another pleasant surprise. “You mean you’re saboteurs?” she’d exclaimed with delight. “A whole Company of dirty tricksters? Bright Astera, why didn’t you say that before? For Haven’s sake, if anyone questions your tactics, send them to me, I’ll back you!”
So now Kero and the Skybolts had carte blanche to do whatever they needed to. Which was just as well, really, since they would have done so anyway.
I thought some of the things we’d run into before were odd, but this is stranger than snake feet, she thought, recalling her presentation to the War Council once she’d finally worked out a general plan based on the tentative one she’d put together with Daren. First, the “watchers,” whatever they were—then the fact that it’s like driving nails into stone to talk to people around here about magic—but then there’s the business with Iftel. It’s like the country was invisible from inside Valdemar. It’s on the map, but their eyes slide right by it....
“We basically have to get Ancar in a pincer, and leave him with only one avenue of escape. Our best bet right now is to get him right up against the Iftel border, and trap him there,” she’d said to the War Council.
And they had, to a man and woman, looked absolutely blank.
Finally, “Iftel?” faltered Talia, as if she had trouble even saying the name. “Why Iftel?”
“Because of what I’ve been told by the Guild,” Kero had said to them all. “That Iftel protects itself—by making you forget it exists, and keeping you out if it doesn’t want you in. I think you’ve just confirmed the first, which makes me think the second is true, too.”
“Iftel is—strange,” Selenay admitted. “I do have an ambassador there, a non-Herald. They—how odd, they didn’t want a Herald there at all. Yet they have never, ever threatened us in all our history, and they have signed some fairly binding treaties that they never will. From all accounts, though, the country is just as strange as the Pelagirs, and that is very strange indeed.”
That matched with what Kero had been told by the Guild. They didn’t have a representative there, but it wasn’t because they’d been barred from the place. It was because every time they’d sent someone in, he’d nearly died of boredom. Iftel had no bandits. Iftel had its own standing militia, organized at the county level. Iftel hired no mercenaries—because Iftel needed no mercenaries. Occasionally young folk got restless enough to leave, but that was the only time the Guild ever got members from Iftel, and they never went back home.
Iftel took care of itself, thank you.
Well, that made it a good place to take a stand; Ancar’s forces would be squeezed against the Iftel border to the north, Valdemar’s forces would be to the west, and Rethwellan’s—hopefully—would be coming up from the south.
Kero wiped rain out of her eyes, without doing much good. She still couldn’t see past the bottom of the hill. But somewhere out beyond in the fog, the specialists had been at work, and if the ForeSeers were right, in the next candlemark or so, Ancar’s forward troops would run right into something nasty that wasn’t supposed to be there.
The skirmishers stirred restlessly below her, waiting for their chance. Today was likely to be the only easy day of the campaign, which was why Kero had wanted only her Company in on it. They knew that a war is neither lost nor won in the first battle, and they knew very well that one easy day is the exception, not the rule. But if Selenay’s greener forces were in on this, when the going got rougher and rougher, they might see every day after the easy one as a constant series of defeats, and lose heart. In fact, Kero hoped she wouldn’t lose a single fighter this first day, but she knew as well as anyone on the field that engagements like that came once in a career and never again.
So we’re due one.
The sound of muffled hoofbeats came through the fog; years of practice had enabled Kero to pinpoint where sound was really coming from on days of rotten visibility.
It’s from the ambush site. I think we’re about to get some action. One of the scouts materialized out of the drizzle and pelted up the hillside, his horse mired to the belly. “They’re coming on, Captain, straight for the trap.”
Her heartbeat quickened, in spite of years of experience. “Good,” she replied, and the Herald beside her silently relayed that on to the rest of his kind—which included Selenay and Elspeth. “Tell the rest that if it looks like he’s straying, tease him into it.”
“Sir.” The scout saluted, and pelted off again, vanishing back into the mist like a ghost.
The “trap” was a swamp—a swamp that hadn’t been there a week ago. But last month Kero’s experts had diverted a small river from its bed, several leagues away, and had confined its waters behind an earthen dam just above the flat, grassy meadow the ForeSeers said Ancar was aiming for. Then, two nights ago, they had broken the dam.
Now the place was two and three feet deep in water and mud, all covered by the long grass growing there and the luxuriant, green, mosslike scum floating on the top. One of Kero’s Healers had a remarkable ability with plants ... and, much to everyone’s surprise and delight, the Heralds were able to feed him energy. Between the scum they’d cultured with tender care on the temporary lake for the past month, and the accelerated growth of the past two nights, they now had the kind of cover that normally took half the summer to grow. It looked just like solid land—until you tried to walk on it.
