A Trail of Blood

TW: volence, death

Danielle was following a blood trail in the snow. The footsteps of the handful of knights with her crunched in the white powder. Red dots trailed off, started again, and faded. Frozen leaves almost covered with snow had been blown across the trail of blood.

            “What do you see Danielle?” Sir Fabian asked.

            Ignoring her friend, she stooped and carefully picked away icy leaves one at a time. Red showed through the petrified brown skeletons of the autumn leaves frozen by the sudden onslaught of winter.

            The tip of a red feather poked out from beneath a leaf as she picked it away. She wiped away the rest of the leaves, shattering them into shards. The feather was almost the length from her fingertip to her elbow. She turned with it in her hand.

            “What is it?” Fabian asked again as she held it out.

            “Oh shit,” said Sir Dewar, the oldest of them. “I think I know what that is. I hope to the gods that I’m wrong.” The veteran leaned in on his left leg because the right one pained him.

            “What do you think it is?” Danielle asked, she ran her gloved finger over the edge of the feather. It scored her leather glove like a newly sharpened blade.

            Sir Dewar’s craggy face lost some of its usual pink as he looked at the feather. Licking cracked lips, he exposed the gaps between brown teeth.

            “Looks like the feather of a red angel to me. A winged vampire. A harpy.” He exhaled a deep breath which turned from vapour into fog and glittering icicles.

            “They’re real?” Fabian asked. Like all of the soldiers of the army of Crann, Sir Fabian Castel wore a deep green tabard with the Crann Oak sigil. Like Danielle he held a heater shield. Where hers had a fiery white unicorn with a red horn on a sapphire blue background, he had a white crescent moon pierced by a silver sword on quarters that were checked black and red.

            “The magic trees that guard our walls are real. The werewolves you killed in the prison were real. Why should these ungodly monsters be any different?” Sir Dewar spat bitterly into the snow.

            “What now sir?” asked Fabian.

            “Can you follow that trail any further?” asked Sir Dewar. His coat of arms was a black sword over the Crann Oak.

            “Until it gets dark, I’d say so sir. Two hours more perhaps.” Danielle looked at the sun that was low over the horizon in a grey sky.

            “Then move as fast as you can, and we’ll be sure to keep up with you.”

            Danielle kept on, blood grew thinner and thinner. She began to jog through the drifts of powder towards a black copse of trees on a hilltop to the west, behind which the sun was turning red.

            “Calum’s Copse,” said Sir Dewar. “Named after a boy who hung ‘imself ‘ere decades ago. Wait.”

            Danielle turned back to look at the green knights whose armour glinted red in the sunset. She heard it as well. There was no wind, but the branches of the trees were rustling above them.

            “Draw your swords. Danielle, your bow. Whatever it was we were following, I think we’ve found it.”

            The sound of a barn owl the size of a horse screeching made the soldiers wince. Other calls as loud and stomach churning answered from the branches above.

Red light of the falling sun made all the snow look bloody three knights and two soldiers bared their swords and raised their shields around her with her drawn bow.

            The sound of great wings flapping filled the air as the bird calls spread out. The silhouette of four, then eight enormous birds left the black mass of the trees. In the sky above they began to circle. The calls echoed around until there seemed to be dozens of them, but Danielle was certain it was only eight.

            Round and around they went, circling high above in the fading light.

            “Shoot them Danielle!” Fabian demanded. His voice held more desperation than she had heard in it since they had fought together in Leonor Prison.

            “They’re too high,” she replied. “I’d waste an arrow hitting air until they’re closer. They’re waiting for the light to die.”

            Occasionally the silhouettes would dive towards them screaming, only to pull up as she was about to shoot. Their screams squeezed the piss from Danielle’s bladder as her heart raced.

            “I hope I’m not the only one making yellow snow here?” asked Catherine Harper, who had joined the army as recently as Danielle.

            “Nope,” Sir Dewar admitted. “I needed a piss for the last hour anyway.”

            “Glad to know I’m not alone,” said Catherine, bitterly.

With an ear-splitting shriek one of the harpies dived towards them. Danielle loosed a shot which sent the screaming mass off course.

            “I think I hit one!” she said. She wished she hadn’t. Whether it was in answer to her boast or as revenge for injury done to one of them, or maybe it was just time, they came.

            As one, eight black shapes fell from the sky towards them. Danielle heard swords hitting flesh. The harpies screamed. The monsters weren’t the only ones.

            A limp mass slammed into the squad of soldiers, right on top of her. When they parted to be out from under the thing Danielle Longbow heard the fading scream of a young man she knew as Rory Gilroy as he was dragged through the snow by his ankle.

            Danielle fitted an arrow to her bow. She fired at the shape as it dragged the boy away. As the arrow sped off towards the target a talon bit through the leather of her glove into her right hand.

            A burning pain, worse than that of a mere stab wound, spread from the hand up her arm. She roared. Looking around at the mess of her squad.

            Two harpies lay amidst them in the snow. One was already dead. The other died as Sir Fabian Castel and Sir Calum Nathair hacked it into pieces.

            “That’s enough. We have to get after the boy!” Sir Dewar held a hand over his jaw, blood dripping over his armour from a wound beneath.

            Danielle ran off to the east, where young Rory had been dragged away. Footsteps right behind her said that two other soldiers were keeping pace. She guessed it was Catherine and Sir Dewar who had fallen behind.

            Night had finally fallen. Grey clouds diffused pale moonlight. A black trail of blood made Rory’s track easy to follow even if there hadn’t been a trench in the snow behind him. His dropped sword lay not far away in that track. Danielle picked it up as she ran. She’d dropped her bow and her shield during the attack. With Rory’s sword and her own, she hoped she would be safe enough.

            A dark twitching shape was attacking something that lay slumped against a broken wall. Danielle roared in a battle cry as she ran at the thing, but it flapped its mighty wings and flew away before she could swing Rory’s sword at it.

            He sat against the snowy, broken wall with his discarded helmet beside him. In the near perfect darkness, she saw the glistening of the pecked sockets where his eyes had been. She saw the gristle of his throat ripped out.

            Fabian brushed past her. She heard him swearing under his breath. The helmet caught blue moonlight as Sir Castel put it on the boy backwards, to hide his face.

            “Are they gone?” asked her friend.

            “I can’t hear their wings,” she said.

            “He survived the siege,” Fabian said. He stooped and picked the young man up in his arms. “He shouldn’t have died like this.”

            “No one should. Let’s get back to Sir Dewar and Catherine.”

            “Aye.”

            Following the trench made by Rory as he was dragged to his death, they found their way back to Calum’s Copse.

            “Oh, fuck no.” Sir Dewar saw the body in Fabian’s arms. “Everyone back to Leonor. We need to warn the city. Kill any more?”

            “No sir, it got away.”

            “At least you’re still breathing.”

            The long trudge back through the snow to the city of Leonor was sound tracked by the constant groans of the injured. Only Fabian and Sir Nathair were uninjured. Danielle doubted Fabian had much to say to the knight who had humiliated him in a tournament a week before.

            Torches on the thirty-foot granite walls of Leonor were a welcome sight as they moved slowly to the northern gate. The welcome light of the flaming torches was far less welcome on the body of Rory Gilroy. Though the dark, staring sockets of his eyes could not be seen through his helmet, his throat was still hanging out over his tabard.

            Help came running to carry them to the castle when those by the gate saw their injuries. Danielle had to shake off green clad soldiers offering to carry her. Sir Dewar didn’t or wasn’t in the shape to protest, as he was carried off on a stretcher.

            Leonor Castle was a mighty grey gravestone with windows and battlements. Torches burned on balconies for the warmth of the guards on watch. Snow turned to slush beneath Danielle’s feet. The cobbles were slippery as she jogged by Sir Dewar’s side to the infirmary. She didn’t know what else to do.

            Down into the depths of the castle they went. Down corridors lined with tapestries of battles and statues of great kings, queens, and warriors she ran. Her arm was burning from within. She didn’t want to see what had become of her hand beneath the now red leather glove she wore.

            They came to a cavernous room filled with beds. Most beds were empty. Old women were in their chairs by the desperate shouts of Crann’s soldiers, carrying Sir Dewar between them.

            “Sir Dewar is injured. Poisoned by the look. Wake up!”

            The youngest of the nurses ran to the old man’s side as the elders shuffled over with stops and starts.

            “Get his armour off. We need to see the wound.”

            Sir Dewar’s eyes were closed. Far from pale. He was more purple than he had ever been. Veins stuck out on his cheeks. When the nurse used a silver spoon to open the knight’s mouth, she saw long, broken brown teeth and they all smelled hideous fishy breath. That was normal for him.

            “Is it just his jaw?” asked the matron, somewhere in her twilight years but bright as the sun. Her teeth seemed long gone, her lips folding into her empty mouth. Her eyes were dark sparkling jewels with more life in them than the young women apprenticed to her.

            “I think so,” said Danielle. “Other than his face the rest of him was covered with steel. The only reason I was hurt was that I was wearing gloves.”

            The matron grabbed her hand, no thought for the pain it might cause. She winced as the glove was taken away. Her whole hand was red and swollen. Around the wound was purple, like Robert Dewar’s face but less so. Blue veins stuck out.

            “Poultice and leaches,” the matron said to an apprentice. The old woman gave Danielle’s hand to the young woman and Miss Longbow found herself being dragged away.

            “Have a seat,” said the woman, giving an order, not asking. “Do you feel drowsy? Sleepy? How is the pain?” The woman lifted her hand over her head and secured it there with a leather strap on the chair.

            “No. No. And agonising, like twenty beestings.” Danielle looked at her wound. The apprentice took a cloth from boiling water with tongs and squeezed it out, somehow not wincing at the heat of the boiling water on her hands.

            Every muscle in the warrior’s body tensed at the boiling cloth wiped at her wound. When the blood was gone, the woman took a jar filled with leaches and began sticking the black slug looking things around the wound, seven in total.

            Looking across the room, the warrior saw her comrade, Catherine Harper across the room with bitemarks across her cheek. Though the bite looked red, Miss Harper looked otherwise unharmed. Catherine was screaming each time her assigned apprentice touched the bitemarks with a heated iron.

            Danielle could smell the burning flesh from across the room. Her leaches were getting fat. The blue veins in her hand and arm didn’t look as obvious as before. The wound was still oozing blood slowly. Out came another steaming rag and again she failed to supress a scream as the blood was wiped away.

            A needle was passed through a flame before it sewed up the wound. Seeing her skin pierced and pulled like gristle pulled by a fork almost made her vomit. When the stitch was done the woman wiped the hand again with the third boiling rag of the evening.

            “What did this to you?” asked the woman. She had blue eyes. Her brown hair was the length of a finger. She had pock marks on her cheeks.

            “A red angel.” Danielle winced as her wound throbbed.

            “Never heard of them.”

            “People usually call them harpies,” said the warrior. Looking at her wound she had to admit it seemed better even if it felt worse.

            “How could winged women possibly hurt Sir Dewar?” asked the apprentice healer, sitting on an empty bed and eyeing Miss Longbow’s wound.

            “They had talons like knives, poisonous I suppose. I do actually feel a bit sleepy now.” She yawned. She watched the apprentice turn over an hourglass.

            “Don’t sleep until that’s done. You seem alright but we’ve never dealt with harpy poison before. Who knows? Better you’re awake to tell us if things turn to shit.”

            With those soothing words the apprentice left Danielle tied up and went back to attending Sir Dewar. It didn’t look good. They were adding endless leaches and sighing constantly. He hadn’t been awake for a while. She reasoned that if he was dead they wouldn’t be bothering with him.

            Halfway through her hour of sand the Royal Coven arrived. Queen Malin, flanked by Sir Castel and Sir Nathair.

            Queen Malin was a striking woman on any day. Her blue left eye contrasted the brown one on the right. Her face was as sharply intelligent as anyone Danielle had ever seen. Her head swivelled, taking in the scene in quick flashes and moving to Sir Dewar’s side. She whispered with the healers, a grave look on her pale face.

            Lupita Smith, a witch of the Royal Coven, snuck to Miss Longbow’s side. Miss Smith also happened to be her girlfriend; a fact known to only a handful of people so far. Lupita had dark brown skin and thick curly, black hair.

            “What the fuck happened to you?”

            “Harpies.”

            "Really? Red feathers?”

            Danielle cut over her, “and talons and screeching like giant ghostly owls, yes.”

            “None of them bit you, did they?” Lupita asked, jumping to look at the warrior’s hand.

            “No. Not me. One bit Catherine though.”

Deadly serious, the witch of the Royal Coven fixed her with a hard stare.

            “Are you certain?”

            “Yes.”

            “Fuck. The bite of a harpy converts women into new harpies. The poison of their talons is deadly to men, agonising and paralysing to women. If Catherine’s been bitten, we need to cure her, fast.” It was too much information for Danielle to process. They sat for a while, staring into each other’s eyes while the warrior’s cogs turned.

            “They let her go. Catherine. Someone needs to get after her and give her the cure.”

            Lupita smiled bitterly. “I don’t know how to cure it. There’s one mention of a cure in a bestiary that mentions harpies. It doesn’t say what the cure is.” Lupita drove her worn fingers into her thick hair and grabbed it in fists.

            The warrior grabbed the witch’s hand. Their eyes met and locked together. Sand sped through the little hole in the hourglass, giving her a sense of haste that she didn’t want to feel.

            “I’m alright Lupita. Go and find a cure before we have one of those things amongst us. Help Catherine Harper.”

            The witch kneaded stress wrinkles in her forehead and nodded.

            “Time to hit the books then.” She leaned in closer and whispered, “I love you.”

            “I love you too. Go and save a life.”

            Lupita mouthed a kiss then explained where she was going to Queen Malin and the other witches of the Royal Coven. The queen stayed by Sir Dewar’s side. The rest left with Lupita.

            “Come on old man,” she said, looking at the veteran, “you can beat it. Stay stubborn you bastard.”

            When the last grain of sand had dropped in the hourglass the healer unstrapped Danielle and let her stand at Robert Dewar’s bedside. Where her swelling had gone down, his had spread throughout the body. His chest rose and fell faster and faster, but every breath was louder than the one before.

            Eventually the wheezing sound stopped. Sir Robert twitched weakly and stopped moving at all.

            “Oh gods,” said Queen Malin.

            “No,” was all Danielle could manage. She watched the healers pull a sheet up over the man’s face. The only sounds were the sniffing of noses that ran as tears dripped silently down their faces.

            “Rest in peace, old friend.” The queen touched his swollen hand tenderly. She turned to the ancient matron. “Make the arrangements.”

            “Yes, my queen.”

            Queen Malin left them, looking overcome with emotion.

            The dark eyed healer gave Danielle a forced smile and a sombre nod. There was nothing else to say.