“Take three companies and sweep through the north camp,” he ordered. He remembered, too, that General Giarna and his horsemen had escaped in that direction. He gestured to several of his Windriders. “Follow me.”
25
Suzine watched the battle in her glass. Here in her tent in the northern camp, she did not feel the brunt of battle so heavily. Though the men here had raced to the fight and suffered the same fate as the rest of the army, the camp itself had not yet experienced the wholesale destruction that marked the south and west camps of the humans.
She had seen the Windriders soaring from the east, had watched their inexorable and unsuspected approach against her general’s army, and she had smiled. Her face and her body still burned from Giarna’s assaults, and her loathing for him had crystallized into hatred.
Thus when the elf commander had led the attack that sundered the army around her, she had felt a sense of joy, not dismay, as if Kith-Kanan had flown with no other purpose than to effect her own personal rescue. Calmly she had watched the battle rage, following the elven general in her mirror. When he led the charge against Giarna’s remnant of the great cavalry brigades, she had held her breath, part of her hoping he might come upon the human general and strike him dead, another part wishing that Giarna would simply flee and leave the rewards of victory to the elven forces. Even when her elven guards fled from their posts, she had taken no note.
Now she heard marching outside her tent as the elves of the sortie force moved through the north camp looking for human survivors. Suzine heard some men surrender, pleading for their lives; she heard others attack with taunts and curses, and finally screams and moans as they fell. The battle coursed around her, washing the tent city in smoke and flame and pain and blood. But still Suzine remained within her tent, her eyes fixed upon the golden-haired figure in her mirror. She watched Kith-Kanan, mounted upon the leaping, clawing figure of his great beast, slash and cut his way through the humans who tried to challenge him. She saw that the elven attack moved steadily closer to her. Now the Wildrunners fought a mere thousand yards to the south of her tent.
“Come to me, my warrior!” she breathed.
She willed him to come to her with all of her heart, watching in her glass as Kith-Kanan hacked the head from a burly human axeman.
“I am here!” Suzine desperately wanted Kith-Kanan to sense her presence, her desire, her—did she dare believe it—love.
The opening of her tent flap interrupted her reverie. It was him! It must be!
Her heart afire, she whirled, and only when she saw Giarna standing there did brutal reality shatter her illusion. As for Giarna, he looked past her violently, at the image of the elven commander in the mirror.
The human general stepped toward her, his face a mask of fury, more like a beast’s than a man’s. It sent an icy blade of fear into the pit of Suzine’s stomach.
When Giarna reached her and seized her arms, each in one bone-crushing hand, that blade of fear twisted and slashed within her. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think; she could only stare into those wide, maddened eyes, the lips flecked with spittle, stretched taut to reveal teeth that seemed to hunger for her soul.
“You betrayed me!” he snarled, throwing her roughly to the ground. “Where did these flying beasts come from? How long have they been waiting, ready to strike?” He knelt and punched her roughly, splitting her lip. He glanced at the mirror on the table. Now, her concentration broken, the image of Kith-Kanan had faded, but the truth of her obsession had been revealed.
The general’s black-gauntleted hand pulled a dagger from his belt, and he pressed it between her breasts, the point puncturing her gown and then brushing the skin beneath it.
“No,” he said, at the very moment when she expected to die. “That would be too merciful, too cheap a price for your treachery.”
He stood and glared down at her. Every instinct of her body told her to scramble to her feet, to fight him or to run! But his black eyes seemed to hypnotize her to the ground, and she couldn’t bring herself to move.
“Up, slut!” he growled, kicking her sharply in the ribs and then reaching down to seize her long red hair. He pulled her to her knees, and she winced, closing her eyes, expecting another blow to her face.
Then she sensed a change within the small confines of the tent, a sudden wash of air against her face . . . the increase in the sounds of battle beyond . .
.
Giarna cast her aside, and she looked at the door to the tent. There he was!
Kith-Kanan stood in the opened tent flap. Beyond him lay bodies on the ground, and she caught a glimpse of men and elves hacking against each other with swords and axes. The tents in her line of view smoked and smoldered, some spewing orange flame.
The golden-haired elf stepped boldly into the darkened tent, his steel longsword extended before him. He spoke harshly, his blade and his words directed at the human general.
“Surrender, human, or die!” Kith-Kanan, obviously not recognizing the commander of the great human army in the semidarkness of the tent, took another step toward Giarna.
The human general, his dagger still in his hand and his body trembling with rage, stared soundlessly at the elf for a moment. Kith-Kanan squinted and crouched slightly, ready for close-quarter fighting. As he studied his opponent, recognition dawned, memories of that day of captivity a year before, when the battle had gone against the elves.
“It’s you,” the elf whispered.
“And it is fitting that you come to me now,” replied the human general, his voice a strangled, triumphant snarl. “You will not live to enjoy the fruits of your victory!”
In a flash of motion, the man’s hand whipped upward. In the same instant, he reversed his grip on the dagger, flipping its hilt from his hand and catching the tip of the foot-long blade in his fingertips.
“Look out!” Suzine screamed, suddenly finding her voice. Giarna’s hand lashed out, flinging the knife toward Kith’s throat. Like a silver streak, the blade flashed through the air, true toward its mark. Kith-Kanan couldn’t evade the throw, but he could parry it. His wrist twitched, a barely perceptible movement that swung the tip of his sword through an arc of perhaps six inches. That was enough; the longsword hit the knife with a sharp clink of metal, and the smaller blade flipped over the elf’s shoulder to strike the tent wall and fall harmlessly to the ground. Suzine scrambled away from Giarna as the man drew his sword and rushed toward the elf. Kith-Kanan, eight inches shorter and perhaps a hundred pounds lighter than the human general, met the charge squarely. The two blades clashed with a force that rang like cymbals in the confines of the tent. The elf took one step back to absorb the momentum of the attack, but Giarna was stopped in his tracks.
The two combatants circled, each totally focused on the other, looking for the slightest hint, the twitch of an eye or a minute shifting of a shoulder, that would warn the other of an intended lunge.
They slashed at each other, then darted out of the way and just as quickly slashed again. Neither bore a shield. Consummate swordsmen both, they worked their way around the spacious tent. Kith-Kanan tipped a dressing screen in front of the human. The man leaped over it. Giarna drove the elf backward, hoping to trip him on Suzine’s cot. Kith sensed the threat and sprang to the rear, clearing the obstacle and then darting to the side, driving against the human’s flank.
Again the man parried, and the two warriors continued to circle, each conserving his strength, neither showing the weariness of the long day’s battle. Where Giarna’s face was a mask of twisted hatred, however, the elf’s remained an image of cool, studied detachment. The man struck with power that the elf could not hope to match, so Kith-Kanan had to rely on skill and control for each parry, each lightning thrust of his own.