“Sire.” Joyeaus bowed and edged her way out of the crowd.
No wonder the voice had sounded familiar, and he felt that familiar apprehension whenever he thought of the half-blind Herald-Chronicler-in-training. Well, at least he’d given her enough skill to get herself out of trouble if she had to, and he could count on her strong instinct for self-preservation to keep her out of the fighting itself.
Unless, of course, there was no other choice. But if that happened, everyone in a white uniform with a mount that was even vaguely pale in color was going to be in danger. The Tedrels knew better than to let a single Herald escape alive.
It has to be Sunpriests that are helping them, though. No mage worth the name would serve Karse or the Tedrels. No mage worth the name will serve where the Mercenary Guild won’t. Even one of the blood-path mages wouldn’t serve the Tedrels, in part because the Tedrels themselves would know better than to trust one of that sort. You didn’t want a blood-path mage around; when sacrifices ran short, they tended to grab whoever was closest. . . .
That didn’t make things any better, however. The Sunpriests had power. Everyone knew about the invisible creatures they commanded that stalked the night, able to see into a man’s very soul and discern if he was a heretic and a traitor, and thus, their lawful prey. He himself had heard them, howling in the distance.
:Then why didn’t they take you?: Kantor asked, with none of the ironic humor he might have put into such a question.
:Because I am no heretic,: he replied, with none of the sharpness he might have put into a reply, because Kantor was not teasing him, and deserved candor. :I follow the Writ as well as I may; and though I often fail, failure does not make a heretic, blasphemy does. They hunt those who would deny Vkandis, not the sinner. If they hunted sinners, there would be no man or woman safe in Karse, and precious few children. And as for their other prey, I am no traitor to Karse or my people.: There was heat in his last sentence, though; he couldn’t help himself, and Kantor reacted to it.
:Peace, I only asked to see what it was that these creatures that haunt your darkness might seek,: he said soothingly. :I suspect in part it is a feeling of guilt, and in part, the fear that such guilt would cause. Especially in those who think that such creatures can read their souls, and know that the Sunpriests would not approve of what is there.:
Well, that was a novel suggestion. And it was one he would think about in depth—and perhaps discuss with Myste, since she was here—but later. For now, since the mere mention of the fact that other peoples had as much or more magic at their disposal as the Heralds did, seemed to cause Sendar and the others to act as if they were momentarily stunned, he had other things to worry about. :Take it as read, you and the other Companions, that the Sunpriests are going to try to block whatever Gifts we use,: he advised. :I don’t know how well Sendar and Joyeaus understood what I was trying to tell them—:
—and even now he truly didn’t understand how the possibility hadn’t even occurred to them.
:We probably can’t do anything about FarSight and ForeSight, but I defy them to block Mindspeech with the Companions boosting it,: Kantor said with determination. :And we might even be able to boost the other Gifts on an irregular basis.:
Good enough. Now for the rest; he waited until there was a gap in Sendar’s orders, and interrupted.
“Majesty,” he said clearly, with a touch of sharpness. “If blocking FarSight the enemy suddenly is, when until now he has not, then is it not that he does not want to be seen? And steps is taking, of that to make certain? And that would be—why?”
Sendar stared at him a moment, his brow furrowed, and again Alberich cursed his lack of expertise in Valdemaran. But it would have taken him a quarter-candlemark to work out how to say it clearly, and they didn’t have the time—
The others just stared at him, probably trying to untangle his mangled syntax as well. Selenay, who was far more used to the way he spoke, uttered an oath that would have made one of the muleteers blush.
“They’re moving!” she said—no, shouted—before her father could rebuke her for her language. “Father, the Tedrels, they knew we’d be watching them, they didn’t care until this moment since all we’d see is their troops building, but now they don’t want us to see them because they’re moving!”
Sendar swore, in language even stronger than Selenay’s (and there was no doubt in Alberich’s mind where she’d learned to curse so fluently). But he put up his hand to quell the raised voices around him, stilling an incipient panic with a single gesture.
Alberich hoped that Selenay was taking note. This was the sort of thing a Monarch needed to be able to do by sheer force of personality.
“Even if they could fly—which they cannot—they could not be at our Border before three days have elapsed,” Sendar pointed out. “Since they must move on their feet and those of their horses, it will be longer than that. We have a dual task—to find another way to gain the intelligence that FarSight would have given us, and to prepare the army to meet them. The former is in the hands of Joyeaus and Myste, and if any two Heralds can find what is needed in the past, they can. So, my friends, let us bend our minds to the latter, for it is time to finish our strategies. That is what we can do.”
Alberich withdrew a little, for at the moment he was best as an observer. No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy, he reminded himself. He’d reminded Myste of that truism often enough as well; with luck, she’d remember it and she and Joyeaus would add several more layers to their plotting.
And if he paid a little more attention to Orthallen than the rest, well, that also was part of his responsibility. It was not only an enemy that could do damage. Sometimes the danger came from within, and the one who brought it could even have all of the best intentions in the world.
It was a very small tent—more like a pavilion, actually, showing old and much-faded colors on its canvas—pitched among the slightly untidy cluster of those belonging to Heralds assigned to the King and his officers. No two of these tents were alike, taken as they were from whatever was available after the Guard, the officers, the King and his servants were done picking over the available canvas, but this one stood out for both its inconvenient size and its shabby state. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, Alberich looked at it askance. Surely not.
“My home away from home,” Myste said, gesturing at the canvas square with its peaked top. She held the flap open to let him in.
“This must be the oddest campaign tent I have ever seen,” Alberich remarked, as he squeezed himself into the tent that Myste had taken, ducking his head to avoid the low cross-beams. “It’s certainly the smallest—”
Myste shrugged. “That’s probably why no one else was particularly eager to take it. I think it must have been cut down after the canvas around the bottom started to rot and stitched together with replacements, because the floor is newer than the sides and top.”
He had expected something entirely different, a tent that was more a semiportable library. Well, there were books, but nowhere near as many as he’d expected. His glance at the neat packing case that served as a bookcase as soon as the cover was unstrapped made her smile. “I brought copies of War Chronicles, and some odd bits, and nothing more than would fit in that case,” she said. “Only copies. If the army retreats and I have to flee with nothing more than the uniform on my back, may the Tedrels have joy of them.”
He didn’t tell her what he thought the Tedrels would use the paper for, he just folded his legs under him and sat on the canvas floor. “And this is interesting—”
He pointed at the arrangement where anyone else would have had a cot or a bedroll. He thought there might be a cot under there, but one third was propped up to serve as a chair back and the opposite end dropped down, and the rest had a strange tray raised over it on some sort of folding legs, with everything needed for writing arranged atop it; a brazier no bigger than the palm of his hand, stacks of very cheap wood-pulp paper, graphite
sticks, and pen and ink, and a lantern she could hang on the tent pole overhead. Which she did at that very moment, raising the chimney after it was hung to light it with a coal from the tiny brazier. And a moment later, she sprinkled the coal with a powder that sent up a haze of insect-repelling incense.
She grinned as she saw what he was looking so closely at. “That’s my invention. Bed, chair, and table in one, and it all comes apart and fits together. It even makes part of its own case. My clothes and bits are packed in the back half under the cot, and the desk is the top. And since we’ve got messengers going to Haven twice a day anyway, they take what I’ve written with them whenever they go. No matter what happens, we won’t lose more than half a day’s rough notes from meetings and anything else I know about, and if everything goes pear-shaped, Elcarth will at least have a record of what led up to it.” She swung the “desk” away on a pivoting arm, and sat down.
He hoped that losing a half-day’s rough draft would remain her only concern.
For all that the bed thing was amazingly compact, there wasn’t much room left in her tent. He’d seen her rooms at the Collegium. She was a woman addicted to clutter and a collector of things. This sparse minimalism was totally unlike the Myste he knew. She gave him a side glance as if she guessed what he was thinking, and a half smile, which swiftly sobered. “Joy and I have had our little conference and we have some plans, and you were right, there have been times when Gifts have been blocked, and—oh, do hold back your surprised look—by Karsites. But there are things we can do, and they have never managed to block Mindspeech on our side of the Border. Or battle line, whichever came first. Another point of interest, if you will, is that since Lavan Firestorm’s time, apparently they have been unable to coax those night-stalking things you were talking about anywhere near the Border because they haven’t appeared at all over here. Now, can I count on that continuing, do you think?”
Alberich chewed on his lower lip and considered what he knew. He had only heard the things in the distance, and had never asked any Sunpriest about them. But then, one didn’t ask them. Interest in what they sent out might cause them to suspect guilt, or worse, heresy. But it did occur to him that although he had never heard them too near the Border, the reason for that was probably less than arcane. The Sunpriests would not risk themselves anywhere near the Border, and they probably had to be within a certain proximity to their charges to control them.
And if the Tedrels were providing a screen of bodies, they wouldn’t hesitate to follow.
However, the situation at the moment suggested that the Sunpriests had a great deal more to concern themselves over than their ancient enemies.
“I think—I think perhaps that even if the Sunpriests could send their servants across the Border, at this point they wouldn’t. I believe that they hold them back in reserve to make certain the Tedrels, after conquering Valdemar, do not turn on them as well.” He raised an eyebrow. “Consider, if you will, the troops we know are flanking the Tedrels, the ones my spies said are not to cross the Border. No, I think the Night-demons will stay within Karse.”
“That is a distinct relief.” She made a note amid the rest on the desk at her side. Then closed her eyes for a moment. She looked tired, and he wondered how long she had been here, for he hadn’t noticed her among the Heralds around the King.
“It is one small blessing,” he replied. “Another is that our troops have limited choice of ground, given where we think they must come. And a greater blessing is that our troops will be fresh.”
“All they have to do is stop overnight, their troops will be just as fresh as ours,” she pointed out. “They know we won’t cross the Border. But frankly, all I know about battles and war is what I’ve read, and everything I’ve read just makes me want it all to go away.”
“Unless he is a madman,” Alberich said soberly, “I believe you will find that even the great generals feel the same.’
She looked down at her hands. “May I ask you a horrible favor?”
He was going to say, “It depends on the favor,” but something about the way she had asked that question made him answer, unequivocally, “Yes,” instead.
She fixed him with that glittering gaze of eyes shielded behind thick, glass lenses. “Shielded” was a good thought—she probably used those lenses as shields to hide what she was thinking.
“May I stop pretending that I’m brave and cheerful around you? I feel as if I can trust you, more even than the rest of the Heralds, I mean; you’ve seen me at my worst, I suppose, and you seem to know, somehow, why I have to be here.” She shrugged, helplessly. “And I do. It’s important that a Chronicler be here, and it can’t be Elcarth, since he can’t make himself detached enough—but it’s also important that someone be here who knows history, because things that have been done in the past are likely to solve a problem now. I daren’t pretend I’m anything other than insanely optimistic around anyone else; Joy is not entirely certain I should even be here—or at least she wasn’t until this afternoon—and if they have any idea how terrified I am, they’ll be certain I’ll freeze up at the worst moment and try to send me back.”
He felt his expression softening, and for once, he let it. How odd to see her looking vulnerable! It wasn’t that she ever attempted to look warrior-tough, but she wore this facade of cool indifference, even when he’d been training her—when she wasn’t wearing an aura of annoyed irritation. He didn’t think he had ever seen her look so helpless, much less on the verge of tears. He held up his hand to stop her. “Of course you can,” he said, with sympathy that surprised even him. “And although I did not expect to see you here, I understand what you can do that no one else can; the amount of information you must carry about in your mind is astonishing.”
“Not so much that, as I know where to look for things. I can ask Elcarth to find what I need, and he can Fetch handwritten notes down here.” She shook her head. “I can’t do that from up there in Haven. It depends on being in a meeting and seeing a problem and knowing where to look for an answer. And telling people that there is an answer, right then, before they get hysterical. You have to be there to know what priority to put on the problem; reports don’t tell you that. But nobody wants me here; they look at me and see a half-blind, clumsy liability who’s likely to be in the way, or worse, need rescuing. So I have to put up a facade so they don’t find another reason to send me back.”
He hesitated. “As the Weaponsmaster, I am concerned that you are the person least able to defend herself here.”
“Which is why I’m petrified,” she replied, in a very small voice. “And I want to go home. But I can’t, and I won’t, and I won’t ask anyone else to look out for me.”
“I never thought for a moment that you would.” The tent was so small, he could easily reach over and pat her shoulder, which he did, awkwardly. Her face crumpled, but she didn’t cry. Just as well. Women in tears unnerved him. She did put her own hand up to hold his on her shoulder, though, and he didn’t mind—
:Bollocks. You like it.:
:You stay out of my head,: he said sharply. :Or at least be quiet about being there.:
Kantor wisely did not reply.
“Don’t think I want you to take care of me either,” she continued, even though she was shaking. “I don’t! I can take care of myself, even if I’m not a good fighter, I won’t freeze up, and will be sensible and be the first to run away, if the time comes to retreat!”
“I didn’t think you would ask, not for a moment. As your Weaponsmaster, although I am concerned, I am certain that I have trained you well, and I trust you to be intelligent enough to do what you must.” He tightened his hand on her shoulder. “But as your Weaponsmaster, you need not be brave with me. In fact, if you have concerns and feel you cannot voice them to others, do tell me. The night stalkers, for instance; that was a reasonable thing to consider.”
She sighed, and some of her shaking eased. “I’m not a brave person,” she said reluctantly. “Actually, I’m
rather a coward. I’m afraid of so much, it’s easier to say what I’m not afraid of. I think about what can go wrong all the time, it keeps me awake at night, and it makes me want to dig a hole and hide in it. And even if things don’t go wrong, it’s still going to be horrible—people dying and blood and pain—and it’s one thing to read about battles, but it’s something else to have one happening around you.”
There were so many things he could have said—that she was right to be afraid, that she would be less afraid if she stopped thinking so constantly about all the dire possibilities—
He said none of them, for none of them seemed quite right. And after a moment, she let go of his hand and he took it back. With a touch of reluctance . . . which felt a bit odd.
:Because you don’t know how to act around a woman who might be more than a friend, but isn’t either out of bounds or a whore,: Kantor said bluntly.
Well—that was true enough. But this was no time to try and learn how. Later, perhaps, if there was a later. And now who is dwelling on the dire possibilities?
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and turned those glittery lenses in his direction with a wan smile. “Thank you for being my friend as well as my Weaponsmaster and fellow Herald, Alberich. It helps to have someone human I can be at ease with.”
He nodded. “As you help me. Think of the relief I feel, not only to drop my mask, but to have someone with whom I can speak my native tongue.” He managed a wry smile. “Perhaps you can help me with my Valdemaran, so we don’t have a repetition of that scene in Sendar’s tent. Only Selenay understood me!”
Myste shook her head. “At least it made her look very competent, and gave her credit a strong boost. Poor little Selenay! I hope she can find someone to take her mask off with.”
“If no one else, it will be me,” he promised, reading the request for exactly what it was. Then he deemed it time for a change of subject. “Now what else have you found in those Chronicles?”
Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor Page 31