That's cool too, you've got ancestors… Did the Archer make your bow? Can I see it?"
"He did that, and you can. Careful now! It's well oiled with flaxseed, but I'd not want to drop it in this wet."
Edain reached over his shoulder and slid the long yew stave free of the carrying loops. It was strung, and the boy tried to draw it after he'd admired the patterned carving of the antler horn nocks and the black walnut root riser. The young Mackenzie let him struggle with it, and there were chuckles from the rest of the clansfolk as the youngster handed it back and said gravely, "That's a pretty heavy draw." He looked at Edain as he returned it. "I've heard a lot about Mackenzie archers. Is it true you guys are witches and can make magic, too?"
"Well, I'm not much of a spell caster myself, beyond the odd little thing to keep the sprites and the house-hob friendly, or for luck when I'm hunting-"
"I shot a rabbit with my crossbow just last week. It was eating the cabbages in Father Milton's garden."
"Sure, and if the little brothers won't mind your gardens, that's what you must do. Also a rabbit is good eating."
"Could you teach me a spell for luck when I'm hunting?"
"Mmmmm, I think your Father Milton might not like you making luck spells, so you'd best ask him for a prayer to your saints, instead. We're followers of the Old Religion, which you are not," he said, touching the Clan's moon-and-antlers sigil on his brigandine.
Then he glanced aside at his lover, Eithne.
"Now, this one you'd better be careful of!" he said, teasingly solemn. "A priestess of the second degree! She can sing a bird out of the bough, and 'chant a cow's teats to give butter ready churned, and blind a man's eyes with love by a rune cut on a fingernail. The fae themselves give her a wide berth, hiding beneath root and rock unless she bids them fetch her tea and spin wool for her, the which they do in fear and trembling before her power, so."
The boy looked at her wide eyed and crossed himself. "Is that why you've got a girl along?" he said, loading the descriptive word with scorn. " 'Cause she's a real witch?"
The mounted Mackenzies all laughed. The four of them were every one younger than Rudi; old enough to travel and fight but not solid householders weighed down with responsibilities like the group by the wagons. Eithne stuck out her tongue at the boy, or possibly at Edain. She was eighteen too, a tall lanky brown eyed girl with skin one shade darker than olive and long black braids falling from beneath her Scots bonnet. The clasp on that held a spray of feathers from a red-tailed hawk, to show her sept totem, and she had a round yel low flower tucked behind one ear, late-blooming coast maida.
"It's because otherwise the boys wouldn't know what to do, the dear creatures, without a woman along," she said, her tone mock-lofty. "Pretty? They are that, but dim. Na glac pioc comhairie gan comhairie ban, as the Chief would say. It's a female's guidance you need when advice is given."
"Very true! That's why I've got Garbh with me," Edain said guilelessly.
The big rawboned bitch walking at his horse's heels should have looked up at the sound of her name. Instead she made a sound halfway between a whine and growl, stopping stock still and looking westward, the heavy matted fur over her shoulders rising and her ears cocked forward.
"Aire!" Edain shouted, loud as he could. "Beware!"
He blushed furiously as his voice broke despite the sudden sharp stab of alarm, but the clansfolk stiffened at the danger call.
He had just enough time to flip off his bonnet and slap his sallet helm over his curls before he heard something. Something familiar as breathing: the wshhssst sound of arrows cleaving air, but this wasn't a practice ground back home, or a riverside thicket with an elk in it. Some one was shooting at them, and doing it while he couldn't see three times arm's length.
"Down!" he yelled, conscious of eyes turning towards him. "Incoming!"
Young Gaston was still on his pony, gaping. Edain kicked his feet out of the stirrups and dove off his bor rowed mount, grabbing the boy as he did and hugging him to his chest, turning his back to the deadly whistle. Black arrows with red-dyed fletching went smack into the mud around him. There was a harder, wetter thwack as one struck flesh, and someone screamed, and a horse bugled pain and fear. Then a hard bang and something hit him between the shoulder blades, also hard. Pain lanced through him, but it was gone in a moment-the little steel plates riveted inside his brigandine had shed the point.
"Down and stay down," he shouted to Gaston, throw ing the boy flat in the roadside ditch. "Garbh-guard! Stay!"
Then he had his own bow out, slanting it to keep the lower tip off the ground as he knelt. As he whipped an arrow out of his quiver, he was suddenly and wildly certain that someone out there was trying to kill him, and felt an indignation he knew even then was absurd.
A high screaming rose from the misty field west of the road, and spears and axes glinted through the fog.
" Haiiiii- DA!" they called, a rhythmic screeching. " HaiiiiiDA!"
His father had told him that it was the waiting beforehand that was the time of fear, and you were too busy for it when the red work began. It turned out to be not quite that way for him; he was aware of being afraid, but he didn't have any attention to spare for the emotion.
Most of the strangers' arrows hit the Protectorate men on that side of the road, or whistled past into the fields and fog. Then there was a roaring onrush of half-seen figures, running in to strike in the confusion.
Edain drew and shot and drew, shot and drew and shot again, the deadly fast ripple he'd been taught from infancy, something else he didn't have to think about, and the other Mackenzies were with him. His quiver was half empty when a man in a helmet with a raven beak covering half his face came at him no more than arm's length away, spear drawn back for a thrust, a shield cov ered with blocky angular patterns in his other hand. Edain dropped his bow and snatched for shortsword and buckler, feeling as if he were moving through thick honey…
The snarling tattooed face behind the mask's beak went slack with shocked surprise as a horse floated by behind him with a flash of steel.
"Morrigu!" Rudi Mackenzie shouted in a voice like brass and steel as he struck.
He swung the long blade in an arc that crunched into someone who staggered back in ruin on the other side. His black horse reared, its milling forefeet smashing heads and shoulders as he called again on the Crow Goddess.
"Morrigu! Morrigu! "
Edain had his own sword out now, and the buckler in his left fist. His friends were with him and they rushed across the road, shouting their totem war cries; some where he could feel part of his mind gaping in bewil dered horror, but he was too busy for that, too busy howling and hitting, spinning and dodging and leaping over a hiss of steel and stabbing as he came down…
Shapes loomed up out of the fog, a man swinging an ax at a fallen crossbowman. Edain punched him with the buckler before he could look up and felt a shivery sensation as a jaw broke beneath the steel.
There were shouts all around him. Haiiiii -DA; calls of Haro! and Saint Guthmund for Tillamook! Farther off a church bell started to ring, and a hand-cranked siren wailed from the castle's tower.
Then suddenly there was nobody within sight standing up except the people he'd started with. A man sprawled in unlovely death at his feet, dark eyes wide in surprise at the arrow in his chest. A broad built broad-faced man not much older than he was, very dark, with blood in his black hair, wearing a jacket of sealskin sewn with bracelet-sized steel rings. A short thick bow of yew and whalebone and sinew lay near his hand and a dented steel cap not far away.
Edain stood panting and glaring around; Eithne handed him his bow, and he checked it automatically be fore sliding it back into the loops. He still had half of his arrows left. The fight had been too brief and too brutally close-quarters to shoot them all away.