“Yes,” said Alfriedo. “Let’s begin.”
“That’s a damn smart kid,” Kessligh remarked as they walked up from the docks some time later, in the company of their Nasi-Keth guards.
“He is,” Rhillian said sombrely. “But intelligence is guarantee of nothing. He is still his mother’s son.”
“We shall see.”
“And they’re all fools to trust a fourteen-year-old to do their negotiating anyway, no matter how smart,” Rhillian sighed. “Fancy entrusting leadership of any group to a person determined by lineage alone. No serrin had believed such an anachronism could possibly still exist two centuries after King Leyvaan.”
“Human ideals die hard,” said Kessligh. “Logic plays little role.”
“Do you think it will hold?” Rhillian asked him. The truce, she meant.
“We can try. The strength of the Steel is a great blessing, but a minor curse too. No one has taken seriously the prospect that they might actually lose. And so, even confronted by a common threat as immense as this one, it fails to unite Rhodaanis in its face.”
“I must soon leave,” said Rhillian. “I am ordering the last significant force of talmaad in Tracato to go in support of the Steel, they shall need all the help they can get.”
“Must you command them?”
“I have experience,” said Rhillian. “It is expected.”
“If the Steel are defeated,” said Kessligh, “all Rhodaani forces as can muster should depart for Enora immediately. We must continue the fight from there.”
“You think a defeat is likely?”
“Not likely. But where the Army of Lenayin is in play, anything is possible. I am stuck here in Tracato, so I have nothing better to do than make contingencies. The Steel is vastly experienced, but the one thing they have never experienced is defeat. I do not think it shall be pretty. They are a complex, structured force, and rely upon total control of the battlefield to maintain that structure. In defeat and withdrawal, that structure shall disappear and will be nearly impossible to regain, in the face of what numbers are arrayed against them. I predict either victory or rout. In the event of a rout, the Steel’s commanders shall march as fast as possible to Enora. Retreating to Tracato shall make no sense, it would be just asking for encirclement.”
“And given the Steel’s strength, Tracato has allowed its own defensive walls to fall into disrepair, and the city to expand well beyond them.”
“You see the problem. The border is defensible. Tracato is not.”
“And Saalshen’s border shall be open to its enemies for the first time in two hundred years.”
There was fear in Rhillian’s voice. Rhodaan’s people too would be at great risk of the predations of invading Larosans, but Kessligh did not think her fear selfish. Rhodaanis were human, and invaders would expect to return them to the status of vassals beneath a feudal overlord. Serrin, to the Larosans and others, were demons and deserved death to the last child.
“They must deal with the entire Saalshen Bacosh before attempting Saalshen itself,” said Kessligh, with more confidence than he felt. “That will be no easy thing, even if Rhodaan were to fall.”
“But they’ll never have so many forces mustered for the task as now,” Rhillian said quietly. “They’ll not waste the opportunity, no matter what their casualties. They’ll take the plains as far as the Telesil foothills, as Leyvaan did last time, only they won’t repeat his mistake and march into the forests. Those they’ll take piece by piece, clearing with axes as they go. It may take decades, but Saalshen will die a slow death. We cannot defeat such massed armour on our own.”
If only, Kessligh was tempted to say, Saalshen had built heavy, armoured armies of its own. If only they had been willing to reorganise their society to accommodate such a militaristic change. With serrin, “if only” solved nothing. They were what they were, and change came to them with the utmost difficulty. And perhaps, he had often pondered, in changing to face such a threat, the serrin would lose that very thing that made them so worth defending in the first place.
“I tried my best,” Rhillian said, her voice small. “I tried to keep Rhodaan stable. I do not have a good record of achieving in human society that which I attempt to achieve, but…but I do not see what else I could have done.”
For a moment, Rhillian appeared as Kessligh had rarely seen her-lonely and vulnerable.
“I do not believe you could have done much differently,” Kessligh told her. “Lady Renine and her followers saw the coming war as a chance to retake control of Rhodaan for the feudalists. To place one’s own group above the defence of all Rhodaan is traitorous to say the least, and she got what she deserved. Had you done nothing, the Steel would never have stood for it, and their intervention would likely have placed some general in charge with a far less balanced attitude than yours. The Civid Sein were a nasty complication, and as much a failing of the Tol’rhen and supposedly civilised thinking as anything else. Even I did not see the extent of that problem until it was on top of us. You dealt with each problem in turn, and released the Steel in time to confront the Larosans, with the issue at least temporarily settled. I don’t think you did such a bad job.”
Rhillian gave him a sideways look. “And what do you think to do now?”
“Reorganise what’s left of the Nasi-Keth. Try to keep the peace here in your absence. Hope for the best, and plan for the worst. We shall not let Saalshen fall, Rhillian. Serrin civilisation is the greatest asset that we humans possess. We must save it for our own sake, not merely for yours.”
“A man named Deani was of the same opinion in Petrodor,” Rhillian said sadly. “He was killed when Palopy House was attacked. Justice Sinidane thought much the same. We found him in the cells beneath his Justiciary, tortured and dead of shock. Those who hold such opinions do not live for long, in human lands. And now one of you whom I have loved has run away to the other side.”
“Sasha has not stopped caring,” Kessligh said quietly. “She cares too much. She struggles to decide whom she loves more.”
Sasha sat on a wet stone by the roadside, and waited in the rain. After a while, she heard a single set of hooves approaching. Then, about a bend in the road, a small horse came galloping, ridden by a man in a long cloak. Sasha’s horse looked up at the approach, ears pricked. She seemed to accept Sasha’s calm, and was not unduly alarmed.
The small horse stopped before her, stamping and frothing, and the rider pushed wet hair and hood from his eyes. The left side of his face was tattooed, in a perfect dividing line down brow, nose and chin.
“Identify yourself!” the man demanded, in thickly accented Larosan. Those were amongst the few Larosan words Sasha knew-probably it was the same for this man.
“I am as welcome here as you,” Sasha replied in Lenay, and pulled from her cloak a crimson-and-yellow striped flag. It was the flag of the local House of Neishure, whose riders had escorted her to this point in the morning, proclaiming it the most obvious route to approach Rhodaan.
The outrider stared at her more closely. “Who are you? Have you a name?”
“I do,” said Sasha. “But it is not for you.”
“The King of Lenayin rides this way!” snapped the rider. His accent marked him a southerner. Neysh, perhaps. “I’ll have your name!”
“Come and take it from me,” Sasha suggested. Her face remained hidden beneath the hood. The rider peered further, his horse edging closer. Surely he suspected. But his suspicions would make no sense. He glared at her, and tore off up the crossroad, leaving Sasha alone in the falling rain. After a moment of silence, he came galloping back, having checked that reach and not found an ambush. He waited opposite her, looking back up the road. Soon another rider appeared and the first signalled to him. That man signalled back, plunged his horse into the stream, up the far embankment, and into the forest. Checking for ambush there, too. In case she were a lone spotter. Or a distraction of some kind. Or a lure.