The Other Crowd. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ her faith.

      No, she still clung to faith, to blind trust and humble servitude. It was all she had.

      A thunderous warrior’s cry from behind her prompted her to spin about. Slick mud made footing unsure. The soles of her laced leather boots had worn thin; she could gauge the rises and fall of earth with a mere flex of foot. She maintained balance.

      With no time to deliver an overhand slash of her sword, she plunged it up into the charging soldier’s gut. The blade slid under her enemy’s bloodied leather cuirass. She felt the soft acceptance as the sword tip sunk into flesh. The soul had been pierced. May God have mercy.

      Blood purled down the flat of the blade. Her victim’s triumphant cry changed to a gurgling requiem. A mace glinting with the blood of her fellow soldiers fell from his limp grasp. For a moment he loomed before her in the rain, arms spread, yet hands limp. Mouth open and eyes horrifically wide. Poised between life and death.

      As a child she had enjoyed playing in the rain. The world would never again be so carefree.

      A heel to his thigh pushed his body off balance. He dropped backward. Mud droplets spattered his face and her leg greaves.

      Death proved far too easy.

      The violet sky briefly teased at the corner of her eye where mud did not blemish her vision. Too pretty for battle. It promised an end to the abominable weather. A rainbow was swirled in an oily slick before the castle wall.

      “Jeanne!”

      The familiar voice cut through the cacophony of warfare. Lieutenant Charlier. Just last night his wife had birthed a baby boy who was not breathing. The lieutenant mourned as a black cloud had entered his life. The child had not been baptized before burial, which Jeanne had protested until her throat ached. Now the lieutenant signaled and she followed him. He did not see the English infantryman swinging a deadly halberd behind him.

      “No!” She rushed across the battlefield, slick with blood and mud.

      A body lay between her and the lieutenant. In the moment Jeanne took to look down and leap over the sprawled enemy corpse, the tip of the armor-piercing halberd poked out from the lieutenant’s chest. His arms flung backward as his torso curved unnaturally forward.

      She swung madly, utilizing no martial skill save a fierce determination honed over the past months. Lieutenant Charlier was dead before his palms hit the ground.

      Jeanne’s sword soughed the air. Impending death held an utterly voiceless tone, yet it sweetened the air as a bird’s wings during flight. Her blade connected with the head of the Englishman who had gutted the lieutenant. Because he wore no helmet, the top of his skull was shaved off just above the eyes.

      Gulping a surge of acrid bile, Jeanne thrust ferociously following the backswing, but the counterattack wasn’t necessary. The man toppled at her feet, his dissected brain oozing out like fresh porridge.

      Stumbling backward, metal slapped against metal. Caught by the shoulders, she slammed into an unmoving force. Unable to lift her sword, she struggled, but the man who held her against his armored chest was too strong.

      “The Maid of Orléans,” he growled. “Does your faith allow forgiveness for murder? You claim power with your sword, vile wench. It is not your power to own. I’ve never killed a woman, but you are no female. You are a—”

      Warm blood spattered her cheek. The man holding her suddenly fell away from her body. She didn’t look down and back, because she’d seen too much death. Another man charged at her with a sword to match hers.

      The clank of opposing weapons stung her ears. The enemy was right. Who was she to claim power with a battle sword when violence only seemed to beget further violence? Was this truly the path she had intended? How could God command such destruction?

      Following a guttural battle cry, a new opponent slashed his bloodied sword toward her. Scrambling to counterattack, her blade tip caught on the screw at her knee greave. She wouldn’t be able to deflect the blow. The blade would cut through her skull—

      A TRILLING ALARM startled her upright on the bed. Slashing her arms out before her to deflect the blow, Annja Creed cried out, “No!”

      When no armored soldier shouted back and she did not feel the agonizing slice of blade to skull, she realized she was sitting in her bed. No English solider stood before her. No mud, or shouts of vengeance, littered the scene. She could not even feel the sting of relentless rain.

      The cell phone on her bedside dresser jingled.

      She gasped.

      The adrenaline rush of the dream did not dissipate. Breathing heavily, she clasped her chest. No wounds. No awkward armor to impede her movements. Not a slick of another’s man blood. But it had felt so real. As if she had stood amid the carnage to swing against the enemy.

      It is not your power to own.

      It was a strange statement she couldn’t resist pondering. What power? Had he meant the bloody, yet spiritual, quest that had seen Joan of Arc through countless battles all in the name of faith for her uncrowned king?

      Had the people of the times known the Maid of Orléans carried a mystical sword?

      Annja possessed that very sword—a sword that had once been wielded by Joan of Arc.

      She startled again at the insistent ring, and this time slapped a palm on the cell phone and croaked out a sleep-laced, “Hello?”

      “I know it’s early, but listen, Annja. I have an assignment for you. It’s a really cool segment for the show.” The voice on the line jabbered on, but Annja’s attention remained divided.

      She pressed her hand to her chest. Her heart still beat frantically. It pounded against her palm. She’d had some nasty nightmares about fire before, but not so much the Catholic saint. And never had a dream been so vivid. Almost as if she’d time traveled and acted out the scene herself. Did her forearms ache from swinging the sword as she traversed the muddy battlefield?

      “Are you listening, Annja?”

      “Yes, go on, Doug. Wait. Did you just say what I think you said?”

      “I did.”

      Annja caught her forehead against her palm. “Doug, I can’t believe you asked me to go to Ireland to track…”

      She couldn’t say the word. Not without laughing. She’d taken on some crazy assignments for her television host job, but this latest suggestion was really out there.

      “Faeries,” Doug Morrell, the producer of Chasing History’s Monsters, confirmed.

      That’s what she thought he’d said.

      “Annja, people have disappeared close to a County Cork village called Ballybeag. Rumors report that faeries are stealing them. It’s like the legends say when you go wandering on faerie territory, they don’t like it and will capture you and make you dance for a hundred years, or something like that. What was the name of that dude? Rip Van Winkle! Wait. He fell asleep—he wasn’t dancing.”

      “Doug. Stop. Please.”

      “Annja, СКАЧАТЬ