Well, he hasn't convinced me, and he hasn't convinced Darkwind, she thought stubbornly. Whatever spell of words or personality he put them under, I hope it's going to be more difficult to work the same "magic" on us. I know mind-magic, and Darkwind is so foreign to Tremane's experience that he might as well be another species altogether. And what's more, I wouldn't be in the least surprised to discover that Kerowyn slipped half a dozen special operatives into our escort. Two sides can play the assassination game, if it comes to that.
She hoped that it wouldn't, but she had enough experience now to make her plans around pessimism rather than hope. She didn't officially know that Kerowyn had planted her own agents, but she knew the Skybolts, and they were, one and all, "irregulars." Their skills were not those of straight-on fighters, although they could act and fight as a disciplined skirmishing unit and had in the past.
On the other hand... Solaris has Hansa, the other Firecat. If she wanted to kill Tremane, there is no way he could stop her. So maybe that fact alone will make him behave himself from now on.
That was certainly something else to consider. The Firecats possessed the ability to "Jump" themselves and anyone in physical contact with them from one location to another, and Elspeth was not entirely certain what their range was. Certainly it was good enough that Altra and Hansa served as messengers between Solaris and Selenay, and between the party in the remains of Urtho's Tower and the mages and Artificers in the Valdemaran capital of Haven. Solaris was perfectly capable of placing an assassin of her own right under Tremane's privy to poke a knife up into him if she so desired, and for that matter, there was no reason why Hansa himself could not kill a man if he chose. Although Firecats had the ability to look like common cats if they wished to, in their true form they were the size of enormous hounds, and their claws and teeth were correspondingly long and sharp.
Elspeth blinked at the images that thought conjured up. My thoughts are certainly taking a grim turn today. Maybe I'm concentrating on spilling blood as an antidote to all this whiteness. Dear gods, it's cold—and we haven't seen another human soul since our guides left us.
They'd been lucky when they'd reached the Valdemaran Border. A couple of Hardornen exiles—vouched for by Kerowyn's agents—had cautiously decided it was safe to return and acted as guides up until this morning in exchange for two pouches of currency and two packs of supplies. Now, though, they would have to go on without guides, because the husband and wife had gone as far as they intended.
Last night the party had reached the village from which the couple had originally fled. Even though it proved to be deserted, abandoned, like the other villages they had passed on this road, the two wanted to stay; even in thick white desolation they had a dream of a time in the future when there would be children running and playing in a verdant town square.
Their journey thus far had been an unnerving one, riding through a landscape devoid of humans. Elspeth could only wonder what had happened. The land might be healing, but where are the people? True, Ancar had decimated the population, but why hadn't they met with anyone on this road? Why were all the villages they passed through completely deserted?
The abandoned villages raised more questions than were answered, for everything had been taken except the heaviest of furniture, and there was no sign of violence. Was this the result of systematic desertion or systematic looting? Who was cleaning off the snow? Were the Hardornens hiding from an armed and possibly hostile group? Given the fact that this was a nation racked by war, that was possible. But why, when there was a Herald of Valdemar riding conspicuously in the front?
Perhaps because at a distance there's no reason to assume I really am a Herald. It's not that hard to get a white horse and a set of white clothing.
"What are our plans for stopping tonight, or do we have any?" she called back to the leader of the troop. They hadn't provisioned themselves for camping, though they had brought all their own food, assuming that rations might be short given the horrible mage-weather Hardorn had endured. It was a good thing they had, or they'd have had a choice between starving and (literally) eating crow.
"In theory there's a town ahead that used to have a weekly market and five big inns," the leader replied, his voice muffled by the scarf swathing his face. "Whether or not it's still tenanted—" he shrugged. "Someone's been keeping the road clean for traders, and I'm hoping it's them."
So was Elspeth, fervently. She was not looking forward to spending another night in an abandoned, derelict building. There was always one building that could be made to serve, and there was certainly no shortage of firewood, but she had always been glad of the presence of the others around her. She'd found it hard to sleep at night, with her shoulder blades prickling as if unseen eyes watched her. No one had actually seen or heard anything that could be taken as a ghost, but such places felt haunted.
She couldn't begin to imagine how Rusi and Severn could bear to stay back there in what was left of their village. Granted, there was plenty of material to make more than one of the houses sound and weather tight again. And granted, they were well-equipped to do just that. But the aching emptiness of the abandoned village would have sent her screaming for Valdemar within a week.
It was more than she could bear to think about right now. I've done a great deal that people think is brave, but I'm not that brave.
But that was also assuming that the land around the village was as deserted as it looked. When the mage-storms created killing weather and murderous monsters, would it have been safer and smarter to fortify the farmsteads and stay where the food was, or to come into the village and trust in numbers and weapons but chance the food running out? It wasn't a decision Elspeth had ever needed to make, and she hoped it was one nobody in Valdemar would be forced to face.
For that, all their hopes rested with that tiny group in the middle of the Dhorisha Plains, in the ruins of Urtho's Tower. If anyone could find an answer, it would be them. Although Elspeth and Darkwind were both Adept-class mages, Elspeth was relatively untutored and Darkwind had abandoned magic for so many years that despite his considerable prowess he still considered himself out of practice. As mages, they were of no help to the researchers who had gone to the Tower. They might be of some use with the Imperials, and they would be of great use as envoys.
She knew that Queen Selenay had debated long and hard before deciding to send Elspeth and Darkwind as envoys from the Alliance to Tremane. The Queen hadn't wanted to send Elspeth, but Elspeth was the only logical choice—she could make autonomous decisions, she had been trained both as a Herald and to wear the crown herself—she was the next best thing to Selenay when it came to being able to think for Valdemar. Elspeth had proven that she had good judgment, and because she was no longer the Heir since her abdication, she was of little value as a political hostage. Moreover, she had been trained by Kerowyn to defend herself against assassins; she could take care of herself in an ambush or an even fight, and she was as suspicious as even that redoubtable woman could have wished.
Then there was magic, in which she was an Adept; Tremane was no more than a Master, though of a far different magical discipline than the one she had been trained in. Very few of the Heralds of Valdemar were mages at all, much less Adepts, and although their Companions would be able to help them to some extent in matters of magic, it was no substitute for being mages themselves.
All that might not have been enough, except for Darkwind; he was an Adept as well, and of longer standing than she. He had been a Tayledras scout, which made him something of a fighter as well. He would have refused flatly to accompany anyone else; he was not a Herald, and his loyalties were to her, not Valdemar. Whereas she would hardly have gone anywhere without him, of course, and together they were a formidable pair.
Between her own qualifications and Darkwind's, there simply was no one as "right" to go on this mission as Elspeth, and if she had been anyone else's daughter, Selenay would not have hesitated for a moment to send her.
To
give Mother credit, she didn't hesitate long. Elspeth was actually a bit pleased at that; Selenay had been treating her less as a daughter and more as—as an adult, and Elspeth had gotten the feeling, more than once, that when the Queen forgot to think of her as her daughter, she acted naturally. In a way, given the Queen's behavior of late, Elspeth had been a little surprised that her mother had given second thoughts to the mission. I wonder if some of what has made her hesitate in the past was more guilt than anything else.
Could it have been? Elspeth and her mother had never been comfortable with each other. No matter how hard she tried, she always saw my father in me. In so many ways, I was more Talia's child than hers. Now Selenay had the twins, children she could give her whole heart to; could she be feeling guilt that she didn't have that same maternal bond with Elspeth? Was that why she had always overreacted when Elspeth did something that might put her in jeopardy—because she felt as if she should have been more worried, more emotionally involved than she was?
An interesting theory, and one I'll never learn the truth of. I certainly couldn't ask her that, and the only other person who would know will never tell me. Talia would never betray anything she learned of Mother's heart, and rightly so. Elspeth gave herself a mental shake. Did it matter? Not really. Except that—if that was indeed the case, she wished she could convince her mother that it didn't matter. The last thing that the Queen of Valdemar needed was one more thing to feel guilty about. She already carried enough guilt for twenty people.
And I would rather be Queen Selenay's friend and fellow Herald than her daughter.
But the thought did present one explanation for some of Selenay's contradictory behavior, and it was certainly worth keeping in the back of her mind. She could watch for evidence of her own, and it would be interesting to act on that theory and see what happened.
Meanwhile, there was a long and difficult job ahead of her, and there was a danger they might all freeze to death before they even got to it if they didn't find some Hardornens soon.
"How much farther do you think this town is?" she called back over her shoulder. She glanced back to see—what was the Guard-Captain's name? Vallen, that was it—to see Vallen shrug, the movement barely visible beneath his multiple layers of fur, sheepskin, and wool.
"Soon, I think, but that is just a guess," he replied. Despite the scarf he wore about his face, his words came clearly over the muffled hoofbeats of their various mounts, over the creaking of the packed snow beneath those hooves. He gave his horse a nudge with his heels, and took the lead position as Elspeth and Darkwind moved aside to let him by.
Elspeth stood in her stirrups for a moment to peer up the road ahead, but if there were any signs of habitations such as plumes of smoke that could have been rising from chimneys, they were invisible against the uniformly gray-white sky. The sun was nothing more than a fuzzy, lighter spot about halfway down to the horizon.
She settled back down in her saddle; the way the road wound about, it wasn't possible to see very far ahead, and they only got a view of the countryside when the snowbanks allowed. We could be right on top of this town and we'd never know it, she thought.
Minutes later, the road gave another turn and dropped away in front of them. The snowbanks themselves inclined down to about waist-height. As if conjured up in a scrying crystal, the watched-for town appeared ahead of and below them, down in a shallow valley, the houses sticking up out of the snow like so many tree stumps in the snow-covered forest.
This was not the first time a town had appeared before them, but now, for the first time, there were signs that the place was inhabited. Some of the houses were nothing more than snow-covered lumps, but some had been cleaned of their burden of white. Thin smoke wreathed up out of about half the chimneys, to be snatched away by the wind before it climbed up to form a plume. There were a few figures moving about on the road near the town, and it was clear from the purposeful way that they moved that the party had been spotted, if not anticipated.
The place looked marginally better than the deserted villages they had already passed. Perhaps half the buildings were in disrepair; one or two had collapsed roofs, and it was hard to tell under the snow how badly some of the others had suffered. She had to guess that only the buildings with smoke rising from them were actually lived in, and she caught her breath at the thought that Ancar and all the other troubles visited upon Hardorn had literally cut the population in half. Maybe more, she reminded herself. How many deserted villages did we pass through?
Were conditions like this everywhere? If so—well, she did not envy any leader the task of trying to bring this country back from such devastation. If Tremane can get the Hardornens to accept him, he has more work ahead of him than I'd care to take on.
A group of about a dozen people had formed up ahead of them on the road, barring them, at least for the moment, from entering the town. They were as bundled up in clothing as Elspeth's group was, making it difficult to tell anything about them, including their sexes; but in spite of that handicap, she thought that their stances showed a mix of fear and belligerence.
Fear? When had anyone ever feared her? They weren't so deep into Hardorn that the natives should be unaware of what a Herald was and what one stood for. How could they fear a Herald? Had Ancar created that fear in them so strongly?
She sensed the fighters behind her surreptitiously loosening their weapons, placing hands casually on hilts, and increasing their watchfulness. So it was not her imagination; they sensed hostility, too. Vallen reined in his horse and allowed her to take the lead; Darkwind signaled the dyheli to drop back with his head even with Gwena's flank. Elspeth brought them all to a halt about a length away from the "welcoming party" by gesturing with an upraised hand.
"We are peaceful travelers from Valdemar," she said in their own tongue, pulling her scarf down so that they could see her entire face—though she did Wonder if they'd believe the "peaceful" part with so many weapons in evidence. "Who is in charge here?"
Two of the figures looked at each other, and one stepped forward, though he did not reveal his face as Elspeth had. Now that Elspeth was closer to them, the ragged state of their clothing was painfully evident. Their coats were carefully mended, but with patches that were not even a close match for the same material as the original.
"Me. I'm in charge, as I reckon," the foremost man said gruffly, and he folded his arms clumsily over his chest. He had no weapon in evidence, but Elspeth did not take that to mean that these people were helpless. If she'd been in charge, she'd have archers with drawn bows at every window.
She did not look up to see if her guess was correct.
"What're you here for?" the man continued. His arms tightened and his posture straightened. His voice rose, angry and strained. "If you think you people in Valdemar are going to come in here and take us over, us and our land—"
"No," Elspeth interrupted, cutting him off more sharply than she had intended. The man's nerves had infected her, and she took a deep breath to steady herself. "No," she repeated with less force. "We—Valdemar—has no intention of taking one ell of Hardorn land. Until Ancar attacked us, we were always the loyal friend and ally of Hardorn, and we intend to return to that status now that Ancar is gone."
He laughed, but it was not a sound of humor. "Ha!" he jeered. "You say that, but why should we believe you?"
"I swear it on my honor as a Herald!" she countered quickly. "You must know what that means, at least! Surely you have not lost faith even in that!"
This all had the feeling of a test, as if what she said here would make all the difference in how they would be treated from this moment on.
Do they have some way to communicate with other communities still? She couldn't imagine how anyone could cross this frozen wasteland faster than they were already doing, but the party of Valdemarans was confined to the road, and perhaps the natives had some way of cutting across country to spread news. Perhaps the old signal-towers were still working.
That
could be the answer. And it could be how they knew we were coming.
"I swear it as a Herald, she repeated. "And as the envoy of the Queen. Valdemar has no designs on Hardorn, nor do any of the other parties to the Alliance."
—though Solaris had to restrain a few hotheads in Karse. Or rather, Vkandis did—
"We're only traveling," she continued smoothly. "We'd appreciate your hospitality for the night, though we did bring our own provisions. We know how difficult things have been for you, and we didn't want to strain anyone's resources."
There was a long silence, during which the man peered at her closely, and finally nodded, as if satisfied with what he saw. "That outfit's kind of outlandish, but you've got the horse, blue eyes and all, and that can't be faked." He shrugged, then, and made a gesture that she suspected told those hidden archers that all was well. "I guess we still believe in Heralds—mostly since Ancar tried so hard to make us think you was some kind of witchy crew that had traffic with demons. I'll take your word as bond for you and the rest of this lot, but you better remember that you stand personal surety for them."
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