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Then the fog would clear again to reveal the army's advance a disquieting
furlong closer. The front lines were near enough now to mark divisions, each
city's garrison ranked out in squares. Rowed pikemen trickled like ants
around the boulders left strewn by old slides. The stream of ribboned
banners, the snorts of fresh horses, the snatched strains of voices raised in
song to hold the tempo of the march as helms bobbed, disappeared and crested
the banks of gullies, formed an inexorable flow of grayed steel over uneven
terrain.
Easier to regard them as a leaden wave, Caolle thought, a mindless, cutting
tide of sharpened weapons. Details only served to tear at the heart, that
defined the ragged edge of the advance as single men who had lives and human
fears.
Caolle shut his eyes, aching inside for what must come.
For the stakes were no longer malleable. Each side would kill in defense of
its prince; the living would mourn and the slain would stay dead. As Arithon
had most cruelly foreseen, the recent blood spilled at the Havens in the
weight of this moment seemed a pittance. A man could stand atop the knoll at
Dier Kenton where the trap would be sprung and wonder if five hundred planned
casualties had been enough; whether more than one raid and a thousand more
corpses could have stemmed the flood of tens of thousands. Then if not a
thousand, how many more, until the goading question of if and if again caused
the mind to shudder off its wretched track and embrace the plunge into
despair.
For the first time since childhood, Caoile felt haunted by his ghosts:
from a few dozen caravan drovers and couriers in Jaelot livery with slit
throats, to the wyvern-picked corpses on the shoreside ledges, to the current
war host still living, still marching in deafened belief of a just role in a
grand destiny, A stranger to himself, to feel harried by a young man's
uncertainties, Caolle found the prospect of drawing steel abhorrent. Nor did
any cause under sky seem reason enough to claim another life. In the wrong
place, years too late, he realized his pride and his skills as a killer led
nowhere.
"I have no one else I trust to see this through," husked a quiet voice near
his elbow.
Caoile started, spun, and met a face as haunted as his own.
His liege lord had arrived without sound at his side, the change in him since
the Havens the very epitome of heartbreak.
Too thin, too pale, too worn, Arithon met the mirrored anguish in his war
captain's glance. Again he answered the unspoken shock for the changes to his
appearance. "It's as much Desh-thiere's curse and the draw upon my will as
Lysaer approaches our position as any single burden from the past."
Caolle bunched helpless fists at his sword belt. "Lysaer's a murderer beyond
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compare, to mislead so many for the effort of buying your life."
A sweep of his arm embraced the advancing lines, now darkening the vale's
western end like an infestation of blight. "Your tactic at the
Havens was a mere pittance before this."
"No." Arithon studied the overwhelming, massive deployment, unable to mask his
expression. Or perhaps the strength in him was too self-absorbed to spare any
token thought for privacy. While the wind flicked his loose sable hair, the
compassion that in this moment lacerated him from within showed in scraped
pain through his words.
"Lysaer's not yet blinded to mercy. I have to believe that. Our twenty-five
survivors never got through, nor had their chance to deliver fair warning."
No argument remained; the weeks since the Havens had seen their shepherd
archers surrounded. Nothing else could be done except embrace grim reality
and follow the final step through.
After one bitter lesson at Merior, Arithon's decision was fixed.
He would abandon no ally to suffer the curse-twisted influence of his half
brother.
Caolle regarded his prince with an uneasy mix of pity and wary apprehension.
"You have a will Dharkaron himself should fear to cross,"
he said, then spun on vexed reflex to meet a scrambling disturbance at his
back.
Dakar crested the rise, wheezing like a holed bellows.
Beneath his tousled hair and the wiry bristle of his beard, his complexion
showed the blued pallor of half-congealed candle wax.
"Nothing alive should be standing here," he gasped. An expressive roll of his
eyes encompassed the surrounding peaks, this moment clogged under clouds. As
if chased by a thought, his brows furrowed underneath his
woolly bangs. "Fiends plague, Arithon. So that's what you were doing mooning
about, walking this place over and over again at night throughout the spring."
He turned an impossible shade paler.
"Listening to the pitch of the stone," Rathain's prince admitted, steady
enough for all that he looked as if the touch of a finger might shatter him.
"Dharkaron's tears!" Dakar cried. For since the seep of the autumn rains had
rinsed the heights, even his limited mage-sight could detect how the shale was
faulted. "Don't anybody sneeze. I want for nothing except to be finished my
work and hunkered down on high ground."
"Well, his Grace said the scarp would slide and close the passes,"
Caolle said, never impressed with histrionics.
"A hard's prize understatement," Dakar groused beneath his breath.
Then louder, "Both of you, move. You're standing on the site I need to
enhance my spell pattern."
Caolle edged aside as though faced by coiled snakes.
Magecraft and mystery lay a rung below cheap trickery in his opinion, but he
knew better than to waste breath arguing points of honor with a madman.
"Dakar adheres to Fellowship teaching," Arithon reassured. "Any spell he
works upon life or substance must be founded upon free permission."
"You say!" The war captain snorted his disbelief, dark eyes squinted down the
valley out of habit to mark tactics as the war host began its last stage of
deployment. "So, they're smart enough after all not to charge their light
horse over stone. You'll face pikemen in squares with archers at the center.
Slow but sure. The gullies will hamper their advance, but not much." The war
captain paused to slice a glower up the rise, where Dakar paced off a slow
circle around the banners and helmets, his head tucked in frowning
concentration. "And I don't believe yon soldiers all chucked you a grin and
bent their stupid necks to be witched."
The Mad Prophet paused between steps, his offense expressed in a crafty glint
of teeth that might have been a smile behind his beard.
"Not in so many words. But Lysaer's soldiers, to a man, allowed themselves to
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be deluded. The mesh I weave here will only cause them to see exactly what
they believe they should find."
"A sorcerer, a vile killer, a corrupter of innocent children,"
Arithon finished in shaded, soft sorrow. "They will behold what my half
brother has led them to expect and react as they have been trained."
"Which means, prince, you'd better have distance between and a blindfold on
when it happens," Dakar retorted.
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