by Glenda Larke
“It’s a stalemate, isn’t it?” Saker said. “You can’t attack because you fear their sorcerers and they can’t attack because you’re up here on the ridge.”
“We’ve been whittling away at the sorcerers. A lucky shot every now and then. We estimate fewer than ten remaining.”
“Perie thinks five. Scattered along the valley from one end to the other. One of them is Ruthgar Fox. We followed him from Vavala, immediately after Valerian’s death. He left the usual trail of smutch that Perie senses. In fact, I think you were very lucky we were hard on his tail, or he might have cut a swathe through your lines last night. It could have been your undoing, but Perie was able to warn your men, and our dog-charmer sent a pack of hounds after the fellow. He escaped down the slope about midnight.”
“Oh. So that’s what that skirmish was all about.” He heaved a sigh. “Sorry to hear he got away. Ruthgar is a sneaky varlet if ever there was one. Clever, manipulative, always one step ahead of us.”
“He’s Valerian’s chosen heir. He knows how to extend his life and gain power. He killed three children between Vavala and here.”
“Sweet Va.” Deremer turned to stare out over the valley once more.
“Perie knows exactly where Ruthgar is at the moment. Two miles to the south of where we are now.”
“If the lancers know Valerian is not coming to lead them into battle, it will damage their morale. Does Ruthgar know Valerian is dead?” Deremer asked, his frown deepening.
“I should think so. The lancers are in for a bad night, anyway. A plague of rats will be on their way at nightfall, to eat into their supplies. Cockroaches, midges, fleas, snakes, spiders and ticks are already making their lives a misery. And wasps. Mustn’t forget the wasps. Tonight, Fritillary’s witchery clerics are arranging a diversion to distract their sentries while woodworkers sneak into their camp.”
“To do what?”
“To weaken or break all the wood they find. Lances, pikes – they usually stack them up outside the tents at night, right? Kegs, barrels. Carts. Tent poles. Boats. Anything they leave unguarded.”
“I like your way of thinking! What happened to the idea that you lost a witchery if you misused it?”
“Who says this is misusing?”
Deremer tilted his head thoughtfully. “What about using birds, the way you did back in Dortgren?”
“I won’t do that except as a last resort.” Deremer raised a questioning eyebrow, but Saker didn’t want to explain his reluctance.
The eagle called then, high above their heads. Saker thought it a haunting sound of loneliness, for there never was a reply; there never could be, not here.
“Is that yours?” Deremer asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Can you send it to see if it can pinpoint precisely where the sorcerers are?”
“I can try. How best can I tell them apart from their soldiers? Are the lancers still wearing only grey coats?”
“No, these days they wear whatever they can get their hands on. They don’t wear jewellery, though, because they don’t like anything ornamental, whereas I’ve yet to see a member of the Fox family who wasn’t adorned with enough gold to please the greediest of bawds.”
“Perie and I will see what we can do.” He inclined his head and, without waiting for an answer, walked off.
By the end of the day, with the help of the sea eagle, he thought Perie was right. There were five sorcerers down in the river valley, and no more. That night, two of them attempted to climb up out of the valley on to the ridge. Perie knew they were on their way long before they were close enough to coerce the sentries into betrayal. He directed Deremer’s archers, and in the morning the bodies lay on the hillside, and the crows gathered to pick out their eyes.
The next few days crawled by after that, with very little happening.
Gerelda muttered that she had no idea war could be so boring. She was also worried about Perie. They all were. He spoke less and less to any of them, and spent much of his time under a young oak tree growing about a mile away. It wasn’t a shrine-oak, and when Gerelda asked why he spent so much time there, he replied, “Because it was born on the same day as me,” and lapsed into silence once more.
“He could be right,” Saker said later, after he’d seen the tree. “It would be about the same age as he is.”
“I’m losing him,” Gerelda said. “I can feel him slipping away, day by day.”
“You think he’s dying?” he asked, alarmed.
“More… fading into a place I cannot reach. Oh, Saker, there has just been too much sorrow and death in his short life.”
He felt the cold pang of bitter failure. He was a witan, yet he didn’t know how to help Peregrine Clary. They all tried: Sorrel, Ardhi, the other clerics, but Perie remained distant and unconnected to life.
“Perhaps when this is finished…” Sorrel suggested. “This battle, I mean. Then things might be more normal. What’s Deremer waiting for? It’s driving us crazy!”
“He doesn’t want to relinquish the advantage we have, so we wait for them to come to us,” Saker replied. “And believe me, they will eventually. They are sleepless thanks to all the bites and itches. They are scared because they must now know Valerian is dead. They are hungry because no one is supplying them. The supplies they do have soon rot or are eaten by rats and other vermin. All they have is the fish they can catch.”
“So how do you think it will end?” Gerelda asked.
“I think the sorcerers will coerce their own men to embark on a frontal assault. All or nothing. And we are going to make it nothing.”
Even as he said the words, though, he felt ill. Deremer had made it clear that Saker was to stay out of the fight. His duty was to twin with the eagle and keep everyone informed of what was happening over the entire length of the river-flats. If Deremer had that information, he could command the placement of the archers and the men with arquebuses for the most effective result. Intellectually Saker knew that was good strategy; emotionally he felt like a coward. Gerelda, who could be coerced, would be fighting, and so would Ardhi. Sorrel could be out there on the battlefield too, but even with her glamour, there were still so many ways she could die.
All the while, he would be relatively safe.
“You don’t like Deremer, do you?” Sorrel asked Gerelda the next morning as the two of them broke their fast.
“Never had much time for noblemen,” Gerelda replied. “Too much good manners and not enough heart, or so I find. Deremer is worse than most because he was raised to have no heart. Then he found out it was all for the wrong reasons. He’s a mess.”
Sorrel took a sip of the hot drink the cooks had been ladling out and grimaced. She had no idea what had been used to flavour it, but it tasted like spinach. “You know what I find ironic? The Foxes were wealthy and powerful and respected, but what they wanted most of all was to live for ever. Yet most died young, killed by their own children, or by their fathers. Even the really long-lived ones didn’t die in bed of old age. They were murdered.” She shrugged. “Got to be a lesson in there somewhere, but they never seemed to learn it.”
“Oh, pox on’t.” Gerelda peered into her mug, her face screwed up. “This drink is horrible. Why didn’t you warn me?”
“It’s hot. I guess that has to be enough on a cold morning like this one.”
“I just saw Ardhi carting water, barefoot and bare-chested! Doesn’t he feel the cold?”
“Not often.” She smiled. All I have to do is think of him, and I feel happier…
Gerelda looked at her oddly.
She shrugged. “Can’t help it.”
“You’ve been travelling with those two for how long? Well over two years? Can I ask you an impertinent question – why Ardhi, and not Saker? I mean, you and Saker have so much more in common and I know you are fond of each other. You’re from the same faith, you’re both Shenat, both from farming families…”
“Well, I could say: for the same reason
s that a Lowmian lawyer falls hard for an Ardronese witan.”
“Now who told you that?”
Sorrel grinned at her. “No one. But I think it’s true, nonetheless. It doesn’t have to make sense. You look at someone and something just… fits.” She was silent for a moment, before adding, “Saker never needed me, not to share his life, his dreams and troubles. Ardhi does need me that way. And I need him.” She thought about that, and then added, “Come to think of it, that applies to you and Saker. He needs you. Or someone like you. Someone… practical, political, knowledgeable. You share things that you both understand.” When Gerelda didn’t answer, she added, “Let me give you an example. When Ardhi and I look at Piper, we just see a child we love. That’s all. Nothing else matters. Saker loves her too, but he also sees a Regala’s daughter, a future Regal’s sister, a king’s niece, a potential sorcerer – and all the ramifications of that.”
Gerelda nodded. “Maybe you’re right. He’s certainly the only man who’s made me think settling down might be something to consider.” She shrugged. “But first, there’s a battle to win. Will you be fighting?”
“I don’t fight. I use my witchery, but I don’t think that’s going to be much help in this. A sorcerer isn’t usually deceived by a glamour. Grey Lancers tend to kill everyone who isn’t another Grey Lancer. If I were to try to scare them with a monster, they’d kill what they saw without a second thought. If I disguise myself as a Grey Lancer, then I’ll get killed by one of you. I thought I might be more use helping the healers—”
A blast from a horn echoed from the edge of the ridge and was almost immediately taken up in the distance to both the right and the left.
“An attack,” Gerelda said, dropping the mug without a second thought. “At last.”
Saker saw it all.
He also did something he’d never done before: he switched every few minutes between being in his body and twinning with the bird’s, stretching his strength and his hold on reality to its limit until his mind was spinning, his thoughts confused and his stomach rebelling. Back in his body, he spoke to Deremer, who would then give orders to his runners, or to his trumpeters, so that the message would go to his fighters.
“… There’s a group of Grey Lancers trying to circle through the marsh and attack from behind.”
“… More men needed to reinforce the slope near the birch copse to the north.”
“… The three remaining sorcerers are still separated. The one to the north doesn’t have many guards. Might be the best target…”
“Ruthgar is not moving…”
Grey Lancers died under a wave of arrows and gunfire. He watched as weakened lances shattered and pike staves splintered. A few made it through that barrage of arrows to the top of the slope, only to fight hand to hand with a coercion-inspired madness that brought down far too many good men. Gerelda was in the midst of it, and fear for her gripped his stomach. Ardhi, bare-chested and barefoot, fought alongside her, his kris sometimes whirling from his hand and returning, dripping blood.
He saw one of Fritillary’s witans sneak down the slope during the fighting, until he reached the central camp of the lancers. Once there, he loosed their horses from the picket line. Saker watched from the eagle as a sorcerer was trampled to death, unable to coerce a man with a horse witchery.
Another Fox son dead.
Two more remaining…
And one was Ruthgar. He knew what the fellow looked like now; unprepossessing. Thin, medium in height, narrow across the shoulders, dressed without much of the usual Fox flamboyance and display of wealth. The only gold he wore was the Fox family emblem in the form of a brooch at his throat. A man, therefore, who put more store by his safety than by any need to declare his position, or boast of his wealth. To Saker, it was a mark of the man’s intelligence, an indication of how dangerous he was.
Hour after hour as the morning wore on the eagle circled overhead and Saker spied. He surveyed the battlefield with an aching heart, as the fight flowed down the slope when the Dire Sweepers succeeded, then ebbed upwards as the Grey Lancers recovered. He watched while people died, or slipped into some place between life and death. He saw the blood, the splintered bones, the guts, the decapitated bodies, the missing limbs. The stench of war and death, the screams of the wounded, the details of the dying – they reached his Avian senses too easily, far too vividly, etched into his memory by an eagle’s enhanced sense of sight and smell.
“We may not be losing this,” he told Deremer on one of his return trips around midday, “but we aren’t winning either.” Dizziness gripped him, and his words were slurred, as though he had lost the art of speaking. He wondered if he was using his tongue correctly. “Ruthgar is keeping well away from any fighting and he’s well-guarded. No one can get anywhere near him from any side.”
“Drop a rock on his head then,” Deremer said.
It was a ridiculous idea, of course. Any rock an eagle dropped was unlikely to hit its target, or be heavy enough to do much damage if it did, and it would certainly attract the kind of attention Saker didn’t want.
“Nothing short of a grenade ball would do the job,” he muttered. Grenade ball. The words were familiar from somewhere in his past, but his memories were strange, interspersed with recollections of long hours of gazing at blue ocean far below, wrinkled with waves…
Deremer frowned. “I’ve heard of those. Gunpowder-filled balls they use in sea battles, right? I’ll talk to my gunner…”
“A grenade would be far too heavy for the eagle!”
“I’ll see what he says.”
The next time he returned to report, Deremer introduced him to his gunner, saying, “Makie here thinks he can solve the problem. He’s taken a ceramic vinegar jar from our supplies, stuffed it full of black powder and horse nails, popped a slow match of woven flax through the cork and tied a loop of string around the neck.” He held up the jar to show him, dangling it from one finger through the loop. “He reckons your bird could hold the string, no problem.” He weighted it in his hand. “Bit heavier than the fish that bird of yours catches, I suppose, but not much.”
“It’s a horrible idea.” The dizziness had gone, but as he stretched his fingers, he wondered why they felt odd and too short.
No feathers.
“I didn’t say it was nice. Will you do it?”
“We can try.” Agreement didn’t make him feel any better. How long before the flame reaches the charge?”
“Five minutes after it’s lit,” the man said cheerfully. “That’s long enough, isn’t it?”
39
Rebirth
Sorrel had been working in the area of the camp where makeshift platforms were built under a shade cover for the treatment of the wounded. There were fifteen healers, but she found plenty to do fetching and carrying, or washing wounds and cleaning up after a healer had finished working on a patient. If there was a lull, she sat with those who had already been attended to, offering water or comfort.
Midway through the afternoon, a soldier with a sword cut on his biceps said he thought the tide had turned. “If we can gut the two remaining bastard Foxes, we’ll have this fobbing battle won. Sir Herelt and some of his Sweepers are preparing to ride after one of the sods. His best mounted men, wax in their ears, riding down the slope at neckbreak speed. Vermin handlers are going to distract the sorcerer with an attack of wasps.” He shook his head in wonderment. “Dizzy-eyed scramble that’ll be, down that bitch of a slope. Ouch! Have a care, you mucking skin-stitcher! That’s my slubbering arm you’re squeezing!”
“And the last sorcerer? Who will get that one?” the healer asked, winding a bandage over the man’s wound.
The soldier nodded to Sorrel. “Your witan’s yellow-eyed witch-bird. It’s going to drop a fobbing grenade ball on his fobbing head.”
“Where is he?” she asked, all her fears emerging once more to battle her calm.
“Oh, they were heading up to the north, about a mile, on the ridge. Overlooking t
hat stinking marsh.”
She left the tent and headed north at a jog.
It was easy enough to find them; all she had to do was follow the supply trail that snaked along the back of the ridge, just below the crest, until she saw them. The gunsmith was there, about to light a slow match, the eagle was perched on an old tree stump and Saker had thrown down a thin pallet to lie on while his mind was with the bird. She wasn’t surprised by that; the more comfortable his body, the better his twinning to the sea eagle.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“You need someone to guard your body while you’re doing something as dangerous as this!”
“Who told you?”
“I think the whole camp knows by now.”
“It’s no different this time to all the other times I’ve flown.”
“Oh, yes, it is. You’re asking the bird to carry a grenade ball.” She squinted at what the gunsmith was doing. “Although it looks more like a vinegar jar to me.”
“It is. And thank you for coming. I’ll come straight back after I’ve checked if the grenade killed the bastard. We only get one chance, and it won’t be a huge explosion. He’s out in the open now, dealing with a wounded lot of Grey Lancers. I think he’s coercing them into not feeling the pain of their wounds before sending them back into the fray.”
“Do you really think shards of pottery will kill him?” she asked.
“It’s got horseshoe nails in it, mixed in with the black powder.”
“Oh. Suitably nasty, then.”
The slow match spluttered into life. Saker lay down on the pallet while the gunsmith, a little nervously, held out the looped cord to the eagle.
“Take care,” she whispered as the bird seized the loop and launched itself from the stump, its huge wings beating the air to gain height as it sailed out over the valley. It strained under the weight of its burden and had to labour to gain height. Sorrel’s mouth was dry until she saw it hit the first updraught of air and cease its flapping.
