alive in the palace wall, and Tol would lose his head. But if all Nazramin wanted was information about the Hylo campaign-?
He read her thoughts in the frown of concentration on her face. His look of triumph infuriated her all the more.
“There may not be any letters! He’ll be much too busy to bother writing me,” she snapped.
“Not write to his beloved? What country swain would fail in such a pleasant duty?”
Nazramin put his hand to her throat. Valaran immediately knocked it away and ducked under his outstretched arm. The prince’s low voice carried to her as she hurried up the wide stairway.
“You cannot refuse me, Princess Betrayer. My eyes and ears are everywhere. I’ll know when every letter arrives. Try to hide them from me, and I’ll tell a pretty tale to my brother and father.”
Valaran lifted her skirt high and ran the rest of the way to her rooms. Nazramin’s deep chuckle followed on her heels, terrifying, inescapable.
Chapter 17
Without fuss or fanfare, Tol’s expedition departed Daltigoth at dawn. They passed through the Old City and out the main north gate, known as the Dermount Portal, for Emperor Ackal II Dermount was entombed there directly under the gate. As an old man, he’d prepared for one last campaign against his lifelong enemies, the Wak- shu tribe. Moments after declaring he would return victorious or be buried where he fell, he dropped dead from his horse as he rode out the north gate of his own capital. His loyal retainers honored his word and buried the doughty old warrior exactly where he died.
For the first time, Tol led his three hundred men from horseback, riding Cloud, a fine dappled-gray stallion and the son of his old mount Smoke. Egrin had brought the horse with him from Juramona.
The bulk of the men given to Tol were city guardsmen, hired commoners like the foot guards he’d once led in Juramona. They were tough and competent fighters, but few had seen any campaigning outside the city. Some had never been out of Daltigoth in their lives. To guide and instruct them in foot soldier tactics, Tol appointed each man of his personal retinue, as well as Egrin, to command a company of thirty men. Each commander was also mounted.
Unlike a typical Ergothian army, Tol’s demi-horde boasted no cumbersome baggage train. Each man carried ten days’ supplies, his arms, and a bedroll. If more was needed, they would have to forage. Once his band left the imperial road, Tol wanted the soldiers to be able to move fast, unencumbered by slow-moving wagons or gaggles of camp followers.
Kiya and Miya walked with the soldiers. Horses weren’t used in their dense forest homeland, and both women disliked the animals. They trusted their own two feet to get them where they needed to go.
Flanked by Egrin and Narren, Tol surveyed his men as they marched past. Alongside him as well were the two kender mounted on their own ponies. Forry was still clad in fringed buckskin, but Rufus had exchanged his oversized turban for a pointed cap with a sweeping plume as long as Tol’s arm. Both cap and feather were a startling shade of yellow-green.
Tol found his eyes drawn away from his passing troops to the walls of the Inner City, tinted rose by the rising sun. It was ridiculous to think he might spot Valaran on the palace battlements from this distance, but he cherished the hope.
Leaving Daltigoth behind, the demi-horde marched due north, along the unfinished Kanira Path. This broad paved road, begun by the Empress Kanira over one hundred years ago, was supposed to connect Daltigoth with Hylo by way of a new city, Kaniragoth. Neither road nor city was ever completed, however. Sixteen years after deposing her husband, Emperor Mordirin, Kanira was in turn overthrown and imprisoned by Ergothas II, a fine ruler much revered in the provinces. Kanira’s extravagant building schemes were quietly forgotten, and the erstwhile empress finished out her life imprisoned on a rocky pinnacle overlooking Sancrist Bay.
The distance from Daltigoth to Hylo was ninety-three leagues. At a foot soldiers’ pace, it would be an eighteen-day journey, and even without the paved road, this early part of their trip would have been an easy one. The land north of Daltigoth was all flat floodplain, watered by several tributaries of the Dalti. On both sides of the elevated Kanira Path enormous fields of green wheat and barley stretched to the horizon. Walnut and burltop trees lined the road as well. Planted by Kanira’s builders, they were lofty, mature giants now.
Raised in hill country, Tol found the utterly flat, ordered vista and open bowl of sky a revelation. All day he gazed ahead as clouds built from small, white streaks on the afternoon’s eastern horizon into vast towers of vapor by evening. The open terrain allowed them to view some spectacular sunsets, but offered little respite from the torrential downpours.
Leaving the river bottoms behind, they entered the wooded foothills of the mountain range that encircled Daltigoth on the south, west, and north. A dozen leagues from the capital, the paved road ended, and the Kanira Path shrank from four wagons wide to a scant two. Trees and thick undergrowth encroached on the edges of the old road. Decades of freezing and thawing had crisscrossed it with ruts and exposed tree roots. This was still the chief land route to Hylo, but these days most heavy trade goods went by sea. Only peddlers, pilgrims, and plunderers used the old track. For their part, the Dom-shu sisters were happy to be done with stone under their feet. They joyfully discarded their city sandals and resumed going barefoot.
In five days, they reached the mountains proper. Camping below the ridge that evening, Tol continued the letter to Valaran he’d begun his first night away from Daltigoth. As a result of her tutelage, writing was less difficult for him than it once had been, but he still found it a tedious chore. However, he was determined to include a letter to Val with the regular dispatches.that he would send off before they crossed the mountains in the morning. When dawn arrived, he would give the courier two silver crowns to deliver the sealed and folded parchment to Draymon, captain of the Inner City Guard. And Draymon in turn would pass it to a trusted servant, who would leave it in a certain alcove in the palace from which Valaran would retrieve it. The precautions seemed clumsy to Tol, but the safety of his lover was worth any amount of trouble.
Once they crested the ridge, the great western plain of the Western Hundred lay before Tol and his men. Removed from the direct influence of Daltigoth, it was a patchwork of rugged frontier towns, vineyards, and vast herds of cattle. The natural abundance of the land made it easy for them to buy victuals along the way.
On the evening of the sixth day, they reached Ropunt, the forest of central Ergoth. Nowhere near as forbidding as the Great Green, Ropunt was riddled with logging trails and dotted with woodcutters’ camps.
Even so, Tol halted his men at the edge of the wood. Though there was plenty of daylight left, the forest was silent. No axes thudded into tree trunks, no shouts rang out warning of falling trees. When the Dom-shu sisters scouted ahead and saw no one at work, Tol ordered his soldiers to take up a defensive position in a field of scattered boulders. They were a long way from the coast, but Kharland pirates were known to make land raids now and then.
Preparing to ride forth with Narren, Egrin, and the two kender, Tol left Darpo in command. A steady, imperturbable warrior, Darpo had served for a time on a merchant ship. The scar that bisected his left eyebrow and ran down to his left ear was the result of that service; a line had snapped, whipping across the deck and lashing his face.
Tol’s small party proceeded down a crude logging road, listening hard and watching for signs of trouble. Their kender guides had not passed this way before; they explained that they had come through a little further north.
A quarter-league along the logging trail they found a clearing. At its center sat a blockhouse, a stout, two- story log structure surrounded by a shoulder-high stockade of sharpened timbers. The upper story overhung the lower and was pierced with narrow window slits. No door was visible in the lower level. A thin ribbon of smoke oozed from the center of the roof.
Around the blockhouse, cut logs were piled, ready for shipment south. Axes and adzes lay about, many with blades pointing dangerously skyward. Egrin examined several blades. Bare metal rusted in a day, sometimes even quicker if it rained. These tools were still shiny; they hadn’t been idle long.
