wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing for a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.
He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the stream. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again. And hi that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest hill was not empty anymore. That there was something standing there.
"Look!" a man cried just then, from further down the river. "He is with them again! We are undone!"
Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and cold fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Within the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.
Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though never before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full, just when, so much of the time, it seemed as if they might have a chance to force the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog and mist as hi a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.
And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of their defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who would step onto the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and claim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he passed, wherever he walked upon the earth.
He stood now on the nearest of the wasted hills west of the river, clouds of obscuring mist rising and flowing all around him. Elena could not discern his face, none of them ever had, but from within that smoke and darkness she saw him raise his hands and stretch them out toward them, reaching, reaching for the Walkers on the riverbank. And as he did Elena felt a sudden shaft of coldness come into her heart, a terrible, numbing chill. Her legs began to tremble. She saw that her hands were shaking and it seemed that there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, to hold her courage to her.
Across the stream the Others, his army or his allies or the amorphous projections of his spirit, saw him stretch his arms toward the battlefield. Elena heard a sudden savage exultation in their cries; she saw them massing west of the river to come at them again. And she remembered, weary and spent, with a grim despair reaching into her heart, that this was exactly how it had been last year, and the spring before that, and the spring before as well. Her spirit ached with the knowledge of loss to come, even as she fought to find a way to ready her exhausted body to face another charge.
Mattio was beside her. "No!" she heard him gasp, with a dull, hopeless insistence, blindly fighting the power of that figure on the hill. "Not this time! Not! Let them kill me! Not retreat again!"⊕⊕文⊕檔⊕共⊕享⊕與⊕在⊕線⊕閱⊕讀⊕
He could scarcely speak, and he was bleeding, she saw. There was a gash in his right side, another along his leg. When he straightened to move to the river she saw that he was limping. He was doing it though, he was moving forward, even into the face of what was being leveled at them. Elena felt a sob escape her dry throat.
And now the Others were coming again. The wounded man beside her struggled gamely up from his knees, holding his sword in his left hand, his useless right arm dangling at his side. Further along the bank she saw men and women as badly wounded or worse. They were all standing though, and lifting their blades. With love, with a shafting of pride that was akin to pain, Elena saw that the Night Walkers were not retreating. None of them. They were ready to hold this ground, or to try. And some of them were going to die now she knew, many of them would die.
Then Donar was beside her, and Elena flinched at what she saw in his white face. "No," he said. "This is folly. We must fall back. We have no choice. If we lose too many tonight it will be even worse next spring. I have to play for time, to hope for something tha