that, unlike her father, she didn’t have armor…and she remained far from anything someone might have called a trained wind rider. Which was why she was sitting on this veranda with a strung bow beside her, a quiver of arrows over her shoulder, and a war maid’s short swords at her side while her father, Hathan, their coursers, and Gayrfressa waited to take the battle to any attackers.
‹ I should be with you… and Father!› she raged silently to her hoofed sister.
‹ Not yet, Sister,› Gayrfressa replied far more gently, raising her head and looking back over her shoulder at Leeana from her own place in the hunting lodge’s central courtyard. ‹ Not until you’ve learned to fight from the saddle, not simply ride. I love you too much to risk you when you haven’t been trained to defend yourself properly from my back. And you don’t even have armor!›
Leeana felt her jaw tighten and forced herself to relax it, shocked by the spike of anger she felt at Gayrfressa, of all people!
‹ You’re not mad at me, › Gayrfressa told her with something almost like a tender laugh. ‹ Not really. You’re mad at hearing the voice of reason telling you what you don’t want to hear, and it happens to be mine. And the reason you’re angry is that you feel as if you’re somehow at fault for sitting there “safely” while your father, Hathan, Dathgar, and Gayrhalan are all out here with me. But you’re not really all that “safe” where you are, you know. You’re simply safer there than you would be out here until we get you properly trained. And while I admit you have a much better starting point than he did when Walsharno first took him in hand, that’s going to take a while.›
Leeana was forced to nod, and Gayrfressa shook her head in a mane-flipping gesture, then turned back to the closed gate, standing between the two stallions and their heavily armored riders. Neither her father nor Hathan had thought to bring lances with them, unfortunately. Instead, they had their horse bows strung, which would be more effective from a courser’s saddle than a sword-in the beginning, at least-unless their enemies were far better armored than anyone anticipated. Yet what gnawed at Leeana’s heart was the knowledge that Gayrfressa had no bow-armed rider, because Leeana hadn’t yet acquired that proficiency. And that meant that while the two armored wind riders might be able to stay out of weapons reach of an opponent, Gayrfressa would have no choice but to close so that she might use those weapons with which nature had endowed her.
And unlike the stallions, she was unbarded.
Stop that, she told herself firmly. You can’t change it by worrying about it, and Gayrfressa knows what you’re feeling even if you don’t actually say a thing to her. The last thing you need to be doing at this moment is to distract her!
A wordless ripple of love reached back to her, and she drew a deep breath as she reached back.
Guran Selmar came out of the undergrowth as silently as a puff of breeze, and Erkan Traram looked up from the mossy boulder upon which he sat.
“Lieutenant Larark’s in position, Sir,” the sergeant said, and Traram grimaced.
“Should I assume you took a close look at that lodge on your way back?” he asked the veteran noncom, and Selmar chuckled grimly.
“Aye, Sir. I did that.” He shrugged. “’Pears to be pretty much the way it was described, Captain. The wall’s nothing much-can’t be more than twelve, thirteen feet tall, and it looks like it’s only a couple of courses of brick.” He shrugged again. “Don’t see how it could have any kind of fighting step, and the ropes and grapnels should go over it clean and easy. The only thing that bothers me is the gate.”
“The gate?” Traram’s eyes narrowed. “What about it?”
“No tougher or heavier than any of the rest of that ‘wall’ of theirs, Sir. The thing is, though, it’s closed up tight. Seems to me the reasonable thing for them to do would be to leave it open.”
Traram’s face tightened.
“ I’d think so,” he acknowledged. “Our information didn’t suggest anything one way or the other about it, but still…”
He and Selmar looked at one another for several moments. Then the captain shrugged.
“Well, either way, they’ve only got forty or fifty men in there. But if that gate’s closed because they’ve figured out somehow that we’re coming, I think we should just leave it closed. Go tell Lieutenant Rasal-I want him and his men on the west wall with me rather than trying to rush the gate.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Selmar disappeared into the undergrowth once more, and Traram drew a deep breath. The closed gate might mean nothing at all, although that seemed unlikely. The next most likely possibility was that someone inside the lodge’s ornamental wall had caught sight of one or more of his men skulking about in the bushes getting into position. He wouldn’t have believed that could happen-his men were better than that-but anyone could make mistakes, however good they were, and sometimes the other side simply got lucky.
And then there was the least likely probability-that someone had betrayed their operation to the Sothoii. In that case, that gate might be closed to conceal the fact that King Markhos was somewhere else entirely…having left a hundred or so of his elite cavalry packed in the hunting lodge’s courtyard, waiting to come thundering out as soon as anyone was sufficiently injudicious as to disturb them.
You’re jumping at shadows, Erkan, he told himself. Jumping at shadows. If there’d been that much traffic in or out of that lodge, you’d have seen signs of it along the road, and you didn’t, did you? No, the only realistic worst-case is that someone did spot one of the boys.
That would be bad enough, yet it was a chance he was prepared to accept. Without the element of surprise, his casualties would climb sharply, but the defenders simply didn’t have enough manpower. The harsh truth was that he could afford far higher losses than the King’s bodyguards possibly could, and given how much they were being paid for this one The staccato cry of a southern bird who had no business on the Wind Plain sounded clearly through the cool, green woods, and Erkan Traram drew his sword and looked through the thin screen of branches at the top of that ornamental wall Selmar had described.
“ Now! ” he bellowed.
Leeana came to her feet with a dancer’s grace, and somehow the strung bow had appeared in her left hand. For just a moment, she wasn’t certain what had snatched her out of her chair. Then she realized- she hadn’t heard that single shouted word; Gayrfressa had.
She turned to her left, facing the direction from which the command-and it had to be a command-had come, and her right hand drew an arrow from her quiver. Somewhere deep under the surface of her thoughts, she recalled her first morning at Kalatha and her hopeless performance as an archer under Erlis and Ravlahn’s evaluating examination. She’d come a long way since that day, and despite the bigger muscles with which an unfair nature had gifted male arms, there weren’t a great many men who could have pulled the bow she’d mastered in the intervening years. She nocked the arrow, her brain ticking with the cool precision of a Dwarvenhame pocket watch, and felt the alert, tingling readiness purring through her nerves and sinews. Despite her years of hard, sometimes brutal training, she’d never faced an enemy when lives were in the balance, and she was vaguely astonished that what she felt most strongly at the moment was an overwhelming focus and purpose, not fear.
Well, a small inner voice told her almost whimsically, there’s always time for that.
Traram’s shout brought his entire company to its feet. Whistles shrilled and other voices shouted their own orders, galvanized by his command, and the attack rolled forward.
The approaches were most open on the western side of the lodge, which was why Traram himself commanded that prong of the assault. The dense greenery of the Forest of Chergor swept up to within little more than thirty or forty feet of the lodge’s other walls; here, on the west, the approach lay through the more open and orderly lines of an apple orchard. The apple trees’ leaves and ripening fruit provided a wind-tousled screen, concealing most of his men’s approach from any observer who might be perched awkwardly atop that purely decorative wall, but they were still far more exposed coming through the orchard. On the other hand, the orchard
