Now? Now he was just a man carrying too much responsibility leading another war band, and with yet more people to nurture and protect.
With a twist to his mouth, Axis waited for his war band and their accompanying trees, and led them through the valley.
In the eastern Skarabost plains, the numbers and ferocity of the demented Demonic creatures were far worse. Axis and his war band had been attacked by a force of some nine or ten thousand large creatures
— cattle, horses, bulls — almost the instant they'd emerged from the mouth of the valley alongside the still-rushing Nordra River.
Without the trees, Axis knew they could very well have been overwhelmed.
His men fought well, but it was difficult to kill a cow or a bull, even with the sharpest of swords, before it had a more than good chance of killing you, and Axis lost several score of men before the trees roared in.
It was the only verb Axis could find to describe their action.
One moment they were fighting desperately, surrounded by a sea of maniacal livestock which had grown horns and teeth far sharper than nature ever intended, when there was a rumbling and roaring such as Axis had never heard before.
He'd twisted in his saddle, staring back towards the valley, and had been so amazed that he'd left himself vulnerable to deadly attack from a cream and brown bull. If it hadn't been for Zared's quick pike thrust, Axis would have died.
But at the time, Axis had no idea of what was going on behind him. All he could see were the thousands of ethereal trees pouring through the gap of the valley mouth.
They were literally roaring, waving their branches wildly about the air in a crackling cacophony of snapping twigs and leaves.
In an instant they fell upon the mob of animals, seizing them with hungry woody fingers and tearing them apart with a crackle of snapping joints and rib cages.
Axis had time only for a few more strikes against the creatures himself before they were all dead.
And when the animals were all dead, the trees stood there, literally shaking with emotion that was, Axis thought, a sadness so deep that outsiders could only barely comprehend it.
Within the hour the column had joined them, and even Urbeth had stood shaking her head at all the slaughter.
Ur had simply stood there, clutching her terracotta pot, and grinning from ear to ear.
Once Axis had buried the dead, he moved the war band and column to Sigholt.
The primary purpose for travelling to Sigholt was to collect Gwendylyr — Theod was a mass of nervous impatience for the day it took them to move across the WildDog Plain and through the Holdhard Pass — but there was more to it than that.
Gwendylyr had undoubtedly attracted hordes of creatures to Sigholt, and thus there would be good exterminating there, as there had been at the valley mouth.
Sigholt was also Axis' home, and he wanted to see it again ... see if it had managed to survive the Demons' attentions.
What he eventually found made him bow his head and weep.
Sigholt had been utterly destroyed. Sigholt! Axis could not believe it. All the magic, the laughter, the happiness, the memories; all had been turned to dust and rubble.
The bridge was gone.
The town of Lakesview was gone.
The lake itself was a dry, dusty bowl. (Axis was not to know that Gwendylyr's victory at the Lake of Life had at least turned the putrid virulence into more palatable dust.) Everything had gone.
The war band had hung back as Axis slowly rode forward, tears streaming down his face. Even Pretty Brown Sal hung her head as if in sorrow.
Axis let Sal pick her own way as she walked towards the pile of rubble that had once been the enchanted castle. Gods, the memories! It hurt so badly Axis was not sure if he could bear it, and just as he thought that, he became aware there was a woman standing at Sal's shoulder.
So lost was he in his grief, Axis gave a great start, thinking it was StarLaughter come back to deal him a mischief.
But it was Gwendylyr, one warm, comforting hand resting on his leg as she looked up at him.
"Trust in your son, and in my other four companions," she said, "and you never know what happiness we may achieve."
Axis opened his mouth to say something, but then there was a thunder of hooves from behind him, and a whoop, and then Theod was flinging himself down from his horse and grabbing Gwendylyr into his arms.
Axis turned his head away, and stared at the rubble.
Chapter 54
A Troubled Night's Dreaming
In the hour before dawn they had lifted from the cliffs and the heaps of rubble where they'd roosted during the night, and they'd flown north, harking to StarGrace's call.
He is here. He is here. He is here.
StarLaughter had found WolfStar for them, as she always said she would.
He had thrown them through the Star Gate.
He had murdered them.
Uncaringly and coldly and only for the sake of his own personal ambition and lust for power.
