Free Raven's Hand by James Somers

Cinderman chieftain were already legendary. Surely,
this beastly man was the same person.
    “It was foolish for Lady Rainier to be sent
so far without her personal bodyguard,” one of the soldiers
remarked as they stared at the battered carriage.
    Other men kneeled around the young girl. They
examined her carefully. Clearly, she was quite dead. There was no
salvaging her even by Malkind magic, as far as they could
observe.
    Another soldier standing near the carriage
turned at the remark from the first. His arm was bleeding from a
grievous looking wound. A sword had hacked into the meat of his
upper arm. Only a torn piece of shirt fabric, taken from a fallen
comrade, had slowed the bleeding to something more manageable.
Nodding, he said, “Kane would have killed them single-handed. I’ve
personally seen him fight twenty men at once.”
    The half dozen other guards standing around
nodded their agreement with this man’s statement. They had all
either seen the former assassin in action, or they had heard the
stories. No one in Rainier, or any other great house for that
matter, was as deadly a man as Kane.
    The men were startled from their musing by
the creaking of metal coming from the direction of Lady Rainier’s
armored carriage. The men who still carried weapons raised them in
alarm, searching for the source of the noise, hoping the Cindermen
had not returned. Inside the half lit carriage, something moved. A
door groaned upon warped hinges. An arm was seen, then a leg and
another.
    Slowly but surely, a figure wearing Lady
Rainier’s clothing emerged from a compartment beneath the carriage
floor. The soldiers were all staring at her dumbfounded when she
crawled to the door. They had no idea such a compartment was
incorporated into the armored carriage’s design.
    Evelyn emerged in the carriage doorway,
looking every bit as disheveled as her pitiful band of soldiers.
There was a bruise upon her cheek and forehead, but no blood. Lady
Rainier had survived the attack of the Cindermen.
    “Don’t just stand their gawping, you fools,”
she said finally, when none of them moved to assist her. “Help me
out of this contraption!”
    Her tone snapped them to attention.
Instantly, the whole group, as well as the wounded, moved into
action, attempting the best way to extricate their mistress from
the wreckage of her armored carriage. In moments, they had her out,
standing on her own two feet next to the dead body of Prince
Nathan’s intended bond.
    Evelyn sighed heavily but did not speak right
away.
    One of the higher ranking men among her
injured officers—a man wearing leather armor with Rainier’s silver
crest upon the breastplate—offered his report. “It was the
Cindermen, Mistress,” he said uneasily.
    Most of the survivors understood the
implications of the girl’s death. House Rainier was now vulnerable.
Because of the king’s poor health, they stood in need of his heir
to ascend to the throne in order to lead and show strength before
the other great houses. Otherwise, the throne would be at risk. A
war might even erupt among the houses as they vied for
position.
    Evelyn continued to stare at the girl’s dead
body. The ground around her was stained with blood.
    “My lady?” the officer asked hesitantly.
“Your orders?”
    She looked at him for the first time now, her
expression considerate. “Gather what resources we have left,
including as many operable wagons as possible,” she said. “We must
return as quickly as possible to Rainier.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” the officer replied, preparing
to set the other men in motion.
    “However,” Evelyn continued, “I want your
best horse and most capable rider to return to the abbey. Inform
the matron of what has happened and instruct her to prepare the
oldest girl, Raven, for her journey to Rainier. My son needs a bond
in order to ascend to the throne and he will have one.”
    The officer nodded his understanding. “Yes,
my lady,” he said. “It will be done