Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4)

Child of Flame (Crown of Stars #4) Page 72

“No!” cried Alain, for truly, she was helpless before them, and it would be more merciful to take her captive. But they hated her kind too much. He winced as they pinned her to the ground with angry spear thrusts. Her blood ran over the dirt.

The baby wailed.

“Weiwara!” cried Adica, dashing inside.

He looked away from the dying warrior thrashing on the ground. Tosti had run inside after Adica. Kel wrenched his spear free and grabbed Alain by the shoulder.

He shouted a word, indicating the woman. Beyond, fire sparked and caught in the thatched roof of one of the village houses.

“Come! Come!” Kel stooped to pick up the screaming baby.

About ten Aoi warriors fitted in bronze armor and wielding weapons forged of metal emerged from the last bend in the earthworks.

“Come!” cried Kel with more urgency, gesturing toward the village and its closed gates. A man lay prone by the outer ditch. Farther out, five of the enemy clustered behind the shield of a ruined hut. From this shelter they shot flaming arrows toward the village, an easy target over the low stockade.

Adica and Tosti appeared at the door with Weiwara’s limp body between them. Blood ran down the side of her face, and a nasty bruise discolored her left cheek, but she breathed.

“The other baby!” cried Alain. He pointed to the shrieking infant and then to the forest.

“No!” said Adica, indicating the threat to the village.

The horn rang out again. Armed adults sallied out from the village, yelling defiantly. Beor led them; Alain recognized him by his height and his shoulders, and by the bronze spear he carried. A half dozen split off from the main group to hurry toward the birthing house, among them Weiwara’s husband and Urtan.

“Go!” said Alain, because it was a word he knew, and because help was coming. “I go get baby.”

Kel shrieked with glee and shoved the infant into Tosti’s arms. He grabbed the dead woman’s bronze spear from the ground. “I go!” He struck his own chest with a closed fist, and then Alain’s. “We go!”

There wasn’t time to argue. The ones they sought had already gotten a head start, and Alain wasn’t going to let that baby be stolen, not when God had welcomed him to this village by granting it the blessing of living twins on the day he had arrived.

He grabbed the shield off the corpse and ran for the forest as the sun split the horizon behind them. Adica called after him, but the clamor of battle drowned out her voice. They hit the shadow of the trees, and he raised a hand for silence as he and Kel and the hounds came to a halt. They heard the headlong flight of the other two as cracks and rustles in the forest ahead. Rage bounded away, so they followed her trail as she pelted through the trees.

Alain saw the two Aoi when he burst out of the woods at the border of the burial field. Sorrow and Rage loped after them, big bodies closing the gap. They hit the man limping behind without losing momentum and he tumbled to the ground beneath them. Kel reached him first. Before Alain could shout for mercy, Kel stuck him through the back. As the bronze leaf-blade parted the man’s skin, Kel screamed in triumph.

The sound shook Alain to his bones, made bile rise in his throat. He had known for a long time that he couldn’t serve the Lady of Battles by killing. But he could save the child.

The hounds matched him stride for stride as he ran after the third warrior, the one who carried the crying infant under his arm. The warrior cut left, and then right, as if expecting to dodge arrows. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Alain and the hounds and that made him run harder, although he seemed to be grinning like a madman, caught in an ecstasy of flight and fury. But Alain knew fury, too, rising in his heart, goaded by the memory of a tiny body coming to life beneath his hands.

By now they had moved well away from the river, but a stream cut down from a hill on the eastern side of the burial field. When the other man tried to head up the stream, he found himself boxed in by the hillside and by a cliff down which a cataract fell, not more than twice a man’s height but too rugged to climb without both hands.

The warrior was no fool. He kept hold of the baby and brandished his spear threateningly as he sprang back to put the rock wall behind him. The baby hiccupped in infant despair, exhausted by its own screaming, and fell silent. Far behind, Kel shouted Alain’s name.

He threw down shield and staff as Sorrow and Rage stalked forward on either side of him. “Give me the child, or strike me down, I care not which you choose.”

The warrior’s eyes widened in fear or anger, flaring white, all that could be seen of his face behind the grinning dog mask he wore.