The raiders grew bolder as the royal procession crawled farther north. The lakes were still too iced over to catch a fish, the game birds were flying over without stopping, and greens had barely begun to show their first shoots. The deserters were starving.

  Compliments of Thorns took shifts as outriders, driving off or killing the gangs of bandits who tried to waylay the train. Much to the dismay of the crown prince’s grafted men, Etian rode out as often as any of them.

  During one of these forays, the cry went up on the westernmost point of their wedge. Faren’s horse went down, then they were on him. Izak and Sketcher were the next closest. There were a dozen bandits, armed with maces, notched axes, and worn swords, wearing dented armor and rusty mail.

  Only one deserter was mounted, but that made him the biggest threat. Izak caught hold of the energies in his blood and wicked thorns burst from within, piercing his organs and cracking through his skull. The dead man fell from his courser with the crash of metal plate.

  Sketcher’s mount leapt the corpse, and the big rustic rode down a pair of deserters who had turned tail and run.

  Faren’s horse floundered, its foreleg a ruin of mud, blood, and bone. On the ground with his attackers, the Thorn hacked and thrust, driving his longsword into unprotected or weak points at the groin, eyes, and joints. The former soldiers knew their business, but with the weight of their armor dragging them down, the starving men were nowhere near fast enough for a healthy, unencumbered Thorn.

  Still mounted, Izak galloped to assist, Loss sweeping like a scythe through the deserters surrounding Faren.

  An arrow thudded into the thick leather of Izak’s saddle. His horse screamed and plunged, throwing the prince mid-swing to the half-frozen ground. The impact knocked the air from Izak’s lungs. He curled in on himself, lungs bucking and fighting. At the edge of the pain, a voice screamed that he’d dropped his swordstaff.

  Suddenly, arrows were falling like rain. Finally catching a gasp of air, Izak rolled to his hands and feet. He snatched a hide shield off one of Faren’s kills, hunching under it and searching frantically for Loss.

  Chainmail clinked. Izak spun, snatching blood energies instinctively, and boiling them. A man in a rusty mail shirt went down screaming.

  Loss lay a handful of paces away. Izak and a weaponless scar-faced deserter saw her at the same time.

  They sprinted.

  Arrows thudded into Izak’s shield and pocked the ground. The deserter was closer. Izak smoke-stepped, bursting into a cloud of black.

  He resolidified a heartbeat later on one knee with a hand on the swordstaff. The deserter couldn’t stop. Izak tried to get Loss up to impale the man, but he wasn’t fast enough. A blinding pain flashed inside his skull as the deserter crashed into him.

  Awkwardly, Izak shoved with his shield-arm. He and the deserter hit the wet, trampled grass. Desperate hands clawed at his uniform jacket, his face. A thick fingernail hooked Izak in the nostril and tore. The man’s ragged panting rang loud as he scrabbled thumbs at Izak’s eyes. Cursing and blind, Izak kicked and swung the shield sidelong, clumsily battering the deserter’s ribs. He had to get enough distance between them to use Loss.

  With a meaty schlock, the deserter’s scrabbling stopped and he slumped forward onto Izak. A second chop sent blood gushing from his empty stump of a neck. The man’s head thudded to the ground and rolled back against Izak’s cheek, the hair greasy and warm.

  Driven by some instinctive disgust, Izak slapped the head away.

  “All right, Commander?” Faren asked, spinning to meet the next attacker.

  “Better now.”

  Levering the decapitated body off, Izak clambered to his feet with Loss. Blood dripped from his face and hair, going cold as it soaked into his uniform. He scrubbed a sleeve at his eyes to clear them.

  Arrows whistled past. Izak swung the round shield around to block them, searching for their source.

  “There!” Faren’s longsword clanged off a deserter’s ax, throwing sparks. While the man fought to arrest its swing, Faren stabbed the point of his blade through his face with a wet crunch. “On the rise! East!”

  Two longbowmen, so far away that any man stupid enough to charge would look like a porcupine by the time he made it to them. Archers were the bane of a swordsman’s existence for good reason.

  “Got them!” Sketcher whipped his horse around.

  “No, you light-burnt—” But the big Thorn was already on the move. Izak broke off in cursing.

  Sketcher ducked low over his mount’s head, but he was such a huge target, he would be impossible to miss. As if to prove the point, arrows sprouted from his shoulders and arms. The rustic bellowed, but didn’t slow his charge.

  On the tail end of Sketcher’s shout came war cry from the west. A second wave of ragged deserters, these split into three groups and moving to surround them. No sign of the rest of Izak’s men. How long had they been fighting already? Either the remainder of the crown prince’s Thorns hadn’t heard the skirmish or they were busy wrestling Etian away from the danger.

  “They’re going to surround us,” Izak shouted to Faren. “Take my back.”

  Nodding, Faren ducked behind Izak.

  Arm still looped through the round shield’s brittle leather handles, Izak raised his fist and caught hold of as many energies as he could in one go.

  The first man screamed as his blood boiled him from the inside out. The man wore a helm that obscured his face, but that didn’t muffle his cries. Izak had used the spell enough times to know when the keening reached a new high then broke off suddenly, the man was dead.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  A burning line of pain lit up Izak’s calf. An arrow stuck high in the back of his boot. Nothing that would kill him, thankfully. He didn’t have time to die right then, and with that line of men still charging toward them, yanking it out and healing the injury wasn’t a possibility either.

  Snarling, Izak turned his attention back to the deserters. He burst the veins in the next man’s lungs and packed them with clotted blood. They were too close now for boiling blood. Thorns for the next three, great wicked things bursting from within their bones, shredding their muscles with every movement, piercing their brains and cracking their skulls open to steam in the cold night air.

  In the corner of his eye, distant movement. Sketcher leaping from his horse just beyond the rise Faren had pointed out. The big rustic gave an echoing roar as he split a bowman nearly in half from neck to groin with a brutal overhead chop of his longsword.

  The thunder of boots and hooves and the clash of steel reminded Izak of the soldiers flanking them. He spun to join Faren in battle and found his brother Thorn lying in the mud with an arrowhead sprouting from his throat, its fletching stuck out the back of his neck.

  Faren’s last action was a weak grab for the shaft with one muddy hand. Then the hand slipped off, and he fell still.

  Another enraged bellow from Sketcher split the plains.

  But the sound of hooves heralded the arrival of Etian, Hare, Phriese, and Rake. Dolo and Gray had been pulled from their mounts. They ran behind on foot, but the rest crashed through the oncoming lines of deserters, splitting and skewering and slicing as they rode.

  A monster of a man in a rusty chainmail shirt wielding a battleax as big as a cartwheel rushed Izak from one side, while a compact man in boiled leathers and a halfhelm screamed and stabbed a sword for his ribs.

  Loss spun, her haft slapping the sword aside. The impact shook Halfhelm’s arms to his shoulders. Throwing his body weight behind the arrow-studded shield, Izak bashed Halfhelm. The man shrieked as one of the shafts slid in through the eye opening.

  Izak spun, sweeping Loss in a wide arc that sliced open the face of the helmetless monster with the battleax. Gore sprayed. The man’s bearded cheek flapped in the wind as he reared the ax back, two-handed, to chop Izak in half.

  Behind Izak, Halfhelm screamed another battle cry. Izak whirled, catching the man across the body with Loss’s shaft. Growling with effort, Izak twisted, jerking Halfhelm into the ax-wielder’s path.

  The enormous ax split the man’s halfhelm and skull like wood. His scream became a gurgling snuffle as he collapsed.

  Izak sidestepped the corpse and whipped Loss’s blade around again, stabbing her into the axman’s throat. Rusty chainmail turned wet and red as life poured from the man’s neck, but he didn’t stop coming. Izak circled away, raising the shield. The monster threw his weight into a final swing of the ax. The blade crashed into Izak’s shield. The impact drove the prince to his knees.

  A sliver of much-sharpened steel peeked through the hardened leather and wood to kiss Izak’s forearm.

  The monster hit his knees beside Izak, mouth working, lips dribbling bloody saliva. He yanked weakly at the ax, trying to dislodge it.

  Finally, he crumbled, dead.

  Izak climbed to his feet again, lungs heaving, drying sweat and blood making him itch all over. The arrow through his calf gave a painful twinge and nearly took him down again. That was going to have to come out soon. Flicking Loss to the side, he slung the excess blood from her blade and surveyed the battlefield.

  The only men left standing wore the royal colors of House Khinet.

  Still on horseback, Etian planted a boot on the chest of a man in plate and pulled his falchion out with a screeching metallic squelch. The crown prince hadn’t taken any injuries that Izak could see.

  Like Izak, Dolo, Rake, Gray, and Hare turned, searching the battlefield for further threat, swords at the ready.

  Except Gray’s blade was in the wrong hand, Izak realized. His sword arm hung at a bad angle, weeping blood. The other three had taken a handful of minor cuts that the blood magic should seal in minutes.

  Phriese knelt beside Faren and closed their dead brother’s staring eyes.

  I should have killed the archers first, Izak thought. If I’d boiled their blood before dealing with the soldiers who were charging us, Faren would still be alive. Doubts arose as to whether he could have reached the bowmen with royal blood magic at that distance, but he pushed them aside. Those were just excuses. Ways to pretend he hadn’t failed his men. Next time, I’ll take out the ranged threats first.

  “That all of them?” Etian asked, wiping at the blood-splattered lens of his glasses with a sleeve.

  “I think so,” Dolo said, though he kept turning, kept searching.

  Sketcher rode over the ridge, leading a small herd of horses. Some were the Thorns’ runaway mounts, some the deserters’. There was even a small, shaggy lakeland pony with a rope bridle and no saddle.

  “Four more over the rise, past the archers,” the big rustic said. “I don’t think they were part of either band here, just came when they heard the fighting. Must’ve wanted to get in on the spoils.”

  “Dead?” Etian asked.

  Sketcher nodded. “Couldn’t go after the horses until they were dealt with.”

  “You’re a beast.” Izak bent to snap off the rusty steel arrowhead poking out his calf before the last of the adrenaline left him and the pain caught up truly. Not an easy task with his hands trying to shake themselves off his body. “I would’ve been a dead man if you hadn’t chopped that archer in half like the rabid bear you are.”

  “Didn’t get there in time to save Faren,” Sketcher rumbled.

  Izak wanted to tell the big man Faren’s death was his commander’s fault, but the movement of muscle around the shaft made Izak’s gorge rise. He swallowed the bile and tried again. Finally the arrowhead broke off. With a less-than-manly shriek, he yanked the shaft out.

  “I couldn’t catch your horse, Commander. It’s running like there’s a pack of dyre on its tail.” Sketcher handed off the extra reins to Hare to dole out, but the bastard of West Crag was too preoccupied by surveying the carnage around them.

  “He’s got an arrow in the withers,” Izak said, “right at the edge of the saddle. Probably jostles every time he takes a step and scares him again. Get down here, and I’ll get that arrow out of your shoulder.”

  Obviously Sketcher had already dealt with the shafts in his arms himself—those had only hit meat—but the last one was going to be a problem. It had lodged in his shoulder blade.

  “This isn’t going to be pleasant,” Izak warned him. “Is your dirk sharp?” A nod. “Let’s see it.”

  Rake cleaned his sword on a deserter’s ragged trousers. “Anybody else piss themselves, or just me?”

  “Thought I was going to,” Gray said. He nodded at his dangling arm. “Then I took that mace swing and forgot how.”

  “Tell anybody who asks that you fell in a puddle,” Izak advised Rake. “That’s what I do.”

  While Izak worked on cutting out Sketcher’s arrowhead, Etian dismounted.

  “Any insignias?” The crown prince searched the corpses. “Do we know whether they’re king’s army or from one of the lord’s standing armies?”

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?” Phriese said, his bug eyes traveling over the carnage. “Whatever army they deserted, they’re done fighting now.”

  Sketcher’s ruddy complexion went gray as Izak finally found steel. Sending a surge of royal blood magic to start cleansing the notch in the bone, Izak wiggled the offending bit of metal until it gave up its hold. Sketcher’s eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out.

  “Strong gods,” Hare finally piped up. “That was three gangs of the scum. Three gangs!”

  “Always good to have your insight, Hare,” Izak said, tossing the bloody arrowhead aside.

  He sent as much of the royal blood magic as he dared to speed the initial healing of Sketcher’s butchered shoulder, reserving what he hoped would be enough to get Gray holding a sword again.

  Straightening up, Izak beckoned to the other wounded man.

  “Let’s see that mace wound.”

  Gray shot him a gallows smile. “First put down the dirk.”

  my Patreon is ~20-30 chapters ahead of RRL right now. (The chapter numbers are different because I've got it separated into each book on Patreon, but... I put the brain in the robot. You get the idea.)

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