Williams, Tad - Shadowmarch 04 - Shadowheart by Williams Tad

Author:Williams, Tad [Tad, Williams,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

26

By the Light of Burning Ships

“The villagers of Tessideme did not want the boy to go on such a perilous quest, for he was much loved, but Adis the Orphan knew this was the task for which the gods had marked him.”

—from “A Child’s Book of the Orphan, and His Life and Death and Reward in Heaven”

BRIONY’S MOMENT OF HOPE was short-lived. As the Xixians on the waterfront fled from the attack of the airborne Rooftoppers and their birds, a force of the autarch’s cavalry burst out from the town and came thundering down Market Road toward the harbor.

Briony joined Eneas and his remaining soldiers as they wheeled to face this new and deadly charge; all the nearby Qar quickly joined them. Some of the fairies were mounted on horses as beautiful and slender as the sticklike creatures she had seen in ancient mosaics, and the riders were even stranger than their mounts. Some of these new allies weren’t even people, but foxes and wolves and wild forest cats whose very presence made the Syannese horses skittish.

“Do not lose heart!” Eneas cried to his men, who had begun to scatter in fear as the alien Qar came among them. “These are allies! Together we will bring the southern Falcon down!”

They met the charging Xixians at the place where Market Road crossed the dock road. As the two troops crashed together, the clamor of steel on steel and the screaming of both horses and men was so heart-breaking that Briony, still a dozen yards back from the fighting, wanted to clap her hands over her ears until the dreadful noise stopped.

Why was I so stubborn? Why did I think I should ride to war like a man? She was terrified.

But even the bravest of these knights must be frightened, she suddenly thought. Even Eneas himself. It didn’t matter why she was here—she was here.

Briony had little time after that to think about anything except staying alive, dealing enough blows to defend herself, or to help an ally in need—she saved a bulky, bearlike creature from a mounted spearman by hammering the Xixian’s helmet with her sword and knocking him out of the saddle. The bear-thing did not stop to thank her, but only hurried off to another part of the fray.

She stayed back from the thickest fighting where her smaller size and reach would be a disadvantage, striking only when she had to. If the southerners managed to push past on just one side, Briony’s company and their allies would be caught between two halves of the autarch’s forces and quickly squeezed to death. Torches were streaming toward Market Road from the fields and the town—hundreds, maybe thousands more of the autarch’s foot soldiers still making their way to the battle. Eneas was too deep in the battle to see it, fighting for his life—without a miracle, there would be no escape from this nightmare except death.

Then the bay behind her exploded into flame.

No, not the bay, Briony saw as she struggled to turn her startled horse.

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