from an Ogre merchant in that respect. “Get the supplies.” He motioned for the one named Turk to bring the items Lyrralt had listed. “There’s maybe three horses in the village for sale, I guess. No more.”
Turk, who had stomped away to do as he was told, now returned. He slammed a heavy, dusty sack onto the counter, and glared at Lyrralt and Everlyn with such anger in his eyes that Lyrralt would have liked to hack his eyeballs from his head.
He touched the dagger hidden at his waist inside the flowing folds of his cloak. The movement was not lost on the humans.
“Turk was a slave in Thorden,” the taller human explained without any hint of apology in his voice. “He has better reason than most to hate your kind. He lost his fingers during his slavery.”
As Turk slammed another sack onto the first, he laid his arms on the top of it. It was true; he had no fingers on his left hand and only two on his right.
“Lost them?” Turk growled and held up his scarred hands, first in the human’s face, then waving them toward Everlyn and Lyrralt. “My master”-he spat the word, forming his right hand into a fist-”ate them. While I watched.”
Everlyn flushed. Lyrralt shrugged. An Ogre might do as he or she pleased with property. Just the same, he turned away from the sight of the man’s missing fingers.
“Get someone else to serve them.” Turk slammed his fist into the bag of flour once more before stomping away.
“We’ll do it ourselves,” Tenaj said softly, moving toward the sacks.
Lyrralt was surprised to see that her face bore the same compassion as Everlyn’s.
Khallayne sat on a row of rocks at the edge of the camp and stared at the flat line of the horizon. Even after days of existence on the plains, she wasn’t accustomed to the eternal flatness.
A few feet away, Jelindra and Nomryh worked at starting fires and extinguishing them. Jelindra had progressed at an amazing pace, but her brother was having more trouble with the fundamentals of magic.
“No, no, Nomryh,” Khallayne admonished. “You’re depending too much on the incantation. Try to feel it. Try to forget the words and feel the power.”
He nodded and bent to a small, cleared space with a pile of dry grass in the center.
Khallayne went back to gazing at the horizon. For all her life, she’d lived in the mountains, where even the largest valley was ringed with mountains. She found the flatness of the land, the infinity of it stretching away, frightening and fascinating.
She felt what the gods must have felt, looking down on Krynn in the beginning. Away from the camp, with only her two charges and the soft murmuring of the spells for company, she felt small and inconsequential.
“Khallayne?” Jyrbian slid down on the rocks several feet away. “I was watching you work with the children.”
“Are you having trouble with your magic?” She patted the rocks closer to her, beckoning him closer.
He nodded, looking so dismayed that she laughed. “It took me two hundred years, Jyrbian. You can’t expect to master it in a few weeks.”
“I know.” He shifted nearer. “It’s just that I’ve come so far… “
She understood exactly. “For two hundred years, I tortured human mages, extorting their knowledge from them. But until the battle in the forest, I didn’t understand.” She turned sideways, drawing her knees up. “Human magic and Ogre magic are vastly different. I didn’t realize that I was hampering my own abilities by relying on the human requirements for incantation and spell components.”
He was following every word, but she saw that he didn’t really comprehend.
“I’m sorry, Jyrbian. I can’t explain any better than I already have. You just have to let go. You must trust your own intuition.”
She held out her fist and popped her fingers open. Puffballs danced in her palm, like those on the tops of the nearby grasses, except that hers glowed at the center. “Try to
He held out his fist, concentrated, and opened his fingers. There was nothing there.
She smiled at his crestfallen expression. It was harder for him than most. The mighty warrior Jyr-bian was not accustomed to failure.
“It’ll come, Jyrbian. It’ll come the way it did for me. And Jelindra.”
He was no longer paying her any attention. He was looking eastward, where the line of sky and land was broken by a group of riders on horseback.
“Look!” she called to her students, pointing.
“It’s only Lady Everlyn and the others,” Nomryh protested.
Khallayne looked at him sternly. “Yes, I believe so, too. But what should we do?”
“Run and alert the sentries. Sound the alarm.” He spoke in a tired voice, by rote.
“Very good.” Khallayne took pity on them, shooed them away. “Go tell the sentries as you’re supposed to. Then go and play for a while before supper. You’ve done enough for today.”
The two hurried away, their energy already renewed.
Jyrbian, too, stood. “I’d better go and see what they’ve found out.” He held out his hand to help her to her feet, but she demurred.
“I think I’ll stay a while longer.”
The clamor of the camp rose as Lyrralt and his group rode in, leading three new horses loaded with supplies. Everyone came over to see what had been brought back, to hear the news, everyone except for Kaede. She left the camp, a shawl folded over her arm.
Khallayne watched lazily, observing the ebb and flow of the crowd, Kaede’s wandering. Kaede roamed far out onto the plain, then bent down.
Khallayne sat up straight and shaded her eyes with her hand. She could see Kaede’s arms moving up and down, as though digging.
Kaede must be digging for roots. Some of the Ogre cooks had been experimenting with roots and berries and grasses, looking for something to flavor the monotonous meals. So far, dried meat, boiled and mixed with greens and herbs, still tasted like dried meat.
Still, Khallayne sat there, staring out over the plains, waiting for the golden disk of the sun to slowly drop toward the dark meeting point of land and sky.
The humans attacked at dusk.
CHAPTER TWELVE
For a moment, Khallayne’s mind refused to be drawn away. The violent sounds seemed unreal, far away.
Humans erupted from the grass, screaming and yelling, like fish leaping from beneath the peaceful waters of a pool. The pounding of horses, the screams from camp, the sudden peal of blade against blade, all were background.
Then reality intruded, and Khallayne leapt to her feet with a gasp. Humans were attacking!
She ran, the pumping of her blood thrumming in her ears, fuel to the coursing of the magic. By the time she reached the encampment, the humans were fiercely engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the Ogres. They had attacked the east perimeter of the camp.
Power coiled in her belly, ready to be unleashed. The fighting was so close, there seemed no way to set it free without danger to her own.
This was no ragtag band of runaway slaves, wielding homemade weapons and crude spears. These warriors rode into the line of Ogre defense, laying about with axe and mace. They ran, sword in hand. Archers knelt just outside the light of the campfires and let fly arrows feathered with the colors of the prairie.
