In moments, Gaborn and the others all gathered around him, and the assault began without fanfare, a hundred men against more than three thousand reavers.
The reavers were running fast, heading toward Feldonshire, loping over the plains with their backs to him, each reaver like a gray hill.
Skalbairn let his huge black charger race. He dropped his lance into a couch. Beside him, a hundred men fanned out. The sulfur and alkali crusting the plains muted the sound of the horse’s hooves, and went flying as they charged.
The plain was as flat and barren of stones as it could be. There were painfully few trees or bushes, hardly even any grass.
He’d never had a better surface for a cavalry charge.
Langley veered to the right, leading fifty men to the far side of the hexagon. Lord Gulliford guided another fifty left.
“Ranks three deep,” Gaborn said to Skalbairn, Marshal Chondler, and Lord Kellish. “Make sure that you cut through the lines!”
Gaborn sounded two blasts short. Gulliford’s riders gave their chargers their heads.
Gaborn sounded one blast long, and Langley’s men swept to the right, driving hard.
Gaborn held his three champions back. Baron Waggit rode beside them.
Skalbairn reined his mount, watched the enemy lines.
Gulliford’s men swept into the reavers, lanced dozens from behind, then veered away from the front, riding as if in a Knight’s Circus. The reavers spun to face them, blade-bearers closing ranks to form a wall of flesh while sorceresses leveled their staves and hurled dire spells. Clouds of green smoke rained down on the fifty. In the mountains the reavers had thrown stones, but the sandy soil here left their artillery with nothing at hand. Only half a dozen men fell under the onslaught.
Almost immediately, Langley’s men hit the reavers’ right flank.
As Gaborn had predicted, the untrained reavers broke rank on both flanks, rushed to do battle.
Thus the front before Skalbairn thinned.
“Fare thee well!” Gaborn shouted.
“Till we meet in the shadowed vale!” Skalbairn roared, and spurred his mount. The ground blurred beneath his charger’s feet. Skalbairn’s black stallion had three endowments of metabolism, and would rank among the fastest in the world. Many better endowed mounts could hit speeds of eighty or ninety miles an hour, but his outraced them.
To hit a reaver at that speed would surely leave him dead. To fall from his horse would break every bone in his body.
Skalbairn held his lance steady. He glanced back, saw Chondler a hundred yards behind him, followed by Lord Kellish.
He spurred his mount and shouted, “Faster!”
Many of the blade-bearers held no weapons at all. He aimed his mount between two of them.
At two hundred yards he drew close enough so that the reavers could sense him. But with his mount racing at over a hundred miles an hour, the reavers barely had time to spin. Without a glory hammer or a blade for the reavers to defend themselves, he darted easily between the first ranks.
A hiss of warning rose from reavers all around.
Off to his right, a quick-thinking sorceress hurled a spell.
A billowing stench flowed out behind him, bowled into the lines ahead, staggering a blade-bearer.
He swerved left now, into the second rank of reavers, never slowing. These were smaller beasts, without weapons. A reaver off to his right did not even spin to meet him. It was loping along, philia dangling, dead on its feet.
He aimed his mount toward it.
He heard the clatter of armor behind him—a shattering lance and a man shouting a war cry. A horse screamed. Reaver spells exploded in the air.
Baron Waggit’s horse walked beside that of the Earth King, and he watched the Runelords charge into battle. He’d witnessed a hundred deaths in the past day, but would never grow used to it.
He felt loath to lose Skalbairn. As High Marshal of the Knights Equitable, the huge warrior had the respect of every lord in Rofehavan, and to Waggit’s surprise, the man had taken him under his wing. He’d taught him a little of how to use the staff yesterday. Miraculously, he’d even sought to match him with his daughter.
In all his life, Waggit could not remember any man ever wishing him as a son-in-law. No woman had ever desired him as a lover. No man would have wanted him as a brother.
The gift of memory was such a many-faceted thing. Now, for the first time in his life, he was desired. Yet his memory was unstable.
For the past day, he’d troubled himself in idle moments, trying to recall his real name. From time to time, it had come to him in the past, but he’d never been able to hold it for more than a few minutes. He did not want to go through life called by the name Waggit, for he felt sure it had been foisted on him derisively.
Yet his real name would not come to him, and the few memories he dredged up were full of pain. He recalled his father beating him as a child, for he had put too much wood in the hearth and the whole house nearly caught fire. He recalled sitting up in a tree one night, feeling lonely as he watched a V of geese wing past the rising moon, while children taunted him below. Of his mother, he could remember nothing at all.
It seemed that the memories he was making now were all darker still. He’d watched from afar as the horde destroyed Feldonshire. He’d heard the muted death cries on the banks of the river Donnestgree as the reavers fell among the wounded from Carris. Even now, they echoed in his memory. He suspected that they would forever.
Thus Gaborn’s blessing became a curse.
“Skalbairn’s going to die, isn’t he?” Waggit asked Gaborn.
“Yes,” Gaborn said. “I believe so.”
There must be an end to the dying, Waggit told himself.
“Am I going to die today?” Waggit asked.
“No.”
“Good,” Waggit said.
He spurred his mount toward the reavers’ battle lines.
Skalbairn glanced back. Chondler had tried to cut past a huge blade-bearer armed with a knight gig, but it darted in front of him. The monster snagged Chondler’s charger out from beneath him, ripping open the mount’s belly. The horse’s gut spilled to the ground, and Chondler went down with it.
Behind him, Kellish veered and slowed. A sorceress hurled a dark yellow cloud that swallowed man and horse. Lord Kellish screamed and his horse never made it from under the shadow of that foul curse.
There would be no second chance, not in this charge.
Skalbairn burst past the second rank, neared the mage’s escorts—a dozen large blade-bearers. Their ranks drew tight around her. Several of the monsters shifted to meet him.
But the mage was larger than her escorts, towered over them. He could see her well, marching away from him, ass high in the air.
In the distance ahead, he heard warhorns blowing. The foothills that hid Feldonshire rose in brown humps, and suddenly two thousand Knights Equitable topped the nearest rise, not half a mile ahead.
They had heard Gaborn sound the charge, and thought that he called to them!
A blade-bearer swung his knight gig and Skalbairn knew he would never evade it.
Yet the great mage was tantalizingly close. He wouldn’t get a quick-killing’ blow, not one to the sweet triangle.
“Farion!” he cried, as he hurled his lance over the escort’s head.
It lofted up twenty feet, and began to descend in a graceful curve toward the mage’s back. He never got to see it land.
His horse whinnied in terror, tried to turn. The emerald staff hit its breastplate, and searing flames erupted from it, cutting the horse in two. Skalbairn’s weight bore him over as the charger stumbled, and he knew no more.
Waggit raced through the reavers’ ranks. The monsters hissed in seeming astonishment as two thousand knights charged the far side of the field. Sorceress’s spells welled up in dark clouds, sweeping the front ranks. Dozens of lords died under the onslaught.
Suddenly, the reavers’ attention was diverted.
Waggit rode through the horde with no weapon drawn. He dodged past a huge blade-bearer that swiveled its head as if looking for other prey. He rode past a second, using its bulk to shield him from the spell of a nearby sorceress.