The Fire Prince (The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Book 2) (22 page)

T
HERE WAS NO
frontier post on the high plateau. Somewhere in the wilderness of saw-leafed grass and thorny scrub, Nolt took his band from Sault into Roubos. At times they saw small herds of black and gray goats that vanished into the scrub in the wink of an eye. One afternoon, Nolt nodded to Steadfast, a slender man with sleek black hair and slanting eyes. Stead strung his bow and rode away. He came back with two young goats, skinned and gutted, strung across his horse’s neck. They ate fresh meat that night, tender and running with fat.

Jaumé got his share, and Bennick gave him a bone to gnaw. He washed his hands and face afterwards in the creek. He had seen how clean these men were—clean, tidy, quick—and he strove to be like them.

But mostly they ate food bought at the hamlets they passed. Bread, dried meat. There was no flight here from the curse. Some people refused to believe in it. Others thought it wouldn’t cross the highlands into Roubos. They carried on with their lives, herding and harvesting and threshing barley. Some called out for news, but Nolt stayed silent.

The farmers calling questions made Jaumé think of Mam and Da, and his sister Rosa. He tried to keep them in his head the way they’d been before the curse, but never managed it for long; soon there was blood on Da’s hands and blood around his mouth, and Mam lay in the kitchen, torn and dead, and the stink of blood was everywhere, and Rosa was screaming...

He pushed it out of his head the only way he knew, by looking at Bennick beside him, and the men ahead, and telling himself they were on their way to fight the curse. They were going to destroy it.

Smoke hazed the sky beyond a row of hump-backed hills. Nolt slowed their pace to a walk, and sent Stead and Odil scouting ahead.

“They’re burning stubble,” Jaumé said, trying to show his knowledge. There had been smoke from stubble-burning down on the plains, and Da had burned his fields that way.

Bennick shook his head. “Wrong smell.”

Stead and Odil rode back and Odil spoke briefly with Nolt. Jaumé couldn’t hear the words.

Nolt handed Odil an object that looked like a brass mug, and sent him up the hill. Jaumé watched, puzzled, as Odil turned the brass mug into a tube as long as his forearm and put the end to his eye. He glanced at Bennick.

“Spyglass,” Bennick said.

Odil waved them on. They rounded the hill and found the back fields of a farm—unburned stubble. Beyond a red barn, smoking and blackened, stood the ruins of a farmhouse. Tongues of flame licked a half-fallen wall.

The men cantered into the yard, holding their horses steady against the smell of blood.

Five bodies lay in the yard. An old man and a younger, both disemboweled, two young boys, one headless, the other hacked almost in half, and a woman with blood running into her blonde hair and her skirts upflung to cover her face. Jaumé jerked his gaze away from the lower part of her body. He didn’t want to see what had been done to her.

“Barn,” Nolt said, and two of the men rode away.

Jaumé’s ribcage seemed to squeeze tightly around his innards. Blood. Death. Fire. He turned to Bennick. “The curse! It’s here. It’s caught up with us!”

Bennick shook his head. “This is hillmen, lad. They raid the farms. And anything passing on the roads.”

Jaumé looked at the bodies, jerked his eyes away. His arms and legs, his chest, were trembling. “Why?”

“For what they can get. Food. The killing’s for fun. And the rape.”

Fun? He wanted to cry, to vomit, and knew he must do neither of those things. “Will they come after us?”

Bennick shrugged, unconcerned, watching Ash and Kimbel trot back from the barn. Young Kimbel had a dead goose slung over his saddle.

“They’ve taken what they can carry. It’s a poor place,” Ash said.

They left the farm behind. Jaumé tried not to think about the bodies. He’d thought Nolt would bury them, but he’d left them lying where they died and not even said words to the All-Mother for them.

The road wasn’t much more than a cart track, running between hills and a stream. Nolt sent Brothers out each side as scouts. Bennick was one, and Jaumé watched him anxiously; it was the most dangerous place to be. Copses of trees rose like islands in water, too small to hide a band of twenty or more men, which Nolt, reading hoof-prints on the track, reckoned was the strength of the raiders.

The prints turned off towards the hills, but Nolt left Odil out scouting, and soon Odil reined in his horse. He dismounted and eased forward and lay peering at something on the other side of the hill. He used the spyglass again, then made a series of arm movements.

“Twenty-six. Spears and bows. They’re behind trees, down the other side,” Bennick whispered to Jaumé.

Nolt waved in Odil.

“They know we’re here,” Odil said.

“So we’ll make them come to us.” Nolt led them across the stream to a low, dense copse. They broke into the center, leading the nervous horses. “Tie them, boy,” Nolt said. “And stay with them.”

The eight Brothers unstrapped their bows from the packhorses, stepped back into the trees and disappeared.

Jaumé tied the horses, and in a moment heard men talking and laughing from somewhere outside the copse. He smelled woodsmoke. Did that mean they were boiling water? Getting ready to cook the goose from the farm? The hillmen would see the smoke and come. Was that the plan? He needed to see.

Jaumé checked the knots securing the horses, then eased his way under sharp foliage to the edge of the copse. The fire was halfway between the trees and the stream. Two billies of water rested in the flames. The Brothers sat eating bread, joking and laughing in a way Jaumé hadn’t heard them before. They had no weapons.

A bow and a sheaf of arrows leaned on the trunk of a tree, hidden from sight, and further along were other bows and swords and throwing knives. He understood: the raiders must show themselves as they rode down the track or down from the hill, whichever they chose, and Nolt and his men were only twenty yards from cover and their weapons.

But there were only eight of them, against twenty-six.

Jaumé wondered if he was going to die, then heard Bennick laugh. He wriggled half on hands and knees and half on his belly for a clearer look, and saw that it was no pretence; the men were relaxed and enjoying their bread. Young Kimbel walked away from the fire and pissed on the ground, then washed his hands in the stream.

The hillmen came with a thunder of hooves and a prolonged cry like the howling of wolves. They galloped along the track, spears held high. Nolt and his men pretended to act in fear. They ran like rabbits for the copse, Kimbel a dozen steps behind, and Jaumé barely had time to slide back into hiding. He drew his knife, but saw how useless it would be. He crept a little sideways, looking for a place where he could see what happened. The hillmen came charging, bareback, their wolf call rising until it filled the sky. Jaumé saw Bennick in the foliage. He was standing easily, an arrow nocked on his bow-string. Nolt was further along, and a shine of silver hair showed Ash on the other side.

The bunched hillmen clattered across the stream, yelling and joyous, thinking they had easy prey hiding in the copse. Each strained to get ahead of the others. Their skulls were shaved apart from a crest like a horse’s mane. Their eyes glared, their teeth were bared as though to bite, and the dangling bones ornamenting their chests rattled like sticks on hollow logs. Their yellow ponies, as hairy as goats, were almost as fierce. Their nostrils flared.

Jaumé lay frozen in terror. These men were worse than anything he’d imagined. The rattling bones, the crested heads. He wanted to burrow into the ground and hide.

The hillmen reined in by the abandoned fire, and sprang from their ponies. With spears held high, they charged at the copse.

Jaumé didn’t see Nolt’s signal, but suddenly arrows sank into the chests or throats of the charging hillmen. Eight of the raiders fell—he didn’t need to count, he knew none of the Brothers had missed—and then another eight as the hillmen turned and ran, their howls turning into cries of panic. The survivors used the ponies as cover and fled in a pack, crossing the stream and stopping out of bow-shot.

“Wait,” Nolt said, and his men stayed hidden.

The hillmen captured some of their ponies and mounted. They milled and argued, some frightened, others still fierce. A thickset man, his mane of hair matted into long yellow tails, seemed to take charge.

“They want their dead,” Nolt said. He looked at Bennick. “Too far?”

Bennick answered by taking another arrow and nocking it. Jaumé crawled under a branch to see better.

Bennick stepped into the open and ran his eye past the fire, past the stream, to the distant hillmen and their leader. Jaumé saw the way he didn’t think or calculate again, but raised the bow, drew the bowstring back until his fingers touched his jaw, and released it. This time, Jaumé saw the arrow in its flight, rising quicker than a falcon and swooping downwards at the end. It buried itself in the throat of the man with the matted yellow hair. He tumbled from his pony.

There was a high shriek of fear, a clatter of hooves, and the hillmen fled back along the track. The riderless ponies galloped after them.

“Nine left,” Nolt said. “They won’t be back.”

“They’ll come in the night for their dead,” said Ash.

Old Maati and young Kimbel moved among the fallen men. They slit the throats of three who were still alive. Jaumé looked away. Blood. Blood everywhere. The curse seemed to reach out towards him.

“Boy,” Nolt said, not turning.

Jaumé crept from his cover, his heart thudding hard in his chest.

“I told you to stay with the horses.”

Jaumé couldn’t speak. He saw with terror that Nolt was going to leave him behind.

Black-skinned Gant came out of the copse. “He tied them,” he told Nolt.

“He had his knife out,” Ash said.

“Did you want to fight them, boy?”

“Yes,” Jaumé managed to say.

Nolt looked at him, narrow-eyed. He grunted. “One mark. Another one and you’re out. Now get the arrows and clean them.”

Jaumé moved among the dead hillmen. Some of the arrows came out easily, others he had to work at with two hands. One, fixed in a man’s head, wouldn’t move. Bennick came and pulled it out. He said nothing, but pointed at the stream. Jaumé washed blood from the arrows. He checked them for damage and took them to the men, knowing who owned each pair from the color and set of the feathers. Gant and young Kimbel thanked him, Ash winked. The others made no sign. They had brought their horses from the copse while Jaumé worked.

Bennick came back from retrieving his arrow from the dead leader. “Better be quick,” he said.

Jaumé ran through the prickly trees. He untied his pony and led it out.

He rode at the rear for the rest of the day. Nolt made up time, not stopping to eat. Jaumé didn’t complain. He gnawed a crust of bread from his pouch. Dead farmers, dead hillmen. Blood everywhere. It made him feel sick, but the deadliness of the archers, Bennick’s skill, returned and filled him with pride and awe. Could he be as good as that, one day?

He knew he would have died if Nolt had left him behind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

D
UKE
F
RANKL VISITED
in the afternoon. He patted Lukas on the head, praised the horse Rutgar had drawn, inquired after Britta’s health. Frankl was using her, but her gratitude towards him was genuine. Rescuing the boys was a much easier task now.

At nightfall, Britta kissed the boys and left them in the care of the nursemaid.

Karel was at parade rest in the corridor. He opened her door and followed her inside.

Yasma emerged from the bedchamber, a blue glass vial in her hand. “I’ve made the All-Mother’s Breath. Half concentration.”

“Excellent. Where would you like to do it, Karel? In here?”

They gathered all the rugs in the suite and piled them on the floor, then spread cushions and blankets on top of them. The armsman took off his breastplate and laid it on the settle. “Make the fire smoke, afterwards. We need to get rid of the smell. Torven will recognize it.” He unbuckled his sword belt. “I’ll try to move after you’ve sprayed me, and say something. If I can. Count how many seconds it takes for me to fall. And speak to me. I’d like to see how much I can remember.”