There were a few laughs from the crowd. Malig scowled at them, but Killian’s hand on his shoulder kept him in line.
“He was sloppy, the same as many of you.” Caim faced the outlaws. “You haven’t listened to a single thing I’ve tried to teach you. You think fighting is about beating down the other man with sheer strength and you’re missing the point. It’s about staying alive, about killing more of them than they kill of us. I can show you how, but only if you listen.”
They looked around at each other. A few were still frowning, but no one was arguing with him. That was a good start. I’ll take what I can get.
“All right,” he said. “Head farther down the trail and try it again, but this time Malig’s crew sets the ambush. Killian, get them set up.”
Groans echoed off the valley walls as the men marched off through the brush. Caim suppressed a sigh. It’s going to be a long day. And a long night, too. I’ll have Killian set up some night-fighting exercises.
Liana waited until the men were out of earshot. “You were trying to embarrass him. I didn’t win.”
“You won.”
“I could do better if you gave me another chance.”
Caim sighed and ran a hand over his forehead. He didn’t want to get into this with her. But she deserves to know the truth.
“Liana, you’re brave and you’ve got more brains than most of these oafs put together, but the men we’ll be facing will be bigger, stronger, and crueler than you. What’s more, they’ll have superior arms and numbers.”
“Yes, but-”
“It takes more than a few days of drills in the woods. It takes years of training and conditioning, and years more experience to know when to fight and when to run. Years we don’t have. Teaching you a few tricks and sending you off against the duke’s soldiers would mean certain death.”
“What about the men? They don’t have years of training.”
He leveled with her. “Many of them are going to die. Maybe all of them, before this is over.”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “So what can we do?”
“Go fetch the women. Tell them to cut saplings this tall.” He held a hand about a foot over his head. “Strip them down to the wood. I’m going to teach you how to use the spear.”
“But the men use-”
“Don’t argue! A spear is better than a sword nine times out of ten. Now get!”
With a laugh, she ran off through the trees, back toward the castle. Caim shook his head and wondered what he’d created. He didn’t know the first thing about training women to fight. Then again, he didn’t know anything about training men either. But now they were here all together, the blind leading the blind.
Gods preserve us.
The pool’s cloudy depths swirled and eddied under her gaze, forming patterns that melded and broke away in an endless dance of shadow and light. Sybelle leaned closer and projected her will through the surface to the deeper substance underneath. It was like pushing through a wall of sludge, but then the resistance melted away and a gray void floated before her eyes.
Sybelle released the breath she had been holding. The pool had been acting strangely of late, fighting her with more than its usual tenacity. This was the third time she’d attempted to reach her agent today, and she was determined to persevere until she got what she wanted.
She needed information. Since the events at the prison almost a sennight ago, her entire world had begun to unravel. She had returned to the palace to discover that Erric had gone out to lose himself in the city’s sordid pleasure houses. After admonishing herself for the umpteenth time for not putting a geas on the man, she went back to her temple to find her priests conducting a bloodletting rite. Normally, such a ceremony would calm her nerves, but that night she had been beyond consolation. She hadn’t been able to summon the necessary hunger to partake fully and had had to content herself with the consumption of a few choice morsels. It was his fault.
The scion.
His appearance had disrupted everything. She needed to eliminate him, but that was easier contemplated than done. Again and again she’d sent the shadows hunting for him, to no avail. Now, fortified and rested, she would try another approach.
Sybelle focused her attention on the scrying pool. The one she sought was far away, and his cooperation was involuntary, which made contacting him a more demanding feat. Then, like fog whisked from the surface of a lake by a stiff breeze, the grayness resolved itself into indistinct shapes. Sybelle pushed harder and the shapes became objects. A crude table. A lantern, dark now, its reservoir almost empty. And tendrils of light-the first pale fingers of dawn through a window. She was in a small room walled in old stone blocks. She listened, and was pleased to hear the wheeze of labored breathing. Her servant lay on a wood cot. A fire burned low in a fieldstone hearth. On the opposite wall hung a shield, battered and scuffed. Through the grime she discerned a picture of some furry Brightlands beast.
Sybelle took in a deep breath, feeling it expand the lungs of her real body, and pushed. Excitement tickled her stomach as a large hand rose into her view. A man’s hand, long of finger and strong despite its wasted appearance. She focused on transmitting her command across the ether.
Turn to the window.
She watched the scene with anticipation, expecting to see the view swivel toward the morning light. Instead, it remained unchanged with only a slight wavering. Sybelle pushed harder. In her own body, the strain sent tremors shooting through her frame.
Turn!
The picture trembled as her minion fought the compulsion, but Sybelle bore down, and with agonizing slowness the view tacked to the left. The morning glow grew brighter as the edge of a window appeared, the aperture covered by a leather flap.
Stand up.
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the view rose to a higher angle. At her direction, the hand rose up again and swiped aside the window flap. Bright sunlight poured into the room. Sybelle squinted reflexively, but the light did not blind her. Of course not. These are mortal eyes.
She looked out into a wide courtyard blanketed in snow. Crude buildings-homes for peasants, she assumed- were built against a backdrop of crumbling walls. Beyond the loose ramparts loomed the sheer face of a cliff, glistening in the sunlight. She compelled her minion closer to the window and lifted his eyes. Sybelle’s breath caught in her throat as the startling vastness of the sky opened above the shack. Never had she seen the firmament with such crystalline clarity. Even swaddled in gray clouds, it was incredible.
She pulled her attention back to the task at hand. Her minion was in a canyon or deep valley, but the hills of Eregoth were riddled with gorges and ravines, many of them unknown to any map. She needed a landmark, something by which she could locate this place, but all she saw was stone and sky. She tried to lean out the window.
Sybelle gasped as she was thrust back into her body. Her heart pounded as she drew in several deep breaths. The pool bubbled and thrashed like a boiling kettle. The man had cast her out! She screeched at the walls until mortar oozed down the stone blocks. The shadows flocked around her, feeding off her rage.
As she steadied herself, images flashed through her head. Memories, but they weren’t hers. She smiled as the pictures slowed, showing her much of what she needed to see. Then she leaned over the pool and sent forth her consciousness into the cloudy waters again. This time Soloroth’s face filled the pool, and for once he wasn’t wearing his helmet. Sybelle’s anger cooled at the sight of her son’s features, his deep black eyes that looked like they could swallow her whole. She had forgotten how much he resembled his father, whom she hadn’t thought about in years. One more thing she’d left behind when she came to this horrid world. Sybelle’s gaze traced the many scars slicing across his skin, the half-missing ear on his left side. He had suffered in her service. We all suffer. It is no different for me.
“Mother.”
Trees moved past him in the background, their white-clad limbs blocking out the dim sky.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Fourteen leagues west of the city, near the first village. We have begun our first sweep of the-”
