In a sense, she was playing his own game against him. At her urging, Prince Kragen and the Alend Monarch had made decisions concerning this war on the basis of knowledge and speculation which they hadn’t shared with any representative of Orison.
Her purpose – as distinct from Kragen’s or Margonal’s – had been twofold: to make the forces of Alend wait, withhold their siege, long enough for King Joyse’s plans to ripen; and to put pressure on the King, pressure which would force him to accept an alliance with Alend. By keeping secrets from her father, she reinforced Prince Kragen’s position.
Now, today, here, what she had done came to the test. She would be right, as the Prince deserved – if for no other reason than because he had trusted her. Or she would be wrong.
Mordant itself might stand or fall on the outcome.
She could choose to keep her eyes away from Prince Kragen, away from the riders boiling into the valley on the left; but she couldn’t choose to ignore her fear. The more pride she felt in King Joyse and the Prince, the more she dreaded the possibility that she had helped bring them both to ruin.
Maybe that was why she looked her worst in sunlight. The sun couldn’t expose her secrets, of course; but it seemed to lay bare the fact that she had them.
Under the circumstances, she considered it fortunate that no one was paying much attention to her.
Unconscious of himself, Geraden muttered, “Get up. Get up.” Everyone had seen the Tor go down; no one had seen the old lord regain his feet. For that matter, no one had seen any of the Masters emerge from the rocks. “Get up. We need you.”
Terisa held his arm with both hands, clung to him. Nevertheless she kept her eyes averted as if she couldn’t bear to watch what he was seeing. Facing to the left of the valley’s foot, she asked softly, “Who is that?”
Geraden apparently had no idea what she meant. And Elega was determined not to look. She needed a way to live with her fear, a way to endure her failure when it came.
Abruptly, it became obvious that Castellan Norge was done with the Cadwals attacking the Masters. Shouts were raised, and some of the men relaxed. Bowmen hurried out of the rocks to retrieve their shafts; riders sped away, some to deliver messages, others to help the Prince. Master Barsonage appeared, holding a glass nearly as tall as himself. Behind him came Master Harpool, doddering painfully. Two guards carried the old Imager’s mirror for him.
Together, five or six men picked up the Tor’s corpse; as gently as they could, they set it in a rude litter. Then they lifted the litter to other men on horseback. Ribuld’s body also was put in a litter to accompany the Tor’s. Castellan Norge mounted his horse, placed himself at the head of his riders.
In procession, like a cortege, the Castellan and his men came up the valley toward King Joyse.
“My lord,” Geraden sighed – an exhalation with his teeth clenched down on it hard enough to draw blood. “My poor lord.”
Terisa shook his arm; maybe she was trying to distract him. “Geraden, look. Who is that?”
Involuntarily, the lady Elega turned.
At once, she saw that the horsemen attempting to enter the valley were fighting for their lives—
—fighting for their lives against the forces of Cadwal outside. She had assumed that they, too, were Cadwals; but she was wrong. High King Festten opposed them bitterly: seen through the breaches in the piled ridge, it appeared that he had sent his entire mounted strength to destroy them.
She saw Prince Kragen spur his charger into a gallop, leading several hundred Alends to the defense of the riders; headlong against thousands of Cadwals.
At the same time, King Joyse shouted to the nearest captain, “Get archers down there! I want bows up in those rockpiles! I want an ambush in each of those gaps! We cannot keep Cadwal out, but we can make the High King cautious. We must not allow him to mass his men inside those piles!”
Cupping his hands on either side of his mouth to make his voice ring, he added, “Support the Prince!”
With her jaw hanging down like a madwoman’s, Elega saw that one of the riders Prince Kragen was risking himself to help bore the dull grape-on-wheat colors of the Termigan.
The Termigan?
What in the name of all sanity was he doing here?
“The Termigan!” Geraden breathed to Terisa. “I don’t believe it. He came after all.”
Elega was too surprised to notice that the catapults were ready to throw again. And she certainly didn’t notice that one of them behind her had been reaimed toward King Joyse’s pennon. She hardly heard the flat thudding of the arms, or the thin, high scream of scattershot through the air. At the moment, her only concern was that none of the engines could strike at Prince Kragen or the Termigan.
She didn’t know how lucky she was when the catapult behind her failed to throw.
Instead of attacking, it leaned forward and toppled crookedly off the rampart, tearing itself to scrap on the rocks as it fell. From the valley rim, a group of Prince Kragen’s climbers raised an inaudible cheer, then turned to defend themselves from Cadwals arriving too late to save the engine.
King Joyse, however, seemed to notice that as he noticed everything else. With a glance upward, he said to himself, “Six left. Progress is made, friend Festten. Be warned.”
Unfortunately, the siege engines had already cost him hundreds of men, dead or hurt.
Elega held her breath, watching Prince Kragen hurl himself against High King Festten’s horsemen. Hadn’t Geraden said that the Termigan refused to come? She gnawed the inside of her cheek. Yes, that was what Geraden had said. Yet he was here. She felt a chill, despite the air’s relative warmth. What new disaster had he come to report?
Who were those people in the center of his formation, those cloaked figures that didn’t fight, that didn’t do anything except ride where the Termigan’s men took them? One of them seemed ordinary enough. The other was huge—
Echoes brought the sounds of battle to her, the strife of swords and shields. Piled rock hid most of the fighting: Prince Kragen had ventured through the gap and was out of sight behind the debris of the avalanche. He didn’t have enough men to oppose that many Cadwals, not nearly enough. Only the speed of his charge could save him, its unexpectedness. But a mixed group of guards and soldiers was almost in position to help him, two hundred horse in the lead, half a thousand foot pelting furiously behind. And when the Termigan had brought all his people into the valley, he wheeled his mount, called most of his strength after him, and returned to aid the Prince.
Together, nearly side-by-side, Prince Kragen and the man who had declared flatly, I trust no Alend, fought their way back toward the bulk of King Joyse’s army.
The rough mounds close on either side saved them: all that broken stone constricted the Cadwal countercharge; an abundance of scattered rubble where the chasm used to be prevented riders from moving in tight ranks. And when the High King’s forces tried to enter the valley again, archers began loosing their shafts from high up among the rocks.
Prince Kragen and the Termigan brought each other to safety as if they had never been anything except comrades.
“Who’re those people with him,” asked Terisa, “the ones in the cloaks – the ones who didn’t fight?”
Elega’s heart began to soar. Who dared to speak of failure, where King Joyse and his daughters were at work?
The men bearing the Tor’s body, and Ribuld’s, arrived at King Joyse’s pennon before the Termigan did; and King Joyse met them as if he weren’t in the midst of a war, with catapults and unexplained arrivals to worry about; met them as if for that moment at least nothing was more important to him than the burden they carried, his old friend’s corpse.
“He saved us,” said Master Barsonage. The Imager seemed too weary to dismount; he looked too haggard to say, my lord King. “He and Ribuld—” The mediator’s voice lapsed into grief.