“What’s wrong?” Eldan had ridden up beside her without her even noticing his arrival.
“I just realized we made a monumental mistake,” she replied slowly, as her spine chilled. “We all thought we were leading him. We haven’t been. He’s been herding us, like stags being herded by beaters.” She looked around for one of the scout Lieutenants, and spotted Shallan’s blonde cap of hair. “Shallan!” she called sharply; the scout-leader looked back, and reined her horse around, sending him loping wearily toward them.
“I want you to send out scouts west and east,” she said as soon as Shallan was within easy speaking distance. “Send them out about a half a day’s ride, on their freshest horses. Have them take Heralds; if what I think is out there really is, I want to know immediately.”
Shallan looked thoughtful for a moment—then blanched. “We’ve been bracketed?” she asked, as her horse stood listlessly, saving his energy.
Kero nodded, and looked back over her shoulder, feeling as if she half-expected the enemy to come into view. “I think so. I couldn’t figure out where his cavalry was, and I’d just about decided he didn’t have any. But if I had his resources, why would I field only foot fighters with less than a Company of cavalry? Now I think I know where he sent them—to bracket us in either the east or the west. I’d bet east, but I want you to check inside Valdemar just to be sure. In all the confusion caused by evacuation he could have slipped someone in.”
“Astera help us, if you’re right,” Eldan said grimly as Shallan rode off to pick her scouts and send them on their way. He, too, looked back over his shoulder, with a grimace. “He’ll have us where we planned to have him—pinned between him and the Iftel Border.”
“I know,” she replied, watching as two small groups of Skybolts broke off from the main body and rode off east and west. “Believe me, I know. I’d give my arm to know where Daren is right now—and my leg to have him close enough to help.”
We must be halfway to Iftel by now. Gods, I don’t know how much more of this dying territory there is—Daren flexed cramped fingers, wiping the nervous sweat from his face with his sleeve, and stared up at the sun. He reined his gelding in a little to drop back beside one of the few unarmored riders in the group. “How far past the Valdemar Border would you say we are?” he asked young Quenten, who frowned a little, and unfocused his eyes. “Last thing I want is for Ancar’s toadies to scent us.”
“Far enough,” the mage replied after a moment. “We’re out of range of whatever it is in Valdemar, and Ancar’s mages are too busy keeping the troops under control to try looking for us. That’s devilish clever of him, keeping his mages just this side of the Border; I don’t know what that guardian is, m’lord, but it’s cursed literal-minded. Your magic can cross the Border all you like, so long as you don’t. And I ’spect that if you didn’t ever do anything magical, once you were inside, it’d leave you alone.”
“I suspect you’re right,” Daren replied. Quenten’s a good lad. Wish I knew how Kero managed to recruit him. “And I’m damned glad you went looking for us on your way back to your winter quarters. If we’d followed along the short route, we’d have lost our mages, too.”
“I didn’t want to leave them in the first place, m’lord,” Quenten said absently. “Let the gods witness it, I’d have stayed if I could! It only seemed right to track you down and warn you, and maybe come with you if you figured a way around the magic problem.” His gentle little mare glided along beside Daren’s tall hunter, the only horse he’d ever seen besides his own that could trot without jolting her rider. Daren kept silent, wrestling with the problem of how to make up the days lost in crossing over to Hardorn, sneaking through the passes and hoping the Karsites would choose to ignore this little invasion of their borders. He’d had double his usual complement of mages to cloak their movements, but who knew what the Karsite priests could and could not do.
Perhaps they had their own troubles to occupy them. Since the defeat of the Prophet there had been no more trouble from Karse; only rumors that the Temple was engaging in a war of intrigue within itself, and more rumors that the Chief Priest of the Sunlord was being challenged for his place by a woman. That was heresy enough, but further rumor had it that this woman affected the robes and false beard of a man, and styled herself the “True-born Son of the Sun.” If even half those rumors were true, small wonder Karse paid no attention to the army of her old enemy, when it was plainly going elsewhere.
But once across the border into Hardorn, Daren had been tempted to turn right around and take his chances with Valdemar and this mysterious “guardian” that drove mages mad. For from the border to a distance of three leagues within Hardorn, the land was blighted and empty.
Bad enough that entire villages lay empty and abandoned; worse came when his men poked cautiously through the tumbled-down buildings. The places had been looted, then demolished. But in the wreckage, Daren’s men found the remains of women and children—and only women and children, and only those younger than three, and (presumably) older than thirty.
Daren had thought at first that it might have been the work of bandits—but then they had encountered another village, smaller than the first, that had fared the same. Then another, and another.
After the fourth such discovery, Daren forbade his men to even go near the places. They had no priest with them, but the mages, Quenten in particular, had felt an odd uneasiness there, and the Healers had refused, in a hysterical body, to set foot inside the perimeters.
And the land itself looked drained and ill. The rank weeds that had taken over the fields were pale, with thin, weak stems. The leaves of the trees were discolored. The only birds to be seen were an occasional crow, and so far Daren hadn’t spotted so much as a rabbit moving. It had been getting worse since the first village, and now the countryside looked to his eyes like a beautiful woman lying ravaged by plague. He couldn’t imagine how his men could bear it—many of them were of farm stock, and intended to retire to little pension-farms of their own, and to see good land like this must be making them ill.
“What do you think happened here?” he asked Quenten, as they crossed a muddy, rust-colored stream. “Is it safe to be riding on this land, do you think?”
“It’s safe enough, m’lord,” Quenten said, but only after the mage gave him a peculiar look. “Why do you ask?”
Daren looked around at the withered limbs of the trees, at the yellow grass, at the diseased cankers spotting the leaves, and shuddered. “Because the place looks poisoned, that’s why. What happened at the villages was easy enough to read—that bastard conscripted the men, took the useful women and little ones and slaughtered the rest as an example—but I don’t understand this ... and I don’t see how the men can accept it as easily as they do.”
Quenten shook his head in wonder. “M’lord, they don’t see what you see. To them it looks perfectly ordinary, except that there’s not much in the way of birds and beasts.” He looked pointedly about them, at the men marching calmly up the road in front of them, and tilted his shaggy, dust-dulled head to one side, as if waiting for a response.
Daren cast a sharp glance at him, but the young mage’s expression was entirely sober. “A glamour? An illusion?”
Again the mage shook his head, but this time he stared into Daren’s face searchingly before replying. “I don’t think so, m’lord. Is there mage-blood in your family?”