"And what came of us here, Milord Wind Rider? What happened when first your folk brought their herds and horses to the Wind Plain? My folk remember, if yours are after forgetting. We remember the Starving Time, when your warriors came down off the Wind Plain like a pestilence. When the barns burned, and the harvests with them, and our babes starved at their mother's breasts. Aye, we remember it, Hathan of the Sothōii, and we're after taking our name from what your kind forced upon us, for we'd no choice but to raid your herds for food! It was that or be watching our children starve, and I'm thinking your own choice would've been no different from ours!"
"Nonsense!" Hathan shot back. "The earliest tales make it perfectly plain that it was your kind who raided us! And—"
"Excuse me, Hathan." Wencit didn't raise his voice, but something in it snapped all eyes to him. He paused a moment, as if waiting to be certain he had the attention of all of them, and then he shrugged. "I'm afraid Bahzell's version is the more accurate, Hathan," the wild wizard said almost gently. "Oh, his ancestors were no saints, but it was yours who began the war between you."
"But—" Hathan paused, mouth frozen in the open position. Then he shook his head. "But that's not possible," he protested. "All of our tales, all our histories—"
"Are wrong," Wencit said with that same note of gentle regret. All the Sothōii, even Tellian, stared at him in disbelief, and he sighed. "Unlike any of the rest of you, I was here at the time," he told them. "I warned Baron Markhos of the presence of Bahzell's ancestors when he set out for the Wind Plain, and I urged him to keep clear of them—to leave them in peace so long as they left him in peace. But he didn't. Like almost all the refugees, he hated the hradani for what they'd done in the Carnadosans' service. It didn't matter to him that they'd had no choice. It was simpler to hate than to understand them, and so when his scouts reported the locations of the Horse Stealers' ancestors, he waited until winter was near and the harvests were in, and then—exactly as Bahzell says—he ordered their barns burned to starve them out."
Total silence ruled the Gullet when he paused. The Sothōii sat or stood frozen in shock, and he sighed.
"It was an ugly time, my friends," he said sadly. "An ugly time for all of us. But I tell you this, Hathan Shieldarm: of all the Races of Man, the hradani's suffering at the hands of the Carnadosans was the cruelest. They were enslaved, driven and goaded by spells you cannot imagine, used and discarded and broken into slavering beasts which remembered being more than beasts yet could not fight the sorcery locked upon them. And then, when a handful of them escaped to Norfressa against all but impossible odds, the other Races of Man fell upon them and slaughtered them like animals, too filled with hate for what the Carnadosans had forced them to do to heed me, or Duke Kormak, or Ernos of Saramantha when we told them the hradani had had no choice.
"So, yes, they raided your herds, for your ancestors had left them nothing else to eat. And, yes, they slaughtered and ate your horses, as well as your cattle. Indeed, they preferred horsemeat to beef, for they knew how much you loved your horses, and they treasured anything they could do—anything at all—to strike back at the warriors who'd tried to exterminate them. It was your people who first called them 'Horse Stealer,' Hathan, but there was no name in all the world they would have preferred, for they, too, knew how to hate, and, oh but your ancestors gave them cause to."
He fell silent, and, one by one, the Sothōii turned away from him, looking at one another in shock and confusion. It never occurred to them to doubt Wencit's word, even though it turned everything they had ever been taught on its head, for he was Wencit of Rūm. And, as he said, unlike any of them he had been there.
Bahzell shared their shock, though in a different way. Hradani and Sothōii had each known for centuries how the other's version of history had differed from their own, yet none of them had ever expected the differences to be so suddenly resolved or to have the truth disclosed with such brutal directness, for it had never occurred to either of them to simply ask the one person who'd been there at the time. And now that the truth had been revealed, Bahzell had no idea what to do with it. It was almost worse than the bitter denials and denunciations his people and the Sothōii had hurled at one another for so many endless years, as if the proof that the Horse Stealers had been right all along was somehow almost immaterial. As if in some strange way the hatred and distrust between them and the Sothōii had been the only thing they truly shared, so that the destruction of its basis left them all bereft of rudder or compass.
But then, at last, Tellian stirred. He shook his head as if to clear it and looked at Bahzell once more.
"I don't—" He paused and cleared his throat. "It will take me some time to come to grips with what Wencit has just revealed to us, Milord Champion," he said finally. "And in many ways, I suppose which of us first offended the other matters far less than the history we have built between us since... and what we must build now." He smiled suddenly—a smile tart as alum, yet a smile nonetheless—and chuckled mirthlessly. "If I was prepared to believe that when I thought your ancestors had attacked mine without provocation, then I see no reason to change my mind now that I know it was my folk who were to blame. Yet I think those of my people who are not here today, who did not hear the truth from Wencit's own lips, will find it difficult to believe. Worse, some of them will refuse to believe, for to do so would require them to give up too much of the hatred in which they have invested their lives. And so, I fear, Wencit's history lesson, however accurate or well-taken, offers no simple solution to our dilemma."
"Aye, I'm thinking you've the right of it there," Bahzell rumbled. "But a solution we need, nonetheless."
"Agreed. Unfortunately, I see only one which my people could possibly accept."
"Ah?" Bahzell cocked his head. "And should I be taking it from your tone that you're thinking as how it's one my people couldn't be accepting?"
"That," Tellian admitted, "is indeed what I fear."
"Well, spit it out, man," Bahzell said impatiently when the baron paused once more.
"Very well, Milord Champion." Tellian drew a deep breath. "The only answer I can see is for us to end this right here, today, before it can escalate further. And the only way I can see to end it is with one side surrendering to the other. And since there are less than two hundred of you and over four thousand of us—"
He shrugged almost apologetically, and Bahzell heard Hurthang's teeth grind beside him. He himself said nothing for a full thirty seconds, and when he did speak again, it was in a very careful tone.
"Let me be certain as I've understood this, Milord. You're saying as how the only way we can be resolving this mess without a war is for us—the ones as were attacked without reason or declaration—to be surrendering to you, as were the ones doing the attacking?"
"Put that way, it certainly sounds... less than just," Tellian admitted. "Yet it's the only solution I can see. I have to end this somehow, either with a victory won by force of arms or with a formal settlement to which my own honor is pledged. If I don't, the Court factions which most hate and fear your people may well force King Markhos to order me to take still stronger action. But if you surrender to me, then I will be honor bound to protect you as the terms of your surrender provide, and not even Erthan of South Riding will want to push too hard in that case."
"So you'd ask the Order of Tomanāk to surrender so as to be letting you 'protect' us, is it?" Bahzell rumbled in a dangerous voice. "Well let me be telling you this, Tellian of West Riding! The Order's no need of your 'protection,' and the one thing I've never learned at all, at all, is how to be yielding my sword to another! So if that's after being the only 'solution' you can see, you'd best be calling up your dogs and finding out how many of them can die with us!"
Tension crackled, and then, to the amazement of every man present, Hathan Shieldarm laughed. Not scornfully or bitterly, but with a deep, rolling belly laugh of pure amusement. All eyes swung to him, and he bent over his saddle bow, laughing still harder. It took several seconds for him to drag himself back under control, and when he did, he leaned forward and murmured something to his courser, then dismounted gracefully, despite the courser's height. He stood for a moment, raised left hand resting lovingly on the courser's shoulder, and then walked around to face Bahzell. He was a foot and more shorter than the hradani, and he craned his neck to look up at him.