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 surviv
ors. 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 wouldn’t’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 liveable. 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 som
e 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.
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