The boy could only stumble to his feet, whilst doing his best not to be ill. The smell of the death-magic remained pungent and pervasive. Memories and fleeting glimpses of the battle were already chasing through the boy, weaving in and out of his mind. He saw in his head visions of dead hobbes, their fingers nervelessly grasping bows. Owls smashed to pieces after falling from the sky. The awful terror that had been clear on the face of the ghostly lady as she was consumed by draig’s fire. All this, and more, wrenched itself around behind his eyes. He felt giddy and sick at the same time. Strange, awful tension writhed in his gut. One moment he wanted to retch, but the next he felt as if sand was pasted all through the interior of his mouth. And the next, he was aware of nothing but the pound of blood in his ears, and a hot flushed feeling on his face and neck and arms. The urge the vomit came back then, stronger.
In the end, he did throw up. Everything he’d eaten for hours came up, and then he wretched some more, until yellow bile and other reluctant stomach fluids came out in spurts and painful convulsions.
He perceived that he was a wet shivering mess some time after the vomiting had finally stopped.
Well, he thought to himself, apparently I’m not cut out for fighting. The thoughts remained dim and distant. His reaction to the violence was no great surprise. He had never been excited by the idea of fistfights and wrestling–not the way some boys are. And he’d never spent time daydreaming himself into a real fight, with swords and daggers and death. It was somehow relieving to come to a sort of certainty about this now. He was absolutely not a fighter by nature, and never would be.
He propped himself up, elbows on folded knees, and surveyed himself. His shirt, pants and hair were swampy with vomit. Still, he needed to get up, dust off, and go back. He needed to find Caewen and tell her that he still had the Old Great Spell. It was safe. He was safe. He had done his job, even if his job had been nothing more than running and hiding. He had done what was asked of him.
He got to his feet unsteadily, and then he began the long, slow awful process of retracing his steps among the tangled roots of the pines, through the heady and scent-thick shadows, over the hard, scrabbly rocks, all red and gold and grey with lichen.
He walked as if in a dream, barely conscious of forward motion, and with no sense of how long it took him to cross the distance that he had sprinted so quickly before. The details of the passing landscape were hard and brittle. He passed more than a few dead hobbes in the treed landscape, and did his best not to look at them.
Then, before he knew it, we was out in the sunlit air again.
All about was a bustle of folk: looking for missing friends, attending the injured as best as could be done, or putting a quick violent end to any injured enemy who still drew breath.