Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

“Your arm is broken,” said Sanglant. He left the corpses and led Resuelto out to the road. The pony stood with legs splayed to resist the tugging of the tethered goat, who was trying to get to water. Alia had vanished. He heard her whistling tunelessly and saw the flash of her movement on the other side of the road, where another group of the bandits had been hiding behind a shield of slender beech trees. Her shadowed figure bent over a sprawled body. She tugged and with a grunt hopped backward with arrow in hand. To her left, another archer had been hiding right up against the trunk of a tree. His body was actually pinned to the tree by an arrow embedded in his throat. Blood had spilled down the trunk. That was the uncanniest sight of all: The obsidian point of the arrow was sticking out from the back of the man’s neck, while the fletchings were embedded in the tree itself, as if a hole had opened in the tree to allow the arrow to pass through and then closed back up around the shaft at the instant the point found its mark.

Matto stumbled back to the path, still cradling his broken arm in his other hand. He was trying valiantly not to sob out loud.

“Let me see that,” said Sanglant.

The youth came as trusting as a lamb. He sat down where Sanglant indicated, braced against a log, while the prince undid the boy’s belt and gathered the other things he’d need: moss, a pair of stout sticks. He crouched beside the boy and fingered around the red lump swelling halfway along the forearm while Matto hissed hard through his teeth and tears started up in his eyes. It seemed to be a clean fracture, nothing shattered or snapped. The arm lay straight, and no bone had broken through the skin.

“No shame in crying, lad. You’ll get worse if you stay with Henry’s army.”

“I want to stay with you, if you’ll let me serve you,” whispered the lad with that awful glow of admiration in his eyes, augmented by the glistening tears. “I want to learn to fight the way you do.”

Perhaps he tightened his hand too hard on the injured arm. Matto cried out, reeling. Alia appeared suddenly and gripped the lad’s shoulders to keep him still as Sanglant cradled the lump with moss and used the belt to bind the sticks along the forearm and hand. When he finished, he got the boy to drink, then rose and walked to the middle of the road where he threw back his head, listening. The bandits were all dead, or fled. A jay shrieked. The first carrion crow settled on a branch a stone’s throw away. In the distance, he heard the ring of harness as horsemen approached.

Alia came up beside him. “Who’s that coming? Do we leave the boy?”

“Nay, it’ll be his company, the ones we just passed. The horn alerted them. We’ll wait.” He undid the sling that bound his daughter to his back, and swung her around to hold to his chest, careful that her cheeks took no harm from the mail. Jerna played in the breeze above the baby’s head, carefree now that danger was past. Blessing babbled sweetly, smiling as soon as she saw her father’s face.

“Da da,” she said. “Da da.”

Ai, God, she was growing so swiftly. No more than five months of age, she looked as big as a yearling and just yesterday at the fireside she had taken a few tottering steps on her own.

“How did that arrow go through the tree?” he asked casually as he smiled into his daughter’s blue-fire eyes.

His mother shrugged. “Trees are not solid, Son. Nothing is. We are all lattices made up of the elements of air and fire and wind and water as well as earth. I blew a spell down the wind with the arrow, to part the lattices within the tree, so that the arrow might strike where least expected.”

She walked over to the tree and leaned against it. She seemed to whisper to it, as to a lover. His vision got a little hazy then, like looking through water. With a jerk, Alia pulled the arrow free of the wood. The body sagged to the ground. Blood gushed and pooled on fern. The crow cawed jubilantly, and two more flapped down beside it on the branch.

Sergeant Cobbo arrived with his men. They exclaimed over the carnage and congratulated Sanglant heartily as Matto stammered out an incoherent account of the skirmish.

“I can see Captain Fulk was sorry to have left you behind,” said the sergeant with a great deal more respect than he’d shown before.

But Sanglant could only regard the dead men with distaste and pity. In truth, he despised berserkers, the ones who let the beast of blood-fury consume them in battle. He prided himself on his calm and steadiness. He had always kept his wits about him, instead of throwing them to the winds. It was one of the reasons his soldiers respected, admired, and followed him: Even in the worst situations, and there had been many, he had never lost control of himself in battle.