"Captain Tyrun is dead, and you take the opportunity to feel sorry for yourself," Sasha said angrily. She felt for Jaryd's suffering, but she simply didn't have time for this now. "You look around you, Jaryd. You look hard. Many families have ended here, and more tragedies unfolded than I care to count. These men fight for something bigger than themselves or their families. If you can't feel that, if you can't understand what it was that Tyrun died for, then maybe you'd be better elsewhere."
Jaryd stared at her, his jaw tight, his stare as hard as stone. "If my services are not required," he said coldly, "then I shall leave."
"Your services?" Sasha replied, incredulously. "What do you believe in, Jaryd? Why be here, if not for a cause?"
"I believe in nothing. My family is no more, and my brother is dead. All the ideals of Verenthane brotherhood and Lenay honour I had been taught to believe are lies."
"Then why are you still here? Why come this far at all?"
Jaryd looked down at Tyrun. The lateness of the day cast all colour, all life, all joy to shadow. The light, falling mist gathered at the tips of his lank hair as it fell about his face. "The Falcon Guard are all I have left," Jaryd said quietly. "Yet with this arm, I cannot serve them."
"Then just be here to pick up their wounded when they fall!" Sasha retorted. "Jaryd, you're… you're such an arrogant, pigheaded… man!" It was, for the moment, the worst insult she could think of. "You're so accustomed to the glory, and the place in the lead, that you can't see the honour in following. Just be there! That's what old Cranyk in Baerlyn told me, he said it was the greatest lesson he had to teach about life. Just turn up!"
Her vanguard were waiting for her, and her officers were moving further downhill into the town. From somewhere in the town, a cry went up. "Usyn's coming! Usyn's coming!" And not before time, either. Sasha placed a final, gentle hand on Jaryd's arm and departed after them in haste. Master Jaryd, of the family once known as Nyvar, stood over the body of his captain in the misting rain. He stood with his weight on one leg, a dark sentinel amidst the sudden confusion of shouts, yells and hasty preparations. If he noticed, or feared, he gave no sign.
Sasha, Captain Akryd and other officers, either from the line companies or appointed from amongst village chiefs, gathered on the field beyond the main gate of Ymoth's wall. Men were leading horses back from the river in great groups as others ran to retrieve them. The air was filled with yells of instruction and question, galloping hooves and the urgent whinnying of horses who knew that something more was afoot. The fields nearby remained littered with dead, mostly Banneryd, as men continued even now to reclaim the bodies of comrades, and check to see if any still lived. Already the grey sky had grown dim with the approach of evening, and Sasha thanked the spirits that it was late summer still and the days remained long.
"The road comes like thus," Jurellyn was saying, drawing a line with his sword on a patch of bare turf amidst the grass, "upon the other side of the river. It's not far, as you can see. He'll be here by nightfall. My best guess is that he has six thousand in the valley-half cavalry, half infantry. This column seems also half-and-half, cavalry to the front and rear, infantry in the middle. But being stretched so long upon the road, we could not see the column's end, so we have no means of guessing their number."
"Well," said Captain Akryd, with a thoughtful glance across the Ymoth wall and the fields about, "these defences will serve us better than they did the Banneryd. Usyn won't have dussieh riding with him, he'll be unable to exploit the gaps in the line. We've received another several hundred men riding over the Shudyn Divide just since the attack commenced. Usyn won't attack at night and we can still sneak riders from the Shudyn through the back woods and into the town. Half the Goeren-yai with horses across central Lenayin are coming to our aid. Most upon the Shudyn will ride through the night, knowing the battle has commenced ahead. By dawn, we could number nearly five thousand, despite our losses. Defender's advantage shall be with us. Usyn may have six thousand, and cavalry of a greater quality, but ours are entirely cavalry, and we have the defence. He shall not overrun us."
Conversation flowed, terse and urgent. Men discussed possible deployments, weak spots and guard posts from which to observe Usyn's forces through the night. Sasha stared at Jurellyn's lines in the bare turf, thinking furiously. Then stared up, gazing north up the Yumynis River toward the valley mouth looming beneath the darkening sky.
Defender's advantage. Cavalry shock. Such were the established norms of Lenay warfare. Kessligh employed all such terms… and then, in the next breath, disparaged them. It had frustrated her, listening to his lessons. He was always so contradictory. Nothing he'd told her was ever guaranteed, and written in stone. But now… dussieh racing through the narrow folds in the defensive line. Charging through the spaces between sharpened stakes. The Banneryd line, once so impenetrable, had been outflanked. The cavalry, at one moment charging downhill with advantage behind them, the next, blindsided, outnumbered, broken and overwhelmed.
An advantage was not always an advantage. A weakness was not always weak. What had Kessligh told her? She recalled a training session beneath the vertyn tree. She couldn't have been any more than twelve, as the stanch had felt huge in her hands. Kessligh had spent much of the lesson demonstrating to her the variations on the low right-quarter defence. The combinations were seemingly endless, depending on the nature of the attack and what one wished to do next, one, two, three or even more moves into the future. But there were ground rules, basic principles that all combinations had in common. He had drilled her on them, endlessly and, slowly, she'd found her selection and execution improving.
Then he'd asked her to attack him so he could demonstrate how one could improvise when one had mastered the fundamentals. After several exchanges, she'd thought of an attack that was particularly cunning and involved a feint she'd seen Kessligh himself use against men at the Baerlyn training hall. Kessligh had responded with a defence-to-offence combination that had been like nothing he'd previously been demonstrating and had knocked her firmly on her backside. She had protested-not so much at the rough treatment, for at that age she'd still been so utterly in awe of Kessligh's swordwork that even a beating could be a delight-but that he'd just spent all that time with her teaching her exactly why she shouldn't be doing it like that.
He'd given her one of his rare, wry yet genuinely amused smiles. "I never thought I'd see the day when you, of all people, would complain of someone else not playing by the rules," he'd told her, yanking her effortlessly to her feet. "That's why I teach you these rules. It's not so you can follow them religiously. It's so that one day, you'll learn when, and how, they can be broken."
"This land here," she asked Jurellyn, pointing to an area of road not far north of Ymoth toward the valley. "What is this like?"
"Some fields of ripe grain and some fallow." Jurellyn was looking at her intently, his eyes narrowed. Jurellyn had known Kessligh from the Great War. Perhaps he guessed at her thoughts. Some of the other men were breaking off their discussions to listen.
"Could we ride on them?" Sasha asked. "A large force, in a charge?"
Jurellyn nodded. "Not easily, the fallow ground is a little rough and the grain fields are near what should be harvest. There are fences nearly hidden. But yes, it's possible."
"M'Lady, no," Akryd said firmly, and with some alarm. "We've good defences here and it'll shortly be dark. That's maybe three thousand Hadryn heavy cavalry out there-they like the open ground, each of them is possibly twice the quality of our average cavalryman, they'd just love to meet us away from these walls where they can do what they do best. Absolutely no, we should stay put."