Surrender None

Chapter Nineteen

Winter wind had scoured the sky clean of clouds, autumn rains were past. The next clouds would bring serious snow, but that was likely days away. Gird followed Arranha across the frostbitten grass, his farmer’s mind noticing every sheep dropping, every wisp of wool caught on a thornbush.

“I feel uneasy, out in the daylight like this,” he said finally, when a fold of ground hid them from the wood in which they’d spent the night.

Arranha gave a brief smile back over his shoulder. For an old man, he was remarkably quick across country. “We are beyond Gadilon’s domain, remember?”

“They wander beyond, often enough.”

“Not this way. Kapristi taught Gadilon’s sires caution, Gird. It was his great-great-grandfather who tried to start a war with them.”

“I still can’t believe—”

“—that those little folk could defeat the magelords? Nor could my people, at first. But you, you want to defeat them with peasants—is that so different?”

“Well—we’re bigger—”

“And not so disciplined. Even with the bit of drill you learnt from your count’s sergeant. You need more; your people need more: law and drill both, which to the kapristi are but branches of the same tree. Or, as they would say, two ends of one rod.”

“Rod?”

“Measuring rod, or staff of justice. One measure suits all lengths: that’s one of their sayings. One law serves justice; many laws serve misrule.”

“I think I will like that,” said Gird slowly. “That’s a problem I know, well enough—right there in the Rule of Aare, it is, though you say it wasn’t meant to be like that.”

Arranha smiled peacefully at him. “Truth is greater than either of us, Gird. I might mean to speak truly and be mistaken: I’m no god. And you might find it where you didn’t expect it.”

A little higher on the slope, something marked the rough grass . . . a straight line, he realized, that went on across the slope, and around the edge of the hill, to reappear on the next elbow west. He could not tell if it went beyond that. Neither fence nor wall nor plowed furrow—but a line in the grass, as if it had been closely mown perhaps two handspans wide. He nudged Arranha. “Is that the track of some demon?”

“You saw it! Good. That’s the kapristi boundary line. Many humans don’t notice—”

“Any farmer would,” said Gird. “How do they mow it so evenly? How do they keep the line? I don’t see any endstones.”

“They don’t need endstones: it’s their domain, and they set the line where they will. Our people no longer dispute it, and yours never did, being wiser.”

“And now?”

“Now we call, and then wait. Remember what I’ve told you: they’re absolutely honest and fair, but they demand the same of others. They give nothing; fair exchange is their rule. They will not take simple courtesies amiss, but they will not return them. Expect no thanks, if a bargain is struck, and don’t expect to get any more for asking please.” Arranha led the way up to the boundary, and called upslope in words Gird did not know. “Kapristi speech, of course,” he answered Gird’s question.

“But no one’s around,” said Gird.

“No humans, no. But a dozen kapristi could be a stone’s throw from here, and you’d not know it unless they wanted you to. This is their land, Gird; make no assumptions about what you do not know.”

I’m not, Gird thought silently. He watched the slope above them, as it roughened into rocky outcrops of some gray stone streaked with black. Rockfolk. Elder folk, like the blackcloak, the kuaknom, he had seen. Like the treesinging elves he had not seen. Even more like the dwarves of legend, who sang gold out of the deep mountain rocks, and made jewels by squeezing rock in their hard fists. Folk created before humankind, who might see humans as he saw the Aarean magelords: intruders, dangerous, enemies.

Rocks moved, coming down the slope. He blinked warily, and they were not rocks, but small gray men. Kapristi, not men, he reminded himself. Gnomes out of fireside stories, all cautionary: what happened to the man who tried to cheat a gnome, the woman who hired a gnome to clean the chimney, the child whose goats strayed over the gnome’s boundary. As a child, he’d thought that last story silly, but back then he’d assumed that the gnome lands had a tall wall around them, that the boy must have pretended his goats got in as an excuse to climb the walls and see for himself what treasures the gnomes had.

The gnomes (he felt slightly more comfortable with his peoples’ name for them in his mind) moved with steady precision, nothing at all like men slipping and clomping down a slope. Six of them, all looking (to his eye) much alike. They loosed no shower of stones, no bits of turf, to roll before them. They had narrow clean-shaven faces (or did they not grow beards?) under close-cropped dark hair. Although they barely came up to his chest, he could not have confused them with boys—no boy moved with such economy, or had such hardness of face. They all wore gray: belted jerkins over long-sleeved shirts, narrow gray trews tucked neatly into gray boots. Jerkins and trews might have been leather; the shirts were wool.

Meanwhile, Arranha had bowed and spoken again in their angular tongue. Gird heard his own name mentioned, and glanced at Arranha, then looked back at the gnomes. The apparent leader was looking at him, a speculative look that made Gird feel like a carthorse up for sale. He could feel his ears and neck getting hot. Finally, Arranha turned to him again.

“Gird, this is Lawmaster Karik—that’s not all of his name, but that’s the polite way for a human to speak to him. I have told him about you, and he has agreed to speak with you. He has not, however, agreed to let you enter kapristi lands: he will speak with you here, across the line.”

If it had not been for Arranha’s gaze, Gird would have turned on his heel and stomped away. They didn’t trust him, that’s what it was, and he had done nothing to earn their distrust. Yet, said a voice in his mind. Arranha had told him of the Aarean nobles’ attempt to take gnomish lands; they had reason to distrust humans.

Gird choked back all he wanted to say, and bowed awkwardly at the gnomish leader.

“Lawmaster Karik—”

“Gird? You have no clan-name?”

“Dorthan Selis’s son was my father; but our clan name was lost. Our lord was Kelaive, whose subject-name I refuse.”

“Ah.” A gabble of gnomish between the leader and another of his group. Then the leader turned back to Gird. “It is that you have no master? No clan? No allegiance? You are without law?”

Gird stared. What were they driving at? He looked at Arranha, who said nothing, and wanted to smack that smug smile off the priest’s face . . . except that it wouldn’t work. He cleared his throat, and then realized that a wad of spit could be misunderstood. He swallowed it. The gnomes waited, motionless but not unattending.

“Lawmaster Karik, our lord destroyed our law.” That got attention; he could almost feel the intensity of their interest. “I came seeking law—a way to make things fair.”

“Things are fair, human farmer: it is living beings who may choose unfairness. Are you a god, to know justice and give judgment?”

Gird shook his head, hoping the gnomes had the same gesture. “No god at all, Lawmaster, but a man seeking knowledge. I know unfairness when I see it: short weight, shoddy work, carelessness that causes injury, stealing and lying—but Arranha has taught me that knowing wrong is not all I need to do right.”

“And he brought you here? Or did you seek us on your own?”

“I—he would have taught me his rules, Lawmaster. He showed me that the magelords have broken the Rules of Aare, changed their meanings . . . but I want nothing of those old rules. I want new rules, better rules, that cannot be so misunderstood.”

The Lawmaster turned to Arranha. “Here is a strange being. You told us once that the serfs had no wit for law.”

“I was wrong.” Arranha bowed, first at the Lawmaster, then at Gird. “When Gird and I first met, I thought he was a common outlaw—a rabble-rouser who wanted only vengeance for injuries done. And indeed, he had suffered injuries enough. But he has more—”

“Indeed.” The Lawmaster’s dark, enigmatic gaze returned to Gird. “And you, Gird son of Dorthan son of Selis, you must know we give nothing: that is fairness, good for good and evil for evil. What can you give, for the knowledge you seek?”

“My pledge. Arranha said you had no law between your people and ours except by steel. If our side wins, I pledge a rule of law that protects all boundaries, yours and ours, and my own strength to enforce it.”

“You could be killed in a season, and your debt to us would not be paid. Or your cause could fail, easily enough . . . though I hear you are trying to teach discipline to idle human rabble . . .”

“Not idle, Lawmaster, but by the magelords’ illwill.”

“Hmph.” The Lawmaster looked hard at Gird, then said, “Will you give the pledge of your hand and heart, to do all in your power to restore justice to these disputed lands?”

“Yes.”

“Then come over the boundary, and I will teach.”

For all that he had thought he was nervous under an open sky, Gird found that winter season mired in the gnome’s halls almost intolerable. Rock beneath his feet, rock overhead, rock walls never far away on either hand. Nothing to see but rock, however finely dressed. He saw no beauty in the austere fluting of columns, the majestic proportion of the ceremonial halls. His hosts soon knew this, and his most constant guide once sniffed, “If you want splendor, Gird, if you want stone wrought into the likeness of beasts and birds and trees, studded with shining jewels and, clad in gold and silver, if you want harp music and singing, you should have chosen our cousins. Dwarves chose splendor; they are all gold and blood, generous or deadly as the passion takes them. But you wanted law, you said, and that is what we live.”

“You do trade jewels,” Gird said. He had seen them once, laid in a precise pattern on black cloth for an apprentice to value.

“We do. We are rockfolk, after all; the rock speaks to us as trees speak to the sinyi.” The gnome sighed heavily at Gird’s blank look. “Elves, that is: the first born singers, those of silver blood. The rock is ours, and the rock returns to us in its treasures what we give of wisdom and loyalty.”

“Like cows,” Gird murmured; the gnome glared him.

“It is nothing like cows. You eat cows.”

Gird did not argue—he could not win arguments with the gnomes—but he thought it was the same. He had loved his cows, cared for them, and out of that love and care had come the bounty of milk and meat and hide.

Most of his time, especially at first, he spent with Lawmaster Karik in a quiet, brightly-lit room lined with shelves full of books—the first he’d ever seen—and scrolls.

Lawmaster Karik insisted that Gird must learn to read and write—to gnomish standards—and calculate with their figures.

“Law is too important to be left to your memory,” he said. Gird could tell that this, like most that he said, was not negotiable. “You must write it down, and in courts of law it must be there for reference. Likewise contracts: you understand the importance of honest exchange, but how can that be adjudicated if the terms of the contract are in question? It must all be written down.”

“But my people don’t usually read and write,” Gird said.

“They must learn.” Lawmaster Karik tapped the heavy slates on which he had marked the gnomish runes. “If it happens that some cannot learn, then someone who reads and writes must stand for that person before the law. We have few so lacking in wit; we must hope that among your people it is also rare. Is it true you know nothing of written speech?”

Gird felt himself flushing again; in a moment he would start sweating. “They—I tried to learn, when my lord’s guard recruited me.”

“Well? Can you read, or not?”

He was sweating; he felt huge and clumsy and stupid next to the precise gray figure of the gnome, whose face never showed emotion. “Very little,” he said unwillingly.

“You will learn. As it is a necessary precondition to your learning how to devise a workable system of law for your imperfect people, and as we did not ascertain before we contracted with you to teach you law, it is to our loss that this is assigned, and you will not incur any greater obligation because of it.” The gnomish clerk who accompanied Lawmaster Karik to the lessons noted this down; Gird suddenly realized that what he had done originally had also been put down as a written contract. “You must learn rapidly, Gird, if you are to be in time to begin your war in the correct season.”

To Gird’s surprise, the gnomish script came easier than the Aarean had—or perhaps it was the absolute lack of distractions, and his fear that he might have to stay there forever if he did not learn. More quickly than he dared hope, he was able to sound his way through a passage of law that the gnomes had translated for him. They had turned aside his attempts to learn their language: “There is not time,” all of them said.

“If it is when a contract made that one party agrees to hold the other not liable in case of death, then it is lawful for the death of that second party to clear the obligation from his own heirs, but if that second party has partners in work, then it is not lawful, even if it is so when the contract is made.” Gird came to the end of that proud of his ability to read, but unsure of the implications for a farmer whose cow dies before it is delivered to the buyer.

Lawmaster Karik said, “A cow cannot be a party to contract: the death of the cow has nothing to do with it. It is the death of the farmer that might apply, if the buyer agreed that the farmer’s death meant the farmer’s heirs need not deliver the cow.”

“But if he has not paid for the cow, why should he expect it if the farmer has died?”

“Suppose he has paid for it, expecting it to come.”

“That’s not how we sell cows,” Gird said. He knew about that; no farmer in his right mind would pay for a cow that did not stand foursquare and in milk before his eyes. The Lawmaster looked at him, and he felt that he must have said something stupid.

“Let it not be cows,” the Lawmaster said, “Even among men, it is common that one buys something for delivery later. One may provide cloth to a tailor, who will make clothes of it. One may send fruit or cheese or grain to a fair, and expect goods or coin to come back.” Gird had to admit that some people did things that way; he thought it was unnecessarily risky. “You, yourself,” the Lawmaster insisted. “You send men out to bring back supplies, do you not?” He did, but most of those were gifts, not paid for, and he knew very well what the gnomes thought of that. To prevent more argument, he nodded.

“So if someone buys something not present, and the person selling it should die before delivering it . . . then, if it was agreed beforehand, his death cancels the debt?”

“That is what that passage says.”

“But does the seller’s heir keep the price?”

A flicker of interest on the Lawmaster’s face. “An excellent question! That is in the following passage, which you may now read.”

Gird cursed himself silently, and put his thick finger on the first symbols of the next line. Another miserable passage of legalese. The matter turned, he learned as he read, on whether the goods exchanged for the undelivered goods were perishable, consumable, or durable. If someone traded soft fruits for grain, the grain to be delivered, the soft fruits might have spoiled, or been eaten, before the nondelivery occurred (counting, the gnomish law specified, the days between making the contract and expected delivery, before nondelivery could be charged.) Perishable goods fell under one section of law, and consumable goods under another.

“For example,” the Lawmaster said, “if someone trades cloth to a tailor for clothing made . . . if the tailor cuts the cloth, but then dies before the garment is made . . . you see that cloth is consumable, and properly so. That is a different situation from a tailor who sold that cloth to someone else, and then died. In the first case, supposing the original contract to have had a death clause, the tailor’s heirs would not have to return the cut cloth. But in the second, they would owe the price they received for it.”

The more he studied, the more Gird saw that the gnomish law did make plain sense. Absolute honesty, absolute fairness in exchange: all the laws came down to this, and nothing intruded. They had a rigid rank structure, but rank had nothing to do with law . . . at least, the law of exchange, which made all equal . . . that “one measure for all” that Arranha had mentioned. He could see how it would work among humans—at least, among humans who wanted it to work. It was what he wanted for his people, fair laws; surely they all wanted the same.

Lawmaster Karik began to give him simple cases to examine. Gird found judging harder than he had expected, particularly when Karik insisted that intent and circumstance made no difference to the law.

“If someone means well, but does ill, the ill is still done—and the consequences still exist. Besides, if intent forgives wrong, then any wrongdoer can claim good intent.”

“But it’s obvious,” said Gird. “I could tell if someone meant to do wrong, or just erred.”

“Could you? Suppose someone stole a measure of grain, claiming it was to save a family member from starving . . .”

“Find out if the person is starving,” said Gird promptly.

Karik shook his head. “Suppose the thief had plenty of grain of his own, but chose to steal someone else’s rather than fulfill his own family obligation. Suppose the thief had money, with which to buy grain, but again chose to steal it. Suppose—”

“All right.” Gird held up his hand. “I understand. But surely there are times when circumstances make a difference.”

Karik nodded slowly. “There are. No code of law can speak to all circumstances, even among gnomes, and among your undisciplined people I foresee great confusion. But for every exception you make to a rule, Gird, more will try to force their circumstances into that exception. As plants growing between set stones force them apart, the roots of the plants seek every weakness in the stone.” Gird suddenly realized that Karik identified with the stone—that all the rockfolk would—where his sympathies had always been with the plants that broke stones apart. Even when it meant mending a wall, he had admired the delicate mosses and ferns that had persevered in their attack on it. He pushed this thought away, and came back to the subject. He had always assumed that the gnomes would feel as he did about Kelaive’s treatment of Meris, that the punishment was far more than a boy’s prank deserved. Now he asked.

Karik listened to all the details before saying anything. Then he had questions Gird had never thought of, and only after offered his opinion.

“The right relation of punishment to wrongdoing is a subject in itself,” he began. “In our law, the obligation is to restore, so far as possible, the right relation between the parties. Thus if you should steal a measure of grain, you would have to replace it—or its value—and also pay a fine to the court, to cover the cost of trying the case. We use punishment only for younglings, but some human systems extend punishment to adult humans, and in our view fail to distinguish properly between punishment and restoration. Some things, of course, admit of no restoration: injury that results in permanent loss of function, death, the breakage or loss of some singular, irreplaceable object. This is difficult to judge, although we have standards.

“In the case you speak of, you are not arguing that the wrongdoer was not guilty, but that the punishment was too great. On that basis alone, I would agree. But if the fine for a theft of so much fruit were a certain amount, the thief’s age would make no difference. Circumstance should not change the judgment, assuming the law to be just in the first place. Kelaive seems to have had no law beyond his own pleasure: this does not make the boy’s thieving less wrong, but adds another wrong—the lord’s wrong—to it.”

“I still think there are times—” Gird began. Karik waved him to silence.

“You have never lived under a just code of law; you cannot be expected to understand how it would be. We shall do our best to teach you, and hope you can teach others, and in time your people may approach justice.” With that Gird had to be content.

In the course of learning law, Gird answered the gnomes’ questions about the way he organized his troops. He had not forgotten what Arranha said about the gnomes’ fighting ability. Perhaps he could find something to trade for their knowledge—but nothing occurred to him. The offer came, to his surprise, from the other side, many hands of days after he had made good progress with Karik.

He and Arranha met with a group of gnomes in one of the formal halls; Arranha had explained that he’d been asked to translate. After a few exchanges of formal greetings, one of the gnomes spoke steadily for several minutes. Finally Arranha turned to Gird.

“They would like to contract with you to provide military knowledge in return for your help in a specific battle. They think you need this knowledge, and may not win your war without it; they have been impressed by your diligence in your study of law, and your lawful nature. But, they point out, you seem to have no knowledge of strategy, and little of tactics. This they can provide. Are you interested?”

Of course he was interested, but for what kind of battle did they need his help, if they could defeat the magelords on their own? He framed that question as tactfully as he might, for Arranha to translate, but the gnomes could follow his speech well enough and began to answer at once. They could give him no details until they knew more of his abilities, but they wanted the Aareans lured into a trap . . . the Aareans were too wary, now, to come after gnomes if nothing else was involved.

Gird stared at the blank grayish faces, all too aware of his own limited experience. He wanted—no, needed—the expertise they had; he had been allowed to see a unit of gnomish guards drilling once, and he lusted after that knowledge. But what would it cost? By their own law, they had to deal fairly with him . . . though his notion of fairness went far astray from theirs. Was this a place in which they overlapped?

They did not rush him. He sat a long time, or so it seemed, in silence, and when he finally nodded, and then slowly read the contract and signed his name—shakily, but legibly—they bowed stiffly and left him alone with Arranha.

The next day, Lawmaster Karik introduced him to Warmaster Ketik, who turned him over to Armsmaster Setik. Not for the first time, he wondered if the gnomes chose their names to sound like beetle-clicks. It was not a question he could ask. Armsmaster Setik had the first scar he had seen on a gnomish face, two of them, in fact. Gird had expected a larger, brawnier gnome, but Setik was built like all the rest. He walked around Gird like a child around a trade-fair wrestler, looking him up and down, then snapped a question at the interpreter who had come along.

“Are all humans your size, he asks?”

Gird shook his head. “No—they come from this high—” he gestured, “to this high—a hand taller than I am. Some are built thin, and some heavy, at every height.”

“And what are your weapons?”

Gird listed them—the ones they’d used so far, and the ones he’d thought possibilities. The Armsmaster listened in the usual expressionless silence, and then uttered a brief comment which the interpreter did not immediately explain. “What?” asked Gird finally. The interpreter’s mouth twitched.

“He said ‘Ridiculous!’ ”

Gird felt the back of his neck getting hot. It was not ridiculous; he had won a battle with just those weapons. The Armsmaster watched him out of black, shiny eyes like seeds. Gird struggled with his anger, all too visibly he was sure, and said, “It worked well enough.” This time the Armsmaster’s question was obvious enough that he began answering before the translator finished, squatting to draw on the floor with his finger the little battle of Norwalk Sheepfolds. The Armsmaster sat on his heels, watching, absorbed in the recital. But ultimately unconvinced; when Gird finished, he began a rapid commentary in gnomish, and Gird knew, before the translator began, that it was critical.

“He says you were lucky. He says you made fundamental errors in placement of scouts, signaling methods, and in choice of ground. He says if you do that very often, you will kill all your people and lose your war.”

Gird had long suspected that his apparent success at Norwalk Sheepfolds had been more luck than skill, but he did not like hearing that hasty analysis by someone who hadn’t even been there. Someone who was used to drilling with experienced (and disciplined) gnomes, who would not have to stop a panicky rout just before a fight, who had time to pick the right ground, and dependable people to work with. He wanted to say all that, until the gnomes understood, but the Armsmaster’s shiny dark eyes offered no sympathy. He wanted to say they’d won anyway, despite his mistakes (if the problem had really been his mistakes) but he met a closed, expressionless face that was not about to change its mind.

“So what should I have done?” he asked, not quite successful at keeping the sarcasm out of his voice.

“He says you will know when he has finished training you.”

Gnomish military training was to the training his old guard sergeant had given as Mali’s cooking had been to his mother’s. He had been proud of his troop’s drill—now, for the first time in his life, he saw absolute precision, and realized how sloppy even his old sergeant had been.

“It did not require much to impress peasants who had nothing,” the Armsmaster said. The three units of gnomes who had just shown off would have impressed anyone, Gird was sure. They had moved forward, backward, sideways, opening and closing ranks, had marched one unit through another, and had come out the other end of a long string of commands in the same close, crisp formation they’d begun. “You will not get this, from your humans who are not all the same size and shape. But you can come closer than you have.”

Gird felt like a clumsy, not-too-bright recruit again, trapped in the middle of a formation of gnomes not quite shoulder high on him. But he learned—learned not only how to move, but why. That notion of a pincushion that he had had, when he ran around turning his people in place at Norwalk: that had a name, and the right commands to achieve it whenever he wanted, from any other formation. He had always assumed that he needed a large uncumbered space for drill, the gnomes taught him to move a unit quickly and precisely in a room cluttered with supplies, to judge the space available and come up with the commands needed.

He discovered that the wrestling ability which had dumped both Cob and Triga was the very first level the gnomish younglings learned. Armsmaster Setik dumped him repeatedly, no matter what approach he took. “You’re too short,” he complained once, bruised and winded from several hard falls. “I can’t get a grip on you—and besides, you rockfolk are stronger.” Setik grabbed his wrist and pulled him up.

“We are not stronger. We know how to use our strength. Can you lift that?” That was a barrel of meal. Gird shrugged, and tried. It was heavy, but he had lifted heavier. Setik put his arms around it and heaved, but it did not lift. “You see? You are stronger, in plain strength. It can be very useful. But you do not know how to use that strength. You want to jump at me and do the work yourself. Make me do the work.”

They drilled with sticks very similar to those Gird’s people used. Setik insisted they must all be the same, no matter the size of the fighter. Gird thought that was another expression of the gnomish need for order, but Setik disagreed. “First: they must all be the same so that your fighting formation can have the same intervals without chancing an accidental blow. Second: they must all be the same so that when one breaks, or someone drops one, that fighter will be comfortable with any replacement. Each weapon has its own best blows; some are similar, but in battle a single mistake chances death. Chance is your enemy, Gird—do not depend on luck. Depend on skill, drill, strength, endurance, tactics: what you know, what you can do. If that is not enough, chance will not save you.”

“But what about our tools? I thought we could use farm tools—we did use them.”

Setik snapped a command at one of the others, who went jogging off to the gnomish armory, and returned festooned with agricultural implements. Setik picked up a scythe. “Show me how your people used this at Norwalk.”

Gird hefted it, enjoying as always the very balance and swing of it, then shifted the handgrips for a better overhand stroke, and lifted it. It made an awkward chopping weapon, harder to control than a mattock, but it could reach over others and deliver a solid blow to a head or back. He had seen only two of the successful strokes, both oblique downward swings that ended in a soldier’s back. He demonstrated on the straw-filled leather dummy set up in the middle of the chamber.

“I thought at first of swinging it as usual,” he explained. “It could take off a leg. But the backswing’s too dangerous—there’s no way to control it in formation.”

“That’s what I thought.” Setik scratched his head. “We had a weapon more like a mattock, used with a similar stroke but easier to handle because it balances better. That great long blade out there, and the curving handle, make this one very unbalanced. And even you, with your strength, could not swing it sideways at head level.”

“Even if I could, the greatest danger is to the person on my left and behind. I’ve seen someone killed like that in harvest, a scythe-tip buried in his belly.”

“Good individual defense,” Setik muttered. “One man against several armed—that might work. Sharpen the outer edge of the blade as well. But not a good formation weapon. I suppose you use the shovel like the pole?”

“Yes, but it has that edge.”

“Hmmm. What we call a broadpike. It would also work with a sharp downward stroke, but that would not fend off the enemy’s. These little things you mentioned, sickles and firetongs and such—good for brawls, maybe, or defense when surprised by an enemy while working—but not for your army.” Setik went down the list, explaining and demonstrating why each tool was not worth using as a weapon, “unless you have nothing else. But I would not waste my time drilling with them. If you are fighting with trained units against real soldiers, you need a formation weapon. We use polearms, to give us reach, a hauk in close fighting, and archers . . . do your people know archery at all?”

A hauk, when Gird asked, was a short stick, a club, which could be used for training, or for cracking heads—it reminded him of the guards’ billets and maces. The gnomes in formation had hauks thrust into their belts behind their backs, ready to grab when needed. Gird learned how to handle all the gnomish polearms correctly; Setik recommended that he settle on one, fairly easily made, for his own army. “A simple spike on the end of your pole will do,” Setik said, “and any smith can make that from scrap metal—those scythe blades, for instance. A real pikehead is better, and you could use broadpikes, but that takes more metal, and more skill in smithing. Sharpening the pole itself is better than nothing, but wood alone is not likely to penetrate metal armor—if that’s what they’re wearing.”

Setik knew exactly how footsoldiers with pikes should maneuver against cavalry; Gird’s rude guesses, based on practice with men on logs, came close but would, Setik said, cost him too many soldiers. Archers were the worst threat; the gnomes dealt with enemy bowmen by having better bowmen of their own. Gird was not sure his people could learn that fast. He himself had never been better than average with a bow. And the art of making good bows and good arrows—strong enough to be useful in war—had passed from his people to the Aarean lords. Peasants had not been allowed to have bows, or make bows; what they had now could take small birds and animals, but no more. Setik shook his head, and explained to Gird again just how much damage an unopposed group of archers could do. The implication was clear: learn this, somehow, or die for its lack. Gird began to consider who among his people might know a clandestine archery expert—someone far to the north, who might have friends or family among the horse nomads, whose bows the Finaareans respected, perhaps.

Days passed; Gird was no longer sure how many. The gnomes did not celebrate Midwinter, and refused to interrupt his lessons for it. He hoped the gods would forgive him, this once—perhaps, since he was underground, among gnomes, they would not know. That didn’t seem likely; the gnomes certainly thought that the High Lord, the great Judge, knew everything above ground or below.

He felt stuffed with new knowledge, things that made perfect sense during the lessons but came apart in his mind afterward like windblown puffballs. The Warmaster had been appalled to discover that Gird had no idea how many of the lords there were, or how many soldiers they had. That Gird could not draw an accurate map of Finaarenis and the surrounding lands. That he did not know who the king was, or how the king was related to the various nobles, or how the land was governed. They poured all this into him, day after day, every minute of his waking hours filled and overfilled with new knowledge. He had never known there was that much knowledge in the whole world, and he wished he hadn’t found it out. Even with the gnomes’ organizing skills, he found himself remembering the name of a town when he wanted the number of stones of grain needed to feed a hundred men on march for two hands of days, or coming up with the right way to place scouts to watch a tradeway when he wanted the command that split a column marching forward into two columns, one of which was veering off to the right. He could imagine himself in the midst of battle calling out the exceptions to liability for delivery of spoiled perishables instead of the right commands, and he sweated all the worse for it.

This struggle was no easier that he did not know how long it would last: how long he had to learn what—he now agreed—he needed to learn. Years would not have been enough; he had started with a bare half-year, if he was going to lead the war in the next season. He would have fretted about that, if he had had time. Instead, the worry seeped into his other thoughts like a drop of dye into water, coloring every moment with fear he had not named. He would have discussed it with Arranha, but the priest was often away when Gird returned to his assigned quarters and fell into bed.

At last, with no warning (at least nothing he had noticed) he and Arranha were summoned to the largest of the ceremonial halls, where a crowd of gnomes had assembled. Silently, Gird noticed; there was none of the whispering or chattering of a human crowd. Lawmaster Karik (one of the four or five he had finally learned to recognize at sight) led Gird to the front of the chamber, and spoke lengthily in gnomish. Then he turned to Gird.

“It is time to send you out, if you would be at your encampment before your people are sure we have killed you. Remember your contracts with us; we have delivered to you that which we promised. You have your obligation.”

At least he knew the correct response. “I acknowledge receipt of your knowledge and training; I admit my obligation, and swear to fulfill it to the length of my life.”

“Witnessed.” That brought a stir, and the chorus from all. “Witnessed.”

A chill went down his back. He fully intended to carry out all he had promised, but that “witnessed” meant uncounted gnome pikes at his back if he failed.

Chapter Twenty

He had known he missed the sun—even the thin, cold sunlight of winter—but not until he came out into that remembered beauty, and rested his gaze on a horizon impossibly distant, did he know how much. Tears stung his eyes. It had hurt, in ways he could not define, to have his vision trapped between walls so long. It had hurt to have sounds reverberating in those walls, quiet as the gnomes had been. It had hurt to smell no live wind, with its infinitely varying smells, its constantly changing pressures on his skin. They had led him out into a morning of softly falling rain, a cold spring rain that still held a threat of late snow. Between the showers that fell curtainlike here and there he could see long tawny slopes, dark patches of woodland, the soft lavender and muted burgundy of sap-swollen buds coloring what had been gray. He heard the soft whisper of the rain on sodden grass, the distant gurgle of water running away downhill, a vast silence between the sounds where nothing would echo. Cold and damp as it was, it soothed the inside of his nose, easing with smells of wet earth and rock the dry itch from a season underground with only rockdust and gnomes. His own human smell, that he had been aware of as unlike the others, disappeared into that freshness.

“We will see you at Blackbone Hill,” said Armsmaster Setik, who had come out with Gird. Arranha was staying behind awhile, but had told Gird he would follow him later. Gird wondered if Arranha knew about Blackbone Hill; the gnomes mentioned the name only when Arranha was not around.

“Yes,” said Gird, drinking in another breath of that air, wondering why the ragged, uneven landscape of duns and grays seemed so much more beautiful than the careful sculpting of the gnomes’ halls.

“You have the maps.”

“Yes.” As he looked at the land, now, the maps he had been taught to use seemed to overlay it. He would go that way, and find a tiny watercourse to lead him north and west, then leave that one by a steep-browed hill, and find another beyond the hill, and then the wood he almost thought of as his wood . . .

“And—” Setik looked up at him with an expression Gird could not interpret. “I found it most satisfying; for a human, you are—are not unlike a kapristi in some ways.”

Gird turned, surprised. The Armsmaster had been even less outgoing than his other instructors, if possible. Gird had assumed he would be glad to rid himself of a clumsy human oaf. Setik’s brow was furrowed slightly, his scars pulled awry.

“You are by nature hasty, as all the lateborn are: hasty to laughter, to anger, to hunger—but you forced foresight on yourself, and withheld haste. You have a gift for order, for discipline, for what we mean by responsibility.”

“You are a good teacher,” Gird said.

The gnome nodded. “I am, that is true. But the best teacher cannot turn a living thing from its nature: I could not make stone grow and bear fruit like a tree. I could not teach a tree to fly. Even among us, who are much alike, some have less talent for war than others. You have it, and you have what is rare with us—what war requires that the rest of our life does not need, and that is a willingness to go beyond what is required, into the realm of gift.”

Gird was both puzzled and fascinated. All he had heard, from Lawmaster Karik, showed the gnomes’ distrust of gifts, and until now he had not suspected the gnomish soldiers thought differently. Setik smiled suddenly, a change as startling as if rock split in a manic grin.

“War calls for more than fair exchange; we soldiers know what the lawgivers cannot understand. Even among us, I say, are some who freely give—and in war that giving wins battles. You have that; from what you say, it is a human trait.” Abruptly, he stopped, and his face changed back to its former dourness. “Go with the High Lord’s judgment,” he said. Gird glanced back at the entrance to the gnomes’ caves, so nearly invisible; there stood several others, watching and listening.

“You will not take thanks,” he said to Setik, “but among my people it is rude to withhold them. I will thank the gods, then, for sending me to such a good teacher of war, and ask their grace to keep my mind from scrambling together what you so carefully set apart.”

If he had believed the gnomes had any humor whatever, he would have said Setik’s black eyes twinkled. “Soldiers of one training are as brothers of one father,” the gnome murmured. “Go now, before someone asks awkward questions.”

Gird nodded, saying nothing past the lump in his throat, and headed downslope. He stepped carefully across the boundary, and did not look back until he had traveled well out of sight of that unambiguous line.

The gnomes had shown him a small, exquisitely carved model of the lands they called gnishina, all drained by the great river Gird had never yet seen, from the western plains to the sea. All his life Gird had lived among low hills and creeks whose windings made no sense to him. He had thought the world was made lumpy, like redroots in a pan, until he saw the gnomes’ country, with great mountains rising behind a line of hills.

The model made sense of what had seemed random hummocks. He had not understood the gnomes’ explanation, but the great concentric arcs of rock were obvious enough, with the river dividing them like the cleft of a cow’s hoof. Rows of hills, variously shaped by the different kinds of rock in them (he understood that much; everyone knew that red rock made rounded slopes, and white rock made stepwise ones) bowed sharply away from the river, to run almost parallel to the southern mountains as they neared them. Between the hills ran the creeks and rivers, all tributaries of the Honnorgat. These stream valleys had formed natural routes of travel. Moving a large force north or south was easiest near the Honnorgat; moving it east or west was easiest away from the great river.

Once more under the open sky, he could interpret the hills before him for what they were: the flanks of a great arch. Going north, he would cross white rock to yellow, and yellow to brown, then travel west to come back to yellow and white. Just so a man might run his finger from the side of a cow’s hoof to the cleft, then forward to the point—and find hoof wall again. More importantly, with his understanding of the whole region, and the maps the gnomes had provided, he would know where he was—where his army was—and how to get where he wanted to go. He hoped.

Human lands were scarcely less perilous than the gnome princedoms, though their perils were less uncanny. Gadilon might not trouble his gnomish neighbors, for fear of their retribution, but he had no intention of letting a peasant uprising unseat him. Gird was hardly into that domain when he saw the first patrols, seasoned soldiers whose alertness indicated respect for their new enemy. Whatever had happened while Gird was underground with the gnomes, it had ended all complacency in the outlying holdings. Gird spent an uncomfortable half-day lying flat among dripping bushes as the patrols crossed and recrossed the route he had planned to take. When dark fell, he extricated himself, muttering curses, and edged carefully around the hill and down a noisy watercourse. Here the water noises would cover any he made.

Even with his caution, he was nearly caught. If the sentry had not coughed, and then spat into the water, Gird would never have known that the dark shadow of a boulder was actually a person. He stopped where he was, wondering if he’d been seen. Another cough, a muttered curse. Gird crept away from the stream’s edge, feeling the ground under his feet carefully. He could not stay here, and he could not go back—not without knowing where the other soldiers were. He made his way into the tangle of rocks on that side of the stream, and eased his way up onto one of the huge boulders. From that height, he could just see a twinkle of firelight downstream and below. The sentry had probably been told to climb where Gird now was, but up here the night breeze was cold and raw; the man had slid down to get out of the wind. Gird flattened himself on the cold hard stone and thought about it.

With his gnomish training in mind, if he’d been the person responsible for that camp, he’d have had sentries upstream and down, and scattered through the woods. Scattered where? His un-gnomish experience told him that men, like the sentry whose cough had revealed him, cared for their own comfort. No matter how wisely a commander had sent them out, they would each choose a place that combined the maximum of personal safety and comfort with sufficient—to that individual—performance of the assignment. If he could figure out what that was, he could get around the camp in safety. If he made a mistake, they would all be after him.

One simple answer was to backtrack upstream and swing wide around the camp. That would work if he didn’t then run into another patrol. He could think of no reason why Gadilon would have another patrol out to the south, but who could read the lords’ intent? Or he could try to angle away from the stream, through the brush and woods, and hope to avoid any other sentries without losing so much ground. If the streamside sentry represented the distance from the camp that all of them were posted, that should be possible. He was still debating this with himself when he heard horses’ hooves in the distance, a cry of alarm from the camp, and a trumpet call. The sentry below him gasped, and started back for the camp at a run, falling over rocks and bellowing as he went.

Gird stayed where he was, trying to understand what was going on. More lights appeared: flickering torches moving between the trees. Loud cries, shouted commands, responses from distant sentries. He felt a little smug that they were coming from the radius he’d guessed. He wished he could get closer, and had started down from the rock when he heard the unmistakable clash of steel on steel. More yelling, more screams, more noise of hoofs, weapons, another trumpet blast cut off in mid-cry. He could hear noise coming his way, as several men thrashed through the undergrowth, stumbled over obstructions. They came near enough that he could hear their gasping breath, the jingle of their buckles and mail, the creak of leather. Behind them were more; someone shouted “There they go!”

With a crunch of boots on gravel, they were beneath him. He could just make out two or three dark forms against the starlit water, the gleam of starlight along a weapon’s blade. One there was wounded, groaning a little with every gasping breath. Gird lay motionless, hoping no one would notice the large shadow flat on the top of the boulder.

“Don’t let ’em get away!” he heard from downstream. “Follow that blood trail.” One of the men below him cursed viciously.

“We got to move,” he said. “They’ll find us, and—”

“Per can’t go farther,” said another. “We’ll have to fight ’em off.”

“We can’t.” A pause, then, “We’ll have to leave ’im. He’s the blood trail, anyway. They find him, dead, they’ll think that’s it.”

“No! They’ll know he couldn’t have got this far alone. ’Sides, he’s my sister’s husband; I’m not leaving him.”

“Suit yourself.” One of the shadows splashed into the stream, and started across. The other threw a low-voiced curse after him, and backed against the rock on which Gird lay.

Now the pursuers were in sight, the light of their torches swinging wildly through the trees. Gird saw rough, bearded faces, men wearing no livery, or even normal clothes, but the skins of wild animals roughly tanned and crudely fashioned. They carried swords and pikes, stained already with blood. Gird dared not lean out from his perch to see the men at the foot of his rock—but he suspected that they were Gadilon’s soldiers, in his livery, and these others were—what? Not any he had trained, he was sure, but who? Gadilon’s peasants?

He slid back carefully over the crest of the boulder, hoping that their attention was fixed on the men below. What happened then was clear enough by the sound of it: a low growl of anticipation from the pursuers, a challenge by the one man still able to fight, and bloody butchery thereafter. It did not last long. One of the attackers said, “There was another—look here, he took to the water.”

“No matter. Well find ’im by day, or let ’im carry word to his lord—he’ll get no comfort of it. One back from each patrol will do us no harm.” Then the speaker raised his voice to carry over the stream’s chuckle. “Hey—you coward! You count’s man! Go tell yer count what happened, and tell ’im ’twas Gird and his yeomen! Tell ’im to shake in ’is boots, while he has ’em to shake in.”

Gird felt the blood rush to his skin at that; he nearly jumped up where he stood to deny it. How dare they use his name! His ears roared with the pressure of his anger; as his hearing cleared, he heard one of the men laugh.

“Diss, what’re you playing at? D’you really think the count’ll believe this night’s work was Gird’s?”

“What do I care? If he thinks it’s peasants, he’ll ride his peasants harder, and spend less time looking for brigands. If he blames every robbery and ambush in his domain on peasants, isn’t that good for us? And if he doesn’t believe it—if he thinks to himself it’s a trick of brigands—he’ll wonder why brigands would lay that crime on peasants. If maybe we’re allies. And the peasants . . . if they’ll skimp to send grain to Gird’s yeomen, why not to us—if we convince them we’re with them.”

Gird dug his fingers into the rock to keep himself from plunging right into that—which was the same, he knew, as plunging a knife in his neck. The brigands all laughed; he heard them stripping the bodies of the count’s soldiers, before they left them naked and unprotected in the night, to return to the fire and carousing with the guard-sergeant’s ration of ale. Gird heard them ride away, in the hours before dawn. He waited until he could see clearly before slithering down from his perch, stiff and miserable, to see for himself what they’d done.

The dead soldiers looked no different from any other dead; he had not forgotten, in his half-year with the gnomes, how the dead looked and smelled. He squatted beside them and closed their eyes with pebbles. They were enemies, but not now his; he had not killed them, and he felt he owed them that basic courtesy. They had stiffened; he could not straighten their limbs. But he found mint already green beside the creek, and laid a sprig on each of them. Then he plucked a handful of it, and went toward the deserted camp. There he put mint on each of the dead, soldier and brigand alike, unsure why he was doing it except that it felt right. This was not his fight; he disliked both sides with equal intensity.

The brigands had stripped the soldiers of weapons, armor, clothes, and money (or so Gird judged, finding a couple of copper crabs trampled into the ground), but had left behind what food they had not eaten themselves. Gird saw no reason not to take it. He stuffed the flat loaves and half a cheese into his shirt. At the soldiers’ picket lines, he found the cut ends of ropes where the brigands had stolen the horses; continuing downstream, he found another dead soldier, the downstream sentry.

He went as warily as he could, aware that he now had two sets of enemies: when Gadilon found out about his patrol, these hills would hum with soldiery, but at the same time the brigands would not be happy to find a real Gird in their midst. By midday, he had put a good distance between himself and the site of the brigand attack, but he felt no safer. The gnomish maps told him that he needed to cross all Gadilon’s domain, south to north, then open sheep pastures shared between several lords and peasant villages, before he would be back in territory he knew by sight. The nearest barton—as of the previous fall, he reminded himself—was a group of shepherds who called their settlement Farmeet.

His most direct route took him across a trade road that connected Gadilon’s towns with those in Tsaia to the east and Ierin, the most southwesterly town in Finaarenis. The gnomes had pointed out that he must, eventually, control traffic on this road in order to secure either southern quadrant of the realm. Like the River Road, along the southern bank of the Honnorgat in the north, the southern trade road allowed the lords to move soldiers and supplies easily from one fortified town to another. Gird himself found moving across country easier, but the gnomes had insisted that no organized army could travel like a single man or a small group.

Gird made it to the road with only one more close brush with a patrol (he had hidden in a dense cedar as the men rode by underneath, discussing the deaths of their friends in the ambush Gird had seen. He was dismayed to find that they assumed peasants had done it—and that the peasants and brigands were in league.) Now he peered from a thick growth of plums, all white with bloom, at a rutted track that seemed deserted. A horseman had ridden by sometime before; he’d heard the hoofbeats, and he could see fresh tracks overlying older ones. He leaned forward a little, shivering the plums, and the bees in the blossoms lifted with a whine to their buzz. Bees didn’t bother him (he wondered where their hive was), but he still could not tell if anyone was on the other side, watching. The soldiers had said something about closing the trade road, keeping the peasants from using it or crossing it. That would take sentries all along the way—surely they weren’t doing that—but he would hate to take an arrow in the neck finding out.

Something chuffed, across the track. Gird held very still. A deer burst through the plums there, paused in the track, ears wide and tail high, and chuffed again. Even as Gird heard the snap of a bowstring, an arrow thunked into the deer and it staggered, limped a stride, and fell awkwardly. Three men dressed alike crashed through the undergrowth, lashed the deer’s carcass to a pole, and disappeared back into the wood on the far side of the road, without a glance toward Gird. Their silent cooperation convinced Gird that they worked together constantly, but he had no idea whether they were foresters, soldiers, or brigands. Or, for that matter, poaching peasants. He could hear their progress through the wood; taking a chance that anyone else watching would be attracted by that noise, he darted across the road and into the trees, then swung wide of their path.

He wished he dared speak to them. That archer had been powerful and accurate; that’s what the gnomes said he needed. If those were peasants, poaching deer, then he might find a useful follower. More likely an arrow, he reminded himself. Too risky.

He made it safely to Farmeet, only to find the shepherds far less outgoing than he remembered from the summer before.

“I heard you was taking on Gadilon’s patrols,” said one of the shepherds, not quite looking at Gird. “Heard as you come on ’em sleeping, and killed ’em lying there, and took their clothes and all . . .”

“No,” said Gird. “That was brigands.”

“How’d you know?” They were all very still, sitting hunched as shepherds do, their long crooks angling up over their shoulders.

“I was there, hiding from the soldiers, when the brigands came.” They said nothing, but he could feel their disbelief. It was unlikely, he had to admit; to such as these, unlikely was nearly the same as impossible. Only a complete story would do; they would suspect anything less. Keeping his voice low and matter-of-fact, he told it all, from first sighting the sentry to laying mint on the bodies.

“Good you did that,” said the oldest shepherd, nodding. “Shows respect to the Lady, that do. Proper to do it for both sides, too.”

“They said they was you?” asked another.

Gird nodded. “They did, and they meant it to confuse both Gadilon’s men and our people.”

“We heard things this past winter.” The oldest shepherd poked the fire. “You’d gone down to the underworld, we heard. Talked to that one—has the horned circle, you know what I mean?”

“Liart—” breathed Gird.

“Aye. No good, that one. Them’s follows him likes hurting. Our lord’s got some like that in his service. Heard you made bargain with ’im, anyhow. That’s where you were, eh? Is it?”

“No.” Gird wondered where that story had come from, the lords or the brigands or simple imagination. “No, I was with the kapristi—the gnomes, the little rockfolk.”

“Ah. They’re not his followers, what I hear.”

“No. They follow the High Lord; I went to them to learn about law—what’s wrong with the lords’ law, and what might replace it.”

A younger shepherd spat. “Anyone can see what’s wrong with the lords’ law—it don’t take muckin’ about underground to see that.”

“Hush, Dikka. This’ll be more, what Gird’s talkin’ about.”

“When this war’s over,” Gird began, hoping they could think that far ahead, “we’ll have to have fair laws, if we’re to have peace. Most of our people don’t remember how it was before the lords came. What we do now’s a mix of our old customs and their laws—it makes no sense, as anyone can see—you’re right there. But what to do about it—that’s something else.”

“And you saw beyond the war, to the peace? Ah, that’s good.” The oldest shepherd finally turned to look directly at Gird. “You want the peace, do you? And not just the fighting?”

“That’s right.”

“And you know a fair law for all of us then, when it’s over?”

Gird shook his head. “I know a way to devise such a law—but it will mean many of us working on it. You, too, perhaps.”

“Not me—but I’ll be glad to think on it, that someone is. So you’ve naught to do with the horned chain?”

“No.” He let it stand baldly, like that; they looked at him a long moment, then all nodded.

The oldest shepherd said, “You have an honest look, and nothing that fits one of the horned chain worshippers. So I say—” gathering the others with his eyes. “I say he is Gird, and not that fellow as stopped by a hand of days ago, claiming Gird’s name and asking our help.”

“What!” They had said nothing of this before. The old man grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth.

“Aye—another Gird was here, if we believed him, which we didn’t. Big fellow, like you in that. Grinned a lot with plenty of teeth. Said that great powers was with him—and us if we joined him—and the lords would be cast down and trampled in the dust. Our sheep’d grow fat and have golden fleece, the way he told it—you’d think he’d been talking to the Master Shepherd and not the Master of Torments.”

“So what did you do?” asked Gird, fascinated. The shepherds all chuckled.

“Do? We’s no more’n stupid old shepherds, lad. Us can’t think o’ none but sheep and wool—can’t make an onion from a barleycorn, nor sheep of mice, no more’n make soldiers of th’ likes o’ us, can you now?” The exaggeration of their accents was so pronounced that Gird found himself grinning; they grinned back, well pleased with his reaction. “He wanted a barton here; we said we’s no barton—we’s shepherds, not farmfolk. He says what’s Farmeet, then, as he’s been told it’s a barton—and we says it’s a bitty sheepfold, no more’n that, just a lambing shed and pen. He was not happy wi’ us when he left.”

Gird sniffed elaborately, reference to the old saying about onions and barleycorn, and said, “I smell an onion in this seedsack, so I do—” They laughed uproariously.

“It works both ways,” the old shepherd admitted. “No onions from barleycorns, but no hiding an onion from anyone with a nose. But them’s certain as they smelled stupid, afore ever they got here; we’s no reason to argue with ’em.”

“How many?” asked Gird. The old shepherd held up his hands and spread them twice: four hands of men, about the size he’d expected.

The little Farmeet barton had only two hands of yeomen: six men and four women. It would probably spend the entire war herding its sheep, shearing, spinning wool, but it had already served him well.

From Farmeet, he made it safely to Holn, where the rumors the brigands had spread had not yet come. Other rumors had. Already conflict had started, and the lords were raising all their troops, planning to crush the peasants before the summer came. They would move, Gird was told, on Kelaive’s domain first, sweeping east across the lands where he had been known to dwell. Gird’s own people had runners in all the southern villages, waiting word from him; Holn’s runner had already gone to tell Ivis and Felis he was back, and another runner waited any message he wanted to send.

What he wanted, desperately, was a pause in time—a few days when nothing happened, so that he could get back with his own troop and make plans. But it could not be, and he understood it. He listened late to the yeomen of Holn, spreading the maps the gnomes had provided and running his finger along the lines. Then he slept, for a few hours, and had a last conference with the barton, warning them about the brigands who claimed his name. He had no time to stop and teach them the new drills the gnomes had taught him; they would have to learn later, when they rose. For now, he must get to his own troops as quickly as possible.

Although he knew the country near Holn, he was glad to have a local guide, who knew just where the patrols had been going. The first bits of green were showing in hedge and wood; wild plum frothed white, and tiny pink flowers starred the rumpled grass that had green at its roots. Cold wet air gusted past him, carrying occasional snowflakes, spurts of rain, and gleams of unsteady sunlight. He could smell the growth in it, the spring smell that made new lambs throw their tails over their backs and frisk as he and his guide went past. There was a pasture with cows, the herder in his leather cape standing hunched against a flurry of hard raindrops, and here was a ditch brimful of racing water, clear as deep winter ice in a bucket. Gird would have frisked if he could, and he chuckled to himself at the thought of a middle-aged farmer-turned-rebel, throwing his tail over his back to dance in a spring rain.

They saw no patrols that day, but between showers Gird thought he saw a smudge of dark smoke blowing away somewhere to the east. He asked his guide, who shrugged.

“There’s been burnings, this winter past. A whole grange, we heard of: every bit of grain and hay lost, and the stones cracked, some of ’em. The lords were making everyone burn the stubble in the fields, last harvest, so’s no one could hide in it. Hayricks, too, some places.”

From Holn to Sawey, where Felis waited in the barton of a farmer called Ciri. It was dark, quiet but for dripping off the roofs—too quiet for a village on an early spring evening. His guide led him to the back gate, clicked the pebbles in his pocket together. Someone answered the clicks from within, then pushed the gate open for them. Inside was the good smell of food, cows, leather, oiled wood, and the sight of friends’ faces. They hugged, smacking each others’ shoulders. The gnomes’ impassive dourness faded from Gird’s mind—these were men, humans that he knew, faces alive with passion for one thing after another.

“At last,” Felis said. Others echoed him. Gird took a deep breath. There was no going back now; there had been no going back from Norwalk, but now he could not hesitate. It was truly “at last” and he must do what he had come to do. They were watching him, relieved to see him but still a little uncertain. Hoping he was over whatever had bothered him after Norwalk Sheepfolds—needing him to be over it—but unsure that he was. They reminded him of boys watching a father whose uncertain temper determines the quality of their life. I am sure, he told himself. When he smiled at them, their faces relaxed.

“At last which?” he asked Felis, intentionally lightening the moment. “At last I am here to settle an argument, or so that you can tell me you don’t want me, or—”

“You know,” said Felis, rubbing his nose. How, Gird wondered, had it gotten sunburnt so early in the year?

“I do, but I’m not sure you do. Yes, this is the year, and yes, I have learned things we can use, and yes, we start now. Tonight.”

He felt the change in the tiny enclosure: relief, eagerness, and—as always—fear.

“I told you,” said one of the local men, in the corner. Gird smiled at him, raising an eyebrow; he flushed. “Some said you’d say wait, like you did last year, but I knew. I knew you had not lost your courage.”

Felis jumped into that. “Only a few, Gird, and no one—”

“It’s all right.” He felt calm and light, certain now where he was going with this group, and for the next few days. After that—“I could not say what I thought was wrong; you know that saying things is not my skill. I’m a plain farmer, same as any of you. I was as glad as any, we’d won at Norwalk, but I knew something was wrong, and now I know what.”

“And that is?” asked Felis, a challenge in his tone. Gird stretched, and let himself hunker down in a corner comfortably.

“You’ve heard of the gnomes’ soldiering, haven’t you?” Felis scowled, but nodded. “Well, they’ve taught me a lot. Norwalk was lucky. I had to learn better—and I have—and with what I know now and you can learn quick enough, even the gnomes think we can win.”

“What did you trade them?” asked Ciris, whose barton it was.

“Our—my—pledge that we would respect their borders, deal fairly with them—” That got nods, and muttered agreement. “—And our help in one battle: they want to trap the magelords in a place called Blackbone Hill.”

This caused less comment than he’d expected; if the gnomes wanted their help, they must think Gird’s was good, and that meant good fortune. Gird had his doubts, but wasn’t about to share them. Not yet.

“We’re not in the same camps,” Felis told Gird, when the other men had left and he and Gird were sharing a heap of straw. “The patrols began to come too close. Ivis thought we’d do better spread through several bartons. He said his forester friends told him the duke was planning a raid around Midwinter. So we left, and let out word to one of the brigand gangs that the camps had supplies in them. They moved in; the duke’s men caught them—and recognized them, too; the leader’s someone the duke’s wanted for years. We hope that’s convinced the duke that his peasant uprising was really a brigand gang in his wood. Ivis’s brother agreed to say in the duke’s court that the leader had been coming to him, threatening him.”

Gird shook his head, half in admiration of their ingenuity, and half in concern. “Not all brigands are that gullible,” he said, and told Felis about that other band he’d run into.

“So what will you do?”

“Fight my war, and let them fight theirs. People will recognize the difference soon enough.” He told Felis about the shepherds of Farmeet. Felis chuckled.

“Everyone thinks farmers are stupid, and shepherds are the stupidest: lords and thieves alike. But tell me, what is ‘your war’—how will we fight, and when, and where?”

“And have I seen the gods themselves, and is the overworld paved with gold and walled in crystal? You want all the answers at once? In the dark?” Beside him, Felis made a sound between a snort and a sniff; Gird relented. “All right. What I heard is that the lords have raised their army, and plan to start by clearing from Kelaive’s domain east. We will take all the bartons from Hardshallows eastward, and move north—away from them, for now—and strike for the River Road.”

“Why?”

“Even if we won here, we’d still be caught between the south trade road, the River Road, and the trade road between Finyatha and Ierin. Their supplies would flow freely; ours would not. If we cut the River Road, we’ve cut Finyatha from Verella, in Tsaia—”

“Tsaia! You’re not thinking of fighting there—”

“Tsaia’s king is kinbound to this one. The gnomes say things are as bad there. Our bartons on the east reported interest in neighboring vills inside Tsaia.”

“But I don’t know where Tsaia is, except eastward.”

Gird grinned, in the darkness; Felis sounded as much affronted as frightened. That was good. “You will know, when we get there. Now: this is what we must do to win in Finaarenis alone. We must be able to feed ourselves, control the food supply—and that means the trade roads, as well as protection for the farmers, and certain towns—”

“You sound—different—” Felis sounded uncertain again.

“I am, in a way. It’s all very different than we thought. It’s more than raising three or four bartons at a time to attack a small force. Right now the lords have trained soldiers with good weapons; they have stores of supplies; they have control of towns and roads—and, if we’re honest, of much of the countryside. We should have more yeomen overall, but you know how it is—if we seem to be losing, some of those will go home and forget they ever heard of us. Our people have almost no experience, our weapons—Oh. That reminds me. Changes there, too.”

Felis rolled over; the straw rustled. “All right. I’m convinced. You’ve come back ready to lead us to glory, full of as many new ideas as when you came into my camp that first day. But unless the gods put their touch on you, you still need sleep, and so do I.”

Chapter Twenty-one

In less than a hand of days, Gird stood facing his first army: the bartons from Hardshallows, his own village, Fireoak, Whitetree, Harrow, Holn, and the original two Stone Circle groups. After his experience with the gnomes, their “straight” lines looked crooked, and their marching seemed as ragged as goats dancing along a path, but he said nothing of that for the moment. They were there, bold, timid, nervous, confident, in every possible mood he might have expected. With them had come the food he had told them to put by for this purpose; each had brought his or her sack of grain and beans, onions and redroots, even strips of dried meat.

What he had not expected so soon was the ragtag clutter of refugees that had come with them. His own village had come all in a lump, convinced that anyone left behind would die. After all, everyone knew where Gird had come from, and Kelaive had never been slow to make reprisals. Most of Hardshallows followed its yeomen, for the same reason, and Fireoak, in the same hearthing, feared the same trouble.

So besides the yeomen, Gird had all the others to worry about: small children, pregnant women, old men and women who could scarcely totter. They knew nothing of camp discipline. He had to double, then triple, the size of the jacks; smoke from the cookfires marked the sky with unmistakable evidence of their presence. When nothing happened for a few days, the oldest and youngest began to treat it as a holiday—spring, and no work to be done. Grandparents sat and chattered, children screeched, mothers festooned every bush with laundry.

Most of those who were young and strong wanted to join the bartons—better late than never—but Gird took only a third of them. The others he assigned to his traditional tally groups, with Pidi (now beginning to show his growth) to teach them the necessary foodgathering and camp skills. This group he knew could not keep up when the army began to move, but he had no safe place to send them; they would have to do as best they could.

As for the bartons, he had all of them change from varied farm tools to the long stick and the hauk for weapons. The farm tools went to the nonfighters, with a few hours of instruction. Once all his units had the long sticks, drilling them began to look more like drilling a real army. Gird imagined good, hard, steel points on the ends of those sticks, but what they had were sharpened wood: not good enough, but cheap and available. He imagined a lot more drill, but they had no more time than they did steel.

What he did have was willing spies. When the enemy army set out from Finyatha, runners passed the word from barton to barton. Gird knew within a few days, while the army was still days north of Hardshallows.

“Why don’t we move now?” asked Ivis and Felis. Gird tapped the map the gnomes had made him.

“We can’t be sure they aren’t getting information the same way we are.”

“But no one would tell the lords about us—not farmers—”

“Felis, think. They burned Berryhedge, didn’t they? Took the survivors, beat them—do you think there’s anything about the Berryhedge barton they don’t know? They burned three other villages we know of last winter, taking prisoners each time. Some yeomen got away; some didn’t. Some of those they caught will have told all they know—from pain, from fear, from hope of saving a child . . . whatever. Most of our people want to be free, but many of them are scared—and so they should be. Some of those scared ones will help the lords, simply out of fear.”

“But I still don’t see why—”

“Look again. If they know we’re moving north, they’ll most likely turn and come after us. They could catch us on the move, before we get to the River Road. I don’t know all that country; I need to see it, so that when we come to fight there, I can choose good ground.”

“The gnomes taught you that, too?”

“Yes.” He looked up, and saw a sulky expression in Felis’s eyes. Ivis was merely puzzled. “Felis, I’ll be glad to teach you all the gnomes taught me—to teach all of you—but right now I don’t have time. Now. When the army has passed the lower ford, there, they’ll be unlikely to turn back until Hardshallows. In spring, that stream runs deep and rough. That gives us time to get well north of them before they turn—and if we’re lucky they’ll go on to my old village, to get word from the steward there.”

Cob said “What about the lords’ magic—did you learn anything about that? Is it real, and what can they do?”

“It’s real.” Gird rumpled his hair with both hands. He could have done without that question. The next would be what could he do about the lords’ magic, and the answer was, nothing. “Some of them have lost it—that may be why they’ve changed for the worst. They’re afraid they’ll lose all their power without their magic to fight for them. But some have enough left—they can make light, call storms, compel men to obedience, change their faces—”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Lucky for us that most of them don’t have it any more; we’ll be fighting soldiers who have no more magic than we do.”

“Better weapons,” said Cob gloomily.

“Better for fighting unarmed peasants. Remember that most of ’em have been sitting around guarding some noble’s home; the ones that have experience got it with horse nomads—not with foot troops who use polearms. They belong to different lords; they’ll have a divided command; they aren’t used to drilling together. We are.”

The lords’ army did exactly what Gird had expected. They moved at a leisurely pace down the trade road from Finyatha toward Ierin, waited for a contingent of troops from Ierin, then swung southeastward, following the west bank of the Blue all the way to Hardshallows. His spies told him they burned that deserted village after fording the stream, then stopped to celebrate a victory. Supposedly, the enemy forces now numbered about 300 soldiers, and that many again of servants, guides, packers, and other noncombatants. This was by no means all the force the lords had at their disposal. Ivis’s duke was rumored to be on his way with his personal guard—a hundred strong, some of them fresh from the northern frontier.

By this time, Gird and his army were on the move. His original Stone Circle troops now numbered just over fifty; these he considered his best trained and hardiest. The bartons already risen contributed over a hundred, and the newest yeomen—the hardiest of the refugees—added another sixty or so. Then there were the refugees themselves, some of whom might be able to fight, at least a single blow: over two hundred of them.

Moving this motley group turned out to be harder than Gird had expected. Although he and his Stone Circle troops were used to traveling, many of the others had never been out of their villages until now. They did not understand maps, and the farther Gird led them from familiar country, the more unhappy and nervous they became. Some of the older people simply stopped, refusing to go on. For the first few days, it seemed that Gird was constantly being asked to persuade someone’s father or mother to keep going. “Not another step!” burned itself into his memory, along with “How many times have I told you—!” addressed to a wailing child.

It was not what he’d planned. It was not anything like what the gnomes had advised. But what could he do? They were his people; he had to take care of them. He led them by the safest ways he could find, avoiding villages where soldiers were quartered. He could not hide the movement of so many from everyone, but most of the peasants would not report them. What worried him were the few who might.

Gird paced back and forth nervously. It was much harder to hide a camp for three hundred than a camp for fifty; the jacks stank almost as far as the road when the wind blew right, and he could not convince his yeoman marshals that any guard sergeant would know what that smell meant. They would not make the trenches deep enough, and insist that the users cover it all. As for the cookfires—he looked back over his shoulder at the wisps of smoke rising into the forest canopy. At least they had trees here, and something to cook. He had to remember that, and the times when they’d had nothing. Farmers around here had been generous, though it was hard to persuade them to stay on their farms and grow food when their barton training gave them confidence. They wanted to fight, now, not plow and plant and reap. He himself would have changed places gladly, in peace, but they wouldn’t believe it. For a moment he felt a scythe in his hands, the lovely long swing back and forth, the bite of the blade into ripe wheat. But that was past, and now he had a camp to care for.

“Gird?” Raheli had come up to him, more quiet-footed than he would ever be. In the dimming evening light, the scar on her face stood out whiter than ever.

“What, lass?” His lass she would always be, the child he had held in the moments after birth, the laughing girl who had put flowers on the endstones and danced in the starlight with her lover . . . the girl he had not been able to protect. He could not get away from that.

“There’s trouble nearby; a runner came in.”

“How much trouble?”

“Farmer’s place burning, soldiers all around.”

“One of ours?”

“They say not. He came to a meeting awhile back, over to Whitford, and he’d been giving food to the local barton, but not drilling there. Tis said he’s a lord’s bastard, and got his cottage-right that way.”

Gird grunted. Peasant jealousy again. “Not his fault, if it’s true. Family?”

“Young wife, two children. Quiet man, they said. Hard worker, but kept to himself.”

Gird interpreted that his own way. If his village had resented his getting the cottage, they’d have made life hard on him; such a man might keep to his own hearth with good reason. Had the soldiers interpreted his solitude as rebellion? “What of him and the family?”

Raheli shook her head. “Don’t know yet. Soldiers took two off along the road, but it looked like a woman and girl.” Her voice shook; Gird’s would if he spoke, and he knew it.

“They killed him, then,” Gird said huskily. “Otherwise, they’d take him along.” To watch, to feel his own shame. The same shame and rage he felt still, when he thought of it. He turned away, blinking back the tears. “Well—we’ll have to keep a good watch; there’s naught more we can do.”

It was near dawn when a sentry found someone crawling through the wood on elbows and knees, sobbing. Instead of killing the intruder at once, he dragged him along to the main campsite. Gird, coming from the jacks to the cookfire in hopes of a quiet mug of sib, heard the commotion as the sentry reported to the night marshal.

“What’s this?” he asked, strolling over. The sentry’s catch was a lean, dark-haired man who stank of smoke and burnt wood. He stood hunched and shivering, his hands cradled to his chest.

“Says he’s a farmer, got burnt out,” said the sentry. “Says they beat ’im, burned his hands.”

“Come to the fire,” Gird said. The sentry and the night marshal both helped the man, who staggered as if he was near collapse. They got him seated by one of the firepits, where the flickering light of the morning cookfire showed a strongboned face smudged with ash and soot. A welt stood out along one side of his face; one eye was swollen, and his hands, when he held them out, were blistered on the palms, as if someone had forced them onto a hot kettle. His shirt was scorched up one arm, with the red line of a burn beneath.

“You need to drink,” Gird said. The morning cook had shifted to the other side of the firepit; he reached for the dipper in the sib kettle and paused. “Is your mouth burnt? Would cool water be better?”

“Water,” the man said faintly. Before Gird could get up, the cook had turned away, and came back quickly with a bucket of cold springwater. Gird held a dipperful to the man’s lips. He sucked it in noisily, swallowing so fast he nearly choked.

“Easy. There’s plenty.” Gird filled another dipper, and glanced at the cook. “Where’s Rahi? We’re going to need a good poultice for his burns.” The cook nodded, gave another stir to the porridge, and went off. When the man had finished the second dipper of water, he shook his head at the offer of another.

“Thanks . . .” he said. Tears made a clean track through the dirt on his face, glittering in the firelight. “I—I thought—”

“You’re safe,” Gird said. It was not strictly true, but he was safer here than where he had been. “What’s your name?”

“Selamis.” An unusual name for a peasant, Gird thought, but Rahi had said he might be a lord’s bastard. Some of them had unusual names. The man’s mouth worked a moment, then he said, “It’s—not a village name. I’m not from there.”

“It’s not a man’s name that matters,” said Gird. “Selamis is as good as any other. I’m Gird—that’s Jenis, and that’s Arvi.” He craned around to look. “And the cook’s Pirik. How did you get away?”

Selamis grimaced. “Tunnel—you—your men said, at Whitford that time, we should all have a way out, tunnel or hole in the wall, something like that. I had one in the woodshed, just under my barton wall. Not big. They threw me in there, after—after they were done—and said they’d take me off to the duke’s court come morning. So—I managed to move th’ wood, get the trap up—”

“With your hands burned like that? Brave man.” Gird flexed his own hands, imagining how it must have hurt to move anything.

Rahi came then, with her bags of herbs and a chunk of tallow. “Get him clean,” she said to Gird without preamble. He nodded, and dipped a bowl of water from the bucket the cook had left there. While Rahi worked the tallow and herbs together in a bowl to make a poultice, Gird washed Selamis’s hands gently, then his arms and face. The man winced, but did not cry out. Rahi smeared the burns and the welt on his face with her poultice, and bound his hands in clean rags. “It will hurt,” she warned. “Anything touching burns hurts, even air. But it will keep them clean, and under the blisters they should heal without much damage.”

Once he was bandaged to Raheli’s satisfaction, Gird and the night marshal, Arvi, helped Selamis to the jacks and then settled him on a blanket. By then it was dawn, light enough to see the paler line around his mouth from pain and shock. Gird told one of the others to keep an eye on him; he himself had more than a day’s work to do. He half expected the soldiers who had burnt the man’s farm to come looking for him, but his scouts reported that all the soldiers from that farm had headed back to the nearest town.

It was afternoon before he came back to see Selamis in daylight. The man was drowsing uneasily, twitching and shifting in the blanket. He muttered indistinct words that sounded almost like an argument, then cried out and woke completely. Tears stood in his eyes. Gird squatted beside him, and laid a hand on his arm.

“Pain, or worry?”

“It—hurts a lot.”

“Aye. I’m sorry we’ve nothing better. Are you hungry yet? Can I bring you water?” The man nodded for water, and Gird fetched it, then lifted him to drink. When he was through, Gird let him down gently.

“How many people do you have here?” the man asked, looking around. Gird blinked, thinking.

“Oh—two or three hundred, maybe more. It varies. Does that surprise you?”

“I thought—bartons—a few men each—”

“Some bartons are small, no more’n two or three hands of men. Others are larger. But you weren’t in a barton.”

“No. I—they didn’t like me much.” The expression on his face was curious; Gird would almost have said spoiled, but the man was too old, and had worked too hard, to be a spoiled child.

“Rumor says you’re a lord’s bastard.” He watched for a reaction, and got it. Selamis’s face closed, hardening; his eyes seemed to chill from warm brown to the color of icy mud. “You won’t let me stay?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I care more for honesty and courage than blood; that’s what all this is about.” That had surprised the man; Gird wondered again just what he’d been through.

“My—my sponsor assigned me that cottage,” the man said quickly. “I didn’t have anything to do with old Kerith being evicted; I’d have taken her in myself, but she wouldn’t come—”

“I’m not blaming you,” Gird said. Clearly someone had, and Selamis still felt he had to explain himself. He could believe that the local barton might have shunned the man, unfair as it was. But unfairness at the top made everyone unfair. “Here you will have the trust you deserve: if you are honest and brave, you will find loyal friends who care not at all who your father was—or your mother, for that matter. If you’ve suffered from both lord and peasant, you may find that hard to believe, but it’s true.”

“You’re peasant-born?”

Gird laughed. “All the way back, near’s I can find out. Farmer after farmer, born to plow and plant and harvest, to tend my stock.”

“But they say you’re a great general,” Selamis said. Something in the tone rang false; Gird looked at him a moment, but couldn’t place what bothered him. He laughed again.

“I’m no great general, lad; I know how to do a few things well, and keep doing them. As long as they work, we’ll survive. The gods have been with us, so far.”

“You believe they care who wins a war down here?”

“You don’t?” Gird looked him up and down. “You don’t think the gods gave you a bit of extra strength, to open your trap door with burned hands? You don’t think they hid you from the soldiers as you came through the night—that they led you to our camp? I’d say you’ve had some bounty of the gods already—”

“But my family—”

Gird laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. The last thing you need now is a scolding, and you still weak from what happened. I’ve cursed the gods myself, more than once, in such trouble.” He patted the man’s shoulder, and levered himself up; his knees seemed stiffer every day. “I’ll talk to you again, but for now you rest.”

He had gone only a few steps, when Selamis called “Gird—” Gird turned. The man’s face had gone white again, and he was shaking.

“What’s wrong?” Gird asked, coming back to his side.

“I—I can’t—” Selamis shook his head violently.

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t lie to you!” That came out loud enough to attract attention; Gird glared at the faces turned his way until they turned back. He knew they would be listening anyway. He sat heavily beside Selamis, facing him.

“What’s this now?” he asked, in the tone that had always gotten the truth from his children. Selamis had started crying, the rough, painful sobs of someone who cried rarely. “Easy, now, and tell me what it is you’ve lied about.”

“They sent me,” Selamis said, so softly that Gird could hardly hear him between sobs. “They sent me.”

“Who? The soldiers?” Selamis nodded; Gird chewed his lip, fighting back the rage that spurted up in his mind. He looked away; he was afraid of what Selamis would see in his face. “Sent you to spy on the camp? To betray us?”

“Yes.” That was as soft as the other; he heard fright as well as misery in Selamis’s voice. Gird waited it out, staring at his fingernails, until Selamis went on. “They—they killed my son. Said they’d—they’d keep my wife and daughter—in prison—so if I didn’t come back they could—could—”

“I can imagine,” Gird said. He could hear the iron in his own voice. When he closed his eyes it was as if he could see all of them together, all the men and women and children taken hostage in the past years—beaten and raped and tormented and killed—he opened his eyes, and stared hard at the leaves on the ground in front of his knees. “Why you?”

“Because I’m a lord’s son,” Selamis said bitterly. “He—he put me there, where everyone hated me; he knew I would have no friends, no one to turn to. They said I owed it to my father, that my only hope was with him. I would—if he had asked, as from a son, I would have done anything for him, but they forced me—”

“And your hands? Was that to make us believe?” Selamis shook his head. “No. That was the guard captain; he knew me before, as a boy. Just to remind me what he could do, he said. He’s one of them—the horned circle—” His head rolled again. “I can’t—I can’t stand it—what they’ll do to her—to my daughter—and I can’t lie to you—what can I do?” Gird pulled him up and cradled him in his arms. There was nothing to do but endure, and Selamis surely knew that. Yet the pain the man was feeling would be like the pain he felt when he found Rahi—when Amis was killed—when Meris was tortured. He held Selamis with all the love he felt for all of them, all the ones who suffered in person or through those they loved.

“It’s all right,” he said, knowing as always that it was not all right, not yet. It was as much promise as reassurance. It would be all right someday; he would make it that way, make a world in which such things did not happen—or if they did, someone who cared would work to change them.

“But my daughter, my little girl! I have to go, I can’t—”

“You can’t go. You’re hurt. And you can’t betray us now; you don’t really want to. You want to save your child, as any father would—as I did, and failed. I won’t lie to you, Selamis. Your child may die, and die horribly. I can’t promise anything better for her. But you can help me, help me make a better land than this.” Selamis was still sobbing, but less wildly. When he was finally silent, Gird laid him down gently. “You are a brave man, Selamis. Brave to come here, brave to tell me—and brave enough for whatever comes of it.” He left him then, and told one of the healers to watch Selamis closely. She peered at Gird, as if she could see his churning belly and the rage in his heart, but said nothing. He was grateful for that.

He was not grateful for the wariness of his marshals, who accosted him before he made it to the cookfires for his supper.

“Are you sure he can be trusted?” asked Felis, “I heard he was sent—”

“He told me that himself,” said Gird. “If he tells me himself, that stands for something.”

“He might have thought we’d heard something from the villagers.”

“Have we?”

Felis scowled. “No. But we might. He wasn’t liked.”

“He wasn’t liked because he was some lord’s bastard, and the lord arranged a cottage for him. One of theirs was evicted. Not his fault. He wasn’t in their barton because they didn’t want him, but he gave food. They’ve got his wife and daughter, threatened him with what you’d expect if he didn’t betray us—and he told me that. Himself. That’s not like a spy.”

“Not if he’s told you everything,” Felis said. Behind him, Ivis and Cob said nothing, but their eyes agreed.

Gird’s own doubts vanished in a perverse determination to have Felis be wrong. “We’ll watch him, but I say he’s honest, and we can trust him. Are we to make the same mistakes they do? It’s a man’s own heart says what he is, not his father’s bloodline. Men aren’t cows.”

“No, some of them are foxes.” Felis stomped off, his own fox-red hair bristling wildly. Ivis and Cob laughed.

“He could be right, all the same,” said Ivis, dipping out a measure of beans. “No better way to convince us he’s honest than to confess something. I’ve done it m’self as a boy.”

“And what if he is honest? How would you have an honest man act?” Ivis shrugged and did not pursue the subject. The next day, when Gird insisted they move on, Selamis was able to walk. Rahi said it would be many days before he could use his hands.

They had been threading their way between the domain of Ivis’s duke and that of a count, to his east. North of that, they would come into the domain of the sier Gird had saved. Although the main lines of the hills ran across their way, gaps existed: ways known to herders, hunters, foresters. Gird had his scouts out all around; for several days they found nothing but their own people.

Then about midmorning on the fourth day, the forward scouts reported that soldiers were blocking the next gap to the north. Gird halted the ragged column and thought about it. They could swing west, here, between two lines of hills, and take the next gap . . . but that would mean stringing his whole line out, down on the streamside. Here that meant open land, arable. They would be trampling young grain they might want to eat, come winter . . . and they would be visible from hills on both sides. Downstream, westward, was a largish village with a permanent guard detachment. Could the blocked gap be intended to push him into a trap?

“How many in the gap?” he asked his scouts.

Fingers flashed. “Two hands. Four in sight, and the others in the trees on either side.”

“Did they see you?”

“No—I don’t think so.” The scouts exchanged looks, agreed on that, and went on. “One of ’em said as how it was boring. They’d been told to guard the gaps—all of ’em—but they didn’t think anyone’d come this way, not with the good bridge downstream.”

Two hands of guards, but well placed in a narrow gap. The noise of battle would bring more—that had to be the intent, that or some similar trap. Overbridge, the village, had a barton but Gird had not called on it yet. His scouts reported that the Overbridge farmers seemed to be at normal work in their fields. Gird looked around. All his people were watching him, waiting for him to make a decision. The longer he waited, the more nervous they would be—and the more likely that some child would get loose and go off noisily, to reveal where they were.

“Six hands,” Gird said. He pointed to Felis and Cob. “Three each from yours. Ivis, have four hands ready for support, if we need it. The rest close up and be ready to get everyone across and through the gap quickly. If there’s a real fight—if they have more hidden that the scouts missed—they’ll have reinforcements coming, from both upstream and down. That won’t hurt us as long as we know it’s coming, and have reached higher ground before they do.” He placed pebbles on the ground to show them what he meant. “If they do come after us, let ’em get right up in the gap, and then turn on ’em. Be sure you don’t cross the water until all of us are across and out of sight. If they see us, I want them to think we’re all the trouble they have.”

Six hands of men—three from the original Stone Circle outlaws and three from Fireoak barton—followed Gird and the original forward scouts. They crossed the rushing little river upstream of the gap, at a narrows where the forest almost met across the water, going single-file as quietly as they could. Then they worked their way upslope, hoping to flank the ambush. Gird was not at all sure this would work; he would have expected his own maneuver. But if the guards were still expecting ignorant peasants, they might have no one on the hilltop to watch for it.

His idea almost worked. Gird spotted one of the guards at the moment the guard spotted him, and yelled. More yells, and the noise of movement. Gird held his group still. It was possible that the guard had not seen them all, and in a moment he would know where all the guards were.

“Come out here, you!” the guard said. “Who are you, skulking about in the woods?” He sounded as much nervous as angry.

Gird did his best to look frightened; he could hear the others clearly now, and then they came in sight. Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . in yellow and green uniforms. They carried short swords; two had bows slung over their shoulders. That was a mistake; he hoped they would not realize it in time to cause him any trouble.

“Answer me, serf!” said the guard, bolder with his friends around him. “You know the rules: no one’s allowed on the hills now.”

Gird would like to have said something clever, but he couldn’t think of anything. The man was three long strides away—farther than that for the men behind him—and Gird would have to be fast or the bowmen might get their bows into action. Someone behind him, trying to move closer, rustled the leaves; the guard’s eyes widened. “Are there more . . . ?” His voice rose, as Gird charged straight ahead.

They had swords in hand, but swords could not reach him. Not if the others came in time. Gird thrust the point of his stick at a face that had blurred to a white blob; the man staggered back. Someone’s sword hacked at his stick; he felt the jolt, swung the tip away, and jabbed forward again. The guards were yelling, surprise and fear mixed together. Gird paid no attention to them; he could see his own men on either side of him, jabbing again and again at the soldiers who flailed wildly with their swords, stumbling into trees. The two bowmen backed quickly, reaching for their bows.

“Bowmen first!” yelled Gird—the first thing he’d actually said, in words, and lunged at one of them. His stick caught the man hard in the chest; it didn’t penetrate, but the man staggered and fell. He gave Gird a look of such utter surprise that it almost made Gird back a step—but instead he thrust again. This time the point caught the man in the neck, slid off to one side, and pinned his shoulder to the ground. Gird leaned on the pole. It was surprisingly hard to force the point in . . . but the man was clawing at his throat, his face purplish. Gird pulled the stick back and clouted him hard on the head. The soldier fell limp; when Gird checked, he was not breathing.

Around him, the fight was ending in a wild flurry of blows, counterblows, and bellows. The sharpened sticks worked, but clumsily: driving a sharp point of wood through clothing and flesh took strength and weight; once spitted, the enemy was even harder to free. Most of Gird’s people had done what he did: use the point to fend off attack and throw the swordsmen off balance, then finish them with a blow to the head. It worked because they outnumbered their opponents, but Gird knew that would not always be true.

“Get their weapons,” Gird reminded his people, as they finished off the last of the soldiers. “Knives as well: we can use everything. All their food, any tools.” The dead soldiers had not worn armor. Gird shook his head over that; they must have assumed that the peasants had no weapons worth wearing armor for.

“Boots?” asked one of his still barefoot yeomen.

Gird nodded. “Clothes, if you want ’em. Felis, take two hands and go downslope; watch for their reinforcements. We made enough noise to rouse a drunk on the morning after. Cob, you take a hand back to hurry our people along.” Gird helped drag the bodies into a pile out of the way. He did not bother to look for herbs of remembrance: these were his enemies; he had helped kill them, and it would be an insult to lay the herbs on them. Only one of his people had been hurt, a young yeoman who had a knife wound on the arm to remind him that fallen enemies were not necessarily dead.

Chapter Twenty-two

Soon he could hear the rest of his people coming. They were hardly past, moving much slower than he would have liked, when he heard hoofbeats from the stream valley. No one had said anything about a mounted contingent nearby, but it made no real difference. Felis sent a runner back up: twenty horsemen, five bowmen and the rest with swords. Dust back down the trail, as if more were coming, though he couldn’t say if those were horsemen or afoot.

“Good,” said Gird, surprising those around him. He hoped it was good; it would be good if they won. “Fori, take eight hands—go that way—” Downstream that was, “—through the woods two hundred paces, then go downslope and wait for my call. You’ll be coming in on their flank or rear. The rest of you, come with me.”

The entrance to the gap trail offered the horsemen a gently rising slope from the narrow fields near the river, a slope gradually steepening as the trees closed in. Gird placed his troops across the point of this triangle, inside the trees, with the center set back a horselength. He watched the horsemen as they rode back and forth near the river, clearly looking for signs of a crossing. One of them went upstream, and came back at a gallop, yelling. The group milled about, then formed into a double column and headed for the gap trail.

Gird was surprised at that. Could they really be so stupid? Sunlight glinted off their breastplates and helmets—these would be harder to kill, but they were trusting too much to their horses and weapons. At the last moment, as the leaders came under the edge of the forest, some caution came to the leader, for he held up his hand and the troop reined in. The bowmen had their bows strung; they reached for arrows. Gird gave the signal anyway. On either side, his men ran out, carefully keeping their formation, poles firm in their hands.

The rearmost horses squealed and tried to back away: their riders spurred ahead. Two bucked, and one unseated its rider, who fell heavily. The first two riders had also fallen, shoved from their saddles by skillfully applied poles. One lay stunned; the other had rolled up quickly, and was doing his best to defend himself with his sword. Behind him, the other riders had tried to charge forward, but their horses shied from the sharp points of the sticks, swerving and rearing. The riders cursed, spurring hard; they could not reach Gird’s men with their swords, and any who were separated were quickly surrounded, and pushed out of the saddle. Three of the bowmen, however, had managed to set arrow to string. Two of the arrows flew wide, but one—by luck or skill—went home in the throat of the man about to unseat the bowman. He managed to fit another arrow to his string, and this one narrowly missed Gird. Now his companions realized what he was doing; the remaining horsemen clumped together, protecting the bowmen in their midst, so that they had time to shoot again and again.

Gird smacked the man nearest him with the flat of his hand. “We’ve got to get them now!” he bellowed. His people surrounded the horsemen several men deep, but were showing no more eagerness to face the frightened horses’ hooves than the horses were to face their poles. “Stand there and they’ll get you all!” he said, flinging himself past those in front to snatch at one horse’s bridle. Its rider aimed a vicious slash at him; Gird ducked, and thrust his belt-knife into the underside of the horse’s jaw. The horse reared, screaming and flailing; Gird caught a hard blow from one hoof, but lunged again. His men yelled; he saw another dart forward, and another. The bowmen could not hit them now without shooting through their own companions. Horses and men screamed; it smelled like a butchering. Gird grabbed for another bridle, and nearly fell; he had slipped in a gush of horse blood. Too bad, his mind said as if from a distance, that we have to kill the beasts for their riders’ sake. And where, his mind went on, are those others that made the dust cloud?

As if in answer to that question, an even louder uproar erupted somewhere behind him. Gird whirled, slipped to one knee in the carnage, and staggered back up. There—downstream a little—it sounded as if Fori’s group had engaged the enemy support without waiting for Gird’s call. Or had he called? He couldn’t remember. He was out of breath, and his leg hurt. When he looked down, he could see a rent in his trousers. The horse’s hoof, probably. He took a deep breath, and bellowed. Those who looked around, he waved toward the new noise. “Fori’s men,” he yelled. “Get in line, idiots, before—” his breath and voice failed together. Someone put a shoulder under his arm; he would have shoved help away, but for the moment he could not. He let himself be helped to the edge of the trampled ground.

Someone handed him a waterskin; he drank, wincing as someone else prodded the gash on his leg. Now he could breathe, and see: all the horsemen down, and half the horses, in a welter of blood. Some of his own dead this time, more wounded. Tending them were women he distinctly remembered from the refugee group . . . what were they doing down here? He had to get back to the fighting, he reminded himself. When he tried to get up (when had he slid to the ground against this tree?) his leg refused to take his weight.

“Your arm—” said someone behind him.

“It’s my leg,” he growled, but glanced at his arm anyway. A bloody gash had opened it from near his shoulder to his elbow; he stared at it, surprised. He didn’t remember that. A broad-faced woman with tangled reddish hair sluiced the blood off with water from a bucket, laid a compress of leaves on the gash, and wrapped it tightly with a strip of cloth. She touched his head; he winced and pulled back.

“Quite a lump,” she said cheerfully. “We might’s well call you Gird Hardhead as Gird Strongarm.”

“But Fori—” he said.

“Quiet. It’s all right.”

He wanted to say it was not all right, not until the fighting was done and they were safely away. But something with teeth had hold of his leg, and was trying to pull it off. He blinked, grunted, and resolved the monster into two people, one of them holding his leg still while the other cleaned out the ragged wound. It seemed to hurt a lot more than it had; he didn’t know if that was good or bad.

“Gird?” That was Fori’s voice; Gird fought his way through the haze of pain and exhaustion to focus on Fori’s face. Pale, but unmarked; he looked more worried than anything else.

“I’m fine,” said Gird. He would be fine; it was not all a lie.

Fori grinned. “It worked,” he said. “Just as you wanted: we took their reserves in the flank before they knew we were there. And then the others from here—from the first fight—came and got them between us. We lost a few—”

“How many, each side?” Thinking about the fight might clear his head.

Fori’s hands flicked, counting it up. “Eight hands of reserves, afoot—our match. Then four hands of horsemen, and two hands in the gap itself: fourteen hands, seventy altogether. All dead. Of ours, eight dead, and four hands wounded, some bad.”

Cob’s head appeared beside Fori’s. “Gird—we’re going to move you now.”

“Move me! I can move myself!” He lunged up, but firm hands pushed him down.

“No. We aren’t going to lose you because you walked all your blood out.” Gird would have fought harder, but his body did not cooperate. He let himself relax onto the rough litter, and endured a miserable bouncy trip to whatever ridiculous site Cob or Felis had picked for a camp.

He woke to firelight, and listened to the voices around him before opening his eyes. He knew at once he was indoors, in some large, mostly bare room. It did not smell like he imagined a prison would smell, and the voices around him sounded tired, but satisfied, happy, quietly confident. Then, in a lower tone, someone said, “What about Gird—do you think—?”

“He’ll be fine,” said the voice of the red-headed woman who had tied up his arm. “If he hadn’t tried to fight the whole battle himself—”

“Did you ever see anything like it!” That was no question; the speaker’s voice carried raw emotion. “Throwing that horse down like a shepherd throws a lamb—”

Did I? wondered Gird. He could remember nothing but the first horse rearing over him, and the hoof raking his leg. Now he came to think of it, that had been the other leg, not the one with the bad gash.

“—Like something out of a tale,” the young voice was going on. Others chimed in, a confusion of details almost as chaotic as the battle itself. Gird felt himself flushing. They made it sound as if he’d waded single-handed into the entire Finaarean army.

“If he dies—” began someone else in a hushed voice.

Gird opened his eyes. “I am not going to die,” he said firmly, glad that his voice carried his intent.

Several men laughed. “I told you,” said Cob. “He’s too stubborn to die.” Under that confidence Gird could hear relief in his voice. He tried to hitch himself up and pain lanced through his head.

“Don’t move,” said the red-headed woman beside him.

“You could have said that before I did.” Gird cleared his throat. With the headache, his other pains awoke again, and he wished he’d stayed asleep.

The woman grinned down at him. “Cranky patients get well faster,” she said. “Soup?”

“Water.” She and another supported his shoulders as he drank, then propped him up. The various pains settled down to a steady but bearable level, and he realized he was hungry after all. And curious: what exactly had happened, and where were they, and who had taken over when he fell on his face? Someone handed the woman a bowl of soup, and she lifted Gird’s head so he could drink it.

He saw movement in the group around the fire. Then his most experienced fighters were around him. “You’re wondering what happened,” said Felis, almost smugly. Gird glared as best he could. Felis had become a good leader, but he could be unbearably smug.

“We were all standing around the riders, having poked and prodded them into a huddle, wondering what to do next, when you jumped out and—”

“I remember that,” Gird said. “It’s what comes after—”

Cob shrugged. “You grew about four hands taller, sprouted wings and horns, and started throwing horses around like sheep. No: you didn’t really get bigger, but you looked bigger. Yelling your head off and covered with blood, and you did throw at least one horse right on its side—I saw that, and so did everyone else. The rider that sliced your arm—you threw him, too, across one horse and into another. The riders panicked, even the bowmen. I think we could have stood there watching you finish them all off, but that was boring after awhile, so we tried it for ourselves.”

“What hit my head?”

“I didn’t see that. We heard the others coming, and Fori’s attack yell, and you told us to go help him. I ran off with my group; when I got back, you were sitting against a tree, not saying much of anything, while Elis here cleaned you up. It was hard to tell which blood was yours.”

Felis broke in. “The new formations work perfectly, Gird. Even in the trees—I admit I’d wondered if that practice going between trees was good for anything, but now I know it is.”

“Of course, we outnumbered them,” said Ivis. “Two to one.”

“More than that.” Gird shifted, testing the limits of his pain. “They were stupid enough to come to us in pieces. We had three to one on the first group, more like five to one against the horsemen.”

“But—oh.” Gird could see by their faces that they were working this out for themselves.

“Remember what I told you. What counts is how many against how many at the point of contact. If they’re not in the fight, they don’t count.”

Fori spoke up. “But we were even against their reinforcements, at first. And we were moving them—I think we could have won.”

“Probably. I hope so. But you’d have had more losses, and a harder fight. We’re good, lads, and better than before, but it never hurts to let them make it easy for us. If we can take them at good odds, why not? Now—where are we?”

They chuckled, slightly sheepish chuckles. Cob said. “You aren’t going to like this.”

“What?” He tried to roar, but it didn’t come out as a roar, more as a peevish growl.

“We’re in Overbridge. In the soldiers’ barracks.”

“You idiots!” That time it did come out as a roar, and faces turned to him. He struggled to sit all the way up, and nearly made it.

“Listen to me.” Cob had a hand on his chest, with weight behind it if he didn’t lie back. He lay back, simmering. “There are no more soldiers in Overbridge. The ones we killed were stationed here; the barton is sure none got away. The nearest beyond are past Burry, at a road crossing. We sent word to Burry—and you know the Burry yeomen.” He did know the Burry yeomen, as determined as any; if they swore no one would get through from Overbridge, no one would. “This village is delighted with us—those guards camped here all winter drinking up the ale and rolling the local girls, even a few with babies coming. We killed them without trampling the fields, or involving the local yeomen. They begged us to come in, offered us food, even the little ale the guards hadn’t found—”

“Ale—” said Gird meditatively. That should dull his headache. “But we can’t stay here,” he said, looking around to see if he could spot a likely jug.

“Of course not.” Cob reached back, and someone handed him a jug. He dangled it in front of Gird’s nose. “But for one night, while certain persons take their well-earned rest—”

“You do have sentries out?”

“Of course. Don’t we always do what you tell us?”

Gird heaved himself up on his uninjured elbow; someone behind him helped him up until he was braced against the wall. He got his hands around the jug, and sniffed it. Yes, just what he needed. He took a long swallow that warmed his throat on its way down. He offered the jug to Cob, who shook his head.

“I’ve had some. Now, about our wounded: three of them won’t be able to travel for days, maybe weeks—” Gird took another swallow, and felt the edge come off his aches and pains. Behind the throb in his head, his mind was beginning to work again. Wounded who could walk tomorrow—in two days—not for a long time. Members of the Overbridge barton who wanted to come along rather than stay home and farm. Villagers who wanted to meet the man who had thrown down a horse. Felis wanted to tell him about the weapons they’d taken from the dead soldiers and those found in the armory. Ivis had questions about food supplies for the next march, and Rahi—when had she appeared at his side?—Rahi had one of her herbal brews that puckered his mouth after the ale.

He woke next in the cool colorless light of dawn, his head pillowed on Rahi’s lap; he looked up to see her slumped gracelessly against the wall, snoring. His head throbbed; he could not tell if it was the ale or the lump. He tried to reach up to scratch his itching hair, but chose the wrong arm; his wince woke her, and she smiled at him with a look that turned his heart. He could not stand for her to be here, for her to be leaning over him as he had so often leaned over her.

“You put me to sleep,” he said quietly, holding her gaze. “You told them to give me ale, and then you had that brew—”

Rahi grinned. “You needed the rest, and you’d have stayed up all night, arguing and keeping everyone awake. Besides, we wanted to clean your wounds again. That hurts.”

“Not so badly now,” he said, moving arm and leg gingerly.

“You told us, clean makes fast healing. And we have two healers, now. From Overbridge.”

“We still need to move, leave here before someone comes.” Some large army they could not handle, a commander smarter than the one that had let Gird pit his entire force against three separate smaller ones.

But that day was spent reorganizing after the battles. Gird fretted less as he realized it was not entirely faked for his benefit, and less still when one of the healers had time to draw the pain from his head and lay it on the soldiers’ hearth. Where, she insisted cheerfully, it really belonged. He thought to ask about Selamis, who had been traveling with the noncombatants, since he could not hold a weapon.

“He looks bad,” said Ivis. “Sad, miserable—I suppose part of it’s the pain. But his wife and daughter—he can’t help thinking about them.” Ivis’s losses were far in his past, a young wife dead of fever, children never born alive. Gird thought he knew the anguish Selamis was feeling now (where was Girnis, his other daughter? She had married a lad from Fireoak, but neither of them had come to the wood when Fireoak village broke up. He had not asked Barin about her, not wanting to know.) He looked around but did not see him. Ivis interpreted the look correctly, and said “He’s explaining the accounts to Triga.”

Gird felt as if someone had poked him with a pin. “Accounts? He can read?”

“So he says.” Ivis could not, and was glad of it. “Says he can calculate, too. And write.”

“I’ll keep him busy,” Gird said. “We need someone who can keep track of what we have.”

Meanwhile, his army had gathered all the clothing and equipment the soldiers had had—those with no shoes or boots tried on the soldiers’ until they found some that fit or were comfortably large and could be stuffed with rags or tags of fleece. The soldiers’ clothes, washed in the stream and dried on bushes, became shirts and tunics for those with no clothes, and patch material for those whose clothes needed patching. In the soldiers’ kitchen were the huge cookpots he remembered, and longhandled utensils. The heavy storage jars would be impossible to carry along (and now, he thought, I know why their army needs wagons), but the food stored in the pantry would fit into sacks. They had fifty-nine swords now (some had broken during the fights), four bows gathered after the battle and another forty found in the armory. Gird spared a moment’s thanks that the soldiers had chosen to go after them with swords instead of carrying those bows along. Best of all, the armory had racks of pikes, eighty of them.

Gird limped over to the racks and touched one gleaming tip. He lifted it from the rack and felt the balance. Not that different from the sticks—the gnomes were right about that, too. And if they carried them for a few days, the new weapons would feel normal.

“That should go through a little easier,” Felis said behind him. Gird noted that Felis did not specify what it would go through easily. He knew that some of them were still shaken by their own violence, by the knowledge that they, too, were men who could kill.

“We have the gods to thank for this,” Gird said. He turned and looked at those who had followed him into the armory. They all nodded; eyes down. “We earned the victory this time. But it will not come so easily again.” They did not like hearing that, but it was the truth, and he could not lie to them. He had won at Norwalk Sheepfolds in spite of his own mistakes, because the enemy had not expected anything. He had won here, as easily as he had, because of the enemy’s mistakes. Some day he would face a commander who made no mistakes, and then—He shook his head. Time enough for that later. Now they must thank the gods who had been with them, who had helped them.

His people had no rituals for celebrating victory in war, because they had not fought a war—at least not in living memory. Gird conferred with the oldest men and women he could find; none of them knew the right ritual. In the end, Gird combined the thanksgiving ceremonies for Alyanya’s permission to open the ground—which should hallow their use of the steel they carried—with the harvest prayers for those who had died in the past year. Sweating with both nervousness and pain, he limped from the soldiers’ barracks to the bridge over the stream, and threw in a ritual handful of grain, of flowers (gathered that day by village children), of mint leaves. The oldest granny laid a fire in the center of the village square; he led everyone in a slow dance around it. The fire burned bright, upright and clean: did that mean the gods were satisfied? He did not know. He felt both sadness and contentment, grief worn out with time, as the harvest lament always left him. The fire spurted up, suddenly, burning blue as the summer sky; Gird felt a wash of heat across him, as if he’d been dipped in it—but he was not burned, and the fire had fallen back to its wooden roots in an instant. All the hair stood up on his neck. They said something, he told himself. And I’d better figure out what it was. . . .

It had looked simpler on the model in the gnomes hall. Gird wiped sweat off his forehead and scowled at the stragglers moving along the trail past him. Go north like this, they’d said, and capture this stronghold, they’d said, and then send part of your force over here to capture this other stronghold which controls . . . it had made perfect sense. There, with gnome soldiers. He could almost understand the gnomish disapproval of undisciplined humans.

He had not planned the capture of the Overbridge guardpost, and it had fallen into his lap, eighty good pikes and all. He had neither planned nor expected the other results of that victory: the bartons that had suddenly decided to leave home and join his army, the lords who decided to punish him by burning farmsteads where no one yet had even thought of joining him, the utter confusion and chaos which had erupted in a few hands of days all over the central part of the kingdom. He had planned a march north to the River Road, to isolate (if not capture) Grahlin, the city in which the Sier of Sorgrahl ruled, and he was instead spending days he could not afford in skirmishes with the sier’s very capable mounted patrols. Remembering that brown man and his courage, he was not surprised to find that the sier made none of the mistakes other commanders had made.

He would have been glad to avoid Grahlin, but it was important for several reasons. It controlled access to the Honnorgat along one of its major tributaries, the Hoor. It sat athwart the River Road, which here bowed away from the Honnorgat to avoid seasonal flooding at the confluence with the Hoor. And the sier’s large garrison would be as much trouble behind him as it was in front or on either flank.

It would have been easier—much easier—without all his unexpected allies, especially the noncombatant followers. They had no place to go; he understood that. But he wished fervently that they would find another no-place besides his army. They could not move quickly, and would not move silently. Even now, when his face should have warned them away, some of the children were calling out to him. The adults shushed them, only after the fact.

At the moment, he was trying to work his way to the west of Grahlin. They had tried it before, but this time Gird hoped that the sier would be busy with eight hands of men who had gone east, with forty of his precious pikes. They were supposed to convince the sier that they were leading the whole army that way, but if these stragglers didn’t move faster (and more quietly) a stupider man than the sier would realize what was happening. Even as he thought that, the last of the noncombatants trudged by, and his rear guard grinned at him. He knew only about half of them. The rest were new, from the incoming bartons.

Gird fingered the tally sticks tucked into his shirt. Eight hands of pikes was less than a quarter of his army now; he found it hard to keep the rapidly changing numbers in mind. New people came in daily, supplies flowed in and out like water in a basket dipped in and out of a river. The gnomes had insisted that no one could manage a war without knowing his own and the enemy resources, but he could not do that if they kept changing. At least he would soon have someone who could really write and cast accounts. Selamis had been able to read everything Gird showed him, including the maps, and he said he could write. When his hands healed, they’d know.

The rear guard had passed; its marshal nodded at Gird, who fell in beside him. This was—Adgar, he remembered. Once of Felis’s troop, then his own—the kind of man he liked as marshal, a solid farmer.

“I got the word by runner,” Adgar said. “The sier’s men took the bait, and are chasing our eight hands eastward.”

“Lady’s grace be with them,” said Gird. His scouts had not reported any nearby enemy troops eastward, but things changed fast. “Our front’s crossed the Hoor, and made it over that first ridge.”

“Be nice if they could get right up to that guardpost without being spotted.” Adgar hawked and spat. “We could use more pikes.”

Gird said nothing. The sier’s men, he was sure, had their weapons with them, not hanging on an armory wall. They would have to earn any pikes they got from Grahlin. Something stung his sunburnt ear, and he swatted it. In another hand of days they’d either stop to find flybane or be eaten alive.

By midday, the end of the rear guard was across the Hoor; the noncombatants were supposed to be sitting quietly in the woods, while the front waited for the rearguard to close up. Gird moved up to lead the rearguard, and noticed that his ragtag followers were following orders, for once. Heat and exertion had given them the will to stretch out in the shade and wait. Even the children were silent as he led the rearguard past them. He wished he could rest; he had gulped swallow after swallow of cold Hoor water and his belly gurgled. The ridge beyond was steep; he stumped up it, using his stick, until he saw the blue rag tied to a low limb. He halted, and clicked the pebbles in his left hand.

More clicks answered. Cob stepped out of the thick undergrowth, and waved him on. “It’s working,” he said. “They left the guardpost as soon as they saw our patrol go across the road.” It had been a small group—purposely small, to draw out the guard detachment without giving them any reason to call for help.

“Horses?” asked Gird. Cob nodded.

“But they’re fast, the fastest we have, and the land’s broken down there. Good cover.” He did not add, as he might have days earlier, that if all went well those guards would soon have better to do than chase fugitives. He knew from experience now that all did not always go well.

He led Gird up to the front now, where his other forty pikes would lead the rest across the open ground between the hill and the guardpost. If Gird was right, few if any were left inside. If Gird was wrong, they were going to be full of arrows, but he would not think of that. Instead, he took a last look at the sun, hoped the “fugitives” had had enough start to lead the guards a good distance away. Then he nodded at Cob, and set off at a quick walk across the short grass.

It felt very open, out here under the sky, away from hedges and trees. In the shadow of a distant clump, cows stopped chewing to watch them walk by. Gird forced his eyes away from the cows and their calves and back to the guardpost. It was designed like a fort in miniature, but its walls were no higher than barton walls. Most of the time it functioned as a toll station, collecting a fee from travelers using Grahlin’s bridge over the Hoor. It did boast a tower, all of three men high, from which a sentry could survey the bridge and the road into Grahlin. Or, as Gird thought, the road away.

So far no alarm had come from the guardpost. Gird squinted at its tower; he could see no one up there. But a thin column of smoke climbed into the sky from somewhere in the guardpost. He muttered a curse. At the least they had left a cook behind—a cook who might chance to look out a window idly. He looked along the road as they neared it. Nothing westward—so he should hope, having sent a small group to block the road well out of sight of the guardpost. Eastward, this late in the day, no traffic moved between Grahlin and the bridge, as he’d expected.

Now they were on the road itself. Gird sent units around both sides of the guardpost, which continued to look as innocuous as a cottage, including the smoking chimney. The little tollbooth on the road was empty. The guardpost’s main entrance, a heavy wood gate, was closed, but the postern stood open. Gird had planned to break down the gate, which a drunken guard in a tavern had reported to one of Gird’s fascinated agents was “only there to impress serfs; it wouldn’t keep out a hungry ox, let alone a determined soldier.” But given an open postern—it was either a trap or great good fortune.

Great good fortune turned in an instant when the cook—a tall woman with two buckets of garbage in her meaty hands—backed out the door into the men Gird was sending in. She let out a scream that would have shaken slates from a roof, and flailed about with the buckets. In the narrow space of the postern, they couldn’t get at her without killing her, and no one wanted to do that. Then her screams roused the hand of guards left at the station, and Gird heard them blundering around inside as they tried to figure out what was going on.

“Quiet!” Gird bellowed. To his surprise, the woman was instantly silent, her mouth hanging open. Her eyes bulged out in almost comical panic, and she dropped the buckets with a loud clatter. Gird took her by the shoulders, moved her aside, and said “Be still.” She nodded, still with her mouth open. “Follow me,” he said to Cob, and plunged through the door.

Already one of the guards had arrived at the narrow passage that led to the postern; Gird lunged with his stick, wishing he’d had sense enough to take a pike instead. His weight and speed forced the man back, but the wooden point would not go through the breastplate. He jabbed again and again; the man retreated, but slowly. Now he was out of the passage. Another guard came up beside him. Cob leaned on Gird, giving him more weight to use. That was fine, but he couldn’t use the point on more than one at a time, and the passage was too narrow for two to stand abreast. He would have to push his way out, and take his chances until Cob and the others got through.

He took a deep breath, and bellowed a wordless cry as he lunged. The guard backed two steps; Gird hit his chest hard, and the man staggered and went to one knee. Faster, Gird told himself, shortening his grip and running out the end of the passage. Cob and the others were at his heels; he struck at the second man’s face. Then Cob was beside him, then another. Cob had a pike, and the man who had fallen died on it. Gird saw a stairway up the outside of the tower, and a man halfway up. He had a horn, and was lifting it to his lips.

Gird threw his long stick, end over end. It spun in the air like a wheel; the man saw it coming, dropped his horn, and screamed. He ducked; the stick hit the stone above him and shattered. Gird had no time to watch this. One of the others had jumped at him as he threw. Gird threw himself to one side, and pulled his hauk from his belt. The sword knocked a chip from it, and the guard grinned triumphantly just as someone else’s pike took him in the back. Gird grabbed the sword out of his hand, and looked around. Four guards lay dead or dying; the small courtyard was full of Gird’s men, and the guard on the tower stairs was slumped against the wall.

“Sling,” said one of Gird’s men smugly. Fori was not the only one, now, who could hit something with a slung stone.

“We’re not through,” Gird reminded them. “Get this place secure, and get four—no, six—hands to the bridge.” He went for the tower, and panted his way up the steps. The guard there was unconscious; Gird dumped him off the steps for someone else to kill, and continued to the top of the squatty tower.

From there he could see dust rising from the distant horsemen who were chasing his fast patrol. A score of them, at least, by the dust. Below, he heard the noise settle into the busy murmur of purposeful activity. He looked the other way. There were six hands—most of his remaining pikes—almost to the bridge. Almost a third of them were wearing blue shirts. Gird grinned. His yeomen had begun wearing them when they expected a good fight. Gird himself still had the one Ivis had brought to their first camp, but he was saving that for the day they really needed luck.

Today they needed only the time the fugitives were buying. Gird had all his yeomen in place well before sundown, when the pursuers might be expected to return. A carefully selected group of followers straggled across the fields, although they did not straggle nearly so well when they tried. They kept closing up into neat lines, until Gird yelled at them again. The returning horsemen, trotting briskly in formation toward their own guardhouse, could not help but notice the milling mass of people in the field; they turned aside to investigate. As soon as their backs were to the road and the guardhouse, Gird’s signal sprung the trap, and up from roadside ditch and out from the enclosure came the yeomen with their long sticks and their new-won expertise in unhorsing cavalry. One, indeed, wheeled instantly and rode for the bridge to alarm the city beyond, but found himself cut off by the pikemen.

Gird hurried his people into position for the reaction that was sure to come. He wanted both ends of the bridge secure, breastworks on the rocky west bank of the river, a defined perimeter that included the guardpost and the bridge. Late that night, he was sitting over a table in the guardpost with Selamis, interpreting the records that they’d found.

“This is tolls,” Selamis said. “Last year by this time they’d had—let me see—almost twice as much road traffic. Numbers and weight are both down. So his income will be down—”

“But he’s rich; he’ll have treasure in a storehouse—”

“He has to pay his troops, feed his troops, pay his suppliers. Where do you think his money comes from?”

“Fieldfees,” said Gird, almost bitterly. Selamis shook his head. “Field-fee’s the least of it. Road tax, bridge toll, market tax, building tax, death fees, marriage fees—not just on farmers, on everyone. Smiths won’t make his weapons for nothing. He has to find them the raw metal, pay someone to bring it here.” Selamis’s hands were still tender, but he could turn the pages himself now. “Look at this. Cloth merchants’ stonage last year—”

“Stonage?”

“Stones’ weight—didn’t your village use that?”

“But cloth is furls.”

“Not in bulk. The rough measure of stonage is what team it takes to start the wagon on the level. If you’ve ever been in a big market town, in the square, you’ll have seen the tracks, where they test it. The town’s market judge has a hitch—can’t use the traders’ horses, they could be trained wrong. Double-double-hand-stone, a thousand stones, that is, if a pair starts it. If it takes another pair, it’s counted as two, and so on. It’s only rough; I was told once that a thousand-stone load will break down to more than that, unloaded, but it takes too long to do that. Most lords just raise the load-fee.” Selamis liked to talk, and explained things clearly. Gird was fascinated at the variety of knowledge a lord’s bastard had collected. When he asked, Selamis shrugged and seemed to answer frankly. “I was in his household until I was shoulder high to a grown man—they taught me reading, writing, figures, something of law and more of custom. Their custom.”

“And then fostered you to farmers? Why?”

“I don’t know.” That was a door slammed in his face. “I suppose my father decided he had enough bastards around.”

Gird thought of asking which lord had been his father, but thought better of it. The man was upset enough already. He yawned, honestly if tactfully, and suggested a few hours sleep before the inevitable attack from Grahlin. As it happened, the attack did not come at dawn, when Gird had expected it, and he got almost a full night’s sleep before someone woke him up to ask his advice in an argument between two families whose children had started a fight.

Once he’d dealt with that (giving each child involved an unpleasant camp chore which took him far away from the others: the mothers might have thought of this, and let him sleep), he went out to look at the bridge by morning light.

Chapter Twenty-three

Full daylight, and nothing moved on the road between the city and the bridge. Gird stalked along the lines, glowering into the distance. He could not attack the city; he knew nothing about attacking cities. They had to come out here, where he could fight them. So far the sier had been willing to do that, and Gird had assumed he would come to get his guardpost and his bridge back.

“I don’t like this,” said Felis, when the sun was a hand higher. Gird didn’t like it either. He wondered what the sier was doing instead of sending his troops out. That brown man would not give up his power easily. Even as he thought this, a shout from the bridge brought his head around. He could see nothing but one of his own yeomen waving an arm; he waved his in reply and jogged on.

Under the bridge in the early morning, the Hoor had flowed steadily northward, toward the Honnorgat. Now, even as Gird watched, that flow diminished, the water’s color changing from clear green to murky brown. Then it was gone, and the wet rocks and mud gleamed in the sun before they dried. Fish flopped frantically in the puddles, splashing the water out. Sinuous gleams flashed up the bank and into weeds: watersnakes.

“Esea’s curse,” someone said softly. Gird felt trapped with everyone looking to him for answers he did not have. He had never seen a river disappear like that, and neither had anyone else he’d known.

“Fish,” said someone else, and he saw several of his yeomen slithering down the bank to grab for fish in the puddles.

“Get back!” he yelled. Whatever it was had power to spare; where a river disappeared it could return. His people stared at him, and turned to climb back out. He wondered how much water they’d drawn, how many buckets and skins and jugs they had for their need. Expecting the worst, he sent someone to check on the kitchen well at the guardhouse; it was empty, which did not surprise him.

What surprised him was that nothing happened. Around midday, a runner came in from the eastern contingent reporting that they had fought two stiff engagements, come off intact, but had to retreat up the River Road eastward. That meant they could not help if he needed them, but he had expected that. The fish trapped in their puddles died, and stank by mid afternoon. The nearest creeks to the west were barely trickling; beyond them, the flow seemed normal. Gird sent a small party north to the Honnorgat; they reported that the big river seemed completely normal. Although it was not particularly hot for the time of year, everyone felt thirsty—which was partly the knowledge that they had no source of water, Gird knew.

He sent those who could not fight away westward, with a score of yeomen, to make camp by the nearest good water source. He hoped it would stay good. He had a feeling that the sier had decided to move to a new battlefield, one on which Gird had no strengths at all.

Afternoon wore on to evening, cloudless and still. As the sun set, the sky took on a strange bronze-green color; everything seemed to glow from within in that uncanny light. No one had actually suggested that they might abandon their position, but Gird noticed too many sidelong looks, too many whispers. He wished he had even the ghost of an explanation to give them. Instead, he had an itch between his shoulder blades and the feeling that something very bad was going to happen when he least expected it.

Early in the night, he decided to pull back his people on the far side of the bridge, except for the scouts dispersed in the fields. He felt a little better then, but not much. He was bone-tired; he’d walked the lines all day, trying to see something that would explain what was going on. But he could not settle to sleep. Most of the others had, worn out with tension, but Gird stalked back and forth, in and out the gate, grumbling to himself.

He had just been to the jacks when he heard a resonant pooot that sounded like a novice hornplayer, followed by a shattering crash that resolved into a splash-edged roar. The ground trembled beneath him. Gird spun to see water erupting from the kitchen well, glittering in the starlight, higher and higher, a trembling column far higher than the tower. Cold mist washed over him, then a splatter of drops, then a flick of solid water falling. The ground bucked and groaned; he fell heavily. He saw the well split, as a cracked waterskin splits if squeezed. Water roared out of a cleft in the ground, waves of it now rolling toward him.

No one could have heard him, but no one needed to. That noise, and the shaking ground, had everyone awake and moving. But the guardpost’s enclosed space was already knee-deep in water, water that surged and heaved, seeking a way out. At least the main gate’s open, Gird thought, struggling to keep his feet in the racing water. He was soaked already, and the water was rising. Other struggling shapes in the darkness clung together; screams rose over the deep-bodied roar.

“The gates!” Gird yelled. “Get out the gates!” He didn’t know if anyone could hear him, but it felt better to yell. He fought his way through the water, now thigh-deep, and lost his footing just as he came to the gates. The water threw him, tumbled him, dragged him toward the dry riverbed, but before he reached it was shallow enough for him to get back to his feet. He angled away from the river, shouting for his marshals. In the starlit, windless night, he could see only the vague shapes of guardpost, toll station, and bridge, dark moving blurs that might be his men, and the glittering surface of racing water.

Then the ground heaved again, and the guardpost disintegrated into individual blocks of stone and pieces of wood, as a final gout of water spurted even higher, and fell with an indescribable noise on the mess below. Gird’s ears ached with the silence that followed; his yeomen’s cries seemed thin, more like buzzing flies than human sounds. He was cold, cold all the way through, wet and shaking. He looked toward the distant city, and saw a faint glow move through the air toward it, to vanish behind its walls.

Anger followed fear so closely that he was still feeling the chill when he found himself bellowing at his people to be quiet and pay attention.

“What was that?” came a plaintive wail.

“Magic,” Gird said firmly. “Now—who’s where? Felis? Cob?”

Answers came, shakily at first, and then more firmly. Not everyone. Cob had been inside, sleeping in the guards’ barracks; he hadn’t answered. Gird shivered, remembering the way the guardpost walls had wavered. Anyone who hadn’t made it out before they fell could be crushed—or drowned. Gird splashed through the water, only ankle-deep now, to the near end of the bridge. He looked down, unsurprised to see water in the river, rising water. Too late for the fish, but the frogs croaked happily. If I were the sier, Gird thought, I would attack while the enemy was still disorganized. How long did the sier expect him to be disorganized?

He got most of his wet, shivering, miserable yeomen back into some kind of order, weapons in hand. One watchfire, on the west side, had survived; he sent a hand of men across the River Road to search for dry fuel. With a makeshift torch in hand, he clambered into the jumbled mess of fallen stones and mud that had been a tidy guardpost. Orange light glistened on wet rock, gleamed on stretches of rippled mud, and turned the slow but steady flow over the lip of the kitchen well to a fiery glaze. Some of the odd shapes were bodies: a naked foot stuck out from under a stone, a dead face, mouth clogged with mud, screamed silently from its pool of water. Gird shuddered. Someone in the darkness coughed, then retched. Someone else groaned.

All through the rest of the night, they searched the wreckage for anyone alive. Most of those in the ruins of the guardhouse were dead or dying, crushed by fallen stones or drowned—or both, it was hard to tell. Daylight made visible to all what those with torches had seen in the night: an uneven pile of rubble, mud, and the smashed remains of whatever had been inside it. One by one they dragged the bodies out. Too many bodies. Gird raged inwardly at the unfairness of it. Felis, red hair thick with mud, crushed when the tower fell: he had been a burr in Gird’s boot, from the first day, but he had also done his best. Cob was alive, but lame; a falling stone had smashed his foot. Gird looked at all the bodies, all the injured. Twenty-three dead, eleven injured who could not walk. Worse than any battle he’d fought so far. They would have to dig a grave—and for that matter, new jacks. They would need litters for the injured. Food—all the food stored in the guardhouse was gone. He was not sure whether to trust the water that still came from the shattered well, trickling away through the mess. It came to him suddenly that no one had blessed this well for a long time. Its merin might have deserted it, or been angry with the men who took its water and gave no thanks. Perhaps that had made it vulnerable to the magelord’s magic.

He sent someone to find herbs for the dead, and flowers for the well. If any good spirit still lived in that water, he wanted it to be happy, to know that the men there now respected it. He laid the proper herbs on each of the dead, muttered prayers for their traveling souls, and scattered the flowers on the water. They swirled in an unseen current. Gird took that as a sign that the merin accepted his offering, and dared to taste the water. It was sweet.

“Do you know what it was?” asked Cob, when Gird paused beside him.

“Magic,” Gird said. “The sier’s magic, I’d guess.”

“What can we do against it?”

Gird shrugged. He had no weapons against magic, nothing but Arranha’s word, and the gnomes’ word, that the magelords were losing these powers, that he could defeat them with ordinary soldiers.

“If that’s what they used to be like,” Cob said, “I’ll quit cursing my grandfather’s grandfather for giving in. No one could stand against that.”

Gird cracked his knuckles. “I don’t know. Most of us are alive, and he’s not come out to fight us yet. Maybe it takes something out of ’em.”

Cob spat. “He hasn’t come out to fight because he doesn’t need to. He can do this again and again—”

“If he could do it so easily, he would have before.” Gird spoke slowly, feeling his way into the truth. “He sent his soldiers, his patrols, because that was easier, until we blocked the road that he needs. Besides, he hasn’t followed it up. If he could, I think he would; he’s not a stupid man.”

“You know him so well.” Cob rarely indulged in sarcasm; Gird thought it was the pain of his foot.

“I met him, last year,” Gird said. Cob stared at him. “When I came to visit the barton—what I thought was their barton. It was a trap, but not for me alone.”

“And you met the sier?”

Gird nodded. “Met him and—” He did not want to tell Cob all the details of that meeting. “He’s—an interesting man,” he finished lamely. Cob gave him a long look.

“It should make a good story sometime. If we live to hear it.” He tried to shift his legs, and bit back a groan. “Last thing I needed—damn that rock!”

What bothered Gird most was not knowing what else the sier could do. If he could dry up a river and then send water out a well, breaking the ground around it, what could he do with fire? Could any one of Gird’s cookfires turn into a huge inferno? Could the sier move hillsides the way he had moved water? Or call a whirlwind? If he could move water at such a distance, could he influence men directly, even kill? Twenty-three dead now—in minutes—at no risk to the sier or his army. He shook his head as if flies were after him; this would not do. He needed to know more.

Selamis, called back from the nonfighters, stared at the sodden ring of destruction in apparent shock.

“You’re a lord’s son,” Gird began, Selamis’s eyes came back to him, wary now. “I met one of their priests, who said they’d had great powers before, but now these were waning. He said one reason the magelords bred with our people was in hopes of getting more mages. Do you know anything about that?”

Selamis didn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes roving across the mud and rubble. “I never saw anything like this,” he said finally.

Gird grunted. “Did you ever see the lords use any magic?”

“Yes. My fa—they could make light. Some of them did, anyway. I saw one call someone once, I suppose you’d say. A quarrel among servants, almost a brawl, and when he came they all quieted, even smiled. Not like they were hiding the anger, like they didn’t feel it.”

“What did he do?” Gird had not missed the change in Selamis’s tone when he spoke of servants.

“He gave his judgment, scolded one—but they didn’t mind. They couldn’t, with that feeling.”

“You felt it too?”

“Partly. It was—” Selamis seemed to struggle for the right words, his hands waving a little. “It felt good,” said finally. “Peaceful, like a hot afternoon. Safe.”

“Mmm.” Gird thought what that could mean for a commander. To have his soldiers feel safe, confident—he remembered that the brown man, the sier, had given him a feeling of confidence. He had thought he didn’t want to kill the sier because of his own attitudes; had the sier been influencing him? And if he could do that, could he make others feel fear and confusion? He asked Selamis.

“I never saw anything like that,” he said. Gird eyed him thoughtfully. Something about the man seemed odd. He was only ten years younger than Gird, but seemed younger than the other men his age; Gird kept wanting to call him “lad.” Was that his magelord blood? Arranha had said the lords discarded their halfbreeds who had no magical talent: was that why Selamis had been fostered away?

“Did you ever do any magic?” he asked bluntly. Selamis’s eyes widened, then narrowed.

“No.” It was a flat no, inviting no more questions. Gird ignored that.

“That priest I met, he said bastards with magic were adopted in, and those without fostered away as small children. You talk as if you stayed with the lords longer—did they think you might have it?”

Selamis reddened, and turned away. “I have no magic. I am only a bastard, and my father sent me away—he never said why. I hadn’t done anything wrong—” But to be a bastard, Gird thought, without the talent they hoped to breed in you. He didn’t like the whine under Selamis’s words. A few years of luxury too many; perhaps he thought he should have had it forever.

“What about fire? Could they make something burn, something far away?”

“Like this?” Selamis looked around. “I don’t know. Light a fire, yes, by touching the wood, but I never saw anyone do it from a distance. Except—” His brow furrowed. “—the priests of Esea, in Esea’s Hall, once. They said it was the god lighting the fire on the high altar, but I always thought it was the priests; they had that look, that concentration.”

So Selamis had been to Esea’s Hall—with his father? Gird did not ask; he had more immediate worries.

“Is there any effort to it? Does it tire them?”

Again a curious expression crossed Selamis’s face, caution mixed with something else Gird could not interpret. “I think so. I remember hearing that.”

“So if one man, say, did that with the water, then he might be too tired to do more today?”

“He might.” Selamis pursed his lips. “They said it was like any other strength—a weak man would be exhausted from lifting what a strong man could carry easily. The man who did this might have been able to do more, or this might have been the work of more than one using all their strength.”

Gird scrubbed at his face; he felt he had been awake forever. “And you could not say which, could you?”

“No.” Selamis looked around again. “Did you lose the maps, in that?”

Gird had forgotten his maps and the records he had found in the guardpost. “I—must have.” They would be crushed under the rocks, soaked and blurred, even if he could find them. He glared at the rubble. “Now what will I do—I can’t draw maps!”

“I can,” Selamis said. “My hands are almost healed—and I remember the maps well enough. Let me look; I might find something.” He stepped carefully onto one of the tumbled stones.

“Go ahead,” Gird said. He didn’t think Selamis would find anything useful, but there was always a chance. Others had picked through the rubble salvaging what they could; though most of what they found was smashed beyond repair, some weapons survived intact.

Around midmorning, two of his scouts returned to say that at least sixty foot soldiers were on their way, carrying pikes. With them were a score of bowmen. Gird could just see the dustcloud. He had only a few bowmen worth the name, although his yeomen had been practicing with the bows taken at Overbridge. He had plenty of time to withdraw, but he did not want to withdraw. He still had almost twice as many yeomen as the reported force, and thirty of the good pikes. Unless the sier could make the river itself flood, they should be able to hold the bridge, at the least. He sent all his wounded west, to stay with the other noncombatants.

“You’re sure about this?” Cob asked. Gird could feel the attention of others; he wished Cob had not asked.

“Sure enough,” he said. “He wants it, or he wouldn’t have done all that. We thought it was important before; now we know it is.”

“But if he has more magicks—”

“We’ll pull back. Ordered retreat—” He had never actually done that, but the gnomes had told him how it should work. “They can’t take us with sixty, even with good pikes—”

“Alyanya’s grace,” said Cob, wincing as someone bumped his foot. He had tried to insist that he could stay. Gird insisted that he go. He wished he could do the same with Rahi, who was perfectly healthy, but he knew better than to try. She had taken all his ideas about women, and her individual situation, and recast them into something that he did not yet understand. It was hard to think of her as his daughter, although the memory of her as a child and young woman still lived in his heart. He knew she had killed, now—he had been told, after Overbridge, about Rahi—but he still thought of her with her bag of herbs, her poultices.

He realized that he was standing there thinking about Rahi because he needed someone to replace Cob, and she was the logical choice—would have been, if it weren’t that she was his daughter, and a woman. He had said it was the same rule for everyone—had he meant it? His mind flicked over the other possibilities. His senior people already had their responsibilities. There was Selamis, but he was new; he had never even drilled with them. He wondered if he could blame it on gnomes. They had been worse than surprised when he told them that women were in the bartons. But Arranha had said that the magelord women were trained to war—or had been.

He looked around. Cob had never said anything, but Gird knew Rahi had been his chosen second. She was busy now, supervising Cob’s unit in raising the breastworks on the downstream side of the bridge. They had no shields that would hold against arrows; they would have to crouch behind their scanty walls and hope. Maybe he wouldn’t need to say anything at all. But as if she felt his gaze on her, she looked around, and waved.

The enemy force came in sight now, marching along at a good pace. Gird felt his belly tighten. They looked ordinary enough, and if he’d had real pikes for all his yeomen, he’d have been confident. It was going to be hard, bloody work with wood alone against their armor and steel, but it could be done. Had been done. Gird placed his few bowmen on either side of the bridge, where they would have the broadest target.

They came closer. Behind the soldiers with pikes he could just see the bowmen. He heard a shout, and they halted as neatly as even the gnomes could have wished. Their bowmen drew and released; the arrows flew up and burst into flames. Gird stared, as surprised as if a cow had suddenly grown fleece. Someone in his own lines screamed, then chopped it off.

The flaming arrows landed close behind his lines, but no one was hit. By that time, another flight was in the air; belatedly, Gird told his own bowmen to let fly. The second enemy flight fell closer. One missed Gird by a fingersbreadth; he felt the heat of the flames. His own bowmen saw their arrows angle away from the formation, as if they had struck something.

“What is that?” someone asked. Gird had no answer. He was beginning to wonder if his two-to-one advantage was an advantage at all. The enemy bowmen released another flight, the yeomen were looking anxiously up to watch the arrows fall. Two of them were struck full in the face. Another four were struck as well, and all six burst into flames, as if they’d been soaked in grease. The other yeomen backed away from them, and at that moment the enemy pikemen charged across the bridge.

Gird’s bowmen tried again, and this time hit some of the enemy, but most of them made it to the breastwork. Even as he rallied his yeomen, Gird realized that he had made more than one serious mistake. They had never fought across a breastwork before, for one thing. Raising it for protection from arrows—which hadn’t worked anyway—had meant raising it higher than his people usually thrust with their sticks. They were awkward now, handicapped by the breastwork, unable to coordinate their moves as usual. And although they had practiced against each other, they had never faced a trained polearm unit before. The sier’s soldiers knew exactly how to handle their pikes over a wall—Gird’s yeomen had no advantage of reach, and the disadvantage of poorer weapons and training.

Worse was to come. Rahi’s yell brought his head around, and he saw her pointing downstream, to the north. He could just see the cloud of dust, and the dark dots within it that were men on horseback. One of the gnome warmaster’s favorite sayings raced through his head: “War rewards the prudent and farseeing, and punishes the unwary. It is what you do not know about your enemy that destroys you.” He had not known horses could ford the Hoor downstream from the bridge; he had not known about that kind of fire arrow; he had not known that he did not know. He was not sure he knew what would get them out of this alive.

Already some of the sier’s pikes were atop the breastwork, forcing a wedge into his line. If they divided his force, all was lost. Gird raised his voice over the din, calling them back to rally around him. Rahi looked over her shoulder, nodded, and got her unit rearranged into a tight mass, backing away from the breastwork one careful step at a time. Keris, on the upstream side, did the same, not quite as neatly. The sier’s pikes overran the breastwork and pressed them hard, but the yeomen managed to come together and sort themselves into rows and columns again.

Gird could just see the approaching cavalry over the heads of the fighters. Would they surround his force, or attack one side? And how would the sier’s commander order the pikes? He felt no fear, only disgust with himself for leading his people into this trap—a mistake from start to finish—and the stubborn determination to get them out if possible.

The sier’s commander (Gird had finally picked out the dapper little man in a helmet decorated with streamers) had no doubts at all. He disengaged abruptly what had been the front, shifted his pikes sideways, and left Gird’s flank open to his bowmen. Gird’s own archers, gifted for once with both initiative and skill, let fly before Gird even realized what had happened, and skewered the front rank of enemy bowmen. But the second rank sent fiery arrows into Gird’s closely-packed troop—and anyone hit was instantly engulfed in flame. Gird himself tripped one victim and tried to roll him, but the man was dead—consumed—after the second scream. Gird hardly felt the blisters rising on his arms for the cold chills that raced down his back. It had to be more magicks—no fire burned like that. His formation rolled; he could feel their terror. Frantic, his bowmen tried again, downed four more of the enemy.

And the enemy pikes slammed into what had been their right flank.

Gird struggled with his own fear and confusion, shouted orders he only hoped were right. Their poles were as long as the enemy pikes—just longer—they could hold them off if they made no mistakes. He threw himself into that line, giving his yeomen his own energy, his own strength. His line stiffened, straightened . . . and behind him, he heard the cavalry coming, a thundering roar.

War is full of mistakes; it forgives none. The gnomes had said that, too. Sometimes the winner was the commander who made the fewest mistakes, or managed to correct them. Gird spun, with a final slap on the shoulder to one of the line facing pikes, and bellowed encouragement to those facing horses.

This, so apparently dangerous, they had done before. The yeomen braced their sticks and pikes, ready to prod the riders off balance. The horses, as usual when faced with an obstacle too large to jump, slowed, shied, ducked away from the line. Their riders spurred them on, whacked them with the flats of their blades, but the horses refused. Gird would have called his line to attack, but he could not do that with the pikes opposite. He heard a yell from the remaining enemy archers, and several horsemen turned aside, to return with archers riding double.

“Look out!” someone yelled, as if there were anything they could do. The archers grinned—six of them, Gird counted. The riders backed off slightly; those with archers mounted turned their horses’ heads away, so that the archers had the best possible angle. Gird sent up a wordless prayer to any god who might be paying attention—though he suspected he had been stupid enough to make them all turn their backs—and received no miracle. The archers made a slow and elaborate dance of taking arrows, nocking them—

“Front two, now—second two, reverse!” It was outrageous, hopeless, and impossible, but better than standing like sheep in a pen. The front two ranks on that side of Gird’s formation followed him in a ragged charge at the horsemen; the second two—who had been supporting the two on the pike side—spun and faced outward to replace them. Gird did not stop to see if it worked, or how neatly they turned. He was running straight for the mounted archers, screaming as loud as he could; when he saw one archer draw, the arrow aimed at him, he threw his stick, end over end, and dove for the ground.

He felt the heat of the flames, but the arrow missed him. The horse, alarmed at an attack from the rear, crowhopped and whirled, fighting its rider; the archer grabbed too late for the rider’s belt and slid off, landing hard on his back. He heard screams: one of his men had been hit by a fire arrow. But more had followed Gird’s lead; horses squealed and bucked, spun and reared, and all but one archer fell off.

The other riders tried to cut Gird and his yeomen off from the fallen archers. Gird ducked under one horse’s neck, got his arm under the rider’s leg and heaved; the man fell off the opposite side, cursing, and cut his own horse trying to strike at Gird. The horse squealed, shied, and collided with another in time to spoil that rider’s stroke. Gird had his hauk out, and popped the next rider hard on the knee. He heard it crunch. Then he saw one of the archers, standing, with his strung bow over his shoulder, reaching up for a lift onto horseback. The rider was leaning out and the archer took his wrist. Gird’s hauk got the archer in the angle of neck and shoulder just as he left the ground. The man sagged, pulling the rider down and sideways; before the rider realized his danger, Gird had yanked back on the archer, and dragged both off the horse. He put a deliberate heel on the bow as he smashed the archer’s head, and then the rider’s.

“Gird! Here!” He followed that yell and found a tight cluster of his men, protected by their sticks, holding off a milling crowd of horsemen. Gird dived into that protection just as a sword opened a gash across his shoulders.

“We got the archers,” said one of the men proudly.

Without archers, the horsemen could not quite reach and kill the yeomen; Gird was able to maneuver the survivors of his raid back into the main group. These had recovered enough control to withstand the pressure from the sier’s pikemen, though Gird realized he no longer outnumbered the enemy by anything like two to one.

Time passed, with sweating, grunting, miserable fly-bitten flurries of effort and equally sweating, miserable, and fly-bitten stretches of exhaustion, when both forces had run out of breath and will. The sun moved on towards evening, and Gird had not been able to move his yeomen anywhere. But no reinforcements had come for the sier’s troops, either. They were locked together like two stubborn bulls that have shoved head against head without yet establishing dominance.

What broke the stalemate was Gird’s twenty other yeomen, coming back from the distant campsite to find out why they had had no orders. They came marching along, singing “The Thief’s Revenge” as loudly and unmelodiously as twenty men could do, while behind them came such of the noncombatants as wanted to flourish a shovel or pick and learn to march in step. In actual numbers, they were too few to matter, but as fresh troops coming onto a field where all are exhausted, they had an effect beyond their numbers. The sier’s men withdrew a step, and then another. Gird did not order a charge; he was near falling down himself, and knew his yeomen did not have strength left for a charge. The sier’s pikes withdrew an armslength, a pike’s length—the horsemen rode between, and the sier’s pikes turned to march away. Gird let them. He was glad enough to see them go.

There was no question of holding his position. Too many had died, demonstrating that he did not have what he needed to hold it. Gird watched the low evening sunlight gild the backs of the sier’s men as they withdrew to the far side of the bridge, and formed again. His own yeomen gathered the bodies of their dead, ignoring the sier’s fallen. It would be foolish to strip the bodies in sight of their companions. Too many, too many: Gird cursed his foolishness, his stupidity, and even the time he wasted cursing them.

“At least you got us out of it,” Rahi murmured, as he gathered them again to march away.

“No thanks to me,” Gird said. “I got us into it.”

“You always said a lesson that leaves bruises is never forgotten.”

He looked at her, but her steady eyes did not reproach him. “I said that?”

She grinned, a white flash out of her dusty face. “Often and often. When that witch of a dun cow kicked me. When Gori hacked his ankle with the scythe—” Gori, her older brother, his first son, who had died of a plague. Rahi went on. “One of your favorites, that was, along with ‘Think first, and you won’t bleed after.’ ”

Gird snorted. “I didn’t remember that one, did I? Gods above: I thought about what I would do, not what they would do.”

But if Rahi did not reproach him, others would. He would reproach himself for this day’s stupidity. He would learn from it—he had to, to make the deaths worthwhile—but he would not forget that he could have chosen differently, and those men and women would still be alive.

Chapter Twenty-four

In this chastened mood, Gird spent the next hand of days ensuring that his camp was as safe as it could be. He examined those who wanted to train as yeomen, and assigned them to units to replace those who had died. He visited the wounded, steeling himself to endure criticisms which no one actually voiced. He was sure they said more behind his back.

To his surprise, his recent defeat brought in as many recruits as his earlier victories. Hardly a day passed without one or three or six men or women straggling into camp, asking a chance to train and fight for “the new day.” Some had traveled hands of days from distant farmsteads; others came from villages and towns only a few hours away. Some were enthusiastic youths, children—as Gird saw them—hardly off their mothers breasts. They stared wide-eyed at his veteran yeomen; he could practically see “glory” written on their foreheads. When he tried to explain how hard a soldier’s life could be, they hardly listened, their eyes wandering to the alluring strangeness of campfires, women in trousers carrying pikes, men practicing archery. Gird sighed, turned them over to one of the more dour yeoman-marshals, and tried to ignore their eager glances when next he passed them as they scrubbed pots or dug jacks trenches.

Older recruits posed other problems. Some had a grievance against a particular lord, and wanted Gird to ensure vengeance. These could turn sour when they found that everyone had a grievance, and Gird thought no one’s private reasons more important than another’s. Some were obviously the misfits of their villages, quarrelsome bullies who thought Gird would supply weapons and food and an excuse for their violent behavior. Some were spies, as Selamis had been originally, some were crotchety old men who were sure they knew how Gird should run his army, and some were soldiers changing sides, born peasants and now returning to their people—who also knew how Gird should run his army. Few of them shared Gird’s concern for the time after the war, for the kind of land they would have. And they all knew less than they thought they did.

Gird dealt with these as well as he could. What bluff honesty and forthright explanation could do, he did, but when that failed he resorted to his strong right arm and a voice that could, as one of his marshals said, take the bark off a tree at twenty paces. He had the least patience with whiners and those who could find, as the saying went, one grain of sand in a sack of meal.

The army grew, nonetheless, and Gird found that Selamis’s ability to read, write, and keep accounts was invaluable. He no longer had to keep in his head the members of each unit, with its marshal and yeoman marshal. Selamis suggested—tactfully—changes in nomenclature, preserving the name “barton” for the original use, and calling tactical units “cohorts” no matter how many bartons went to make them up. Gird agreed, after scowling at Selamis’s neat script for a long moment. The gnomes had had names for the units, based on size, from the five-gnome pigan to the hundred-gnome gerist, but the language of his own people had nothing but “horde” and “skirra.” The former meant everyone in the steading or hearthing who could fight, and the latter meant a small raiding party sent to steal livestock. He did not like using one of the magelords’ words, but cohort was better than the others.

With Selamis and his most experienced yeomen, Gird worked out a new, more uniform, organization. His cohorts were upwards of 120 hands—though the term “hand” began to fall out of use with the larger unit. Each cohort would have a marshal, and at least four yeoman-marshals. Where bartons had joined to form cohorts, their yeoman-marshals would serve, otherwise the most experienced yeomen could be chosen. Each cohort would divide into tally-groups for camp work, and each tally-group would be supervised by the yeoman-marshal for that section. When the army divided for some reason, Gird would appoint one of the marshals to command whatever group he himself was not with—which led to the title of “high marshal” for such a situation, and—over Gird’s initial protests—“Marshal General” for himself.

“They don’t have to call you that,” Selamis pointed out.

“Thank the gods! Why should they? A general is one of those fancy officers in gold-washed armor with a plume to his helmet; I’m not—”

“But you are, in one way. Commander of the whole army. It’s for the records, Gird, and if you send orders—”

“Flattery.” Gird eyed Selamis dubiously. The man had good ideas, but he had too many of them, too fast, and was too tactful by half in presenting them. Gird could not doubt his bravery—he had asked to start training while his hands were still sore—but he could not overcome the feeling that Selamis was just a little too smooth.

Somewhat to Gird’s surprise, the sier had caused no more trouble—no patrols had come in pursuit, and the guardpost near the bridge was left a pile of rubble. Gird’s eastern troop—half-cohort, he reminded himself—returned after several hands of days, full of their own stories of battle. They had “almost” held the sier’s cavalry; they had seen no sign of magicks.

Ivis made no comment on Gird’s mishaps, but did get him aside to discuss Selamis. “Are you making a yeoman-marshal out of him?”

Gird raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t thought. Why?”

“He wasn’t in the barton in his village.”

Gird sighed. “We went over that. He was an outsider; he’d been given someone’s cottage—”

“I don’t entirely trust him.” Perversely, Ivis’s distrust made Gird feel obligated to defend Selamis.

“He’s not like us, I’ll admit, but he’s good enough.”

“He was telling Kef what you thought about the lords’ powers,” said Ivis. “As if you’d told him to. Did you?”

“Well—no. But I don’t see that it matters, unless he lied about it. What did he say?”

“Just what you’ve told me, mostly, and you thought the others should tell you if they’d heard anything more.”

“That makes sense. If I’d thought of it, I’d have done the same.”

“Yes, but—” Ivis shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but he’s—he’s not solid.”

“His wife and daughter died. We heard three days ago, from someone who saw it. He knows—that would unsettle anyone.” Gird did not say how Selamis had taken the news; he was not sure himself what that white-lipped silence meant, that was followed so soon by apparent calm. He looked off across the camp, where Selamis at that moment was chatting with someone while scrubbing a kettle. Harmless enough; what was it that unsettled Ivis? Gird remembered that Diamod had unsettled him, with the difference between farmer and craftsman, an indefinable shift in attitude.

By this time they had moved the main camp, shifting west away from Grahlin, and south along one of the arcuate band of hills. Only one of the gnomish maps had been recovered; Gird was trusting Selamis’s memory for the rest. The maps looked much the same to him, barring the use of a brush instead of a pen.

The larger camps, and richer resources of summer, allowed refinements he had missed before. One of their number claimed to have made his own brews before, and combined the seeds of early-ripening wild grasses with gods only knew what to produce a potent brew. The taste varied widely from batch to batch, but no one was asking for flavor. Gird found it relaxing to sip a mug in the evening after dark, when the weight of the day’s worries seemed to bow his shoulders and put an ache in every joint. It had been a long time—many years—since he could end most days in a pleasant if hazy mood. He had, he told himself, earned it.

It was on one such evening, after a day spent settling the petty disputes which so often infuriated him, that he found himself faced with six newcomers, all women, and all with a grievance. His head had ached since before dawn with the coming storm that drenched the camp in afternoon, and brought a foul stench from the jacks. No one else admitted to smelling it; he’d had to bellow at the marshals before they reassigned their tally groups to digging a new one. Even after the storm, it was hot and sticky, with hardly a breath of breeze and clouds of stinging flies; nothing would dry, and his boots were sodden. For supper they had only cold porridge left from the morning; the storm had caught them by surprise, and all the fires had gone out. So Gird had retired to his favorite stump with a pot of Selis’s brew, and let the stuff work the day’s irritations out of his consciousness.

He was not happy to be interrupted by the newcomers, and the woman who talked the most had a sharp, whining tone that set his teeth on edge. She had a complaint about the duke’s steward in their village, and a complaint about the barton’s yeoman-marshal, who did not welcome women. She wanted to tell him in detail about a legal dispute involving one woman’s husband’s mother and a promised parrion which had then been withheld, as proof of the unreasonable attitude of the steward. His eyes glazed after awhile. He was acutely aware of her disapproval, and that made him even less willing to be sympathetic. The other five women stood shifting from foot to foot as they listened, clumping behind Binis, the speaker, as if she were some sort of hero able to protect them. She didn’t look much like a hero, a tall scrawny dark-haired woman with a big nose and very large teeth, hands too large for her wrists . . .

He never did remember when the vague annoyance sharpened into active dislike, and the dislike into anger. Along the edge of his memory was the sight of Binis’s face, the expression changing from surprise to dismay to anger and contempt, the faces behind hers mirroring hers as if she were in fact the only real person there—his memory blurred, after that. The next thing he knew, Kef had waked him with the news that Binis was gone, and with her the five newest yeomen. That was the next morning, broad daylight, far later than he usually woke.

“She’s gone to tell the sier where we are,” warned Kef. “You really made her furious—”

“I said what I had to.” Gird rubbed his face, hoping the headache would go away, and wondering what, in fact, he had said. He hadn’t drunk that much, and the stupid woman shouldn’t have kept nagging at him.

“I know, but—” Kef peered at him. “You should be careful, Gird; that stuff Selis makes would take the hair off a horsehide.”

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t, but he would be with a can of cold water over his head and something to eat. If they had anything left. He clambered up, stifling a groan as stiffness caught him in every joint, and looked around.

Something was wrong. He couldn’t tell exactly what, but instead of the busy, determined life of the camp he sensed uneasiness, an almost furtive bustle in the distance, and ominous stillness around him. None of his cohort marshals were nearby, and yet he saw no drill in progress, and heard no tramp of feet out of sight. He smiled at Kef, and started toward the hearth. It was bare; the fire burnt out and the stones barely warm. One cookpot sat to the side, and in it was one cold sodden lump of porridge.

“That’s yours, then,” said a woman walking by—Adar, he remembered after a moment. Widowed, mother of two surviving.

“You’ve eaten?” he said to Kef, who was still hovering near him.

“Oh yes. Hours ago. I mean—”

“You mean I overslept because I was drunk,” said Gird, and prodded the porridge to see how firm it was. He broke off a smaller lump and ate it with difficulty, watching Kefs eyes. They wavered, not meeting his gaze.

“Well—you had a lot to do last night—”

“Is that what they all think?” He took another small lump, and gulped it down without trying to chew it. The stuff would hold slates on a roof in a gale, he thought.

“Oh no. I’m sure they don’t—although some—I mean someone said, but I don’t know who—”

Gird finished the porridge, cold and gluey as it was, and thought about it. Rahi’d told him to be careful about drinking too much, but she’d always said that. Tam and Amis, too—but that was years ago. And some people always complained that others drank too much. Far as he was concerned, it was those who had neither head nor heart, trying to deny others what they themselves couldn’t enjoy. Yet he remembered old Sekki well enough, who always smelled of sour ale and staggered when he walked, day or night—who died in a stinking puddle of his own vomit, one night. The sergeant had pointed him out to Gird and the other recruits—and he knew the sergeant’s warnings against drunkeness didn’t come from lack of taste for it.

So—had he been drunk last night, and had he thrown away five good yeomen (he wouldn’t count Binis) by losing his temper in a drunken rage? Evidently some of the others thought so. Could they all be wrong? They’d all been wrong before, but so had he.

His head throbbed, and the porridge sat uneasily in his belly. He hadn’t been really drunk, but then again he had to consider how the others felt, what they thought. He picked up the cooking pot and started for the creek.

“Where are you going with that?” came a sharp voice from behind him. He turned, and grinned at Adar. She reddened.

“Going to clean it,” he said. “Don’t we have a rule, that laggards to table clean the pot?”

Her mouth fell open, then shut with a snap. “But you—but you’re—”

“I can dip water and scour, Adar,” he said mildly. “And one thing about rules, they’re for all of us. I’m no different.” He turned away before she could offer, and stumped down the bank. The first splash of cold water went on his face, then he dipped the pot, scooped up a handful of sand and small gravel, and swirled it around. When he felt with his fingers, the gluey coating of dried-on porridge was still there. Blast. He’d have to really work at it. He looked around for rushes or reeds. Adar was standing on the bank, watching him.

“Here,” she said. “This makes it easier.” She handed him a lump of porous gray rock, very light for its size. Scrapestone, or scourstone: he remembered seeing similar lumps for sale in city markets, priced far above a village peasant’s ability to pay. Mali had always used rushes. But the scourstone took the porridge off the pot quickly, and his knuckles hardly hurt at all. He gave the stone and the rinsed pot back to her.

“Does it pass your inspection?” he asked.

A smile tugged at her mouth. “Better than my breadshovel did yours. I never would have expected you to know how to clean pots.”

He thought of saying it was simple enough, like most women’s work—which had been his father’s comment when his mother was sick—but he thought better of it. Simple work could be hard, and since it had to be done, better those who did it should take pride in it.

“When my mother had fever,” he said, “my father bade me do kitchen work—my brother’s wife was sick, too.”

“Ah. And can you cook?”

He grinned, remembering burnt porridge and bread that baked stone hard outside but soggy within. “No, not well. I’ve tried, and we didn’t starve, but no one would choose my porridge or bread. The Lady gave me wit to plow and raise the grain, not prepare it.” He did not mention his hearthcakes, which had helped him win over a campful of hungry men. They were poor fare compared to real food, and he knew it.

“You have a brewer’s taste for ale,” she said, then colored again. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did. And I gather you all agree. How much did I drink last night?”

“Too much,” she said. “A pot or so, that I know of.”

He wanted to explain about the pain in his knees and hips and shoulders, the steady ache that sapped his strength some days, the tension and fear, that ale relieved. But he remembered—and knew she remembered—the tonguelashing he’d given young Black Seli for getting drunk in a tavern and blabbing about the nearest barton. Black Seli’s excuse had been a fever, and he hadn’t put up with it. Rules are for all of us. I’m no different. Why had he said that, right out loud. It was true, but still. No one knew how hard it was, dragging a mob of ignorant peasants through one battle after another. He looked at Adar, and realized that she was not going to accept that argument. Neither would he, if someone else gave it.

Gird sighed, heavily, and said, “Well, you may be right. Times before, I drank too much, and I thought I had my reasons.”

“Most men have,” said Adar, “At least they say so.”

“Yes. Well, I can’t stop last night now—”

She cocked her head at him. “No—and you can’t stop the results of it, either.”

He had not thought Adar was so forthcoming. She’d been a quiet one, hardly speaking in drill, always busy at some task but never chattering with the other women. You said women had brains too, he reminded himself. You said men should listen to them. But it was different, Rahi or Pir and this stranger. He wasn’t going to justify himself to her, and he wasn’t going to make promises, either. He climbed the bank, regaining the advantage of height, and looked down at her.

“I’ll have to try,” he said. Then he went on, to hunt for at least one of his cohort marshals.

Kef caught him halfway across the camp, by which time Gird was sure that the problem was much bigger than he’d thought. All the firepits were cold, when someone should have been brewing sib and baking for the noon meal. Those few he could see all looked to be tying up bundles.

“Gird! Red Seli wants to see you.” Kef was breathless; he must have run some way. “Back there,” he said, waving an arm to answer Gird’s unasked question. “In the woods near the spring.”

“Where are the other marshals?” asked Gird. Already he knew they might have deserted.

“Ivis took his cohort up the river, to gather fuel; Sim’s looking for a better campsite—”

“Better than this?” Gird looked at the clean-running creek, and the heavy woods around that hid them from almost all directions. And they had watchers on the high rocks, the only point that overlooked the camp.

Kef looked down. “They’re afraid Binis will tell,” he said. “Or those new ones.”

“So they all decided to move while I slept.”

“They tried to wake you, but—” Kefs voice trailed off. Gird’s headache was no worse than the pain in his heart. He had told them the importance of a leader’s ability to stay alert, to wake quickly and able to deal with emergencies. He had shown them—and would they distrust him now, because only once he drank too much ale? Could he not have any relaxation?

He remembered the gnomes suddenly, their stern faces and inflexible rules. Their warmaster would have had something to say about “relaxation,” and not what he would like to hear.

“What did I say to Binis?” he asked Kef.

“You don’t remember?”

“If I remembered, I wouldn’t need to ask you, now would I? Tell me.”

Kef looked down, scuffed his toes in the leafmold, and then stared past Gird’s shoulder. “You said—you said you didn’t care what the steward had done, that the yeoman-marshal had a right to run his barton any way he pleased, and if he didn’t want a gaggle of whining women treating war like a village brawl over oven-rights that was fine with you, and if she didn’t have a better reason than that for joining up, she’d never last a day of camp discipline—that you had enough half-witted, lovesick wenches hanging around already, bothering your soldiers with nonsensical notions—that for all you cared she could take her ugly face to the duke and see what good it did her—”

“I said that?”

Kef nodded. “More than that—and livelier than that, if you take my meaning. You brought up every god I heard of, and a few I haven’t, and threatened to unbreech her in front of the whole camp and tan her backside.”

“Oh gods.” His heart sank. He had never suspected himself of that kind of thing. He thought Binis was ugly, and just the sort of woman he disliked, but that was no excuse for what he’d said.

“That’s when Rahi tried to get you to be quiet—”

“Rahi—!”

“And you told her to shut her damnfool mouth or you’d show her you were still her father—?”

“Mmph.” Humor pricked his misery. “I daresay she didn’t take that well.”

“No—she said ale was no one’s father, and stormed off—that’s when Binis left. And the others.”

Gird scrubbed his head with both hands. Worse than he’d thought. Worse then he’d ever imagined—how could he have done such a thing? He could see, with the clear vision of the morning after, just how that would affect all the women. He had had no problems with them before; they had done all he asked of any soldier, and now—he shivered. “Where’s Rahi?”

Kef was staring at the ground again. “Gone. She went off with Sim. I—I think she’ll be back.”

At least his son had been far away, off scouting with a small group in the west. Maybe he could get this straightened out before Pidi came back. He had the feeling it was going to take a long time, and a good bit of unpleasantness.

“Well. Thank you for telling me.” That surprised Kef; he had expected anger, Gird could see. “I needed to know what had set everyone off. Now I do, and I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not?”

Gird shook his head. “No—why would I be? I didn’t know what I was saying, Kef—you don’t have to believe that, but I didn’t. That’s not an excuse; I’ve told you all that, and it has to apply to me, too. I was wrong to get drunk, wrong to say all that to Binis—”

Kef scuffed the ground again. “That yeoman-marshal, he did say as how she’s hard to live with—always picking quarrels, complaining—that’s why he didn’t welcome her—”

“That’s as may be.” Gird took a deep breath, and it out in a long sigh. His head still hurt, but he could see, between the waves of pain, what he should have done, and would have to do now. “I was still wrong, and I can’t afford to be wrong like that. Red Selis first, and then I’ll find the other marshals: we need to have a conference.”

Red Selis, who had taken over Felis’s unit after the guardhouse defeat, was so relieved to find Gird sober, cooperative, and reasonable that he looked almost foolish. Gird did his best to project calm confidence. They discussed the transport of water to an alternate campsite, if one were found, and the possible storage of some equipment near the spring in case they came back to this site later. When all this was settled, Gird looked Red Seli straight in the face.

“I played the fool last night, and you have cause to mistrust me—what about it?”

Red Selis’ face turned redder than his hair. “Well, I—I was going to say, sir—since you mentioned it first—it’s not that we don’t trust you—”

Gird resisted the temptation to shake him. “Of course you don’t, right now: what I’m asking is, do you want to quit? Go home?”

“Quit!” Startled, Red Selis stared slack-jawed a moment, then shook his head. “No, ’course not. Just for one bit of temper? It’s just that—I dunno, exactly, but—”

“If I’d done that in the midst of battle, it could’ve killed us all,” Gird said harshly. “If someone else had, I’d be ready to break his neck for him—might even try. It’s worse for me—I’m supposed to be showing you how. Tell you what, I never knew it to take me like that before—not that I recall. It won’t do: you know it, and I know it. That’s well and good: no more of it for me. But to mend last night’s bad work—I have to know if you’ll trust me on this, long enough to see that I mean it.”

“Well—yes.” Red Selis looked thoughtful. “I never—I mean I thought you’d be angry, like, that we’d seen you—”

“I am angry, but with myself. It’s not your fault.”

“ ’Twas my cousin made the brew—” muttered Red Selis. Gird had forgotten that.

“It’s not his fault either. You’ve heard me say it to others: the rule’s the same for all. I was flat stupid, that’s what it is, and it won’t happen again.” As he said that, he wondered—how was he going to tell when he’d had too much? Surely it wouldn’t mean giving up ale altogether? He could see sidelong looks from those of Red Selis’s cohort who were close enough to hear. At least they were there, and not on their way home.

By nightfall, Gird had visited each of his marshals. Sim had not found a really good campsite; the army was dispersed among several temporary sites, and, to Gird’s eye, had lost perhaps one in seven. He didn’t do a formal count, and no one told him. Gird had not seen Rahi all day; he had not wanted to ask Sim about her. He had asked the marshals to gather everyone briefly, and in the dusky forest light of early evening he faced his army in a clearing not big enough for them all. He could feel hostility, fear, and even more dangerous, detachment—too many of them had decided they didn’t care what he did.

“How many of you,” he began, “saw what happened last night?” Arms waved, and a general growl of assent. “And how many of you saw it coming? How many noticed I was drunk before that?” Fewer arms, and a subdued mutter. Finally one clear voice from behind a screen of trees.

“I seen it days ago, the way you started goin’ to the ale-pot every night. Said to my brother, you just watch, and he’ll go the way of our uncle Berro, see if he don’t, and you did.” That brought a scatter of chuckles, but some nodding heads.

“Well,” Gird said, “you were right. I just hope your uncle Berro never made such a fool of himself, and never said so much he wished he hadn’t said.”

“I always heard as how drunks say what they really mean,” said someone else, challenging. A woman’s voice. Gird had expected that.

“My Da said, the first time he found me drunk, that a drunk’s mind was two years behind him, at least.” He paused, looked around, and felt a flicker of interest from them. “If you’d asked me, back when I had a home and a wife and children, if I thought women could make soldiers, I’d have said no. I’d never seen one, and neither had any of the rest of you. When Rahi came, my own daughter, I doubted her at first. But she had nowhere to go, and I knew my own blood was in her.”

“And you told her—”

“Aye. Drunk, which I shouldn’t have been, I told her a bunch of nonsense. Maybe I do think that, down in the old part of me, in my past. But here and now, I mean what I’ve said afore about women. You know what that is, and how I’ve made the rules here. And kept them, until now. I let my own daughter—and you that have daughters know what that costs—choose to put her body in front of pikes and swords. I meant all I said, and my pledge is still that what laws we make afterwards will be fair to women as to men.”

“Fine, then, when you’re sober—but what if you’re pickled in ale when you write the laws?”

“I won’t be.” He waited a moment, to see how they’d take that, and was surprised at the change in the atmosphere. Most of them were listening, were believing him. The others were uncertain now, no longer detached or hostile.

“I may be pigheaded, but I’m not that stupid: I made a mistake, a big one, and it’s cost all of us, not just me. I’m not going to do it again.”

“Going to let someone tell you to quit?” asked the same woman’s voice. Gird had not thought farther than keeping away from ale altogether.

“Good idea,” he said, surprising her. “Who would you trust?” A long pause was followed by several muttered suggestions, mostly marshals. The woman spoke up again.

“Rahi?”

“Tell you what,” Gird said. “I’ll talk to Rahi, Cob, those others you mentioned—and as far as the ale goes, they can tell me what they think. Is that fair?”

This time almost all of them agreed. “But what about Binis?” asked another woman. Gird nodded, and waved quiet those who tried to hush her.

“She’s right. What I do from now on is one thing, but what I did to Binis and those others is another—something I have to deal with. What I thought is I’d go after her, find her. Apologize—”

“No! She’ll turn you in.”

Gird shrugged. “If she does, it’s better than her setting the sier on all of you.”

But this provoked more discussion and argument. Gird waited it out. Finally, Red Selis seemed to speak for most when he said, “It’s already happened; if she’s gone to the sier, then she’s gone—we don’t want to lose you as well. If she comes back, you can apologize then.”

“She won’t be back,” said someone else. “But the redhead has the right of it. You’re no good to us dead or captured.”

“I should tell her—” Gird began, when a voice behind him spoke out.

“Tell her what?” It was Rahi; he turned to see her standing there as if she’d never been anywhere else.

“I’ll tell you I’m sorry,” he said. “About last night—I didn’t know how drunk I was.”

“Very,” she said. Her mouth quirked. “More than I ever remember. I hope you learned something from it.”

“I did. And I was going to find Binis, and tell her—”

Rahi shook her head before he finished. “Best not. I’ve got her settled for now, best I could do.”

“What?”

“Where did you think I’d gone off to? Someone had to be sure she didn’t put the sier’s men on us right away. I let her have her say—and she’s got a tongue on her almost as bad as yours, when she’s roused—and finally convinced her she wouldn’t get any profit out of the steward, besides it not being everyone’s fault. But she hates you still, and she’d be glad to do you an injury if she could. You can’t mend it; best end it.”

The meeting broke up into clumps of people talking, a few arguing, some coming to Gird to thank him for speaking, some edging around him. He spoke to all who approached him, feeling Rahi’s attention at his back like a warm fire. Finally everyone wandered off into the gloom, and she came up beside him.

“You were stupid,” she said quietly. He heard the steel underneath.

“I was. I don’t know—”

“Mother said when you were young you drank like that sometimes. Came home ready to fight anyone.”

“I don’t remember—before I met her, yes, but after—”

“Only a few times, she said, but when she was dying she bade me watch for it. Help you if I could.”

“You helped me here. I’m sorry, Rahi.” He would have hugged her, but she stood just too far away, his daughter no longer, making sure he knew it. That, too, pierced his heart with a pain as great as all the rest.

She heaved a sigh much like his, and her hands turned, gesturing futility. “I don’t think you can understand what your ways have meant to women—beyond what you saw in it.” He raised his brows, inviting her to speak, but she shook her head. “You can’t understand; you’ve never been where we were. But don’t take it back, whatever you do. Not for me or for any of us. You’ll lose—lose more than soldiers from your army, if you do.”

“I don’t mean to, Rahi. You keep me straight, eh?”

She grinned, a little uneasily. “I’ll tell you you’re drinking too much, and you’ll curse at me.”

“To no effect; the gods know what curses to take seriously. I tell you now, when I’m sober—do it, and I’ll listen, or you can lay a hauk across my skull and let sense in. Did you hear me tell the others? Well then—it goes for you, too.”

Chapter Twenty-five

In the next few days, there was no sign that Binis had carried out her threat to expose the army to her sier. Gradually, by ones and twos, those who had fled returned. Gird, having apologized publicly, would have liked to forget it had ever happened, but knew that it had. In fact, the longer he thought about it, the worse it seemed: first a defeat, and then a drunken temper tantrum. He would have to do something to redeem himself.

His first choice of action was the disruption of a taxday at a market town west of them. Most towns had a garrison of troops, either belonging to the local lord or to the king. This made enforcement of special fees and taxes much easier. As well, the townsfolk felt even more at risk than poor farmers, and were less willing to lend their skills to Gird’s supporters. Although most farming villages now supported a barton, few towns did, and those bartons were small and timid.

This time, Gird made sure, through his spies, that none of the lords were actually in Brightwater before he planned his attack. He would face fewer than a hundred soldiers—well trained and equipped, but unsupported by magicks—and he had the support of bartons in all the surrounding farm villages, as well as shaky support from a faction of artisans in Brightwater itself.

Brightwater lay in a valley between two ridges, just where a stream had cut the western ridge to join the one that ran northward toward the Honnorgat. Most of Gird’s army had been east of it; he moved two cohorts onto the ridge west of the town, and waited. The town was too small to infiltrate beforehand; even with the summer fair approaching, the local troops were being cautious. He could not count on help from the two hands of yeomen in the barton there, either; they had formed only that winter, and had no regular place to drill. But as he’d expected, the approaching fair, and the incoming traders, distracted the local soldiers; they kept close to the town, scrutinizing traders, and did not bother to scout the woods. Once the fair began, the soldiers gave up even a pretense of patrol. They had enough to do in the town and the meadows around it. Traders who had not made it through to Grahlin on the River Road had turned aside and come here; the fields south of the town were thick with their camps.

On the day before the tax would be collected, a second contingent of soldiers arrived from Finyatha, wearing the king’s colors and carrying pikes. Selamis, watching this with Gird, announced that the enemy now had 150 soldiers in the town. Gird scowled, and sent scouts to check back along all the roads to make sure there were no more surprises. Then he called Rahi over.

“We’ll want every yeoman who can carry a weapon, and they need to be there—” He pointed across the valley to a wood below an outcrop of streaked yellow rock. “When we come down here, the fight’ll slide that way, and they’ll be placed right to land on ’em—”

“You’re sure?”

“Naught’s sure but death, but it should be so. They can’t go the other way, without getting into the rapids where the streams come together. Handy of the Brightwater folk to build their town on this side of the river. If things go well for us, I’ll want our reserves right down there by the bridge when they retreat that way.”

In the event, it happened as Gird had planned. His two cohorts made it to the edge of the fields just south of the town unobserved; the traders who might have seen him were in the market square, complaining bitterly about the tax being exacted. The soldiers stood around the market square, menacing the traders. The few traders’ servants took one look at Gird’s ragged but determined army and dove under the wagons, too scared to give an alarm. By the time they reached the town’s inadequate wall, with its gates standing wide for the fair, a few soldiers did see the peasants coming, and tried to sound an alarm, but in the confusion of a fair that alarm went unanswered until Gird and his men were well inside the town.

It was less a battle than a bloody slaughter, as his first cohort took a section of guardsmen in the rear. They had been stationed around the market, to keep merchants in until the tax had been collected; they could not turn and combine fast enough to defend themselves. Many of the people in the market had their own grievances, and joined in the fight with savage glee. Gird saw one woman lobbing cheeses at a line of soldiers just before they fell; a shepherd yanked back one man’s head in time for a yeoman’s knife to slice his throat. Gird’s battle plan dissolved as everyone entered into the fray on one side or the other. When the tax officer fell, a swarm of peasants and merchants tore at the sacks holding the fees, and dove after the shower of coins that spilled out.

On the other side of the market, the soldiers had chance to regroup and settle themselves to fight. Their trumpets blared signals; they locked shields and started forward. Gird managed to get his cohorts back together, not without difficulty, and forced a way through the surging crowd, even as the crowd fell away from the soldiers’ swords.

The two groups met in the market square; Gird’s had the advantage of numbers, and forced the soldiers back into one of the narrow lanes opening onto the square. At this point, the citizenry re-entered the fray by throwing things out of windows—mostly at the soldiers, but some of the missiles landed on Gird’s group. When a ripe plum splattered on his head and dripped sweet sticky juice down his face, Gird was instantly reminded of that first row in his own village. He kept his cohorts moving, and the soldiers, increasingly unsure, retreated faster.

The town gates on the east opened onto a narrow strip of land between the walls and the river; as with most towns, the bridge was not in the town proper. Here the soldiers tried to rally, but they had no real hope against Gird’s larger number and longer weapons. They backed raggedly south, along the town walls, toward the fields where the traders had camped, and the bridge that would let them across the river to a road leading safely north. But Gird’s reserves were just where he had expected, and the soldiers were caught between.

Gird was just ordering the bodies stripped of weapons, when a stream of bellowing men ran out of Brightwater’s east gates. His cohorts reformed instantly. The men slowed, and a small group approached cautiously.

“Who’s in command?” asked a tall, heavyset man in a trader’s gown. He was used to command himself, by his voice. Gird stepped forward.

“I am Gird.”

The man’s worried expression eased. “Gird—I’ve heard of you. You have to do something! They’re rioting in there; they’ve killed the council, and they’re looting in the market—”

Gird shrugged. “What did you expect? I daresay they’re hungry.”

“But you—but I heard you were different—that you had studied law or something of that sort, that you had some notion of order.”

Gird gave him a long, level look. “Are you asking me to bring order to the city?” He heard a stirring in the ranks behind him, but ignored it.

The man’s eyes shifted, and he turned to glance at the other equally worried men behind him. Gird noted that they all looked prosperous; their clothes had no patches and their faces had good flesh.

“Well, I—I can’t. I don’t know anyone else—they said you could control the peasants.”

“Is that what you want?” asked Gird of the others. A few nodded; the rest looked confused. Gird felt a sudden surge of excitement. Was this the start of the new society he had dreamed of? A chance to set one town on the right path? It was a chance, whether or not it was the right one. He nodded, abruptly, and saw on their faces that they were more glad than frightened. He hoped his cohorts would agree. He turned to them, scanning their faces quickly. Some looked as confused as the traders; some looked eager, and a few angry or unwilling. Those he called out, and sent as scouts to patrol the roads.

“We’ve been asked to help Brightwater regain its order,” he said. One of the merchants mumbled something; Gird ignored it. “I want no looting, no idle mischief: you know what I mean. These are our people, same as farmers; we need them and they need us. We’ll let them see if they like our rule, if they think it’s fair.”

He took in only one cohort, replacing wounded with sound yeomen from the others, and marched them in as if for drill practice. The crowd in the market dispersed, to stand flattened against the walls. He could hear some dispute at a distance, angry voices and clangs and clatters; that would have to be dealt with, whatever it was, but for the moment he had to control the center of town.

It looked far worse than the count’s courtyard: dead bodies, some that stirred, broken pottery and foodstuffs scattered and trampled, market stalls torn down, broken, their awnings ripped and flapping in the breeze. Once he had his troops in the market square, it occurred to him that he had never explained how to organize a city. He wasn’t sure himself.

The traders and merchants who had come after him now sidled up, looking even more alarmed. “You have to say something!” hissed the leader. Gird nodded, but let his silent gaze pass across the square, catching the eyes of those who watched, noting their expressions. Then he nodded, sharply, and raised his hand for silence.

They stared back at him, much like the first men he had met in the wood. Perhaps the same common-sense would work with them.

“You’ve heard of me,” he began, not sure they had. “I’m Gird; we’re peasants seeking a better way to live. We fight the lords who tax and tax—” A ragged, halfhearted cheer interrupted him; he held up his hand again and it ended. “You’ve seen peasants fight before, out of desperation, but we are not desperate. We know a better way, a fairer way, and we want to see that for everyone. These men—” he pointed at the traders, “—came out and asked me to bring order to Brightwater. I would rather bring justice—is that what you want?”

A sulky-looking man slouched against a wall yelled out, “What matters what we want? You got the weapons; you’ll do what you want.”

Gird shook his head. “No: if Brightwater prefers chaos to order, you may have it. Do you?”

“Me? I want my rights, that’s what I want.”

“That’s what we want for all.” Other heads nodded. Gird noticed unfriendly looks aimed at the sulky man. He raised his voice to carry beyond the square and said, “Where is Jens, the harnessmaker’s assistant?”

“Here!” Gird had never met Jens, yeoman-marshal of the Brightwater barton, but he liked the compact young man with bright blue eyes under a mop of chestnut hair. Jens had his entire barton together, and they were standing in what could pass for a double row.

Gird turned back to the others. “This is the yeoman-marshal of Brightwater barton. He will help me restore order, and bring justice to your town. He knows you, and you know him; what he says is said in my name.” He looked at Jens. “Do you know what fighting is still going on? Are there more lords’ men here?”

Jens shook his head. “No, sir. I think that noise is at the council chambers, people taking things, but no more soldiers.”

“All right then. We need this square cleaned up—” Gird looked around. “Wounded by the well, so the healers don’t have far to go for water. Dead outside the walls—we’ll need men to dig graves. Those whose stalls are broken, you can start repairing them.” He pointed to the woman he remembered throwing the cheeses. “You—what about your stall?”

She pointed at a jumble of broken wood and ripped cloth. “That was it, sir, and how I’m to get another I don’t know—”

Gird pointed to two of his yeomen. “Help her fix what she can. Selamis—” Selamis was at his shoulder, staring bright-eyed around. Gird glared at him. “You can take accounts—who had what space, who needs help to repair stalls or houses. Anything else you find out.” He looked at Kef, one of the marshals he’d brought along. “You take a half-cohort and settle that riot, or whatever it is. Rahi, you take the rest and make sure everything else is quiet.”

Gird stayed in the square with Selamis, trying to get a sense of the town’s organization. It was far more complex than his village, or the army. The artisans were not simply “craftsmen” as he had supposed: each craft had its own standing in the town, and rivalry between crafts became apparent as he listened. Within each, too, were hierarchies and rivalries. So a tanner’s apprentice might jostle a dyer’s apprentice with no more than a curse in response, but a potter’s apprentice ranked a tanner’s. The finesmith had nothing to do with the blacksmith, and Brightwater boasted both a weaponsmith and a toolsmith. In Gird’s village, anyone might peg a bench together or frame a cowbyre; here carpenters and joiners were separated by custom and caste. He wondered what Diamod would say about that, then remembered that Diamod was off scouting. Then there were merchants, some as specialized as the salt seller, and some as general as the importer who handled any and all goods transported across the mountains, from needles to silks to carved buttons in the shape of sea monsters. The houses towered two and three stories tall; those of the wealthiest were clustered in the southwest corner.

An uneasy stillness gripped the town soon after Gird’s yeomen occupied the soldiers’ guardhouse. Gird did his best to keep everyone busy, insisting that streets must be cleaned of dead bodies (“Yes, the rats too!” he had yelled at someone who asked) and debris. When it was possible, he restored goods to the merchants who had owned them—although he could not clean and mend what the fight had soiled and broken.

He settled such minor disputes as were brought to him the first day with what wit he could muster, although some of them seemed frivolous. Why would someone in the aftermath of a battle want a judgment against a neighbor for using the neighbor’s balcony as one end of a laundry line? Why pick this moment to complain that someone’s son was courting a daughter without the father’s permission? He realized that the Brightwater yeoman-marshal, though well-known and considered to be honest, had the low status of a “mere” harness-marker’s assistant; whatever he said on an issue was immediately appealed to Gird. Gird might have found this funny (after all, they were preferring the judgment of a discottaged serf), but he had no leisure to savor the joke.

That night, Gird found himself invited to dine with the principal traders, who had, he was sure, their own ideas about his notions of justice. They offered beef and ale, raising their eyebrows when he refused the ale, and insisted that they each take a bite of the bread he brought before he would eat of their meat.

“We had heard you liked ale,” one of them said, too smoothly. “If you prefer wine—”

“I prefer water,” Gird said, smiling. “In war, I’ve discovered, the drunkard has half the men of a sober man, and less than half the wit.”

They laughed politely, and came to the point rather sooner than he expected. What did he mean by justice, and how would he insure that traders would be respected and treated fairly? Gird answered as the gnomes had taught him: one law, the same for all, of fair weights and measures. A market judicar, backed by a court to which all parties could appoint representatives. He sensed that some of the traders were satisfied by this (he had never believed that all traders were inherently dishonest), but that one or two were appalled. One of these last walked with him back to the guards’ barracks, complimenting him on the discipline of his troops. Gird felt as he had when the steward complimented him on the sleekness of a calf.

“And you yourself,” the man went on, his voice mellow as the ale Gird had not drunk. “So different from what I’d expected—truly a prince of peasants.” Gird controlled his reaction with an effort. Did the fellow think peasants had never heard lying flattery before? The calf the steward had praised so highly had been taken as a “free gift” to his count’s marriage celebration. “I’m sure you will not misunderstand—” The voice had a slight edge in it now; Gird braced himself for the thorn all that rosy sweetness had been intended to conceal. “Some of my colleagues are—alas—less than frank with you. They have their own standards, not perhaps what you would understand, being so honest yourself.”

Gird was tempted to say “Get on with it, man! Is it gold you want, or someone’s life?” He merely grunted, and walked on a little faster. The man’s hand touched his sleeve, slowing him. Gird glanced ahead, to the torchlight where his men were on guard at the corners of the market square.

“There’s fair, and there’s fair,” the man was murmuring, his hand still on Gird’s arm. “A man like you, peasant-born—good solid stock, I always say, Alyanya’s good earth—” That came out of him as harshly as a cough; Gird would have wagered that the man had never given Alyanya a thought in his life. “I just want you to know I’m your friend; you can trust me. And as a token, I have a little gift—” The little gift came heavily into Gird’s hand, round and smooth, with a slightly oily feel. He knew without looking that it was gold, the first gold he had ever touched. With anger and revulsion came curiosity: he wanted to peer at the coins, to see if it was one of the fabled gold seadragons, or the more common (by repute) crowns. He opened his hands and let the coins ring on the cobbles of Brightwater’s main street.

“You dropped something, trader!” he said loudly. Heads had turned at the sound of gold hitting stone; he himself would not forget the almost musical chime, or the edges of the five coins against his fingers.

“You stupid fool!” The trader’s voice was low and venomous. “You might have been rich, powerful—”

“I might have been your tool, or dead,” said Gird softly. Then, louder, “Best pick them up, sir; there’s been enough coin scattered today.”

“If you dare tell anyone—” began the trader, crouching and scrabbling over the cobbles for his coins. “I’ll—”

“You’re threatening me?” Gird’s voice rose, the day’s frustrations and his anger getting the better of him. “You sniveling little liar!” The trader’s hand slid into his gown, and the torchlight glinted on a thin blade; Gird batted it aside, hardly aware of the shallow gash it gave him. He could heard his men coming to see what was going on. His second swing felled the trader as if the man had been a shovel leaning on a wall. Gird stood over him, sucking his knuckles. He wished the man would stand up, so he could knock him down again.

“What happened?” Jens, the Brightwater yeoman-marshal had come with the others. Gird didn’t answer until they had all arrived, perhaps two hands of his own yeomen and those citizens of Brightwater who had been on the street and brave enough to hang around when trouble began. He looked around the circle of faces.

“This one came with me into the city, tried to bribe me, and pulled a knife when I refused his bribe. Tried to tell me the others were dishonest.”

Jens snorted. “That doesn’t surprise me. Short weight, scant measure, stone-dust in the meal, and it’s been said for three years that it’s his bribes to the council chair that preserved his license to trade here. They’re not all bad.”

“I didn’t think so. But it’s this sort of thing I’m going to get rid of.” Gird looked around the faces again, seeing varied expressions from glee to worry. “An honest man doing honest work should be able to survive that way—one reason he can’t is cheats like this. If you want my help, that’s what the cost is to each of you—I won’t tolerate bribes, cheats, lies. One rule, the same for all, and fair enough to let a man live if he’s willing to work honestly.”

“And women?” asked one of the two women there. He nodded.

“And women. Same rule—no more being cheated because only a man can hold a cottage or craftcot. Earn the pay, get the pay.”

“I’m for that,” she said. Gird wondered who she was, she looked smaller than any of his women, but her face had the same resolute expression.

“What about him?” asked Jens. “Are you going to kill him?”

Gird was startled; it had never occurred to him, but from Jens’ voice and the reactions of the townsfolk, no one would think it odd if he sliced the man’s throat on the moment. “No,” he said. “We’ve proclaimed no laws—he could claim he didn’t know—”

“Not if he was dead,” someone muttered. Gird ignored that.

“It’s got to be fair,” he insisted. “The lords kill for whim; we don’t.” That we included those around; he saw by their faces that they realized it, and were surprised. “No, this’n goes back to his own wagon, out there, with his money, all of it, and the other traders must know.” As he said it, he realized that he would have to do part of it himself. They were still not accepting Jens or even one of his own marshals. He wished he could have a mug of ale; his belly needed it. He pushed that thought away, and pointed to two of his men. “Simi and Bakri—you carry him. I’ll come along and explain. Jens, you come too: I can’t stay here forever, and they’re going to have to learn to respect you. The rest of you—back to your posts, and call out replacements if you need them.”

Fires were still flickering in the traders’ field; Gird could see a cluster of dark forms around the one where he had eaten. He hailed them, as his yeomen carried the trader toward the fire. By the time they laid him down, he was beginning to stir and groan.

“This man,” Gird said, “told me some of you were dishonest, and then he tried to bribe me. I dropped his gold on the street—he got it back, threatened me, and then drew a knife.” He pulled up his sleeve, and showed the fresh gash still dripping blood. “So I knocked him down, and here’s his purse. Anyone here know much he had, so they can verify it?”

The other man who had seemed upset at Gird’s original comments on fair trading scuttled forward. “I’m his partner—I know—” and then his voice trailed away. Gird could imagine what he was thinking. Supposing he did know how much his partner had had, should he give that amount, or something higher—and claim Gird had stolen it—or something lower, and let Gird keep the bribe he would be sure Gird had taken. Gird looked past him to the trader he had already picked as the most trustworthy. He had asked Jens about him, on the way out, and Jens said he had a reputation for fair dealing.

Gird carried the purse to the trader. “He gave me five coins, gold I think, but he picked them up when I dropped them. Would you hold his purse?”

Reluctantly, it seemed, the trader reached for it, and then upended it into one of the wooden bowls they’d eaten from. “Five gold crowns,” he said. “Three silver crowns, and two copper crabs.” He stirred the coins, picked up one of the golds, and bit it, then examined it closely. “And this one is false—poor Rini, he couldn’t even bribe honestly.” Several of the others chuckled. The trader looked hard at Gird. “I presume you have a reason for bringing him back here rather than slitting his throat for him?”

“I don’t do that,” Gird said. The gash on his arm was beginning to sting, and he felt suddenly foolish and countrified, standing there with his sleeve torn and blood dripping down his hand. He did not like the feeling, or those who made him feel so. It should have been obvious why he came; it had been obvious to him.

“Well.” The trader cleared his throat. “He won’t trouble you again, I daresay, and if you intended to be sure none of the rest of us offered you bribes, I may say that some of us would not, anyway.”

He sounded almost angry; Gird realized that from the trader’s point of view they might resent being lumped with the dishonest one. “I didn’t think all of you would,” he said. “But it seemed fair to return him here, where he was known, and make sure you knew his purse was with him.”

“Oh.” The trader’s voice had changed. “You were not accusing us of being his accomplices? Of sharing the bribe?”

That had not even occurred to Gird; it opened new insights into the ways merchants thought—not reassuring. “No,” he said firmly. “I thought before that most of you were honest, but one or two—” he carefully did not look at the unconscious man’s partner, “—were less happy about what rules I might make. I spoke to you, sir, because you seemed honest before, and Jens said you were.”

“Jens? Oh—that—uh—”

“The yeoman-marshal of Brightwater barton,” Gird said.

“I thought he was a harness-maker’s—”

“I was a farmer,” Gird interrupted. “And now I’m the marshal-general.” It was the first time he had used the title Selamis had come up with; it felt strange in his mouth, and sounded strange on his ear. He went on before the traders could comment on it. “We consider all yeomen equal, whatever their skill. Yeoman-marshals guide each barton; marshals train yeoman-marshals and command cohorts.”

The traders looked a little dazed; the one who had been speaking before said, “Is it like a guild, then? More like that than an army, it seems—”

Gird knew nothing of guilds, and did not want to admit it right then. “It’s enough of an army to fight a war with,” he said. “But we think beyond war, to the way people should live in peace.” Their faces were still blank, carefully hiding what they thought. Gird felt the day’s work heavy on his shoulders, and wanted a quiet place to sleep before anything else. “You take charge of him,” he said to the traders, waving at the one who had opened his eyes, but still lay flat. Then he turned and headed back for the town.

He would have fallen into bed without even cleaning the knife-gash if one of his men hadn’t insisted on washing it out. They had saved him a bed—a real bed—in the barracks. He was asleep as soon as his head went down. He woke in full day, with sunlight spearing through the high, narrow windows and all the other beds empty. Someone had pulled his boots off, and laid a blanket over him. He felt stiff and dirty; somehow it was worse to sleep clothed in a bed, inside.

Outside he could hear what sounded like normal town noises. No screams, no clash of weapons. He stretched, shoved his feet into his boots, folded the blanket, and looked around. Weapon racks on the walls, but no weapons: the soldiers had used them the day before, and his men had them now. He could smell cooked food. He followed the smell and came to a wide-hearthed kitchen. Someone at the hearth looked up and saw him.

“There he is. Bread? Cheese?”

“Both.” Gird looked around. “Where’s the jacks? And a well?” He followed gestures and found the jacks, then a long stone trough fed by a pipe in the wall of the barracks court. A thin trickle leaked under the wooden plug; when he pulled it out, a stream of cold clean water raced along and out the open drain at the far end of the trough.

“Clean shirts inside,” called someone from within. Gird pulled off his filthy one and used it to mop himself with water. Someone had left a chunk of soap—real soap—on the rim of the trough. He scrubbed, feeling more human by the moment. For that matter, he might as well be clean all over; he shucked his boots and trousers, and scrubbed himself all over. Yesterday’s gash on his arm reopened, stinging, but it looked clean, a healthy pink. When he was done, he replugged the pipe, and looked for somewhere to lay his wet clothes. Rahi was standing in the kitchen doorway, chuckling and holding out a blue shirt.

“You!” He could not have said why it bothered him then, but somehow being found wet and naked, alone in a walled yard after his bath, was not the same as bathing with others in a creek or pond. He dropped the wet clothes, snatched the shirt, and then held it away. “Blue? But I don’t have a blue shirt—”

“You do now. Go on, put it on; they’re asking for you, a whole gaggle of them.” She had brought trousers as well, somewhat too large but clean and whole. As he dressed, she picked up his wet clothes, sniffed them, shook her head and dumped them back in the trough. “These’ll need more than rinsing.”

That day Gird found himself having to explain in more detail than he had yet devised just how he thought the law should work. He discovered men of law, who explained at great length why his simple measures would not do, and why the law had nothing to do with justice, and a great deal to do with precedent, custom, and the maintenance of commercial stability. Gird listened until he could not stand it, and then roared at them; they turned pale and disappeared, and he thought no more of them. He let each craft, each kind of merchant, present an appeal: Selamis sat beside him and wrote them all down. Brightwater had plenty of clerks who could read and write, but Gird trusted Selamis more than the strangers. He was not surprised to notice that Selamis talked easily to the merchants, even the richest, or that they seemed to prefer him to Gird.

Then he gave them all his plan, which combined (he thought) absolute common sense with absolute fairness and honesty. When everyone complained, he was sure he’d gotten it right: it pleased no one completely, but everyone slightly. Somewhat to his surprise, the grumbling died off, and the townsfolk and traders went back to their work. He had expected more trouble, not shrugs and winks and return to business as usual.

Many of his yeomen had never been in a town as large as Brightwater. Gird spent the next several days straightening them out, and insisting (until his voice nearly failed) that his rules applied to them, too. It was always possible that a townsman’s gift of a pear or meat pasty to the man patrolling the street was not intended—or taken—as a bribe, but Gird could see clearly where it might lead. If someone wanted to give supplies to the army as a whole, as the farm villages had done with their gifts of food and tools, then Gird insisted it had to be done openly. Selamis had to record the gift, and then Gird would distribute it among all the cohorts as needed. Only a few yeomen were obviously looking for bribes, or extorting gifts, whichever way it could be described. Gird shocked his followers and the townsfolk by discharging those few, publicly, and explaining why. After that, the problem seemed to disappear.

He himself had a chance to see inside a rich man’s home for the first time, when the surviving master merchants and craftsmen invited him to dine. He had never really thought about what would go into all those rooms, had envisioned even a king’s palace as a glorified peasant cottage, but with everything whole and in abundance. The guard barracks had reinforced that notion: it was larger than his cottage, but the furnishings were much the same. Now, when he stepped onto glazed tiles of blue and white, when he saw the tapestries hung from walls, the carved and inlaid chairs and tables, the shelves crowded with things whose purpose he could not even guess, he realized how wrong he had been. The dining hall lay at the back of the house, facing a walled garden—but a garden made more for viewing than using. No cabbages, no redroots, no onions or ramps—but bright ruffles of color he did not even know. Two fruit trees were trained against opposite walls; their fruit gleamed like jewels among the leaves.

The meal itself surprised him as much as the house. He had assumed rich men ate more of the same food that he ate—what else was there? He peered suspiciously at a translucent yellow-green liquid in a glossy blue bowl, and waited until the others had dipped their spoons (their silver spoons) into it before trying it. It tasted like nothing he had ever imagined; he could have drunk a kettleful of it. That was followed by a stew of vegetables and fish, then a roast of lamb, rolled around a grain stuffing flavored with herbs. He had not known lamb could taste like that. Then came a dish of fruit with a honeyed sauce, then an array of cheeses, white, yellow and orange.

By this time, he had had more food than his belly would hold with comfort. The merchants nibbled on, watching him covertly. He wondered if they knew he was calculating how many of his yeomen just one such meal would feed. They might—and they might be worrying about it, too. He looked around the room, noticing the soft-footed servants who had brought and removed all those dishes. One of them met his gaze with an angry challenge; Gird gave him a slight nod. He refused the last three courses, explaining that he never ate so heavily in the midst of the day, and when he left he felt as if he should take a bath and wash it all off.

“And that’s an honest one, they say,” Gird reported to Selamis and several of the marshals that evening. “Not so rich as the one the mob killed, not cruel or unfair to his laborers and servants. I saw just that one part of the house, from the entrance to the dining hall—but if the rest is anything like it—”

“It would be,” said Selamis, the corners of his mouth twitching. Gird glared at him.

“You know all about it, I suppose; you may even know what that green stuff was that looked like ditch-water and tasted—oh, gods know how it tasted, but it was good. But men like that, they have a lot to lose. They’ve done well under the lords; they won’t stick with us if they don’t do well under us. But if we bend the rules for them, we’re betraying our own people.”

The marshals nodded seriously, but Selamis lounged in his seat, almost smirking. Gird wanted to clout him. It was hard enough making the marshals accept him when he was invisibly efficient; when he put on airs, it rubbed everyone’s hair backwards. Gird glowered at him.

“I suppose you think you should have gone to that dinner? You, who would know all the names for that land of food, and which of those pesky things on the table were for what use? I see the way they talk to you first—maybe they should’ve asked you.” Gird paused for breath, puffed out his cheeks, and made a rude noise. “But they didn’t ask you, Selamis: they asked me. They know where they stand with me, even if they don’t like sharing table-space with a big stupid peasant who doesn’t know what to do with a silver spoon. You’re in between: not one nor t’other, not true peasant nor true lord. We don’t care if you’re a bastard or not, but they do. Yet you push it in our face that you’re more like them.”

Selamis had gone first red, then white, then red again. “It’s not my fault,” he said, glaring at Gird. “I can’t help it that I know figan soup when I hear of it, or what the things are. Or that the better—the merchants and such are comfortable with me.”

“No, I suppose not.” Gird was half-ashamed that he’d let his temper loose, but the silent support of the marshals, who had never liked Selamis that much anyway, stiffened him. “What is your fault is the way you use it. If you’re one of us, be one of us; don’t be smirking in your ale when you know something we don’t.”

From the traders he found out where the king’s army had been all this time. It seemed that after reaching Gird’s village, they had had word from Gadilon about an army harassing his domain—an army headed by a terrible, cruel commander named Gird. Gird thought back to his near encounter with the brigands in Gadilon’s forest, and managed not to laugh. The king’s army was busy, the traders said, in the south and east, convinced that that was the main peasant force. And the traders had heard only vague rumors of trouble in the north until they were near Brightwater—and then the rumor had said the trouble was up on the River Road, near Grahlin.

“We were near Grahlin,” said Gird, not specifying when, or why they’d left.

“I don’t expect the king has heard that yet,” the trader said. “Sier Sehgrahlin has much of the old magicks, but not the way of calling mind to mind. Even if he could, the king could not hear, nor any with him. There’s no one much left with that, but the king’s great-aunt, and she’s too old to matter.”

“Where is she?” asked Gird.

“In Finyatha, of course, in the palace. Amazing lady; she came to the market there once, when I was a boy, and my grandfather sold her a roll of silk from the south. She looked at me and said ‘Yes, you may pet my horse,’ and my grandfather clouted me for presuming. I never asked; she saw it in my mind. She told my grandfather so, and he said I shouldn’t even have been thinking it, and clouted me again.”

“What was the horse like?” asked Gird, suddenly curious.

“A color I’d never seen; I heard later it was favored in Old Aare: blue-gray like a stormy sky, with a white mane and black tail, and what they called the Stormlord’s mark on the face, a jagged blaze that forked. But it was the fittings that fascinated me: that white mane was plaited in many strands, each bound with bright ribbons that looped together. The saddlecloth was embroidered silk—I was a silk merchant’s child, I could not mistake that. Then when she mounted, she sprang into the saddle like a man—and rode astride, which the horse nomad women do, but no merchant woman I had known. My grandfather told me later all the magelords do, men and women alike, but they think it is presumptuous in lower ranks.”

Gird returned to the topic that seemed to him more important. “But if she is the only one—and the sier Grahlin has no such powers—then his messengers must find the king’s army before the king will know and come north?”

“Yes. If he even calls for him: did you not know that Sehgrahlin is the king’s least favorite cousin? They have been rivals for years; Sehgrahlin refused to send his troops on this expedition, although he has some up north, guarding against the horsefolk. He will not like to ask the king for help, that one; he will do his best to drive you out of his domain with his own powers.”

He had done that, Gird thought, but what more would he do? He asked the merchant, who shrugged. “He might help Duke Pharaon—they’ve hunted together a lot, and he once loved Pharaon’s sister—but he married into the Borkai family. Those he would help, but they lie away north of you, north and west, right on the nomad borders.” The trader knew what the gnomes had not—or what they had not bothered to teach Gird—which lords lived where, and how they were related. Gird had Selamis write it all down, although he suspected Selamis might know some of it already. Then he asked about the one magelord family the gnomes had mentioned, and the trader’s expression changed. “Marrakai! Where would you have heard about them? They’re not even in Finaarenis; Marrakai’s a duke in Tsaia. No magicks, that I know of, but probably the best rulers in both kingdoms: honest, just, and put up with no nonsense. If that brigand you say is using your name wanders into Marrakai lands, he’ll find himself strung high before he knows it.”

The trouble with towns, Gird realized when he had been there a hand of days, was that they were harder to leave than villages. He would like to have had a town allied to him—but he could not hope to protect Brightwater against a full army. No army had come, but one might. Their barton had grown, swelled with sudden converts, but he didn’t trust that. The newly elected council of merchants and craftsmen wanted him to stay (one told him frankly that it was cheaper to feed his army than pay the bribes and taxes of the earlier rulers) but he had not won his war. When the gnomes sent word that it was now time to redeem his pledge to help them at Blackbone Hill, he was glad of the excuse—but he left most of his army near Brightwater, under the command of Cob, whose broken foot was nearly healed.

Chapter Twenty-six

Under a milky sky, the crest of Blackbone Hill loomed dark and inhospitable. Gird had expected the darkness, but not the shape, which made him think uneasily of a vast carcass, half-eaten. Sunburnt grass, like ragged dead fur, seemed stretched between the gaunt ribs.

“There’s them says it’s a dragon,” Wila, his guide, said nervously. Clearly he thought it was something. Gird forced a grin.

“If ’tis, ’tis dead, long since.”

Wila shook his head. “There’s bones, up there. All black, black inside and out. Seen ’em myself.”

“Dragonbones?” Despite himself, Gird shivered. No one had seen a dragon, but the tales of Camwyn Dragonmaster proved that dragons had lived, and might still. Even the lords believed in dragons; one of the outposts up on the western rim was called Dragonwatch.

“Dunno.” Wila paused, and hooked one foot behind his knee, leaning on his staff. “All the bones I seen was too little, unless a dragon has almighty more bones than other creatures. If they’d been normal bone, I’d have said fish or bird—something light, slender. But black like that—and no one could think that hill’s just a hill, like any other.”

Gird glanced upslope again: true. Something about the shape of it, malign and decrepit, made the hairs on his neck crawl. “Why’s anyone live here, then?” he asked.

“Well, now.” Wila switched feet, and leaned heavily into his staff. Clearly this was a question he’d hoped to answer. “In the old days,” he said, “before the lords came out of the south on their tall horses, this was uncanny ground. The Threespring clans claimed the east side for spring sheep grazing—it’s not so bad then, with new grass and spring flowers. The Lady tames all, you know,” he added, and dipped his head. Gird nodded, and swept his arm wide, acknowledging her bounty. “Then the Darkwater bog folk, they claimed herb right to the western slope, and the land between rock and bog.”

“Herb-right to that?”

“Aye. In the old days, that is, when the Darkwater bog folk gave half the herbalists in this region, they gathered the Five Fingers from that very rock, the Lady’s promise to redeem it, they said.” He peered closely at Gird. “You do know the Five Fingers—?”

Gird nodded. “But where I come from, only the wise may say the names—I have heard, but cannot—”

“Ah—yes. I forgot. You’re from the overheard, aren’t you?”

“Overheard?” Gird hadn’t heard that term.

“Where the kuaknomi overhear the blessings and overturn them. That’s what I was taught, at least. Where the kuaknomi overhear, only the wise may say the name of any sacred thing, lest a prayer be changed to curse.”

“They don’t come here?”

“Well—there’s them as says Blackbone Hill has felt their touch, but aside from that, no. We have the truesingers here, the treelords.”

“Elves?”

Wila snorted, then coughed. “That’s coarse talk of them, lad. What they call themselves is truesingers. Sinyi, in their tongue.”

“You speak it?” Gird could almost forget the coming battles for that.

“A bit.” Wila put both feet on the ground, and picked the staff up. “Best be going, if we’re to be past the Tongue by dark.” And despite Gird’s questions, he would say no more about elves, but led the way at a brisker pace than Gird expected from someone his age. What he did say, briefly and over his shoulder, had to do with the human settlement now nestled at the hill’s steeper end. “Lords forced it,” he said. “Broke apart the Threesprings clans, and settled a half of ’em here, and put in two brothers from the bog folk, and set them all to digging in the hill. Came out as you’d think: fever and death, broken bones and quarrels, but the lords want what comes out the mine shaft, and never mind the cost. Send more in, when too many die. It’s a hard place, Blackbone, and no hope for better.”

“But the barton—”

“Oh, well. The barton’s together, and they’ll fight—they’re good at that. Come the day—”

Come the day, Gird thought, and no one will have to live in a place like this, ever again. The black, disquieting hill loomed higher as they plunged into one of its gullies, angled downslope, then up and across to another. He had been days coming here, after the gnomes’ message arrived, passed from one guide to another.

Blackbone was as bleak as its hill, a cramped village of dark stone huts locked in by steep slopes. It stank, not with the healthy smells of a farming village, but with rot that would never become fertility, human waste and garbage piled on barren stone. A thin dark stream writhed behind the row of dwellings, too quiet for its rate of flow. Wisps of sulphurous steam came off it. As a mining village, it had no farmsteads; the barton, Gird found, had adapted to circumstances, and met in the mine itself.

“They dunna come ’ere,” said the yeoman-marshal, Felis. “They come to the outside, we got to haul it that far, and load their wagons. Inside they dunna come.”

Gird found it hard to endure even the outer tunnel, as daylight faded in the distance. Now he was out of sight of the entrance, sweating with fear, and hoping the barton would think it was the heat. Around the gallery where they drilled, torches burned, smoking. In that dim and shaking light, the men and women looked like nightmare creatures, monsters hardly human. He had already noticed that they were all grimed with the black rock. Now their eyes glittered in the light, the whites unnatural against dark-smeared faces. He glanced up, seeing the dark rock overhead far too close.

One of the women grinned, teeth white against the darkness. “You’re no miner, eh? The rockfear gripes you?”

No use to pretend. “It does. I’m a farmer, used to no more than a bit of roof between me and the sky.”

She laughed, but not unkindly. “At least you don’t lie. Lead us out to fight, then, and you’ll be free of this rock.” The emphasis on “you” caught his attention.

“And you? Do you want to stay here?”

“Nay—but what do I know of farming? I’d go to other mines, could I.” Some of the faces nodded agreement, others were still, with a stillness Gird had never seen.

He had no time to wonder at that, for the detailed plan of battle had to be made that night. Now that he’d seen for himself the shape of the land, the way the dark rock loomed over the wagon road into Blackbone, he could mentally place his few archers where they could do the most good. The barton members nodded when he spoke, but he wondered if they understood at all. None of them were archers. Most of them had never been out of Blackbone in all their lives. They knew digging and hauling, enough carpentry to build ladders and simple boxes, and not much more. They’d been drilled with picks and shovels. Gird felt the edges filed onto the shovels and wished he could have such metal for better weapons.

One of the men nodded. “They ’ad to give us good steel, see, or it wouldn’t be no use against this rock.”

“But no smith,” said the woman who had asked him about rock-fear. “They brings us the tools, but takes no chances we’ll make swords.”

Deep in the ground, away from natural light, Gird lost track of time and would have gone on all night, but they had candlemarks for measure, and brought him back out to sleep under the sky. He almost wished he’d stayed within, for the air stank worse than in the mine itself, and he felt smothered.

The next day, his troops arrived. None of them liked Blackbone Hill. He saw the looks sent his way, noticed how they angled away from the line of march, as if they didn’t want to set foot on that dark stone. He hated it himself, felt a subtle antagonism through his bootsoles. What if he was wrong? What if the power of Blackbone turned against them, preferred the lords? The gnomes had said it would not, but they were, after all, rockfolk. Their goals were not his goals.

Threesprings barton, kinbound to Blackbone, had sent twenty-seven yeomen, the largest contingent. They were all darkhaired, dour, barely glancing at Gird when he spoke to their yeoman marshal. A third of them were women, all as tall and thickset as the men. Longhill, barely a day’s march away, had sent fourteen: its best, the yeoman marshal assured Gird. Deepmeadow, Whiterock Ridge, Whiteoak, Hazelly, and Clearspring had been on the march two days each. Some of them had never been so far from home; they clutched their weapons and foodsacks as if they expected the rocks to sprout demons. Westhill, the most veteran of this lot, had marched four days across the rolling hills. Their sturdy cheerfulness heartened the novices more than Gird could; he did not explain that Westhill had no village to return to, for the lords had burnt and salted it over the winter.

Blackbone barton greeted these allies with restraint—or, as Gird saw it, with total lack of enthusiasm. A few words passed between the Threesprings yeoman marshal and a Blackbone man, a mutter of family news, as near as Gird could make out, but nothing more. Longhill clearly expected no better; the yeomen smirked and sat quietly without attempting conversation. The others, barring Westhill, clumped up nervously and stared roundeyed from the taciturn Blackbone yeomen to the higher slopes of Blackbone Hill. Gird made his way from one barton to another, doing his best to reassure and cheer them.

Blackbone barton itself actually broke the ice with a contribution to the evening meal. Short of supplies as it was—as any remote mining village without farmstead support would be—the village nonetheless made a very potent brew and had saved it, as their spokesman said “For the day.” Now the chunky little jugs passed from hand to hand, raising spirits or at least numbing fears. Gird, mindful of watchful eyes, took but one pull at a jug before passing it on. The story of his drunken rage had traveled farther than he had; he knew he dared not risk another, and certainly not before a battle.

By dawn, he had them all in position. They looked fewer in the morning light, when he knew an enemy was coming, and the land itself looked larger. Could they possibly hold the narrow throat, choke the lords’ soldiers from the village?

Eight bartons. Near two cohorts, by his new reckoning, though he had none of his marshals along. And there, coming along the stone-paved trade road, were the mounted infantry, the archers he feared so much, the light cavalry, and—he squinted—and a small troop of the lords themselves, mounted. So—so the gnomes had been right. Whatever they got from the Blackbone mines was important enough to bring them out themselves. He could not read their devices, or recognize them by the colors they wore; the traders had told him all that, and Selamis had written it down, but Selamis was not here to remind him. Lords were lords, he thought to himself, and what difference did it make if he faced sier or duke or count—any and all would be glad of his blood, and he of theirs.

Because he was looking for it, he noticed that the lords’ troops also disliked the touch of Blackbone Hill, and veered slightly until sharp commands brought them back. He told himself that the horsemen would have trouble on the slopes. Would horses, too, flinch from Blackbone? He hoped so; they were ruinously outnumbered otherwise. Perhaps he should have brought some of his regular troops—but there would have been no way to move that many that far without opposition, and he had had no time for additional battles. He looked over at Wila, who could see down into the cleft where his few archers waited, and held up his hands three times. Wila passed the signal on. If they could take the archers out, then his people could stand against a charge. Horsemen couldn’t spread wide on that uneven slope. He hoped.

The clatter of hooves and boots rang loudly from the stones on either side of the track. Gird kept his head down, trusting his carefully placed archers to choose their targets wisely. He heard the twang of one bowstring, then another, then shouts from below. So it began, again, and he squeezed his own hands hard an instant, fighting down that last-moment fear that caught him every time. He stood, and waved his arm.

In that first scrambling rush downslope, Gird could see that his archers had done their work well; many of the lords’ archers were down. Arrows flicked by, close overhead. A few of those below had found cover, and returned a ragged flight. Someone beside him staggered and went down, hands clutched to chest. Ahead of him, the front line of yeomen, with the best weapons, had engaged the mounted soldiers, unseating many of them and killing horses. The slope and sunrise gave them advantage, and Gird’s archers continued to pick their targets wisely.

“Get the lords!” he bellowed, reminding them.

But the attack lost momentum, foundered. No arrows found the lords on their tall horses; Gird could have sworn he saw arrows slide aside, as if refusing to menace the magelords. The lords themselves drew no weapons he could see—not then—but their soldiers regrouped with amazing speed. They paid no attention to the wounded and fallen among them, striding over bodies as if they were merely more rocks. Gird had called for all his bartons to attack when he thought he saw the enemy crumbling, but now he had no unseen reserves, and the ground no longer favored him. Either his people were spread out along the road, outnumbered at each point, or he could call them to clump on the road itself, and try a frontal attack—exactly what he had not wanted to do with the weapons he had available.

Furious with himself, and with the gnomes who had advised this battle plan, Gird watched his ambush degenerate into a lengthy slaughter. Now that they were sure the rocky slopes held no more surprises, the lords and their soldiers pushed forward strongly on the road itself. Already they were beyond the range of Gird’s archers, who would have to come out of cover to find targets. The yeoman marshals were looking over their shoulders now, expecting Gird to come up with something—some plan—and he could not think of anything. Could he hold them together? Would a rout be worse than this? Why had he ever thought the gnomes could design a battle plan for humans? He had to try something. He called them all in, trying to slow the enemy advance along the road. That might give someone a chance to escape.

It had been a mistake. It had been a disaster, and now the end would come. Gird held the retreat together, as foot by foot they were forced back through the village into the maw of the mine. He had been so sure that taking out their archers would be enough. It might have been, without the lords themselves there, with their wicked magicks. Their troops, who might have broken and fled—would have, Gird was sure—still moved forward, as if they had no thought at all, as if they could suffer no wound or fall to no death. Yet they fell, and died, and were trampled by their own. The faces he could see did not change expression even in death. Too far behind for any of Gird’s weapons to reach, the lords sat veiled on their tall horses, watching, performing whatever magicks they could.

Here was still more evidence that some of the lords still had potent powers to call on. Rocks split, air hummed and thickened in his throat, unnatural light rippled over the battle, making it hard to see. And so he was going to die under a mountain of rock, because he had believed the wrong story. There wasn’t any way out of this, but if he did live, he was going to have a few choice words for Arranha, if ever he caught up with him again.

He shifted to one side as the mine closed around them.

“Go on!” bawled the Blackbone yeoman marshal in his ear. “Let us take this.”

“It was my bad idea.” Gird smashed his club into a shoulder, and ducked aside from a pike. “I should be last—”

They fought side by side for a few moments, as the soldiers charged again. Then the momentum of that charge dissipated, and they could retreat further into the dark shaft without immediate risk. The soldiers were cursing the darkness, stumbling over loose rocks and the fallen.

“Hurry up,” the yeoman marshal said. “Afore the lords get in, and make they magical lights—”

“But we should make a stand,” Gird said. “I’ll do it—a few others—”

“Never mind!” The yeoman marshal yanked Gird’s arm hard. “Leave them to it; they’ll find out—”

“What?” He couldn’t see, in the dimness, anything but a flash of teeth.

“It’s in the charm,” said the man, almost gleefully. “Come with me.” What charm was that, Gird wondered. It was that or be left in darkness, and Gird came. Dying inside a cursed mountain wasn’t his idea of the way to die, but what choices did he have? None, like the rest of them. All around, in the darkness, he heard the rasp of feet on stone, the groans of the wounded, the heavy breathing. Deeper into the blackness, and deeper, twisting and turning through passages that were sometimes tight for a single man, and other times so wide that three or four abreast must reach out with hands to feel the walls. Gird clamped his fear within him, and tried to think, without success.

When the dim bluish light of a gnomish lamp blossomed nearby, he could not believe it. All around were faces equally surprised, mouths open. A firm, cool hand gripped Gird’s, and he looked down to see the warmaster who had set this battle’s plan.

“It is for you to command,” the warmaster said. “No human noise!”

“Silence!” Gird bellowed and no one spoke. He bent to the warmaster, full of his own questions and complaints, but the warmaster’s expression stopped him.

“It is that they are within, the outland lords?”

“Yes.”

“You marshal your humans, follow my orders.”

“Yes.” There was nothing more to say. Whatever the gnomes demanded, he would have to perform, both by his contract and by the logic of the situation.

“Then go. Follow that one—” the warmaster pointed. “Go far and swift.”

“You don’t need our help?”

The warmaster’s face conveyed secret amusement. “Human help for rockwar? Go.”

Gird waved, and the others formed up to follow him, as he followed his guide. It occurred to him, as they plunged once more into a narrow dark passage, that the gnomes might have planned all this just to lure a few lords underground—though he hated to think that.

All he could hear behind, though he strained his ears, was the noise of his own people shuffling along. His guide carried a lantern, so he himself could see where to put his feet, but the others stumbled in darkness. At last, a dim shape of light ahead, that widened and brightened to daylight. He squinted against the light, and then as he came out, stopped short. They faced a gloomy sunset, a few rays of somber light escaping beneath heavy clouds. And that meant—he shook his head, to clear it. They had walked through Blackbone Hill? He peered up and over his shoulder. There it was, that gaunt, misshapen spine arched slightly away from them.

Ahead the gnome set off downhill, in that measured but tireless tread, and Gird waved the foremost of his people on. He would stay to see the last of them out, and silence questions.

By dark they were far below the hill, coming into marshy ground. The blackwater bogs, Gird thought. The gnome stopped suddenly, and Gird nearly ran into him.

“Here is good water.” The lantern light glittered from a pool that looked as black as the rock of the hill. But when Gird dipped a handful, it was clear, trembling in the light, and tasted sweet. Others knelt, dipped for themselves, and drank thirstily. He could hear the splashes, and the moans of the wounded behind him in the darkness. The gnome touched his arm to get his attention. “This is water that runs clean, and the bog clans know safe ways from here. Do you acknowledge debt?”

There was no alternative. “You have brought us from danger to safe water: I acknowledge owing.”

“That is fair. This is the exchange: no humans to go beneath that hill. To gather the herbs of the field, to pasture flocks, it is permitted. It is not permitted to delve in the rock, or build aught of the loose rock of the surface. Granted?”

“Granted.” Gird sighed, nonetheless, thinking how he would have to argue the miners into it. He wanted to ask why, but knew he would get no answer. And he was tired, desperately tired. He wanted to know how many they’d lost, and if the wounded would recover, and he wanted to fall in his tracks and sleep.

“What of the magelords?” he asked, determined to get something out of this exchange.

The gnome smiled. Gird remembered that smile from his months in their princedom. “It is not a place for humankind, within that hill. The magelords took what was not theirs; knowing, they took it. We return justice.”

The ground heaved, thudding against Gird’s feet, and a shout went up from his people. Trees groaned; their limbs thrashed briefly as if in a gust of wind. In the lantern light, the water in the pool rocked and splashed like water in a kicked bucket. Gird looked at the gnome, whose smile broadened.

“Justice,” it said again. “No pursuit.”

When dawn brightened behind Blackbone Hill, the marshy forest looked much less threatening. Delicate flowers brightened the hummocks of moss; butterflies flicked wings of brilliant yellows and oranges in and out of the sunbeams. They had halted beside an upwelling spring of clear water, that flowed into an amber stream between thick-trunked dark trees. A clearly-marked trail led away downstream from their campsite, and the gnome—who had stayed with them until daylight—said that it led safely to an old settlement of the bog folk, now abandoned, but on another safe trail to Longhill.

Gird counted up his survivors. Only five of Blackbone itself had survived. Their kin from Threesprings had lost but three, and still remained the largest barton. Longhill had lost seven of fourteen; Deepmeadow had lost eight of twelve. Whiterock Ridge had lost all its archers, but no one else, and Hazelly lost only one. Clearspring and Westhill had lost two each. But of those living, a quarter were wounded, unfit for work or fighting for many days.

And the survivors were anything but satisfied with the way the battle had gone.

“You didn’t tell us they rockfolk’d be involved,” said the yeoman marshal of Hazelly. For someone who had never fought at all before, he was surprisingly pert, Gird thought.

“Us would’nt’ve let ’un fight in th’mine unless they’d been there,” said one of the Blackbone survivors, “They told us away last winter they’d no more patience with the magelord’s thievery.” He peered at Gird through the morning mist. “But they didn’t say what t’would cost us. They said you was the best leader—”

Before Gird could answer that, someone from Threesprings broke in. “Ah, them rockfolk! Suppose it was their plan, too, warn’t it? And you their hired human warleader?”

“They didn’t hire me,” Gird began, wondering how he was going to settle this lot. They had good reason to grumble, but so did he; it was not his fault the gnomes had kept the main part of their plan from him. So had the Blackbone Hill folk, for the matter of that.

Westhill, more experienced in living in the country, had done most of the work to make the camp livable. The others learned quickly, if unwillingly: the Westhill yeoman-marshal had a tongue sharpened on both sides. Gird began thinking what to do with this ill-assorted lot. Some of them, from the villages that no longer existed, could come directly into the main army. Others might go home for a time, though the areas of peace shrank day by day.

In a few days, the mood had settled; those who had been most badly wounded were either mending or dead, and everyone else had decided to stay with Gird or go home in a huff. There were only a few of the latter. The rest had begun to recast the tale as they would tell it to friends at home. Gird noticed that the lords’ troop grew, and the lords’ magicks became ever more spectacular, as they retold it to each other. The survivors from Blackbone Hill itself—including some who had hidden in the houses until the fight passed by, and then escaped around the hill—seemed glad to go to Threesprings, where they had kin.

Gird himself climbed back up the trail to take a last look at the west side of Blackbone Hill in broad daylight. It had not changed, that he could see, and he felt no desire to walk on it again.

He made his way back across country toward Brightwater, with the Westhill yeomen. On their way, they found ample evidence that the war was spreading. Twice they fought off attacks by mounted patrols; once they blundered into the path of a large infantry force, and got away only because they were fitter than their pursuers. Gird wondered where that force had been going; as far as he knew, he had no one active in that direction. They passed more than one burned-out village, inhabited by peasants who fled into the woods when they approached, and slunk out behind them to work the fields.

Gird led them in a careful circle around Grahlin; they were near Burry when they met someone recently from Brightwater, a yeoman Gird remembered only vaguely. His news was mixed. The king’s army claimed to have killed Gird, between Gadilon’s domain and the gnome lands to the south; it had then marched north, celebrating that victory by burning any village whose lord reported it as rebellious. For some reason, it had gone east, rather than returning in its tracks, and was now at the eastern border of Finaarenis, preparing to march home on the River Road.

“So,” Gird said, putting a blunt finger on the map. “That group we saw was probably going to join the king’s army. Well. When they get to Grahlin, the sier will have much to tell them, and we can expect them in Brightwater sometime after harvest, no doubt.”

According to later reports, the king’s army had met with scattered but brisk resistance on its march north; bartons Gird had never heard of had fought individual and combined engagements. In the meantime, Gird’s main force had control of the valley in which Brightwater lay, from just south of the River Road all the way to the southern trade road. They had taken two lords’ residences, although only servants were there: the lords were off with the king’s army, and their families were safe (for the moment) in Finyatha.

Putting all this information together with Selamis and the senior marshals, Gird thought he still had numerical superiority, but most of his troops were ill-armed and had no defensive armor at all. They were short of supplies, in part because Gird did not want to squeeze the remaining farmers. Some smiths had come over to the rebels, it was true, but they had little metal for them to work.

As the summer waned, Gird remembered the gnomes’ warning that he must win in one season, or find an ally with money or troops—or both. They had suggested one, which he had been reluctant to approach.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Not for the first time, Gird felt well out of his depth. These wooded hills had taller trees than any he’d known; following a gurgling creek between two of them, he felt he was sinking deeper and deeper into unknown lands. Far overhead, the leaves just changing turned honest sunlight to a flickering green, as unsteady as the water beside him. Most of the undergrowth still showed the heavy green of summer, but one climbing vine had gone scarlet, as if the tree itself were bleeding. Gird shivered when he saw that.

If he had not spent that winter with the gnomes, he would never have come here, so far east, to meet a lord reputedly not so bad as the rest. But if he had not gone to the gnomes, he would never have survived his second season of war. If they had been right about other things, perhaps they were right about the Marrakai.

“Ho!” Gird jumped as if struck, and then stood still, peering about him into the confusion of leaves. Then a man in green stepped out on the trail he’d been following. His guide? Or was it a trap? The man had a staff like his own, and a bow slung over his shoulder. “Are you from the Aldonfulk hall?” the man asked.

“Yes,” said Gird. The man moved like someone well-fed and well-rested, full of confidence. The lord himself? Then he remembered what he was supposed to say. “Aldonfulk Lawmaster Karik ak Padig Sekert sends greetings to the lord duke Marrakai.”

“Ah. And Kevre Mikel Dobrin Marrakai returns those greetings, through his kirgan.”

Gird struggled his way through the names he had heard only in the gnomish accent, and the references, to remember that the kirgan meant heir of law and blood. He stared as the young man came forward. Black hair, green eyes as the lords had sometimes, a face young but already showing character. That sier in Grahlin would have been glad to have such a son. The young man smiled.

“And you must be Gird, the scourge of the west, that we have heard so much about. I’m Meshavre, called Mesha.”

“But you’re a—” He didn’t want to say it, but the young man said it for him.

“A lord’s son? The enemy? I hope not that, at least. Yes, Kirgan Marrakai, in formal usage, but this meeting you is hardly formal. Do not your people use one name only, at least in this war? Call me Mesha, then, and I will call you Gird.”

He was used to command; his voice carried the certainty that Gird would do what he wanted because he asked it, and he (that voice conveyed) would ask nothing unreasonable. Gird could imagine him dealing with dogs and horses, with wounded men, with crying women, all of them calming under that voice and obeying it. Yet it was reasonable, what he said, and Gird could see no good reason to disobey, nothing that would not make him feel foolish.

“Well,” he said, to gain time. “Mesha. Whatever you think of rebellious peasants, that’s the first time I’ve called a nobleborn by a pet name in all my life.” He met the young man’s eyes squarely, to find surprised respect. Mesha nodded.

“My father was right, then, as were the kapristi. They said you were different, and told long tales of you; my father had heard some of those same tales from Finaarean lords.”

“Who told them differently, I would guess,” said Gird. He liked the young man; he couldn’t help it. Was that the charming he’d been warned about? But the gnomes had said the Marrakai magic had gone long ago, that these lords were no longer magelords except by inheritance.

“I heard only one of them, from the sier whose life you saved. He was divided in his mind; if all the rebels were like you, he might be your ally. But come: let me bring you to a safe place to rest and eat. There’s a forester’s shelter, down this way.” And without another word, Mesha turned and started down the trail. Gird followed, still half-afraid of a trap. But why then would the young lord meet him alone in the first place? Why not simply put an arrow through him from behind a tree?

The forester’s shelter had three sides of stone, the front open to a firepit ringed with stones. Tethered beside it were two horses, a brown and a gray; a small fire crackled in the firepit, and something was cooking that sent a wave of hunger through Gird’s belly.

Duke Marrakai was an older version of his son: heavy black hair and beard, green eyes, and a powerful body. Gird was aware that the two of them, father and son, could easily kill him if that was what they had in mind. But so far neither made a move against him. The duke was himself stirring a pot of some dark liquid, and Mesha moved quickly to unpack saddlebags: bread, cheese, onion, apples, slabs of meat. Gird unslung his own thin pack, and put his remaining loaf of bread with the other. Mesha looked startled, but his father nodded approval.

“We thank you, Gird, for sharing.” His voice was deep, and Gird had no doubt its bellow would carry across a battle. “Mesha, show Gird the spring.”

The spring came up beside a flat rock. Gird knelt and held his hand over it; the surface rippled a little with the flow. He muttered the greeting for its guardian spirit, and looked up to find the kirgan watching him curiously. “You don’t speak to it?” he asked. Mesha shook his head. Gird looked back at the spring; surely it was glad to be recognized. He bent and scooped up a handful of icy, clean-tasting water. It made Gird’s teeth ache. He filled his waterskin after Mesha drank.

“Do all your people talk to springs?” asked Mesha. Gird retied the thong that held the skin closed for travel.

“Whenever we take water from the earth, we thank the Lady, and the guardians. It’s only courteous.”

“Even from a well?”

“Of course.” Gird looked at him. “If you give something to someone, don’t you expect thanks? We cannot live without water, without the rain falling and the springs rising.”

“Yes, but—is that why peasants—why your people—tie flowers and wool to the wellposts?”

“Yes, and if this were a spring on my land, I would bring gifts at Midwinter and Midsummer. Perhaps someone else does that here.”

Mesha looked as if he would ask more, but didn’t. Instead he waved at the clearing behind the shelter. “Over there, behind that cedar, is the jacks for this shelter. ’Tis far enough from the water, my father says.” Gird had no need then, but wondered how long they thought he would stay.

They came back to find Duke Marrakai pouring the dark liquid into thick-walled mugs. “Do you have sib, in your country?” he asked Gird. Gird nodded. “Good. I like it with more tikaroot than most, though that makes it more bitter; this has honey in it.”

It might be poison, but why? Gird took a mug and sipped cautiously. A strong flavor, thicker and darker than his people made it. After another sip or so, he decided he liked it well enough. The duke had his knife out, and cut the bread and cheese into slabs. Now it was Gird’s turn to be surprised, for he held his hands over the food and used a form of blessing Gird had never heard: “Thank the Lady,” had been enough for him.

Marrakai and his son took Gird’s bread first, which forced him to share theirs. He wondered if they knew the significance of that among his people. Arranha had not, but these were supposed to be different. One bite stood for all; he might as well have cheese and apples. They ate in silence, as hungry men do; Gird, being hungriest, was most aware of his own eating. There was enough to fill his belly, and he took it. Mesha and his father ate slowly, so that they finished all together.

Then Duke Marrakai turned to Gird. “You are not oathbound to me, or to any with whom I share oaths: we are as strangers, among whom is no rank. Call me Kevre, if you will.” Gird stared at him: a peasant call a great lord, a duke, by one name? He nodded, trying to cover his confusion. Marrakai went on. “We have shared food; among our people, that used to mean peace, and sometimes alliance. If it is not so among your people, I will not hold you to those obligations—but if you want first truce, and then perhaps alliance, let us speak of that.”

Gird wondered if there had been ale in the sib; he could hardly believe what he was hearing. Alliance? With a duke of Tsaia? That the gnomes had had some reason for sending him here, he’d been sure, but this went beyond all hopes.

“Sir—Kevre—” That would take getting used to; the “sir” still came easily to him. “Among our people, shared food declares peace, at least for that meeting. And sometimes more—if something is being decided, then food shared means agreement.” He did not mention obligation, intentionally: let the Marrakai duke show what he knew.

“Yet you were trailhungry when you came; it would be unfair of me to bind you by that—”

“Are you bound?” asked Gird boldly. Marrakai nodded. “I am. Both by custom and by my own honor. I knew what I did when I ate of your bread, and gave you mine; therefore am I bound. While you are here, in my domain, you are my guest; neither I nor mine will harm you, nor let harm come to you.”

Gird nodded. “And I thought of what it meant, Kevre, when I put my food with yours, and when I saw you take it, leaving me only yours to eat. I said nothing and ate: that binds me, by the law the gnomes taught me, and by the custom of my people.” He grinned at Marrakai. “Of honor I cannot speak, since I was taught that we peasants had none, but I can see right and do it.”

“Which is honor enough for anyone,” said Mesha quickly. His father gave him a sharp glance, but nodded.

“Mesha’s right. So here we are, you my guest and I your host, both of us brought here by an interest in gnomish law. What law have the gnomes taught you? Is that your message?”

Gird tried to put his scattered thoughts in order. “Sir—Kevre—the gnomes taught me their law, and something of past times, and how the old customs of our people were like and unlike the High Lord’s law.”

Marrakai frowned. “Do they call Esea and the High Lord one thing and the same?”

“I’m—not sure. What they said was that the High Lord had been for the Aareans in the form of Esea. But they themselves consider the High Lord the source of justice. The judge.”

“Yes. That I knew. The High Lord’s Law, as they say. You know of the Rule of Aare?”

Gird nodded. “A priest of Esea taught me, but he was outcast, for claiming that the Rule of Aare meant differently than the king’s law said.”

“You met Arranha?” Marrakai shook his head. “Gird, I am well rebuked: I had not thought any peasant leader, no matter how worthy, would be familiar with Arranha’s heresies and gnomish law. Are you sure you are not a scholar, rather than a fighter?”

Gird felt himself redden. “I did not choose fighting; I would farm if I could. But—”

“But you could not. My pardon, Gird; it is no time for jesting. But Arranha! I have not met him myself, although I have heard from his horrified colleagues all about his views. I think myself he’s right. The oldest documents in my archives are from Old Aare, and from these it is clear that the interpretation of the Rule has changed, over the generations. I have tried to convince our king to return to the intent of the Rule.”

“Would he?”

“Felis? No. None of them see it as I do, although some agree that great wrongs are being done in its name. Some would abandon the Rule entirely, seeing no hope of reform, and some are, unfortunately, profiting so well that they see no reason to change.”

“Some like wrong itself,” muttered Mesha. “The Verrakai—”

“I name no man’s motives,” said Marrakai firmly. “You know what I think, but that’s not at issue here. There are bad men in any realm, and in every family.”

“Not like that,” said Mesha. Gird looked at him and wondered if he spoke as freely to his father in his own hall. “Taris is merely foolish.”

“Judge all by the same rule,” said Marrakai. “If you would name Verrakai wicked, for gambling with lives, then consider Taris’s loss of those steadings—were there not men and women farming them, who came under another’s power? How is that different? We have been fortunate to have so few, but we are not gods, to be perfect.”

“You punished Taris; Duke Verrakai gave his son jewels when he—”

“Enough!” Gird noticed that Mesha was instantly silent, but clearly unconvinced. Marrakai turned to Gird. “My nephew, whose father was killed years ago, gambled away some of his father’s lands—which to me is dishonor, for the care he owed those who lived there. Lands are not like ring or sword. As for the Verrakai—have you heard of them?”

Gird shook his head. “Only that Verrakai is one of the dukes of Tsaia, a great lord of the east.”

“A great lord, if wealth counts for all. I would not speak of him, Gird, without need. Our families share no great love, and I cannot be fair.”

Gird looked from one face to the other, and said nothing. After a moment, Marrakai sighed, and went on.

“That’s beside our purpose. The kapristi may have told you that long ago my father’s father’s father resisted our king’s attempt to invade their princedom across Marrakai lands. When they routed that invasion, and made a pact of peace with the Tsaian throne—as they did with the king of Finaarenis for the same reason—the kapristi noted our action on their behalf. They counted themselves in debt to Marrakai. My great-grandsire argued that what he had done was right—that he had laid upon them no debt—but they argued in return that by our law he had not been obligated, and so it went, until they agreed on a settlement. From that day on, we have dealt evenly with kapristi. As you know, they accept no gifts and give none, but with those they consider upright, they deal willingly and fairly.”

“That is so,” said Gird.

“Of course I knew of the unrest in Finaarenis; there is unrest in Tsaia, for the same reasons. And I had heard of you: after Norwalk Sheepfolds, everyone heard of you.” Marrakai paused to drink more sib, and offered Gird another mugful. Gird took it, nodded, and Marrakai went on. “A peasant turned off his land turns outlaw: that’s nothing new. That peasant joins a rebellious mob, burns hayricks, ambushes traders: that’s nothing new. But a peasant training other peasants to march, to use their daily tools as weapons, to fight trained soldiers—not only training them so, but leading them: that was new. And not at all to most men’s liking. Most lords, at least. And then you disappeared entirely, after saving Sier Segrahlin’s life. Dead, most thought, or frightened into flight.”

He had to ask, though he was sure he knew the answer, and the question itself could anger Marrakai. “Is it because you fear this for yourself? You would give me help, and for what—to let your domain abide?”

Marrakai was not angry, but his son was. He shook his head, at both Gird and his son. “What I fear is long war, with all the lands laid waste and no justice gained. They have not begun to fight back, Gird, not with the worst magic. You will see far worse than you’ve seen: poisoned wells, fields ruined for long years, unless you find someone with magic to restore them. You did not win quickly; they know, now, what they face. Yet you must fight. I understand that—it had gone too far, and your lords have no intent to mend matters. Am I afraid? Of course. I have children too; I have lands I love, people that depend on me. Worse, I have an oath I swore to our king, when he took the crown. I cannot take my own soldiers into this, except to defend my own lands, without his permission, which he will not give.”

“Why obey a wicked king?”

Marrakai sighed. “Felis is not wicked, merely weak. He has wicked advisors, some of them—if he had only had the sense to marry his rose, as he called her, instead of that sister of Verrakai’s—but that’s not wickedness. Gird, I pledged my loyalty to him, to the king of Tsaia both as king, and as the man Felis Hornath Mikel Dovre Mahieran Mahierai. If I go to war against his will, then I have broken my word, and if my word was ill-given, foolishly given, it is still binding on me. It would not be on everyone; some can free themselves with less trouble. I cannot. I cannot do it and be who and what I am, the self I respect. I have argued with him, pled with him, stormed at him, and finally left court—with his entire consent, because he was tired of hearing me. But that one thing I cannot do.”

Gird felt the unshakeable substance of the man, as unyielding in his way as the gnomes. He had never found anyone to give such an oath to; the oaths he had had to give the steward he had never felt as binding. A peasant did what he must to survive; honor was something the lords sang of, in ballads.

“You disapprove?” asked Marrakai. Gird shrugged and shook his head.

“I have no right to approve or disapprove. It is right to keep a promise, that I’ll agree, and if that is how you see your duty to your king, it may—must—be right for you.”

“I wonder sometimes,” said Marrakai. His lips quirked in a rueful smile. “What I propose to do is, in the eyes of many, just as bad as marching my own men out to face his. Fine wit, one of my tutors said, splits hairs, but split hairs make weak ropes to hang a life on.” Gird said nothing; he could not follow that. Marrakai seemed to understand, for he shrugged in his turn. “Let me be clear, then: the gnomes sent word that you were the best of possible leaders to the revolt surely coming in Finaarenis. Last summer I thought you might come, and heard instead of your campaigns—”

“Not all of them mine,” said Gird, rubbing his nose. “That fellow in the south—”

“I expected confusion of tales,” Marrakai said. “But some were surely yours. The gnomes said you might—with the High Lord’s judgment—win in one season, but they expected not. You would need gold for good weapons, they said, and possibly troops, and they were unwilling to provide either. They thought I might, for my own reasons.” He looked at his son. “There is one of my reasons: Mesha will not succeed to my lands as long as Felis is king. He was too forthright at court, worse even than I am.” A chuckle escaped him; Gird noticed that the young man’s ears were bright red. Marrakai shook his head. “We are not good at hiding our opinions, we Marrakai; it has been so for generations. My grandfather said someone dropped yeast in the mix when the gods shaped the first of us; it bubbles out at inconvenient moments.”

Gird looked from one to the other. He knew nothing of the lords’ way of living, but he would expect no great tact from either of them. Curiosity pricked him. “What did you do?” he asked Mesha. The young man turned even more red than before, but his eyes twinkled. He started to answer, but his father waved him to silence.

“What does not matter, save that he spoke the truth as he saw it, and that was too stony a mouthful for the king’s dignity to chew and swallow. I’ll not have it a common jest, Mesha, I told you that: I’m proud of your honesty and courage, but it is wrong to make tavern gossip of your liege lord.”

“He’s not my liege lord,” Mesha said, eyeing his father warily. “He will not take my oath—he said it—and thus—”

“I named you heir, and my oath binds you. Gods above, lad, this is no time for your antics! We are near enough the traitor’s blade as it is.” The younger man sat back, averting his face, and Marrakai turned to Gird. “I’m sorry, Gird: it is discourteous to withhold the tale, and yet I cannot let him tell it. Forgive me that discourtesy, if you will, and accept in its stead my support.”

“Support?” Gird was still confused by the rapid exchange between father and son.

“Yes. You need weapons; I can supply some, and gold to buy others. You may need sanctuary; my woodlands are open to you, and my troops will not permit others to cross the boundary, if you should be pursued. If my peasants wish to organize—bartons, do you call them?—then I will make no objection. Your war will spread into Tsaia—it must, because our king is allied to yours—and you must win in both kingdoms if you are to win at all.” He paused long enough that Gird wondered if he had finished speaking. “What I want is much like the gnomes asked of you: I want your assurance that you will do your best to organize a society after the war, in which order and law prevail—and that you do not urge your followers to massacres and destruction beyond the necessities of war.”

“I’m doing that already,” Gird said.

“So I had heard, but the stories were confused enough I was not sure which stories were of you, and which of your more fanciful selves. I can see for myself that you are not a man who hates easily, who would kill or rape for the pleasure of it; I know, from my own life, that war is a fire that cannot be caged in a hearth. This has already been bloody; it will be worse. I want to know I am supporting someone with a vision of peace beyond the war.”

“Yes.” Gird saw the futility of more words; how could he explain his vision? But his calm certainty seemed to convince Marrakai, who nodded shortly, and then stood.

“Gold I brought with me; you may take it as you go. Mesha will guide you to our borders, and introduce you to trusted men of my personal guard. Weapons—you will have to provide transport beyond my borders, but I can supply 250 pikes, whenever you can take them, and heads for the same number, if you have the poles.”

Once again Gird found himself handling gold coins, this time in daylight, openly. Coins of both kingdoms were minted with the same values: Tsaian crowns were traded in Finaarenis often enough to cause no comment. He let his fingers rummage among them, enjoying the feel, and looked up to see a wary expression on Marrakai’s face.

“They’re so—heavy,” Gird said. “And they feel—they feel so different against my skin. It’s no wonder some men become misers, and want to touch gold all the time.”

“Had you never felt gold before?” asked Mesha.

“Once. Someone tried to bribe me.” Gird poured the coins from his hand back into the leather bag Marrakai had handed him.

“You cannot be bribed?” Mesha asked.

Gird met his eyes. “Between this gold and my heart is the memory of my daughter, raped and bleeding, her dead husband, my closest friend, struck down for nothing. I could be bribed, I daresay, but not with gold.” The young man looked alarmed, but Marrakai smiled.

“I have trusted the right man, then. Fare well with that gold, and your memories.”

Mesha, on the way to the Marrakai border, shared knowledge as precious as the gold he carried. “My father says I cannot tell you what I did to be banished from court and my inheritance, but he said nothing about what I saw.” He explained the kinds of magicks the lords might use, and the tools needed for each, and the cost. He knew nonmagical counters for some of them, because the Marrakai, having lost their magicks early, had had to defend themselves from rival mages.

“It’s said the best defense is a pure heart, but none of us has one pure enough, if we even knew what the gods meant by it. Men were not made perfect, I say, and come nearest perfection as fools when they deny their mistakes.”

Gird nodded. “I’ve made plenty. It’s a rare young man sees that, but you have a rare father.”

“He’s—different.” Mesha walked on some strides before explaining that. “I knew that before I knew why; I could see it in the way others treated him. They’re afraid of him, although they have greater powers.”

“I hope for your peoples’ sake that you are different the same way,” said Gird.

Mesha looked at him, started to speak, and then, after several minutes of silence, tried again, his face turning red even as he spoke. “What is it like, being a peasant?” When Gird did not answer at once, he turned away, ears flaming, and hurried on. “The harpers sing of simple country joys, of the delights of the farm. My father’s people seem happy enough, but they would not tell me, would they? I asked my father, and he said go and try it—but my tutor brought me back.”

Gird thought at least part of Mesha’s curiosity was genuine interest, something he had had no chance to pursue in a place he was so well known. He looked, to see the young man staring at the ground as he strode along.

“I liked farming,” Gird said. “It’s hard work, but I grew up with it; I was good at it. Have you ever milked a cow? Swung a scythe? No? Well, it came natural to me. Digging’s no fun, but it has to be—plowing, planting, harvesting, all that’s the good part. Seeing Alyanya’s grace fill the baskets and barrels. Weather’s weather, the same for all. What’s bad comes from other men—from the lord taking more and more in field-fee every year, from death-fee and marriage-fee, from losing the right to gather herbs and firewood in the forest, all that. Having to take grain to his mill, instead of using our handmills, and having to buy ale from his brewery, instead of brewing our own. Going hungry, when there’s no need but to pay the taxes, seeing our children thin and sick, while his plump younglings ride by on fat ponies, trampling our fields.”

Gird looked over to see how Mesha was taking this; the young man’s face was sober, neither angry nor disapproving.

“Never think the troubles of peasants are little ones, Mesha. Hunger gnaws at you; the hunger of your family, of your children, hurts worse than your own. To feel the winter wind strike through ragged clothes, to have no fire in the house, and then the steward comes, smelling of meat and new-baked bread, to demand a special tax because the lord’s courting a lady, or his lady has had a child, that’s the bad part of it. Our lord, Kelaive, said peasants were lazy cowards: said it with his plump belly full of food we raised, with his well-fed soldiers around him, and we listened, shivering in a cold wind, or baked by summer sun. The steward said we should understand his greater problems. Greater than hunger? Greater than cold, than sickness, with healing herbs denied? Can there be worse than choosing which child shall have a crust of bread?” He could say no more; he felt the blood beating in his ears, the breath storming through his lungs.

“I’m sorry,” Mesha said.

“It’s all right,” said Gird, blindly walking on.

“It is not, and it is not right that I did not know.” Mesha sounded angry now, and not with Gird. “My father is a better man than that. I know it.” But Gird heard the uncertainty in his voice.

“I hope so,” he said, carefully making his voice light and easy. “As you will be.”

“I would tell you of things my father has done, but I see now that it is not enough, not for me. I must know how our people live. He has asked me before to take over a village, but I wouldn’t—”

Gird was surprised to find himself relaxed again, “You are young, Mesha. When I was young, I did not look for pain. I trained as a guard under that very steward—not looking, not seeing. My family—I thought they were fools, and I would show them all. After all, as a guard I ate their food, wore their clothes, brought money home—real coppers—to my father. And boasted of it. That’s what hurt worst, later—that I had boasted, while my sisters and brothers went hungry and I was full.”

“You—you do not hate me?” That was a boy’s voice, a boy’s naked desire to have an older man’s respect.

“No. I do not hate you, or even—by this time—Kelaive. I hate what made Kelaive greedy and cruel, what made my father cringe before even his steward, what has kept you—who would, I daresay, be just and generous if you could—from knowing what you need to know.” Gird smiled at the young man’s worried face. “Be at peace, Mesha, while you can; long life brings enough battles to every man’s door.”

Once he crossed the border into Finaarenis, Gird began arranging transportation for the promised pikes. It would have been easier to sneak them across country before the summer’s war erupted; the gnomes had advised him to go to Marrakai first. But he wasted little energy on regret. Before the leaves fell, all his pikes were over the border.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Meanwhile, his people told him, the war had hardly slowed for harvest. The king’s army had split, one column going to Blackbone Hill, where they found only ruin. The other had started west along the River Road, but when it reached the lands controlled by Sier Segrahlin, the sier had refused the king’s army passage. Rumor had it that the king and the sier would not mend their quarrel, whatever it had been, until an enemy army lay at the gates of Finyatha.

“We could arrange that,” said Gird, laughing.

“Could you?” Arranha, to Gird’s surprise, had come to Brightwater. He wore the same face Gird remembered, and seemed content to live with Gird’s army and to endure the nervous glances of the other yeomen who distrusted anyone who had been a lord.

“We must someday,” Gird said. “But having fought the sier, I would prefer not to do it again, if we can avoid it.”

Arranha smiled at him. “You are acquiring prudence, then? I thought he might give you trouble. If his powers last, if he is not killed by a rock falling on his head, or lung-fever—”

“Can he be killed so? When my bowmen aimed at lords, the arrows flew astray.”

“As I understand that form of magic—and it is not my own—one must know of the attack to defend against it, like a man holding up a shield over his head. If someone surprises him, he has only the strength of his bone.”

Arranha had brought additional reminders and suggestions from the gnomes. “Not free gifts of information, you understand. I was told that they consider this to fall under the original contract; they’re pleased with what you accomplished at Blackbone Hill.”

Gird snorted. “They damn nearly got us killed at Blackbone Hill; they didn’t tell me what they were doing, or that they’d been talking to the miners—”

Arranha laughed gently. “But you survived.”

Another surprise of that homecoming was Selamis. After Gird had scolded him for not letting go his aristocratic background, he had seemed to fit in better. Once more, he was almost unnoticeable. Gird had begun to make use of his special knowledge, taking it for granted that Selamis would know which lord was related to whom, and what the news the traders brought meant. But until he left for Marrakai’s domain, the other marshals had still been wary of Selamis. Several had come to him privately, and asked him not to make Selamis a marshal, or give him command. Gird had had no intention of doing that anyway. Now, however, they all seemed at ease with him. The marshals had discovered how handy it was to have someone able and willing to write and keep accounts—and someone whose face everyone knew, but who had no actual command. Selamis, Gird heard with some surprise, had stopped a street brawl—and he had patched up a quarrel between two of the newer marshals—and he had convinced the ranking merchants that the Brightwater yeoman-marshal was worth hearing.

“I thought you were crazy,” Ivis said, on Gird’s first night back. “A lord’s son, troublemaker in his village—I know, you said he wasn’t, but we had one in our village and you never did. Now—he’s not that bad. You know what Cob’s been calling him?”

Cob leaned over and punched Ivis. “Hush. Gird won’t approve.”

“What, then?”

“Luap,” said Ivis, snorting with glee. “You know—the lords’ own term for a bastard who can’t inherit. Rank but no power. Cob’s been calling him our luap.”

Gird looked hard at Cob, who had the grace to blush. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said defensively. “He’s the one taught me the word, and made a joke about it. Spends all his time with us high-ranking folk, marshals and you, and has no command of his own. So I took it up, and he just grinned.”

“Joke or not, I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” That came from the subject of discussion himself, who flung a leg over the bench, clapped Gird hard on the shoulder, and faced him squarely. “No one’s ever liked the name my father gave me: you said yourself Selamis was a strange name. I am a luap: my father’s bastard, and your trusted assistant in all but command. They’ll tell you I’ve practiced, and learned fighting, but I’m still best at keeping accounts.”

“Yes, but—” Gird shook his head, uneasy about something in the guileless, open face in front of him. If it didn’t bother the man, it should. But this was one argument he lost; he found that many of the yeomen had fallen into the habit of speaking of “the luap” or “that marshal’s luap.” With Gird’s return, and Selamis’s return to Gird’s side, it quickly became “Gird’s luap.” Gird still called him Selamis, though he sometimes slipped.

Later that fall, the lords changed their strategy. They had not been able to trap Gird’s army all summer, and he had inflicted sharp losses on them. So they turned their attention ever more strongly to the land which supplied him with soldiers and supplies, forcing the evacuation of farming villages, burning them out if they resisted, stripping the countryside of resources. They had armed soldiers supervise the harvest, after which the fields were burnt; for hands of days the sky was streaked with smoke, and ash dusted travelers. Livestock they drove to the lords’ fortified towns or dwellings, and any they could not confine under guard were slaughtered to feed the soldiers.

This work proceeded at different rates in various parts of the kingdom. Some lords were loathe to lose the produce of villages they had established, and counted instead on quartering more of their own soldiers among them. Some did not have the resources to reduce or move more than one or two villages that autumn. Those that survived could choose to try escape, or wait and hope that the coming spring would change things. But Gird found more and more refugees wandering, some seeking him and some looking for any safe place to spend the winter.

His own force controlled the valley lying south and east of Brightwater. This provided a large grain harvest—large, that is, until he measured it against his increasing needs. The town of Brightwater, all the little villages, his army—the grain would feed so many only if it were carefully managed, and by his own laws (he felt the teeth of a joke in this) he could not seize it. Some, of course, would not trust him, and yield it willingly. His own followers had sometimes less patience than he did; he found himself scolding his own as often as the others about the need for fairness, the evils inherent in bullying.

“It’s not the same thing,” Ivis argued, one dank late-autumn day, when a cold rain had blackened the falling leaves to a silent dark carpet. “If we’re fair in distribution—in famine law—and all share equally, then it’s not bullying. Bullying benefits the taker—”

“So it does—and so it does here.” Gird blew his nose noisily on a bit of dirty fleece and rubbed it on his sleeve. His head was pounding, his ears felt full of water, and he was sure this was more than a fall chill. He could not feel this sick with a mere chill. “It benefits us—the takers—because then we have more to distribute fairly, and our own share—as well as others—is larger.”

“But it benefits everyone.”

“No. Not the ones who lose—who have larger shares now. Our way is right, Ivis, and better than theirs—I know that. But part of our way is how we do what we do, not just what we do.”

“If we all starve it won’t do them any good—”

“We aren’t starving yet. Besides, while I won’t bully our people, I don’t have anything against taking from our enemies.”

“I thought you said we weren’t ready to assault their fortified places.”

“A grain caravan isn’t fortified.” Gird did not bother to explain, the way his throat was hurting, that he’d suggested to outlying bartons that they attack grain caravans. Some of them were successful—successful, too, at running off herds being moved from the deserted villages. More and more bartons began even bolder actions: ambushing any guard unit unwary enough to camp outside walls, or travel carelessly along the roads and trails. Clashes between small groups of rebels and small units of guards soon convinced the guards to move only in larger numbers.

Winter snows had always meant the end of military actions, but this winter brought no peace, only the slowing of movement. Gird, struggling to codify his laws with the help of Selamis and Arranha in Brightwater, sifted the reports from distant villages. Here a barton had ambushed a lord and two hands of guards, killing all of them and leaving that domain open; there two bartons had fought off a brigand attack, only to fall to the soldiers who came onto the scene when the battle was almost over. The merchants and craftsmen of Tarrho, a town about the size of Brightwater near the eastern border, had decided to overthrow their lord and declare their freedom—then the servants and laborers had rioted, overthrowing the merchants in their turn. Tarrho’s small barton had tried to bring order, but had the trust of no faction; after bitter fighting that left many dead and the city without supplies of food, brigands rode in, looted everything, and set it afire. The king’s messengers declared it was the fault of Gird and his rebels; the barton’s survivors, who arrived in Brightwater before Midwinter, explained what had really happened.

“A good many of them brigand bands claims to be your yeoman, Gird,” the yeoman-marshal said. “Nobody knows, for sure—I mean, if they aren’t one of yours already, they don’t. So they’re afraid of your name, and the bartons.”

“That’s why we need to have our rules known,” Gird said. “If they know we have rules, and what they are, and they see that we stick to them, then perhaps they’d trust us.”

“Maybe.” The yeoman-marshal did not look convinced. Gird peered at him.

“What do you think it would take?”

“Well—sir—I think they need something to see. We can say we have rules, but that’s not enough, not for city folk used to looking up law in a book.”

“Which is why I’m writing it down,” said Gird, slapping the table and jostling Selamis’s tools. He pointed at the younger man. “This is Selamis.” He still would not say my luap. “He writes a better hand than I do, one anyone can read.”

“That should help,” the yeoman-marshal said, craning his head to see what was on the top sheet.

“It’s very simple,” Gird said. “I told him, we have to get it all into no more than four hands of rules—if people can count their fingers and toes, they’ll be able to remember them.”

And gradually, copy by copy, the first simple laws that later became the Code of Gird spread from barton to barton, even into the towns. Of necessity, these rules were suitable for a time of war; Gird could not possibly work out all the laws needed for trade and commerce in peacetime. But he was sure of his intent: cruelty was always wrong, and always harmed the community. Honesty and fair dealing were good, and helped it.

In the bitter cold and deep snows of winter, no army could march far. Stragglers came to Brightwater and the villages where Gird had some of his army encamped—starving, ragged, sometimes dying of cold even as they staggered to a fire. Gird himself traveled from one camp to another as best he could, trying to make sure that food and warmth were shared fairly among them. He knew, without needing the gnomes’ advice, that he would have to win in this coming year—at least he would have to control most of the farmland, so that his people could grow food again. Otherwise his army would starve, and then the lords would win without a fight.

Food stores dropped lower and lower. His yeomen did not grumble much, seeing Gird’s belt as tight as theirs. But the soft cries of hungry children pierced him as if they were all his own. He hardly saw Rahi or Pidi, these days; Girnis had disappeared into the dust of war and he knew nothing of her. But the children in the camps were always with him, a reminder of what he was fighting for, and what would be lost if he failed.

It was in the first days of coming spring, uncertain weather that could bring thaw or hard freeze from day to day, that he took one of his cohorts out to seek food from one of the villages that had promised it the year before. They marched four days, south and east down the valley, across a ridge, and down another valley. Gird had sent a runner ahead. But instead of a yeoman marshal, or the barton, come to meet them, he found the entire village standing grim and unwelcoming in a snow-swept meadow nearby. They would not, they said, give anything—not one stone’s weight of grain or handbasket of dried fruit. Begone, they said, before you bring the lords’ wrath down on us. Gird nodded, and looked them up and down individually.

“What it comes down to, you don’t trust me.”

The cluster of ragged men and women said nothing. He hadn’t expected them to admit it. No one met his eyes. Behind him, his cohort, even more ragged than the peasants from the village. He could hear their breathing, the rasp of pebbles under their feet when they shifted in place. He could feel, as if it were a hot iron, their rapt attention on the back of his neck. His own belly knotted with hunger; he knew theirs were empty too.

Gird tried again. “You agreed with us last year, you remember that?” He stared right at the headwoman, who stared at her feet. But she nodded, slowly. “Yes—you said you’d share your harvest with us, feed us, to help us win against the lords—”

“You didn’t win.” That voice was bitter, but low, from the back of the group. Gird could not tell which dark-wrapped head it had been, or whether man or woman.

“We haven’t won yet,” said Gird. “But we’re a lot closer—Lady’s tears, did you think it would be all one battle? We told you—”

“ ’Twas a bad winter,” said the headwoman, still avoiding his eye. “And them folokai got after flocks, near took the whole lamb crop.”

“Tell ’em all, Mara,” said the same bitter voice, louder this time.

“The lords come,” the woman said. Now she looked up, and Gird could see a fresh scar across her face, the mark of a barbed lash that had almost taken her eye. “They said we had to have more than we could show. They said we’d been giving it to rebels, and they said they’d have no more of it. They took a child from every hearth—they come here, and where was you? Away, is all we know. No help. Help for help, that’s what we say, and you’ve given no help.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gird. Now all the faces looked at him, all scarred one way or another, all bitter. All betrayed. He wanted to say It’s not my fault, but knew that wouldn’t help. They had protected many of the villages, in the past year: he thought of all those skirmishes and battles, the cost of it to his army. This year, given supplies enough, they’d control more territory, and fewer villages would suffer. But here they had not protected the people, and the people had changed their minds.

“They come oftener,” the woman went on. “Check the fields, check the stores. Leave us bare enough for life, they do, and destroy the rest. Threaten the fields, if we give aught to rebels.”

Could he promise they would not come again? Did he have the strength yet? Gird tried to think, but he wasn’t sure. And a false promise would be worse than no promise. And if he told them how close he was to moving his lines on another league or so to the hills, would these betray him to their lords? Were they lost to him entirely?

“Gird?” That was Selamis, as usual. He had, no doubt, come up with some clever idea for saving the situation. Gird wished he could be properly grateful. He waved the man forward. Selamis muttered “The Marrakai gold?” in his ear. Well, it was a clever idea. Probably not what the Marrakai agent had intended the gold to be used for, but it might work. Although—if they went buying food, to replace what he bought, their lords would surely notice that, too.

But he had to try. His mouth dried, thinking of all possible consequences. “We have a bit of gold we found—”

“Found!” That was not a promising tone. Someone spat juicily; it splatted on the rock a bare handspan from Gird’s boots. “They told us you brigands’d have gold—and what they’d do if we come to market with it. You’re no better than they are, that’s a fact. Take our food for your army—they do the same. Both raids us, neither protects—not them from you, nor you from them, and there’s not a hair of difference.”

He could not, even hungry as he was, drive these folk farther. Like it or not, they were the reason for his fighting, and he could not harm them—yet. Could they use the gold at some market? One of them might pass for a trader, perhaps—someone robbed on the road? That was common enough. Would that pesky priest wreathe his magicks for them, make someone safe in the towns? He might, but he would want something for it, and Gird did not yet trust him.

“We’re not the same, and I think you know it. But you’ve had more trouble than you could stand; I understand that. We won’t take it by force, but you think of this—one child from each hearth now—do you think that will satisfy them? I lost more than that, before I broke free. You need not be as stupid as I was.”

“You lost children?” Others shushed that voice, someone in a leather cloak, but Gird answered it, counting them on his fingers.

“My first two sons died of fever; the lord refused us herb-right in the wood. My wife lost two babes young, one from hunger and one from fever. My eldest daughter they raped; killed her husband. The babe died unborn. My youngest son they struck down; he lives. Another daughter they struck down, breaking her arm; I know not if she lives or dies. And my brother’s children, that I’d taken in: two of them dead, by the lords’ greed. And that’s children. I lost friends, my parents, my brother. You ask yourselves: if they can take one child, will they stop there? Will all your submission, all your obedience, get you peace and enough food? Has it ever worked? You can sit here and let them take you one by one, or you can decide to fight back.”

And he turned, glared at his own unhappy men, and marched them away. No one called him back, but he was not surprised to find three of the villagers following his cohort when they had gone some distance—and ready to join him.

Still, such incidents made him touchy. He was trying to stretch a small bowl of gruel one day, when two of his marshals reported that the villages to which they’d applied had refused to give or sell supplies, on the grounds that they’d been raided by brigands. His patience snapped.

“I am so sick of this!” It came out louder than he meant, and he’d meant it loud enough. Everyone fell silent, watching him, which only made him angrier. He lowered his voice to a growl, all too aware that his growl was audible farther than some men’s shouts. “All this dickering, like a farmer trying to work down the price of a bull. All this haggling with thieves and bullies, craft guilds and village councils. Any idiot should be able to see what we’re doing, and the worth of it. You’d think they liked being yoked and driven by the magelords, the way they kick and snap when we free them. The Lady of Peace herself would be driven to fury, the way they are. By the gods, we’re trying to make them free, and make things fair, and they won’t see it!”

“We might as well be brigands,” said Herrak. It was not the first time he’d said something like that, and Gird disliked the whine in his voice. “The way they are, what difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to us,” said Gird. “There were brigands before; they never helped the farmers. If we’re only robbers, all should be against us. What I can’t see is why they don’t see the difference.”

“We need to win,” said Selamis, smiling. He had the honeysweet lilt to his voice that Gird hated; it worked on the crowds, most times, but it was not plainspeaking.

“What do you think, I should go to the brigands and recruit them?” He meant it as a jest, but the quality of the silence told him the others had thought of that before. Seriously. Selamis was paring his nails with a knife; he gave Gird that sideways look that Gird disliked.

“Some of them might be more like us than you think. Leaderless farmers thrown out of their villages—isn’t that what you started with?”

Cob sat up straight and glared at Selamis. “We were not brigands. We may have been disorganized, lazy, filthy, and incompetent, but we were not brigands.”

Selamis smiled at him. “That’s what I meant. But your lord called you brigands, I’d wager.” Cob was not mollified; he glowered at Selamis. But Ivis nodded.

“He did. And maybe—you were good with us, Gird, and if you found even another cohort by full spring—”

Gird mastered his anger with an effort. Late winter had always been the worst time for quarrels, even in the villages: empty bowls and enforced idleness made everyone irritable. “I suppose you have a particularly saintly brigand in mind for me to recruit?”

“I can’t promise saintliness, but these last two villages both claim that the brigands near them muster a cohort or two. And there’s a man who can guide you to their camp.”

“I’ll think about it.” He would have thought about it between other things for a long time, but the next day a stranger came bearing an offer—written, Gird was surprised to see—from that very brigand captain. He had been a soldier, he said, and turned his coat when the war began. He had much to offer Gird, and would meet with him—in his camp. Gird talked to Arranha. The old priest shook his head and spread his hands.

“You put your life in the hands of Sier Segrahlin, Gird, and came out of that alive; if you want to chance this brigand I have no reason to think you’ll do worse. Will you take a cohort of your own?”

“No. We don’t have the food now to move them that far, and have them look like anything but starvelings. That won’t impress him or his men. I’ll go alone, and wear my best boots.”

“You might like to consider something.” The big man’s face was dark with more than weather; ancient dirt outlined every crease, and his heavy dark hair was greasy. But the dagger with which he was paring his filthy nails was spotless, its edge gleaming.

“I might,” said Gird, accepting the dirty clay pot one of the other men offered without enthusiasm. Gods only knew what kind of brew would be in it. He sniffed as unobtrusively as possible. The big man’s shrewd eyes missed nothing.

“If you want ale, we’ve got it. That’s just water—spring water, from over there.” His head jerked, and Gird’s eyes followed, to a glisten of water among rank weeds across the clearing. Gird sipped, cautiously. It tasted like spring water, untainted by any herbs he knew.

“You’re the peasants’ new general, I hear,” said the big man. He waved his hand, and a woman in a striped skirt, a pattern Gird had never seen, brought over a wooden tray. On it were a loaf and two wooden bowls half-full of stew. The stew had slopped onto the tray, making a gray puddle, but it smelled good. “Here,” the man said, breaking the loaf and offering both chunks to Gird. Gird took the smaller; the man frowned, but passed him one of the bowls.

“I’m not a general,” Gird said. He nibbled the bread: coarse and sour, but no worse than his own baking.

“General, captain, leader, whatever you want to call it. You’re commanding them now—”

Gird nodded. No use hiding it, and by rumor this one would never tell the nobles.

“You need troops.” The big man dipped his own chunk of bread in the stew, and stuffed his mouth full, then bit it off savagely. “I have troops.”

Gird looked around at the men huddled at the cookfires, being served by the two women. “These?”

“Among others. More than you have, peasant general.” The words were slurred with chewing.

“Then you want to join us?”

The man swallowed that mouthful, took another, and finished it before answering. “You need us. I think you want us.”

Gird dipped his own bread into the stew and took a large bite. Better meat than he’d tasted since spring. “Good stew,” he said. The man frowned at him, but said nothing. Gird looked past his shoulder at the others, and found eyes staring back at him that quickly looked away. He put his bowl down, and leaned forward, fists on knees.

“I need people who want to make a better land.”

The man’s eyes widened, and then he laughed, an explosive gust that sprayed spittle an armspan. “Better land! What kind of talk is that? Is that what you peasants think you’re doing?”

“If it’s not, we’re nothing but outlaws.”

“And you think that’s so terrible? Simyits’ fingers, Gird, we’ve been outlaws so long most of us don’t know where we come from, and do we look so starveling to you?” The man pushed up his sleeve, and squeezed a meaty forearm. “See this? Show me the peasant with as much meat on his bones—not you, not anyone you know. Besides, you’re all outlaws: the lords have a bounty on you, same as us.”

Gird was aware of ears stretched long to hear their words. “We’re outlaws because we had no choice. Because the magelords’ law gave us no way to live within it. Given a fair chance, I don’t know many as ’ud live outside the law. All I ever heard of outlaws, they was mostly men driven off their lands by some greedy lord.”

The man hawked and spat, not too near Gird’s feet. “Aye, it’s unfairness drives most men to the woods. Some of us was stolen away young, or born to free fathers. But we’re all free now, that’s the thing. Free, and with no wish to put our necks under the yoke again.”

“The magelords’ yoke?”

“Any yoke.” The man spat again, this time a hairs-breadth nearer. Gird thought it was deliberate. “See here, Gird, I’ll be straight with you. We’re free, and we want to stay free. You talk of a better land: just what do you mean? A better king? A better tax gatherer?”

Some of the others had come nearer. Gird had noticed before that they were well-fed; now he could see the glint of weapons in their hands. “No king,” he said. “The magelords brought kings to our land; we had none before.”

“Who told you that?” It was a long, lanky redhead well behind his leader.

“The gnomes,” he answered. He would have gone on, but the collective intake of breath stopped him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You deal with gnomes?” The big man sounded both angry and afraid.

He was not sure how to answer. Would they understand that bargain he’d made, or would they fear gnomish incursions? “I learned of old times from the gnomes,” he said finally. “And of law.”

The big man’s eyes slewed to left and right, meeting others and picking up control as visibly as a man picks up the reins of horses in harness. Gird felt a cold draft down his back. Something he’d said had changed their minds—and not for the better.

“I would not call it better for the rule of gnomes or gnomish men,” said the leader.

“They seek no rule in human lands,” said Gird. “They abide by their laws, which forbid that.”

“But you learned law of them—and from them learned what you would do to make the land better?”

“It’s obvious enough what would make it better. Honest dealing between one man and another, one craft and another. Fair judges. Taxes there must be, but fair, and no more than a man can pay and still live decently. From them I learned what is needed to make such things exist, what rules groups need.”

The big man’s teeth gleamed as he grinned. “Fair dealing, eh? And who’s to say what’s fair, with no king? The gnomes?”

Gird shook his head, pushing away his doubts. This was familiar ground, at least, and perhaps they would listen. “Not the gnomes; they have their law, for themselves. We need a law, a rule, for us—for all of us. We decide what’s fair, all of us, in council—as our forefathers did, in the old days of steading and hearthing.” Talking fast, he explained more of the plan he and his friends had worked out. But he knew soon enough that they listened with only idle interest. When he finished, the leader was shaking his head.

“That’s fine enough for farmers, and village bakers. Do you think the finesmiths will sit elbow-to-elbow with stinking tanners and pig farmers mired to the knees? And what about us? We have none of the crafts you mentioned. What do you think such as we will do, in your ‘better land’? Do you really think I’ll take up plowing and reaping, or Pirig will return to herding sheep?”

“Why not?” asked Gird, though he was sure he knew. “It’s honest work, and without the magelords’ interferences—”

“Because I’m not what you call an honest man,” said the big man, leaning toward him. “You want honest, you go to the gnomes, and much good it will do us! Should I push a plow or swing a scythe, when my skill is with sword and handaxe? Will your better land have a place for soldiers?”

Gird raised his eyebrows. “Soldiers? Is that what you are?”

“Close enough. Strong men with weapons: call us brigands or soldiers, it matters not. Soldiers are but brigands in uniform.”

Gird bit back the angry reply he wanted to give; this was no time to lose his temper, or his head might go with it. “Some are,” he said in as mild a tone as he could manage. The other man sank back onto his rock. “But if life’s to be better for all, our soldiers must be more.”

“Your soldiers! Your half-starved peasants who know less about swordplay than the worst fighter in my band.”

Gird smiled at him, with clear intent. “If your swordplay’s so skilled, then why haven’t you freed yourself of the militia’s scourge, these past years?”

“It’s not all swordplay!” yelled someone from the back of the crowd that had now gathered.

“Exactly,” said Gird to that unseen voice. “Fighting a war’s more than swordplay; my peasants may be clumsy with blades, but they know that much. You’ve tried your way, and it didn’t work—now you want my help—”

“No!” The big man had jumped up; something had pricked him there, something Gird might use if he could figure out what it was. “I don’t need anyone’s help! We could sit here, fattening on the spoils of your war, peasant, preying on both sides. I offered you help, help you need: men and weapons. I don’t need your pious words, your gnomish law.”

“And what did you want, in exchange for your help?”

“Only what you give others who bring in troops for you: that you name me marshal—even high marshal—along with those others.”

“I think not,” said Gird, and bent down to pick up his bowl. As he’d expected, the big man came at him, seeing a clear target. As he’d planned, the bowl of cooling stew went into the big man’s face, and he tucked and rolled away from the knife. His feet jammed into the big man’s belly, and then he was up, balanced, fist cocked, as the big man choked and gasped on the ground. He kicked the man’s knife away. The other men had started forward, but now ringed about him, uncertain.

“Soldiers must trust each other,” said Gird loudly. “I must trust my marshals, and my marshals must trust the yeoman marshals, and those trust their yeomen—or nothing works in battle.”

“I’ll kill you,” growled the man on the ground, between gasps.

“Get up and try,” said Gird. Someone snickered, in the crowd, and he felt that others felt the same way. But the ring surrounded him; he could not have escaped if he’d tried. He didn’t try, and they came no closer, more curious than angry.

The big man finally clambered up, his dirty face grim. “You—you should have killed me when you had the chance, fool!”

“It’s not my way to knife a helpless man who is not my enemy.”

“I am now.” said the big man. He glared around the ring. “You—why didn’t you hold him?”

“Why?” asked the same redhead who’d spoken before. “You started it. Take him yourself; he might hurt me.” More chuckles, this time more open. The big man flushed.

“So I will, then, and you’ll miss your fun after—I’ll let Fargi take his skin. As for you, Gird, I hear they call you Strongarm, not rocktoe: if you have strength in that arm, use it.”

“Aye,” said other voices. “No more wrestlers’ tricks: fight Arbol manlike, fist to fist.”

Stupid, Gird thought, remembering the gnomes’ acid commentary on human brawling. But stupid or not, his one chance of surviving this ill-chanced venture lay in the strength of his arms and the hardness of his fists. The big man crouched, then rushed him. Gird sidestepped, jabbed hard into the man’s ribs, and took a glancing blow on his own. So that worked—if he ever saw the gnomish warmaster again, he’d have to tell him. If you must use fists, Ketak had said, learn to use them well. The big man was throwing a flurry of blows at him now, blows Gird took on his own arms, keeping them away from his face. His own punches were landing on shoulders, arms, and body; the other man was quick enough to protect his own face, ducking behind his fists like a river-crab behind its claws. He heard the other men mutter, call encouragement to their chief; he tried not to hear any of that.

Then the other man kicked out, catching Gird on the shin. He dropped his guard for a moment, and took a hard blow to the side of his head. For some reason, that made him laugh: the memory of his father once telling him he’d be safe in a brawl, having a head made of solid stone. He saw on the other man’s face surprise and a touch of fear at his laugh—well, so he should be afraid. For all the big man’s extra weight, he was no stronger, his shoulders not quite as broad—and he had eaten all his supper, and taken a kick to the belly.

Gird let himself grin. The man himself had chosen fists, when he might have skewered Gird with a sword—did he not realize he had chosen Gird’s best weapon? The other man gave back, foot-length by footlength, as Gird hammered him. He hardly felt the return blows; he had not had such a wholly justified excuse for pounding someone in a long time. In battle he had to be thinking of the whole, had to be looking ahead—in training he had to be watchful that he did not cripple one of his own. But now, here, he could let out all the frustration and rage of the past year, and whether he lived or died, he would have the satisfaction of pulping that arrogant face that thought itself too good to be a peasant.

Now the other man had given up attack, and was trying to defend himself from Gird’s blows. Gird drove him back with two, three, four short jabs to the body, and then loosed his favorite swing, all his weight and shoulder behind it, to crack the other’s jaw and drop him like a loose stone. The big man went down, twitched, and lay still. Gird flexed his hands, and sucked a cut. Nothing broken, though they’d be stiff in the morning. As his temper cooled, he could feel the lumps on his ribs that would be bruises, and the throbbing of his kicked shin.

The mutters around him now were awed. He looked deliberately from face to face, wondering if they’d attack him, knife him. He would not have a chance against so many. But although two knelt beside their leader, and someone brought a bucket of water, the ring widened, giving him space. He heard a complaint, quickly squelched, about a wager, and realized that some of them had gambled on the fight—he should have expected it, but he hadn’t.

“Is that how you won your army, then?” asked one of the men. Gird shook his head.

“No. But I find it useful sometimes. My—Da used to say the only way to get an idea into some heads was to break them open and let the light in.” Open laughter now, a little uneasy but genuine amusement. He felt slightly guilty for the lie, his father having been Alyanya’s servant to the end, but his instinct said that letting these men know he’d ever been in the militia would be a mistake.

“An’ now?”

Gird looked at the speaker, licked his knuckles again, and said, “Now what? He tried to take me, and I flattened him—that’s between us. There’s nothing between you and me unless you make it so—are you challenging?”

“Nay, not I. What I meant—d’you claim command of us?”

“He can’t!” said someone behind him. Gird did not turn.

“No,” he said slowly. “That’s not what we fought about. You’ll choose your own leader—for all I know, you’ll choose him again.”

“But about joining your army—”

Gird shrugged. “You heard what I said. I’m looking for men as want a better land later, and those that’ll be honest yeomen now. Those that do can come with me; those that don’t had better not. We may be skinny and hungry, but we do know how to deal with those as try to stick a knife in our back or steal from us.” He nudged the fallen leader with his toe.

“We could kill you now,” muttered one of the men just at the edge of his sight. Gird laughed, and saw the surprise on their faces.

“Killing’s easy—you could kill me, and the magelords likely will. So then what? Killing me won’t get you into my army. Make up your own minds; I’m going home.” He turned, and stared hard at the men who had crowded close behind him. Like dogs, they wilted under a direct stare, and shuffled, making a gap for him to walk through. His back itched; it would take only a single thrown knife, a single sword-thrust. But he could not have fought his way out anyway. Behind him he heard a sudden argument, curses, and more blows ending in yelps. Someone else was taking over, he guessed, wondering if they’d come after him. He walked on, into the trees, not looking back. Looking back would do no good.

He had gone some distance when he heard running behind him on the trail. Gird slipped aside, crouching in the undergrowth to crawl back down parallel to the trail, and saw four men and the woman in the striped skirt jogging along. All were armed; the first watched the trail keenly, and stopped them about where Gird had left the trail.

“He can’t be that far ahead of us,” said one.

“Wait—I don’t see—”

Gird stood up; they heard the rustling leaves and turned, clearly startled and alarmed.

“Why did you follow me?”

“We—I—wanted to join you,” said the first man.

“I heard you let women join,” said the woman.

Gird stepped out onto the trail, warily enough. “I do, if they’re willing to take orders like anyone else. But we have rules you might not like.”

“There’s better than him,” said the first man, jerking his chin in the direction of the brigands’ camp. “I’d rather fight than steal.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Spring rains that year delayed everyone’s movements. Gird drew and redrew his battle maps, revising his plans over and over again. His cohorts were most effective as he’d used them before, striking swiftly against small concentrations of the enemy, where they could outnumber them and control the surrounding country. But if the supply situation stayed as bad as it was, he could not do that another year; he would have to confront the lords’ armies directly, win and control larger areas, to ensure the safety of food-producing lands and those who farmed them. Should he do that early, or late, after wearing down the lords’ armies with raids? What would it cost him, in unsown grain, in next year’s harvest?

In some areas, the lords were not allowing their peasants to plow and plant; in others, the farmers were guarded by soldiers. Gird shook his head at that. Why would they think he’d raid during planting time? His own forces protected an area in the Brightwater valley; over the winter he had urged all the farmers to form bartons and learn drill. Most of them had. Now his army protected them during planting, and he hoped they could protect themselves during the fighting season.

He began moving his army eastward, one cohort at a time, cloaked in the rains and leaving less trail than if he moved everyone at once. Ivis had found a good shelter two days’ journey away, overhanging ledges that opened into a sonorous cavern. Gird himself went back and forth with the first two, then spent several days in Brightwater, settling accounts with Marrakai gold and hoping the town would be there when he got back. If he got back. Then he headed out with the last cohort, noticing that despite all his care, the tracks left by the others were as clear as any map ever drawn, one brown scrawl of mud after another across the new spring grass.

Roads, he thought to himself. We’ll need good roads, when it’s over. What they needed now was good luck, the gods’ gift of miracles; remembering the other times he’d wanted miracles, and what he’d actually received, he was not willing to ask. He felt unusually grumpy; he had banged his knee hard on the doorpost going out of the barracks, and it still throbbed. The damp raw air seemed to bite into the bruise, rather than soothe it. He hawked and spat, catching an early fly; that cheered him.

By nightfall, he felt he’d been marching for half a year. His feet were damp and cold; he pulled off his worn boots and pushed his feet near the fire, rubbing them. A fine drizzle hissed in the flames; smoke crawled along the ground, making them all choke and cough. Gird thought longingly of the barracks in Brightwater—even that merchant’s house, with the brazier in the center of the table, where several men could sit around it and talk. He would never think like a merchant, but he had gotten over some of his first astounded contempt. He told himself to be glad he had a good leather cloak; time was when the drips off the trees would have wet his bare head. But it didn’t work. He was cold, stiff, damp, and without reason homesick for his own small cottage, with his own fire on the hearth, and his own family around him. He said nothing; the others were quiet as well, on such a dismal evening.

The next day’s march brought them to the rock shelter and cavern, where most of his army was gathered. He plunged again into the familiar problems: how large to make the jacks, how many sacks of grain and dried fruit did they have and how long it would last, where the nearest sources of supply were. He was more than ready to pull off his boots and stretch out near one of the fires for a rest when Selamis insisted that he had to speak to Gird privately.

Gird followed his assistant deeper into the cave, annoyed once more at Selamis’s fidgits. They didn’t have time for such nonsense.

“Here.” The younger man’s voice, hardly above a whisper, halted him.

“I’m here,” growled Gird, trying for patience. “What is it now?”

Instead of answer, soundless light answered him. Between Selamis’s clutched fingers shone a rosy glow, steady as daylight. His eyes glittered in it, squinted almost shut. Gird, through his own shock, saw the taut lines of his face, the tears that trickled down those quivering cheeks. He looked down, terrified, at his own hands, but they were outlined only from without, by Selamis’s light.

“What—” His voice broke, and he swallowed, tried again. “What is that—what did you find? Where?”

“In me.” The man’s hands spread a little; the light glowed steadily between them, sourceless, rose-gold: the light of spring evenings hazed with pollen, of autumn dawns among the turning leaves. Or of friendly firelight, welcoming. Gird shuddered, and fought back a rising terror.

“You’re a—a mage?” And almost simultaneously, rage shook him. You lied to me, he thought. But Selamis’s face showed more fear than even he felt, fear not of him, but of the light.

“I don’t know.” The man spread his hands farther apart, sighed, and the light vanished. Far back up the passage, Gird could hear Raheli arguing still about how many onions should go in tonight’s kettle—so it was still the same world, the same time. “I told you,” the voice went on in the darkness, “that I am a lord’s bastard. But I didn’t tell you—”

What this time, Gird wondered, remembering the many things his so-called luap had not told him until circumstances forced it. Would the man never find truth, and cease his lying?

“I was bred for magic.” It came out in one gulping rush. Gird said nothing, listened to Selamis’s breathing as it slowed again. “They do that now—”

“I asked you about that,” said Gird softly. It made sense, now. “Go on,” he said, more gently than he might have a moment before.

“I—I had none they could find,” his luap said. “That’s why they sent me away—the real reason.”

“You know,” Gird began as delicately as his nature allowed, “if you’d just tell me the whole damn truth to start with, we wouldn’t have these little problems.”

“I know. But if you’d known—”

“Damn it, I’m not a monster!” His voice echoed off the walls, most monster-like, and then he had to laugh, muffling it as best he could. “Oh lad, lad, you are too old for these tricks. I can believe your heritage of blood, true enough, the way you never trust outright—”

“Trust is dangerous,” muttered Selamis.

“And you trusted me with this.” As always, the rage and mirth had passed quickly; he felt a pressure to reassure this frightened man, a certainty that he must be saved for them.

“It has to be the magic,” Selamis said, his voice now steady but very soft. “But I don’t know—”

“When?” asked Gird, rather than let him entangle himself in his uncertainties.

“Two days ago, when we came. Raheli asked me to come back here and see if anything threatened. I fell over a ledge, just beyond here, and suddenly felt I’d fallen a long way. It was dark—darker than this—utterly dark inside and out, despair and grief. What I fear in death, only worse.”

Gird grunted. Darker than this end of the cave, after that uncanny light had left it, he could not imagine. Fear? They all feared, but Selamis was braver than he knew. He had a storyteller’s gift of tongue, that was all, that let him talk himself frightened.

“Then I called on Esea,” the luap went on. Darkness pressed on Gird’s shoulders, so hard he nearly gasped. Esea! Was he so much a lord’s son he still reached for their god in his trouble? “And the Lady—both of them. Light came to my mind—not as memory of light, but light itself, within.” Gird felt the hairs prickling on his arms and neck as the luap talked. “Silver as starlight, cool. Then under the silver light flowers grew in a wreath, but colored as in sunlight, sweet-smelling: the midsummer’s wreath, fresh-woven. But the light was silver yet.” Gird’s eyes filled with tears, and he felt them hot on his cheeks. Not magic, then, but the gods’ gift? It had to be. “Then the light came, in my clenched hands, just as I showed you, and in the light I could see the symbols on the rock.”

“The what?” Gird muted that roar even as it came out. Again the light bloomed in front of him, the same serene rosy glow, but this time the luap’s face was calm.

“Come on. I’m supposed to show you. They said tell Gird.”

“They?” He didn’t expect an answer, and got none, following the luap over that ledge of rock to a bell-shaped chamber in the cave. In its center was a smooth polished floor, inlaid with brilliant patterns. Something glittered there, as if faceted, but the light was too dim to make it clear. Selamis stepped around it, and Gird followed, eyeing it doubtfully. Selamis stopped before a recess in one side of the chamber.

“There,” he said.

The light in his hands brightened. Gird looked uncertainly at the wall, as the designs became slowly visible, then glowed of their own light.

“It’s something about elves,” Selamis said, when Gird said nothing. “And something about the rockfolk, and something about the gods—”

“And men,” said Gird, tracing one line with a blunt thumb, for he did not put the pointing finger, the shame finger, on anything that might be sacred. Something rang in his head, a sound he later thought of as the ringing of a great bone bell, his skull rapped by the god’s tongue—but at that moment he was conscious only of the pressure, the vibration shaking wit and body alike.

When it ended, he was flat on his belly on the cold stone, eyes pressed shut, and he heard Selamis’s equally shaken breathing nearby. He opened his eyes deliberately, rubbed his palms on the stone, and then over his head.

“You might have told me you were the king’s bastard,” he said, mildly enough he thought. Selamis had already come to a stiff crouch, the light still glowing between his hands.

“I should have.” It was the first time he hadn’t made an excuse. Whatever had happened had affected him, too. “I—I should have.”

“You could be the heir. Bastardy’s no bar, not with magic.”

“I—don’t have that much—”

“They should never have let you live.” Gird heaved himself up, shook his head, and glanced cautiously at the graven designs. Now he could barely tell what they were, interlacing curves and patterns that meant more than any ordinary man could understand. Or should. He looked over at that mysterious pattern on the floor. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Huh. Bring your light, can you?” The light came, and Selamis with it, almost affronted to have Gird interested in something else. He could make nothing of it, even with more light and finally shrugged. “Well. Whatever that is, now we know what you are—do we?”

“King’s bastard. Outcast. Light-maker.” Selamis’s voice was bitter.

“Do you want that throne, king’s bastard?” The growl in Gird’s voice made the chamber resonate. “Is that what it is, you’d like a peasant army to put you on your father’s throne, let you rule instead?”

“No!” That howl, too, resonated, a reverberating shriek that seemed to pierce the stone itself. “No. I want—I just want—”

“Safety.” Now it was contempt that shook the air.

“There is none.” A mere whisper, but Gird heard it. He looked across the comfortable, cozy light into a face that had grown into its years. Almost.

“Right you are, lad. No safety, no certainty, and hell to pay if the others find out who you are. Is that what you see? Or do you also have the foreseeing magic?”

“Some, yes. Since the light came.”

He would not ask. Pray to the gods for favor, yes, and make the sacrifices his people had always made, but he would not ask the future. That was for the wild folk, the crazy horse-riders, and the cool arrogant lords who had no need to ask, because they knew.

“I will not be what he is,” Selamis said. “I renounce my own name, and name myself luap—I swear I will not inherit that throne, that way, that habit of being—” It sounded like a vow to more than Gird, and Gird did not interrupt. “I am no true heir; I renounce it.” But the light glowed on, even when he spread his hands wide.

Gird waited, then into the silence said, “Lad, you can no more renounce what the gods give—that magic—than I can the strength of my arm or the knowledge of drill that forced me into this in the first place. I’ve been that road; it turns back on you.”

“I will not be the king!” shouted the luap, eyes wide.

“No. You will not be the king. But you cannot divide the king’s blood from your blood, or the king’s magic from your mind. You have only the choice of use, not the choice of substance.”

“What can I do?”

Gird’s belly rumbled, and he had a strong desire to hawk and spit. Clearly that would not do in this place; he didn’t want to find out what would happen if he did. Grow up, he thought to himself, but to the luap said, “For one thing, you can guide us back out. I’m hungry.” Then, at the indignant expression, he said “By the gods, you’re half-peasant: use sense. You can be who you are, and do what is right. What’s so hard about that?” Then he strode away, past the patterns on the floor that seemed to have tendrils reaching for his feet, and stumbled into the ledge. “Damn it,” he roared. “Come on.” His shin would hurt for days, he knew it, and there was too much to do and not enough time.

No one said anything when he came out of the shadows to the cookfire, the luap at his heels. The onions in the stew had everyone belching. They can smell us in the king’s hall, right across the land, Gird thought, going out to the jacks, but he wasn’t worried. He would have to think about the luap, but not now. Now he had to think about the army, and the king’s army, and where would be best to meet them.

His one advantage was the willingness of the people to help him; he knew where the king’s army moved, but the king’s army must search for him. The king had left Finyatha again, and this time Segrahlin rode with him (so the word came), and every lord who could make magicks of any kind. And their well-fed soldiers, rank on rank of them, and their horsemen, who now had learned to armor the horses as well.

Thus he was in no mood to be cooperative when Selamis cornered him again the next night, and wondered, in too casual a tone, if Gird were going to name him a marshal in the coming campaign. Gird stared at him, momentarily speechless.

“I can’t give you any command now,” said Gird. “You can see that, I hope—”

Selamis glowered silently. When he was sulky, he did look almost aristocratic.

“And it’s going to be damned hard to explain why I’m not. Blast you, you might have thought—”

“Would it have done any good to tell you sooner?” Gird did not like the self-righteous whine in that voice. Selamis had lied, and liars had no right to be self-righteous.

“Whether it would or not, you didn’t. You didn’t tell me, and didn’t tell me, and if you hadn’t had that—that experience—” He couldn’t say it aloud, that Selamis had used magic, that he was a mage. It terrified him still, though he hoped he was concealing his reaction. The saying was that liars weren’t much good at spotting others’ lies. He hoped it was true.

“If I’d had no magic, it wouldn’t have done any good to tell you.”

“You think it’s done good?”

“Well, I meant—if I didn’t have magic, then my birth didn’t matter—”

Gird rounded on him. “By the Lady’s skirts, you’re still thinking of the throne, aren’t you? You still think your blood and your gods’ cursed stinking magic give you some sort of right to power?”

“It wouldn’t be the same—”

“You’re right it wouldn’t—because you’re not getting within leagues of that throne, my lad. Forget that. You can make pretty lights, and your father is the Finaarenisian king. And that means nothing, not one damn thing, to me or any other peasant—”

“It means something to the nobles,” said Selamis stubbornly. “You said that yourself. If they knew—”

“They’d slit your stupid throat. How can you be so dense? I’ve seen smarter stones, that had at least the sense to roll downhill. No. You’re the king’s bastard, and not alone in that, I’ll wager. You’ve got a bit of magic, enough to scare girls with—”

Light blazed around them, and a cold fist seemed to squeeze Gird’s heart in his chest.

“It scares you,” said Selamis, furious, his handsome face distorted. “Quit pretending it doesn’t. Admit it.”

But there was rage and rage, and Gird’s grew out of deeper roots than pique. He forced one breath after another out of stiff lips, and felt his heart settle once more into a steady rhythm. Without his thought, his powerful arm came up and smashed Selamis in the face. The light vanished, as Selamis measured his length on the ground.

“You stupid, stupid fool,” said Gird, almost calmly. He squatted, made sure that Selamis was still breathing, then looked around. Could they be lucky enough that no one had seen the light Selamis made? No: there in the gathering dusk someone hurried toward them. Gird sighed, gustily. He ought to kill Selamis, quickly and painlessly, before he woke. He should have done it before, when he first realized the man had lied, and lied again. The fool had renounced his claim before the gods; that alone should have settled him. Now he, Gird, would have to explain everything, and it was the worst possible time to tell everyone that they had the king’s bastard in their camp.

He was frowning over the supply rolls when he realized that Selamis was awake and staring at him. He glanced over and met a furious look.

“You hit me,” said Selamis, in a hoarse whisper. His head probably hurt; the bruise on his face made it look lopsided.

“That I did. You showed me what you were.”

“Why do you assume I’ll be bad—?”

Gird put down the notched tally stick reporting the grain harvest in Plumhollow Barton and looked hard at Selamis until he wilted. “You know what you did: you lied, and lied, and lied again, and then lost your temper and used your magicks on me. Is that what any of us would want in a king, if we wanted a king at all? Should I believe that a crown will make you honest, teach you patience and mercy, give you wisdom? You seem to think you’ll be a good king, better than your father. You might argue that it would be hard to be worse. But I’m not helping a liar, a lackwit, or a hotheaded fool onto a throne, where he can put his foot on my neck again. No.”

Selamis’s eyes closed, briefly, and the hand Gird could see stirred. Was he up to magicks again? But the eyes opened again, and the hand relaxed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that—”

“No more you should. Where’d you be if you’d killed me, eh?”

“I—I didn’t think—”

“True enough. And does not thinking make a good king?”

“No.” It sounded sulky, but then Selamis’s face must have hurt a lot. A sigh, then, long and gusty. Gird didn’t look up. “What are you going to do now?”

“I ask myself that,” said Gird, picking up the single tally from the smithguild and running his thumbnail along the nicks. “I should have killed you, back when I first realized you were lying, and I definitely should have killed you last night. But I’ll tell you what, lad, I’m a bad keeper of accounts, and you’re good at it—and sometimes the best milker is the worst for kicking the pail.”

“You’ll let me live because I can read and cast accounts?”

“For now. But use those magicks just once more and you’re dead.”

“Did I hurt you?”

Gird’s hand went to his chest before he thought; he glanced at Selamis and met his eyes. “Yes, and you might have killed anyone less stubborn. What did you think you were doing, eh?”

“I didn’t really know—it just seemed as if I could press—”

“Don’t. Don’t even think about it. As soon hand a child of three Midwinters a pike to play with, and hope no crockery breaks.”

“I’ll be loyal,” said Selamis, but it carried little conviction.

Gird put the tally down, and faced him squarely. “You will be loyal, lad, because I will break your neck myself if you’re not. You have no more choices, no more room to maneuver. I’ve told the marshals what they must know; what you must know is that your life depends on my good word. And if they think you’ve charmed me, magicked my good word, they will kill you. And if you try charming one of them first, the same. If you find that too harsh, consider your father’s way of dealing with traitors. We will kill you quickly as we may—but we will not let you loose again to misuse your talents.”

Gird shifted east and south, taking two smaller holdings easily when the outnumbered garrisons fled, and winning another with a stiff fight: he needed the food enough to make the losses worthwhile. One of the fleeing lords had magic enough to poison the wells and blast a field to dry ash. Gird wondered if anything would ever grow in that gray grit. The others’ fields might make a harvest, if nothing went wrong through the summer. The one that fought gave them, unwillingly, their first magelord prisoners.

The lord was dead; whether he had had magicks or not, he had fallen to pikes. His wife, several servant women, and the children—wholebred and bastard—had barricaded themselves into a wholly inadequate tower. Gird’s yeomen battered the door down easily and dragged them out. Gird looked at the woman. But for her long robes, so unlike anything the peasant women wore, she looked like any other woman her age. She had borne children; she looked to be carrying another. The children were children: a stairstep gaggle, in all states from wild terror to infant placidity. The servant women were trying to gather them in their arms, soothe them.

Gird felt his head throbbing. He had never really thought about prisoners, and certainly not women and children. He had assumed that the lords would all be killed in battle, somehow, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Now he did. The woman—the lady, he found himself thinking—looked as if she expected death. Or worse. The servants were unsure, glancing from the lady to his yeomen.

“She was about to stab the children,” said one of the men holding her. Gird came closer. Brown hair, eyes with flecks of blue and green and gold. Her chin came up and she braced herself to face him.

“You didn’t want to kill the children,” said Gird.

“Better me than you,” she said. Her voice was calm, almost toneless, the voice of someone who had given up.

“I’m not going to kill the children.” What was he going to do with them? Where could he send them? But he was certainly not going to kill them; that was what lords did.

“What, then? Torture them for your amusement? I know what kind of games you peasants play.” She had gone white, sure of what he would do; in the rage that followed, he almost did it, but one of the children broke loose from the servant women, and ran straight to him, pummeling his legs and screaming. Gird leaned over, wrapped the child in his arms and lifted him. Her? The mite had braids; did the lords braid boys’ hair as well as girls’? The woman struggled frantically when Gird picked the child up, but quieted when she saw Gird hold the child carefully.

“Quiet, child,” Gird said to the girl. He would assume it was a girl. She screamed all the harder, red-faced, tears bursting from under tight-shut lids. “No!” he yelled down at her. Silence followed; the child sniffed and opened her eyes. Remarkable eyes, blue flecked with gold, eyes he could drown in. He looked across at the lady. “You do not know the games peasants play, lady, if you think we torture children. It is the pain of our children that drove us to this war. Is this one yours?” White-lipped, she nodded. “A lovely child. I hope she has a long life.” He set the child down and pushed her toward her mother. “Go, little one.”

It was still no solution. He caught the sidelong looks, the low-voiced comments he was meant to overhear. As he toured the stronghold, learning more about fortifications than the gnomes had ever bothered to tell him, he wondered what he was going to do with them. The dungeon, when he found it, drove that thought out of his mind briefly, for there were the fates the lady had feared, knowing them too well. Gird swallowed nausea and rage, as his yeomen helped the pitiful prisoners up to daylight. He fingered the torturer’s mask of red and black, wondering which of the dead men above had worn it. There on the wall was a larger version of the same mask, leather stretched over wood and painted in garish stripes. Beneath was a circle of chain, with barbs worked into the links. Behind him, his yeomen murmured, angry. Gird yanked the mask and circle off the wall, careful not to let the barbs prick his hands, and nodded to the other equipment.

“Take this all up and burn it. We’ll leave nothing like this behind us.” The words rang in his mind as he went back to his prisoners. Nothing like this behind us meant intent as well as material objects. He wanted to crush something, hurt someone, but that was what had started the whole mess.

The lady was crouched, with her children, in a corner of the outer wall, with a jeering crowd around her. They fell silent when they saw Gird, and he waved them away, but for a few guards.

“I think you know what I found below,” said Gird. She would not meet his eyes, this time. She had known. Had she condoned, even encouraged? “I found the mask, the barbed chain—”

“I told him,” she said, looking at her clenched hands. “I told him we were never meant to follow Liart. That our only hope was Esea’s light, and if it failed, we should greet the long night peaceably. But he would not. He would not admit his powers failed, that his children might not have all he had been given. I told him nothing was forever, that men rose and fell like trees, like—like wheat, even, brief as that is. That we could not win safety this way.”

Gird reached out and took her hands in his. “Look at me. Yes, like that. Did you, yourself, kill anyone? Did you send anyone to the torturers?”

Her head shook once, side to side; she said nothing, staring into his eyes with those multi-colored eyes of hers. Was she trying to charm him? Could she?

“Did you truly try to stop him, your husband?”

“Yes. But he would not listen.”

Gird released her hands. “Well, then: you listen to me. If I find you’ve lied, that you helped with that filth, your life is forfeit. Otherwise, it depends on you. Will you redeem the evil your husband did?”

Her eyes widened; she had not expected that. “How could I do that?”

“Come with us, work to heal those who are hurt.”

“I have not the healing gift—and besides, I am—” she gestured at her belly, just swelling her robes.

“Where do you think peasant women go, when they’re thrown off their land and are pregnant? As for healing gift, if you can boil water and wash bandages, you will earn your keep—though I admit it’s little enough, until this war’s won.”

“And I will be the slave of slaves, for your delight?”

His mouth soured. “No, lady, I would be delighted to have everyone safe at home, no one a slave to anyone.”

“And if I don’t agree?”

Gird shrugged, and stood up. “I suppose we can turn you out, chase you away from our camps, and let you find your own keep, if you can. Can you?”

“Not as I am,” she said. “All right. I will take your offer.” The unspoken for now seemed to hang in the air around them. Gird had the uneasy certainty that this would not be the last such problem, and he was not at all sure he had found the best solution.

The next day, he watched the lady—now garbed in the more practical peasant clothes—and her children set off with those of his wounded he was sending back to the rock shelter. He had had to argue harder than he liked with his own yeomen, to extract their promise to treat her fairly. The children they would have taken happily; he sensed that they wanted him to kill the lady, but feared to say it. Selamis—the luap, he reminded himself—had not offered his opinion, and Gird had not asked it. He had returned to being the efficient keeper of accounts and carrier of messages.

One of the new problems of this year, with the larger army was his inability to see what was going on across the field of battle. Now he knew exactly why the soldiers’ officers rode horses: they were above much of the dust and all the bobbing heads and weapons. This count’s stables had held many horses. Some of them were dead, but the others could be useful. He could barely remember how it had felt to ride that mule, back in his youth, but it would have to do.

The stables yielded five live, unhurt horses. Two were tall and leggy, one was a pony (for the children? Gird wondered) and the other two were nondescript animals of middle size. He was not even sure how to saddle and bridle them, but some of his ex-soldiers were, and quickly had all but the pony tacked up. These experienced riders mounted and tried the animals out. One of the tall ones began to fret and prance; it was lathered on the neck almost before it was ridden at all. The other tall horse seemed quieter, but on the second circuit of the courtyard went into a fit of bucking and dumped its rider in a corner. Gird knew he didn’t want either of those. The other two horses were more obedient, but his experienced riders said neither was suitable for a novice. He could not afford a broken leg right now, Gird told himself, so he’d better keep using his legs for what they were meant for: walking. Maybe he could stand on a rock?

Two days later, as he was moving the army north again, he saw an old gray carthorse plodding through a narrow wood. One of the food scouts waved, hopefully. Meat? Gird waved back a negative. He really would like a horse; he had always wanted to ride a horse. Not someone’s trained warhorse, but a plain old horse that would plod along, and let him learn without breaking his legs for him. He had no way to catch a horse, but he wasn’t going to eat his desired ride, not yet. Besides, they still had meat from the horses back at the count’s stronghold.

At the midday break, an old gray horse grazed only a few pike-lengths from them, ripping up the grass with delight. Was it the same horse? Gird could not tell. He could tell one cow from another across a field in the fog, but horses were horses to him, with color and size their only distinction. This one had the usual big dark eye, a pink-freckled nostril fluttering with each breath, burrs in the long hairs of its fetlocks—he realized that the horse had come a lot closer. He had to look up to see its back, its slightly swayed back. Ought to make it easy to stay on, he thought. The horse blew a long slobbery breath over his leg, mumbled the edge of his boot in its lips, and sighed.

He could probably grab its mane and hang on long enough for someone to get a belt or something around its neck. The horse’s lips brushed his arm, gently as human fingers, and softer. Gird reached up to a tangle of yellow-gray mane that felt surprisingly silky. The horse yanked its head up, and Gird came to his feet. Everyone was watching him, silently. He looked at them, shrugged, and stroked the horse’s neck. It stretched its head out, shook it sideways, and gave an elaborate yawn, showing a mouthful of heavy, slightly yellow teeth. Gird stroked its shoulder and barrel. He loved the feel of a healthy animal, and although this one had looked dirty from a distance, the coat felt sleek and clean under his hands. It must be someone’s stray.

He found himself atop the horse bareback, holding the rope of an improvised halter, hardly aware of the sequence that put him there. The horse had sidled this way and backed that way until Gird had had to climb on a rock to keep stroking that sleek coat; he had wanted to keep stroking it. Then in some way the horse had indicated an itch, a flybite, on the opposite shoulder, and Gird had leaned across to scratch it, and there was a fly biting lower down, and he had leaned farther—and found himself lying belly-down across the horse’s back. It had stood motionless until he made the obvious move of throwing a leg over.

It was much easier to see, from up here. He could see all the cohort beside him, and the ones ahead and behind. He could imagine how much easier this would make guiding a battle. But he had never imagined the effect of horseback riding on the unaccustomed rider. At first he was tense, then he relaxed and enjoyed it, and then—all too soon—his muscles and tendons began to complain. About midafternoon, he couldn’t stand any more of it, and managed to slide off—which was harder than he’d supposed. His feet burned and tingled unpleasantly, until he walked the blood back out of them. The horse followed Gird as if he were tied, although Gird had forgotten to take hold of the rope.

He climbed on again the next morning. He was stiff in places he had never been stiff, but the horse had found another rock to stand beside. His legs loosened up quickly; he found the rocking motion pleasant. Something about the feel of the gray horse between his legs gave him confidence. He wondered if this was what the horse nomads felt, what made them raiders and not farmers. Of course, they rode real horses, war horses, and not gentle old carthorses. The back under him heaved a little, and Gird grabbed for the mane. Surely the horse had not heard his thought, and taken insult! He tried to think of something complimentary, just in case, and was rewarded with a relaxed back and springy walk.

His original intent, in coming north again, was to intercept the king’s western movement at a site where the ground gave him advantage. The king, however, had recognized that same situation, and put his army to a forced march to intercept Gird’s. Unluckily for Gird, the runners who would have brought him this information were captured. If he had not chosen to ride, for the first time, out beyond his scouts, he would have led them into a trap. As it was, the gray horse stopped with a snort, planting its feet firmly in the road, and refused to budge. When Gird tried to swing off, it whirled, nearly unseating him, and then started smartly back down the trail at his first experience of a trot. He clung to the mane desperately, afraid to fall at that speed; when it slowed, where his forward scouts were, they had taken that return as an alarm.

“I don’t know,” Gird said, glad to slide down now that the horse was standing still. It looked past him back up the trail, and snorted. “It saw something it didn’t like; animals can smell and hear better than we can.”

His scouts slid forward, to reappear not long after with word of a large enemy force lying right across the route Gird had planned to take. Gird looked at his maps again. Any other route to the same ground would take them several more days, and the enemy might easily trace them and reposition themselves. Straight ahead he might get a slight advantage from a slope, but he’d have to engage in woods where the pikes were far less handy than swords. He frowned. Back down their trace a half-day or so was a passable field, a large natural meadow, backed by a steep forested ridge behind several lower hills. They had come the long way through it, to avoid the hills, but he could hide several cohorts back there.

It was the best he could do, and it would do only if the enemy decided to come after them; they could not sit for long without starving. He gave his orders, and then had someone give him a leg back up onto the horse. Old worn-out horse it might be, but it had saved him, and maybe the war. He stroked its neck, as he waited for the last cohort to reverse. Strange that an old carthorse should be so willing to carry an untrained rider, and so gently, but he would be foolish to question such good fortune. The horse heaved a huge sigh, and butted his foot with its soft nose. Gird scratched its withers, and his own head, contented for the moment.

His army reversed and marched back down its trace without attracting immediate mounted pursuit—the only kind Gird feared. They were on his new-chosen field a little after midday. It was not as good as he remembered: there were bramble patches near a small creek, and muddy areas under the fresh green grass. But such as it was, he had no choice. He moved his army back, under the edge of the trees, to encamp, sent his scouts well out, and set to work to improve the site as best he could. By nightfall, he had word that the enemy was coming, on more than one trail. The largest group followed his own trace, but another was moving in from the northeast, on one of the alternate trails. So, he thought. He had been right—no escape that way, even if he’d tried it.

Chapter Thirty

In the predawn stillness, he could hear a single bird calling from far away, high on the hill’s slope. His army slept. As quietly as he could, Gird made his way past the banked firepits, past the line of sentries, to whom he nodded without speaking, and started up the hill. Here, beyond the camp, he walked through layers of fresh summer scents, the night smells of open country. A patch of pale tiroc flowers poured out heavy sweetness; in the hot daytime sun, they hardly had an odor. Down from the heights came a waft of cedar, a sharp bite of wild thyme. A goat had brushed against the bushes here; its sharp pungency banished the other smells for a moment, until he’d climbed past it.

Ahead, the hill was dark against the early dawn glow. Something rustled in the bushes, a frantic frightened scurry as some small animal fled. The bird called again, closer now. It was no bird he knew, with that exquisite rippling flow of music. Gird looked back. Light had seeped into the upper sky, and far to the west the land began to show its shape, the hilltops their color. He climbed on, very aware of the smells and sounds, the feel of the cool air on his bare arms, the texture of the leaves that brushed against him, the feel of the stone or soil beneath his feet.

He came to the hilltop sooner than he expected. Behind, below, the ragged and smelly army lay hidden in shadow. He heard a distant clatter of pots, and wondered what the cooks would find to put in them. More roots and herbs, no doubt, and they still had two sacks of meal. Not much for a whole army. But morning hunger had been part of his life from childhood; farmers were always out working at dawn. He had this brief, private moment before the day’s cares.

Far over the rim of the world, the sun rose up, the light by which truth could be seen, as Esea’s priest had named it. Against the low slanting light, Gird saw the myriad furred tufts of grass, rose-gold, forming a dancing curtain of rose, veiling the sun’s impossible brilliance, transmuting it to grace and delicacy. He stood bemused, as he had once long ago on his farm, on that silver starlit evening. All was gold now, gold and rose together, shifting veils softening piercing brilliance; the scent of it rose up around him, a column of rose-gold incense. He had just time to think This is a vision, when the hill slipped out from under him and he hung suspended in gold and rose draperies. Now he looked west again, over the land new-lit by the sun, where soft gold light filled the valleys like wine, and a harder radiance chiseled the hilltops into clean, unblurred beauty. Despite the haze of gold, he could see far, to the distant mountains on the edge of Finaarenis. He had dreamed of them as cold, gray, uncaring crags, but now they stood serene and gracious, great castles awaiting their lords. He seemed to see within them, to the arched and echoing halls where the rockfolk harped and sang and crafted jewels and gold into treasures worthy of such castles. Now he looked north, across the light, to the great river and beyond, seeing at a glance all its laughing little tributaries, and the great loom of the moors and the broad steppes. There the horse nomads roamed, with bright embroidery on their boots, narrow streamers blowing from poles by their tents, herds of shining horses. Above them romped the Windsteed, flaunting a cloudy tail, and broad across the grassland the Mare of Plenty ranged on tireless hooves. Behind her, grass sprang tall and green, and her hoofprints filled with clear water.

He would have been frightened if it had been possible; he retained enough of his wit to know that. But it was not possible. He lay quiet in the gold and rosy veils, looking where he was bid, seeing the land as it was, as the gods saw it, as it could be: in the broad light of day, peaceful villages of farmers, orchards restored and fields once more fertile. Flocks of sheep on the hillsides, herds of cattle in river meadows. A market fair, in some town that might be built where a burnt village had been, with fair measures given, and fair weights enforced. Children splashing in a shallow ford, a woman riding a horse, a bright helm on her head, cottages with tight roofs and mended walls, rows of bright flowers. The vision pierced his heart, brought scalding tears to his eyes. This—he had almost forgotten—this was what he wanted, not an obedient army, helpful farmers, even victory in battle, but this peace, this plenty, this justice.

With the tears came his release from the dream. He felt himself falling, but slowly, like goosedown or a dandelion tuft; felt gentle arms around him; heard a murmuring voice he could not quite follow. Flower petals drummed feathersoft on his bare arms, against his face, drying his tears, and when he came to himself, he was standing in a drift as white as snow in the broad morning sun. He reached his arms into the cool petals, lifted them, buried his face in them. Alyanya’s sign, it had to be—but beneath the fragrance was a faint bitter tang of cold wet earth in autumn. Promise and warning, then, and he but a peasant. Laughter rang about him, so joyous that he smiled before he realized the sound had been within him.

“Dammit!” he burst out, unthinking. “You won’t ever make anything simple!”

And the voice that answered him then was cold, clean and precise as starlight.

—No. I did not make anything simple.—

Gird’s knees gave way, and he fell into the flowers. That was not Alyanya, by any reckoning, and he could not pretend to himself not to know who it was. Ask for a word from the gods, he thought crazily, and beware—

But the knowledge he had asked for without really wanting it was pouring into his head, overfilling it as if someone stuffed a sack with wool.

Promise: it was possible to win that peace for his people.

Warning: it was not his peace.

His fault? he wondered.

No answer, only certainty. All the symbols the priest had taught him, all the gnomes had shared of their lore, flickered through his mind as quickly as the counters on a trader’s account board, a rapid clicking that ended with the crashing finality of stone falling onto stone. As it was now, as reality lay, that peace was possible, but he was forfeit.

He had thought he did not care, until he knew it was certain. Now, in a silence he realized was more than normal, he lay face down in Alyanya’s flowers and had leisure to consider if he meant in truth what he had said so often. I would give my life, he’d said. I will risk, he’d said. I could be killed as easy as you, he’d said to frightened yeomen.

But that had been risk; the spear might thrust in his gut, or not. The sword might slice another’s neck. So far it always had been someone else, and he knew now he’d half-expected it always would be.

Now . . . certainly die? Never enjoy that peace? Never sit with his grandchildren around him, telling his tales of the old days?

He was suspended again, this time in the vast caverns of his own mind: cold, darkness, fear beneath him, and nothing at all above. If he fell now nothing would slow his fall; he would not land in Alyanya’s flowers. His own mind—he knew it was that, and no gods’ gift of vision—painted all too vividly a picture of the land after his fall. No peace, but the ravages of the magelords, the scavenging of brigands. More dead bodies bloated in the fields for crows to pick clean; babies and children and young and old: he saw all their faces. Innocent beasts, cows and horses and sheep, lame and wounded, wandering prey for folokai and wolves. And he saw his own death then, the death of an old man, bald and feeble, when he could no longer forage from his hideout in distant caves: he fell to folokai, and the crows followed.

Death either way, then. It should be easy, he told himself fiercely, to buy that peace with an early death. It was not easy. On his tongue he tasted the ale he would not drink, the roast he would not eat, and in his hands he felt the warm bodies of the children—o, most bitter!—he would never hold. It is not easy! he screamed silently into silence. His own mind replied tartly that nothing was easy, nor ever had been—and he opened his eyes and blinked against the snowy petals.

It was not easy, but he had done other things that were not easy. He had seen his mother die, and Mali that he loved, and his daughter near death at his feet. He had seen the best friend of his youth trampled under the lords’ horses; he had seen wells poisoned and fields burnt barren. He took a deep breath, holding all these things in his mind, all the pain he could remember, all the love he’d had for family and beasts and trees and land—love that no one else ever knew, because he could not speak it. He tossed it high, with his hope for life. And felt it taken, a vast weight he had not known he carried.

The petals vanished, though he could feel their softness yet, and their perfume eased his breathing. He was all alone on the hilltop, though he heard someone crashing through the bushes on the upward trail.

“Gird! Marshal-general!” One of the newer yeomen, to whom that title came naturally. Gird took a breath, and hoped his face did not show all that had happened.

“What?” he called back, hearing in his voice a curious combination of irritation and joy.

“They’re coming! They’re already out of the wood!”

Gird swung to look north, and they certainly were. Horsemen first, the low sun winking on polished armor and bit chains, gleaming on the horses themselves, gilding the colors of banners and streamers and bright clothing. Some of those were surely magelords. Behind them, shadowy in the dust already beginning to rise at the edge of the wood, were the foot soldiers, rank after rank. His mouth dried. How many hundreds did they have? He had thought he had more—one thousand, two thousands, three. . . . The horsemen halted just far enough out on the meadow to let the infantry deploy behind them. Gird searched the wood on the far slope for the archers they would surely have sense enough to send out in a flanking movement. His own archers were supposed to be up on the end of the ridge, guarding against archers getting into his rear. He hoped they were alert. He had no fear of the horses or foot soldiers getting back there; the ridge behind him to the south was safe as a wall.

Below him, he heard his own army coming into order. He started down the hill, hoping the enemy had not spotted him atop the hill. He put his hand up to his hair, thankful that he hadn’t put on his salvaged helmet yet.

At the foot of the hill, the gray carthorse stood as if it were waiting for him. Someone had found a saddle for it, and a bridle. Even so, the horse had positioned itself beside a rock. Gird climbed on, wondering even as he did why he found it so natural that the horse was making itself useful. Cob came running up with his helmet, and offered a sword. Gird shook his head. He hadn’t learned to use a sword yet, and a battle was no time to try something new. The horse was new enough.

His cohorts had formed; he rode past them, checking with each marshal. The faces blurred in his eyes; his mouth found the right names by some instinct, but only Rahi’s stood out distinctly. She gave him her broad smile, and the gray horse bobbed its head. Rahi’s cohort laughed. He wanted to tell her, and no one else, what the god had told him, but he could not. That kind of knowledge had to be borne alone. He noticed, without really thinking about it, that over half of his yeomen had managed to find a blue shirt to wear; it was beginning to look like a uniform.

For a time it seemed that the enemy might simply stand on the far side of the field and stare at them, but after a time they moved forward. On the north, the broad-topped wooded ridge sloped directly into the meadow, but on the south, Gird’s side, three distinct low hills lay between the sharp southern ridge and the more level grass, with the sluggish creek running east to west along it.

Gird had done what he could in the limited time he had to make this ground as favorable as possible. He had archers on the north face of all three hills, as well as the blunt end of the southern ridge. He had had pits dug, in the mucky ground near the creek, lightly covered with wattle and strewn with grass. This would, he hoped, make both cavalry and foot charges harder, and prevent easy flanking of his troop. His main force was arrayed before and between the two more eastern hills; the western hill seemed undefended, but in addition to archers had several natural hazards. Against the lords’ reputed magicks, he had no defense but Arranha’s comment that a mage could not counter what he did not expect. He hoped they would not expect the small, doomed, but very eager group that he had left well hidden on the south face of that north slope, directly in the enemy’s rear, with orders to stay hidden until the lords were busy with their magic elsewhere.

Now the king’s army moved; for the first time, Gird saw the royal standard that he had heard about, a great banner that barely moved in the morning breeze, then suddenly floated out, showing its device. Gird had been told it was a seadragon; by himself he would have thought it was a snake with a fish’s tail. Each of the lords with the king had his own banner, his or her own colors repeated in the uniforms of the soldiers—and, if the gnomes were right, his or her own separate battle plan. That was supposed to be another advantage to his side. They looked pretty enough, like the models the gnomes had shown him: one hundred all in yellow and green, then two hundreds in blue and gold, then a block of orange, and a block of green and blue. Gird assumed that the lords were in the rear, those mounted figures in brilliant colors that seemed to glow with their own light. Even as he watched, he saw bright-striped tents go up, servants hanging on the lines. Smoke rose from cookfires newly lit. For some reason, that show of confidence infuriated Gird. Win it before you celebrate it, he told them silently.

The cavalry screen drew aside on either flank, and the foot soldiers advanced. Most of them still carried sword and shield; some units had pikes; a few had long spears. Gird frowned; those could cause him a lot of trouble. But watching them advance, he realized that they were not accustomed to that extra length. Evidently someone had decided to make a weapon that would outreach his pikes, but the men carrying them had not had enough drill. Behind the swordsmen and pikemen came the archers. Over the winter, Gird had tried many versions of a shield that would stop arrows but be light enough to carry, and easily dropped when both arms were needed for the pike. Nothing worked perfectly. His foremost cohorts had small wooden shields that might protect their faces from arrows near their utmost range, but most trusted to their stolen—no, salvaged—helmets and bits of body armor.

The first enemy flights of arrows went up; Gird’s marshals shouted their warnings, and all but the stupidest looked down. The enemy made a rush forward, discovering a moment too late the pits Gird’s army had dug. These were not deep enough or large enough to keep the enemy back, but they slowed the rush just as the archers, following it, came within range of Gird’s archers.

More angry than hurt, the enemy foot soldiers floundered through the mud, hauled themselves out of the pits and flung themselves on at Gird’s unmoving cohorts. The enemy lines were no longer lines, and behind them their own archers were falling to Gird’s. They did not care; they looked, to Gird on his old gray horse, like any young men who have made fools of themselves in public. Their officers, bellowing at them from the rear, didn’t seem to have much effect; a second and third line staggered into the pits, tried to jump across and failed, and fought their way out, to storm up the gentle slope toward Gird’s cohorts.

The marshals watched Gird; he watched the straggling but furious advance. Those few seconds seemed to stretch endlessly, as if he had time to notice the expression on every face, whether the oncoming eyes were blue or grey or brown. Then the first ones reached the mark he had placed, and he dropped his hand, with the long blue streamer that served as their banner.

His cohorts moved. One step, two: cautious, controlled, their formations precise, he thought smugly, as any gnome’s. Where the king’s soldiers had expected last year’s sharpened wood stakes, they met instead the steel pike heads that Marrakai gold had bought. The first died quickly, almost easily, a flick of the pike it seemed, from where Gird sat on the gray horse. He knew better, from having been there himself. Then the ragged lines caught up with each other, and the slaughter began.

Pikes outreach swords, but swordsmen and axemen can form a shield wall hard for pikes to breach, if all are brave. Whether it was courage, or the kind of magicks Gird had seen at work at Blackbone Hill, the soldiers of the king were brave. At first Gird’s cohorts advanced, step by step, down that gentle slope, pushing the king’s men back into the trampled mud and treacherous pits. Then the king’s cavalry swept east, toward Gird’s right flank, and back down the near side of the creek, avoiding the pits he’d dug at that end of the meadow.

This was not what he’d hoped they would do. He had hoped they’d be seduced by the apparent gap on his left flank, between that and the westmost hill. It should have looked like an easy way to get right round behind him. But apparently they’d been looking for something more quick than easy. And if he didn’t do something—quickly—they’d be on attacking his flank with only the archers uphill to hinder them.

The gray horse seemed to understand this almost as quickly as Gird; he was picking his way neatly but rapidly across the gap between the center and the eastmost hill without jolting his rider at all. Gird looked around him. There—that cluster of bright colors up under the trees must be the lords and the king. So far they’d done nothing magical, but he had no doubt they would. And there, across the creek and coming his way, were the enemy cavalry.

Gird bellowed loud enough that the gray horse flattened his ears; the nearest cohort marshals turned, and caught his signal, then saw the rushing horses. He would have wheeled the gray horse around, but the gray horse leaped onward, straight at the oncoming cavalry. Gird hauled on the reins, to no avail.

“I know I said it would be nice to slow them down, but we can’t—one horse—one rider—” Was this to be his destined death, charging uselessly an entire wing of cavalry? But they were almost on them; Gird shrugged, and swung the pole his blue banner was tied to.

Pole and rag took one horse in the face; Gird nearly lost the pole, and his seat, but managed to keep both, and duck a swipe from a curved blade. The gray horse swerved under him; he grabbed for mane and hung on. All around were horses, most of them swerving aside and one frankly running backwards before it slipped and fell, rolling on its rider.

Then they were in the clear, Gird with his banner and the gray horse with a disgustingly smug cock to its ears.

“I want to go back,” Gird said between his teeth, as if the horse were a recalcitrant child. It shook its head, blew a long rattling snort, and picked up an easy lope back toward the battle. He saw a dozen or more horses down, some with arrows in them. He saw the back of the enemy cavalry, trying to charge again and again into two of his cohorts of pikes. The armor on the horses, heavy padded canvas, would have protected them from sword-strokes of other mounted fighters—not from pikemen on foot. Gird wondered if they realized that, or simply never thought of it. He felt the gray horse tense under him, and braced himself for whatever it might do.

What it did was outflank the enemy cavalry, working its way up and over the knee of the eastmost hill without putting a hoof wrong, and return Gird to his observation post on the central hill. From here he could see that that particular cavalry sortie would be thrown back without much danger. His own center was not advancing now, holding place to support the right flank under pressure, but that did not concern him. More worrying, some of that bright-clad group of nobles who had been back under the trees were moving forward. Several of them, clustered together, raised their arms.

He had not expected the well to spout water, the year before, and he did not expect the storm that gathered like a boil atop the ridge behind him, and spat lightning into the trees. Wind rushed irrationally down the slope, bringing fire and smoke with it. Shrill screams rose from both sides, louder from Gird’s camp followers, who found themselves caught between a forest fire and a battle. Then the wind stilled, as suddenly as it had started, and Gird saw that the little group of mages had fallen to the ground. Behind him, the fires still burned, but less fiercely, and the new wind direction took the smoke and flame upslope, away from him.

His eyes still stung and watered; he could barely see across the meadow to the king’s party. Had it been his hidden archers who killed those nobles, or someone else? The momentary lull caused by the onrushing fire had given way to renewed din of battle. His cohorts were inching forward again, by the half-step now, the wounded shifting back as they had practiced, the fallen trodden underfoot. He could do nothing about that, not yet.

The enemy spearmen had finally made it to the front of their lines; they proved as clumsy as Gird had hoped.

Even so, they made rents in the cohort they faced, and it could not advance. For hours, it seemed almost for days, the two armies were knotted in battle. Their lines staggered back and forth, gaining and losing an armlength, a footpace. The noise was beyond anything Gird had imagined, so loud that individual screams and blows merged into a hideous roar.

He concentrated his attention on the details of it, sending his own voice above the rest when necessary. The enemy’s reserve archers, mounted, tried a sweep past his left wing. This was the maneuver he’d been looking for: would they support it? At least half the remaining enemy cavalry, and—yes—behind the screen of battle, a cohort or two of infantry. They thought the west hill empty, available; Gird smiled to himself. He might be only a stupid peasant, but he had learned a few things. That trap would spring itself, but he had to set the main one now.

Once before, the arrival of his camp-followers bearing almost useless “weapons” had convinced an enemy that he had vast reserves. The lords had been telling themselves that the peasants were all rebels at heart; they had only to count to know how many peasants were on their own lands, and fear the worst. Gird had taken the chance that the king and his advisors would follow the trails they had followed through the ridges, trails where horses and pack animals could go, where armies could march without fighting their way through prickly undergrowth. Gird marched that way where he could, and he knew they had trailed him back to this meadow. So they would think that what they saw, and what might be behind the little hills, was the worst of what they faced. That was, in fact, the truth, but would they believe the truth when a pretense fit their deepest fears?

He rode the gray horse a little up the slope, above the dust of the battle, to where he had a clear view across the meadow to that forested ridge behind the king. The king would have scouts atop it, for a certainty—if his people had not found them yet. But that would do him no good. Gird waved the pole with its long blue streamer twice. An arrow whirred past his head as the horse neatly sidestepped. Evidently some archers had decided he was worth hitting—well, he’d told his own to take out archers first, and anyone on horseback next.

Shrill yips from the western hill told him that the first part of his plan was working. His archers were falling back, coming around the slope into the hollow between the two hills—not a deep hollow, but one with its own peculiarities. The enemy archers should be making for the hilltop; he thought the cavalry would swing around, trying to take him in the rear, and so came the signal he had been waiting for.

It was amazing how many pits five thousand yeomen could dig in less than a day. Gird thought they could have dug a trench all across the meadow, but trenches could be jumped, and pits cleverly placed where horses must go between rocks of a rockfall—pits just too wide to jump easily—are a most effective cavalry trap. Thanks to the land and the Lady, he thought piously, for that fortuitously placed rockfall between the hill and the ridge behind it, where many horsemen could get into trouble out of sight of the rest of their army. His archers, having slipped around the hill to the rock-fall, were busy; the enemy archers above them, on the hilltop, found themselves unable to see what was going on. Those that tried to come down the south face of the hill to support the cavalry found the scour of the rockfall dangerous in more than one way. The others could—and did—let fly into the backs of the cohorts Gird had between the west and the central hill. He had anticipated this; those cohorts gave way, bending back around the hill; the archers found themselves having to shoot downhill into a confused mass of their own and Gird’s troops.

One unwary captain in the king’s forces saw that withdrawal as weakening, and urged his own cohorts on to flank those retreating. Gird smiled grimly. His left flank was now anchored by a wall of rock three men high—out of sight of that rash captain, up the little creek that looked so innocent. His troops stood on rock ledges, while their opponents were in the creek, or the mud on its other side. When they reached what they thought was his flank, they would find themselves standing on the far side of a pool of deep water, with no way out but the way they had come in. His archers would find them easy targets.

Meanwhile, the knot of bright-clad nobles across the field was moving again—perhaps it been only exhaustion that felled them. Gird squinted; he was sure he saw someone still on the ground. Out of the trees across from him came yet more cohorts of infantry, more squadrons of cavalry, and some—he squinted, shook his head, and looked again—some did not look human. Magicks, he told himself firmly. It’s only magicks. Masks and costumes and fancy ways of frightening people into doing what you want. He wished he knew if the king’s whole reserve was committed now.

Below him, the main forces contended as they had all morning, in a heaving, sweating, bloody, snarling mass. If it comes to plain fighting, he had told his marshals, if it comes to simple pounding each other, we win: we’ll pound harder, and take more pounding. The king’s army now outnumbered his in the center, but his center had not given back at all. They leaned into their pikes with every thrust, grunting with the effort.

Then the king’s new reserves hit the back of his force, giving it that extra weight—man against man, those in front were forced forward by that pressure, onto the waiting pikes. They died, had to be shaken from the pikes, and others were already there, already being killed—and again, and again. Gird saw the shiver in his ranks, the realization that something new had entered. The marshals looked aside, trying to find Gird; he caught their eyes and waved with his free hand. Then he took the long pole and signaled his last reserve, across the meadow and up on the ridge behind the king’s camp.

It seemed to take forever for that reserve to appear; he had told them to hide neither on the ridgetop nor near the bottom. In the meantime, his center sagged backward, and the enemy, heartened, drove forward with renewed energy. Gird had hardly time to see the first of his reserves clear the trees, yelling their heads off and sprinting downhill toward the enemy rear, before he was down in the thick of his own battle, supporting the center.

Fighting on horseback was completely different, he found. He had dropped the banner-pole, no longer needed—from here they would fight to the death, win or lose; he had no more decisions to make—and pulled his hauk from his belt. It was good for bashing heads, and bashing heads from above worked as well as when he was afoot. For one moment he thought of Amisi, and shoved the thought aside.

Later, when he heard it in songs, the battle of Greenfields (as the meadow became known) sounded much tidier than it had been in reality. The songs didn’t mention the several times he was knocked off the horse, and remounted by some helpful soldier, or the blow to his knee that had him limping for a quarter year, or the near-rout when the enemy’s last cohort of reserves turned out to be masked magelords with their power in hand. The songs certainly did not mention that long and miserable night after the battle, with the forest fire still burning its way south, or the cries of the wounded that never ceased. And somehow in the songs, that gray horse turned white. Gird was sure he had not aged that much in one day.

He remembered stumping through what had been the enemy’s camp, swarming now with squads of his own yeomen gathering up supplies and weapons. The king’s tent had gone up first, larger than many houses Gird had seen, with interior rooms walled in fluttering embroidered panels. He had had musicians with him (two had been killed, almost accidentally, when Gird’s reserves tore through the camp; the others had been found crouched around their instruments), and a man who painted pictures on lengths of fabric. He had started a picture of the king, victorious, returning with Gird’s head, but offered to change the faces for only ten gold pieces. Gird shook his head, and wondered what kind of king would take musicians and painters to battle.

The king was dead. He did not look much like Selamis, but fathers and sons did not have to look alike. He had been a tall man, dark haired as many magelords were, and in death his eyes had only the dull color of a fish found dead on the shore. Gird had found Sier Segrahlin’s body, spiked with arrows from behind; he felt no guilt at that, but wished he could have talked to that brown man. They had almost understood each other, across a gulf no one else wanted to bridge. He still wondered, occasionally, if the sier had charmed him that night.

The songs listed the dead magelords, as if to remind the listener that these were all real. Gird did not even look at all of them; he had seen bodies enough. They had killed the wounded as quickly and painlessly as they could; they had killed all the magelords they captured; they dared not do less. At least there were no children with them.

He did not understand why he was still alive; his vision of the morning had been so clear, so certain. He felt curiously suspended, as he had after the Norwalk Sheepfolds, unable to rejoice in the same way as the others, though he felt a deep contentment. So many had died, and he had not, yet he had been sure he would—he had been almost promised he would. Nor had Rahi died, or Pidi; he found them both alive, marked but certainly not mortally wounded. But when he touched them he felt no more and no less than he felt for any of his yeomen: they were all his children, in some way he could not define.

He remembered coming back to his own encampment, holding the wounded and dying, speaking what comfort he could, until he fell asleep and woke to find that someone had covered him with a stolen piece of the king’s tent. All that day and the next, as the crows and flies fought with them, he tried to bring order and restore health to that trampled and discolored ground. “Bury them all,” he said, “Or burn them—even the magelords, yes: we had the gods’ gift of victory, we owe them respect.”

The songs began that first night, with the talk around the fires of those who could talk, and by the next night a few were trying to fit words to familiar tunes. The dead king’s surviving musicians were glad to help. Gird was more than a little amused that the first version he heard of what became “Gird at Greenfields” was set to “The Thief’s Lament”—the very song with which he had been taunted for cowardice.