Chains of Gold by Nancy Springer

sister?”
    He came up the slope like a charging bear. Once you have called a man a coward enough times, it seems, he is no longer afraid. Arlen saw him coming and leaped forward to meet him with a wild shout, spurned his own breastwork with his foot to send it scudding down the esker slope. It took the feet out from under Eachan’s mount, but Eachan leaped clear as the beast came crashing down. He charged afoot, sword raised, and Arlen awaited him between the fanglike rocks. Eachan’s men fell back a few paces, glad enough to leave the field to him for the time—
    And Eachan broke Arlen’s pitchfork with one blow of his sword.
    I sprang forward, battering the brute with my spade, now blunted; he shrugged off my beating as if he had not felt it. And Arlen stood staunchly between his rocks, not yielding, fighting with nothing more than his bare hands. Eyes ablaze, no hint of fear in his face, trying to wrest the sword from Eachan’s grasp, while I was hurling myself against Eachan from the side, kicking and clawing and tearing at him. We both fought like lunatics, but it was no use. Eachan was like a bull for strength, and he was cruel, teasing us. He gave Arlen a few wounds, cuts, shallow wounds to hurt and bleed, and then he gave him a few deeper, trying to make him cry out. And all the while Arlen withstood him gamely—and I broke my spade on Eachan’s back—and then he ran his sword through Arlen’s thigh, and Arlen went to one knee with the pain, his eyes afire with hatred. I stood woodenly, beyond screaming or clawing at Eachan and hitting him; I felt as if my heart had been torn out. Then Eachan stabbed Arlen in the shoulder so that he fell back on the ground.
    â€œBelly next,” Eachan said. And then—
    And then I took a rock as large as a smith’s anvil, picked it up in both hands, lifted it high, and smashed Eachan’s head with it, lifted it high as I should not have been able to do and smashed it again. He lay on the stones, and I split his head open, and I stood on his body and continued to pound at his head with my monstrous rock until what lay there had turned to something other than Eachan. I ground my heel in what had been his brains. When at last I was tired, I looked up—Arlen! I had forgotten him, and he lay moaning in pain. I went to him quickly and pressed a fold of my skirt against his worst wound, the shoulder wound. Hazily I became aware that Eachan’s men were sitting their horses all around us, and I looked up at them. It did not appear as if they were going to help me, so I dismissed them.
    â€œGo away,” I told them.
    They shook their heads. “We are taking you to our lord,” one of them said, meaning Rahv. “There is to be a reward for your capture.”
    I chose not to understand. “Go away,” I said again. “I must care for him. Leave us.”
    Several of them dismounted and began to approach us from all sides. They moved slowly, cautiously, as if they expected me to be dangerous.
    As, indeed, I suppose I was. But I did not feel dangerous just then; I felt exhausted, heartbroken and helpless. They were not going to let me be, they were going to take me away from Arlen, leave him there to die. I could not bear it. All powers that be.… There were no words in me. All was feeling, despair and plea, but the feeling was a prayer.
    The rocks of the esker started to stir.
    The men froze where they stood, some few feet from me. And well they might. For out of every cranny, out from under the boulders, out from between the rocks that had been our small stronghold, out from under Eachan’s body, burrowing out of the very sand—snakes crawled, snakes, so it seemed, by the hundred. Most were small, but some bulked as long as a man and as thick as my arm, and they were black, shiny bead-black with golden eyes, and yellow like the sand, and brown, all hues of brown, dun, ochre, umber, and some were