Chapter 952: Mad Dash (Part One)
Heila was mad.
Heila was mad. No, mad was far too mild of a word to describe the diminutive witch as she raced across the rooftops of Hanrahan Town, her breath coming in ragged gasps that burned her throat in the frigid air. Each time she reached the edge of a roof, she had to force herself to draw on Snow Fang’s power one more time, sending flurries of snow into the air to use as stepping stones to the next building.
Lunacy might be a better word to describe her rush across the rooftops in the night. If this had been how she started the battle, perhaps it would have been a reasonable, even a wise method of avoiding townsfolk and rushing to assault the Hanrahan Keep directly.
But this wasn’t the beginning of the battle, and the strain she felt was showing. It should have been almost effortless to leap between rooftops, she’d had plenty of time to practice with Snow Fang since she received the blade from Master Erkembalt, yet now it required conscious effort and desperate concentration just to conjure flurries that would bridge the gap between rooftops.
Her legs trembled with exhaustion from the magical healing that had drained her reserves, and twice already she’d misjudged a landing, her cloven hooves slipping on ice-slick thatch as rotted timbers creaked ominously beneath her slight weight.
Focus, she commanded herself, taking a deep, steadying breath and slowing her pace as another roof beam groaned under her feet. The damage from the recent blizzard was everywhere, from missing sections of thatch to broken support beams barely held together by hasty repairs, and even entire sections of roofing that sagged dangerously where snow had accumulated in the hollows that formed when entire sections of a roof collapsed.
"Curse that stupid, greedy, human lord," she muttered as she leaped to another roof, landing harder than intended when her usual grace failed her. The impact sent her crashing through a section of damaged thatch, her armored coat catching on broken timbers as she scrambled to avoid falling into the house below.
"Isabell was right about the neglect in this place," she said as she pulled herself free and resumed the charge across the rooftops that only a lunatic would contemplate in the state Heila was in. But even lunacy fell short of describing her plans as she approached the walls of Hanrahan Keep and the archers who stood atop them.
There were no buildings within a hundred paces of the keep’s walls, and Baron Hanrahan orders reserved more than twenty skilled archers and twice as many men-at-arms to defend his fortress, even during the demon assault on the walls.
If Loman had realized the Baron had a reserve who were commanded to remain in place at the keep, he might have sent them to the outer walls, but there hadn’t been time to discuss his deployments with the baron before he was escorted out of the great hall.
Heila’s heart hammered in her chest as she sprinted toward the edge of town and the wide gap that led to the keep. It was a different form of ’mad’ that kept her moving as fast as she was able, even though it meant leaving everyone else behind in order to reach Loman Lothian as quickly as possible.
She was already furious at the sneak attack while they’d been trying to convince the human defenders to surrender. The only saving grace in it was that Lord Jalal would survive with nothing more than the loss of his arm. If he had died, Heila didn’t know if she would have been able to forgive the Lothian lord for striking such a cowardly blow.
But when she saw the wanton disregard for the lives of his own men as Loman’s rain of luminous arrows consumed the courtyard, it took every last bit of her restraint to remain in the west gate plaza to arrange a surrender with Inquisitor Diarmuid. The rage boiling within her chest only grew hotter when she healed the wounded of both armies and fully comprehended how much greater the suffering had become because of Loman’s sneak attack.
So much of this could have been prevented if the humans had just accepted the defeat of their champion, Tommin. Or, if Loman insisted on representing his people, he should have taken the field against Dame Sybyll in Tommin’s place.
"Ashlynn would never have been so cowardly," Heila muttered as she ran. "Even when she was weak, she was braver than this." Ashlynn hadn’t hidden or resorted to cowardly tricks when she fought the Tuscans on the frozen lake. She hadn’t harmed her own people when she fought against the Frost Walker Ancestors in the High Pass.
Ashlynn was living proof that humans weren’t all part of the cowardly, selfish, murderous pestilence that voraciously consumed Eldritch land and Eldritch lives. Ollie was too, and from the impression she had of her so far, Isabell was the same. There were good humans among the common folk and the nobility. But Loman, it seemed, lived up to his Lothian name and all the wickedness of the corrupted Church as well.
"Aaaah!" Heila cried in surprise as a luminous arrow came streaking towards her. With a crash and a slide that nearly saw her falling to the cobblestone street below, she flung herself sideways at the last minute, narrowly avoiding the first arrow of light, and sliding within a handsbreadth of the follow-up shot that buried itself into the snow less than a handsbreadth from her hooves.
She only had a heartbeat, two at the most, to grab the hilt of Snow Fang and fling herself into the sky before a third arrow struck the place she’d just been lying in the snow, and she fell halfway to the cobblestone streets before she gained her footing on the swirling flurry of snowflakes.
"Finally," she said with a relieved grin as she dashed higher into the air, pulling a whirlwind of icy air with her that set the long tails of her armored leather coat flapping behind her like a pair of leathery wings.
Her relief was short-lived, however, when she glanced over her shoulder and realized that the deadly rain of arrows pelting the west gate plaza hadn’t abated in the slightest!
She had expected that Loman would have to abandon his assault on the soldiers in the plaza in order to shift his focus to the approaching threat of a witch, but it seemed like she’d still underestimated the young Lothian Lord.
Somehow, it seemed like Loman Lothian could both assault the forces in the west gate plaza and fire the sort of lethal arrows that had nearly claimed Lord Jalal’s life directly at her, and if one of those arrows struck her diminutive figure... She was sure to lose far more than just a limb.