“We’ll have to hope he doesn’t move fast enough to do that,” Carus said, his tone dismissive but a dangerous glint in his eyes. “It’s hard to get an army moving when it doesn’t expect to, you know that.”
“He’s got cavalry,” Lord Dowos said, fully animated again. “Maybe not all his infantry at first, but his horse and skirmishers will reach us. They’ll hold us long enough for him to get the heavy regiments up too.”
“I’ll lead my phalanx against anybody you show me, your highness,” Lord Muchon said forcefully. “But you said yourself that we have to be attacking. We can’t defend against somebody behind us while we’re already engaged!”
“Silence!” the king said. His right hand gripped his sword hilt, and it was with an obvious effort of will that he managed to release it.
No one spoke. The disbelief of the men around Carus was changing to sullen anger.
“We’re going to carry out the plan I’ve outlined,” Carus said in a tone of quiet, deadly fury. “Because there’s no other choice. Do any of you see an alternative that has a chance of success?”
“Given where we are,” said Master Ortron, a commoner and former mercenary leader promoted to command of the other division of the phalanx, “no, there’s no chance of anything else working. May the Sister swallow my soul!”
He snorted. With a humor that he might not have been willing to show openly if he’d expected to survive the coming battle, he added, “As she doubtless will.”
“See to it, then!” Carus snapped to his officers. He jabbed his mount into a trot in the direction of the fleet encampment.
“Your highness!” Sharina called, prodding her own horse as well. She wasn’t a good rider; the only horses in Barca’s Hamlet had been those brought by wealthy visitors.
Carus didn’t slow down. Attaper, with a face of grim death, gestured forward the platoon of Blood Eagles who formed the king’s immediate escort.
“Brother!” Sharina cried.
Carus looked over his shoulder, then reined back so sharply that the hastening bodyguards almost rode into him. The slope was a mixture of brush and turf, but loose rock was exposed on the trail proper; pebbles danced downhill ahead of the king.
“Let me talk privately with my brother,” Sharina said as she rode past Attaper.
The Blood Eagles’ commander eyed her speculatively. He nodded with the hint of a grim smile. “First section, lead his highness by fifty paces!” he ordered. “Second section, we’ll follow at the same interval.”
Carus waited for Sharina, then walked his horse down the track beside her. “It isn’t what I want, girl,” he said quietly, looking at the camp half a mile ahead instead of meeting her eyes. “But there’s no choice, the way things are.”
He grimaced. “The way I’ve made things, I’ll admit.”
The king’s eyes swept his surroundings with a sort of wakeful energy that proved to anyone who’d grown up with Garric that some other spirit now animated his form. Garric was an observant youth, but Carus had been a warrior. To him a glint in the forest suggested ambush and slaughter rather than a neighbor cutting wood.
“What’s that?” he said, as two Blood Eagles trotted a sedan chair out of the camp. Then, recognizing Tenoctris—who else could it have been?—he added, “If she’s found something that couldn’t wait till we reached her, then I don’t suppose it’s good news.”
Four more black-armored Blood Eagles accompanied the two with the chair. The squad leader’s helmet was marked with a horsehair crest. He kept a cautious eye on the nearby Blaise forces, but Lord Attaper still snarled a loud, angry curse.
Attaper believed he and his regiment had the duty of keeping safe those they were detailed to guard. The fact that the people they guarded might have other priorities—the kingdom’s salvation, for example—didn’t matter to Attaper, and he was furious that Tenoctris seemed to have convinced some of his men to take a needless risk.
“Carus,” said Sharina, speaking so that she would be heard before the wizard arrived. “Even if you win the battle, the battles—”
“I will, girl,” the king said in a tone that wouldn’t brook argument. “I’ve watched the phalanx training. It all depends on the phalanx going through the mercenaries without a stumble, then turning and double-timing back to face Lerdoc…but they’ll manage, you watch!”
“Carus, winning that way will be as bad as losing,” Sharina said; her expression calm, her voice clear but not raised. “Even if nobody dies tomorrow but rebels—”
Which was as likely as the sun rising in the west.
“—that’ll be enough blood shed to drown the kingdom in it. Slaughter like that will fragment the Isles, as surely as it did in your own time.”
Carus said nothing. His face showed less emotion than the portrait struck on a coin.
Letting a little of the fear she felt tremble in her voice, Sharina added, “Garric wouldn’t do it, your highness. My brother wouldn’t choose that way!”
“Sister take you, girl!” the king said. “I didn’t choose it myself! There is no choice, now that we’re here and they’re—”
He took his right hand off his sword pommel and swept it through an arc starting with Count Lerdoc’s forces and continuing around to point back at the rebel stronghold of Donelle. His face went sour.
“And don’t say I should withdraw by sea,” he added. “Lerdoc would attack as soon as I started to do that. I’d sacrifice half the army trying to save the rest, and from the moment I’ve been chased off Tisamur bloody there’ll be no kingdom left.”
Tenoctris in her sedan chair had reached the contingent of Blood Eagles preceding the king. They’d stopped her and her guards—their colleagues—with as little ceremony as they’d have shown a troop of tattooed savages waving bows.
Carus swore and trotted his horse forward. “If you delay my advisor a moment longer, Undercaptain Atonp,” he said pleasantly to the section’s commander, “I’ll have you mucking out mules for the rest of your life. Which, of course, may not be long, given the circumstances we’re in now.”
He dismounted and bowed to Tenoctris, motioning her down into her seat when she started to rise. Sharina reached them and slid from her saddle also. It felt remarkably good not to clamp a horse’s ribs with her thighs.
The bodyguards were obviously concerned, but Attaper positioned them at a polite distance from Carus and the two women instead of pressing the king to ride the rest of the way to the camp. They were near enough to reach the earthen walls before Lerdoc could organize a force large enough to be dangerous…and speaking of dangerous things, the king’s mood was obvious to anybody.
“I’m sorry to come rushing to you this way,” Tenoctris said, “but there isn’t much time. If I’m correct.”
The old wizard smiled with a self-deprecating shrug. Her face was pale, and her tongue slurred as she spoke. She looked as though she should be in bed with nurses in attendance.
“I think there’s a trap being set for you, your highness,” she said. “For all the Isles.”
Carus straightened with a frown. “Aye, there is indeed,” he said, his voice a little colder than it usually was in speaking to Tenoctris. “There’s a Blaise army landed this day already. I’m afraid your warning is late.”
His face hardened further. Hatred for wizardry overwhelmed a mind already aflame with frustration. “As you might have seen, were your eyes not so set on your books and spells!”
“What my books and spells have shown me, your highness…” said Tenoctris in a tone that reminded Sharina that the old woman had been raised a noble “is that there are three springs to the trap. The city you came to take; the army brought from the north to confuse you—”