So, princess Hildy is turning out to be quite the bad-ass! And the battle… well, I won’t spoil it for you. Remember you can read the whole thing if you click the button in the top bar at the top of the page called: The Seven Kingdoms.

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The Seven Kingdoms

Chapter Six

Hildy stood once more and turned to the Evergreen soldiers around her. “Stand to battle!” she shouted. “Form lines! Protect your king and prince!” The men were so relieved to receive orders of any sort that they gave no thought to who had issued them. Hildy turned again to face the enemy as men formed up on either side of her.

She was surprised when the enemy lines halted at shouted commands only thirty feet away from the Evergreen lines, now thinned to only two or three ranks. She glared across the open ground at the enemy commander. Nardis stared back, and his mouth dropped open when he realized who it was that stood so defiantly before him. “Princess, what a pleasant surprise to find you here. I am glad I won’t have to haul you kicking and screaming from behind castle walls.”

“This battle isn’t over yet, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she yelled back at him.

He graced her with a self-satisfied smirk. “What a fine queen you will make me,” he said with real relish. “We will just keep your parents locked in the tower and rule Halfmoon together. Of course, once we are married, you will have to give up all this nonsense of donning armor and wielding a staff. You will be much too busy giving me many sons and making me my favorite meals to have time for such manly pursuits.”

Hildy took her rockwood staff off her shoulder and removed the leather thong, hanging it from her belt. She grasped the staff firmly and set her feet. “If this is to be my last battle, I suppose I better enjoy it, so my plan is to knock your teeth out and make you swallow them,” she said in deadly earnest.

The Skull prince laughed. “What a woman!” he shouted. “Hear me, my fine soldiers. No one lays a hand on my intended bride. I will kill the man who harms her in any way.” He paused to give Hildy one last smug smile, then yelled, “Set blades!”

Set blades, Hildy wondered, what kind of an order was that? It didn’t take long to get an answer.

The halted Skull troops grasped their staves with one hand, setting one end to the ground. With their free hands, they all reached to their belts, and from leather sheaths, they pulled long, iron blades. The blades were six inches long, double edged, and, instead of a knife handle, they had a hollow base. The Skull soldiers lifted these blades to the upended tips of their staves and fitted the hollow handles over them, turning the staves into deadly spears.

“Lower blades!” shouted the man who wanted Hildy as his wife, and the lines of soldiers raised their weapons from the ground and thrust them forward, points towards the soldiers of Evergreen. Hildy glanced left then right. The greatly depleted ranks, filled with young, terrified men and boys, grasped their own staves and held their ground. Very few of them had ever fought in a battle at all, and none knew what to expect in this new and horrifying situation.

Hildy looked back across at the enemy. Very few of them had been taken out of the fight by the slingers who had followed the old rules of war. She looked at Nardis once again. He gave her another mirthless and merciless smile.

“Forward!” he bellowed.

The lines of deadly blades began to advance, the spears of the second rank thrust forward between the soldiers of the first rank, the last three ranks holding their spears aloft. The wall of death came closer at a relentless pace. Hildy spared another glance in each direction, down the thinned lines of Evergreen soldiers, and she was proud to see that not a man had left his place. She thought desperately of a way to counter the spears, but nothing came to her.

“Swing at the blades,” she screamed, hoping that strong enough blows would knock the blades off the staves and at least even the odds a bit. As the lines crashed together she saw that it did indeed work in some instances, but too few- far too few. The iron blades thrust forward, driven into flesh. Men screamed in agony and terror. Men fell to lay still or thrash about.

Hildy took full advantage of the fact that the enemy had orders not to harm her. She saw Nardis stop a few paces in front of her, allowing his men to advance ahead of him. “Coward!” she shrieked at him. He hadn’t even put a blade on the staff he was carrying, she noticed. She laid about her with her own staff. The Skull troops in front of her split up to pass around her. When they turned their spears away from her, the iron blades made perfect targets for her. She knocked more than one blade off and onto the ground, and knocked a few men down as well. This gave the Evergreen soldiers clustered around her a chance to hold their ground.

Hildy now saw that the rest of the Evergreen lines were being forced back. Some of the men had had enough and were turning to flee, all too often to be stabbed in the back as they did so. The carnage was terrible. She realized that the king, the prince, and the small group of men around her would soon be surrounded.

She shouted over her shoulder to the men behind her, “save the king and prince!” But even as men lifted the king to his feet and began to pull him off the field, she saw a Skull soldier standing over the prince. He thrust his spear into the prince’s chest as he lay helpless in the dirt. Hildy went into a rage.

“Attack!” she screamed, spittle flying from her mouth. “Forward, soldiers of Evergreen!” She felt tears come to her eyes, tears of rage, tears of sadness for her friend’s loss, and tears of pride as the few men about her followed her into the enemy lines. She struck about her with her staff, feeling bones shatter. The enemy was still hampered by their orders not to endanger her, and they fell back before her or moved out of her way. With only a few long strides she found herself face to face with the enemy commander. She wasted no words on him. Before he could even bring his staff up to parry the blow, she thrust her staff forward as if it were a spear. The rockwood tip smashed into the prince’s mouth.

“What, no smile for me now?” she asked him in a cold voice. He stood before her, even more pale than usual, one hand to his mouth, blood leaking between his fingers. His other hand moved as if to swing the staff it held at her. The rage still burned white-hot within her. Without even knowing she was going to do it, she thrust her staff forward yet again, right into his throat.

She watched calmly as he fell to his knees. He looked into her eyes for a moment, and she could see disbelief and pain, and then he fell over onto his side and lay still. She turned to the figure that stood over the body on the ground. It was the other Skull prince, in his too-fancy armor. She thought for a moment that she might kill him too, but when she looked at his face, it was the face of a terrified boy. She lowered her staff.

A hand fell on her shoulder, and she became aware once more of the battle going on around her. “We must retreat, princess,” a man said to her. It was one of the Evergreen captains. She let him pull her back, the soldiers around them moving back pace by pace even as more of them fell. There were very few of them left by the time they reached the edge of the forest. The enemy did not pursue them into the woods where their line would have been broken up by the trees. The two hundred freshly-trained Evergreen soldiers who were meant to have come to the rescue if needed had obviously fled when the survivors of the battle began to stream back into the woods. They were nowhere to be seen.

They made their way back to the road that led towards the castle, and then Zareena and the others were there. Tears streaked Zareena’s face. “I saw them kill Evvord,” she sobbed. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Hildy had no words to comfort her. She was still trembling with anger and fear and perhaps even some guilt over killing a man. She looked around at the twenty or so men who had fought side by side with her, and at her small group of friends. “We have to keep moving,” she said with no emotion. “We have to get to the castle and set up some kind of defense.”

But when they came to the top of the rise and the castle came into view, they could see Skull troops in black and white were already streaming into the castle through the two gates visible to them. Beyond the castle, smoke rose from a few burning buildings in Evergreentown, and beyond that, in the harbor, Skull ships were tied up to the docks all around the town. More Skull troops were disembarking and filing into the streets.

“Evergreen is lost,” Hildy said, a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Princess,” one of the soldiers exclaimed, “Skull troops are on the road behind us!”

“Into the woods, quickly,” Hildy ordered, and led the way at a rapid pace. They all followed unquestioningly.

As they passed through the woods, they found other survivors of the battle and gathered them up. By the time they reached the far side of the forest, they had nearly fifty men with them. Hildy went and stood beside the young captain. “What is your name?”

“Tar, Nius Tar, my Lady,” he answered.

“It might be best if you were to take charge,” she told him. “The men might not be willing to take orders from a mere girl.”

The captain looked at her in surprise. “My Lady, the men are already talking about your bravery in the battle. Some of them began taking your orders when you told them to lay down and thus saved them from the enemy slingers.” He smiled at her. “And those of us who followed you in that charge into the enemy lines, we are your men, now and forever.”

“The king, what has become of the king?” Hildy was horrified to have forgotten all about him until that moment.

“I fear he was captured as he reached the castle with some of his soldiers,” he said sadly. “They arrived at the gate at the same time the Skull soldiers from the ships did. One of the men we picked up in the woods saw it happen.”

Hildy looked around and saw every pair of eyes looking at her. Every face carried a look of expectation as they all waited for her to tell them what to do. “We need to leave Evergreen,” she said firmly. She was stalling for time while she tried to come up with a plan. “We can’t stay here. They will be looking for us.”

“We can go to Flame,” Lawry said from where she was comforting Zareena.

“We need a ship,” Hildy added. “And it needs to be big enough to hold us all. And that means we need to get to the harbor. And to do that we need to sneak through the town first. After that, stealing a ship should be easy. How many sailors do we have here?”

Ten or twelve men raised their hands, including Tolly and Tull.

“It will be getting dark in another two hours or so. I suggest we retrace our steps and then cross the road. We should be able to get right to the edge of town down in the valley without leaving the cover of the trees.” With that, Hildy began leading them back the way they had just come. Before they reached the road they had added six more men to the group, bringing the number to more than fifty.