:One of these days, Sayvil is going to frighten someone right off a roof,: Gwena said, shaking her head and mane vigorously. :Honestly! Oh, Treyvan's group wasn't the only one doing weather-work today; Hydona had her lot working in the morning, but since they're much stronger, she had them working at a distance. Off to the west a ways, doing something about that horrible Gate-storm we triggered when we came home.:
Elspeth sighed with relief. "Thank goodness. I was feeling terribly guilty about that mess. Darkwind said that at this point, what with all the new energy-patterns around, there are probably storms over every major node in this Kingdom. Gods, I can't believe the mess we've got."
:I hope he also pointed out we can't take care of them all,: Gwena said with resigned practicality. :There aren't enough of us, and there isn't enough time. The only reason we can deal with any of it is because it's a way to train our new mages.:
"He did." Elspeth took a moment to hoist herself up onto Gwena's bare back. "Dearheart, I need a ride. Darkwind said when he finished with the books, he was going to go consult with Kero a bit more and I should meet him at the salle." She stifled a yawn. "There just aren't enough hours in the day. This calm is so deceptive—but under it all, I feel like we can't get everything we need done taken care of fast enough. Ancar is going to get us, and only he knows when."
:Right.: Gwena set off at a brisk trot, without a complaint. Elspeth took the brief respite to try to force the knotted muscles of her neck to relax. Before being "introduced" to the Heartstone, she had spent the morning going over the newest set of trainees, testing them for Mage-Gift, then giving them a rush course in the basics of magic. She had an advantage over Darkwind, as a teacher; she knew what the mind-magic lessons were like, and she could tell her students exactly how mind-magic and true magic differed. Once they were proficient in those basics, she turned her group over to Hydona.
Then she had gone off to the archives, and the crates and boxes of books she and Darkwind had discovered late last night, all of them with fading traces of long-ago mage-energies on them. Most of them were handwritten, were either original bound manuscripts, or handmade copies of even older manuscripts. Fortunately, all her delving into the archives had made her uniquely qualified to sort through them, and determine which were real books teaching magic and which were only contaminated by proximity. Then she had handed the mage-books over to those Heralds that Herald-Chronicler Myste felt could translate them into more modern terms. There had been a few clearly written in Tayledras, which had given Darkwind a bit of a shock, and a couple in no language either could identify. Darkwind was planning to take those to Kerowyn, once he determined if there was anything worth their time in the Tayledras books.
Both of them were running themselves ragged. Her day had started before dawn, and it would last long past midnight. There just weren't enough hours; the peace of the Palace was so deceptive. Even with the violent weather plaguing them, it didn't seem as if they were about to be invaded. In fact, things weren't really much different than they had been when she'd left. It was easy to be fooled into thinking there was nothing wrong here, but Ancar was planning something, she knew it....
For that matter, he might well be doing something, right this very minute. With all those storms on the borders, the relay-towers were useless except when the weather cleared a bit. At least she had a barrier over Haven now, and Firesong would return to the Heartstone when he was done with Treyvan's students, and use her shield as a model to set other protections in place, as many as he had time and strength for.
And tomorrow, before dawn, it would all begin again.
That was why Gwena was not scolding her for riding the short distance to the salle. Not when riding was quicker than walking, and not as exhausting as running.
She slid off Gwena's back at the door to Kerowyn's domain, and hit the ground at a trot. The salle, a huge, wooden building, with clerestory windows and mirrors on two of the walls, was full of trainees being supervised by Jeri, Kero's assistant, and a Herald who had been hand-picked and personally trained by Alberich, the absent Weaponsmaster. Jeri looked up when she caught Elspeth's reflection in a mirror, nodded at her, and pointed with her chin toward Kero's office, all without missing a command to her line of young, clumsy sword wielders.
Elspeth skirted past the youngsters in their worn practice armor, moving along the wall with the benches between her and them, and avoiding the piles of practice gear strewn in her path. She tapped on Kero's door at the other end of the room, using her own code without thinking twice about it.
It was a good thing she did. The door opened a mere crack, just wide enough for an arm in brown leather to snake out, grab her by the wrist, and pull her inside.
As soon as she cleared the doorway, the reason for Kero's action was obvious. Darkwind was with her, sitting cross-legged in the corner, but so was another man, a stranger, filthy and travel-stained, dressed like a peddler. He had half-risen from his stool at Elspeth's entrance, taking a wary stance and perfectly ready to defend himself.
One of Kero's spies—probably one of her old mercenary company, the Skybolts. That was the only thing he could be. Her heart sank. The man would not be here unless he had some word on Ancar, and from his grim expression, it was probably more trouble.
"I'm glad you're here," Kero said, with a nod to the stranger, and a quick hand-sign Elspeth recognized as being the Skybolts' hand-language for "all clear." He sank back down onto his stool again, and picked up a towel from a pile on the floor next to him. "You and Darkwind know the most about Falcon's Breath, and Ragges here actually managed to see him. He's been describing the man to Darkwind. I want you both to hear what he has to say."
"Bright feather, I fear it really is Falconsbane," Darkwind added. "Ragges has described him perfectly; it could be no other."
Elspeth sat down quickly on another stool, with an explosive sigh. After twice thinking Falconsbane was gone for good, then hearing he had escaped yet again, her reaction to hearing this confirmation that he lived was, oddly enough, simple exhaustion. "Damn. Damn, damn, damn. I didn't really think there was any chance of a mistake. I wish that Beast would just die."
"Don't we all," Kero said, leaning up against the door with her ear near enough the crack that she would be able to hear anyone approaching on the other side. "Well, go on, Ragges. Anything you know for a fact could be more important than either of us would guess."
Bleak depression settled over Elspeth as the spy continued his report.
"This Falconsbane is not only advising Ancar, he seems to be very high up in Ancar's mage-ranks," the stranger said, wiping his face vigorously with a towel. As he rubbed, Elspeth realized that what she had taken for dirt and the man's own swarthy complexion was actually makeup or dye. Underneath it he was far paler than he looked. "Rumor had it, literally just as I left, that he is claiming he has taken down some kind of protective barrier that keeps magic out of Valdemar. There were so many rumors that war was at hand that I fled the capital, hoping to outrun any army Ancar might mount."
Darkwind looked sardonic. "He would claim anything he thought he could convince folk of," was all the Hawkbrother said, his lips twisted with distaste.
"Well, Hulda is not long for her spot of 'favorite mage' if she can't find a way to counter his influence," Ragges told them, picking off bits of hair and things that counterfeited moles perfectly, which had been glued to his cheeks. "At the moment his star is rising pretty quickly. But there's another player in this little game now, and I have no idea what he's about. There's a new envoy at Ancar's court, wearing badges and livery from some lord I don't recognize. And mind, most of the allies Ancar picked up in the beginning have pretty well deserted him by now, so whoever sent this lad must be fairly certain there's no way that Ancar can turn on them." He fished a bit of pencil and a scrap of paper out of his pocket and made a quick sketch. "This is the badge, and the man seems to be great friends with Hulda. She does her best not to be seen coming and going, but she sp
ends a great deal of time in his suite. She's so busy watching for spies from her rivals she never noticed me."
Kero gave the sketch a cursory glance, and shrugged. "Nothing I know," she said.
"Let me see that," Darkwind said, suddenly, urgently. She handed it to him, and he frowned over it for a moment.
"I have seen this somewhere—within a day," he said, his brow creased as he stared at it. "No—I saw it today, this very morning. In a book. No, not in the book, I remember now!"
He reached down to the pile of books at his feet and looked just inside the covers of each of them in rapid succession. Finally he exclaimed, "Here!" and held up the book for all of them to see.
"That's the device, all right," Ragges said decisively. Kero shrugged again, but Elspeth took the book from Darkwind and leafed through it. It was in Valdemaran so archaic she had taken it for another language entirely until this very moment. But she had not noticed the very first page before, which looked a great deal more modern. She went back to that first page when she simply could not puzzle out any of the script. As she had hoped, in a modern, scholar's hand, she found a history of the book itself. This was a copy, not the original, but the scribes had faithfully reproduced every handwritten marginal note and scribbled diagram.
For this was a copy of a very important tome; one of the books brought to this land before it was a Kingdom, before it was even a nation.
By the Baron Valdemar, who became, by declamation, King Valdemar the First.
"According to this," she said, slowly, puzzling out the words and feeling cold fear growing in the pit of her stomach, "the device inside the cover of this book is that of the former owner—the one that King Valdemar 'borrowed' the book from, when he ran west with his people."
No one would ever have anticipated this; no one could have.
Kero frowned. "I have the sinking feeling I'm not going to like what you're going to tell me."
"It's the personal arms of the ruling family of the Eastern Empire," Elspeth said, her throat closing until her voice was hardly more than a harsh whisper. All her life she had heard tales of the horrors and injustices that the Emperor wrought on his subjects, and always the refrain had been "be glad the Emperor is too far away to notice us." Valdemar had run for years with his people before settling here, but the memories of what he had escaped still haunted every scholar's nightmares. There was no name for the Eastern Empire; it didn't need one. It covered the entire Eastern coastline, a monolithic giant from which not even rumors escaped. "The Emperor of the East himself has sent an envoy to Ancar's court—"
"The Emperor's personal envoy is playing footsie with Hulda?" Kero exclaimed, her voice rising sharply. "Old Wizard Charliss? The Emperor of the East? Bloody hell!"
Whatever else she might have said was lost as someone pounded urgently on the door. "It's Jeri!" said Kero's assistant, with strain audible in her voice. "There's been a relay-message from the east, and they sent a page out here to get you. They need you people in Council right now! Ancar's troops are attacking our border!"
"Bloody hell!" Kero cried again, then snatched open the door and headed out at a dead run, with Elspeth and Darkwind right on her heels.
The ax had fallen, and it was worse than Elspeth had feared. Nightfall brought three more messages as soon as lanterns could be seen from relay-tower to relay-tower, with word that a Herald with more detail was on the way.
But the messages, although they were clear and concise, made absolutely no sense.
Elspeth rubbed her eyes and fought back the urge to sleep; no one in the Council chamber had slept for three days. Right now Selenay was reporting what little the Council knew to her chief courtiers while Prince Daren held her seat. Elspeth was trapped between exhaustion and tension. There was no time for sleep; there was no time for anything, now. A trainee put a mug full of strong, hot tea discreetly by her hand; she took it and emptied it in three swallows.
Ancar's forces had crossed the border shortly after noon on the first day of the attack. As Kero and Elspeth had feared, they seemed to be more of his magically-controlled conscript-troops, and they continued to remain under control long past the point when spells had lost their effectiveness in the past. So the barrier was down, just as Vanyel had warned.
What was insane was that they had overrun the first garrison in their path, and had lost at least half their men taking it. Now they were fortifying it and holding it against a counterattack, while more of Ancar's troops came in over the border at their back—and given the rate at which they were losing men, in a day or two they would have to replace the entire force that had mounted the attack in the first place!
"This isn't like Ancar," Kero said tiredly, as she and the Lord Marshal shoved counters around on a map in response to every message from the border. "He just doesn't fight like this. That garrison is of no value whatsoever; there's no one of any importance there, there's nothing valuable there, it's just one more place on the border. It isn't even strategically valuable. He just doesn't go after targets that aren't worth anything—he certainly doesn't continue to hold them afterward!"
"I'd say he'd gone mad, except he already was," the Lord Marshal agreed, running his hand through his thinning hair. "I have never seen Ancar strike for anything that did not have a substantial value to it. That was why we didn't bother to fortify that town all that heavily."
"Someone else is dictating his tactics," Darkwind said suddenly, sitting up straight.
All eyes turned toward him. "He's never let anyone dictate his tactics before this," Kero replied skeptically. "That's one reason why we've held him off for so long. He's very predictable, and bad losses have always made him give up. He always follows the same pattern; he tests us until he loses his test force, then he falls back. Resist him strongly, and he gives up."
"That was so in the past, but it is not so now," Darkwind replied emphatically. "He has given over his main strategy to someone else, and we know who it is that spends the lives of underlings like sand, and leaves a river of the blood of his own people in his wake."
He looked significantly at Elspeth, who nodded. "Mornelithe Falconsbane," she said.
"The mage?" was Kero's incredulous reply. "Since when does a mage know anything about tactics?"
"Are these sound tactical decisions?" Darkwind countered. "No. But they will win the war for Ancar. All he needs do is keep driving his troops in, and they will overwhelm you. He will conquer by sheer numbers. Recall, neither of them care at all for the state either land will be in when the war is over. Falconsbane would as soon both lands were decimated, and he could very well have prodded Ancar until he cares only for revenge."
The rest of the Council stared at him, appalled. Elspeth felt her gut knot with cold fear. This was what she had felt, but had not been able to articulate, probably because she had not wanted to believe it. But now, hearing it spoken aloud, she did believe it.
"No one can win against something like that—" one of the Councillors faltered.
Darkwind only nodded grimly, and Elspeth seconded him.
"Then we are doomed. It is only a matter of time—" The Seneschal did not wail, but he might just as well have. His words, and the fear in them, echoed the feelings of everyone around him.
Black despair descended—eyes widened with incipient hysteria—and the High Council of Valdemar was only a heartbeat away from absolute panic.
"Not if we do something completely unexpected," Elspeth heard herself saying, and she marveled absently at the calm she heard in her own voice. "Something atypical. That was how Darkwind and I defeated him before. We figured out what he thought we would do, and we did something that he couldn't anticipate."
"He'll assume panic," Darkwind put in. "He'll assume that you will mount a rearguard action and attempt to hold a line while the rest of your populace flees, becoming refugees. He will expect you to go north and south, I think; he will try to cut you off from Rethwellan, and count on the mountains to trap you. I would guess that once
he panics you, he will come in from a southerly direction to drive you."
Kero studied the map. "That fits," she said at last. "That cuts us off from our allies, although he probably doesn't know about the new alliance with Karse."
"We have an alliance with Karse?" squeaked someone to Elspeth's left. Kero ignored whoever it was. "So he's going to be expecting some kind of digging in, a defensive line, you think?"
"Isn't that what logic dictates?" Darkwind replied. "A large defensive attempt. Fortification. So, what is not logical? How can we strike at him in a significant way that he will not anticipate?"
Kero stared at him for a very long time, then transferred her gaze to Elspeth. "A dagger strike," she said slowly. "A very small counterattack, inside his own stronghold. We cut off the snake's head. Kill Ancar, Hulda, and Falcon's Breath, and the whole thing falls apart."
Darkwind nodded, his mouth set in a thin line, his lips gray with tension and fatigue.
Silence around the Council table, although Elspeth saw her stepfather nodding out of the corner of her eye. Prince Daren knew something of expediency.
"That's murder—" faltered Lady Elibet.
"That's assassination." said the Lord Patriarch sternly. "Coldblooded, and calculated. A deadly sin by any decent man's moral code."
"Oh, it's a moral dilemma, all right," Kero replied, grimly. "It's murder, it's cold-blooded, it's wrong. If you face an enemy, you should give him a chance to defend himself. Hellfires, killing is wrong. I'm a mercenary, my lords and ladies, and I will be the first to tell you that there is no nice way to kill. But what choice do we have? If we try to run, we either abandon everything to him—and may I remind you, at least half of our population has no means to escape—or we find ourselves running into a trap he's set for us. So the half that runs gets slaughtered, too. If we make a stand, his numbers overrun us and destroy us. And while we're dying, so are his own troops. Remember them? They're poor mage-controlled farmers, graybeards, and little boys! In fact, once he starts taking our land, he'll start turning our own people against us! Do we have a choice!"
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