He woke next in the cool colorless light of dawn, his head pillowed on Rahi’s lap; he looked up to see her slumped gracelessly against the wall, snoring. His head throbbed; he could not tell if it was the ale or the lump. He tried to reach up to scratch his itching hair, but chose the wrong arm; his wince woke her, and she smiled at him with a look that turned his heart. He could not stand for her to be here, for her to be leaning over him as he had so often leaned over her.
“You put me to sleep,” he said quietly, holding her gaze. “You told them to give me ale, and then you had that brew—”
Rahi grinned. “You needed the rest, and you’d have stayed up all night, arguing and keeping everyone awake. Besides, we wanted to clean your wounds again. That hurts.”
“Not so badly now,” he said, moving arm and leg gingerly.
“You told us, clean makes fast healing. And we have two healers, now. From Overbridge.”
“We still need to move, leave here before someone comes.” Some large army they could not handle, a commander smarter than the one that had let Gird pit his entire force against three separate smaller ones.
But that day was spent reorganizing after the battles. Gird fretted less as he realized it was not entirely faked for his benefit, and less still when one of the healers had time to draw the pain from his head and lay it on the soldiers’ hearth. Where, she insisted cheerfully, it really belonged. He thought to ask about Selamis, who had been traveling with the noncombatants, since he could not hold a weapon.
“He looks bad,” said Ivis. “Sad, miserable—I suppose part of it’s the pain. But his wife and daughter—he can’t help thinking about them.” Ivis’s losses were far in his past, a young wife dead of fever, children never born alive. Gird thought he knew the anguish Selamis was feeling now (where was Girnis, his other daughter? She had married a lad from Fireoak, but neither of them had come to the wood when Fireoak village broke up. He had not asked Barin about her, not wanting to know.) He looked around but did not see him. Ivis interpreted the look correctly, and said “He’s explaining the accounts to Triga.”
Gird felt as if someone had poked him with a pin. “Accounts? He can read?”
“So he says.” Ivis could not, and was glad of it. “Says he can calculate, too. And write.”
“I’ll keep him busy,” Gird said. “We need someone who can keep track of what we have.”
Meanwhile, his army had gathered all the clothing and equipment the soldiers had had—those with no shoes or boots tried on the soldiers’ until they found some that fit or were comfortably large and could be stuffed with rags or tags of fleece. The soldiers’ clothes, washed in the stream and dried on bushes, became shirts and tunics for those with no clothes, and patch material for those whose clothes needed patching. In the soldiers’ kitchen were the huge cookpots he remembered, and longhandled utensils. The heavy storage jars would be impossible to carry along (and now, he thought, I know why their army needs wagons), but the food stored in the pantry would fit into sacks. They had fifty-nine swords now (some had broken during the fights), four bows gathered after the battle and another forty found in the armory. Gird spared a moment’s thanks that the soldiers had chosen to go after them with swords instead of carrying those bows along. Best of all, the armory had racks of pikes, eighty of them.
Gird limped over to the racks and touched one gleaming tip. He lifted it from the rack and felt the balance. Not that different from the sticks—the gnomes were right about that, too. And if they carried them for a few days, the new weapons would feel normal.
“That should go through a little easier,” Felis said behind him. Gird noted that Felis did not specify what it would go through easily. He knew that some of them were still shaken by their own violence, by the knowledge that they, too, were men who could kill.
“We have the gods to thank for this,” Gird said. He turned and looked at those who had followed him into the armory. They all nodded; eyes down. “We earned the victory this time. But it will not come so easily again.” They did not like hearing that, but it was the truth, and he could not lie to them. He had won at Norwalk Sheepfolds in spite of his own mistakes, because the enemy had not expected anything. He had won here, as easily as he had, because of the enemy’s mistakes. Some day he would face a commander who made no mistakes, and then—He shook his head. Time enough for that later. Now they must thank the gods who had been with them, who had helped them.
His people had no rituals for celebrating victory in war, because they had not fought a war—at least not in living memory. Gird conferred with the oldest men and women he could find; none of them knew the right ritual. In the end, Gird combined the thanksgiving ceremonies for Alyanya’s permission to open the ground—which should hallow their use of the steel they carried—with the harvest prayers for those who had died in the past year. Sweating with both nervousness and pain, he limped from the soldiers’ barracks to the bridge over the stream, and threw in a ritual handful of grain, of flowers (gathered that day by village children), of mint leaves. The oldest granny laid a fire in the center of the village square; he led everyone in a slow dance around it. The fire burned bright, upright and clean: did that mean the gods were satisfied? He did not know. He felt both sadness and contentment, grief worn out with time, as the harvest lament always left him. The fire spurted up, suddenly, burning blue as the summer sky; Gird felt a wash of heat across him, as if he’d been dipped in it—but he was not burned, and the fire had fallen back to its wooden roots in an instant. All the hair stood up on his neck. They said something, he told himself. And I’d better figure out what it was. . . .
It had looked simpler on the model in the gnomes hall. Gird wiped sweat off his forehead and scowled at the stragglers moving along the trail past him. Go north like this, they’d said, and capture this stronghold, they’d said, and then send part of your force over here to capture this other stronghold which controls . . . it had made perfect sense. There, with gnome soldiers. He could almost understand the gnomish disapproval of undisciplined humans.
He had not planned the capture of the Overbridge guardpost, and it had fallen into his lap, eighty good pikes and all. He had neither planned nor expected the other results of that victory: the bartons that had suddenly decided to leave home and join his army, the lords who decided to punish him by burning farmsteads where no one yet had even thought of joining him, the utter confusion and chaos which had erupted in a few hands of days all over the central part of the kingdom. He had planned a march north to the River Road, to isolate (if not capture) Grahlin, the city in which the Sier of Sorgrahl ruled, and he was instead spending days he could not afford in skirmishes with the sier’s very capable mounted patrols. Remembering that brown man and his courage, he was not surprised to find that the sier made none of the mistakes other commanders had made.
He would have been glad to avoid Grahlin, but it was important for several reasons. It controlled access to the Honnorgat along one of its major tributaries, the Hoor. It sat athwart the River Road, which here bowed away from the Honnorgat to avoid seasonal flooding at the confluence with the Hoor. And the sier’s large garrison would be as much trouble behind him as it was in front or on either flank.