Princeps

78

Quaeryt swayed slightly in the saddle of the mare as he neared the midsection of the old fortified bridge across the Aluse, guiding the mare to the left side of the span away from the damaged roadbed and wall ahead on the right.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Undercaptain Jusaph, turning back to watch Quaeryt.

“I’m fine.” Quaeryt forced heartiness he didn’t feel in his voice. Even after resting and recuperating for another three days since waking up, his entire body ached, and he had bruises and strained muscles in improbable locations.

“Yes, sir.” Jusaph’s voice contained doubt, and he continued to look back every few yards as they rode past the stoneworkers and engineers already working to repair the damaged bridge.

Quaeryt straightened himself in the saddle, trying not to wince, and turned his eyes to the southwest once he was clear of the workers and riding down the bridge’s unharmed southern span. Everywhere he looked there were wagons and carts moving, and hundreds of troopers toiling in the steamy air to bury the Bovarian dead before the sun of full summer corrupted the bodies. Two long and deep trenches stretched across the front of the low bluff of the triangle below which the rivers met, and in those trenches lay body after body. Another square pit had been dug, closer to the Narrows Bridge, then filled and heaped up with earth packed into a pyramid. That had to be the grave for the Telaryn fallen, Quaeryt knew, although no one had told him. In fact, few had spoken to him, except for Skarpa, Zhelan, and Shaelyt. And, of course, Bhayar.

Quaeryt looked back at Jusaph, noting the muffled murmurs of the two squads of first company escorting him to Nordruil. He could not hear the words and was just as glad he could not. Yet what else could he have done?

He looked ahead at where the road branched below the southern approach to the bridge, the one turning westward and then running south along the smaller river past the dark stone structure that he and the imagers had created to span the Vyl-and destroy thousands of Bovarians. That dark structure pointed like a crossbow quarrel toward Bovaria … and Variana, like the quarrel that once might have killed him, and had forced him to develop the imaging abilities that had seemed inevitably to require greater and greater destruction on his part.

Deliberately-and abruptly-he turned his eyes to the road leading southeast, first along the greenery of the river and then angling southwest toward Nordruil. Bhayar had said the holding was peaceful and quiet. He could use both.

He smiled faintly as he turned the mare southeast where the roads split, riding toward a respite, a time of rest … and a place where he could wait for Vaelora.

Vaelora …

He smiled once more.