“You know,” spoke Dapplegrim. “Lordly sorts can ransomed.” He said this as he watched a hobbe draw a dagger across the throat of a knight: the prone man was outfitted in rich shining grey armour, trimmed with gold filigree. Velvet trimmed his cuffs. Ermine lined his cloak. But the hobbe just calmly proceeded. The knight breathed hard, squirmed, tried to crawl away: until he didn’t.
The little hobbe stood there afterwards, and watched the knight die, detachedly. Then he cast a look over at Dapplegrim, and he spoke back in a soft low voice. “Don’t much care,” he murmured. “Too many of me friends are dead. I’m not letting any a’ these Sorthely fellows live. Exchange gold. Grub off to live a life. No. Not that.”
Dapplegrim rumbled out a few his usual horse-monster whinny-growls, turning them around in his throat. He settled on stating, plainly, “Fair enough I suppose.”
Caewen was sitting some distance away, right out at the very lip of the cliff. Her legs were hunched up, so that her knees were near her face. She looked ruined. All bent forward. Her elbows upon knees. Hair whispered about her face in the wind. Other people’s blood had trickled its way into her hair, clotting it into wild red-black locks, and then seeping down into her clothing too.
Stepping gingerly–making his way around the dead–the boy took himself to her clifftop perch.
“Hello,” he said.
She managed a smile. It looked like it took effort. “I’m glad to see you’re safe.” Then she gestured at the view. Small figures of men, both on foot and mounted, were receding away over the rough ground. They ducked and dodged among the trees. Darker shapes of feather and wing hurled and swooped after them. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you battles are glorious,” she said. “It’s not like in the songs. Mostly it’s just a matter of battering the other side until they break, then cutting down the scared and the fleeing. The poet’s lie. The droll-tellers are false fabulists.” She returned her attention to the vista before her. “It’s an awful business, this.”