Hey all, thought I would try my hand at a little bit of FanFiction writing. I hope that you all enjoy. I'm just testing the waters with this story so do tell me if I should continue. Drop a review. Enjoy.

Blaze.

Chapter 1: Sarmatians.

Fear of what she might find forced her to push her sweat lathered stallion to keep up his frenzied pace, his muscles rippling underneath her as he fought to do as she commanded. For a horse as big as he was, he was nimble and had a speed that no other stallion that the Woads possessed had matched or surpassed and even with as tired as he was he managed to avoid the worst that the forest seemed to throw in their path until they reached the wind open plains.

It wasn't long before they came upon fleeing people, tears streaming down their mostly dirty faces as they ran with her, her stallion's stride easily taking them over until they reached the great river's fording place and she turned the black beast she rode to the west before the crossing, battling against the people moving the opposite direction from her to get to her home and village.

Fear was a common look on the faces around her, the people were moving south and it was out of fear that they did so, that much was obvious as they swarmed around her, running with bundles of their belongings on their backs or on the backs of their horses that trotted nervously behind their masters. Horses that called out to her stallion as they galloped past them, some even trying to turn from their masters to follow the great horse that she was riding but the beast beneath her ignored them, diligently keeping up his pace.

The people however had more sense then their beasts. They moved out of her stallion's way as he thundered through the crowds and the village that they were all fleeing from came into view.

"Stop Arienh, stop!" A village elder called from behind her but she ignored him and his commands. She had only one objective and that was to find her father and brother. To make sure that while she had been scouting in the high north they had not succumb to the madness that the invading hordes had plunged her people into.

The Woad village was all in up roar, people ran around in a messy rabble, ignoring each other as they screamed in fright and gathered what things they could, some loading them onto horses, others just taking what they could carry before running away, scattering into the woods or following the river to the fording place so that they could continue to run south. She however ran her horse right through the crowd, pulling the big black beast to a halt outside of the leader's home, her father's home.

She sat him as he reared and screamed his defiance of the people running around him. Only to jump off of him as his hooves once more touched the ground; her hand wrapped in a fist full of his long mane as he whinnied and stamped his left hoof against the packed earth.

"Don't you dare move, I'll need you when I get back!" She told her stallion before moving off and entering the home that she had stopped outside of.

"Father! Father!" She yelled as she entered the dark living quarters. "Aheam, father?"

"He's not here Arienh, they are not here and your father will not be back. He passed on protecting his people from the moving Saxon hordes." Her father's brother in arms was sitting in a chair, his face semi-covered in scars from a fire that he had saved her father from many years before. She looked at him numbly and swallowed hard.

"Aheam? Guinevere? Merlin?" Arienh looked at him with unshed tears in her green eyes.

"Merlin is safe and protected with our people, your bother insured that safety and is with him as we speak. Guinevere wasn't so lucky, she has been captured and imprisoned by a roman named Marius Honorius living not far south from here." He answered her.

"How long has she been missing?"

"Coming up for two and a half months, she went missing two weeks after you left for the north to scout and meet with the king of the Isles who has been massing his people on our shores." He answered her.

"And who has been sent to bring her back?" She asked, thinking about her friend and the daughter of their leader Merlin. "Tell me who Merlin has sent to get her back!"

"No one. Everyone is too busy evading the Saxons or joining her father's force."

"What do you mean there is no one? Teague, there is always someone. Why has Merlin not sent someone to fetch his daughter?" Arienh looked at him in desperation.

"It is likely that she is already dead Arienh. You know of the things that Marius Honorius is rumored to do to the serfs that do not obey him."

"So her own father has left her to rot in the clutches of his enemy? Coward I would call him and good would she be to disown him."

"I would not speak so of our leader, he has more important things to do girl! By the time that we got word of what had happened to her there were more pressing matters at hand."

"And what is more important then your own kith and kin. Is that not why we all fight so that our kith and kin can be free? But no, not Merlin, he leaves his own flesh and blood to rot in the cell of a Roman." She gritted her teeth, angry at the man she had looked up to and followed since she had been given her first tattoo at puberty.

"Merlin has massed his army while you were away doing his bidding child and the rest of the Woads that are unable to fight have been fleeing from an army that is more sure to destroy us then the Roman's ever were." Teague shook his head, his sword hand resting on the pommel of his broadsword. "I am sorry Arienh, truly I am and Merlin is sure to feel the grief for his daughter's loss as keenly if not more so then you her friend. Our orders are to make haste to the gathering and join with the warrior's there."

"And leave Gwen to die?" The girl shook her head incredulously and kicked a roughly made stool across the room shattering it.

"You wear Merlin's mark like the rest of his warriors, it is time to bow to the will of your commander."

"I will not bow to the will of a man that leaves his own daughter to the hands of pagans like Marius Honorius. I will not!" She snapped.

"We need you and Saoi with the warriors at the gathering. If we must ride against the Saxons and the Romans at the same time then we need every warrior that we can get and you are worth five of us at times with that horse underneath you. The plight of our people has become more important then the plight of Guinevere daughter of Merlin." The older warrior reasoned with her but she was not seeing his side like he had hoped that she would.

"I'm not going to leave her to die at the hands of a Christian Roman!" The last two words were spat from her mouth like a foul taste. "It leaves a foul taste in my mouth to think that you of all people, who knows that Guinevere is like a younger sister to me, is trying to convince me to leave her to her fate. I will not do so."

"Arienh we need you with us!"

"You need Guinevere more, it'll be an insufferable blow to the people without her. She is their courage and their hope, if she dies, so does their will to fight for the cause. She embodies what we are fighting for and for those who have not been born of a strong warrior line she is the reason that they fight, without her they will fight no longer." Arienh breathed in deeply.

"Then what do you suggest daughter of Anyon?"

"If there is no one else to get her then I will!" Arienh strode out of the house once more, Teague right behind her as she swung up onto her stallion once more, her hands gripping the sweat slickened leather reins as the scared man looked at her.

"This is madness!"

"If it is madness to fight for a friend then so be it, I am mad." She answered him as Saoi reared once more, plunging forward, his hooves churning the earth between his feet as she forced him to stay on the spot.

"If this is what you must do Arienh daughter of Anyon, then the gods grant you with speed and strength." The old warrior shook his head as he watched the girl before him handled her stallion, a great gift from her father, a stallion that she had raised from colt for the very purpose of war, with an ease that made handling a war horse such as he look easy like he knew it was not. They were truly a noble pair, proud and filled with a courage that came from the very ground that they were anchored to.

"If you wish to grant me speed then pray to Edian that I might have it." She answered him.

"The goddess speed."

"Tell my brother that I will see him soon." She said as she spun her stallion and sent him at a gallop out the way that they had come.

It was harder to weave through the people that were charging in the same direction as she was traveling as she made her way to the fording place. They all seemed to have two very similar ideas that might in some cases cause more harm then good. Firstly they wanted to huddle in groups, not realizing that whoever told them that there was safety in numbers in cases like theirs had been lying to them. Secondly they were all heading to the same place and therefore were a hindrance and an annoyance to her.

"For the love of the gods clear the way!" She shouted over the rabble as Saoi plunged underneath her, his head snaking out and nearly sinking his teeth into an old woman's arm before she was able to pull him short. His black ears were plastered back to his black skull, his eyes rolled in their sockets showing their whites as she slowed him right down to a bouncy trot and maneuvered him around the crowds, doing her best to avoid him treading unintentionally on the feet of fleeing people.

The stretch of land that had only taken her ten minutes to travel on her way to the village took her nearly three times that to reach the ford. It was only after Saoi leapt down the banks of the river, just off the main fording sight that people took notice of them for he had leapt straight into the ice cold water, plunging them both in over their heads for a moment before coming up again and striking out against the current with his powerful legs, his breath huffing out before him in white clouds of steam, his nostrils a frightening red against the wet black of his satin coat.

Arienh's skin tingled and her breath caught in her throat as she steered Saoi toward the shallower area of the ford, the water rushing around them causing her limbs to feel like they had been set a light. The black stallion's hooves struck mud, sand and stone for the first time and he heaved them out of the main river and onto the main ford, the water swirling around his legs as he picked up a trot of his own accord.

She was shivering as they moved across the river that had swollen with recent ice melts from the mountains of her land; her hands were wrapped stiffly around the rein leathers and strands of his hair as water from his hooves plunging into the water time and again splashed up, continuing to pelt her body with what felt like beads of ice.

This journey was not going to be the adventure that she always prayed to the goddess Edain that she would grant her. She had only started out on her mission and already she was soaked to the bone by an ice-cold river that the gods had put in the way of her and her best friend. Yes, this was a journey that was going to be like hell and yet she knew as her stallion climbed the banks of the river and back onto the open plains that she would get Gwen back or she would at least die trying.

Her wet cloak whipped out behind her as she let Saoi set his own place. The wind that he created soon dried the warrior's gear that she was wearing and her dark brown hair with it's many randomly placed braids flew around her face as she let him charge on until he had worked out the frustration that being in the crowd of stupid people had worked up within him.

They were back on their own again and as much as Arienh loved her stallion, he was not a person as much as he seemed to show human emotion at times and he could not hold conversation. It was no secret that while she was among people she wished to be away from them, riding in solitude through the forests or the mountains, gathering her Intel and meeting the people that her general would have her speak with. But coming to the end of her time alone she always yearned for the company of certain human beings.

To find that her father was dead, her brother was helping Merlin gather a fighting force to go up against both Roman and Saxon and her best friend, Guinevere, taken by the enemy was not easy on the girl and for once she did not relish the task that she had set herself. Breaking a girl out of a Roman's clutches would not be easy and yet that was what she had demanded of herself that she did. She could have at least used a score more riders to help but all she had was Saoi and herself and that would, in this case, hopefully be enough.

It would have to do but it was going to make for a lonely journey if the stallion didn't learn how to speak this time.

The journey to the Roman's estate would take her a day and a half of hard riding, two at a canter and with only a six hour rest stop to sleep, she calculated as she turned the horse on a dime and they entered a forest that she was all too familiar with. The belt of trees would take her as far south as the Roman wall where is had been split in two by the creators of the wall.

The forest would give her what cover she felt was necessary as she travailed to the estate and even while she formulated her plan and watched her friend's captives to gather the best way in the forest would hide them. It was a more then normal for her to blend into the woods. She had been doing it since she was a young child, painted in the blue swirls of her people as she learned the trade of the scout and tracker that she had been born to do.

Saoi stopped dead in his tracks without warning, almost throwing his rider over his head but the death grip that she had on his main meant that she was able to steady herself. A raven screeched overhead and she froze on his back. Death! The raven was foretelling death but if it was hers or not she could not tell as the raven was not visible to her sight.

"There is no battle here Morrigan." She whispered to the goddess and she made the sign against evil as Saoi stamped pawed at the earth, his ears pricked as he looked around them, his breath huffing as he waited for his rider to command him.

Her stallion shook his head, his black mane whipping out and hitting her in the face. She looked around her once more before squeezing lightly with her claves and letting the black beast move forward at a couscous walk. The trees were whispering of bad things and her muscles were tense as if she expected attack. She had never had the gift to be able to decipherer what the trees were speaking off; she had always relied on Guinevere for that. She was a tracker; she understood the signs left for her by man and beast and the movement of the earth or the whispering of the wind but the old pine trees that covered the forest belts were beyond her understanding.

"Why the hell did you have to get yourself caught Gwen?" She asked the girl who could not hear her. "Cause you better have a damned good reason if I'm not going to gut you when I find you."

Arienh rode at a steady pace until night fall and even then she rode on for a couple of hours, her horse blending in with the night as they moved through the forest without sound like a specter. She only stopped when the moon was high in the sky and she could be sure to be woken by the first light of morning. She tethered Saoi next to the place she had chosen to sleep. She unsaddled him and brushed him down with handfuls of rough grasses that grew at the base of the trees before unrolling her bedroll and laying down.

Tomorrow Marius Honorius would pay dearly for taking a friend of hers!

Knights had beaten her to the home of Marius Honorius and from what she had heard before they had broken into the walled room they were there as protection of the Roman. She had ridden in as close to them as she dared, keeping herself hidden using the buildings that the serfs had erected as their homes. As of yet she had not been detected by anyone but the serfs who stayed out of her way not giving her away and not getting close enough to her to cause trouble either.

She recognized the knights instantly as the remainder of the indentured Sarmatian knights that she had often seen in battle and yet had never had the misfortune of coming up against herself. Her task had just gotten that much harder.

Saoi shifted underneath her as she watched the knights along with two monks charge out of the stone building, two with people in their arms, one a young boy child and the other unmistakable as Guinevere. Her breath caught in her throat as disgust rose like a bile as she saw her friend's emaciated appearance, her blue paint and tattoos were covered in a think layer of blood, dirt and general grim and filth. Her light brown hair was matted and looked black against her pale skin.

The Roman master Marius Honorius suddenly ran forward, his wife swift at his heels. "Stop! Stop what you are doing!"

"What is this madness?" The leader of the Sarmatian Knights looked at the Roman incredulously, his eyes blazing with a righteous anger that couldn't help but shock Arienh as she slipped off her horse, sword in one hand, spear in the other making her way through the crowds of serfs watching doing her best to get to her friend. The knights were too intent on the man they were meant to save to even take notice of her.

"They are all pagans here!" The master said, his face turning red with a type of rage as if his words explained everything clearly. Pagans Arienh thought with disgust, her people were not the pagans; her people followed the true gods.

"So are we." One of the knights spoke up.

"They refused to do the tasks that God set for them." The Roman master was flustered and clearly unhappy that his actions were being called to account by a mere solider.

"You mean they refused to be your serfs!" The Captain of the knights, a man still holding her friend yelled.

"You are roman, you understand. And you are a Christian. You!" He snapped suddenly, turning on his wife who was just a little behind him. "You kept them alive!" He backhanded her across the face. One of the knights started forward but his Captain beat him to the pompous fat man, landing a punch across the man's face before drawing his sward and pointing the tip at the man's throat.

"When we get to the wall, you will be punished for this heresy." Marius Honorius was grasping at straws as he stared down the knight's blade.

"Maybe I should just kill you now and seal my fate." The Captain's anger was strange to Arienh as she assessed her best way to get between the knights around their Captain so that she could get Guinevere from his grasp. It might end as a suicide mission but she hoped that they would care little enough about the beaten girl just to hand her over and let them leave.

The monks that had made their way out of the building made their way over to them, whimpering slightly still. "I was willing to die with them, to lead them to their rightful place. It is God's will that these sinners be sacrificed." The monk addressed the Captain.

"Then I shall grant his wish, wall them back up!" Arienh knew that stealth would do her no good, she had only two possible outcomes now, somehow they would let her go with Guinevere or she could at least make sure that Guinevere did not die of starvation and dehydration.

"Let her go!" She said as she leapt forward her sword pointing at the Captain's throat and everyone froze.

Glossary

Edain – goddess of horses and horseback riding

Morrigan – goddess of battle, war, death, strife and fertility. She can take the form of a crow or raven. If seen by a warrior before battle that warrior will die.

Areinh – meaning Oath

Teague – poet

Saoi – warrior or champion.