in droves—unless the mages were somehow controlling them, either directly or through fear. That might explain why the mages hadn’t attacked Selenay’s army—they were too busy keeping Ancar’s own troops in line. She was a good leader—and she couldn’t hate men who were being forced the way these were. But she certainly could hate the kind of man who forced them.
Or the kind of man who tortured for the sheer pleasure of it. Eldan told her what he’d done to Talia—and she’d felt Need waking during the tale, with that deep, gut-fire rage that was so hard to control. But Ancar wasn’t within reach, so the blade subsided; though for once, Kero agreed with it.
But most important of all, one of the other officers in Selenay’s army who had once lived in Hardorn told her what he had done to his father and his people, and why they had left. Kero had encountered tyrants before, but never one who so abused his powers as this one. The way he drove his men was a fair example of the way he treated his people as a whole. Worse than cattle, for a good farmer sees his cattle cared for.
She finally called her Company together one night when they dared have a fire, and told them everything she’d learned, figuring that they should know what would happen to them if they ever fell into Ancar’s hands.
They listened, quietly. Then Shallan made a single, flat statement for all of them. “He’s an oathbreaker,” she said, her mouth set in a grim line. “And he’s just lucky we haven’t a mage with us, or I’d set the full Outcasting on him.”
Kero looked from one fire-gilded face to another, and saw no sign of disagreement. Several, in fact, were nodding. The Guild was full of people with disparate and sometimes mutually antagonistic beliefs. The one thing every mercenary in the Guild commonly held sacred was an oath. They reserved terrible punishment for an oath- breaker in their own ranks. For rulers and priests there was another form of retribution—the Outcasting. Kings were bound by oaths to protect their lands and men, usually from the time they were old enough to swear to the pledges, and Ancar had broken his oaths—as surely, and as dreadfully, as had the late, unmourned, King Raschar of Rethwellan, the monarch Tarma and Kethry had helped to unseat. Kero learned that night that she was not alone in her hatred of Ancar—as her troops had heard more tales from the Hardorn refugees, one and all, they came to share her cold rage.
It gave them an extra edge they’d never had before. But rage was not enough, not when confronted with the desperate strength of Ancar’s men.
They were worn thin by running alone, and when you added the steady losses, manpower that wasn’t being replaced, you had another kind of drain on them.
Of course, Ancar was losing an equal number of men in those encounters, but Ancar could afford to lose them. Selenay’s army couldn’t.
Kero tried an ambush at one point, splitting her forces on either side of a river hoping to catch him with a good part of his men still in the water. But she’d discovered, only through the vigilance of the scouts, that he had outflanked
He brought his foot in to surround the ambush-party on his bank and only years of experience had enabled her to get them out again. Those years of experience had taught her to always have an escape route—in this case, an unlikely one, the river itself. Profiting from her escape by water, she’d engineered a more controlled version of the same, by making sure the ambushers were all strong and experienced swimmers, with horses capable of pulling the trick off.
Even so, the escape had been a narrow one, and their luck ran down from there.
Every day meant a succession of tricks and guerrilla tactics, just to keep Ancar from closing with the entire force and finishing the job. With the Heralds acting as links between them, they split their forces by day, pecking away at the edges of the massive army, and rejoined by night. The individual groups, some as small as Kero’s original scout group, could dart in and out to whittle away at Ancar’s more cumbersome foot—but to offset that mobility, they were a great deal more vulnerable. Quite a few of those little groups vanished, Herald and all, when Ancar’s troops could surround or entrap them.
Every loss meant far more to them than a comparable loss meant to Ancar—if, in fact, the losses meant anything to him at all, other than the drop in manpower.
“I can’t believe this,” she muttered to Eldan, as she shaded her eyes and stared at Ancar’s army, a dark carpet of them covering the fields below her vantage point, trampling the fields of new grain into mud. They should have been ready to drop; they’d been marching at a steady pace all day, and any sane commander would have them making camp now. Yet here they were, pressing on though sunset painted the sky a bloody red. “I thought I’d planned for everything, including the very worst possible case, but these people aren’t human. No one can follow the pace we’ve set—”
“You did,” Eldan pointed out. “You set it.”
She glared sideways at him; she had a headache from wearing her helmet all day, and she was in no mood for quibbling. “Semantics. We’re on home ground; we have the advantage of local support and supply, and we know the territory. He doesn’t have any of that. He shouldn’t be able to keep up with us, much less attack every chance he gets. But he’s doing it, and I’ll be damned if I know how.”
“Because he’s willing to sacrifice everything to get you—or rather, Selenay,” Eldan said flatly. “Everything is expendable if he gets her. He’s perfectly willing to burn out every man he has to achieve that single goal.”
She shook her head, and pounded her fist on the tree trunk beside her in anger and frustration, gashing the bark with her armored gauntlet. “That’s insane. I can’t predict what a madman is going to do next! How can I plan
