The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue #1) - Christopher Buehlman Page 0,2
nor spear. His heavy chain mail hauberk measured to his knees, but those birds punch holes in skulls, so what was left of Jarril’s parts under the chain mail didn’t bear thinking about. He dropped, too badly hurt even to yell. Frella yelled, though. I glanced left and saw Pagran bent over, covered in blood, but I think it was Frella’s—she was bleeding enough for both of them, spattering the ground from a vicious underarm cut that looked to run elbow to tit.
As the Spanth switched directions, I caught a glimpse of her naked sword, which was definitely a spadín. Sharp enough to stab, heavy enough to chop. A good sword, maybe the best short sword ever made. And she could use it. She moved like a blur now, stepping past Frella and booting her broadsword out of reach.
Spear, her back in tatters, was just getting up on all fours like a baby about to try walking. Beside me, Nervous cried out, “Awain Baith,” Galtish for “death-bird,” and dropped his bow and ran, his older sister turning tail with him, leaving me the only archer in the trees. I had no shot at the Spanth, who kept her shield raised toward me even as she lopped Spear’s hand off below the wrist. Funny what the mind keeps close—I glimpsed the shield closer now and saw its central steel boss was wrought in the shape of a blowing storm cloud’s face, like the kind on the edge of a map.
Pagran had taken up his dropped glaive and was trying to ward the corvid circling him. It bit at the glaive’s head twice, easily avoiding Pagran’s jab and not seeming to notice my missed arrow—these things don’t move predictably, and at twenty paces, an arrow doesn’t hit the instant it flies. Now the war bird grabbed the glaive-head and wrenched sideways so Pagran had to turn with it or lose the weapon. Pagran turned at just the instant the Spanth leapt fast and graceful as a panther and cut him deep just above the heel. Our leader dropped and curled up into a moaning ball. The fight on the road was over.
Shyte.
I nocked another arrow as Spanth and bird looked at me.
The bow wasn’t going to be enough. I had a fine fighting knife on the front of my belt; in a tavern fight, it would turn a geezer inside out, but it was useless against chain. At my back, I had a nasty spike of a rondel dagger, good to punch through mail, but against that sword in that woman’s hand, not to mention the fucking bird, it might as well have been a twig.
They moved closer.
I could outrun the Spanth, but not the bird.
I pissed myself a little, I’m not ashamed to tell you.
“Archer,” she said in that r-tapping Ispanthian accent. “Come out and help your friends.”
* * *
That they weren’t really my friends wasn’t a good enough reason to leave them maimed and wrecked on the White Road, nor was the fact that they deserved it. The Spanth had fished an arrow from the bloody tangle of shirt under her arm, matched its fletching to the arrows still in my side-quiver, and said, “Good shot.”
She gave me the arrow back. She also gave me a mouthful of wine from her wineskin, good thick, black wine, probably from Ispanthia like she was. Pagran, grimacing and dragging himself to lean against a tree, got nothing. Frella, who seemed within two drops of bleeding herself unconscious, got nothing, even though she looked hopefully at the Spanth while I tied her arm off with one stocking and a stick. The wine was just for me, and only because I had shot true. That’s a Spanth for you. The surest way to make one love you is to hurt them.
To speak of the injured, Jarril was still unconscious, which was good—let him sleep; no stander wants to wake up a squatter, especially one barely old enough to know the use of what he’d lost. Spear had picked up her lost hand and run into the forest like she knew a sewer-on of hands whose shop closed soon. I don’t know where the bird went, or didn’t at the time. It was like it disappeared. As for the Spanth, she was off down the road like nothing happened past a scratch and a bloody shirt, but something had happened.
Meeting that Ispanthian birder had just changed my fate.