It was awful. He saw an owl bitten clean in two by the jaws of a draig. He saw hobbes cut down, with axe or sword. The knights were still intent on fighting from horseback–and this alone was helping the other side. It was madness. One horse toppled over completely and rolled back downhill, taking half-a-dozen riders and mounts with it.
Everything, everywhere was noise and screams and wet red blood and death. It was awful to look at. And yet, it was very much a fight, not a slaughter. The hobbes might have been a small folk, but they were vicious and fast. Caewen and Dapplegrim had thrown themselves right into the breach, and were doing their best to stop more knights piling through. The boy could see the reaction as horsemen came up, over the cliff and into view of the young woman and terrifying horse-creature. Men stopped and stared. A few backed away. Only the bravest seemed willing to attack.
It was as if Caewen was illuminated with some ancient and awful fire. Her eyes seemed to shine. Her sword was sticky with blood, but it glowed just like a hot wand of wrought iron, taken from a forge. Or perhaps none of that was true. Perhaps it was all a confusion in the boy’s eyes.
The fight was so awful.
He watched as a hobbe dashed underneath a horse, and used a knife to open the horse’s guts where there was no armour to protect it. The horse made a terrible, sickening noise as its innards collapsed out of the split. It went down and the knight came down too, with a thud that sounded like bones being shattered.
He watched as the same hobbe was split through head, neck and chest by a battleaxe, brought down by another of the endless stream of knights.
Up above, the fight between draig and owls did not appear to be going well for either side. A lot of dead bodies trailing little spirals of feathers had fallen, and one draig had apparently lost both its eyes: it was thrashing about blindly on the wing–barely under control, if it was under control at all. Then, the white wraiths entered the fight. They came up out of the darkness from between some tall rocks, surprising the knights on a poorly defended flank. A glow like moonlight on water danced at their feet. They set themselves to cutting at men, pushing blades right through a belly or a throat, sweeping with swords as sharp and cold as icicle and nightmare. The phantom manifestation of the Wounded Queen, meanwhile, had climbed a small stony hillock, and was now loosing arrows at the knights from this vantage. These were not small, poisoned barbs, such as used by the hobbes. These were great, thick arrows, shorn of a strange white wood and tipped with broad heads of a gold-grey metal. Every arrow she fired struck its mark, and every strike was deadly. A strange grey pallor spread through both flesh and armour wherever an arrow struck. It looked much as if the arrows turned both the body and encompassing steel into brittle ash. And perhaps they did. There was one man who had been frozen into the twisted but still-standing shape of a grey corpse by an arrow-strike. He was toppled over in the fighting, and the grey body broke into a cloud of dust and charred bones the moment it hit the ground.
The boy pulled himself to his feet. He wavered and considered when it would be time to run. Even with the ghaists and the Fane Queen, even with Caewen and Dapplegrim setting about with a carnage of hoof and sword, even with a hundred owls, and a thousand poisoned arrows: the fight was turning against them. There were just too many soldiers and horsemen. The knights were pressing forward. For every one that fell, two or three more were pushing up the hill. More and more hobbes were being cut down where they stood. Fewer and fewer owls were left to harry the draig–and a moment later the less-wounded of the dragonish creatures broke away and was able to sweep itself down, towards the ground again.
With a shrieking roar, the beast landed atop an outcrop in the fight and laid waste around itself. The rider was attempting to control it with goad and rein, but the beast was enraged and intent on death. It killed several of the Sorthe knights, just as surely as it killed a dozen hobbe archers. One of the white ghaists ran at it with a sword above her head. Her hair streamed silver in the fickle light and her eyes burned blue. But the draig rounded on her and caught her with blast of unnatural, white hot fire, throwing her to the ground. Whatever ethereal flesh the Fane Queen had used to make the bodies of the wraiths was not strong enough to resist that. The flesh wavered and blew away, like smoke, leaving empty armour behind and and faint voice of pain.
The boy hadn’t even known that draig could belch fire.
It seemed that most of the hobbes were unaware of this too.
A sudden ripple of panic began to shudder its way through the hobbes, and even the white ghaists looked fear-struck.
But Caewen and Dapplegrim.
Caewen and Dapplegrim.
No.
Not them.
They turned and charged the creature.
It reared and drew in another long draught of breath, holding it in: a blistering furnace heat began to roil around behind its teeth.
Caewen and Dapplegrim were still too far away.
They could not hope to reach the beast in time.
It was going to be awful.