“Shift to the right! Shift!”
The line staggered to the right trying to shift under the weight of another concerted attack. Their feet slipped in the ice and snow and men cursed as they fell. Slowly, ponderously, the line began to move, finding purchase on firm ground not completely covered by snow. Owain, shoulder behind his shield, growled and pushed his shield into the press, knocking the man in front of him off balance. He slipped in the ice and as he fell backward, Owain struck out with his war hammer and stove in the man’s helmet. The line ahead of him was starting to falter but that was not going to be enough to change the fight. Behind the lines, chanting as he drew figures in the frigid air, was one of the sorts of mages that lived in the high reaches of the mountains, powerful, reclusive men who, for a price, could be called down to fight for one lord or other. The man at Owain’s right, old enough to have been his father, could remember the last time a lord had a sorcerer in the Highlands. It had taken half the country to stop him and left them weak to attack by the orcs. So this time, instead of waiting for the mage to come from the mountain, the High Council sent men to kill him first.
“We’ve got to get to him,” the older warrior grunted as he speared a man in the groin with his spear. “You see them clouds? That’s the magic. He’s about to send ice like spears down on us, no doubt. Owain, you, Ciaran, Padraig, and Black Ned, you break out when I tell you, bowl over these bastards, and kill ‘im.” Owain nodded and shouted the order to the three other men near him in the line. “Ready… NOW!”
The whole line, drilled in the summer in the warm plains in the south, moved as though it were another drill. Each man took three paces back and reformed quickly and the enemy, without the press of men against them, staggered and fell. Gaps appeared in their line and Owain and his companions aimed themselves at one of them at a run. Owain’s shield took a ringing blow on the boss but he shouldered past the attacker, focused solely on the sorcerer. He heard, but did not see, Black Ned fall to his left but a second later, he and the other two had broken through the lines and were charging at the sorcerer. The man, his filthy beard matted with the remains of too many meals past and woven with bones, looked up from his ritual and grunted. He drew another symbol in the air and flung a casual hand toward the onrushing men. From nowhere, spears of ice lanced from his fingers. The man crouched behind their shields, still moving, and the ice crashed through the linden boards as neatly as steel. “What in the name of the…” Ciaran could no finish his sentence as another gesture from the mage launched a spike of ice from the ground beneath him up like a dagger, splitting him from crotch to crown.
“Kill that bastard!” Owain shouted and Padraig, the closer of the surviving pair, shouted his victory as his sword arced down to slit the sorcerer’s throat. The ragged man looked up but his eyes were filled with contempt and not fear. Tendrils of ice leapt from the ground like a fence and blocked Padraig’s blow. Before he could recover, he found his feet were trapped in the ice. The sorcerer grinned toothlessly at him and drew a long dagger. Suddenly Owain understood. The clouds were gathered but they had not rained down death on the Highland men. Instead, they swirled, almost impatiently, and Owain could guess why. A sacrifice was needed to seal the magic in blood and Padraig, helpless as the ice grew around him, was to be that sacrifice. Owain cocked his arm back and hurled the war hammer, end over end, at the sorcerer. He did not even wait to see if it struck before yanking his short sword from its sheath. The lead weighted hammer head of his weapon struck the sorcerer in the chest, breaking ribs and sending him staggering a pace back in the snow. Owain closed with the sorcerer, putting himself between the man and his sacrifice, his shield held high and his sword low, snarling defiance as the sorcerer stepped forward, shrieking a curse. Owain moved quickly, knocking the dagger out of the man’s hand with his shield and sank his short sword to the hilt in his throat. As the blood welled up, his body seemed to glow and unnatural blue, then burst apart in an explosion of energy. Owain was thrown off the edge of a ravine and, as he fell, dashed his head against the rocks, before he sank into the snow below.
Padraig, the bonds broken with the sorcerer’s death, scrambled to the ledge and looked down at Owain’s limp body. It seemed to glow with the same light that came from the sorcerer and, seeing his friend unable to move, he concluded that Owain had died saving him. He had a debt to Owain’s family, a life debt now, and though he could not retrieve Owain’s body as it began to lash down freezing rain, he took his war hammer, Owain’s father’s before him, and, with a tale of heroics, returned with both to his friend’s childhood home.
Owain, a day later, at least, began to stir, his head feeling as though it had been beaten with a blacksmith’s hammer. His skin felt like it was crawling off him and when he finally pried his eyes open, he found himself looking face to snout with a giant wolf, a wolf large enough to ride, with a rider there as well. “Maker’s balls, what in the hell is this,” he shouted as he scrabbled backward over the snow until his back was against the wall of the ravine. He pulled out his dagger and waved it, ineffectively he would admit, at the wolf-mounted strangers. “Who are you? What in the hell happened? What’s that bloody wolf…” He felt the power coursing in him again and a tendril of cold air, like a breath on a winter’s morning, trailed from his fingertips like the sorcerer’s. “And what in the nine hells is that?!”
