A Man Rides Through (48 page)

"They will not hide their trail from me. I will follow and make a new one behind them. I am helpless for everything else, but that I can do. He"—she indicated the man with the badly cut shoulder— "will get support for me from Romish. But you must ride to Orison. You must warn Father."

She had lost her mind. There was no question about it.

Torrent couldn't entirely stifle her rising hysteria. "Do you not understand? It is his only hope!"

Terisa and Geraden stared at her, gaped, held their breath— and suddenly he gasped, "She's right!" He grabbed at Terisa's arm, wheeling toward the horses. "Come on! We've got to get out of here!"

Terisa froze: she couldn't move at all. Get out of here. Of course. Why didn't I think of that? Ride like crazy people halfway across Mordant to Orison, while she goes after those Alends and her mother
alone.
You've done this once before. Don't you remember? You sent Argus after Prince Kragen, and he got killed. And stopping Nyle didn't do us any good.

"Terisa"
he demanded. "I tell you, she's
right.
It's his only hope."

"What—?" She couldn't make her throat work. An avalanche had come
this dose
to falling on her. Like the collapse of the Congery's meeting hall. "What're you talking about?"

In response, Geraden made one of his supreme and unselfish efforts to control himself for her sake. Intensely, he said, "His only hope is if he finds out what happened to her before the people who took her know he knows. Before they can tell him. Before they start trying to use her against him. During that gap—if we can give him a gap—between when he knows and when they know he knows—he can still act. He can do something to save her. Or himself."

"Yes," Torrent breathed. "It is the only thing I can do."

Abruptly, she climbed out of the ruin of the porch, heading toward the horses. Her knife was still gripped in her fist.

As if she were her mother, she commanded the injured man, "Take a horse, ride to Romish. You'll be tended there. Tell them what happened. Tell them I require help. I'll leave a trail for them." Then her tone softened. "You're badly hurt, I know. There's nothing I can do for you. I must attempt to save the Queen—and my father's realm."

As if she were accustomed to extreme decisions—not to mention horses—she chose a horse, untethered it, and swung up into the saddle.

Terisa would have tried to stop her, but Geraden's acquiescence held her. "Geraden—" she murmured, pleading with him. "Geraden—"

"Terisa," he replied, so full of certainty that she couldn't argue with him, "she's right. I've got the strongest feeling she's right."

"Farewell, Geraden," Torrent broke in. "Farewell, my lady Terisa. Save the King.

"Do that, and together we will rescue Queen Madin."

Geraden turned to give the King's daughter a formal bow. "Farewell also, my lady Torrent. This story will fill King Joyse with pride, whatever comes of it." A moment later, he added, "And both Myste and Elega are going to be
impressed."

That almost made Torrent smile.

Alone, she rode out of the hollow on the trail of Queen Madin's abductors.

Terisa put the best tourniquet she could manage on the wounded man's shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Geraden slapped a measure of sense into the Queen's whimpering servant, then instructed him to make sure the Fayle's man reached Romish.

After that, they selected the two best horses, packed a third to carry their supplies, and started toward the Demesne and Orison.

THIRTY-SEVEN: POISED FOR VICTORY

The Alend army didn't move. It hadn't moved for days.

Oh, Prince Kragen kept his men busy enough: he was determined to be ready for anything. But he didn't waste another catapult; didn't risk any kind of sortie, much less a massed assault; didn't make anything more than covert efforts to spy on the castle. In fact, the only thing he apparently did to advance his siege was to completely prevent anyone from getting into or out of Orison: he cut King Joyse off from any conceivable source of news. Other than that, he and his forces might as well have been engaged in training exercises.

He was busy in other ways, of course. For instance, he had quite a number of men out at all times, furtively searching for some sign of the Congery's champion. Knowing what the champion had done to Orison, Prince Kragen felt a positive dislike for the prospect of being attacked from behind by that lone fighter. In addition, he spent quite a bit of time, both alone and with his father, trying to fathom King Joyse's daughters.

But King Joyse's warnings haunted him—and Master Quillon's. He took no direct action to hasten the fall of Orison.

That changed during the night which Terisa and Geraden had spent with Queen Madin.

Naturally, Prince Kragen had no way of knowing where Terisa and Geraden were. He couldn't know that they had ever left Orison—or that Mordant's need was coming to a crisis around him.

On the other hand, he was alert to every outward sign of what was happening in the castle.

When the men who had the duty of watching the ramparts more closely after dark reported to him that they heard shouts and turmoil, saw lights in the vicinity of the curtain-wall, he didn't hesitate: he sent half a dozen hand-picked scouts to creep as near to the wall as possible, climb it if necessary, and find out what was going on.

The news they brought back tightened excitement or dread around his heart.

There was a riot taking place on the other side of the curtain-wall.

Apparently, the overcrowded and raw-nerved populace of Orison was breaking into active rebellion against Castellan Lebbick.

After a while, the noise receded, as if the riot were moving into the main body of the castle. But light continued to show at the rim of the wall, blazing up in gusts like a fire out of control. And when dawn came the Prince saw dirty plumes of smoke curling upward from the wound in Orison's side, giving the castle a look of death it hadn't had since the day the champion had first injured it.

Again, Prince Kragen didn't hesitate: he had spent the night preparing his response. At his signal, fifty men carrying a battering ram in a protective frame ran forward to try the gates. The walls and roof which received the arrows of the defenders made the ram look as unwieldy as a shed; but the use of the frame could be an effective tactic, as long as the gate failed before the defenders had time to ready a counterattack—or as long as they were distracted by trouble elsewhere.

As a distraction, Prince Kragen sent several hundred soldiers with storming ladders and grappling hooks to assail the curtain-wall.

Unfortunately, Orison's guards proved equal to the occasion. A tub of lamp oil and a burning fagot turned the ram's protective frame into a charnal. And the Castellan—or whoever had taken command after the riot—had obviously expected the attack on the curtain-wall; so the defense there had been reinforced.

When Prince Kragen saw that his men were taking more than their share of losses and getting nowhere, he chewed his moustache, swore, and shook his fists at the sky—all inwardly, in the privacy of his thoughts, so that no one witnessed his frustration. Then he ordered a withdrawal.

Rather tentatively, as if sensing the Prince's state, one of his captains commented, "Well, they have to run out of oil
sometime."

Prince Kragen swore again—out loud, this time. Then he instructed the captain to begin raiding the surrounding villages and trees for wood: he wanted more battering rams, more protective frames. And while that raid was underway, he set about using up the rams and frames he already had.

If the defenders had left any of the battering rams he now sent against them alone, they would have soon learned that none of the rams had enough men with it to actually threaten the gates. This time, however—for once!—his tactics succeeded. The defenders faithfully burned every ram and frame to charcoal.

The Prince grinned grimly under his moustache. Apparently, Castellan Lebbick—or whoever had replaced him after the riot— was still human enough to be outwitted once in a while.

The riot which had taken place in Orison that night was an ugly one.

It had a number of excuses. The castle was indeed overcrowded, badly so—a detail which became increasingly onerous for everyone as the siege wore on. And of course the siege had come at the end of a hard winter, before spring could do anybody any good; so supplies were relatively short, and everything from food and water to blankets and space was strictly—a swelling number of people said
harshly
—rationed. By Castellan Lebbick, naturally. Despite Master Eremis' heroic replenishment of the reservoir.

And Orison's surplus population had nothing to do. Nobody really had anything to do. As long as the Alend army just sat there with all their heads crammed up the Prince's ass—as one tired old guard put it—nobody had any outlet for long days of pent-up fear.

Why didn't Prince Kragen
do
something?

Where was High King Festten?

For that matter, where was the Perdon?

How much longer was this going to go on?

Tempers grew ragged; hostility fed on frustration and uselessness; grievances multiplied in all directions. Orison's sewers kept backing up because the drainfields weren't adequate to the population. And the leaders of Orison, the men in command—King Joyse, Castellan Lebbick, Master Barsonage—did nothing to ease the pressure. They all went about their lives in isolation, as if the burgeoning misery sealed within these walls were immaterial to them. Even the castle's most comfortable inhabitants—men of position, women of privilege—were in an ugly mood; and the ugliness was spreading.

But even ugliness couldn't function in a vacuum: it needed a focus, a target.

It needed the Castellan.

He would have been a likely candidate in any case. After all, the responsibility for deciding and implementing Orison's distress was on his shoulders. Merchants and farmers had time to become bitter about the confiscation of their goods. Mothers with sick children had cause to complain about the rationing of medicines. People with a normal need for activity—and privacy—didn't have anyone else to blame for the lack of those necessities.

The guards, however, were loyal to their commander. Most of them had had years to become familiar with his loyalties—to them as well as to King Joyse. And they were accustomed to taking his orders. One way or another, they worked to control the pressure building against the Castellan.

As a result, there was no riot—no outbreak of resentment— until someone threw a spark into the tinder of Orison's mood.

That someone was Saddith.

She was on her feet now, able to get around. Despite the loss of a few teeth, and the rather dramatic damage done to the rest of her face, she was able to talk. And that was what she had been doing ever since she had healed enough to climb out of her sickbed: getting around; talking.

She had started with every man in Orison who had ever visited between her legs—or had let her know he'd like to visit. She had told those men what the Castellan had done to her, and why: she had gone to his bed out of simple pity for his loneliness, out of compassion for the pressure he was under; and he had hurt her
here,
and
here,
and
here.
But as her strength returned she broadened her range. She carried her injuries everywhere in public: her left hand broken and useless, the right nearly so; her face so badly battered that it would never regain its shape, one cheek crushed, one eye unable to close properly, scars in all directions. If anything, she wore her blouses unbuttoned farther than before, enabling the world to see what Lebbick had done to her there.

And everywhere she went, her message was the same.

You sods were quick enough for fornication when I had my beauty. If you were men now, you'd hoist Castellan Lebbick's balls on a stick.