Exile's Honor v(-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  "Draw straws over who washes up tonight, and who does in the morning," Sendar suggested, as conversation ceased while jaws were otherwise employed. Most everyone was probably as starved as Alberich; they'd all eaten while on the move, taking out provisions that had apparently been packed by Palace servants, since Alberich didn't recall packing the contents of the little bag on the front of his saddle—a paper-wrapped pair of sausage rolls and a skin of cold tea. But it had been candlemarks ago, and it had been a very long day.

  Someone collected enough black-and-white beans from the Waystation to equal the number of riders, and put them into a bag. Alberich was not unhappy to find his was a black bean, and when he was done with his ham and pickled beans, joined the queue of those who were cleaning up now. Water straight from the well felt refreshing after the hard and sweaty day of riding; it was going to feel cursed cold in the morning. Sendar and Selenay got black beans as well, and Alberich insisted they go ahead of him. There was method in this; they were in the Waystation and probably asleep by the time he finished, and he was able to stretch himself out across the door without worrying that he'd be inconveniencing them. But he wondered, just before he fell asleep, if there was even the faintest likelihood that a village of Karsites would sacrifice portions of their own meals to a troop of Sunpriests and Sunsguard under similar circumstances.

  On the whole, he thought not.

  The next day followed the pattern of the first, except that they had to stop at midday in a large town and several Heralds went to each tavern and inn in turn to collect meat pies for all of them. Alberich had an idea that he would be heartily tired of meat pies and sausage rolls before the end of their journey... but of course, that was the least of his worries, and it was better fare than he'd ever gotten with the Sunsguard.

  The contrast between their grim purpose and the placid, lush countryside they rode through could not have been greater. Alberich tried not to look too closely at the folk who came out to see them pass, but he couldn't ignore them altogether, and it wrung his heart to see them—middle-aged men and older, women either with children or as old as the old men. There were a great many children and not very many young adults. He knew what that meant. Those that could be spared, were unattached, had no families to support—they were gone. In the army, facing the Tedrels. And who knew if they'd ever return? He saw that in the faces of those that they rode so swiftly past, in the fear they tried not to show.

  But if the Tedrels broke through, these same people would be taking up whatever arms they had to defend their lives—or fleeing back up that road to Haven—And try as he might, he could not but help look at those peaceful villages and imagine flames rising above the roofs, and bodies sprawled in the streets.

  It was better when they were riding through the countryside. And maybe the others were cursed with the same sort of imagination as Alberich, for their pace seemed to increase, just a trifle, when they were going through a center of population.

  So it went, sunrise to sundown, league after league of it, and no end in sight. It almost seemed to him as if he was caught in a peculiar nightmare, riding inexorably toward a dark and dreadful fate.

  «»

  Selenay had longed for a day when she might ride out like any other Herald, taking to the road with her packs behind her, leaving the Palace and all of the stuffiness of the Court behind. Now that day had come, and she thought—often—that it might have been a good idea if she had never made that particular wish. She would rather have to suffer being laced into a tight gown and listen to dull speeches every day for the rest of her life than face the Tedrels. And it didn't matter that there would be an army between them and her. She was as much afraid for the people she knew, her friends, the people she'd been with as a Trainee, who would be in that army, as she was for herself.

  What was more, the reason why Alberich had assigned bodyguards to her for day and night was real now. She understood that her life was in genuine, serious danger—and worse than just her life. She had learned in several sleepless nights following a long and somber talk with Alberich that there was a fate worse than death. The Tedrels had every reason to want to take her alive, and many more reasons to want to make sure that she was alive, and outwardly well, but not in possession of her wits anymore. And there were a great many ways to ensure that she wasn't sane once they got hold of her... the most obvious being to murder Caryo. She was used to a Valdemar where the King could walk unguarded among his people—but her father wasn't going anywhere without his six shadows either, and that shook her to the core. He no longer trusted his own people—or at least, no longer trusted the ones he didn't personally know. It would have made her weep, if she hadn't been too frightened to cry.

  The heavy, leaden feeling of fear increased day by day. It hung over all of them, making conversation stilted and unnatural, punctuating the silences, and making it impossible to enjoy the fragrant, picturesque countryside through which they rode. The enforced, close presence of her father, quiet and grave with worry, or absent altogether as he Mindspoke with the Heralds relaying a moment-by-moment summary of what was going on with the enemy and with their own forces, was a greater burden than she allowed him to guess. She couldn't lean on him for comfort, for Alberich and Talamir were right; he was already taking on more than he should. She could only thank all the gods that ever were for Caryo; at least she had someone to turn to, even if that someone couldn't actually do any more than she could. It helped, immeasurably, when in the dark of some Waystation, unable to sleep, she could unburden her heart to another who would understand; and in moments when she could steal away a little, with Keren or Ylsa pointedly not looking at her, that she could pretend to groom Caryo and cry into her soft shoulder.

  There were times when Selenay wondered if they would ever reach the army, but more times when she hoped they never would. So long as they rode, she could put off the day when everything would change. So long as they rode, she was safe, safe as only a Herald in the company of Heralds could be.

  So long as they rode, the army had not yet met the enemy, and she could pretend that they never would.

  Nevertheless, the Companions, even her beloved friend, carried them inexorably to that confrontation, and it was almost a relief when that day did come. Almost. The waiting might be over, but now she was here.

  She heard the army long before she saw it; the hum of a city many times the size of Haven transported to the rolling hills of the southland. And long before she heard it, there were other signs of it; provisioning wagons going toward it full and away from it empty, messengers pounding up or down the road.

  There were other signs; more ominous signs. The countryside was empty. It was empty, because insofar as it was possible to get the people to leave, it had been evacuated. There wasn't a sheep on the hillsides, or a farmer in the fields. The fields that no longer held sheep did hold something else, grazing on the rich, emerald grass, grass that the Tedrels desired for their own herds. The horses, the oxen, the mules of the army grazed there—not the horses of the cavalry, which were kept within the camp, but the horses that drew the carts that supplied the army, the horses that carried messengers when the message was not urgent enough for a Herald. Common horses, but for the most part better by far than any that these hills had seen before.

  But when they finally reached the outskirts of the encampment, it was something of an anticlimax, for it looked like nothing more than an ordinary army camp. They topped a hill, and saw the edge of the camp below them, across the slow river that split the valley in half, on the other side of a stone bridge. Sentries guarded the road there, the visible token of the ones Selenay could not see. Beyond the sentries, rows of pale canvas tents, rows of tents that were as even as furrows in the soil, that marched up the other slope and crowned the top of the hill, a strange and martial crop of spears and pikes planted in stands beside them. And yet, it was no larger an encampment than ones she had seen before, on the edge of the city.

  She knew abstractly th
at it wasn't possible to see all of it from any one point, not in these hills. She knew that in her mind, but the emotional impact of so great a force as they had gathered together should leave her breathless, or so she felt. So as the sentries barring the road demanded and received passwords, she felt oddly disappointed.

  But then they followed the sentry's directions down the road, with properly arranged ranks of whitewashed canvas tents on either side, each section with a central campfire, each four sections serviced by a larger cook tent. And as they continued to ride forward, the ranks of tents went on, and on, and on until she began to lose count. Over the next hill and down the other side, the tents ranged on before them, interrupted only by trees and hedgerows, the racks of pikes and spears piercing the sky beside them. Then the tents were interrupted by a drill ground, full of Guardsmen at practice, followed by another hill, another little valley, and yet more tents and another drill ground. Then a farmhouse, taken over by officers, full of comings and goings, with the yard crowded with horses, snorting and switching their tails at flies. And when they didn't stop there, at what she had thought was the command post, that was when it hit her; just how big their army was—

  Selenay tried to imagine it, and failed. She had seen several hundred people at once many times, even several thousand, crowded into one of the huge public squares in Haven for some speech of her father's, but never more than a fraction of the number that must be assembled here now. And that number didn't include Healers and Heralds either—and there were probably a lot of Bards here, too, for you couldn't keep a Bard away from something like this. Then there were all of the support people, cooks and carters, laundresses and tailors, the servants of anyone highborn—

  No wonder her father had put off assembling this huge a force until now. Where would he have housed them? How long could he have kept them fed? The logistics were mind-boggling. She couldn't imagine the amount of coordination it took just to feed this army for a single day, let alone care for it for the past several fortnights. How could it have been organized in the first place? Who was doing the training? Who was keeping the place clean, for the Havens' sake?

  No wonder Talamir kept telling her father to delegate more.

  Now she knew why Alberich couldn't be jollied into a better humor. He knew this was coming, of course. Well, so had she, but unlike her, Alberich had known very well how large a force the Tedrels had when they decided to commit all of it. For their army was just equal to the one that the Tedrels were fielding, and only just.

  Her heart went cold, and she was suddenly, desperately, urgently wanting to run away, to turn Caryo and go so far north that not even the Tedrels would find her. There were places up there—the Forest of Sorrows for one—where you could lose an entire regiment of cavalry and not find them for years. One girl on a single Companion could stay hidden until the rivers ceased to flow.

  The truth of it was, she could do that. And no one would blame her if she did. Some people would even applaud her wisdom in giving the Tedrels one less available target. But if she did that, some people would lose heart, and she had no way of knowing how many. It might be enough to make a difference, and she could not take that chance. She could not do much here but this; by her very presence, one slim girl facing down the enemy, daring him to try and take her, she might give heart to those who were actually doing the fighting. And she could take some of the burden—not much, but some—from her father.

  So she couldn't run away. And she dared not show how afraid she was.

  But she was very glad that she had reins to hold. They kept her hands from shaking.

  She had thought that they would stop at that farmhouse—but no, they went on, past more tents, more drill grounds, until she wondered if they would ever make an end.

  «»

  The practice grounds were all in use—no slacking going on in this army, and well-drilled these fellows were, too. Alberich's practiced eye ran over the troops, and he was pleased with what he saw.

  :Better than anything in Karse, eh Chosen?: Kantor asked smugly, as the men lunged and recovered in time to their leader's chants. Spears, this lot had, with cross-braces like on a boar spear that kept the enemy from coming at you once you'd stuck him. It made them a little awkward to handle in a group, but that was what practice was for.

  :Not better trained, but better-motivated,: he admitted. :That's as important a factor as food and weapons.:

  The trouble was, of course, that the core troops of the Tedrels were just as highly motivated. But not the shock troops... and that just might make the difference. The shock troops, the ones meant to take the brunt of the attacking, were the flotsam that the Tedrels had lured to their ranks with promises of loot and blood. Once it was their blood that got shed, the question was how well they'd stick. Valdemar had that working in their favor.

  In numbers, if all of their ForeSeers and spies were right, Valdemar and the Tedrels were evenly matched. But not, perhaps, in motivation.

  :Greed might be motivation enough,: Kantor said, soberingly. :Don't count on them to turn once the fighting gets bloody. Most of them have seen plenty of fighting; it's not as if they were a lot of sheepherders dragged in by fast-talking drummers.:

  His eye lingered on a group of spearmen and pikemen training—spears in the first two ranks, pikes in the next two. Pikemen were traditionally the positions of the least trained. Although there was some skill involved in handling a pike, it was not much different from handling a boar spear, and involved more following orders than thinking.

  There was some clumsiness, but not enough to make him think that they were entirely fresh. There was a great deal of determination. Their clothing, beneath their Valdemaran tabards, told him that they were farmers.

  Other men might deride farmers-turned-soldiers. Not he. Farmers knew what they were fighting for; farmers were used to death and killing, for they did it every autumn when they killed the cattle and swine that would feed them through the winter. The average citydweller might never see meat that was not already rendered into its component parts; the farmer had raised that "meat" from a baby, and had resisted his children's efforts to name it and make a pet of it.

  Killing a cow was easier than killing a man? Not when the farmer had delivered the cow as a calf, had agonized over its illnesses, had called it to its food every day for all of its life, brought it all unaware into the killing shed, and stared into its eyes before killing it. Whereas the man he faced was a stranger, was hidden in his helm, and wanted to kill him. Then wanted to take his land, his goods, and his women. A farmer would have no difficulty in making the decision to kill a man.

  No, he was happy to see farmers here. It was the city-dwellers, the craftsmen, that he was concerned about. It was one thing to train and look proficient—it was quite another thing to hold yourself together in combat.

  He glanced at his charge; Selenay was looking white about the lips. He wondered why.

  :She understands now what we're facing,: Kantor replied. :It's hit her, in her gut, in her heart, just how big our army is, and by extension, how big theirs is, and all that this implies.:

  Ah. Well, he felt sorry for her, but better now than later. Better now, when she would have time to gather the courage he knew she had and compose herself before the eyes of those who would fight for her sake.

  :For the sake of Valdemar,: Kantor corrected.

  :It is the same,: he countered, as he spotted the convocation of larger, fancier tents that marked the center of the army, and the seat of its leadership. What with bodyguards, sentries, servants and all, it had been too big a convocation to house in any farmhouse.

  :A philosophical difference, perhaps,: Kantor replied, :to you. A real one to us.:

  They reached the periphery of the tents, a boundary marked by another set of sentries stationed every few paces around the edge. The edge was defined by what appeared to be ornamental swags of rope hung between stakes. It wasn't ornamental, and it was a device suggested by Alberich. Hidden amid
the fringe and bullion were bells, very loud bells, and anyone who so much as brushed against those ropes would raise a very audible alarm. One couldn't climb over it or crawl under it. A small thing, but one more barrier between his charges and harm.

  The Lord Marshal was taking no chances. It was the Lord Marshal who had suggested the second innovation, a layer of black felt lining the inside of the tents, so no one would be silhouetted against the canvas by lights within. Another small thing, but it would make the King, his Heir, and the officers less of a set of targets once night fell. Unless a spy was able to watch them closely, one wouldn't even know when they were in their tents.

  The Lord Marshal himself was there to greet them, and Alberich moved closer to Selenay as they all dismounted. This would be another good time to strike at her, in the moment when everyone was a trifle relaxed at the end of the journey.

  But Kantor had made a statement that needed to be answered. :She is not Valdemar? Then let her become Valdemar,: he said fiercely. :Men fight better when the symbol of what they fight for is before them. Why do you think we carry a shrine of Vkandis before us when we wage war?: