She followed Orc to the stockade and covered him as he began to free the orckin held there. Two of the magazines she’d already shot through and she loaded in her last and drew a bead on a sergeant rallying his men in a wash of the river. A hundred yards out and with a crossbreeze she shot him clean through the neck.

  When she turned back to Orc he was hugging on a goblin.

  She levered out the empty and drove home the next charge and she slapped him on the back. “No time for that,” she called.

  His head swiveled to her as if he hadn’t even known she was there. Counterfire cracked all around them. He was bleeding badly from his leg and the goblin was squirming in his grasp. She grabbed Orc’s waistband and pulled him along to the side of a wagon laden with cloth sacks of flour that poured forth in white streams from the holes shot through. On the far side she saw orckin moving on foot from tent to tent, hauling out maimed and broken men covered in blood, decapitating them. One of the sows strode from the smoke dragging a naked woman by her hair, a camp follower come too far and hard used by the look of her who now shrieked for mercy with her bare feet on fire. The sow dropped her in the open and tossed a fallen horse blanket at her and moved on as the woman snuffed the flames.

  By now some ranks of the king’s men had reformed in their underwear and helms and they advanced upon the destroyed camp and fired volleys at the marauders among the burning tents. Horses cried out and fell in clouds of dust, their cavaliers trapped under their kicking and flailing. Mym peered over the wagon and squeezed two shots off so close together they sounded as one and in the distance two soldiers fell. Orc made to charge and she snatched his waistband again and pulled him back again as shots splintered the wagon and slashed through the air where he’d just been.

  He stared at her and she could feel the unrealized rage boiling off of him.

  “This isn’t a fight for blades,” she said. She rose over the side and sighted and fired and ducked as gunshot peppered the burlap and boards. Suddenly the wagon exploded in a great cloud of flour and shattered wood and it threw her to the ground and the percussion of a cannon roared after.

  Mym rolled over. She saw the dead on the river ice and awash in the current. The bodies drifting downstream as if they were timber harvested and floated for milling. Between tendrils of smoke the field cannon rested on its carriage and the crew scrambled around it. Its number one was passing the wet sponge down the smoothbore and its number two worming the barrel and muzzle and in a daze she watched the gunner direct the turnabout, the lowered declination, the falling brand. A full-throated explosion of noise and fire and smoke and a cavalier and his horse disappeared in a red mist of entrails and body parts and the ball skipped on across the tundra.

  Mym reached for her carbine where it had fallen. On her hands and knees she brought it before her. The cannoneers and their piece were a hundred, hundred ten yards. She bellied against the frigid earth and laid the barrel across her outstretched fist and her face against the cheekpiece. She felt the breeze in the flyaways coming out of her braid and she noted the red glint of the sun on the blued foresight. The gunner was now aiming at where the longhorn was laying into a rank with his enormous maul. The number four raised his smoldering brand, the filament of smoke streaming out sideways in the breeze. Mym touched off her trigger. The shot rang flat and mute in her deafness. The brand faltered on its downward path and the number four crumpled to the earth.

  Again she levered a round. The ejected casing hissed on the morning frost. Downrange the number three picked up the brand and the gunner repositioned the piece toward her. The left wheel backing and the right wheel rotating forth. The brand began to fall.

  A shape flitted in and out of the whipping smoke on gunner’s left and she saw Orc sprinting full tilt and carrying some burden in both arms as she had once carried her da. The number seven saw and dropped the next ball. Orc pitched his burden at the cannon and as it flew through the air it unlimbered and Mym saw it was the goblin, four limbs stretched, claws flashing, fangs beared, falling upon the number three and ripping the brand from his grasp and putting it through his eye. As the number seven raised a dagger Mym shot him. Then Orc was among the crew roving to and fro and she dared not fire again for the speed of him and he thrashed the men and brained their skulls upon the ironsides of the six-pounder and he ducked their blows with a certain grace and he swept over the neck of the artillery and smashed the gunner's face upon his knee and passed his blade through the man's heart. Mym elbowed up off the ground, both eyes open and watching the harmony of the orc and the goblin as they tore the crew to pieces and it was plain they had worked in this manner before.

  The gun now silenced she heard Uhquah whoop and she saw him surge forward. The cavaliers and orckin followed. The kingsmen on the riverbank had formed a double row and were fixing bayonets to the ends of their arms. Uhquah discharged his carbine a last time at the officer stood to their side and he turned in his saddle to holster his rifle never taking his eyes off of the humans. From his scabbard he drew a smith's hammer with an adamantine head. The kingsmen lifted their eyes and their weapons with guttural cries. Uhquah leaned forward whispering as if to his mule. Each fell upon the other.

  Mym had advanced to the cannon. To where Orc sat against a wheel bandaging his tore up calf with a strip made from wadding. The goblin watched holding the dagger that had been meant for him with needle teeth bared and eager eyes narrowed.

  She looked at Orc. "Ye good?"

  Orc nodded.

  The goblin uttered something in its harsh language and gestured urgently at her and at the melee at the river's edge whence came a clamor of shouts and gunshots and the shrill cries of horses and the peal of steel on iron and the acrid smoke of shot powder.

  "What's he sayin?" she said.

  Orc made another turn of the cloth around his calf. "He wants to know if you're coming."

  "Comin where?"

  "To finish the fight."

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  She regarded the goblin. The ochre eyes and the face halfburnt around them. The once pointed ears now cropped. The rags he wore and the blood of men soaking their front. The hunger with which he looked back.

  She nodded at him. "Lead on."

  The goblin grinned and loped off. Mym offered Orc her hand and up he came. She slung the carbine over her shoulder and drew her alpenstock.

  By the time they reached the riverbank Uhquah had driven the kingsmen out onto the river ice. There they slid and scrambled and aimed to make a stand. A wounded officer directed ten or twelve men already panicked, their eyes seeking refuge in the black water beyond the ice that held no promise but death. Uhquah pulled his carbine from the scabbard and held his mule steady between his knees and the reins clenched between his teeth and he sighted down the barrel. Mym jogged up beside the blue dwarf and saw the officer borne up between a bugler and a teamster. This was an occasion for quarter but being dwarves neither she nor Uhquah offered it.

  The first shot grazed the bugler. With the second shot the teamster teetered over and into the river. The officer lay upon the ice. His men turned to aid him but the goblin was already there menacing them with his dagger. The bugler turned and jumped into the water and the rest jumped in after. Mym watched their heads recede silently downstream until one by one they slipped under.

  The goblin knelt with the officer's head between his thighs like some priest of men administering last rites. Uhquah came gingerly across the ice and warned off the goblin with his hammer. He sucked on his pipe and eyed the dying man. Blood bubbled from his chest and onto the ice where it froze in a sheet that would seize the body in place. The officer turned his eyes to Uhquah’s, the hate fading, the pupils dilating. In their blacks each swam a cold red sun.

  “Who do you have there?” called the longhorn from the bank.

  “Come and see,” said Uhquah. He drew a huge knife from his boot and began to make the cut.

  Mym had seen enough. She withdrew to a place on the shore where no dead lay. There she watched the river, the sky. The orckin dispersed to take trophies and the cavaliers plundered the wreckage and the goblin squatted with Uhquah. Orc limped up to where she sat. He stood over her with the wind in his hair and his own blood blackening his hands and a splatter of it dried across his face. He sat down beside her. She heard the pain hissing in his breath.

  “You ought te clean that,” she said.

  He looked out over the river and said nothing.

  She stood up. “Come on.”

  She led him to where the river ice was thin and she chopped it up with her alpenstock until water burbled over. She made him sit on the shore with his leg straight out and she took water in her hands and soaked the bandage he’d made. From her kit she dug out a keeper’s candle and a pinch of wool lint and a flint. She struck the adze of her alpenstock across the flint and caught a spark in the wool. She cupped her hand around it and blew flame into it. With this she lit the candle and then she laid the spike of her alpenstock above the wick.

  She turned back to the dampened bandage and peeled it away. Orc watched and winced. They got a good look at the wound. It had begun to seep again.

  “Seems te be a clean cut.”

  “Yeah.”

  "Three, four inches deep."

  "Yeah."

  She looked at him. His face was a shade lighter than usual.

  “I figured ye’d done this sort of thing plenty back in yer pitfightin days.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figured ye’d be used te it.”

  “Yeah.” He tore his eyes from the wound and looked into hers. “Doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”

  She squeezed his thigh at the knee. “Yer goin te be fine.”

  He nodded. His eyes were on the spike. It had begun to glow orange.

  “Shift yerself on down.”

  She helped him scoot to the hole she’d made in the ice and she submerged his leg in the frigid water and when it ran over the wound he sucked in his breath.

  “Hold it there.”

  “How long?”

  “As long as ye can bare it.”

  She stood up and walked along the bank with her eyes on the round river stones in the wash of sediment. Whispering as she went and listening for any answer her eyes followed her ears until she stood over a glimmer half buried in gray sand. She picked it up and returned to where Orc sat.

  Through a clenched jaw he said, "What's that?"

  "Malachite."

  She rinsed the stone upstream of his leg. She withdrew it and ran her thumb across its surface, feeling its coarseness. It was as black as obsidian in the ruddy sunlight. She rinsed it again in waters that had flowed through the wound, withdrew it again, and asked its permission in a tone similar to that spoken by Uhquah that very morning. The stone assented. In a deep thrum that made the blue dwarf pause a moment in his grisly task she called forth its metals. The stone warmed in her hand until it steamed as if it was a burning coal.

  She nodded at Orc. He lifted his leg from the water and she took it by the ankle and held it on her lap and began to pass the stone back and forth through the wound as if sanding down a rough cut of wood. He laid on his elbows and let his head hang back between his shoulders and he looked at the sky without seeing.

  She felt him shudder. "This works?" he said.

  "Aye fer dwarves." She wet her lips with her tongue. "Don't see why it shouldn't work fer ye too."

  "I'm not made of stone."

  She laughed. "Ye've seen me bleed enough te know that’s a bigotry. There's copper in the malachite that makes it green and it'll cull any sick out of yer flesh fore it gets goin."

  She made another pass from achilles to knee and she saw the muscles in his thigh bunch. She glanced up to where his head hung. The ties in his neck all standing out. The mandible pulsing under his cheek and the rasp of his teeth grinding one set against the other. She thought he might pass out.

  “Next time yer down my way ye should come te the delvin. Actually come inside and see the vault and the forge and the billows for yerself. Ye know as tall as ye are ye'd make a good billower. Come meet Thayne properly and my brothers and sister we hope te be freein from the stone. Come see me lass. She's all shaped up now. Khaz has one too ye ought te meet. Maybe ye can come back with me once we've got this manstone and ye can be there for their birthin, so te speak. For when we imbue animus inte them. Course Daraway'll be there too and she'd love te see ye. And Cousins. She keeps askin about ye and ye don't give me anythin new te tell her. Come and stay. I've got a spare bed ye can bunk in so long as ye don't mind stone. Hell, we've got so many empty homes undermount I'd be happy te set ye up with one of yer own. The two next te ours are empty. What do ye think about that?"

  He grunted. "We'd be neighbors."

  "Aye."

  She peered up at his hanging head but he said no more. "Who's the goblin?" she said.

  "What?"

  "Ye seemed te know him."

  He picked up his head and saw her begin the next pass. He shut his eyes. "He was at Booky's."

  She nodded. "I could tell ye've fought together."

  "More times than I can recall."

  "Now yer back together again."

  "Yeah"

  "Like some family reunion.” As the words tumbled forth she regretted them. As if a collection of servile creatures forced to injure one another could be family with the woman who tortured them. She felt awful and she looked up at him and saw him smile a little through the pain he now endured.

  "Yeah," he said. "Something like that."

  She felt suddenly very far away from her own family. She looked down at the leg of this orc, like yet unlike her own. This alien thing, gray, barbarous. Cold to the touch. She looked away downstream, saw where the one-headed ogre now embraced the goblin and where the woman Booky openly wept.

  "Everything alright?" said Orc.

  He had opened his eyes, was watching her. She realized she had stopped scrubbing.

  "Aye, sure.”

  She pocketed the stone and picked up her alpenstock. The steel spike white hot. “Ye might want te hold onto somethin fer this next part.”