straggler. Thickly tangled summer scrub swiftly isolated children from hunters. Crows startled up from feeding on blackberries flapped away with raucous calls of warning. Squirrels scattered chattering in alarm. Raked by briars and low branches, the horsemen determinedly pressed onward. Their mud-flecked mounts gouged through dead sticks and moss, the odd hoof-fall a dissonant chink of steel against buried scarps of granite.
Ahead, all but invisible in their deer hides, the barbarian children raced in fierce silence, the one towhead among them picked out in the gloom by the chance-caught flicker of filtered sunlight.
Intent on keeping him in sight, the lead rider never saw the wooden javelin left braced at an angle in the path. His mount gathered stride and cleared a rotten log, then crashed, shoulder down, impaled. Its scream of mortal agony harrowed the dawn-damp wood, while the rider, thrown headlong, struck a bough at an angle and broke his neck.
First casualty of the Deshir barbarians, he died with his eyes still open and the taste of blood on his tongue.
Attracted to the site by the thrashing convulsions of dying horseflesh, the survivors gathered and pulled up. With spur and rein they stayed their mounts’ panic, while the first man in called the verdict.
‘He’s stopped breathing.’
A still, stunned moment progressed to passionate contention over whether to stop now and call the army, or to ride down verminous whelps whose parents had trained them for murder.
‘Dharkaron’s Spear!’ raged one rider. ‘I’d say there’s no clever trap waiting! Or the Sithaer-begotten brats would just draw us on, and not bother stopping to kill!’
That outcry was silenced, and grimly, by an officer given his authority through Etarra’s pedigreed elite. ‘We stick with orders and track. One man will go back as spokesman. Lord Diegan’s no coin-grubbing headhunter. He may roust up the garrison. Else risk finding himself a laughingstock, as craven.’
Which recast the affair as rank insult, for a boy’s prank with a wooden spear to have killed a man before the armed might of Etarra.
Shouts of agreement endorsed this plan, while the dismounted volunteer asked for help. Willing hands lifted the slain man and tied him over the saddle for transport back to the main troop.
Fled in swift silence up the marshy course of Tal Quorin, the children were long since lost to sight. But in the beds of green moss, under the sills of the sedge clumps, water pooled in a flurried progression of footprints. These the iron-clad hooves of the destriers milled under, as the main strength of Etarra’s garrison ploughed past. The ground was left harrowed to brown mud that sucked and spattered, causing the horses to stumble, and the riders to curse as their tassels and trappings became begrimed. Lances hooked in the greenbriar, and the foot troops slogged silent to the rear.
The supply wagons perforce had stayed behind. If Gnudsog had opposed the decision to turn the main army up the riverbed, he knew better than to belabour the mistake. His mouth a grim slash in his hardened leather face, he brought his lancers forward with professional determination.
Noon passed. No ambush seemed in evidence. The fall of the floodplain sloped more steeply and the ground firmed, though the soil beneath its canopy of deep wood still reeked strongly of bog. Swarming gnats remained in force. The heavier shade at least curbed the growth of brambles, and as the footing improved so did spirits and eagerness. Aware for some time that the hemming effect of the hillsides was crowding his troops along the bank, Gnudsog consulted with Lord Diegan and received permission to regroup.
‘I mislike the feel of this entirely,’ he grumbled, his eyes on his men as their ranks wheeled and reformed to order despite the unsuitable terrain. The garrison split and regrouped, two companies to divide and cross the ridges on either side. These would advance up adjacent valleys and flank the main force along the river. Gnudsog kept ruminating in monologue. ‘Too easy.’
At his side, stripped of his helm to adjust a crest plume disarranged by low branches, Diegan raised his eyebrows. ‘Does everything have to be difficult?’
‘Here? Against Steiven’s clans?’ Gnudsog curled his lip and spat. ‘Yes.’
‘But the clan chief might not be in command,’ Lysaer pointed out, his regard, chilly blue, on the veteran captain, and his hands, lightly crossed, on his sword.
‘Well.’ Gnudsog cleared his throat. ‘Yon thieving little stoat of a sorcerer’s clever enough, if your cant to our council held truth.’ Unfazed before lordly affront, he grinned through his yellow, broken teeth. ‘You and my Lord Commander will ride behind with the second division. And if we go back proving you hazed the city ministers like the ninnies they are, so much the better. I like my killing quick, with the advantage of superior numbers. Should things fail to get grim, you can always strip me of rank. It’s my pension I’m risking, not your necks.’
His helm half raised, his reins looped over one forearm, Lord Diegan stiffened in the costly glitter of his accoutrements.
Aware the Lord Commander would protest, and quick to see Gnudsog was earnest in a concern he lacked any polish to express, Lysaer diplomatically intervened. ‘No one loses pensions for good sense.’ He stroked his horse’s neck, smiled and said to Diegan, ‘Since I spoke truth to your council, we’ll ride behind. Whether or not this clan encampment is taken by surprise, should Arithon s’Ffalenn be with them, we must expect counterthrust by sorcery. Our presence may well be needed to bolster the middle ranks.’
‘My sister will call you fainthearted,’ Diegan warned.
‘She may.’ Lysaer’s smile never faltered. ‘Better that than have her weep for me, dead.’ He nudged his horse around and made his way to the river’s verge to find a place when the second column passed. Diegan jammed on his helm, disgruntled, and hastily rearranged his streamered reins. When the Lord Commander of Etarra’s guard had trotted his horse beyond earshot, Gnudsog spat again, this time in rare admiration.
‘Dresses like a daisy, like they all do who sport pedigree,’ he confided to the sergeant who awaited the order to march. ‘But yon royal puppy is canny at handling men. He might be a priss at his swordplay, still I don’t think I’d want him for my enemy.’
Unable to find an appropriate reply to criticism involving his betters, the sergeant complained instead about the gnats.
‘Well,’ cracked Gnudsog, out of patience. ‘Sound the horn for the advance! Clansmen are waiting, I know it, so we might as well call them to the bloodbath.’
In moving waves of pennons and lances that juddered and cracked through the greenwood, the army surged on
