The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron Page A

us things about ourselves.’ She frowned.
    Then she looked up. ‘Let us pray,’ she said. When she was done, they ate in relative silence. And when she’d finished her share, the nun rose. ‘When we’ve washed up, let’s go bury the dead and say the service,’ she said.
    Phillippa, who had never been a great one for religion, was surprised by how moved she was by the nun’s quiet prayers, her open-faced plea to heaven for the souls of the departed, and by her homily – on how deeply they’d all been touched, and how they must trust in God.
    When the nun was finished, she smiled and kissed each woman on both cheeks. Then she walked to the pile of dead boggles. They didn’t smell, but they didn’t rot as men do – their leathery hides and the heavy cartilage of their ‘shells’ took time to return to the soil.
    ‘God made the Wild, as surely as he made Man,’ said the nun. ‘Although these were our enemies, we pray you take them to you.’
    The nun raised her face to heaven, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross; the entire pile turned to sand.
    Twenty women lost the ability to breathe for a moment.
    The nun turned to Helewise. ‘The afternoon is yet young. Now, about the seed?’
    Ser John had fished for too long.
    He caught and killed more than ten pounds of trout – perhaps much more than ten pounds – and the fishing was superb, at least in part because most of the other fishermen were dead. He didn’t want to stop, but as the sun began to sink in the west he made himself pull his line off the water. He was a mile downstream from where he’d started – a mile from his horse, and, he suddenly realised, a mile from his spear.
    Feeling more foolish than afraid, he plucked his harvest from the water and started back along the bank. The late summer sunlight was still strong and red, and the Wild had seldom looked less threatening but Ser John was too old in the ways of the Wild to be fooled by it, though. He moved quickly, making as little noise as he could.
    He’d travelled a quarter of the distance back to his horse when something alerted him – a movement, perhaps, or a sound. He froze, and then, very slowly, lowered himself to the ground.
    He lay still for a long time, watching, and the sun’s angle steepened. Then he rose and began to stride rapidly along the trail. Every stream like this one had a trail along its bank – men made them, and so did the Wild. They shared the trails.
    When he was just a bowshot from his horse, he climbed a tree to have a look. There were no carrion birds but there was a persistent rustling away to the south, and twice he heard the distant crash of a large animal moving too quickly for stealth. And darkness was just an hour away.
    He swung down from the tree, cursing his shoulder muscles, his age, and how much all this was going to hurt the following day – but he paused to pluck his bag of fish from the ground by the tree.
    To his immense relief – he hadn’t even known how worried he had been – his horse was merely nervous, not boggle-food. He saddled the big riding horse – a failed warhorse – and fetched his heavy spear from the crotch of a forked tree where he’d left it at sunrise.
    ‘I’m an idiot,’ he said aloud. Calm again.
    The Wild’s army was beaten, but the woods were still full of danger. He had been very foolish to leave his horse. He stood with it, calming it.
    He got one foot in the stirrup, powered into the saddle, and turned for home.
    Two hundred feet in front of him, a young doe bolted from the trees into the meadow. She was too young to be cautious, and she turned towards him, never seeing the man or the horse.
    Behind her, a dozen boggles burst from the wood line. One stride into the clearing, the lead creature paused – a slim dark figure against the light, and it took Ser John a moment to register what he was seeing. The boggle had a throw-stick.
    The spear left the throw-stick as fast as an arrow and the missile took