Kerish pulled up a stool next to her. “I’d have thought you’d be at the command tent, waiting for word.”
“I needed to be alone for a while. No, I didn’t mean without you. You’re not a burden the way Lord Quinn is.”
“He’s been making a fuss again.”
“He doesn’t so much make a fuss as try to insinuate himself into every decision I make. I have to fight him for every inch of ground. I’m beginning to wonder if accepting his help was worth it.”
Kerish took her hand. “The Waxwold forces have already proved their worth. You know we didn’t have another choice.”
“I know.” She sighed. “I should go. The first of the teams will return soon, and if I’m not there, Lord Quinn will try to tell them what to do next.”
“I’ll come with you. I feel too keyed up to sleep.”
“What about Felix?”
“Claudia’s right next door. He’ll be safe.”
Willow rose, keeping hold of Kerish’s hand. “Better than safe, probably.”
The camp was quiet despite the early hour. Full dark had settled over the tents, and though lanterns and fires lit the canvas walls, the moonless night still felt oppressive. Men and women moved between the tents without speaking, as if they were going to a funeral. Willow nodded to people she knew—there weren’t as many of those anymore, what with their increased forces. The little armies maintained separate camps, but close together, and Huddersfield militia mixed with insurgents and Waxwold troops and vice versa until it was time to go to bed. Willow suspected some mingling went on after hours, too, but she wasn’t so prudish as to demand unmarried people not sleep together. That was between them and heaven.
She and Kerish still pitched their tent with the Eskandelic troops, which she felt gave the appearance of impartiality toward any of their Tremontanan allies, and the command tent remained square in the middle of that company. As she and Kerish approached it, voices drifted toward them on the frigid air. Soltighan, and Captain Robinson, and Richard Quinn, and…yes, there Lord Quinn was, holding forth on something she couldn’t yet make out. She quickened her pace. Surely she hadn’t needed a moment’s peace badly enough to give Lord Quinn the opportunity to increase his power?
“Have the teams returned?” she said, pushing open the tent door and overriding whoever was speaking.
The four men looked up from where they stood around the table, where a map was spread. “Not yet,” Soltighan said. “I anticipate it will take some hours more. This is a larger force of Ascendants than we have yet faced.”
“I say we should have sent more troops,” Lord Quinn said. “We lost good men yesterday because the spies were careless. We ought to assume more enemies than the spies perceive.”
“My men were not careless,” Richard said. “Those Ascendants joined forces after they surveilled the area. They can’t be expected to read minds.”
“Good thing, that, or we’d be fighting our own troops,” Robinson murmured.
“We can’t expect to have no casualties,” Willow said. “All our troops perform to the best of their abilities.”
“And I’m to believe it was coincidence that only Waxwold soldiers paid for that carelessness with their lives?” Lord Quinn said.
“Every army has lost men and women,” Willow said, keeping a firm grip on her temper. “I mourn all of them, regardless of whose people they were. As should you.”
“Think instead of how few we have lost,” Soltighan said, cutting across Lord Quinn’s retort.
“Indeed,” said Richard. “Shall we plan tomorrow’s march?” He traced a line on the map. “Tomorrow will bring us to the gates of Treston, the capital of County Cullinan. We must decide whether to stop there, or bypass it and make straight for Aurilien.”
“I take it we still haven’t received word from Lady Harcourt,” Willow said.
“Not at all, but that was to be expected, given that our messenger never returned and might have been captured or killed before delivering our response to Lady Harcourt’s pledge of support.” Richard made a little circle on the map with the tip of his forefinger, centered on Treston. “She may be waiting for our arrival.”
“Or she may have given in to Terence’s demands,” Lord Quinn said. “Treston could be a death trap for us, fortified against our armies and our not-so-secret weapon.”
“I agree,” Willow said, though agreeing with Lord Quinn burned like acid inside her. “We need more information.”
“I can send another messenger,” Richard said. “But if Terence knows Anastasia is against him, he’ll be watching very closely for us to try to communicate with her. It’s not as if the general location of our army is a secret.”
“Can we continue to count on the Ascendants not being willing to make common cause against him? It’s been to our advantage that they get along as well as cats in a sack, but suppose Lord Valant is able to force them to do his bidding?” Robinson tapped the little drawing of Aurilien on the map. “If hundreds of them come at us all at once, even our wand-wielders will have a hard time of it.”
“Terence hasn’t set foot outside the palace in weeks,” Richard said. “My guess is he’s dealing with fractious lords and non-Ascendants who might be inclined to challenge his rule. But I don’t think we should make plans based on that guess.”
“It’s not just that they won’t make common cause,” Kerish said. “It occurred to me, after yesterday’s battle, that the more Ascendants there are in one place, the less source each of them has access to. It would explain why we never see more than a dozen at a time. They’d be fighting each other for resources.”
“You could have said something earlier,” Lord Quinn said, in a way that said he was working up to be disagreeable.
“It doesn’t matter so long as we understand it now. And it ultimately makes no difference whether we fight a dozen Ascendants or a hundred. For now, we have to go on as we’ve been doing,” Willow said. “Sending out the spies ahead of us, locating the Ascendants intent on attacking our forces, and stopping them before they can do that. Richard, send another messenger to Lady Harcourt. We need to know what she’s capable of doing before we send troops to Treston.”
Shouts rang out in the distance. Kerish squeezed Willow’s shoulder briefly and stepped out of the tent. The shouting stopped. Not an attack on the camp, then. Running feet, drawing nearer. Kerish held the tent flap open and the runner entered, breathing heavily. “Fifteen Ascendants, not where we expected,” she panted. She leaned over, hands on her knees, and struggled for air.
“And our soldiers?” Lord Quinn demanded.
“Give her a moment,” Willow said. She crossed to the woman’s side and put a hand on her shoulder. “Just catch your breath. We can wait.”
“People could be dying.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that, Alric.”
The woman was already straightening, her ruddy face returning to its normal olive-skinned hue. “We intercepted them,” she said, “on a direct line for the camp. Good thing for us they don’t travel lightly. It’s only about two miles from camp, the ambush site I mean. We lost two people and near everyone’s injured, but we accounted for all the bastards and most of their people. Took the rest captive.”
“Two miles,” Richard said. “That’s far too close.”
“It’s about time the Ascendants started working together, even if it means coordinating separate groups,” Willow said. “Even they can’t be so stupid as to not see their strategy, if you can call it that, isn’t working.”
“We need more information,” Soltighan said. “We have not seen nearly as many Ascendants as there certainly are, so near the capital. Are they holding back out of fear, or as part of some plan Terence Valant has set in motion?”
The message runner bowed to Willow. “Can I tell ‘em to bring the prisoners back to camp, my lady?”
“Um…actually, no. I’ll meet them outside camp, if you’ll take me there. Kerish?”
Wil
low helped herself to a lantern hanging outside the tent and followed the woman northward. In the darkness, the lamplight felt like a warm bubble encompassing her, outside which was emptiness. The illusion of floating along in a void was persuasive enough that Willow took Kerish’s hand briefly as a reminder of what was real. The messenger’s back was all that was lit by the lantern, and Willow wondered briefly if this was a ruse, if the woman wasn’t one of theirs, but an Ascendant’s servant or, worse, an Ascendant herself…
Movement ahead, in the darkness, as a shadow detached itself from a tree. “Linda?” a voice whispered.
“It’s Lady North and Mister Serjian,” the messenger said. “Come to see to the prisoners.”
The shadow came forward and became one of the Huddersfield militia Willow happened to know. “Over here, my lady,” he said. Willow let out a relieved breath and followed him.
The road, which Willow’s forces were paralleling, was a darker line against the winter-dead grasses of the plains surrounding Treston. Off to one side milled more than a dozen horses, shifting restlessly but showing no inclination to bolt. Willow couldn’t see if they’d been hobbled or restrained in some other way. More animals for Rafferty to take charge of, though they’d probably need to sell them; they were running out of people who could both ride and would be more effective on horseback than on foot.
To the other side of the road, barely visible in the dimness, sat ten or twelve people, none of them bound—well, it wasn’t as if the fighters carried rope on their raids. Willow shone the lantern over them. Most of them were dressed in the sort of low-grade finery Willow associated with the personal servants of a noble, but a few wore clean but well-worn clothes that to Willow smacked of the stable. They all looked afraid, all but one older woman, who gave Willow a look that said Willow was wasting her time. Willow smiled at her in a friendly way, though her heart was beating faster at the thought of what came next.
“You’ve seen what we can do,” she said, drawing everyone’s attention. “You’ve seen your Ascendant masters and their soldiers fight us and die. We choose to believe that you who serve the Ascendants may decide you want to do other things with your lives. This is your opportunity. Give your fealty to King Felix, and we’ll let you live. Refuse, and you’ll die a traitor’s death. Those are your choices. I’ll give you a minute to think about it.”
It no longer surprised her that people who’d served Ascendants didn’t immediately leap to pledge to Felix, though she thought it was an obvious response, when the alternative was death. But a hand shot up immediately. “I’ll swear, just don’t kill me!” the woman shrieked. “I want to swear!”
More hands went up until the only one still silent was the woman who’d given Willow such a hard stare. “What about you?” Willow said.
“What about me?”
“Are you going to choose life?”
“I’m no traitor.”
“That’s no answer.” Willow wanted to go to her knees and beg this woman to see sense. “You can’t possibly be so loyal to your former master. He or she is dead now. You’ve got no reason not to transfer your loyalty to the true King.”
“Amalia, don’t be a fool!” said the shrill woman who’d been first to swear to Felix. She had her arm around a young man, whose head lolled as if he were falling asleep despite the precariousness of his situation.
Amalia glanced over her shoulder at the woman, then back at Willow. “I’ll swear,” she said in a low voice, too low to make it farther than Willow’s ears, “if you let me do it privately.”
“Privately?” It was the strangest request she’d ever had from one of those prisoners. Strange, and unnerving. “No. In public, or not at all.”
The woman glanced around again. “Then I swear loyalty to King Felix.”
Willow nodded. “Let’s get them moving back to camp and see what they know. Maybe some of them can tell us what the Ascendants’ next move will be.”
Kerish held the lantern on the way back to camp. “We don’t know if they’re telling the truth,” he said, “about swearing to Felix, I mean.”
“We never do. But I’m not going to preside over mass executions. And so far none of them have turned on us. I’m going to hang on to that.”
“Where’s the suspicious woman I married?”
“She’s too tired to maintain that level of suspicion.”
The camp had come alive while they were gone, suggesting to Willow that more of the fighting teams had returned. Two wand wielders matched with a soldier—get three or four of those teams together and no Ascendant stood a chance. Willow prayed they’d have no more deaths that night.
There were lights on inside the infirmary tent, and Willow waved her little procession to a halt and ducked inside. Claudia was there, wreathed in purple lights with her hand on someone’s bloody forehead. “Just a scalp wound, nothing serious,” she said. “They bleed a lot.”
“I’ve heard that,” Willow said. “Would you come and see to the wounded in this party? They didn’t look too badly off to me, but I know our soldiers have a tendency to downplay their injuries, as if that would let them return to the battle quickly.”
“I think they’re not used to having a healer around.” Claudia handed the woman a wet towel and said, “Wash your head thoroughly, then go to bed and stay there until morning. You’ve had your brains rattled enough that rest is essential.”
Willow held the tent flap for the healer. “You left Felix with his bodyguards, I take it?”
“I did, and one of them is inside the tent. I decided Felix would—” Her eyes, which had been roving across the prisoners, went wide. “Sweet holy heaven!”
Amalia made a dive for the center of the crowd. “Somebody stop her!” Willow shouted, though she had no idea what the woman meant to do. In the next moment, Amalia grabbed the young man from the shrill-voiced woman and bore him to the ground. No one else moved. “Get her up,” Willow said. She pushed through the crowd until she stood beside where Amalia crouched over the young man, patting him all over. “Get away from him. What the hell is going on?”
“Willow,” Claudia said, her voice sounding strained, “get out your wand.”
Willow turned toward the healer. Bright purple lights twined up her arms and throat, shedding a light stronger than the lanterns. In front of her, the shrill-voiced woman stood frozen in the act of pointing. More purple light like glowing tattoos traced lines along her skin. Two men and a woman crouched near her, keening pain through clenched teeth.
Willow swore and fumbled her wand out as three insurgents did the same. When the Ascendant’s source was drained, the prisoners crouching nearby sagged like puppets cut free of their strings. Claudia stood still, purple lights still making a halo around her. “You should bind her,” she said in a normal voice.
“Somebody get some rope,” Willow said. Now her heart was pounding. “I brought her back to camp. I can’t believe—why in the hell didn’t any of you say something!”
“She had my son in her grasp,” Amalia said, cradling the young man close. “She threatened to kill him first, then start in on the rest of us, if we gave away her game. I tried to tell you—” Her words broke off with a sob. “He’s not waking up. He’s not breathing!”
“He’s alive,” Claudia said, walking away from her frozen victim. “Though not from lack of Marietta trying. She had just enough time—never mind, it won’t matter to you.” She knelt before the young man and peeled back his eyelids, then took his wrist and put two fingers over his pulse.
“You know her?”
“We were in the same academy class. I haven’t seen her in years, but I don’t forget faces.” The young man sucked in a deep breath, then coughed, long and hard. His mother cried out and crushed him to her, tears spilling over her cheeks. “She certainly wasn’t expecting me.”
“I can’t believe I brought her back to camp.”
“As if you could have foreseen this.”
“No, I should have. I—”
Willow couldn’t look at Kerish. “I’ve become sloppy. Careless. And it could have gotten someone killed.”
She heard Kerish take in a deep breath. “I’m not going to tell you it’s all right,” he said, his words like an icicle sending cold, sharp pains through her chest. “But you’re not perfect, Willow. Don’t destroy yourself trying to be.”
“Let’s worry about taking care of the rest of these people, all right?” Claudia said. She helped the young man and his mother to their feet. “Any more hidden Ascendants among you? Why don’t you and you—” she pointed at a couple of soldiers “—take them to the mess tent and get them something hot to drink. Then I think our captains would like a word or three with them.”
She put her hand on the Ascendant’s immobile elbow. “I can keep her paralyzed for a while, if you want to decide what to do with her.”
Willow swallowed more self-recrimination. “Back to the command tent,” she said. “We’ll interrogate her, then…” More deaths. She was sick of death. But when it came to Felix’s safety…she cringed inside, remembering her careless words to Kerish. She couldn’t afford to relax, no matter how certain she felt that they were safe. Obviously, safety was an illusion.
Kerish lifted the Ascendant, still frozen in place, and carried her in the direction of the command tent. Willow and Claudia followed in silence. Willow went through a dozen conversational possibilities, none of which seemed right. Claudia wouldn’t criticize her, much as she felt deserving of criticism. “Could she…do what you do? Kill at a distance?”
“No. She’d have to touch a person to do that. Which was why she had that young man in her nasty claws.” Claudia sighed. “But she wouldn’t have had any qualms about killing a child, and she’d have found a way to get her hands on Felix.”
“I’m not going to be able to forgive myself for this.”
“Just so you don’t let it paralyze you. Hating yourself won’t protect Felix.”
Richard and Soltighan were the only ones in the command tent, for which Willow breathed out a silent prayer of thanks. She didn’t need to reveal her weakness to Lord Quinn, who’d use it against her somehow. “What—who’s this?” Richard said, startled.
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