The Prince looked up and saw the Kindred firing arrow after arrow from the ledge above them, but it was nowhere near enough.
A loud command and a sharptwang!came from behind them, followed by the sound of a thousand pointed needles of death whistling through the air, and then the arrows were falling among them as they ran, slashing through their cloaks, thudding into trees, ravaging bushes.
“RUN!” a voice roared at them. It was Tomaz, standing at the opening to the lowest of the escape passes through the mountain. He was barely fifty yards away, but that distance seemed as far away as the bottom of the sea.
Not knowing where they found the speed, Leah and the Prince shot for the pass, arrows still falling around them as the men reloaded, falling around them like a deadly rain… and then they were through.
They collapsed against the side of the rock wall just long enough for Tomaz to bodily hoist them both in his arms and begin to run, sprinting as fast as he could.
“NOW!” he roared in a voice so loud it left the Prince’s ears ringing.
Boulders crashed down from the sky above them, and the Prince thought for a brief moment that the world was ending. But the rocks landed behind them, and the rumbling soon stopped as the big man slowed and set them down on a small patch of dirt.
“What was that?” the Prince asked, lifting his head.
To his amazement, the pass they had just escaped through was now completely blocked by the remnants of a landslide. He raised his eyes and saw that two groups of Kindred soldiers had scaled the rock walls, waited until the big man had brought them safely through the pass, and then brought a mountain of rubble down to seal it behind them.
There was a loud series of echoing crashes off to their right, followed by a final booming roar, loud enough to sound like thunder, which rippled through the earth beneath their feet.
“What was that?” the Prince repeated. It was very difficult to breath; he must be more winded than he’d first thought.
“The other passes,” Leah managed to say. “They’re all being blocked.”
“And if I’m not mistaken,” Tomaz added, “that last one was the castle itself.”
There were whoops and cheers from the Kindred soldiers standing on the mountainside, and the three of them looked up to see them motioning down over the sheer cliff side to the army trapped in the ravine below.
“They’re retreating! They’re turning back! Hah-hah!”
Leah and Tomaz let out whoops of joy.
“Well done,ashandel!” Leah cried.
“Are you well?” he asked, looking her over with a critical eye.
“Yes, amazingly,” she responded.
“Good—because now I’m going to kill you for being a stupid, foolhardy slip of a girl!” he growled ominously. She just beamed back at him. Slowly the grimace on the big face slid off and he let out a resigned sigh.
“You are far too much like your brother.”
She laughed, and then turned to the Prince and smiled tauntingly.
“What, princeling, going to sit there all night? A little exercise too much for you?”
He tried to respond, but all that came out was a choking gasp that surprised him as much as it did her. Together, they looked down and saw a thick wooden shaft sticking out of the left side of his torso, under the armpit. He coughed and felt something salty and metallic in his mouth; he spat it out and realized, dumbfounded, that it was blood. The last thing he saw was Leah’s look of horror, as the world caved in around him and swirled into blackness.
Chapter Twenty-one: Aemon’s Stand
The Prince of Ravens was standing in a large field, and on his right was Tomaz. On his left was his brother Ramael, the Prince of Oxen.
Tomaz held his huge greatsword, Malachi, an enormous ribbon of steel that seemed to undulate in the shifting light as he moved it back and forth between his hands. Ramael, the Prince of Oxen, held his customary weapons: Two huge battleaxes, double-bladed, and made of the finest Tynian steel, the wood dyed black and the metal dyed red, making it seem as if they had blood on them even when they were clean.
For a long moment, they remained frozen in an awesome tableau, standing proudly on either side of the Prince of Ravens, but then a breeze stirred the grass of the field, and the Prince knew what was going to happen. He jumped up and yelled for them to stop, but he couldn’t make any sound: his mouth was gagged.
They both leapt toward each other, ignoring the Prince as if he weren’t even there. They clashed, and then fell apart. They stood for a moment, towering over the Prince, and then Tomaz fell in a heap. The Prince of Oxen hefted his axes and looked down at the Prince. He smiled a blood-curdling smile.
“Not even he is strong enough to defeat me,” he said in a voice deep as the ocean that rattled the Prince’s bones and squeezed his heart like a vice. “I’m coming for you.”
