Brightly Burning

the Guard or army, and a couple more men and women like him, but the majority were nothing at all like professional soldiers. The youngest was no older than Lan, a dim-looking, shaggy-haired youth mounted bareback on a pony that was just as shaggy, whose main article of clothing was a rough-sewn coat of sheepskin and hat and boots to match. The oldest was a stick-scrawny graybeard, whose horse could have been plucked from the King's stable just before a parade, and whose costume seemed to consist of odds and ends he'd picked up over the course of his lifetime.

The rest of the group was just as eclectic, and included a young woman who kept close to the old man and was obviously highborn, a male and female pair of hunters (or at least, that was what Lan guessed their profession had been), a couple of farmers, and five people who were clearly civilians, or former civilians, but whose former professions weren't immediately obvious.

Calum didn't bother to introduce anyone; he just fired off some orders, and roughly half of the scouts mounted up and vanished over the next hill. The rest formed up into a rough group behind him, and with Herald Fedor, followed him over the hill at a slower pace. Tuck and Lan, with Lan leading, worked their way through to Calum's right, since Fedor was already on his left.

'Did you have anything in mind for me, Sir?' Lan asked diffidently.

'We're going to wait at the outermost picket for the army to get marching,' Calum replied, with an amused quirk of his lips, perhaps at Lan's diffidence. 'Then this lot will spread out and work the leading edge of the march. You Heralds will stick with me, until someone comes back with word—either of a pocket of trouble we already know about, or something we don't. I'll decide if it requires the—hmm— catapult solution. If it does—' He pointed a finger at Lan. 'You and your friend there will go with the scout to deal with it.'

That seemed simple enough, and Lan nodded.

'I hope you've got an arrow in your quiver that's a bit more subtle than what you did at the pass,' Calum continued. 'We won't need to burn down the forest; in fact, the people that live here wouldn't appreciate that.'

'I do, sir, I do!' Lan hastened to say. 'I—we—we've never done anything like that before, Kalira and I. I— didn't know we could.' If the last words came out in a faltering tone, Calum didn't comment on it.

'Good. That's a relief. Yo, Ben, Diera—come over here and tell the boys what they're likely to be up against, will you?' Calum waved at the old man and the young woman with the magnificent horses, who cut across a line of brush to take their places on either side of Lan and Tuck.

'I'm Diera Ashkevron, and this is Ben Dotes, our Horsemaster,' the young woman said.

'Retired, missy,' the old man corrected. 'Barnebin be every bit the Horsemaster I ever was.'

Diera smiled, and continued. 'We volunteered, first thing; brought a string of horses from the Home Farm and volunteered ourselves. We don't know this country, but we do know scouting and horses, so here we are.'

Diera was not an attractive young woman; she had a face like an abused ax-blade, but her friendly and open personality made her face irrelevant. But it was Tuck who identified her, not Lan.

'Ashkevron?' he gulped. 'The Ashkevrons? Of Forst Reach?'

:Oh, my ears—that's the family that Herald Vanyel came from!: Kalira exclaimed as the girl nodded.

'We're all girls but my one brother, and he can't fight, he's laid up with a leg broke in three places,' Diera continued. 'There's more of us coming, but I was the only one ready to go now. Fancied I'd go into the Guard, and been training for it.'

'And I wasna about to let her go off alone,' the old man added, with a stubborn set to his mouth. 'But thas' neither here nor there. We're to tell you 'bout what we know, eh? So les' get to it.'

Over the next league or so, the ill-matched pair detailed the three or four pockets of Karsite strength they thought would fall to Lan to eliminate. Rather as he had expected once they began, these places were all small fortresses, manned by no more than twenty or thirty, that overlooked key passes. With that handful of fighters, the Karsites could easily delay the Valdemaran army by a day and perhaps more, if they had Sun-priests with them who could command similar powers to the Heraldic Gifts.

The excitement of being called a hero had long since worn off, and when he realized that he would be expected to burn these people out, he began to feel queasy. Kalira sensed his unease, without knowing the cause, and enveloped him in a wordless blanket of assurance.

There were hundreds, thousands of fighters in the army depending on him, who could— would—lose their lives if he didn't do what he was expected to do.

'You'll be able to take care of them, won't you?' Diera asked anxiously. 'If you can't—it would be bad, very bad, I think.'

I hesitated once. I swore I never would again, and I won't. I won't.

When that didn't extinguish the queasiness, he called up the mental image of Pol with his bandaged eyes... Ilea beside him, with a reproachful look aimed straight toward him.

That awoke guilt, but guilt was better than indecision. 'Just get me there,' he told Diera. 'I'll do the rest.'

*

SINCE they would travel with the Lord Marshal and the bulk of the army, Pol and his family were left at loose ends until everyone was underway. There were servants to pack up the Healers' gear, and the Lord Marshal's people dealt with Pol's. So Pol found himself with a rare moment of leisure to share with his wife, as they perched on a log with the last scrapings from the mess kettle to eat (nothing went to waste when a Guard-cook was in charge) and tried to stay out of the way.

'What's wrong with Elenor?' Pol whispered to Ilea to get her mind off of her own failure to restore his sight, although he was afraid he already knew the answer. His daughter's listless behavior since Lan had awakened was something he would have called moping in anyone else. Most of her conversation was in monosyllables, and although he couldn't actually see her face, he suspected that her eyes were reddened from secret crying.

'What do you think?' Ilea replied, with a distinct edge to her voice. 'Lavan woke up and didn't ask for her, didn't look for her, didn't even thank her. In fact, Lavan hasn't even looked at her since