“Harlot!” Xanthon spat, and reached down for the sword of a dead guard.
Before he could pull it, Sarmon’s muffled voice fell silent. A loud boom reverberated through the tiny room, and the tower door came apart in a spray of shattered planks and twisted hinges. The explosion caught Xanthon full in the back, hurling him across the chamber but shielding Tanalasta from the worst of the blast. Armored soldiers came clanging through the door instantly, coughing and choking on sulfurous fumes.
Xanthon rolled to his feet and hurled himself down the stairs, disappearing into the musty depths beneath the tower before the dragoneers had taken two steps. A moment later, Alaphondar rushed through the door, Sarmon the Spectacular close on his heels.
“Tanalasta!” cried Alaphondar. “In the name of the Binder! No!”
The old sage collapsed to his knees and cradled her head in his lap. He started weep and rock to and fro, causing the ends of Tanalasta’s broken jaw to rub against each other. She moaned and reached up, clamping her fingers onto his arm to make him stop.
“By the quill! She’s alive!” Alaphondar pulled her higher into his lap, wrenching her broken arm around painfully, and waved Sarmon over. “Teleport us to Arabel-now!”
2
“No,” the oldest tracker said flatly, “no horse willingly gallops along bare rock when there’s soft turf to be had, unless the rider it’s obeying guides it so. If Cadimus went along here-as he must have done, to leave no trace for so long, and not having wings-then you can be sure someone was riding him.”
“His master?”
The tracker shrugged. “Who else?” Suddenly mindful that he was answering an anxious king and not an ignorant recruit, he added awkwardly, “Mind, Majesty, riders don’t exactly leave tracks of their own that we can follow, if ye take my meaning, but…”
“I understand,” Azoun said, lifting a reassuring hand. “You do good work, Paerdival-continue. The fortunes of the realm may depend on the trail you find for us.”
In reply, the tracker silently lifted a bushy pair of eyebrows for a moment, then bent over again to study the southern end of the bare shoulder of rock. In a matter of moments he’d given the impatient wave of his hand that meant he’d found signs left by the passage of the royal magician’s warhorse, and the army moved on.
The brief horn call that blared a breath or two later brought the army to an abrupt halt, and hundreds of heads turned in haste. A man was running from the rear guard, waving his hands as he came.
“To arms!” he cried. “Orcs behind us-thousands of them!”
The king did not hesitate. “Up this hill-everyone!” he bellowed. “Form a ring, spears to the fore, all with bows within and readying them. Move!”
The swordlords and lancelords around him began relaying the orders as Purple Dragons surged into motion, rolling up the hill in a vast, gleaming wave.
“I’ll be needing a foray force,” Azoun called to the lords Braerwinter and Tolon. “Gather forty men at most- men who can move swiftly and have good eyes, but none of the scouts. They deserve a rest.”
As he spoke, the horns that would call in the far-flung scouts sounded, and the first men reached the crest of the hill. In involuntary unison they turned and peered in the direction the rear guard had indicated for the orcs.
“Move, Tempus-damned sheep!” a swordcaptain bellowed at them. “Time for sightseeing later-there’s a war on, and we’re in it!”
Several mock bleats came as a reply as dragoneers moved hastily into a ring, grounding their spears and looking for their accustomed officers.
“Move, I said!” the swordcaptain growled at a lone, motionless figure, then fell silent, realizing he’d just bawled an order at the king.
Azoun spun around and clapped him on the shoulder reassuringly. “Keep right on doing that,” he murmured. “You never know when you might save a royal life. Just be assured that most of the time, I’ll ignore you.”
They traded grins-albeit a rather sickly one on the swordcaptain’s part-and took their own places. The officer stepped into the ring, and the king stood beside the two nobles who’d wisely selected some veteran officers to lead the force rather than trying to claim glory for themselves. They were standing with about twenty men. The king nodded approvingly.
“I’ll be needing some swift swords to seek out the enemy,” he told them. “If anyone is footsore or slowed for any reason, say so now. Your lives will almost certainly depend on being fleet in the field.”
He looked again at the hill from where the rear guard’s warning had come and stiffened.
A lone figure was running toward them, stumbling with weariness. It was a warrior, armor covered with dust, but seeming somehow familiar-a Cormyrean, to be sure.
Orcs were streaming up over that hill now, close behind the running knight. They were going to catch him and slay him right under the king’s nose, in full view of all the royal army.
Azoun’s mouth tightened. It would be foolish to abandon a strong defensive position to go down there to swing blades with so many orcs, but the last thing he wanted was to stand idle and watch a man he might have saved get hacked apart while he did nothing.
It was also something he didn’t want Purple Dragons to see and remember. The lone figure might be them, next time. What good is a king who stands heartless when a subject is in need?
“Foray force-down, and defend that knight! The rest of you charge when the hilltop is covered with orcs!” he roared, and set off down the hill.
“Majesty!” a lancelord protested, and another cried, “This is madness, good king!”
Azoun turned without slowing and cupped his hands around his mouth. “I can only hear officers who run with me,” he called. “If one man dies while I stand idle, what kind of king am I?”
He heard the approving murmur from the warriors in the ring, and the officers heard it too. No more protests came to the royal ears as the King of Cormyr, and his strike force raced down the hill, angling their charge so as to come between the foremost orcs and the lone fleeing figure.
Gods, but it was a horde. Hundreds of tall, hulking orcs, fresh and eager, loped along with their blades out and their tusks gleaming, howling as they saw the humans rushing to meet them.
The two running forces crashed together in a sudden mass of shouts, ringing blades, and thudding bodies. Azoun pointed at the lone, gasping knight they were trying to rescue to make sure no orc slipped through the fray. He saw that Tolon and Braerwinter were leading four dragoneers to form a ring, then he crashed into a knot of struggling men with the old, quickening eagerness for the fray. The king drove his sword half through an orc’s forearm. The beast screamed and tried to shake the steel free. Azoun barely heard an unexpected shout through its noise.
“Father! Azoun! Father!”
It could only be Alusair, but her voice was a raw sob. The king fell back from the fray, raising his ring. “Alessa? Lass?”
“Majesty!” Braerwinter’s voice arose like a trumpet, and Azoun realized that the exhausted, fleeing knight had been his daughter.
He sprinted across the field, hearing the mighty roar of his main army behind him as it charged down the hill to slay the orcs. He ran to where the small ring led by the lords stood around a lone, shuddering form.
The Princess Alusair was sitting, her mouth wet from the healing potion Braerwinter had already forced down her throat, her face streaked with dirt and rivulets of sweat. Her eyes were dull with weariness, and she was shuddering between gulps of air.
He might have stood on a hilltop and watched orcs butcher her-one of the best warriors in the realm.
“Lass,” he said fervently, dropping his sword and putting his arms around her in as gentle a cradling as he could manage. Her own embrace was fierce, and she put her face against his armored chest for only a few heaving breaths, never letting the men standing watchfully around them hear a single sob.
“I… found a grove of those twisted trees… It was full of orcs… Been running since… Spent all the magic I had fighting and running… Ring wouldn’t take me to you… How came you here to my backlands?”
The battle was rising around them in earnest now, men and orcs shrieking and shouting as they died, their
