For a moment, they all held their positions, regarded each other intently. Then Covenant cursed under his breath, gripped the reins of his horse, and moved up the road toward Trell.
Bannor started after the Unbeliever, but High Lord Elena stopped him with a quick gesture. “He needs no protection,” she said quietly. “Do not affront Trell with your doubt.”
Covenant faced Trell, and the two men glared at each other. Then Covenant said something. Troy could not hear what he said, but the Gravelingas answered it with a red-rimmed stare. Under his tunic, his broad chest heaved as if he were panting. His reply was inaudible also.
There was violence in Trell's limbs, struggling for action; Troy could see it. He did not understand Elena's assertion that Covenant was safe. As he watched, he whispered to her, “What did Covenant say?”
Elena responded as if she could not be wrong, “The ur-Lord promises that he will not harm me.”
This surprised Troy. He wanted to know why Covenant would try to reassure Trell in that way, but he could not think of a way to ask Elena what the connection was between her and Trell. Instead, he asked, “What's Trell's answer?”
“Trell does not believe the promise.”
Silently, Troy congratulated Trell's common sense.
A moment later, Covenant jerked his horse into motion, and came trotting back down the road. His free hand pulled insistently at his beard. Without looking at Elena, he shrugged his shoulders defensively as he said, “Well, he has a good point.” Then he urged his mount into a canter to catch up with the rest of the riders.
Troy wanted to wait for Trell, but the High Lord firmly took him with her as she followed Covenant. Out of respect for the Gravelingas, Troy did not look back.
But when the Warward broke march at midday for food and rest, Troy saw Trell eating with the other
By that time, the army had wound out of the foothills into the more relaxed grasslands west of the White River. Troy gauged the distance they had covered, and used it as a preliminary measure of the pace he had set for the march. So far, the pace seemed right. But many factors influenced a day's march. The Warmark spent part of the afternoon with First Haft Amorine, discussing how to match the frequency and duration of rest halts with such variables as the terrain, the distance already traversed, and the state of the supplies. He wanted to prepare her for his absences.
He was glad to talk about his battle plan; he felt proud of it, as if it were a work of objective beauty. Traditionally, beaten people fled to Doom's Retreat, but he meant to remake it into a place of victory. His plan was the kind of daring strategic stroke that only a blind man could create. But after a time Amorine responded by gesturing over the Warward and saying dourly, “One day of such a pace is no great matter. Even five days may give no distress to a good warrior. But twenty days, or thirty-In that time, this pace may kill.”
“I know,” Troy replied carefully. His trepidation returned in a rush. “But we haven't got any choice. Even at this pace, too many warriors and Bloodguard are going to get killed buying us the time we need.”
“I hear you,” Amorine grated. “We will keep the pace.”
When the army stopped for the night, Mhoram, Elena, and Amatin moved among the bright campfires, singing songs and telling gleeful Giantish stories to buttress the hearts of the warriors. As he watched them, Troy felt a keen regret that long days would pass before the Lords could again help Amorine maintain the Warward's spirit.
But the separation was necessary. High Lord Elena had several reasons for visiting the Loresraat. But Revelwood was out of the way; the added distance was prohibitive for the marching warriors. So the Lords and the Warward parted company the next afternoon. The three Lords, accompanied by Covenant and Troy, the twenty Bloodguard, and the Lorewardens, turned with the road southwest toward Trothgard and Revelwood. And First Haft Amorine led the Warward, with its mounted Hirebrands and Gravelingases, almost due south in a direct line toward Doom's Retreat.
Troy had business of his own at the Loresraat, and he was forced to leave Amorine alone in command of his army. That afternoon, the autumn sky turned dim as rain clouds moved heavily eastward. When he gave the First Haft his final instructions, his vision was blurred; he had to peer through an ominous haze. “Keep the pace,” he said curtly. “Push it even faster when you reach easier ground past the Grey River. If you can gain a little time, we won't have to drive so hard around the Last Hills. If those Bloodguard the High Lord sent out were able to do their jobs, there should be plenty of supplies along the way. We'll catch up to you in the Centre Plains.” His voice was stiff with awareness of the difficulties she faced.
Amorine responded with a nod that expressed her seasoned resolve. A light rain started to fall. Troy's vision became so clouded that he could no longer make out individual figures in the massed Warward. He gave the First Haft a tight salute, and she turned to lead the warriors angling away from the road.
The Lords and Lorewardens gave a shout of encouragement, but Troy did not join it. He took Mehryl to the top of a bare knoll, and stood there with his ebony sword raised against the drizzle while the whole length of his army passed by like a shadow in the fog below him. He told himself that the Warward was not going into battle without him that his warriors would only march until he rejoined them. But the thought did not ease him. The Warward was his tool, his means of serving the Land; and when he returned to the other riders he felt awkward, disjointed, almost dismembered, as if only the skill of the Ranyhyn kept him on balance. He rode on through the rest of the day wrapped in the familiar loneliness of the blind.
The drizzle continued throughout the remainder of the afternoon, all that night, and most of the next day. Despite the piled thickness of the clouds, the rain did not come down hard; but it kept out the sunlight, tormented Troy by obscuring his vision. In the middle of the night, sleeping in wet blankets that seemed to cling to him like winding sheets, he was snatched awake by a wild, inchoate conviction that the weather would be overcast when he went into battle at Doom's Retreat. He needed sunlight, clarity. If he could not see-!
He arose depressed, and did not recover his usual confidence until the rainclouds finally blew away to the east, letting the sun return to him.
Before midmorning the next day, the company of the Lords came in sight of the Maerl River. They had been travelling faster since they had left the Warward, and when they reached the river, the northern boundary of Trothgard, they were halfway to Revelwood. The Maerl flowed out of high places in the Westron Mountains, and ran first northeast, then southeast, until it joined the Grey, became part of the Grey, and went eastward to the Soulsease. Beyond the Maerl was the region where the Lords concentrated their efforts to heal the ravages of Desecration and war.
Trothgard had borne the name Kurash Plenethor, Stricken Stone, from the last years of Kevin Landwaster until it was rechristened when the new Lords first swore their oath of service after the Desecration. At that time, the region had been completely blasted and barren. The last great battle between the Lords and the Despiser had taken place there, and had left it burned, ruined, soaked in scorched blood, almost soilless. Some of the old tales said that Kurash Plenethor had smoked and groaned for a hundred years after that last battle. And forty years ago the Maerl River had still run thick with eroded and unfertile mud.
But now there was only a trace of silt left in the current. For all the limitations of their comprehension, the Lords had learned much about the nurturing of damaged earth from the Second Ward, and on this day the Maerl carried only a slight haze of impurity. Because of centuries of past erosion, it lay in a ravine like a crack across the land. But the sides of the ravine were gentle with deep-rooted grasses and shrubs, and healthy trees lifted their boughs high out of the gully.
The Maerl was a vital river again.
Looking down into it from the edge of the ravine, the company paused for a moment of gladness. Together, Elena, Mhoram, and Amatin sang softly part of the Lords' oath. Then they galloped down the slope and across the road ford, so that the hooves of the Ranyhyn and the horses made a gay, loud splashing as they passed into Trothgard.
This region lay between the Westron Mountains and the Maerl, Grey, and Rill rivers. Within these borders, the effects of the Lords' care were everywhere, in everything. Generations of Lords had made Stricken Stone into a hale woodland, a wide hilly country of forests and glades and dales. Whole grassy hillsides were vivid with small blue and yellow flowers. For scores of leagues south and west of the riders, profuse
