“Here is good water.” The lantern light glittered from a pool that looked as black as the rock of the hill. But when Gird dipped a handful, it was clear, trembling in the light, and tasted sweet. Others knelt, dipped for themselves, and drank thirstily. He could hear the splashes, and the moans of the wounded behind him in the darkness. The gnome touched his arm to get his attention. “This is water that runs clean, and the bog clans know safe ways from here. Do you acknowledge debt?”
There was no alternative. “You have brought us from danger to safe water: I acknowledge owing.”
“That is fair. This is the exchange: no humans to go beneath that hill. To gather the herbs of the field, to pasture flocks, it is permitted. It is not permitted to delve in the rock, or build aught of the loose rock of the surface. Granted?”
“Granted.” Gird sighed, nonetheless, thinking how he would have to argue the miners into it. He wanted to ask why, but knew he would get no answer. And he was tired, desperately tired. He wanted to know how many they’d lost, and if the wounded would recover, and he wanted to fall in his tracks and sleep.
“What of the magelords?” he asked, determined to get something out of this exchange.
The gnome smiled. Gird remembered that smile from his months in their princedom. “It is not a place for humankind, within that hill. The magelords took what was not theirs; knowing, they took it. We return justice.”
The ground heaved, thudding against Gird’s feet, and a shout went up from his people. Trees groaned; their limbs thrashed briefly as if in a gust of wind. In the lantern light, the water in the pool rocked and splashed like water in a kicked bucket. Gird looked at the gnome, whose smile broadened.
“Justice,” it said again. “No pursuit.”
When dawn brightened behind Blackbone Hill, the marshy forest looked much less threatening. Delicate flowers brightened the hummocks of moss; butterflies flicked wings of brilliant yellows and oranges in and out of the sunbeams. They had halted beside an upwelling spring of clear water, that flowed into an amber stream between thick-trunked dark trees. A clearly-marked trail led away downstream from their campsite, and the gnome—who had stayed with them until daylight—said that it led safely to an old settlement of the bog folk, now abandoned, but on another safe trail to Longhill.
Gird counted up his survivors. Only five of Blackbone itself had survived. Their kin from Threesprings had lost but three, and still remained the largest barton. Longhill had lost seven of fourteen; Deepmeadow had lost eight of twelve. Whiterock Ridge had lost all its archers, but no one else, and Hazelly lost only one. Clearspring and Westhill had lost two each. But of those living, a quarter were wounded, unfit for work or fighting for many days.
And the survivors were anything but satisfied with the way the battle had gone.
“You didn’t tell us they rockfolk’d be involved,” said the yeoman marshal of Hazelly. For someone who had never fought at all before, he was surprisingly pert, Gird thought.
“Us would’nt’ve let ’un fight in th’mine unless they’d been there,” said one of the Blackbone survivors, “They told us away last winter they’d no more patience with the magelord’s thievery.” He peered at Gird through the morning mist. “But they didn’t say what t’would cost us. They said you was the best leader—”
Before Gird could answer that, someone from Threesprings broke in. “Ah, them rockfolk! Suppose it was their plan, too, warn’t it? And you their hired human warleader?”
“They didn’t hire me,” Gird began, wondering how he was going to settle this lot. They had good reason to grumble, but so did he; it was not his fault the gnomes had kept the main part of their plan from him. So had the Blackbone Hill folk, for the matter of that.
Westhill, more experienced in living in the country, had done most of the work to make the camp livable. The others learned quickly, if unwillingly: the Westhill yeoman-marshal had a tongue sharpened on both sides. Gird began thinking what to do with this ill-assorted lot. Some of them, from the villages that no longer existed, could come directly into the main army. Others might go home for a time, though the areas of peace shrank day by day.
In a few days, the mood had settled; those who had been most badly wounded were either mending or dead, and everyone else had decided to stay with Gird or go home in a huff. There were only a few of the latter. The rest had begun to recast the tale as they would tell it to friends at home. Gird noticed that the lords’ troop grew, and the lords’ magicks became ever more spectacular, as they retold it to each other. The survivors from Blackbone Hill itself—including some who had hidden in the houses until the fight passed by, and then escaped around the hill—seemed glad to go to Threesprings, where they had kin.
Gird himself climbed back up the trail to take a last look at the west side of Blackbone Hill in broad daylight. It had not changed, that he could see, and he felt no desire to walk on it again.
He made his way back across country toward Brightwater, with the Westhill yeomen. On their way, they found ample evidence that the war was spreading. Twice they fought off attacks by mounted patrols; once they blundered into the path of a large infantry force, and got away only because they were fitter than their pursuers. Gird wondered where that force had been going; as far as he knew, he had no one active in that direction. They passed more than one burned-out village, inhabited by peasants who fled into the woods when they approached, and slunk out behind them to work the fields.
Gird led them in a careful circle around Grahlin; they were near Burry when they met someone recently from Brightwater, a yeoman Gird remembered only vaguely. His news was mixed. The king’s army claimed to have killed Gird, between Gadilon’s domain and the gnome lands to the south; it had then marched north, celebrating that victory by burning any village whose lord reported it as rebellious. For some reason, it had gone east, rather than returning in its tracks, and was now at the eastern border of Finaarenis, preparing to march home on the River Road.
“So,” Gird said, putting a blunt finger on the map. “That group we saw was probably going to join the king’s army. Well. When they get to Grahlin, the sier will have much to tell them, and we can expect them in Brightwater sometime after harvest, no doubt.”
According to later reports, the king’s army had met with scattered but brisk resistance on its march north; bartons Gird had never heard of had fought individual and combined engagements. In the meantime, Gird’s main force had control of the valley in which Brightwater lay, from just south of the River Road all the way to the southern trade road. They had taken two lords’ residences, although only servants were there: the lords were off with the king’s army, and their families were safe (for the moment) in Finyatha.
Putting all this information together with Selamis and the senior marshals, Gird thought he still had numerical superiority, but most of his troops were ill-armed and had no defensive armor at all. They were short of supplies, in part because Gird did not want to squeeze the remaining farmers. Some smiths had come over to the rebels, it was true, but they had little metal for them to work.
As the summer waned, Gird remembered the gnomes’ warning that he must win in one season, or find an ally with money or troops—or both. They had suggested one, which he had been reluctant to approach.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Not for the first time, Gird felt well out of his depth. These wooded hills had taller trees than any he’d known; following a gurgling creek between two of them, he felt he was sinking deeper and deeper into unknown lands. Far overhead, the leaves just changing turned honest sunlight to a flickering green, as unsteady as the water beside him. Most of the undergrowth still showed the heavy green of summer, but one climbing vine had gone scarlet, as if the tree itself were bleeding. Gird shivered when he saw that.