King's Shield (70 page)

“And who will have to pay for rebuilding it?” Barend retorted.

Rat straightened up, wincing. Terrible fight yesterday, fast gallop this morning, the bandage was leaking. His coat was already ruined.

But he grinned, his prominent front teeth making him look fierce. “What if we only seem to set fire to your city?”

“What?”

“What?”

“Hah?”

He lifted a hand toward the shore, trying not to pull the open wound on his back. “Still haven’t got all the fires out. Right? I saw smoke when riding in to report.”

“That’s so,” the harbormaster said, adding dryly, “When you people set fire to something, you’re as thorough as the pirates ever were.”

“Hey—” Buck began.

Barend waggled a hand. “Never mind. What are you thinking, Cousin?”

“That we keep those fires going,” Rat said. “From the ocean it’s got to look like the entire city’s aflame. Inda told us they have magic communications. That Venn mage o’ his said so.”

“Venn mage?” the harbormaster repeated, wondering if that shocking rumor could be true after all.

No one paid him any attention. Rat said, “Which means the fellows coming here got to see a burning city from this end, see?”

“You mean, make it look like all of Lindeth’s gone up in flames?” Buck said, and whistled.

“That’s it.” Rat turned to the harbormaster. “We’d need your cooperation. We have maybe a watch or so before they reach us. So it has to be now if we’re to do it.”

Barend chuckled. “Oh, a watch ought to do it easily.” He did not say that he knew some pirate ruses for making fires look far worse than they were.

The harbormaster huffed. “You won’t be setting fire to the city?”

Barend raised his hand, palm out, in a gesture of promise. “You tend the fires yourselves. Just keep them going, lots of smoke, like I show you, and they won’t set foot in Lindeth.”

“Ourselves?” the harbormaster said, bushy white brows raised. “What will you be doing?”

“Riding over the white cliffs the back way. So when they turn around again to go upriver to the pass, well, they’ll get their own welcome party.”

“You don’t have nearly enough men,” the harbormaster protested.

Barend’s grin faded. Rat looked sardonic. Buck widened his eyes. “We don’t?”

The harbormaster kept shaking his head all the way back to his house, now crowded with frightened faces.

“We’ve got a plan,” he said.

 

 

 

A thick cloud mass moved in on a strengthening wind. Just as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen the Venn smelled fire on the wind, and when they topped the highest hill before the gradual descent toward Lindeth Harbor, there was no harbor to be seen. Just a thunderhead of smoke over the entire city, glowing with flame.

Chapter Twenty-one

SIGNI woke before dawn. The headache was just a shade less murderous. She managed to rise and force her shaky legs to bear her out of the room and down the stairs. She stopped on the landing outside the archive, and felt the door. It was closed: she bowed her head, accepting judgment.

She made her way slowly downstairs, trusting in the dim light and her rumpled, anonymous clothing to draw little attention. The few awake paid her no heed. They were too shocked, too weary, and wondering where to begin cleaning up the sodden remains of the city. Not one of the few people moving about the castle that morning noticed a small, sandy-haired woman of indeterminate origin.

She drifted to the kitchen. In the light of a single lamp, she found less devastation than she’d feared. Certainly everything on ground level or below was ruined, but the water had left the bags, jars, and jugs on shelves above table height untouched, and tightly-made barrels had also survived.

She helped herself to some heels of the day before’s bread and a hunk of cheese. She felt much better, enough to set to work. She was a sea dag. Most of her spells pertained to water in some way.

The morning sun had crowned the distant hills and the summer air was hot enough to spoil wet things when her spells began to take effect. In a reversal of the calling spell she evaporated pools and puddles, compressed water out of wood and cloth, sending it all back to the underground river. The dank smell diminished, leaving dry detritus for the citizens to clean up.

Signi found her way to the lazaretto. Her second set of skills was in healing. She knew she would be needed that day.

 

 

 

Hilda Battle Chief (newly promoted) Vringir’s mood was vile when the sun came up. Overhead a blanket of low clouds promised stifling air later; it already smelled of smoke drifting from the still-burning city.

The thud of horse hooves caused his head to pang. All night long horsemen had attacked his camp: a flurry of galloping hooves and arrows, then they dashed away into the darkness. The Marlovans were far too fast to chase even if he’d had enough horses.

He issued the command to rouse the camp. The second half of the landing party had been ordered to share out their journey bread, which had been meant to get them through the first day. Instead, half rations would have to suffice until his scouting parties could gather food from the countryside and meet up with them.

They would have to march hungry, but march they must. He glared in the direction of Ala Larkadhe’s white tower, hazily outlined against the rising sun, the battlements of the walls just visible. If anyone came riding out of the gates of Ala Larkadhe, there’d be no mercy this time.

He nodded at the signal ensign, who blatted the horn. The men rose and prepared to march alongside the river to the mouth of the pass.

 

 

 

When it was just barely light enough to make out figures, Evred woke with a snort. An Inda-shaped shadow stood in the middle of the trail, head slightly bent.

“Inda?”

The shadow straightened up. “Can you see me?”

“Barely.”

The sound of their voices roused the others.

“Then I can see the trail. I’ve been wondering if I can or I just think I can.”

Evred did not try to make sense of this. He got to his feet. “Let’s go.”

They emerged through a mossy natural archway onto an outcropping where the stone foundation of a tiny house sat looking over what once had been a spectacular panorama.

Thump. Thump. Thump.
The tramp of many feet echoed up the stone canyons. Evred had thought the thumping was just the ever-present headache; he became aware that it was external.

They couldn’t see the pass, only a wider gap in the rocky cliffs and crags. But they certainly could hear the army marching up the last leg of the pass toward the top.

They stopped at one of the many little waterfalls and drank, then shared out one of their travel loaves. Finally, with a luxuriant whispering of cloth, Evred pulled out his heavy silken battle-tunic, golden light running along the embroidery, the silk itself glowing like the heart of a fire. “I think we’d better get ready,” he said.

Inda grinned, sat down, pulled on socks and boots. Then stood up, wiggling his toes and rocking back and forth to get used to footgear again. “Tau?”

“Right here.” Tau pulled from his pack the neatly folded battle-tunic that he and Vedrid had made.

Inda hadn’t thought about clothing for so long, he felt strange as he took off his coat. Tau lifted the battle-tunic over Inda’s upraised arms. His chain mail bunched at the shoulders, then lay flat again, jingling as the cool silk rustled down around him. He looked down, his rubies winking at his cheeks, then up. “I look like a hothouse fan dancer.” And he swung his narrow hips from side to side.

The men nearby laughed heartily, for there could not possibly be any vaster a difference between a daintily and alluringly dressed pleasure house performer and this powerful, hard-bodied, scar-faced fellow with the king’s eagle spread so splendidly across his chest, piratical earrings glinting. His total lack of strut won favor in their eyes—even if it did not in his king’s.

But only Tau observed the quick contraction of Evred’s features. Once again Evred had been moving with that ritual deliberation, signifying an internal scale of meaning of which Inda was unaware. But his expression shuttered again. “Let’s run.”

 

 

 

When Durasnir emerged from his cabin ready to begin the day, he found Dag Ulaffa waiting, eyes closed, hands together.

No one else was in the little breakfast alcove. Durasnir looked from his message case to Ulaffa, who gave a single shake of the head. “Erkric is not here,” he said. “The prince sleeps. In the south, they are marching toward the pass.” And then, “The clash will be in the north this day. Valda found a place if you wish to observe our people and the Marlovans meeting in the pass.”

Durasnir did not wish to, but once again he felt the conviction that he
must
be there. Through the roots, the trunk, the mighty branches—people, culture, kingship—came meaning. Though roots were uplifted, the great tree twisted and cracked, and the branches shed leaves into the fires of ambition so that everything around him burned, he had to see.

Why? Perhaps his real motivation was only the military hatred of being taken by surprise. Simple curiosity.

Immaterial. He was not going to question anymore. “Please take me there,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-two

HAWKEYE’S and Noddy’s men heard the Venn approaching long before they saw them. The sound was intermittent because of the thick, swirling fog. But the animals knew they were there; ears twitched, heads tossed, forefeet plunged.

Noddy and Hawkeye waited side by side in the middle of the second row of lancers. The fifty in front were the biggest, toughest dragoons on the toughest horses. The wings of the second line were the next toughest. The honor of riding to either side of the commanders had been hotly contested, though a couple of them had not been able to hide little signs of relief when they were not picked. Maybe only Noddy noticed because he was paying attention: though all protested, some vehemently, there was just that lightening of the voice, the easing of tense faces, that betrayed the stubborn body that wanted to live.

Wanted to
live.

In the realm of the spirit few can hide thoughts. As the Venn marched up the last distance, Noddy and Hawkeye fell silent, but their inner voices were clear to any who had the ability, and the interest, to listen.

Hawkeye had never told anyone that the urge to fight made him hot. All the others saw was smiling, fierce alertness, as he checked the placement of archers behind two lines of straw men, then more straw men and the stronger archers. His lust for battle being real lust, well, it sometimes bothered him—felt wrong, somehow, except wasn’t he a fighting man? If he knew the fight was honorable, then it couldn’t be wrong, could it?

Back in the academy days, he’d loved fights until Gand pulled him aside one day after lance practice and pointed out that broken bones and teeth on our side was doing the enemy’s work for them, right? So Hawkeye had ceased scrapping, saving his martial ardor for a real enemy.

He’d got that when he faced pirates on the Nob. Battle was far better than scrapping, he’d discovered. But it had been over far too fast.

Now, at last, here were the Venn.

“Fog! Came down to help us, eh?” Hawkeye laughed, clapping a man on the shoulder as he rode down the lines in inspection, then he passed through the last line of lancers and reached the first line of the fake army. “Hey, straw man, where’s your prick? Who built this one? Tlennen, get over here, give him yours. Who’ll notice the difference?”

A shout of laughter amid hoots and jibes at the grinning Tlennen. Hawkeye rode back and forth, horsetail swinging, handing out insults mostly, but the tone was one of comradeship, and the laughter felt good.

Men took courage at the sight of his flashing smile, the ring of anticipation in his voice, the strut in his moves. He was not yet thirty, tall and tough and handsome, looking like he was riding off to Heat Street and not to a battle where he was outnumbered a hundred to one.

The men scattered among the straw army were under orders to yell and wave weapons, to look like more than one man. “We couldn’t have asked for a better day,” he said to another who kept chewing his lips, which were revealingly chapped and red.

Yes we could,
Noddy thought.
A good day would be me at home, eating breakfast with my wife and cousin before we plan the day’s work. Watching my boy drool. Chasing the colts around the paddock before the watch changes.
He had done his best, but he couldn’t resign himself to certain death. He couldn’t fight off the sickening conviction that Inda’s plan was a shambles, that no one was where he was supposed to be—except for himself, Hawkeye, five hundred men, and how many thousand Venn?

Oh, yes. Five hundred men and a whole lot of horses and men of straw.

The
whisht!
of arrows was the first sign of battle.
Damn the wait,
Noddy thought, and was surprised at a small spurt of relief. The inevitable was here at last. He’d soon be too busy for regret.

“Helms!” Hawkeye shouted, one hand winding up his horsetail, the other thumping his helm over his head.

The men unhooked their helms, shoved their hair up inside to further cushion their heads, settled the helms down tightly over their ears. Though they’d all complained about their heaviness, the heat, no one complained now.

“Shields up!”

Indistinct movement in the gray murk resolved slowly into tall figures, square shields, spears. Swords. Horned helms. Rank on rank of them, more shadows than shapes: a hundred men across, for Talkar had never liked how messily charges ended on the plains, and here they were in a terrain that couldn’t be more different.