The slap of running sandals sounded outside the screen as armed warriors rushed through the courtyard garden. Drawn by the disturbance, they saw the puddled blood and corpses through the screen, and almost instantly a second Strike Leader arrived, giving fast orders for a grounds search, while detailing six men to surround the Acoma heir.
A moment later, Jican appeared, his composure vanishing as he saw the carnage on the nursery floor. He shoved his load of slates into the hands of the stupefied slave who followed him and, in atypical haste, threaded a path through a room suddenly filled with armed men. Beyond a wall of sticky cushions crouched the Acoma heir, pounding the wall with bruised fists and screaming, ‘Minwanabi, Minwanabi, Minwanabi!’
The warriors who gathered to help seemed unwilling to touch him.
‘Ayaki, come here, it’s over,’ Jican said firmly.
The little one appeared not to hear. Mara’s hadonra reached out anyway. He ignored the child’s flinch from his touch, extracted the traumatized boy from the mess, and bundled him against robes that smelled like chalk instead of slaughter.
‘Let’s get him out of here,’ he instructed the nearest warrior. ‘Get the healer. He’s injured.’ Looking at the motionless forms of Nacoya and the two nurses, he said, ‘And somebody find out if he has a nurse left alive.’
The blows on the shield redoubled. Kevin yanked one hand away from the rim, an instant before losing a finger. He was dimly aware of a heave of movement in the bodies behind his hip, as one of the mortally injured warriors he leaned on thrust a dagger handle into his palm.
‘Defend our Lady,’ croaked a voice. ‘She’s alive.’
Kevin rejected the defeated realization that she could not remain so much longer. Naked and bleeding and half-crazed with battle fury, he accepted the blade, reached under the rim of the shield, and stabbed an enemy foot. The knife was promptly lost as the skewered enemy jerked with a scream of rage.
‘Happy dancing,’ wished the barbarian, turned drunken with blood loss and adrenaline. He took a moment to notice that the blows on the shield had stopped.
Hands in green-lacquered gauntlets caught the rim a moment later and strongly lifted the battered wreckage away. Kevin peered up, blinking against the sun. Through vision that danced with dizziness he made out an officer’s plume and the face of the Acoma Force Commander.
Relief overturned his sense of humour. ‘Thank the gods you’re here,’ he said. ‘We found ourselves in a sticky situation.’
Lujan regarded Kevin’s bloodied hands and the dripping gash on his forearm. ‘Happy dancing?’ he quoted, puzzled.
‘Later,’ Kevin muttered. ‘I’ll explain everything later.’
He turned awkwardly against the pain of his bleeding side, and cursed bilingually. He felt sick, and the sun was too bright.
‘Where is our Lady?’ Lujan demanded, sharply now, and taut with worry.
Kevin blinked bemusedly at the overturned litter. Acoma dead lay crushed like so many impaled beetles underneath.
‘Light of Heaven, not under there!’ Lujan called another order that to Kevin’s ears sounded like noise. Then many hands were reaching down and dragging his battered body out from under the splinters.
‘Don’t,’ Kevin protested weakly. ‘I want to know if Mara . . .’ Words were hard; the air burned his lungs.
Still protesting, he was pushed supine on the ground, and darkness closed over his ears just before the shouts of amazed discovery from the warriors who righted the litter; they sorted the tangle of dead and injured and found a bloodstained, crumpled figure who was not conscious but had no wound beyond a purple bruise on her head.
Mara was laid on the soft, dry moss by the spring. Surrounded by a hundred soldiers, her head pillowed in Lujan’s lap, she roused as a rag that dripped icy water bathed the lump on her brow. ‘Keyoke?’ she murmured as her eyes first flickered open.
‘No,’ her Force Commander answered gently. ‘Lujan, mistress. But Keyoke was the one who sent me here. He thought you might run into trouble.’
Mara stirred, faintly reproving. ‘He’s not your commander, but my Adviser for War.’
Lujan stroked the hair from his mistress’s face and gave her his most insolent smile. ‘Old habits die hard. When my old commander says jump, I jump.’
Mara shifted painfully. She seemed battered and sore in a hundred places. ‘I should have listened.’ Her eyes clouded. ‘Kevin,’ she said. ‘Where is he?’
Lujan inclined his head toward his field healer, who crouched over a second figure lying on the moss. ‘He survived. In a loincloth, without armour, and with a hero’s complement of wounds. Ayee, what a warrior that man is.’
‘Wounds!’ Mara shoved up in distress, and Lujan required a surprising amount of strength to keep her quiet.
‘Lady, be still. He will live, though he’ll have a pretty set of scars. He might limp, and he will be a long time regaining full use of his left hand. The muscles were badly slashed.’
‘Brave Kevin.’ Mara’s voice shook. ‘He saved me. My foolishness almost killed him.’