Arithon’s fingers fell away, to uncover features as hollowed as stripped bone. ‘You’ve seen this before,’ he accused.
Steiven laughed. From his towering height, he embraced his royal liege like a son. ‘I’ve lived for it.’
Then, aware that Arithon’s exhaustion threatened collapse, he shouldered the prince’s weight as he had done for his own spent scouts and in peremptory command sent his clan elders packing to fetch bath water, hot food and dry blankets.
The war council resumed upon the moment Arithon’s needs had been attended. Etarra was capable of mounting an invasion force ten thousand strong: and with an understanding turned to grimness by five long centuries of hatred, Steiven dared not assume that the army sent after Arithon would be one man less than full muster.
Etarran lives would be counted cheaply for the ruin of the s’Ffalenn royal line.
‘I’ll need another message run through the relay,’ said the gaunt old Earl of Fallowmere, his single, unclouded eye fixed like a gimlet on his regent. ‘By tomorrow every scout I have of fighting age will march to support your Deshans.’
‘Well, they’ll get here too damned late!’ Caolle drove his poignard into the rough-split wood that planked the table. ‘You know that fey princeling is right. If we stand, we’re going to have a massacre.’
‘If we don’t stand, we’ll be slaughtered on the run, or else die of rot and fever in the boglands of Anglefen by summer.’ Quietly, Steiven added, ‘We’ll fight. But the field must be chosen to our advantage.’
‘Biggest, blood-spilling raid we’ll ever stage,’ said the last Earl of Fallowmere. ‘For myself, I wouldn’t miss it.’
Caolle glared.
In a warmth of brotherly bickering, the strategies were argued, discarded and reworked, chart after chart unrolled and shoved aside until parchments layered the carpets like quilting. A site was finally chosen in a range of valleys along the Tal Quorin where the current ran wide and shallow between a grassy verge of low banks.
‘All right then.’ Steiven raised his corded arms, the dull studs on his brigandine winking in sequence as he stretched. ‘Roust last night’s patrol. All our camps must relocate east to the river site. The first arrivals will need to start cutting timber to build the traps.’
‘And the prince?’ Caolle demanded. His chapped lips thinned at the softening he saw on his chieftain’s scarred face. ‘Ah, no, my lord, you’re not thinking to wait out his grace’s infirmity. This is unsafe territory and we need to break camp before nightfall.’
There followed a moment in which clanlord and war captain clashed glances across the candletops. In Deshir, the custom was unbending: any scout unfit for travel was given a mercy stroke and abandoned where he lay by the trail. In lands ranged by Etarra’s headhunters, litters for the wounded and the lame endangered those men still hale; and no man, however minor his injury, was ever left at risk of captivity.
‘You wake him,’ Steiven invited with a fierce flash of teeth. ‘I warrant he’ll walk, just to spite you. It’s the grey he rode in on we’ll likely be leaving for crowbait.’
Arithon came half-awake as a warm weight settled over his knees. Something else tugged at his hair and another touch trailed across the knuckles of his unbandaged hand that lay outside the blankets.
He drew breath and stirred, and the stiffness of his body caught him up in an ache that made him gasp.
‘You woke him up,’ a child’s voice piped anxiously.
‘Didn’t,’ said another, fast as echo, from the other side of the pallet.
Arithon opened his eyes.
‘Did too, see?’ said a brunette perhaps six years old, with tea-coloured eyes and dimples, who lounged against the ticking by his shoulder. ‘He might get mad.’
Exactly what he chose to do next became the focus of four pairs of eyes, from the auburn-haired angel astride his knees, to the tallest, regarding him with pre-teen dignity from the bedstead, to the least of them, as dark-haired as the father she resembled, sucking on two fingers and staring shyly from behind her eldest sister.
Arithon elbowed himself halfway upright, and froze as the slide of the blankets warned he was naked underneath. His sluggish thoughts scrambled to reorient and to integrate hide walls and the patchworked fur coverlets of a sleeping cubicle with his last waking memory, of an inadvertent nap in the saddle that had ended in a fall from a moving horse.
‘You aren’t mad, are you?’ said the sable-haired ten-year-old with another bounce against his knee.
He hurt everywhere. He was too tired still by half, and if he wanted to be annoyed, he lacked the will. Outnumbered, and pinned beneath the coverlets by a weight of small admirers, he adjusted his tactics to accommodate.
A short interval later Steiven’s wife Dania peeked into the alcove. She carried a bowl of bread dough braced against her hip, and was fumingly prepared to dress down daughters warned all morning to leave their guest in peace.
The miscreants had found a length of rawhide. Five heads bent together over a puzzle that, with the help of tiny hands and much patient instruction from the prince, was forming into an intricate piece of knotwork.
Dania’s reprimand died unspoken. Quietly, carefully, she moved to slip the privacy flap closed. But he had heard her, involved as he was, even through the giggles of the girls.
‘It’s all right. Tashka has told me the camp is to move this afternoon. I should have been wakened soon in any case.’ Green eyes turned in question toward the doorway, made the more vivid by close proximity of the oldest child’s fiery hair. ‘You have beautiful daughters, lady. They are yours, I see, and Lord Steiven’s? The resemblance is too striking to overlook.’
The bread bowl suddenly seemed an encumbrance. Aware that as her sovereign he deserved a semblance of courtesy, Dania froze with the intuition that if she curtseyed, she was going to see him angry.
Her youngest displaced one awkwardness by creation of another.
‘Mama, look!’ Edal called pulling her hands too fast from hide lacing. Oblivious to her sisters’ cries of dismay as the pattern collapsed into tangles, she seized Arithon’s wrist in chubby hands and said loudly, ‘Look, the prince has
