His aide looked baffled but ducked his chin in quick agreement. “Aye, Lord Vantane, understood. Hold them off, bring them down only if necessary, keep them busy.”
“That’s the idea.” Bistel waved him off. The aide put a bootheel to his mount, and the horse sprang away as if spurred within an inch of its life, mane and tail flying.
Traps within traps, and Abayan Diort would have only the surface of them revealed to him. Bistel settled his boots in stirrups. He watched the shield men fall into position and the archers begin to nock their arrows. Horses neighed in anticipation of a charge as lancers swung into their saddles. The foot soldiers secured their weapon harnesses. Every one of them looked to him at least once before looking away to their own commander for orders. He had already given them his blessing. He would not fight today, it would not do well to have the forces lose their leader if he could help it. But tomorrow . . . he glanced at the sky. Tomorrow all might be necessary.
They burst out of the tunnel like a submerged apple bobs to the top of a tub of water. Bregan reeled and fell to the ground, laughing hoarsely until he lapsed into gasping. Garner collapsed into a sitting position, turning his face to the sky, the gray and leaden sky that had been promising rain for days, make that weeks now, without any real release. He did not care. He had thought he would never see the sky or clouds again. He listened as Bregan finally subsided into wheezes that were, comparatively, silent. He freed his waterskin to take a long, satisfying draught that wet his throat and filled his stomach. The trickle of water he’d found and they’d followed led here, to where the trickle became a little more than that, and the grass was winter brown and the shrubs stuck dying leaves into the air.
“This,” he observed, “can’t be the Ashenbrook. That is a great, wide river, aye?”
“So I’ve heard. Never crossed it myself.” Bregan Oxfort rolled over lazily onto his stomach, propping himself on his elbows, and took the waterskin when it was passed to him. He poured a little over his head and face before drinking deeply.
“I’ll see if I can snare something for a bit of supper. Then we’ll need to fill my skin and your flask and anything else we can carry that will hold water.”
Bregan looked at him with his fine-boned Kernan face streaked in dirt and water as if he were a Bolger heathen, and he arched an eyebrow. “Might I ask why?”
“We’re going back in, to find the passage to Ashenbrook, and warn them, aye?”
Silence met his question. Garner waited a moment or two, then put his hand out and shook Bregan’s shoulder roughly. “We’re warning them, aren’t we?”
Bregan let out a sigh. “That would be the question.” He pushed himself into sitting up, his braced leg stretched out in front of him and kneading it as he seemed to gather effort and words. Or perhaps it was courage he gathered, Garner thought. “There seems little profit in life or in coin to go back in and find ourselves a leg behind the Raymy, an encounter we’re not likely to survive a second time. On the other hand, time flows differently along those passageways—”
“What do you mean?” Garner interrupted sharply.
Bregan took a timepiece out of the vest under his coat. He tapped it. “Dead it is, and has been ever since we stepped foot into the caves. Its gears aren’t broken or jammed nor its winding stem snapped. It’s just . . . dead. Well, it did a few things first. First all its pictographs spun in reverse as if its little world had gone mad. Then it worked in fits and spurts but never with the correct time as I reckoned it must have been, and then it spun to a halt altogether.” He tapped the timepiece again gently. “Fine workmanship made this. It’s never failed before.” He slipped it back into his inner vest pocket.
Garner gave a chuff. “Which can mean nothing.”
“Or it can mean that we have no chance of cutting them off. They could be days ahead of us in travel.”
“As my da would have said, no planting ensures no harvest.”
Bregan considered him. “Your father was a fine caravan guard in his day. Disciplined and yet hell on wheels. Raiders stayed away on the mere chance he might be guarding the caravan that trip.”
Tolby spoke little of his youth, yet Garner was not surprised to hear Bregan’s evaluation. He gave a nod of comprehension and then toed his boot into the other. “That was then. Tell me how to read the tiles, and I’ll be going by myself if necessary.” He stood and dusted himself off.
“I would if I could.”
“It does you no good to keep me back. You can fend for yourself out here.”
“I’m not keeping you back on my account!”
They locked eyes. Bregan sucked in a breath. “Do you accuse me of lying about the tiles?”
Garner lifted and dropped a shoulder diffidently.
“I make deals that could buy and sell most cities at the shake of my hand, the promise of my word.”
“When it profits you, I’ve no doubt of that.”
“There is no benefit in this but death.”
“Then you’re as blind and useless as that timepiece of yours if you can’t see that even one life saved is profitable.”
Bregan got to his feet. He bent to straighten his trousers under the brace and check the strapping that held it in place, wincing a bit as he did. It might be chafing him a bit, but Garner couldn’t find much sympathy. The trader walked and even ran when others less fortunate might be hobbled for life. Oxfort looked up to see Garner considering him and must have read the expression, for he flushed a little. “I’ll take you in, show you the first tile we find.”
“And then?”
“Whether you can read it or not, first we come out, get water and eat. It doesn’t do anyone any good if we drop.”
Garner told him, “I’ll set a snare first.” He patted his pockets down for a bit of twine and a peg, a useful thing Dwellers carried that could be used for snaring or even fishing, if it came to that. He’d rather fish, but the brooklet here was far too reedy and insubstantial to have more than frogs basking in it. He went down to the water anyway and set his snare near a bevy of small paw prints before rejoining Bregan.
The tunnel had grown dark again and they stumbled against each other until Bregan’s searching touch found what he was looking for. At the glide of his fingertips over it, the tile lit and its glow illuminated the passage just enough to see by. Bregan drew him to it. “Can you see the brushstrokes over the tile? The sigils and runes?”
Garner all but put his nose to it. The tile had been glazed masterfully and held a pleasing pattern to it, but he could see nothing remarkable about it that could be deciphered and read. Finally, he shook his head in regret. “Maybe a pattern or a decoration, a floret, nothing more.”
“I can’t see the runes till I touch the tile, although I can sense the tiles wherever they are placed.” Bregan put his palm over it. “Magicked, I suppose, like the Elven Ways of the Vaelinar.”
“Then I’ll go without the tiles.”
“You’ll never find your way. You’ll wander under these mountains until . . .”
“No choice is there? I won’t be having much of a life to live if I know that I might have done something to save others, and didn’t.”
“Dwellers always did have a stubborn streak.”
“Aye. That comes from doing things ourselves and not waiting for the Gods to speak to us. The Gods help those who are already doing the deed.”
“Do you think? Or perhaps they’re just always watching you because you’re entertaining?”
Garner punched Bregan in the bicep and the trader laughed. He rubbed his arm and waved. “Out, out, I’m hungry and then we’ll brave being the heroes.”
As luck and skill would have it, Garner’s snare had caught a small coney. He prepared it gratefully for roasting while Bregan managed to strike a fire and rig a spit. While he cooked and the waterskins were being filled to bursting, he pondered their course of action. As gambling men, he and Oxfort both knew that whatever they planned, it would be against all odds.
Bistane sang. Whether loud enough to be heard by her troops or quietly enough that only his mount, ears flicking back and forth, heard the crooning, he had not been quiet. Lara supposed that he would have a battle chant ready on his lips when, if, they reached the Ashenbrook. Now he paused before starting a new ballad, one that tore at her heart when she recognized it:
“Over hills of drifting mist and
valleys cupped low with sun,
we wander yet, our souls in search
of the lost Trevilara.
Her name is forever burned
and yet stays buried,
carried on every wind and treasured breath.
Trevilara is lost and gone before us all,
A final hope, waiting for our death.
Oh, Trevilara, if I could but know you
If I could see and touch you through sorrow’s rain,
My spirit would soar beyond the silences
Of all the stars, and my soul come home again.”
She put her hand out to stop his song. Bistane turned wondering blue eyes to her, and then dipped his chin in understanding.
He smoothed the reins in his hand. “I give it five more days before we reach the fighting plains.”
“I know.”
“My father will hold.”
“That, I know, too. Only at what cost.” She looked away, over the dry highlands as they rode, past the bountiful lands of Larandaril, out of range of the blessing of the sacred river Andredia. She saw, as she knew Bistane did, land struggling as it was to survive without the bane of armies marching through and blood staining the ground instead of needed rain.
“I am old enough,” she murmured, “but I cannot remember a drought like this.”
“And I older, nor can I.”
“After the battle, we shall have to send engineers throughout the lands. See what conservation we can work. Set to building irrigation canals. We can’t depend on chance to break the dry spell.”
“It could only be a season or two.”
“Or it may be the beginning of a cycle which our farmers cannot survive without our help.”
“There are Kernan weather witches . . .”
“I’ve consulted them,” Lara told him. “Dry as a stone, they told me, for years to come. They are frightened.”
“Then we shall have to take whatever steps we can.”
“Your word on that?”
His blue-within-sharp-blue eyes met hers, eyes of blue with gold and silver, and his face became very solemn. “My word to my queen.”
“Good.” She put a hand to the nape of her neck and rubbed there, as if easing a tension. “My vantanes show me a pitched battle. The warlord holds his own, but . . . the cost is mounting.”
He had no immediate answer. When he found one, his words were cut short by a shout from one of the troops riding point.
“Smoke!”
Lara wheeled her mount around and caught up with the scout. “Yes, I see.” She frowned at the very thin snake of blue-gray smoke undulating into the air. “Not much of a campfire.”
“Not a lightning strike, or we’d be facing wildfire.”
“No.” She weighed losing time against finding out who might be camped in the middle of nowhere. She signaled for the scout to proceed. “Let’s see who is having an early dinner.”
Chapter Fifty-Two
"I AM FREEZING,” Nutmeg grumbled, hugging her arms about herself. She jogged to keep pace with the strides of the others, cursing long-legged humans silently. Even being forced to lead their horses didn’t seem to slow them at all. Her hair worked its way loose from its tieback for the twentieth time that day . . . had it been a day? . . . and she
pfuffed
stray curls away from her forehead and eyes in aggravation. The day before she’d worn it braided, so it had been a day and then two . . . she gave up trying to reckon time.
Rufus gave his customary grunt in response. He fumbled for a moment in the pockets of the leathery apron he wore under his armor like some others wore shirts before fishing out a handful of jerky bits and pushing them onto her. “Eat. Chew slowly.”
As if she had any choice, jerky being what it was, but she shoved the first one into her mouth with a grateful, “Thank you!” around the tough, dry piece. Salty, sweet goodness swelled in her mouth as she chewed. And chewed. And finally got it softened enough so that she could savor it before swallowing.
“Not good on march,” Rufus observed.
“They threw us in the cellar for two days,” Nutmeg told him. “Without food! I started off cold and hungry.”
The Bolger showed his tusks in a grin. “Little one always hungry.”
She had to agree with him. “Lately, anyway.” She would have added more, in her defense, but Rufus put up a grizzled hand, stopping her abruptly. He waved back at Tiforan and Lyat, and they all plowed to a halt, the tunnel glimmering faintly about them.
“Hear, smell, something.”
When they stopped, she became aware that the muffled noise that she had been hearing for quite a while now, like the drumming of a heartbeat within the mountain, had grown louder. But it was not near, or so she hoped, not knowing what she heard. Was it the pulse of the beast Rufus told them had made the tunnels even though he said it had gone to the sea and died? Could another such great reptile still live within the stone, its venom cutting endless loops of passages around them? Would it have a great heartbeat that echoed and thrummed throughout the mountain?
The Bolger listened for a long while before clucking at the back of his throat. He flashed his tusks. “This way.”
Nutmeg balked. “How do you know?”
Rufus patted her back stiffly. “She always smell like flower. Even here.” He cast his glance about the tunnel. “Even here.”
“Good enough for me, then.”
“If not, then I suggest you drop behind and let us finish our mission,” Tiforan commented from behind them. “I can have food and water left with you as well as designating a way out.”
Nutmeg threw him a look over her shoulder. “And what would that mission be?” He did not know Rivergrace had been charged with treason, nor did he seem to be in pursuit of her. In fact, he seemed to regard Rufus as leading them toward an objective for which Tiforan had no time or patience.