For no good reason except that she saw nothing – not even the walls of the city, once she and Geraden had left the road – she began to think these pauses for caution were unnecessary. They crossed the unmistakable swath of ground which had brought the Alend army to the road – unmistakable because the soil still held the cut of wheels, the gouge of hooves, the pressure of boots – but they didn’t see any sign of Alend supply wains or Armigite spotters. She would have preferred the risk of speed to the frustration of delay.
She changed her mind, however, when he came down out of a tree so fast that he nearly fell like the fumble-foot he had once been. Hissing instructions rapidly, he dragged the mounts into a nearby thicket; with her help, he forced the beasts to lie down, then did his best to muffle their noses, prevent them from whickering as the other horses came near.
A small band of riders with grime-caked clothes and eyes made evil by fear passed so close that Terisa could have hit them with a stone.
“Mercenaries,” Geraden grated under his breath after the riders were gone. “Men like that—If they were in a hurry, they might cut your throat before they raped you.
“I thought every mercenary in the world worked for Cadwal.”
Terisa was having trouble with her pulse. “Then what’re they doing here?”
He shrugged stiffly, as if all his muscles were in knots. “Working for somebody else. Or spying for the High King. If the Lieges send Prince Kragen reinforcements, Festten will want to know about it. He may have men all over this part of Mordant by now.”
Oh, good, Terisa muttered to herself. Just what we need.
She and Geraden had to hide twice more before the end of the day, but both times they were able to avoid discovery with relative ease. The scouts or mercenaries expected many things, but they clearly didn’t expect to encounter a man and a woman with three horses cutting across open ground around Batten.
In a fireless camp that night in a small gully, she remarked, “I can’t live this way.”
“What, sneaking around like this? Surrounded by people who would gut us unless they had the good sense to take us prisoner if they only knew we were here? You aren’t having fun?” Geraden snorted softly. “Terisa, I’m surprised at you.”
Actually, she was surprised at herself. Without warning, she was filled with a sense of how strange her circumstances were. Wasn’t she Terisa Morgan, the passive girl who had typed sad letters for Reverend Thatcher until she had lost faith in him and his mission? Wasn’t she the lonely woman who had decorated her apartment in mirrors because she didn’t know any other way to prove she existed? So what was she doing here? – surrounded, as Geraden observed, by enemies; struggling across country on horseback in a nearly crazy effort to warn King Joyse that his wife had been abducted; so angry at Master Eremis that she couldn’t think about it without trembling. What was she doing?
“So am I,” she murmured; but Geraden had been teasing her, and she was serious. The night on all sides felt at once vast and subtle, too big to be faced, too cunning to be escaped. And the stars—She knew in her bones that the city where her apartment was had nowhere near this many stars watching it. “Right now, it seems like there isn’t another place in the universe farther away from where I used to live than this.”
“Are you afraid?” he asked gently. “We still have a long way to go.”
He wasn’t talking about the distance to Orison.
“That’s the funny part,” she mused. “When I stop and take my pulse, I get the impression I’ve never been so scared in all my life. But when I think about where I came from – my apartment, my job, my parents – I think I’ve never been so brave.”
After a while, he said, “It makes an amazing difference when you have good, clear reasons for what you’re doing. I think I used to have so many accidents because I was confused. In conflict with myself.”
She agreed, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she said, “Don’t get cocky. I saw you almost fall out of that tree.”
That made him laugh. And his laughter always made her feel better.
Prince Kragen also had reasons for his actions.
What he was doing was unprecedented. Despite the darkness – despite the fact that his men couldn’t see Orison’s counterattacks in time to defend themselves very well – he was belaboring the gates with the heaviest battering ram he had.
He had two reasons for risking the blood of his army so lavishly, one immediate, the other alarming.
His immediate reason was that just before sunset the defenders had stopped pouring oil on the shells of his rams. The particular ram spared by this forbearance wasn’t especially impressive: its shell protected only enough men to move it, not enough to seriously threaten the gates. Nevertheless the forbearance itself was significant. Without hesitation, the Prince called back that ram and sent out a bigger one, fully manned.
This one, also, was allowed to do its work without being set afire.
Two interpretations immediately suggested themselves. Orison was out of oil. Or Orison was trying to conserve oil – was trusting the dark for protection.
Under other circumstances, this chance to hit the gates wouldn’t have been worth the risk. At night, protected by darkness from archers, the castle’s defenders would be able to swing down from the walls on ropes and strike at the ram in a matter of minutes. But the Prince was too worried to miss any opportunity, however costly it might prove.
He was alarmed because during the afternoon his scouts had intercepted two hacked and dying men who were apparently the last survivors the Perdon would ever send to Orison.
They weren’t actually sure of their lord’s fate. When he sent them away, he still had several hundred men around him, was still fighting. But he knew he was finished. He sent these two soldiers to warn King Joyse.
They were too badly hurt to last the night; but Prince Kragen pieced their story together from their confused and feverish babblings. What had apparently happened was that High King Festten had suddenly changed his tactics. He had halted his unexplained march into the Care of Tor: for a while, he had even stopped striking at the Perdon. Instead, he had camped his huge army as if he had gained his goal, as if his only real purpose had been to capture the ground where he now stood – a relatively uninhabited region of complex hills and thin rivers no closer to Marshalt than to Orison.
And then, while the Perdon was still trying to figure out what Festten was doing, the High King had sent out nearly five thousand soldiers to encircle and trap the lord. In the end, only the terrain had enabled these two wounded men to escape. They had hidden in a tree-clogged ravine until darkness allowed them to creep away northward.
How many days ago? Prince Kragen wanted to know. How far exactly? In fact, he wanted to know so badly that out of raw frustration he was tempted to resort to some of the harsher forms of questioning. But it was obvious that the Perdon’s men, in effect, had already been tortured past the point where they were able to think or speak coherently. Prince Kragen was left with very little idea when they had left their lord, or where Festten was.
So he attacked Orison’s gates at night, despite the losses he knew he was going to incur. He was afraid: he could feel a kind of doom stalking him through the dark. An enemy who would march at least twenty thousand men that far into the middle of nowhere – in this case, the middle of the Care of Tor – for no discernible purpose except to make camp was capable of anything.
Through the hours of darkness, Kragen listened to the flat, dull booming of the ram against the gates, to the shouts of the defenders and the cries of his own forces – listened, and ground his teeth to restrain his rage at a war he couldn’t either avoid or understand.