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7

Ilna felt the warmth wrap softly around her. She wriggled in pleasure at its embrace. "I'm coming closer," the darkness whispered. "I'll be with you soon."

She couldn't see its face—she didn't know if it had a face—but she knew that it cared for her as no one else could care. It would make sure she became what she deserved to be.

Cashel's shout ripped through the dream like a icicle plunging from a high tower. Ilna shot bolt upright from her bed in the stable loft. The word hadn't penetrated, only the awareness that the brother she'd cared for all her life was in trouble.

"Attack!" Cashel shouted again. Steel met steel in a ringing crash.

Tenoctris was already halfway down the ladder; she'd awakened before the shout. The older woman must have heard something in her sleep just as Ilna did.

Rather than wait for Tenoctris to reach the bottom of the ladder, Ilna gripped the edge of the loft and swung down. Her feet dangled in the air for a moment; then she let herself drop in the assumed confidence that there was nothing but the hard-packed earthen floor beneath her.

"Attack!"

The shock of a three-foot fall into darkness was nothing. Cashel was in trouble.

Most of the dozen stalls were occupied by horses or mules. A mare screamed nervously and kicked her box. The stableboy was trying to quiet her, but all the animals were whickeringly restive.

There were more shouts and the clang of weapons from the inn yard. Ilna had been slow to rise, wrapped in her fantasy of contentment. Thinking back, she couldn't pick a single dream image from memory; and the whole, the gorgeous paradise that had enfolded her, had an aftertaste like that of rotting meat.

A man screamed in a voice that rose in pitch until it stopped as abruptly as glass breaking. Ilna slid open the stable door. By the open sky's relative light, her eyes searched for a weapon. Tenoctris scurried past.

Ilna knew that there were rakes and forks in the stables somewhere, but she didn't have time to search. Hanging from a peg on the doorpost was a simple halter, a rye-straw rope spliced into a bight on one end with the other reeved through to form a running loop. She snatched it down and stepped into the yard.

Tenoctris seated herself cross-legged by the corner of the stable building and plucked a blade of the long grass growing from a seam in the stone foundation. A dozen men and liches fought in a confused mass in front of the inn proper. Cashel wasn't among them: his bulk would have marked him to her eyes.

There wasn't anyone as tall as Garric in the melee either, but bodies lay on the stones for living fighters to trample.

Garric burst from the inn's door, holding a sword in one hand and the doorkeeper's long-legged stool in the other. "Haft and the Isles!" he bellowed like a herd bull challenging the world.

A lich cut at him. Garric blocked the sword with the stool's seat, stabbed the lich through the eyesocket with a return stroke as quick as a frog's tongue, and smashed the skull of a second monster with a backhand flick of the stool.

Cashel stood across the inn yard, fighting two liches with his back to a stone wall.

"Haft and the Isles!"

Ilna's blood was as cold as a midwinter storm. She sprinted the fifty feet to where her brother defended himself.

The liches moved as though they were the limbs of a single entity: one drew back as the other thrust, then reversed the process the instant Cashel focused his attention on the immediate threat. The creatures reminded Ilna of a praying mantis shifting its weight from side to side as it prepares for the double stroke that will doom its victim.

Cashel knew better than to fight opponents working in perfect unison; instead he concentrated on defending himself. The quarterstaff spun as a dynamic shield before him, its motion as smooth and assured as the shuttle of Ilna's loom.

Cashel's wrists crossed and recrossed, feeding the heavy staff from one hand to the other. He'd get tired eventually, even Cashel; but for now the blurred rotation was as strong and sure as water flowing down the channel of the Stroma River. The liches poised and feinted, but they could not pierce his guard.

Ilna stepped behind one of the creatures, judged her distance, and flipped the loop of the halter as the lich swayed. The rope settled over the hairless, glistening skull. Ilna pulled hard as though she had a stubborn ram in the halter.

The lich jerked backward. A man would have gagged, but this creature twisted and tried to cut the halter with its rusty sword. Ilna ran three steps to pull the lich off its feet; the halter was too short for her to take another hand-over-hand grab on her end.

Cashel shifted the quarterstaff from vertical to horizontal and tore the ribs out of his remaining opponent in the same spinning motion that had protected him for the several previous minutes. The creature fell like a bird with a shattered wing; its sword arm still slashed, but its body could no longer keep itself upright.

Ilna's lich cut at her ankles. She leaped high without letting go of the halter. Cashel took a stride forward and brought the iron-shod cap of his staff down like a thresher swinging his flail. Gelatinous flesh and fragments of bone splashed in all directions.

"Ilna?" Cashel gasped. "Did he hurt you?"

Across the inn yard Garric laughed like a joyous demon. Ilna turned. All the liches were down. Guards and other travelers stood to either side gaping, but Garric was alone in the midst of the carnage.

The sturdy stool in his left hand had been hacked and beaten to splinters; little remained but one leg and fragments of the seat. Garric's blade was twisted like a ribbon fluttering in the breeze.

"Haft and the Isles!" Garric shouted. He spun his battered sword high into the air, then as it fell caught it again by the hilt. As though the spinning blade had cut the strings holding him upright, Garric toppled face-first onto the pile of bodies, lich and human.

Ilna ran toward him, but the drover's beautiful daughter Liane darted from the inn to Garric's side before her.

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Framed