Elvenborn

'Brilliant!' Kyndreth boomed, as Kyrtian ducked his head

modestly. 'Brilliant! Clearly they never guessed you would force a march after dark to get into place before sunrise.'

'I had made a point of always bivouacking before sunset un­til I knew where they had made their headquarters, my lord,' Kyrtian said, as Lord Kyndreth accepted a glass of wine from one of the slaves. 'I wanted them to see a pattern and become used to it.'

Kyrtian's tent had been cleared of everything except tables and chairs borrowed from those of his underlings who insisted on traveling with suites of furniture; with carpets on the floor and slaves holding trays of refreshments, it could not have looked less like his campaign headquarters. But Lord Kyndreth had insisted on Gating here ('with a select few of the Council, nothing to trouble yourself about') to tender his congratula­tions in person. 'Nothing to trouble yourself about' had en­tailed non-stop, frantic work on the part of his staff up until the very moment that the temporary Gate opened and Kyndreth and entourage marched through.

'Ha—of course, you'd never done such a thing before, so they lacked the imagination to suppose that you would do it now,' Kyndreth laughed, as the other three Great Lords he had brought with him nodded wisely. 'Of course, old Levelis never did such a thing either.'

'Levelis,' said one long-faced Lord sourly, 'never exerted himself to travel more than a league or two at a time.'

'Levelis is an old fool,' Lady Moth snapped, joining the dis­cussion, wineglass in hand, 'and if it had been left up to him, I'd still be penned up on my estate next Midwinter.'

Moth rode over, escorted by her bodyguards, soon enough to welcome the Councilors along with Kyrtian and to serve as his hostess. This was not the first time in the conversation that she had made a point of mentioning that Kyrtian had rescued her from the rebels, and it probably would not be the last.

'Entirely possible, my lady,' the sour-face Councilor said, with a slight bow. 'And now what do you plan, young com­mander?' he continued, turning to Kyrtian.

Kyrtian sighed. 'Now, my lord, comes the most tedious, most time-consuming, and least-rewarding part of this cam-

paign,' he replied. 'We hunt down the fugitives one at a time and bring them back to the Council for judgment. I'd calculated that something like this would occur, and planned for it from the beginning; this is a task for smaller parties of men, and if you will permit me, my lords, I would prefer to use my own men if possible. I can count on them not to damage the fugitives when they are caught. As for the rest of the force—well, if it were my decision to make, I would disband it. An army is es­sentially a great beast that is all mouth and stomach out of which no useful work can be gotten when it is not engaged in a campaign.'

'We will—take that under consideration,' Lord Kyndreth replied, with a glance at his fellow Council members. 'It does make sense, however.'

He's thinking about the Wizards. Kyrtian took a sip of wine and tried to look unconcerned.

'Oh, come now, Kyndreth, the boy's right,' said the sour one, appropriating a tidbit from one of the trays and examining it as if he expected to find a bug on it before putting it cau­tiously in his mouth. 'There's no point in keeping these men sitting about doing nothing more useful than military maneu­vers when we could have them all back on our estates doing some meaningful work, even if it's only in the breeding pens.'

He's not. And he might not be in favor of another Wizard War if the subject were broached at the moment.

'And Levelis,' pointed out a Council member in midnight blue and deep green, who was making steady inroads on the wine without showing the least sign of intoxication, 'would im­mediately advise to keep these men out here under his com­mand.'

'And you know how I feel about' Levelis,' Kyndreth acknowledged with a faint smile. 'Another salient point, but one that is better discussed in Council, don't you think?'

'Hmmm,' said the fellow in blue, but didn't add anything more.

How is he drinking so much and staying sober?

Kyndreth immediately changed the subject back to the cur­rent victory, but Kyrtian couldn't help but notice that there was

an aspect of it that he did not touch on—the rebels' ability to counteract his own levin-bolts. It was the fourth member of Kyndreth's party who brought it up.

'I had no notion that you had so much magic of your own— and how were those brats managing to dodge your levin-bolts, Kyrtian?' he asked, incredulously. 'I thought they hadn't but driblets of magic of their own!'

He shrugged. 'I never saw anything like it,' he admitted. 'Even if they had been using shields as I know them, the levin-bolts wouldn't have acted in that way when contacting a shield. I'm baffled.'

'Huh. I wonder if they found anything in my library.. ..' Moth mused, as if thinking aloud—but her sly glance at Kyrt­ian alerted him that she was about to present him with an op­portunity for something.

But what?

'Your library, my lady?' Kyrtian asked, obeying her prompt­ing. 'What do you mean?'

'Oh, when I got into the Great House on the estate, the li­brary was in a right mess,' she replied promptly, 'books down off the shelves, piled up on the tables, left lying open—some­thing on the order of the huggle-muggle your father used to cre­ate in there when he was doing his research, Kyrtian, but on a larger scale. My household is cleaning up the chaos now, but to tell you the truth, it's as if they were following his lead and looking for something.'

'Perhaps they found it—' Kyndreth said slowly, speculation creeping into his gaze as he looked from Moth to Kyrtian and back again. 'Perhaps—having discovered that the son's little eccentric hobby was so deadly to their cause, they thought to counter it by following the father's example.'

Kyrtian did his best not to stare at Moth with his mouth open in shock, gathered his wits, and seized the opportunity he'd been given with both hands. 'If that is true—and I do recall my father being very enthusiastic over something he found in Lady Morthena's books—then the rebels might have done just that, and we need to discover what it is that they found!'

'Agreed!' said the Councilor in blue, instantly. 'Someone should begin immediately!'

I wish mother could hear that. My father has just gone in an instant from crazed eccentric to vindicated.

He turned to Lord Kyndreth. 'My lord, if I may be so bold— anyone can track down fugitives; it's only a matter of having good hunters and endless patience—but I know the direction of my father's research as no one else could. Would the Council be pleased to permit me to course this particular hare?'

Lord Kyndreth's speculative expression gave Kyrtian the thrill of excitement that the sham battle had not. 'What, pre­cisely, was he looking for?'

'A way, or perhaps a device,' Kyrtian said, very slowly, 'for those with little magic to amplify that magic.' Even as he said that, he realized that this would not be pleasant hearing for those whose powerful magic kept them at the top of the hierar­chy. 'Presumably it would do the same for those with great magic as well,' he added quickly. 'I would assume it would work for anyone who used it, whether 'it' is a device, an object, or a method.'

'What sent your father into Lady Morthena's library, Lord Kyrtian?' asked the wine-loving Lord, with every evidence of interest.

'He was a student of our history, and could not fathom why we were unable to replicate some of the feats of the Ancestors, when according to the fragments of chronicles he found, even the least of the Ancestors could accomplish what the Great Lords could,' Kyrtian replied carefully, looking earnestly into the older Lord's intent eyes.