Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  He needed no other clue than the dazed way she looked at him; he touched her cheek gently and went looking for Devan himself.

  When he came back, he brought with him not only Devan but three other Healers as well. By then the little room was rather crowded; Kyril was back, and Elspeth with him. The Seneschal had returned and had brought the Lord Marshal. Candles had been brought, lighted and stuck on every available surface; the room was bright and a little warm and stuffy.

  “I hate to ask this of you and of her, Devan,” Selenay said, looking guilty, “But we haven’t got the choice. Can you Healers hold her together long enough for her to tell us what we need to know?”

  Dirk wanted to protest—then his rebellion subsided. He knew what he’d be doing in Talia’s place; using his last breath to gasp out every bit of information he could. Why should she be any different?

  “Majesty,” Devan bowed his head in resignation. “I will say that I do not approve, and we will not let her kill herself with exhaustion.”

  “But you’ll do it?”

  “Like Talia, we have no choice.” The Healers surrounded her, touched her lightly, and went into their Healing trances. She sighed; her pain-twisted expression eased and she opened her eyes, which were alert and clear again.

  “Ask—quickly.”

  “Ancar—what can we expect from him?” the Lord Marshal spoke first. “How large is this private army? What kind of men does he have in it?”

  “Prison scum; about three thousand. No mercenaries I heard of. But they’re trained, well trained.”

  “What about the standing army? Will he use them?”

  “I don’t think yet. He murdered Alessandar; don’t think he controls officers in the regular army yet. Have to put down rebels in the corps before he can use them. Needs to replace all officers with his own puppets.”

  “Do you think—can we expect defections?”

  “I think so. Whole Border Guard may come over when they learn what happened. Welcome them, but Truth Spell them.”

  “Where was his own army last?”

  “Just outside the capital.”

  “Does he know you know about his three thousand?”

  “No.” Her eyes were almost unnaturally bright. “He didn’t ask any questions of me, ever.”

  “The more fool, he. A bit overconfident, wouldn’t you say, Alberich? So,” the Lord Marshal mused, stroking his beard, his black brows knitted in thought. “Twelve to fourteen days of forced marching would get them here. Much cavalry?”

  “I don’t think so; these were prison scum before he recruited them. But they’re trained to work together, been training for at least three years. He also has magicians. Old magic, real magic, like in tales. If he thinks he’ll come up against Heralds, he’ll use them.”

  “How good are they?” asked Kyril.

  “Don’t know. One of them kept me from Mindspeaking, from probing Ancar, from defending myself, and kept Kris’ passing from reaching you here—but he couldn’t block empathic link with Rolan. Gods—this is important—they can block us, but they can’t read us. Ancar let that slip—said something about ‘damn Heralds and your barriers.’ ”

  “Which means they can’t possibly use their magic to learn our plans, especially not if we keep shields up?” Kyril asked, with hope in his eyes.

  “Think so. Didn’t even bother to try to read me, and Hulda is a mage, too—taught Ancar; I don’t know how good they are. This isn’t mind-magic; can’t guess how it works.”

  “Orthallen,” said the Seneschal. “How long has he been working against the Queen?”

  “Decades; he had an assassin take the King during battle.”

  “Who was he working with?”

  “Nobody then. Wanted the Throne for himself; just took advantage of Tedrel Wars.”

  “When did he change?”

  “When Hulda contacted him. He thought he was using her.”

  “That was years ago—!

  “Right. She came to groom Elspeth as Ancar’s consort. She found Orthallen, worked with him. He warned her in time to escape. Later Ancar offered him the Throne in exchange for information and internal help.”

  “The magicians—?” said Kyril, anxiously.

  “Not much I can tell. Told you about the mindblock. Same mage kept Ancar shielded. Hulda shielded herself, I think. She looked physically about twenty-five years old. Could have been illusion, but don’t think so. She’s old enough to have been actually Ancar’s nurse—makes her at least forty. Saw her make a witchlight—” Talia pulled her bandaged hand away from Dirk’s for a moment, and pulled her loose gown away from her shoulder. Selenay and Elspeth gasped, and the Seneschal bit back an exclamation at what was revealed there—a handprint, burned into the flesh of her chest as if with a branding iron. “She did that, while they were—playing with me. Just laid her hand there, casually. Like it was easy as breathing. Rumors were they can do worse; lots worse.”

  The four Healers were beginning to look drawn; even with their aid, Talia was visibly fading.

  “Tired—” she said, begging with her eyes for a rest.

  “We’ve got enough to go on for now,” Selenay looked to each of the others and they nodded in confirmation. “We can get our defenses organized, at least. Rest, my brave one.”

  She led the others out; one by one the Healers disengaged themselves. As they did, Talia seemed to wilt, and more than a little. Devan caught Dirk’s shoulder before he had a chance to panic.

  “She’ll live; she just needs rest and a chance to heal,” he said wearily. “And she’s going to get at least some of both right now—if I have to post guards to keep people out!”

  Dirk nodded, and returned to her side. She opened her eyes with an effort.

  “Love—you—” she whispered.

  “My own—” His throat closed for a moment, and he fought down a renewal of tears. “I’m going to leave you for a while; Devan says you need rest. But I’ll be back as soon as he lets me!”

  “Make it—soon—”

  He left, walking backward; she keeping her eyes on him until the door closed.

  As Alberich had suspected would be the case, when dawn came, the bivouac on the Border as well as the smaller collection of Councillors and officials at the Keep were in an uproar. Units of the Guard—heartbreakingly small—arrived every hour. Tales, more or less garbled, of what had occurred the previous night were spreading like oil from a shattered urn, and were just as potentially flammable. Talia slept in an induced Healing-trance, blissfully unaware of the confusion.

  The Guard was easiest to deal with; the Lord Marshal simply called all the officers together, and with Alberich present to verify exactly what had been said and done, related to them the entire true story. The officers of the Guard, for the most part, had never associated closely with Orthallen; thus, while they were shocked by his betrayal, they took the tale at its face value. They were far more worried about the army Ancar would bring against them, for they numbered something around a thousand to Ancar’s three thousand. The magicians they dismissed out of hand.

  “My lord,” one veteran officer said, his face as scar-seamed as Alberich’s “Begging your pardon, but there’s nothing we can do about mages. We’ll leave that in the hands of those that deal with magic—”

  His gaze flickered to Alberich; the Armsmaster gave him a barely perceptible nod.

  “—we’ve more than enough on our plate with what’s coming at us.”

  And Ancar’s army was on its way; Alberich and the Lord Marshal knew that for a fact. There were two Heralds in Selenay’s entourage gifted with Farsight who had also been in Hardorn on more than one mission. They had bent their talents beyond the Border during the Bight, at Alberich’s urging. They had seen Ancar’s army, plainly camped for a few hours’ rest. More disturbingly, they had “looked” again for that army with the coming of dawn—and found nothing, nothing but empty countryside.

  “So there’s at least one mage with them,” Kyri
l deduced, as the warleaders conferred over breakfast. “And he’s concealing their movements from our Farsight somehow.” Knowing what they now knew about mages being in Ancar’s entourage—however little that was—Kyril and Alberich had been made co-equal with the Lord Marshal. Their task was to lead the assembled Heralds in combat—either by steel or by Gift. One of the Heralds’ most important tasks was communications; each officer would have a Mindspeaking Herald with him at all times, and Kyril would be with Selenay to coordinate all of them. That was the trick that had won the Tedrel Wars far them, the one thing no other army could match.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the Lord Marshal replied, “at least not at the moment. We know where they were; we know by that how fast they’ve come, and how soon they’re likely to get here. We also know those mages haven’t been moving ’em somehow—else they wouldn’t have needed all the horses your Heralds ‘saw.’ “

  “My lord?” One of his officers had appeared beyond the open tent flap, saluting smartly. He was scarcely old enough to have grown a beard; morning sun gilded his fair hair, and he was having a difficult time repressing a grin. “We’re getting the recruits you warned us of.”

  “Recruits?” Kyril said, puzzled, as Alberich nodded.

  The Lord Marshal gave a brief snort that might have been a laugh. “You’ll see, Herald. Bring them on up here, lad; we’ve got two here that can test them.”

  “All of them, sir?”

  “How many are there?” The Lord Marshal was surprised now.

  “Over a hundred, sir.”

  “Lady Bright—aye, bring them all up. We’ll get them sorted out, somehow.”

  As the three Warleaders left the tent to stand in the brilliant sunlight, there was a small dust-cloud in the vicinity of the trade road. As those who made the cloud neared, Kyril and Alberich saw that those at the front of the crowd that approached afoot were wearing the black-and-gold uniforms of Alessandar’s regular army.

  It appeared that the entire force guarding the Border, from officers to Healers and all their dependents, had defected when they had learned of Alessandar’s murder.

  Elspeth had the joyous task of breaking the news to the rest of the Council. There was no such accord among the political leaders of Valdemar as there was among her military leaders.

  Lord Gartheser was speechless with outrage and shock; Bard Hyron was dazed. Lady Kester and Lady Cathan, still seething over Orthallen’s accusations of complicity with the slavers, were surprised, but not altogether unhappy. Father Aldon had closeted himself in the tiny chapel of the Keep; Lord Gildas was with him. Healer Myrim made no attempt to conceal the fact that Orthallen’s treachery had not surprised her. Nor did she conceal that his demise gave her a certain grim satisfaction. But then, she might well be forgiven such uncharitable thoughts; she was one of the four Healers who were tending Talia’s wounds.

  Once the bare bones had been told to the Councillors as a group, Elspeth went to each of these Councillors in turn, privately. She gave a simple explanation of what had occurred, but would answer no questions. Questions, she told them, must wait until Talia had recovered enough to tell them all more.

  Long before then, Ancar’s army arrived.

  Alberich was beginning to feel hopeful. The ranks of Valdemar’s forces had been swelled to nearly double the original size by deserters—partisans of Alessandar—from across the Border. The Lord Marshal was fairly dancing with glee; with the exception of the dependents, every one of the men and women who sought sanctuary with them was a well-trained fighter or Healer—and every one burned with hatred and anger for the murder of their beloved King.

  For the true tale had been spread to the countryside, from the capital westward, by a most unexpected source—the members of Trader Evan’s clan.

  Evan, it seemed had taken to heart Talia’s warning to flee—and done more than that. He had spread the word among the traders of his own clan as he fled; they in turn had carried the tale farther. Close to the capital, the people were cowed and afraid, too frightened to dare even escape; but close to the Border where Ancar’s hand had not yet fallen so heavily, and where Alessandar had been served out of love, feelings ran high. High enough, that when two or three Border officers decided to defect to Valdemar’s side of the Border, nearly the entire contingent of the regular army stationed in the area chose to come with them.

  Ancar surely had not anticipated this, nor would Ancar have any way of knowing they had gone. A small group of volunteers had remained behind at the signal towers and continued to send messages and information—all of it false.

  “They’ll fade into the villages when Ancar has gone by,” the Captain who had hosted Kris and Talia told Alberich. “They’ve got civilian clothing at hand now. If they can, they’ll come across to us, but all the men who volunteered have families, and they won’t leave ‘em.”

  “Understandable,” Alberich replied. “If it is that we win this battle, we shall post watchers to guide them here at every likely crossing. If not ...”

  “Then it won’t matter a damn, because Ancar will have us all,” the Captain answered grimly.

  The Lord Marshal, with his forces doubled, was in no doubt as to the outcome.

  “Randon,” Selenay said anxiously, as they waited for some sign that Ancar was within striking distance, “I know it’s your job to be confident, but he still has us outnumbered three to two—”

  They were standing, as they had every day since the Border had been alerted, at the top of the highest hill in the vicinity. Ancar’s mages probably could mask the movements of his troops from Farsight, but they’d be hard put to eliminate the dust-cloud of their passing, or the disturbance of birds, or any one of a number of other signs of the movement of many men. From this hill there was a clear line-of-sight for miles into Hardorn. Trained watchers were posted here, but Selenay and the Lord Marshal also spent most of their time not otherwise occupied squinting into the bright sunshine alongside them.

  “My lady, we have more on our side than he can guess at. We have a thousand trained fighters besides our own that he knows nothing about. We have the choice of battleground. And we have the Heralds to ensure that there are no botched orders or misheard messages, or commands that come too late to be effective. The only thing I fear are his mages.” Now doubt did shadow the Lord Marshal’s eyes, and creep into his voice. “We have no way of knowing what they can do, how many he has, or if we can counteract them. And they may turn the day for him.”

  “And Heraldic Gifts for the most part are not much use offensively,” Selenay added, sobered by the thought of the mages. “If only we had one of the Herald-mages alive today.”

  “Lady-Queen, will I do?”

  Selenay whirled, startled. As she and Randon had been absorbed in watching the Border and in their conversation, two Heralds had climbed the hill behind them. One was Dirk, pale, but looking better than he had in days.

  The other, so begrimed with dust that his Whites were gray, his face lined with exhaustion, but sporting a self-conscious grin despite his weariness, was Griffon.

  “I brought him right here as soon as we’d pried him off his saddle, Majesty,” Dirk said. “This lout just may be our answer to the mages—remember his Gift? He’s a Firestarter, Majesty.”

  “Just point out what you want to go up in flames—or who,” Griffon added. “I guarantee it’ll go. Kyril hasn’t found anything that’ll block me yet.”

  “That’s no boast, Majesty; I trained him, I know what be can do. He’s limited to line-of-sight, but that should be good enough.”

  But—you were riding circuit up North,” Selenay said, dazed with the sudden turn in their fortunes that brought Griffon there when he was most needed. “How did you even find out we were under threat, much less get here in toe?”

  “Pure, dumb, Herald’s luck,” Griffon replied. “I ran into a Herald Courier whose Gift just happens to be Foresight; her message was delivered and we were—ah—passing an evening together. That night she g
ot a really strong vision; all but dragged me out of bed and threw me into the saddle stark naked. She took over my circuit, I rode for the Border as fast as Harevis could carry me. And here I am. I just hope I can do you some good.”

  The setting sun was turning the clouds bloody when one of the lookouts reported the first long-awaited sign of Ancar’s army. Selenay prayed that the blood-red of the sunset was not an ill omen for her forces, even while the Weaponsmaster and the Lord Marshal issued the first of the orders for the battle to come.

  The Lord Marshal had chosen as the battlefield a low, bare hill just on the Valdemar side of the Border. It had woods to the rear and the left of it, and open fields to the right. What Ancar couldn’t know—and what even now the scouts and skirmishers heading into the woods intended to keep him from learning—was that the woods to the rear of the hill had flooded with the bursting of an earthen dam earlier this spring. Water lay two and three feet deep all through them, and the hitherto-spongy ground was a morass of mud.

  Others besides those skirmishers were moving into the woods to the left of the chosen field—the thousand or so fighters who had defected to Valdemar. In groups of a hundred or thereabouts, each with a mindspeaking Herald, they were taking positions to lie in wait past any point where Ancar’s scouts would be allowed to penetrate.

  Teren slapped at another mosquito, and curbed his irritation. The ground was high enough here that they weren’t up to their rears in mud, but the stinging insects were having a rare old party—not only acres of new-made marsh to lay eggs in, but this unexpected bonus of humans as refreshments! It was dark, the air was damp, and it was chilly. Wythra didn’t like it any better than he did; he could hear his Companion blowing impatiently in the darkness to his right.

  :Twin?: he mind-sent. :We’re in position, how about you?:

  :The same,: was Keren’s reply, with an overtone of exasperation, :and up to our armpits in goddamn midges!:

  :Mosquitoes here. :

  :Count your blessings,: came her retort. :The midges are crawling into people’s armor and you beat yourself black and blue trying to get them.: