But where were the Baron of Heathbire’s men? Hadn’t Dain just been there? Wardin saw neither the baron nor a single green cloak.
Well before he could organize his own people, Wardin’s question was answered by the thundering of hooves. The Heathbire men, Sadon riding at their fore, bore down on them from behind, even as the Harths began to advance from the stronghold.
As if to emphasize the depth of the baron’s treachery, Sadon made straight not for Wardin but for Corbin, and crushed Dain’s nephew’s skull with a single swing of his flail.
22
Bramwell
Bramwell stood on the wall, Tobin on one side of him and Radley of Aldarine on the other, watching with great satisfaction as his plan began to unfold. Perfectly.
He was smiling like a gleeful child. He could hardly help it, when he could so vividly imagine Wardin’s confusion and horror at seeing an army stream out of the stronghold, knowing how vulnerable he now was against it.
What it must have been like for him, that moment when he realized his magic was gone.
It made up for Bering Pass. It made up for the boy’s poisoning Bramwell not once, but twice, first to escape Witmare, then to make fools of the Harths at Pendralyn. Had Wardin guessed by now that Bramwell had turned that tactic back on him?
Not with the water, of course. One of the first things the Eyrds had done when they set up their encampment was test the two nearby streams, casting spells to reveal any poisons or traps. They did the same with the food given to them by two local farmers. (Those unwise souls were now dead at Tobin’s orders, their farms and families seized.)
The Eyrds’ caution was misplaced. Heathbire’s men had been with them for days by then. Long enough to gain their trust—and taint their mead.
One could always count on Eyrds to drink their mead.
They had no reason to be wary of their supplies, when their allies were eating and drinking from the same stores. The boy and his magicians could not have guessed that there was something in that mead that would not bother the moorlanders. Not poison. It wouldn’t harm a man in the least.
It would only prevent him from using magic.
They could not have guessed, because until Bramwell’s very fruitful journey to see an obscure Eyrdish crone, such a substance was thought not to exist.
Bram had been searching for quite some time for something that would prevent spellcasting, or at least dampen a spell’s strength. Some said sea salt had that effect. (It didn’t, not in any experiment Bramwell or his father had tried.) Others recommended various herbs and concoctions. (Equally useless.)
But most said it was impossible. That once the ability to do magic sparked in a person, there was no putting out that flame.
For a long time, it seemed the latter group was right. And to make matters worse, Bramwell needed something that would not only work, but work in practical terms. The ingredients must be reasonably easy to obtain, the antimagic reasonably easy to produce in large quantities and deliver to a significant population of magicians.
It was too much to ask. Until it wasn’t. Until it came together so well, in fact, that one could almost believe fate, or Hart himself, had a hand in it.
When Bramwell at last found the one who could do it, she turned out to be right there in Eyrdon. Just a small matter of a ride east, and with the added convenience of obtaining his other prize along the way. In addition to ensuring that Heathbire would tell Wardin any lie the king commanded him to, Rora kept Bramwell (mostly) amused. The journey was actually pleasant.
The crone’s formula did use sea salt, as it happened, in combination with several other things. Things that, in total, threw off the taste of water to a likely unfeasible degree. But mead was a different matter, particularly with the way the Eyrds liked to spice it.
The woman was revoltingly happy to doom her countrymen by giving the antimagic to Bramwell, if it meant raising up her family. He gave his word to match her granddaughter, a peasant of no bloodline, to a baron, and that was that.
A promise he resolved to keep, as he enjoyed the fruits of her labor. Down on the field, the already dismayed Eyrds were being made to understand that Heathbire’s men were not their allies, after all.
Tobin laughed. “This will be over within the hour, Father!”
“Sooner.” Radley reached behind Bramwell to clap Tobin’s back. “Care to liven it up with a wager?”
Bramwell elbowed them both. “I assure you, it will be quite lively enough. Now stop your infernal chatter. I’d like to enjoy the screams.”
Magic was an enormous asset, but that could cut both ways, if one’s greatest advantage was one’s only advantage. Stripped of it, the battle was as good as lost, no matter how small a percentage of the rebels’ force was actually comprised of magicians.
And best of all: they knew it. They were falling apart. Had been from the moment they discovered their magic was gone, and more so when they saw the gates open. Now that the moorlanders were cutting them down where they stood, panic was spreading with unstoppable speed and force. There would be no regrouping, no rallying, no reasoning. Not when they were led by a green boy and as pathetic a commander as Forthwind.
Made more pathetic, no doubt, by Bramwell’s strict order that Forthwind’s bastard be among the first to die. Dain had begged for his nephew’s life. But the baron must be punished. And though she was his hostage in name, Bramwell had no desire to hurt Rora as long as there were other, easier ways to make use of her father.
Surely the bastard—Corbin, that was his name, not that it mattered—was dead by now. Bramwell couldn’t identify any of the combatants below, living or dead, ally or enemy. Except Wardin, who was set apart by his fine chestnut charger and his height. The latter would have made Bramwell equally recognizable to the boy, although the king had made doubly certain Wardin would know exactly who had orchestrated his ruin, by wearing no helmet. Bram’s fifty-three years had not grayed his famously red hair.
He did not require names or faces to see that the end result was a brutal slaughter, even by the standards of war. The Eyrds, trapped between Heathbire’s men and Bramwell’s, were hacked to pieces until the breeze carried the stench of blood and death even as far back as the stronghold’s walls.
Wardin charged to and fro on that magnificent horse—Bramwell decided he would take it for himself, if it lived—shouting, fighting, desperately trying to drive his men to break through Heathbire’s line and, no doubt, retreat into the mountains from whence they came. That was the logical course to take, but focusing in that direction also gave the Harthian and Aldar troops the opportunity to flank them, closing the circle ever tighter.
Still, the Eyrds were making some headway. Gaps were opening. Many of them were fleeing. Some of the Harths broke away to give chase, leaving the rebels more spaces through which to retreat in turn.
Well, some of them were bound to get away. So long as more died than lived, and Wardin’s ranks were decimated down to an easily manageable size, Bramwell would be satisfied enough.
Or he would have been, had he not seen Wardin take a blow to the head. The boy fell from his horse and struggled against two attackers before some of his own men came to his aid and dispatched his opponents for him.
Then, to Bramwell’s great displeasure, the Eyrds started to carry Wardin away.
“No!” the king bellowed, startling both Tobin and Radley. “Do not let him be removed from this field!”
He’d given a clear order that Wardin be captured. It wasn’t only that he wanted the joy of killing the boy himself, although joyous it would certainly be. Bramwell wanted Wardin executed publicly, horribly, exactly like his father before him. It was marvelous, the way pulling the entrails out of their prince could subdue a conquered people.
The victory, no matter how catastrophic the Eyrds’ losses, would be diminished without that. But the confusion on the field was too great. None of Bramwell’s men seemed to notice that Wardin was wounded, or that his own men were retr
eating with him even as the king watched.
Ignoring the protest of his aching legs, Bramwell ran down the stairs to his waiting horse and thundered out the gates, leaving his guards, his son, and his allies to follow in his wake.
He cursed and barked orders as he approached the field, sending more men after the fleeing Eyrds, ordering them to find Wardin and be sure he did not escape the king’s justice.
Finally Bramwell found Darren, his own captain, a man he trusted far more than his other officers or the Aldars. Or Tobin, for that matter. “How many men did you send to surround the area?”
“Four hundred, Majesty, or thereabouts. They won’t be able to stop them all, especially with the Eyrds knowing the land better than we do. But they will stop some. In any case, a great many are already dead on the field.”
“Some won’t do, unless it’s the proper some!” Bramwell urged his horse on again, racing around the outskirts of the battle himself while his hapless guards, desperate to protect him, tried to keep up.
They rode for an hour through the fields and woods surrounding Corghest. They went door to door through the town and surrounding farmhouses for another hour after that, searching for fugitives.
With every Eyrd they came upon that was not Wardin, Bramwell’s fury deepened, until it burrowed into his bones. No amount of blood could satisfy him, when it was not the boy’s blood. But still he spilled more of it. And more again.
Until, as often happened when his temper reached its peak, that boiling rage turned all at once to ice. Bramwell’s chest heaved as his senses returned. His pulse slowed. His mind went clear and cold.
His teeth hurt. Why was that? Had he been grinding them, or had he actually bitten someone?
He found himself beside a stream, surrounded by several of his guards and no less than eight—no, nine—dead Eyrds. Once again, Wardin was not among them.
Last autumn, Bramwell had been carried, wounded, off a field where he’d faced the last Rath. He was furious when he woke in a tent miles away, to learn that his men had fled, dragging their king with them. Perhaps the boy would be equally frustrated.
On that occasion, Wardin had been wise enough not to chase the retreating Harths. Rather than thin out his troops, he stayed at the center of the point he’d set out to defend, and held his objective.
It was a lesson Bramwell himself had learned young, after a hotheaded choice led to a great loss. Those first and harshest lessons were the ones that never left him.
They’d cut down as many of the retreating rebels as was practical. They wouldn’t chase them into the mountains. Not even to get to the boy.
One of the Eyrds on the ground whimpered, barely conscious but, it seemed, not dead. Bramwell cocked his head and watched the man’s hand twitch for a moment, before stepping over, kicking a corpse’s leg out of the way, and running the soldier through.
“That’ll be you soon enough, boy. Our day will come.”
23
Wardin
“Where is Bramwell?” Wardin sat up, winced, and leaned back against the large mound of pillows behind him. In the two weeks since the catastrophe at Corghest, there had been no further attacks on the Eyrds, nor any sign of the Harths making a move on Pendralyn. “Not that I’m ungrateful.”
“No? Because you sound ungrateful.” Erietta offered him a soft smile, which Wardin returned. He’d once said the same thing to her, when she was the one hurt. He was surprised she remembered.
But that brief smile was the best he could manage. Those two weeks had been wretched, for all of them.
Half their people had been killed at Corghest. It likely would have been more, if not for the heroic efforts of a single contriver who found, half an hour into the battle, that he could cast cloaking spells to help with the retreat. Nobody understood how or why magic had returned for him alone.
Half. The very word still made Wardin choke.
And choking was a painful thing, at the moment. The sage who had tended him when they got back said Wardin had more than one broken rib, though the real threat to his survival was the ugly wound that ran from just past his right eye all the way around to the back of his head. She declared that only Eyrdri’s intervention could have brought him home alive at all.
The bandages were gone now, but Wardin still hadn’t recovered from either injury. He alternated between thinking the struggle for every breath was worse than the nauseating headaches, and deciding it was the other way around.
His new scar would remain with him for the rest of his life. Erietta assured him that he was right in thinking women found marks of battle attractive. Arun, whose own face had been scarred at Mindoral, said that it made them brothers, of a sort.
Wardin viewed it differently. For him, it would always be a well-deserved reminder of his failures, to be carried forever as both a punishment and a warning.
Half.
His people, mainly Erietta and Quinn, had saved him on the field and fought hard to get him away. Quinn even made sure Dragon’s Edge wasn’t lost, though nobody found Ciril. They regrouped in the mountains with as many of their own as they could.
The Harths only chased them as far as the higher elevations, and all of their magic returned within a day. The sages healed the wounded, and the contrivers used their cloaks and tricks to help get the survivors home.
Wardin’s head wound was severe, worse than any disruption to his balance had ever been. For days along the journey back, he could hardly think. He didn’t always know where he was. He didn’t always know who he was. Much of that time was a fog.
Much. But perhaps not enough. Wardin had very clear memories of the slaughter of the Eyrds. (Half.) A slaughter brought about by Dain, in a nefarious bit of treachery worthy of Draven Rath himself. Had Rora ever even been a hostage at all?
Most likely she had. Surely Dain wouldn’t have killed Corbin for any lesser purpose than saving his daughter’s life—not with a rescue, but with a lie.
Or perhaps Dain’s affection for Corbin was also a lie, and Rora didn’t enter into it at all. Wardin supposed he might never know.
Blood and treachery.
A prediction meant to help Wardin decide whether to start on the path that would lead him to the baron, to Corghest. It seemed Odger had been wrong about the traitor’s identity.
Perhaps the boy had also been wrong about this path leading to triumph. Wardin could see no victory at its end.
Erietta rose from the foot of his bed, giving Rowena more space to stretch out. “If you actually want an answer to your question, I expect Bramwell is making more of whatever it is that stole our magic from us, now that he’s found out it works. And as soon as he has enough of it, he’ll be marching straight here. At which point we’ll be doomed unless we do something first. I have a suggestion.”
Wardin started to nod, then thought better of it. Moving his head too much still made him ill. “I have a few ideas of my own.”
This was true, but he’d said so mainly to change the subject away from Erietta’s idea, which he suspected involved the words Iver and Dordrin. Words he would be quite content to never hear again. “And I agree we need to make some decisions soon. Now would be good, in fact, since my head’s reasonably clear, but we’ll have to meet in here. The healers are still forbidding me to stand or walk. Where’s Arun?”
“Making more slow progress on enchanting, I believe. He made a pipe play a tune on its own three days ago, but it won’t do it again.”
“Rowena.” Wardin nudged the hound with his foot. She snorted and rolled over. He nudged harder. “Rowena! Do not make me clap my hands or raise my voice, if you please, both will hurt.” She raised her head, though not without a beleaguered sigh. “Go and get Arun.”
Rowena jumped off the bed and took her time stretching, first front, then back, until Erietta snapped her fingers and went to open the door for her.
“Do you mind checking around for Quinn a bit?” Wardin asked when Erietta came back into the bedchamber. “If you don�
�t see him in any of the obvious places, we can do without him. He’s been spending time with his sweetheart in Avadare, and he’s earned the rest, if anyone has.”
“And Pate?” Erietta crossed her arms.
Wardin scoffed. “Do you really think Pate would come, even if he were invited?”
“War, the two of you will have to make your peace at some point.”
“Will we?” Wardin raised his brows. “You’re the last person I’d expect to be concerned for him.”
“And you’re one of the last people I’d expect to have no concern for him. The man lost his son.” She pressed her lips together. “Fine, I’ll leave it alone for now. But only because we can’t fit too many people in here, not because you’re glaring at me.”
After she left, Wardin leaned back and heaved a painful sigh as he stared at the ceiling. In truth, he was somewhat ashamed of his treatment of Pate. He had refused to allow the commander back into Pendralyn at first, until a lengthy interrogation satisfied him that Pate had known nothing of Dain’s deception.
An interrogation conducted with the inkwell. In what was surely one of fate’s cruel jokes, Arun had managed to restore it—three days after the rest of them had ridden south. If only he’d been able to do it a bit sooner, they might have brought it with them, and asked a few questions of the Baron of Heathbire. But Wardin had refrained from saying so. Of all the people who could be said to bear any part of the blame for Corghest, Arun was the least of them.
The others, even Arun and Erietta, had been shocked by Wardin’s mistrust of Pate. The man’s grief over Corbin was plain enough for anyone to see. He would never have been complicit in his son’s death.
And yet. Pate and Corbin himself had all but insisted that Wardin trust Dain. Right after Wardin returned from the Well of Songs—where Pate had also strongly encouraged him to go—just in time to have the almost fully formed plan to attack Corghest presented to him. He had to at least consider that they might have been part of the scheme, minus the intent to kill Corbin.
A Dark Reckoning Page 24
