Exile's Honor

'Won't the Karsites just take them?' Selenay asked, looking to Alberich.

'Probably—no,' he said, reluctantly. 'Karse needs no extra mouths that come not with hands that can work. And—they are heretics, and the children of heretics, and what is more, even their own blood, to the Sunpriests' eyes, they are not—or no longer are—Karsite.'

He did not elaborate on what that meant, but there was something very unpleasant stirring in the back of his mind; something like a—protovision. An intimation, not of what would be or what was about to be, but what might be.

A vision of the Fires of Cleansing. And the fuel that fed them.

'I don't want to sound utterly callous and hardhearted, Herald, but—not to put too fine a point upon it, what can we do?' the Lord Marshal asked. 'They're on Karsite land, in Karsite hands.'

She looked at him as if he was an idiot. 'And this stopped Vanyel? This stopped Lavan Firestorm?'

The Lord Marshal wasn't about to back down. 'That was in another situation entirely,' he retorted. 'And if you're referring to the 'Demonsbane' legend, Vanyel was on Hardorn land, not Karsite.'

Alberich cleared his throat. 'Ah—Herald Laika—a question. Suppose I must, that you have these children been among. Think you, they can be anything but Tedrel?'

'Most of 'em aren't now,' she replied, and shook her head. 'Some of 'em, in fact, a lot of 'em, are Karsite orphans—some of 'em are camp followers' children. And, dare I repeat myself, some of 'em are ours, grabbed every time they hit Valdemar in the past three years! But like I said, they don't have much use for girls that aren't breeding age, so they don't pay any attention to 'em, and boys aren't useful until they're thirteen and old enough to take into a Tedrel lodge for training, so they're all right up until then. Basically, they're not Tedrel, they're not Karsite, they're not anything, really. When I was in there, they had a lot of the camp followers that were tending to all of them, and most of those were girls out of Rethwellan, Seejay, and Ruvan, with a couple of Karsites. So that's what they've been raised as.'

'Raised as nothing, then,' Selenay ventured.

'Pretty much. A pretty weird mix, they all speak a kind of Tedrel-pidgin with words from all over. The girls don't ever get taught pure Tedrel tongue; that's a man's mystery. The kiddies have got some little religious cult they've made up on their own that isn't like anything I've ever heard of. Like I said, they aren't Tedrel, they aren't anything.' She sighed. 'What they are, is dead needy for adult attention. Even an old hag like me, they swarmed over.'

'But babies—without mothers—' someone put in doubtfully.

'Babes in arms—' she shrugged. 'That little, the Tedrels don't take. The ones born to the camp followers, well, they may be whores, but they're still mothers; the ones that'll bolt, they'll take the children they can manage to carry and run for Rethwellan. That leaves the orphans, or ones whose mothers don't care, and there's a couple hundred, anyway, of an age we could rescue. No more than a thousand....'

Selenay glanced at Alberich, who was thinking furiously. 'Karse—I think might be busy—elsewhere—'

Elsewhere hunting down all the escapees on their side of the Border and either conscripting them as bound slaves or making sure no one else ever does—

'—and,' he continued, 'If the rescue and evacuation were made quickly, might not know it had been entered at all.'

'And a thousand children?' Selenay gulped.

'It's not an unmanageable number,' the Lord Marshal put in. 'It's not as if it would be a thousand captives; most of them couldn't run far.'

Laika snorted. 'Show 'em food and smiles, and most of 'em won't run at all. And don't forget— some of them are ours. And if word gets out that we left Valdemaran children to starve or hope for the mercy of the Sunpriests....' she let that particular statement sink in without elaborating. 'What's more, they aren't more than a day's march inside Karse! When the Tedrels moved this time, they were preparing the full-on invasion, remember. They thought we were going to go over with just a push, and they had everything and everyone set to move straight across the Border.'

'Surely not,' Lord Orthallen said skeptically. 'Surely they were not going to put all of that so close to the battle lines.'

Laika smiled grimly. 'And what makes you think they were unaware that the moment the fighters left the base camp, the Karsites were likely to grab everything? Believe me, that was the talk all over the camp—everyone wanted to be sure that they didn't get left behind. The last camp they made would be