Okay, there wasn't a whole lot more to tell about the battle, so ... here's what I came up with instead.
Interlude: Clover Oil
Still your breath. You will need it.
The old command rises to her mind easily, as freely as the crow circles, flits across the surface of the little mountain stream. Beneath its reflection, blood trails away in threads and clots as the woman crouched at the water’s edge rinses, blackish to watery crimson, mingles and merges with the icy stream. A bit of fur clings, wedged where blade meets thong: it bends a nail back before it tears free and is swept away.
Clarity. Quiet. Still your breath.
Her breath ceases to become as still as she would wish.
Xiang –
Cho pushes at a stubborn clot with more force than needed. Pain flashes through her flank and shoulder. Water ripples. The circling crow’s reflection shivers, breaks.
She sits back and focuses, knowing it will be in vain. She has spent all she can on stopping various heavy bleedings. Her pulse hammers against walls of flesh swelling around the gashes from the lamed worg’s bite. Infection rising. Deal with that tomorrow. Rest, a treacherous corner of her mind whispers, sleep a while before you run further. The day will be long.
Ambushed. The last run, Cho had promised herself, before she would turn back and let them go. It should have been easy: a single goblin, mount tired and lamed, javelins spent.
Instead, they almost had her – would have had her, in fact, if they had not decided she was easy enough prey to catch alive. Well, she did change their mind on that one. If now she could convince that little pack to break off pursuit ...
Above, a second crow has joined the first.
Elros would have seen them in time, of course. Leo’s floating eyes would. Of no relevance. Yet, Cho can see almost them: Aos fluttering wide sleeves and flourishing his rapier with that deadly grace; Saphie’s and Leo’s pellets of fire streaking past to explode into fireballs; and Xiang clanking forward with that inarticulate battle cry of his, eyes expectantly wide. It is strange how things come back to Xiang, always Xiang.
It is the Dream Bird’s command to protect him, of course. Or is it? Some things are difficult to disentangle without a mentor’s aid. Such as – Cho pushes away the crowding images of a warrior in battered armour. Of no relevance!
Best to remember that he may well become a deadly enemy one day.
Instead she bends her mind to that new thing that found her, as light as the stroke of a passing wing, two morning ago as she sat to meditate. She did not have that keeping still inside Leo’s magic balloon with the others, while beneath them on the battlefield men and dwarves and goblins and orcs fought and died. She did not have it dropping down onto that field muddy with blood, ready to meet a target that would never come within reach that day; nor afterwards when Kanor’s army celebrated their costly victory and she knew suddenly that she must either lose herself or get away from all the foreign incomprehensibleness and squabbling. But she has it now: a an icy silver thread, unbroken, like a narrow mountain stream.
It is not a thing to be lightly used, this touching the Void. That is what the teachers said, long ago. She has already learnt to her cost that she cannot go through the Void more than once in a given day; yet it was worth coming here, for that if for nothing else.
Time to move. Cho shakes water off Talons and cold-stiffened hands, and gingerly reaches around for her bag. The oil sloshes as she uncorks the bottle: a scent of clover spreads. Not much left. Soon she will have to make do with what the longnosed warriors use to oil their blades. Not hog’s grease though, which is what one of them must have used that day in the Rope Trick. The stench was abominable. Wonder what Xiang –
“You’re not a goblin.”
Hawk’s Tattered Wings! Cho swallows what surely must be a dreamy moron's smile.
The child crouches on a rock a mere three or four paces away, arms wrapped around bony knees, hair sticking out in many dirty fraying braids. There’s something … that makes Cho put down flask and rag to free her hands.
Go. Quickly.
Instead, she keeps still, trying to gauge the wrongness.
"What are you?"
“I am from the Mountains. Far west from here.” She points, careful to let the sleeve fall to conceal her hand and Talons. The child’s eyes do not follow her gesture.
“I’m hungry.”
So am I. How old those eyes are. How do people here talk to children? “What is your name, girl?”
She has already heard his last few steps along the far bank when he speaks. “You leave my sister alone, Witch!” He is a boy still, armed with bow and arrow: the type peasants make to hunt rabbits. His aim is shaky.
For no good reason than to reassure him, she gets up and steps back. The boy’s eyes widen and he steadies his aim. The little girl watches, unmoving.
Wrongness. Trap! That thought comes at the same instant at the shout from behind and above her.
“Down on your face. Now!”
Five, no, six that she can see. They have taken the high ground and rocks to give them cover. She does not need to look back to know the little girl and boy are unsurprised.
Smoothly done.
“I mean no harm to the child.” Buying time. They wear no one’s insignia and their bows are real war bows. That mixture of arrogance and a hunger that is not of the stomach: bandits. (With astonishment a far corner of her mind registers that she recognised them as outlaws before she ever noticed that they are, of course, longnoses. So she is learning to read their expressions now?)
“Down!” The one who stands broadest, speaks again, obviously assuming leadership.
Calculating how many of them will be trained to shoot without harming the child, or cold enough to shoot regardless; calculating the distance to the nearest trees. “I drank from the stream. I will leave now.”
He likes that. “On the contrary. You’ll be paying.”
Too far to run. Too many to take on, Hawk gnaw their eyes out. “This is not a safe place to be.”
“You don’t say. I’ll have those boots of yours. For a start.”
“There are seven goblins on worg mounts, not half a morning behind me.” Six mounts. Two are riding double. “They are dangerous. They are trained –”
“Dangerous, yeah? And you personally summoned them to rescue you, I take it?” A snicker from the far left. Another man, too thick-headed to hear sarcasm perhaps, flicks nervous glances.
It is no use. “– Trained to work together,” she finishes, merely to cover the beginning of her dive.
The girl sees her coming but merely claps hands over ears and shrieks, shrieks even as she is shoved roughly and tumbles off the rock. An outcry from the boy (really her brother, then?) Arrows whistle, too close, but there is no time to think about arrows. Focus deepens, narrows into an icy silver thread of awareness. Here is the Void, expanding around her, and like a crow’s reflection on a rippling stream, her image breaks.
Bitten off more than you can chew? Again? Amused.
Lady?
Almost she falters. The Void pushes her on.
She slams back into Time with feet already running, stumbles and rolls. A bramble whips, missing her eye by a hair’s breadth. An arrow twinges as it hits a tree off to the left; already branches are slapping shut behind her as she starts sprinting.
Next time, she thinks savagely,
remember to come out on clear ground. And to keep breathing.
And to run away when you see a little child.
Angry commands fade behind as she settles into her long-practised step. Warmth fingers down her flank as she runs: her fall has started the worg bite bleed again.
That voice. Neither female nor male, neither one nor a chorus – perhaps in the end nothing but imaginings of her own mind. The paradoxes of the Void are many, and more confusing with no mentor to explain them.
Uphill turns to downhill, and uphill again. And suddenly, at about the same time she knows that, Hawk willing that she can shake off those worgriders, it is time to go back: back to a city full strangers and a bunch of new, if at times incomprehensible, friends. At about that same time laughter bursts from her – the first in perhaps a lifetime or two – as she realises that she has left her last precious bottle of clover oil behind.
When did it suddenly become National moan about AOS week?
