own curiosity about something,' he said, silkily. 'This Valdemar that troubles you - you can tell me something about the land? How did you choose to quarrel with them in the first place?' He studied his own fingernails intently. 'It would seem to me that you have been placing an inordinate amount of effort into attempting to conquer them, when so far as I can see, they are fairly insignificant. They have never attacked you, and they always stop at their own border, even when they are winning. Trying to conquer them seems, at least to an outsider, to be a losing proposition.'
He looked up, to see Ancar flushing a little, his eyes showing a hint of anger. But the King did not reply.
He smiled. 'And if I understand everything I have heard, now you plan to try for them again. What is the point here? Are you so addicted to defeat that you cannot wait to give them another opportunity to deliver it to you?' As Ancar flushed an even deeper shade, he continued, taunting the boy with the litany of his failures, gleaned from questioning servants, courtiers, and some of Ancar's other mages. 'First you attack them before you are ready, and you naturally suffer a humiliating defeat. Then you attack them without ever bothering to discover if they had found some military allies and suffer a worse defeat. Your people are leaking across the border into their land on a daily basis, and you cannot even manage to insinuate a spy into their midst! Really, Ancar, I should think by now you would know enough to leave these people alone!'
Ancar was nearly purple with anger - and yet he held his peace and his tongue. Ancar did not want to talk about it. Now that was a curious combination....
And to Falconsbane's mind, that spelled 'obsession.'
When one was obsessed with something, logic did not enter into the picture.
When one was obsessed with something, one was often blind to all else. An obsession was a weakness, a place into which a clever man could place the point of his wit, and pry until the shell cracked....
As Ancar sat silently fuming, Falconsbane made some rapid mental calculations, adding up all the information he had been gleaning from courtiers, servants, and underling mages. Ancar was a young male, and any young male hates to be defeated, but that defeat must be doubly bitter coming as it did from the hands of females. He had failed to conquer Valdemar, failed to defeat its Queen, failed to get his hands on its Princess. He had failed a military conquest not once, but twice.
But that was by no means all, as Falconsbane's probes had revealed. He had tried, with no success whatsoever, to infiltrate a spy into the ranks of the Heralds. The only agents he had in Valdemar itself were relatively ineffective and powerless ones, placed among the lowest of the merchants and peasantry. Mercenary soldiers under yet another female leader had thwarted every single assassination attempt he had made, even the ones augmented by magic.
In short, the Queen and her nearest and dearest seemed to have some kind of charmed existence. They prevailed against all odds, as if the very gods were on their side. Their success mocked Ancar and all his ambitions, and without a doubt, it all maddened him past bearing.
So Falconsbane thought.
Until Ancar finally spoke, and proved to him that in this one respect, he had underestimated the young King.
'I must expand,' he said, slowly, his flush cooling. 'I am using up the resources of Hardorn at a rapid rate. I need gold to pay my mages, grain to feed my armies, a hundred things that simply must be brought in from outside. I cannot go South - perhaps you will not believe me, but the Karsites are the fiercest fighters you could ever imagine in your wildest nightmares. They are religious, you see. They believe that if they die in the defense of their land, they rise straight to the feet of their God...and if they take any of the enemies of their God with them, they rise to his right hand.'
Falconsbane nodded, a tiny spark of respect kindling for the King. So he understood the power a religion could hold over an enemy? Mornelithe would never have credited him with that much insight. Perhaps there was more to the boy than the Adept had assumed. 'Indeed,' he said in reply. 'There is no more deadly an enemy than a religious fanatic. They are willing to die and desperate to take you with them.'
'Precisely,' Ancar sighed. 'What is more, their priests have a magic that comes from their God that is quite a match for my own. When you add to all that the mountains that border their land - it is an impossible combination. Those mountains are so steep that there is no place to bring a conventional army through without suffering one ambush or trap after another.'
'Well, then, what about North?' Falconsbane asked, reasonably. And to his surprise, Ancar whitened.
'Do not even mention the North,' the King whispered, and glanced hastily from side to side, as if he feared being overheard. 'There is something there that dwarfs even the power Karse commands. It is so great - believe me or not, as you will, but I have seen it with my own eyes - that it has created an invisible fence that no one can pass. I have found no mage that can breach it, and after the few who attempted it perished, not even Hulda is willing to try.'
Falconsbane raised his eyebrows involuntarily. That was something new! An invisible wall around a country? Who - or rather, what - could ever have produced something like that? What was the name of that land, anyway? Iften? Iftel?
But Ancar had already changed the subject.
