Chapter 143: An Orc Rescue

The wolves didn’t react. Their eyes tracked the movement and their heads tilted, confused. For one heartbeat they stood there, unable to place what they were looking at.

"Now," Emeric whispered.

Merrick hit the first wolf in the flank before it could lunge. Joss and Perrin took the second. Gaius went through the center like a falling tree, cleaving the third in half. The boars hesitated, and Halvard rode them down, shield first. Oswin, Brennan, and Emeric closed the circle.

It was over in less than a minute.

When the last boar fell, Emeric dropped the magic. Sound came back like a wave breaking. The horses screamed. Brennan was shouting something, laughing, almost sobbing.

"We didn’t lose a man!"

"No." Gaius was breathing hard. He wiped his blade on a clump of moss and looked at Emeric.

It was a long look. It wasn’t suspicion exactly, and it wasn’t fear. It was the look a man in awe.

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

"Your hands are shaking," he said instead.

"A little."

"Rest. I’ll set a watch."

He turned away and began giving orders in a quiet, ordinary voice. He didn’t ask anything.

Emeric flexed his fingers. They were still numb to the knuckles.

It worked well. That is the part that concerned him.

They didn’t make camp. Gaius refused to stop in the open, and Emeric agreed, so they led the horses on foot through the failing light. The Thunderhoof was in front, nose low. The marks on the trees came more slowly now, the nicks higher and farther apart, as if the person cutting them had been getting tired.

The forest changed.

At first, it was only a smell. Cold stone and old snow, something that didn’t belong in the middle of summer. Then the trees grew thinner. The ground tilted gently downward. Between the trunks ahead, a faint grey-blue light was pulsing.

It wasn’t fire. Fire wavered. This stuttered, a slow, uneven beat, like a heart under a thin skin.

Merrick came up beside Emeric. His voice was barely audible. "Is that them?"

"I think so."

"Is it magic?"

"Yes."

The Thunderhoof stopped. It threw its head up, ears flat to its skull, and the lightning along its mane flared and died.

Emeric put a hand on the animal’s neck. Under his fingers, it was shaking. He wanted to say something reassuring. He didn’t have the words.

Then, from the trees ahead, a roar tore through the dark.

It wasn’t a wolf. It wasn’t a boar, or any beast he knew. The sound had a rough edge of speech in it. A raw, ragged, furious shape, torn out of a human throat or something close to it. It rose, cracked, and rose again.

It had words in it. He couldn’t catch them.

But it was defiance. He was certain of that.

They crested the slope on foot, leading the horses behind them.

The trees ended at a lip of rock. Below it, the ground dropped into a round, silver clearing, sixty paces across, lit by the stuttering grey-blue glow Emeric had seen through the trunks.

Four stakes stood around its edge. Each was wrapped in pale bone, and each pulsed in turn, one, two, three, four, like a slow heartbeat.

In the grass between them, the team stood frozen.

Ashe was closest, sword half-raised, mouth open on a word that never came. Tomas was beside him with his shield up. Hale, Corbin, Doss, Pell. Brokk, pickaxe over his shoulder, face twisted in a curse. Lirael, bow drawn, arrow nocked, as straight as a post.

Dew had settled on them all. Their hair was wet. Their eyes were open.

"Gods," Gaius whispered.

"They’re alive," Emeric said. "Look at their chests."

Faintly, in every one of them, a shallow rise and fall.

Then he saw the thing in the middle.

It stood among the frozen men like a wall. Eight feet tall, gray-green and scarred, one tusk broken to a jagged stump, wearing the ruined remains of plate armor. His left arm hung limp against his side. His right leg dragged. In his good hand he held a club made from the trunk of a young tree, and he was swinging it.

A wolf lunged at the frozen team. The club met it in the air with a crack like a snapped branch, and the animal went spinning into the tree line. Two boars charged from the left. He pivoted, took the first on his shoulder, and drove his forehead into the second’s skull.

"What is that?" Brennan breathed.

"An orc," Merrick said. "Gods. An orc."

"Is he with the mage?"

"Does it look like it?" Emeric said.

The orc staggered. His bad leg gave out, and he went down on one knee. A wolf leapt for his throat. He caught it by the jaw with his good hand and slammed it into the ground. It stopped moving.

He rose. He roared.

It was the same sound they had heard in the forest. Rough, cracked, shaped like words. This time Emeric made some of them out.

"Not them. Not them. Take me."

Emeric’s chest went tight.

"Gaius."

"My lord."

"Take the knights. Hit the beasts at the tree line, east side. Draw them off him." He kept his voice low and steady. "Don’t step on the white. Whatever you do, stay on the grass outside the stakes."

"And you?"

"I’m going for the stakes."

"You’ll freeze."

"I won’t know until I try."

Gaius stared at him for a long moment. Then he drew his sword.

"Seven!" he barked. "On me! East side, wedge formation! Brennan, stay close to Merrick!"

They moved.

The knights hit the beasts like a fist.

Gaius led the wedge, riding low in the saddle with his sword out. The first wolf turned and the blade took it across the neck. It dropped. The second jumped at his horse, and Gaius kicked free of the stirrup and landed on his feet, driving his sword up through its jaw.

"Hold the line!"