“But first the Severing River, Autria, the Warburg, and many mountains,” Terrell murmured. “Before we reach Silbar. I wonder what we’ll find?”
“As it happens, I’ve been scrying our route, Highness,” announced dour Shimoor, the Royal Wizard of Silbar. He stumped into the tent leaning on a cane, dressed in gray while his cloud-white hair escaped under the edges of a hooded cape. A flicker of heat leaked from it, Shimoor had a spell going to warm his old bones in the morning chill. Despite his obvious frailty—even more than Father’s, Terrell thought with a pang—the old wizard practically glowed with power.
“What did you find?” Terrell asked eagerly. The trip so far had been uneventful, or in other words, boring.
“One moment, Highness.” The old wizard sank heavily onto a stool and grunted in relief. A servant offered him a hot tea fragrant with willow bark and wild strawberry leaf. Shimoor flicked a hand over it to adjust the temperature to what he liked, then drank half of it, visibly enjoying the way they all waited on his next words. Finally he added, “I suspect trouble ahead.”
“Are there bandits?” DiCervi asked practically.
“A pack of wolves?” Terrell speculated.
“Or bears?” Pen suggested.
“None of those,” Shimoor answered. “That’s the problem. The forest around and ahead of us should be thick with bear and wolf and their prey. I’m seeing almost none. The land wights are silent and both the local mages and the Druids have all withdrawn from our path, though their connections to the local Nodes are as strong as ever, possibly more so. As for bandits, not a whisker. If I were a trusting wizard, I’d say our path has been made easy and clear.”
“But you’re not a trusting wizard, are you?” DiCervi asked with a smile.
“It smells of coordination.” Shimoor scowled ferociously. “I suspect somebody is planning to surprise us.”
“Where?” Pen asked, putting a hand on Irreneetha’s pommel. “When?”
“Unclear. But somewhere ahead, that much is certain.” Shimoor’s ferocious scowl settled into a merely foreboding one and he gulped more tea.
“What kind of surprise?” Terrell asked. “And who’s behind it? Do you think it is Osrick’s doing, or one of the resentful barons, or—”
“Or perhaps your Aunt,” Dona Seraphina interjected, joining them in the tent. “The magic of the land is her purview. If her Druids are in command of the local Nodes through the land wights, they can deny the power to us if they choose.”
“But we’re leaving Gwythlo tomorrow.” Terrell looked at the map again. “Ah. After we cross the river. Where will we camp tonight, General?”
“I had planned to position us on this plateau right above the river plain, your Highness,” DiCervi answered thoughtfully, tapping the map. “We want to cross in the morning, when the water is lower after a chilly night slows the melting mountain snows. But the plateau is open to attack from all sides, so perhaps it would be wiser to camp in this curve.” He tapped the map again. “That would give us water on three sides, and we can make our crossing as soon as the sun is up.”
“Unless the river is the route of attack,” Pen pointed out. “There is plenty of wood in this country for boats or rafts.”
“Or we might be attacked by something that swims,” interjected Dona Seraphina. “I would not underestimate Klairveen.”
They all looked at each other for a moment.
I didn’t think she would dare try anything so direct, Terrell thought, feeling faintly sick. Sword work didn’t frighten him, he knew he was strong and well-trained and had excellent weapons, horses, and armor. But magic treachery wasn’t something he could fight personally.
Shimoor’s tired face quirked a half-smile at him that seemed to say, I’m still here for you, My Lord. An overwhelming gratitude for the old wizard’s decades of support and teaching seized Terrell. The measure of a King is not in his own prowess, but in that of his people, he recalled Shimoor saying in one of his lessons.
“No good answers,” Terrell said. “Let’s plan for the river campsite, but keep our people away from the banks, and patrol them. Camp as tight as we can and put up every ward we can. Shimoor?”
“Agreed, Your Highness.” He nodded. “I have a few tricks under my cloak. But we planned this trip expecting to tap the local Nodes along our way, and now we must assume they may be denied to us. We don’t have enough charged silver with us to replace all that missing power. If we spend too much of what we brought there on the edge of Gwythlo, and then get caught by other trouble somewhere ahead, we could have a more difficult time getting through later.”
“A point,” Terrell acknowledged. He thought for a moment, feeling the growing Light inside him. It circulated through his body like moving blood; he fancied he could pour it like a sluice, if he only knew how. Dona Seraphina squinted at him with the beginnings of concern in her face, while Shimoor simply squinted. “But we have to do something. We’ll choose caution now.”
“Very good, Your Highness,” DiCervi said. “It shall be done.”
* * *
“That’s a big river,” Pen said, shading his eyes from the setting suns to look across its width. They were standing on a bank a few feet above the waters.
“Yes.” Terrell looked back at the flat meadow behind them where the brigade busily set up camp. DiCervi had ordered a hollow square formation with the royal party and the camp followers inside it. It looked like the married men were almost done getting their wives and children settled.
His gaze lingered on the travelling brothel that serviced the unmarried men. It had already been pitched on the opposite side of the royal pavilion from the family tents. He knew that red striped camp-within-a-camp was a feature provided to every major Silbari army unit by Madam Ymera, the witch who ruled Aretzo’s Red Street. Dona Seraphina’s husband Merritin had told him with a chuckle that the Temple Hierarchy frowned upon the brothels but had long ago grown resigned to their necessity. A banner in front of the biggest tent proclaimed, ‘Lust will not keep—something must be done about it.’
Those red striped tents seemed uncommonly interesting today. He remembered some delightful explorations with Serah, a castle maid who Dona Seraphina had provided with a pregnancy protection spell. He wondered if he could ask for one of Ymera’s women to be brought to him, and regretfully decided that the servants weren’t likely to accommodate him without more trouble than he was willing to endure. Though his loins had begun to fret him more and more since he’d left Serah behind in Gwythford.
They were unaccompanied at the moment, so Terrell lowered his voice. “Pen, do you remember that talk about lust that Merritin had with us last year?”
Pen frowned. “A little. It all seems so distant now.” He made a vague gesture that ended with his hand resting on Irreneetha’s pommel. “Since She chose me I haven’t been bothered by any of that.” He shrugged and went back to studying the river as if they’d been talking about the weather.
Terrell knew a moment of sorrow. Of course. Pyrull as much as told me. Irreneetha fills Pen’s heart. He’ll never have any other love than her. He can’t. It pained him; a difference had been driven between him and his best friend, one that went to the core of their beings and would never go away.
“Why do you ask?” Pen said absently, still looking at the river. “Are you missing your maid?”
“Serah,” Terrell corrected; he needed to think of her as a person and not a thing. Then he admitted, “Some. Merritin said the palace staff in Silbar will provide me with, um, concubines. I’m just wondering, is all.” He tried not to squirm.
“There’s plenty of cold water in that river,” Pen pointed at it as he glanced sidelong at Terrell. “I could dunk you in. That ought to mute your lust for a while.”
“I might dive in on my own,” Terrell answered ruefully. “It’s been four days since I had a bath, or anyone else either.”
“This wouldn’t be the best place for swimming. Look down below us and to the l
eft, in that big pool under the leaning willow tree. What do you see?”
Terrell squinted at a confusing mass of shadows where the pool lay hard against the steep riverbank. One of them moved and turned into a fish. A fish longer than he was tall. More than twice as long as he was tall. A gar, a predatory fish with a long snout, jaws to match, and teeth as big as his hand.
“Angels and Demons!” Terrell blurted, feeling slightly ashamed of the blasphemy.
Abruptly the enormous gar darted out into the river to seize a silver and green striped fish a quarter its size. The prey put up a fight, but the powerful jaws of its adversary soon broke its back. The gar retired to the pool to commence the grisly job of devouring its catch.
The teeth, Terrell decided, were larger than his hand. He found himself inadvertently stepping back farther from the bank. His imagination pictured what might happen if it lunged at him with those jaws snapping.
“Probably better not to go swimming,” Pen suggested. “Unless Shimoor is willing to cast a spell that will drive it away. It and its cousins.”
“My Lords, the Royal Wizard has requested that I restrict everybody to staying a hundred feet back from the bank,” General DiCervi said as he approached them. “This would be easier to enforce if both of you were behind that line yourselves.”
“Certainly, General.” Terrell consented. “What are we doing for water?”
“There’s a good spring inside the camp, and Dona Seraphina has cast a purifying spell on it.”
“Very good, General.”
The camp was more crowded than usual but still as orderly. Militarily precise rows of tents had been pitched behind the brass standards of the Brigade’s various units. Even the family tents were pitched in rigid rows, though the children swarming among them blurred the lines. Two platoons of soldiers drove stakes cut from willow branches into the soft soil in a long curve roughly parallel to the riverside. Two mages strung cord between them. Several small boys were receiving a lecture from a sergeant about staying on the right side of the cord, together with a pantomimed ‘snap’ of giant jaws closing on a careless boy. The wideeyed youngsters drank in the man’s words.
Terrell hoped they heeded well, as the gar wasn’t likely to leave enough for a funeral.
He found Shimoor preparing a set of poles with silver insets. “Are those our temporary ward anchors?”
“Yes,” the wizard grunted as he completed a spell on one of the poles. “I’m amplifying their effectiveness. Bloody exhausting work, Your Highness.” He mopped his brow with a trembling hand before tackling the next. As Terrell watched, appalled, the lines in his teacher’s aged face grew deeper.
“You shouldn’t be spending yourself like this!” he remonstrated. “Let the other mages handle it.”
“No choice,” Shimoor growled. “I’m delegating everything I can to them, but I’m better at ward casting.” He gestured to his two assistant spell casters working on the assembly of another ward marker; Dona Seraphina’s husband Merritin helped them. “I do not like the currents I feel in the local mana flow. As I feared, somebody—almost certainly a coven of Druids—is manipulating it away from us. I’m drawing what I can from the nearest node, but I must fight for every scrap, and it’s not enough to feed normal nighttime wards big enough for this camp. That’s why I’m going to try for a distributed protection.”
Terrell struggled to remember the finer points of ward construction. “That would make them work like a soap bubble, right? If pierced anywhere, the whole thing bursts?”
“Which is why I’m adding reinforcement spells, so that it won’t burst if it gets pierced. We’ll see if it works. If not—I hope Baron Penghar’s sword arm is ready.”
In answer, Pen drew Irreneetha and held her point uppermost. The steel blade glowed even to the unaided eye, a lavender shine shot through with tiny red flashes. “She knows something is happening out there,” Pen said. “And it’s not friendly. She’s ready.”
* * *
Night fell, but sleep would not come. Terrell lay awake on his cot, staring at the tent fabric over his head and listening to the sounds of the camp. A fretful child cried softly while a woman’s tired voice soothed it. The men were on watch-and-watch, with the on-duty ranks formed up two-deep along the landward side of the camp and one-deep on the other three sides. The off-duty men had been given strict orders to get some sleep during their rest. He wondered how many of them really were sleeping.
“Pen?” he finally whispered.
“Terrell?” Pen’s voice came back immediately.
“We’re of no use lying here awake. Let’s get up and be ready to fight.”
“I was about to suggest that myself, My Lord.”
They dressed in undergarments and helped each other into their gambesons and armor. The night air had been cool, even though they were more than five hundred miles south of Gwythford now. Terrell shivered a little and told himself the cold river caused his chill. Their rustling about woke their servants. The yawning men lit tapers and helped, after which the armoring went much smoother. Terrell and Pen exited the tent into a night that boasted only a pale crescent of Madness to light the darkness.
Terrell left his visor up as he and Pen saddled and mounted their big destriers, not the lighter rounceys they’d been riding most of yesterday. The two of them set out on a circuit between the lines.
Shimoor’s wards were emplaced in a giant octagon around the square camp. Terrell squinted at the assemblage. The cords stringing them together glowed to his magesight like lines of blue-white fire. He examined the rings of protection that glowed around each individual ward pole as he rode past. The rings were wider than his arms could reach and perfectly rigid, floating in the air roughly waist high with the glimmer of a spherical dome above and below each. When he looked up, he could see a far larger dome that extended over the whole camp.
Pen had been using Irreneetha’s abilities to see the same. He commented quietly, “It’s like a castle made of light.”
“Mmm,” Terrell answered. Light. His insides were suffused with it. When he looked at his hands the Light leaked through every joint of his gauntlets.
Pen glanced at him several times, repeatedly touching Irreneetha’s hilt, until finally he said, “Terrell? Did you know that you’re glowing right through your armor?”
There didn’t seem to be anything else to say but, “Yes.”
They made two full circuits of the camp, riding inside the wards but outside the waiting ranks of men. DiCervi nodded a curt greeting when they passed him sitting atop his horse in the middle of the landward side. The mage standing night duty with the commander gaped at Terrell. Then, as they approached the middle of the opposite side—
“Do you hear a sound from the river?” Terrell asked Pen.
The giant gar leaped out of the water.
It landed on the bank twenty feet from the river’s edge and flipped itself end-over-end towards them. Terrell’s horse had been trained for war, but not for this. The destrier reared and dumped him out of his saddle. He barely managed to free his feet from the stirrups as the panicked horse bolted. He hit the turf back-first and saw stars. Those cleared in time to see the mighty fish land with its gaping jaws right on the ward line. Teeth that looked bigger than his head snapped shut on the cord - and cut it.
The spell discharged a titanic bolt of power into the gar’s head. Bits of flesh, bone, and teeth exploded outward to batter Terrell. A gobbet smacked him on the lips and left a bloody taste behind. He sat up and spit.
The wards were pierced. A horde of creatures poured up the riverbank out of the water. Behind him the line of soldiers had been knocked off their feet by the explosion. A few began to cry warning.
The ends of the broken cord lay sparkling on either side of the wreckage of the fish. He scrambled on hands and knees towards the nearer, snatched it up, and staggered to his feet. Shaking legs carried him to the carcass where the tension in the ensorcelled cord brought him up short. His gaunt
let grew warm where it grasped the raw end. He stretched his arms and squatted, trying desperately to reach the other end where it spit sparks onto the turf. It stayed out of his reach.
“Here,” Pen said, running up to snatch it off the grass in his own gauntleted hands and press it into Terrell’s. “I’ll guard, you fix!”
Pen stepped right over him and onto the fish carcass. Irreneetha shone in his hands like a spike of starlight as he called to the men behind them. “Beware! Attackers from the river!”
Terrell scrambled to his feet, tried to bring the severed ends together. They would not quite meet no matter how much he strained. The spell fractured around him, fading, he had to do something, but it was getting so bright—
The glow wasn’t outside, but inside.
Light surged out from his heart and into his fingertips. It twined with the frayed ends of the ward and knit to both. A river of Light flowed out of him and into the spells that gave the wards their shape.
The cord glowed bright enough to reveal the whole riverbank. Creatures came boiling towards the camp. Crawling, leaping, shambling—hundreds of nightmare pastiches of beast and fish and beaked bird. The soldiers uttered shocked cries at the sight. Sergeants bellowed as they reformed the defensive line. Terrell stood up and tried to join the severed cords again, but couldn’t. The fish had bitten part of it off.
Pen swung Irreneetha and lopped off a reaching limb from a bastard mix of crayfish and badger, then took its head on the return stroke. Another beast tried to strike at Terrell but the sword got in front of it; red ruin fell back.
Terrell jerked his head to make his visor close. With it down he’d be encased in armor from scalp to toe, and nearly invulnerable. But the swiveling metal facescreen barely wiggled. It jammed open when I was thrown. I can’t let go of the cord. I can’t protect my face!
To his left and right creatures seared themselves on the wards and reared back, screeching their pain. Snarls broke out as those behind pushed forward and the front line fought desperately to get away from the deadly cord. A tall swaying thing fell directly onto the ward. Instead of replicating the success of the fish, it was simply sliced in two. The severed halves flopped madly. A toothed beak snapped twice before a spearman pinned it down to die.
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