Chapter 9

The riding knight leaps from the ridge, over the women's heads, as the arrows begin to fly their way from the serried ranks of gargers. Asterith, realising the desperateness of the situation, has to turn from her hapless patient, having delivered some herbal concoction to ease her pain. She snatches up her trusty bow, having left her harp behind for more peaceful times.
The Gargers roar as they charge, brandishing their brutal weapons. Their leader rides a vulstrich, swift of foot, raising a cloud of dust in the plain.
Battle is joined; the odds are dire, but the knight is bold. He strikes first at the most formidable of his opponents, thrusting his sword through the neck of the vulstrich, and on into the chest of its rider, while snatching his weapon. The momentum of Odo's impact sends the vulstrich's carcass tumbling backwards, and over it the knight bounds attacking the throng of foes.

Meanwhile the baby has been born.

The thought of the monster-child is too much for its mother to bear. Desperate and maddened, she raises a rock to obliterate the little monstrosity's existence...

'No!' Asterith steps in to prevent the mother from destroying her child.
'Why not? I... I must... Why should do you care, anyway, milady?'
'There is a reason... no time now, but please, do not do this!'

'But this is a fiend!'

'What is your name?'

'What?...' the woman has not heard her own name in... much time. Many months of nightmare and trauma. It seemed something from another life, another world, little more than a fading dream now. It is a moment before she can retrieve it from memory.

'Your family...' Asterith prompts.

'Whitfern. Kreysta Whitfern is my name.'

'This is your son, Kreysta, a Whitfern. It is yours! Think before you do this!'

'No! These things killed my family!'

'Mine too....' Asterith saw that she must explain. 'All but a brother... a half-brother, at least. One born after my mother was taken as you were, or by similar beings. He is like this...' Asterith indicated the child... 'Sired by a monster but no monster himself!'

Kreysta puts down the rock and takes up her child in her weary arms, but still she can scarcely bring herself to look at it.

Nearly out of arrows, meanwhile, Asterith returns to firing into the mass of warlike fiends on the plain below. They have closed in around her knight in the meantime, so that he is no-longer in view. The one-sided battle seems already lost... Neither of the women have noticed that more gargers are creeping towards the edge of the ridge behind them...