“I’m so sorry.” The soft voice roused her. Slowly, contemplation of her own mailed hands on her knees became awareness of self, companion…corpse. Despair nearly burst her heart. This time, though, she let it expand til it filled her. “You are injured?”
She shook her head.
The half-elf knelt to within her field of view, beside the body. A single green laurel leaf remained caught in his hair, remnant of their ploy to approach the cabin. The leaf slid to the shoulder of his soft leather vest and thence to catch in the tightly laced collar as he looked up, face grave. His hand wound his bow stave. He leaned on the yew shaft. Green-flecked eyes of brown showed his sympathy. He was a liar. It was hard to focus on that fact, around the agony.
“Lady, your Revered Lord Captain will understand.”
“Do not speak of what you do not know.” Scales shimmered, a metal whisper as her fingers flexed. Beneath the chain gauntlets, a tiny rivulet of blood beaded on the knee-guards of her greaves.
“Helm will under—“
“Be quiet.” She stood from the chopping stump stool. “Indeed, be quiet, and recognize your own convenience, and its limits, scout.” His pity tainted her, like the reflection from a slimy pool cast upward on her armor. Even more so if it was real. The pity. Real. “I preferred you silent.”
The cabin and glade around it lay bare in the revealing sun. She straightened, and removed her helmet, taking advantage of his obedient silence to review. Squire Melis, dead, beside the well. No more to smile, and fumble with buckles while chattering of his seemingly endless pets. A tendril of hair cracked and broke as she turned her head, then her whole self, tucking the helm beneath her arm. The murderers…the child stealers…dead as well, two of them beside the wood pile—beneath the woodpile—once stacked for winter and now tumbled across the churned earth where the one with the bow had fallen from the roof onto the carefully split logs. An autumn fire yet smoldered in the center of the glade. She had kicked over the pot and tripod in the course of action. The touch of the wind was cold down the collar of her sweating neck. She sniffed, smelling the poignant loss of the season.
Movement turned her. Her sword, always in her hand, measured its edge along her leg. The half-elf scout was searching the bodies, having stepped so quietly away from her back to them that she might have been dead, had he been more dangerous. The small body at her feet lay differently than it had, the child’s cheek to the mud rather than with blue eyes gazing blankly at the sky. She watched the scout, knowing he felt her observation. It was in the momentary pause of his hand as he turned over a dead murderer, the slight shift on the balls of his moccasin clad feet to give her a profile rather than his back. She would swear the delicately scalloped ears had pricked her way. “Nothing.” He rose, nearly her height, half her weight, three quick running strides away. His quiver strap crossed his chest, pinning the open vest to chamois shirt and wiry frame. He lounged, insouciant, sly.
“And on the child?” The small body accused. She set her jaw, not looking down.
“Nothing.” He didn’t hesitate, shaking his head.
“You did search him? The child.”
This time those slightly slanted eyes narrowed a little. “I did, Lady.”
She turned, setting her helm carefully to the stump, beside the axe. “Allow me to do the same.”
He approached, two strides, as she went heavily to a knee, a leg-length of sword longer on the ground than was the sprawled innocent, hair gleaming in the thin light, tiny limbs stilled. Kidnapped, the boy had been alive. Death was her rescue. Her finger twitched aside the child’s bloody robe. A single ragged puncture wound lacerated the neck, low in the throat, broken arrowhead showing through skin tattered and twisted like nothing more than the white cloth of the robe. “We will find the other. I will track these human brigands who would do this, for you, Lady. You do not have to pay me—”
She drove up from her knee as he bent to lay a hand on her shoulder. Shoulder spaulders slammed into his chin and he went over backwards, skull thudding into the chopping stump. His feet kicked. She reversed her grip on the sword and dropped with all her armored weight behind it. The resistance to the thrust was barely noticeable. Point and blade slid through his throat, just in the notch of the collar bone. He gurgled and was dead before the blade broke, catching the spine on exit and deflecting into the ground and an ancient stump root below. She fell sideways, support gone. He had tried to cover his body. His arms flopped, fingers uncurling. His vest opened. An arrow shaft tumbled from beneath. White threads trailed, caught in the cracks where he had broken it off in removing it from the child’s body. The eyes of a man murdered without process bulged at the sky.
Breathing hard, scuttled back on her elbows, she gazed at the length of blade standing out from his throat, and felt bile rising. “Helm…will understand.” Rolling, she buried her face in the dirt, away from the sight of her failed obligations and broken honor, and retched. Helm would understand, too well.
Eye for an Eye
Eye for an Eye
Enjoy the game
-
Killthorne
- Orc Champion
- Posts: 422
- Joined: Tue Jan 06, 2004 6:22 am
- Location: Saint Cloud, Minnesota
