Exile's Honor

The others just stared at him, probably trying to untangle his mangled syntax as well. Selenay, who was far more used to the way he spoke, uttered an oath that would have made one of the muleteers blush.

'They're moving!' she said—no, shouted—before her father could rebuke her for her language. 'Father, the Tedrels, they knew we'd be watching them, they didn't care until this moment since all we'd see is their troops building, but now they don't want us to see them because they're moving!'

Sendar swore, in language even stronger than Selenay's (and there was no doubt in Alberich's mind where she'd learned to curse so fluently). But he put up his hand to quell the raised voices around him, stilling an incipient panic with a single gesture.

Alberich hoped that Selenay was taking note. This was the sort of thing a Monarch needed to be able to do by sheer force of personality.

'Even if they could fly—which they cannot—they could not be at our Border before three days have elapsed,' Sendar pointed out. 'Since they must move on their feet and those of their horses, it will be longer than that. We have a dual task—to find another way to gain the intelligence that FarSight would have given us, and to prepare the army to meet them. The former is in the hands of Joyeaus and Myste, and if any two Heralds can find what is needed in the past, they can. So, my friends, let us bend our minds to the latter, for it is time to finish our strategies. That is what we can do.'

Alberich withdrew a little, for at the moment he was best as an observer. No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy, he reminded himself. He'd reminded Myste of that truism often enough as well; with luck, she'd remember it and she and Joyeaus would add several more layers to their plotting.

And if he paid a little more attention to Orthallen than the rest, well, that also was part of his responsibility. It was not only an enemy that could do damage. Sometimes the danger came from within, and the one who brought it could even have all of the best intentions in the world.

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It was a very small tent—more like a pavilion, actually, showing old and much-faded colors on its canvas— pitched among the slightly untidy cluster of those belonging to Heralds assigned to the King and his officers. No two of these tents were alike, taken as they were from whatever was available after the Guard, the officers, the King and his servants were done picking over the available canvas, but this one stood out for both its inconvenient size and its shabby state. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, Alberich looked at it askance. Surely not.

'My home away from home,' Myste said, gesturing at the canvas square with its peaked top. She held the flap open to let him in.

'This must be the oddest campaign tent I have ever seen,' Alberich remarked, as he squeezed himself into the tent that Myste had taken, ducking his head to avoid the low crossbeams. 'It's certainly the smallest—'

Myste shrugged. 'That's probably why no one else was particularly eager to take it. I think it must have been cut down after the canvas around the bottom started to rot and stitched together with replacements, because the floor is newer than the sides and top.'

He had expected something entirely different, a tent that was more a semi- portable library. Well, there were books, but nowhere near as many as he'd expected. His glance at the neat packing case that served as a bookcase as soon as the cover was unstrapped made her smile. 'I brought copies of War Chronicles, and some odd bits, and nothing more than would fit in that case,' she said. 'Only copies. If the army retreats and I have to flee with nothing more than the uniform on my back, may the Tedrels have joy of them.'

He didn't tell her what he thought the Tedrels would use the paper for, he just folded his legs under him and sat on the canvas floor. 'And this is interesting—'

He pointed at the arrangement where anyone else would have had a cot or a bedroll. He thought there might be a cot under there, but one third was propped up to serve as a chair back and the opposite end dropped down, and the rest had a strange tray raised over it on some sort of folding legs, with everything needed for writing arranged atop it; a brazier no bigger than the palm of his hand, stacks of very cheap wood-pulp paper, graphite sticks, and pen and ink, and a lantern she could hang on the tent pole overhead. Which she did at that very moment, raising the chimney after it was hung to light it with a coal from the tiny brazier. And a moment later, she sprinkled the coal with a powder that sent up a haze of insect-repelling incense.

She grinned as she saw what he was looking so closely at. 'That's my invention. Bed, chair, and table in one, and it all comes apart and fits together. It even makes part of its own case. My clothes and bits are packed in the back half under the cot, and the desk is the top. And since we've got messengers going to Haven twice a day anyway, they take what I've written with them whenever they go. No matter what happens, we won't lose more than half a day's rough notes from meetings and anything else I know about, and if everything goes pear-shaped, Elcarth will at least have a record of what led up to it.' She swung the 'desk' away on a pivoting arm, and sat down.

He hoped that losing a half-day's rough draft would remain her only concern.

For all that the bed thing was amazingly compact, there wasn't much room left in her tent. He'd seen her rooms at the Collegium. She was a woman addicted to clutter and a collector of things. This sparse minimalism was totally unlike the Myste he knew. She gave him a side glance as if she guessed what he was thinking, and a half smile, which swiftly sobered.