Time of Daughters II

by Sherwood Smith

  He looked eastward, which was their assigned route, then north, then back at his flight. They’d broken column to gather around, something the army would never do. But when Rat Noth had taken Braids aside after his promotion, saying, You’re a compromise between the king and queen. Don’t worry so much about the strict rules of chain of command, to which Braids had said, I grew up with girls. I grew up as a girl. Academy rules won’t work with them, but I know what will.

  The women and girls chatted back and forth, something not encouraged in army column. Braids ignored the chatter, taking in the range of expressions from curiosity to Henad Tlennen’s white-lipped gaze northward. Yes, she knew that was the general direction of Tlen, lying somewhat to the north and west, back in the direction they’d come.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We can always give ‘em a good canter even if it’s nothing.”

  The closer they got, the bigger the smoke cloud. When the westering sun faded below the orange glow beneath the cloud, no one had to say anything. They broke into a gallop, reining when they topped a gentle rise and peered between the trunks of a stand of red cedar toward the walls of Tlen. Flames flickered above the walls.

  “What could burn like that?” asked a Marthdavan rider, used to stone castles.

  “The village is inside the walls, thatch and a lot of old wood,” Henad said tightly.

  Braids gazed doubtfully ahead, his guts coiling with a sense of danger. He looked back at his command, only twenty-seven. Situations like this were best approached with a wing, or better, a company.

  The youngest was sixteen-year-old Shen Sindan, another of the complicated tangle of clan alliances. Tears glittered in her eyes as she said, “Don’t send me back. Don’t. I won’t go. I have to see. And if who did it is in there, I’ll kill them,” she added fiercely.

  Braids sighed. He’d gotten used to the academy, where you never argued about orders. In Senelaec they’d always talked them over—sometimes argued, lengthily—and moved once consensus was agreed on. Maybe that was why nothing ever got done on time....

  He reined the distracting thoughts, and forced his attention to the ring of waiting faces. One of the toughest things for the girls in the queen’s training to learn had been to carry and use a shield. Braids knew that well because he’d had the same problem when he went to the academy as a senior. As border scouts, the girls traveled lightly. They had no remounts, and when they encountered trouble they were trained to shoot and run for reinforcements, a tactic that had served the alliance well for a generation.

  So here they were, in a situation they’d only practiced in drill, the only patrol in sight, maybe for days, with no reinforcements.

  “Let’s take a look before we decide anything,” he said. “Bows strung, arrows at hand, knives ready....” And he outlined a familiar academy approach—one riding to proceed, two spread out and covering them with nocked arrows—in case there were enemies hiding up on the walls.

  He picked for the investigative riding the two women who had learned sword, both having had more experience with swords than Braids. Henad Tlennen had been trained by the jarl, having ridden as a girl on scouting forays that had clashed with horse raiders. She was as tall as Braids, rangy in build, pale of hair, with a strong, capable face. He’d picked her first as one of his three riding captains—which no one had argued with.

  The other girl with a sword was a Sindan-related cousin, short, barrel-shaped, all muscle. She’d grown up with brothers, all Riders, and had been practicing with them since her first time at the Victory Day games.

  The three of them formed the point of a wedge, three flanking them to each side, arrows nocked. Behind them, the others waited, with orders to shoot anything that popped up before it could shoot first.

  Braids led the way...into silence, except for the buzzing of flies, and here and there the flapping of birds. Every one of the sprawled people was too still for breath.

  Henad gasped. “That’s Uncle Tuft,” she said, pointing to a hacked-up man, hand outstretched toward his sword. He lay not far from the gate, with bodies all around him. Many were dressed in gaudy outlander clothes, with loose or short hair.

  The jarl had died defending the gate, Braids thought, swallowing hard. “Spread out, in threes, no one alone,” he ordered in an undervoice. “They could still be hiding.”

  Not likely, though. The stable was empty; the entire place resonated with an eerie emptiness. Nothing lived, except those flies. Acrid smoke billowed up from the still-burning cottages, the smoke drifting westward as they entered from the east gate.

  They checked the few standing structures, to find only the dead, no one spared: at rough estimate there were as many dead enemies as Marlovans, if not more. But none of the obvious enemies were children or the elderly. Clearly the attackers had vastly outnumbered the Tlens, and took savage revenge for how hard the defenders had fought. The place had been looted, what remained hacked up, tumbled, and if flammable, set on fire.

  Finally Braids and his riding stood in the court facing the main building. Heat poured off the fires, the flames shooting skyward to the roof. There was no use trying to get inside that building. Nobody could be alive in there, defender or enemy.

  Braids wound his hand in a circle, and they retreated, coughing out smoke. The rest, seeing them trudge out, abandoned their positions and rode forward, clamoring questions.

  Braids didn’t hear them. He was trying to think past those terrible images. What now? He was not a commander. He followed orders. He preferred following orders. But there were no orders for this situation.

  He looked back as Henad sobbed, turning swollen eyes toward Braids. “The gathering.” Her voice cracked.

  “What?” Then he had it: the rest of the Tlen household was out in the plains, gathering in the horses from their winter pasture.

  “They don’t know,” Henad said through shut teeth. “They don’t know.”

  Braids gazed around once more, then outward toward the plains as the enemy plan manifested: the enemy had struck when the Tlens were weakest, half holding the castle and the rest out in the plains rounding up the horses from their winter pasturage. “They’re raiding for the horses,” he said—knowing instinctively that he had it.

  That meant he knew what to do. “We have to go after them.”

  “First we must lay Uncle Tuft and the others out properly for Disappearance,” someone cried, choking on a sob.

  “We have ride to warn the jarlan first,” the oldest said urgently.

  “We can’t just leave Uncle there, and the others!”

  Braids shouted, “Quiet!”

  Silence and affronted looks for a heartbeat, then Henad said to her sobbing cousin, “What do you think Uncle would want us to do, spend the day gathering them for Disappearance, or warning Garid and Aunt?”

  “But—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Braids said, this time without shouting. “There are no orders for this situation. Let’s think it out. We’re a third of a wing only. But that’s better than nothing, considering those rounding up the horses don’t know what’s coming.” He glanced at Henad. “Do you know where the winter pasture is?”

  “Yes,” she stated, her chin quivering slightly, her eyes betraying the fury she barely contained. “I rode with them every year after I turned ten, until I went to Queen’s Training.”

  Braids turned to the rest. “I need a fast volunteer to get back to Ku Halir. Tell the commander. Roust out defenders. We’ll go ahead.”

  Three volunteers came forward, eyeing each other.

  “Who’s fastest?” Braids asked, though he knew that already.

  “Shen is,” a half-dozen voices rose.

  Shen’s lips trembled, then tightened them into a line. “I’ll go. Now that I know.”

  She clucked to her horse, wheeled, and was off without another word.

  Braids said, “Henad, show us the way, but we’re not going in column. We’re going to spread out in a net, and look for the tracks
of the enemy. If you see them, don’t muddy them before we count how many, and....” He went on to outline a plan.

  This time no one argued.

  They rode out.

  TWELVE

  The sun had long set when Shen galloped into the garrison at Ku Halir. A stable hand took her shivering horse in hand as another tried to find out why she was crying.

  His impatience vanished when he picked the words “Tlen” and “all dead” out of the disjointed stream. He led her straight to Arrow’s cousin Sneeze, now Commander Ventdor, whose command until that moment had been a model of orderly ease.

  Once Shen had told the assembled captains everything she knew (which wasn’t much) and what she’d seen (that effectively silenced them all), a runner led her off as seam-faced, balding Ventdor faced his captains, which included Rat Noth, recently arrived from a very brief leave in Feravayir. In fact, the briefest yet; as a boy he’d never liked his stepmother, but as a young man, he’d come to loathe her as much as she despised him. So here he was, staring up at the map with the others at the drawing of Halivayir, which had only this in common with Tlen: it was small, the second smallest of the jarlates.

  “...unrelated,” Ventdor was saying. “Tlen’s really just a horse stud. The big castles are at Sindan-An and Tlennen.” He tapped the drawings at the southwest edge of the Nelkereth Plains lying to the east. Then he tapped Yvanavayir up north—

  “Not unrelated,” Rat said, as possible ideas sprouted in his mind. “Attack Halivayir, get everyone running north. Then go for the horses here in the south. It has to be Yenvir.”

  “But his gang’s never numbered any more than twenty or thirty. That’s what everyone says.” Ventdor rapped Tlen’s map image with a couple of knuckles. “From what young Shen said, there were at least that many dead at Tlen, so who took the remaining horses?”

  Rat opened his hands. “Too many questions. But one thing for sure. Braids Senelaec will need backup.”

  Ventdor scowled at the map. “The princes are chasing around the hills up north—”

  “Send somebody to Larkadhe as well as the royal city,” his first captain suggested. “They’d better hear, whether this attack is related to the attack on Halivayir or not.”

  “Right. If the king wants to send us some fresh Riders, we can use ‘em.” Ventdor turned to Rat. “But right now, I think you’d better take your company to Braids Senelaec as reinforcement.”

  When Rat’s three wings galloped out the gates, war banners snapping, followed shortly thereafter by runners bearing the royal pennons going in all directions, the denizens of the town stared, asking each other what was going on—and before the midnight bell clanged, word had spread about the destruction of Tlen, little more than half a day’s ride from Ku Halir.

  The sun came up on a sinister smoke pall smudging the eastern horizon.

  Roughly the same time, far to the north, Connar stood under the sheltering branches of a fir, hands on hips, gazing into the rocky overhang that had obviously been a camp. Dry wood gathered and stacked inside for burning (few brigands had firesticks, which were very carefully rationed by the various guilds), and half a sack of moldy oats. Connar frowned, then—heedless of pouring rain—walked into the cave and kicked the firewood. It was all damp underneath.

  “This is long abandoned.”

  “But we did see footprints, before the rain came,” said one of the scouts. “Over that way. Half a dozen prints, man size, no horses. Now pretty mushy. I think there was a thin layer of ice that was slow to melt, on that slope.”

  “So within the last couple months, then,” Connar said, and swung around, looking at the oats and the firewood.

  Stick propped a booted foot on a rock and leaned his forearm on his leg. “Could be they left the oats because they were rotten. Took everything else.”

  Connar looked up. “Where’d the footprints go?”

  “Downstream. Bending west, then vanished.”

  Nobody spoke the obvious—they could have gone in any direction from there.

  A distant shout was followed by two brief, high notes on the bugle, announcing the arrival of a report. Connar waved a hand. “Send ‘em up.”

  Stick nodded to his runner, who dashed down the trail, slipping in the mud.

  A short time later the bushes thrashed as a pair of wet dogs appeared, tongues lolling. They sniffed all around, then sat to wait as a stocky, gray-haired scout in sodden tunic came toiling up the path, mud caked to his knees.

  When he saw Connar, he stopped, slapped two fingers against his breast, then said, “Connar-Laef. There’s something you better see.”

  “Where?”

  The scout pointed northwards, into the hills. “Three, maybe four days’ ride.”

  Connar felt the denial shaping his lips. He loathed the thought of blundering about in these hills any more than they already had—just to find another campsite that could have been used by anyone, at any time.

  But this man had been hailed as a first-rate scout, brought down from Olavayir by Sneeze Ventdor around the time Connar was born, and well respected now.

  “Lead the way,” he said, hating it. He turned to Stick, issuing new orders, and then mounted up.

  Three and a half days later, at least the weather had abruptly warmed to summery brightness. The scout took them up a narrow, rocky gorge with an ancient path running parallel to the river with its many falls, until they reached a plateau overlooked by snow-capped mountains.

  Connar looked around the empty space, irritation spiking. He was about to snap out an order to leash the damn dogs racing and snuffling about, which were distracting in their noise, when their purpose struck him: they didn’t get excited like that unless there were human scents. Fresh ones.

  He looked around the flat space more slowly, wondering what about it looked vaguely familiar, though he knew he’d never set foot in these hills.

  Then he had it: the very flatness. This was exactly what the two favorite academy campsites looked like, a week’s ride from the royal city. They could always find them again because of the brush cleared out, all the big stones removed so that tent floors could be flat under bedrolls—

  He looked again. This was a campsite, even bigger than the ones that accommodated the entire academy.

  He turned to Stick. “An army was here.”

  Stick looked about, a frown between his mobile brows. “How can you tell? There’s nothing save that stream over there, below the fall—”

  “Stick, you’ve had rock duty on academy overnights. Look.”

  Stick’s mobile brows shot upward. He stared around more slowly, then turned back. “This...is an army camp.”

  “And not all that old,” the scout spoke up unasked, and began pointed out details of recent occupation.

  Connar shut that out, his thoughts racing. If an army had been here, where was it now? He gazed upward at the northern mountains jutting up like teeth against the sky. Beyond those lay Lorgi Idego. There was no pass here, but that didn’t mean the mountains were impassable. Assuming the Idegans had put an army here, why? And why attack Halivayir? What could they have possibly gotten there? Unless it was a feint of some kind.

  He turned in a circle, wild to see, to understand, then caught himself up. He knew he was building what-ifs on top of what-ifs. Even Inda-Harskialdna would have made no sense of this, he thought as he gazed eastward. All right, unless they’d gone north again, after the most pointless attack in history, they had three other directions. West was out. Connar knew that no force could have gotten past his wide-spread net. That left east, into Yvanavayir, or south, toward Ku Halir....

  What if Halivayir wasn’t a feint, but practice?

  South was Ku Halir, and then, straight south of that—

  The royal city.

  He turned to Stick, to meet his wide, light gaze, his brows slanting in question. “We need Noddy, right?” Stick asked.

  “Yes. And Fath and his heavies, as soon as we can get them.”


  “I’ll send Askan. He knows Noddy. He’ll be able to explain....”

  While Connar and Stick spread their net again and started southward as fast as the animals could run, in Ku Halir, Ventdor went about his duties, but every free moment snapped his mind back to the map as if he could somehow draw the truth out by glaring hard enough.

  He was fighting frustration the next day as he tried to down a scanty meal, half-listening to his duty captains arguing what-ifs before the map, when noise out in hallway nearly drowned their voices.

  Ventdor dropped the biscuit he’d been eating. “What is that racket out there?” He got up, thrust aside his aide, and yanked open the door himself, then stared at the gangling boy no older than fourteen in the process of dragging away a younger girl with frizzy hair.

  “No, no, no, I won’t go home!” she screamed. “I’m telling the truth!”

  “What’s this?” Ventdor snapped.

  The two youngsters jumped as though stabbed, and turned distraught faces his way, the girl’s tear-stained. “I know who did it,” the girl shrilled, running toward him.

  The boy flushed to the ears. “It’s nothing,” he said as he chased after her. “My sister just thinks she heard something because she hated somebody,” he said miserably.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Ventdor muttered, and the duty sentry turned to muscle the youngsters out.

  But the girl grabbed the door frame, set her feet against it, and screeched, “I know who did it, I know who did it!”

  Ventdor sighed. “Stop that noise. You have the count of twenty to tell me why you’re howling down my castle. And if it turns out either of you are wasting my time, you’ll regret it,” he snapped.

  It was an empty threat, but the youngsters didn’t know that. They both paled, the boy looking sick, and the girl’s jaw jutting. She kept a death-grip on the door frame and began shrilling a rapid stream of disjointed sentences.