The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(56)

I spat a curse and lashed my lathered horse to greater speed. If the bastard managed to cut the reins or cut the horses loose altogether, we were lost. The road was far too narrow at that point for the following wagons to even steer around a crash. One horse down or disabled would mean a catastrophic pileup, and all would be lost. But it wasn’t an easy feat to just cut the reins. He would have to lean so far out over the back of the yoked, galloping pair that a single misstep from either horse would throw him under the wagon. In fact, anyone sane wouldn’t have attempted what he was trying to do. But Aquila’s Sons of Dis were fanatics, so sanity wasn’t really an issue.

Apparently, it wasn’t really one for me either . . .

As Sorcha helpfully pointed out, shouting, “Fallon, stop! You’re mad!”

Maybe, but I wasn’t about to stop. I galloped up beside the rider hacking at the reins and flung myself from the back of my horse onto his—knocking him from his saddle. I almost fell with him but managed to grip the mane of his horse, winding my fingers tight in the horsehair as, beneath me, the Dis rider grappled desperately, clutching the side of the saddle girth strap with one hand and the harness of the wagon horse with the other. Both animals were panicked and running full out, but the rider clung on grimly, hanging faceup between the two beasts and kicking his feet, trying to hook them onto the harness.

I heard myself snarl, looking down on him as I righted myself in his vacated saddle. We locked eyes for a brief moment, and I saw the maniacal hatred in his gaze, unmitigated by fear . . .

I lifted my knee and drove the heel of my boot down into his face.

His scream as he lost his grip and fell was brief, truncated mid-cry when the wagon wheels ran him over. But even though he hadn’t managed to sever the reins, he had managed to pull them free from Charon’s grip. I looked down and saw that the reins were trailing uselessly on the ground between the galloping beasts. Without a firm hand guiding them both, the horses were running wild, and it was only a matter of time before, in their panicked state, a swerve or a misstep ended in bone-crushing disaster. Charon was leaning out over the front boards of the wagon, reaching for all he was worth, arm outstretched and fingers splayed wide, but he wasn’t even close.

The wagon was runaway, and there was no stopping it.

My own horse pounded along behind the mount I’d appropriated, running full out even though he was riderless, because there was nowhere else to go but forward. Soon there would be no room for the horse I was on. The only thing for me to do was to switch mounts again—this time to the yoked wagon horse running beside me. The steep walls of the pass soared up on either side, closer and closer. I hitched my legs up under me and leaped—

Just as two more arrows split the air.

The first missed. The second laid a fiery kiss along the top of my shoulder, the razor-sharp point slicing through the fabric of both my cloak and my tunic and carving a searing gash in my flesh. The sudden bloom of pain made me twist midair and overshoot my target. I slewed across the draft horse’s broad withers and barely managed to grasp a handful of harness before tumbling off the other side and down between the two galloping beasts.

“Morrigan’s teeth!” I swore, hanging half upside down, with a clear view of Tanis on horseback, galloping along the top of the valley ridge high above. “Damn it, Hestia! Where are you . . .”

I snarled through my teeth, kicking my feet as I struggled to right myself. After that, there wasn’t much I could do but hang on. Draft horses didn’t exactly respond to the pressure of a rider’s knee and heel.

“Macha . . .” I ground out the first of the three sacred names of the Morrigan, my jaw clenched to keep my teeth from rattling out of my head. “Macha, Nemain . . . Badb Catha . . .” I despaired of the goddess hearing me over the thunder of hooves and wheels. “Hear me, my goddess . . . Help me save my friends. Send me your strength . . . Send me help! Take my blood, take anything you want from me . . . Raven of Battles . . . help me!”

My grip was failing. In another moment I would fall. The horses would falter. All would be lost . . .

And then, the Morrigan answered my prayer.





XV


“FALLON!”

I twisted and looked over my other shoulder to see that Sorcha had thrown a leg out over the front boards of the wagon. Charon was shouting at her to stop, but she ignored him and edged out onto the yoke pole that ran between the horses.

“Fallon!” she called to me again. “Stay where you are! I’m coming out . . .”

I didn’t have much choice but to stay where I was, crouched and clinging to the back of the wagon horse like a burr. My hair, torn from my braid by the wind, whipped into my eyes, and blood was running down my arm from the arrow crease on my shoulder. Sorcha was coming to save me, but the last time my sister had tried anything like the risky stunt she was about to attempt, it had been performing the Morrigan’s Flight in the Circus Maximus for the entertainment of the masses rather than the life and death of her friends. And she’d failed. Fallen. The chariot wheels had rolled over her, and she’d never completely recovered from her injuries.

No, I thought. When I prayed for help from the Morrigan, this is not what I meant.

But the Morrigan sent what help she saw fit. That was not for me to decide. I had asked . . . and this was her answer.

Sorcha . . .

The cloak she wore whirled madly around her, catching at her limbs, and she reached up and tore it from her throat. The wind caught it and spun it up into the sky like a great bird, wings spread wide. Her face a rigid grimace of fierce concentration, Sorcha edged farther out onto the rattling yoke pole. She tilted her head, squinting with her bad eye as if she were having trouble judging the distance between her outstretched foot and the pole. I held my breath. She was Sorcha. My warrior sister. Legend of my tribe and hero of the sands of Rome’s arenas. The accident had been a fluke. Sorcha didn’t even need her eyes, I told myself, she could do this blindfolded. And I almost believed it.