Exile's Honor

Selenay saw them off, but she kept things brief. 'Go safely and swiftly,' she said, and impatient to be off, they took her at her word. She didn't linger to watch them rattle across the little stream at the Border either; when he looked back, she was gone.

Not only was he not surprised, he was pleased. It wasn't as if she didn't have more than enough on her hands, for the aftermath of a war generally left both sides in shambles. There were hundreds of decisions to be made, and in the end, only the Queen could make them. Then, when one factored in all of the messages and dispatches arriving from Haven moment by moment, every one of them requiring her attention, he was certain she would be getting very little rest between now and when he returned.

Which might be just as well. It would give her very little time to brood, and might exhaust her enough that she would actually sleep instead of lying awake, staring at the darkness behind her eyelids.

It was a strange sensation, crossing onto the Karsite lands of the hills, where he had once ridden at the head of a troop of Sunsguard. 'A close watch keep, for bandits,' he warned everyone when they first set out. 'Driven away by the battle, they were perhaps—but like vultures, return to feast upon the slain they shall.' He had to wonder, though, as they rode through empty valleys, and over hills bare of the usual flocks of sheep and goats, if the Sunsguard had actually sealed off this area. If that was the case, and bandits had fled the coming conflict, they could easily have run right into the Sunsguard. He hoped so. He truly hoped so. Not only because it meant that they would not encounter any trouble going there and back, but because the scum that had fattened on the misery of the shepherds of these hills for so long well deserved to be cut down like the plague rats they were.

It was easy enough to know where to go, despite the fact that there was no road to follow. The marching feet of so many thousands of men had left a road across the landscape, the tough and wiry vegetation hereabouts pounded flat, then into dust. This was a tough country, of scrubby vegetation and endless hilly moors, punctuated (as he used to tell Dethor) by endless rocky hills, yet it had its own beauty. The gorse was in bloom, and the heather, and drifts of purple, white, and yellow spread hazy blotches of color across the face of those hills. The weather elected to smile upon them today—or the Sunlord Himself did—for the sun beamed down upon them, neither too brazenly hot, nor thin and chill, out of a sky whose blue was interrupted only by the occasional white, fluffy cloud like one of those missing sheep. Once or twice, they caught sight of wild goats on the ridges, or heard the bray of an equally wild donkey, but otherwise it was nothing but wind and birdsong.

He had no idea how low his spirits had been in the wake of the battle until they were well away from the battlefield, and he could allow himself to pretend it had never happened. But the clean wind swept through his heart and soul; he was going to a rescue, not a battle, and he felt as if the wind was carrying away his sadness, a little at a time.

And this was home... the breeze felt right, the hills smelled right, they were the right color of gray-green, and the right sort of rocks poked up through the thin soil. He might never see these hills again, so he absorbed the changing landscape, stowing it away in his memory to take out on those nights that would surely come, when he felt himself to be entirely alien in an alien land.

Finally, he had to remind himself to stay alert; this was no pleasure jaunt. Things could still go wrong at any moment. If the Sunsguard wasn't busy picking off former Tedrels, they could be here at any moment....

:This is a handsome land,: Kantor observed, ears pricked forward to catch every sound. :Hard, but handsome.:

:I think so,: he agreed, secretly pleased by Kantor's compliment. :Ah—we'll be coming up to a spring here shortly, if my memory of this area is any good. There aren't a lot of good watering places here; warn the others that we'll be stopping for a moment.:

His memory was good—and interestingly enough, the Tedrels had not made use of the spring he recalled, for they had to deviate from the track and go over a hill to the east to get to the half-hidden water source. When they did, they found no sign that anyone had been there, and the Tedrels would surely have trampled the bank of the stream that the spring fed, and muddied the basin.

But Alberich was taking no chances. Just to be sure that they hadn't been here and tampered with the water (which would have been entirely like them) he called over one of the Healers.

'Test this, for fouling or poison, can you?' he asked the green-clad woman.

'Hmm.' She gave him a sidelong glance, but bent to test the water, taking up a single drop on the end of her finger and touching it to her tongue. 'That would have been like those bastards, wouldn't it?' she said absently. 'Spoil what's behind them so the Karsites couldn't follow.'

'My thought,' he agreed gravely.

'Well, it's clean; you can bring them all in.' She stood up; he waved at the wagons, and the teamsters brought their charges in to drink at the stream fed by the spring, while the humans drank at the source. Tooth- achingly cold, the water tasted of minerals. The horses adored it. Fortunately, they were not so thirsty that they were in any danger of hurting themselves by drinking too much, too fast.

He kept an eye on the crests of the hills around them; the disadvantage of stopping here (or anywhere) for a drink was that doing so made them very vulnerable. But this spring, flowing as it did out of the side of a hill, at least was not as exposed as the stream it fed, that ran along the bottom of the valley. He put a lookout on the crest of the hill, which was all anyone could reasonably do, and trusted also to his Gift and that of the FarSeer that was with them to warn of any danger approaching.