Chapter 16: Chapter 16

The wyldeman face splattered blood across Giadine as a sword swung across and carved through its grasping arm and dug into its goat-like face. She screamed, more in shock than fear, and felt bile rising in her throat as the thick, hot blood seeped into her clothes.

“Make a decision, girl,” Gresham shouted. He was already pivoting, slicing down again with his sword at another of the beasts as it was reaching the top of the cliff. “In or out.”

Giadine swallowed her bile down and grimaced. Gresham was to her left, swinging his sword in his right hand and wielding the short-hafted halberd in his left. To her right, the squire Taldrin was using his spear to great effect, the longer reach allowing him to stab sooner and disrupt the wyldemen as they climbed. She saw him thrust, catching a wyldeman on its shoulder - not a death blow, but the force and the wound combined with its uncontrolled fervor to reach the top made the creature scrabble its hands on the rocks. It lost and fell backwards, limbs pinwheeling as it tried to grasp onto anything. It caught one of its fellows, and dragged the other down with it onto the heads of those still below.

But that was just two, and there were dozens more swarming up the rockface, bloodying their outstretched fingers and claws on the rock without care, frothing at the mouths as they closed with their prey. Giadine hefted the hatchet and chopped down on a hand as it reached over the edge of the cliff. Her iron blade bit into the wrist, cracking bones and causing the wyldeman to howl in fury and pain. But it kept coming, thrusting itself higher and battering her with the broken limb. 

In a panic, Giadine swung with her other weapon, the dagger, and thrust it into the side of the wyldeman’s head. Its braying howl cut short, its bulging eyes with their blocky goat pupils rolling back in its head as its jaw went slack. Giadine almost lost the blade as the naked beast fell backwards, but she just managed to wrench it free of the thing’s skull.

Giadine had seen death. On her father’s ranch death was just another fact of life along with breeding and birthing. And then, with Jon and the troupe, death had been a business - she watched men die. Of fatal wounds, of disease. Some things she might have been able to prevent with the right resources, and she had felt guilt for that for the first few months. And frustration. But she had learned to live with it and did what she could for the people and animals she cared for.

Never before had Giadine killed a living thing with her own hand, watching the life leave its eyes as its hot blood splattered her arms.

The bile came back with a vengeance, and Giadine vomited over the side of the cliff, a brief spray down onto the braying horde. It had been nearly a full day since she’d had more to eat or drink than a sip of water or a bite of hardtack bread. Her body heaved again, but there was nothing to give, and then she wanted to curl up and cry but another of the beasts was already climbing towards her, its snarling face splattered with her gorge.

Giadine screamed, and she swung down with the iron hatchet and buried its blade in the next wyldeman’s face.

* * *

Later, Giadine took a moment to gulp water from one of the water barrels, then splashed more over her face and hands. She could still taste the sour in the back of her throat, swimming behind her molars. The blood was starting to get sticky and congeal on her skin.

Just the thought, and the view of her hands as she tried to scrub them halfway clean, made her want to vomit again. But she couldn’t. She had things to do.

“Who’s worse?” she asked, looking over her shoulder as she poured a measured cup more of water over her hands and scrubbed some more.

“Gresham re-opened some of his stitches in his hip,” Morio said. He was acting as her aid since he hadn’t been in the fighting. The rotund man called himself a ‘pacifist,’ which seemed odd considering his profession as a Lancer’s footman. Giadine had decided it actually meant he was simply a coward as well as lazy with his duties. “It doesn’t look too grievous. Farthing is still making his way down to Taldrin, though we can still hear the lad talking so we know he’s alive. Braice is likely the worst, between his shoulder dislocation and his fingers.”

“I’ll deal with Gresham first, then Braice,” Giadine said. Taldrin, who had been pulled off the side of the escarpment in the last minutes of the fighting, was likely the first in need but also the hardest to get to. Next was Braice, but Gresham was more important. And not just to me, Giadine thought to herself. To the group. He was a warrior, Braice was a lackey. “Bring Braice water and help him sip it, Morio. I’ll be there in a moment.”

The round man nodded and fetched a fresh cup, dipping it into the open water barrel. Giadine, meanwhile, fetched her sewing kit from her packs and made for where Gresham was laying out a few feet from the edge of the cliff.

“No one died,” he chuckled as she approached. Shilling was kneeling next to him, one hand on the old man’s shoulder to keep him from trying to stand up.

“Not for lack of trying,” Shilling laughed. “For a moment there I thought I was lunch.”

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Giadine knelt on Gresham’s other side, seeing that his brigandine had already been unlaced from the iron cuisse that protected his thighs. She pulled them apart, looking at the stab wound that she’d sewed up not three days prior. The stitches were ripped right where she had warned him it could happen. She clucked her tongue and shook her head, pulling out a thread and needle from her kit. “Didn’t I order you to at least a week’s bedrest, Gresham Cutter? You’re like to come apart at the seams, carrying on like this.”

Gresham grinned. “Sorry, ma’am. I had a dreadful need to take a walkabout, and wouldn’t you know it but I was accosted by goatmen.”

“Goatmen?” Giddy replied, feigning shock. “Well, that is quite the tale.”

Shilling leaned to look over at Giadine’s deft work. “What do you think, Giddy? Any chance you’ll check my seams as well? I had to race more than a few of them through the woods, and I think I might have strained myself.”

Giadine pursed her lips. “Shill, not now,” she said.

“Go check on your brother, lad,” Gresham said, patting the archer on the leg. “Make sure he can climb down as well as you climbed up, eh?”

Shilling nodded and stood. “Sorry, Giddy,” he mumbled.

When they were alone, Gresham snorted. “Like a lovesick duckling, that one is.” He hissed through his teeth a moment as one of Giddy’s new stitches tore, set just a little too close to the last.

“Almost done,”  Giadine said.

“You alright, girl?” Gresham asked. “Ain’t had you slip a stitch before.”

Giadine hesitated, then set the last one. “I’m fine. Just worried about Jon.”

“You are, and so am I,” Gresham said. “But that’s not it. You were in it with us today.”

“I’m fine,” Giadine said, biting it out. She cut the thread and tied it quickly. “You’re done.”

“It ain’t nothing to be ashamed of, Giddy,” Gresham said. “Killing ain’t an easy thing, even when necessary.”

Giddy stood and looked around. “I need to be fine, Cutter. Need. So let me be, so I can focus on my work. Hopefully, the squire hasn’t broken his damn ba-”

Giadine cut herself short as she saw a big horseman slowly riding towards their hill from far off, in the direction that Jon had ridden. Her heart fluttered, hope in her chest, but also fear.

She couldn’t tell if it was Jon, or that thing he had gone to fight.

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