take away one of Deline’s names and make her second daughter the prince and heir. This was the only possible solution to an impossible situation, but the peer thought it unnecessarily severe. Long afterward, when Deline raided Midd Village with the guard she wasn’t supposed to have, her mother had to do what I had suggested. It must have been a wrenching experience for everyone but especially for Deline. How did she react?”
“She was stunned,” Arne said. “For a time she seemed to go through the motions of living without feeling anything at all. But she recovered well. She did excellent work, and I know she enjoyed it.”
“Of course. She always had the intelligence to accomplish anything she wanted, but she never wanted anything beyond her own pleasure. Now I will tell you what happened. She had lost everything that mattered to her, she was alone among strangers and reduced to performing menial labor, but fate gave her the most capable, the most conscientious and honorable, the most dedicated, the most wholly admirable man in the peerdom to work with.”
The peer raised a hand to stop Arne’s protest. “Your modesty is as remarkable as your devotion to duty. Never mind. That is how you appeared to her. She had to admire your ability and the way you worked, and admiration is as good a basis as any for love. Unfortunately, the more deeply she fell in love with you, the more she realized you were far more interested in your work than in her and always would be. She finally decided you would never love anyone.”
“But I did love her,” Arne protested. “I asked her to wive me.”
The peer stared at him. “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have suspected it. What did she say?”
“I was about to visit the other peerdoms to ask for help in forming an army. She said she would tell me when I returned.”
“And?”
“Before I had a chance to talk with her, the land warden told me the prince her sister wanted me to be her consort.”
“But if you loved Deline, surely you weren’t compelled to—” She paused. Then she continued slowly, “I see. Now I understand. When a prince invites a one-namer to be her consort, he
“Then the Lantiff came, and you fought and loved together, the two being more than twice as exhilarating in combination. Her sister was dead, and she thought she couldn’t lose you again, but this time you lost each other— to the war—because she slipped naturally into all of her old ways, and suddenly, without any official notice, she was a prince again. She couldn’t possibly consider wiving you after that, but she would have accepted you as her consort if you had been willing to remain her humble subject, follow her about obediently, charge into battle with her, and attend her when it was over. Since you couldn’t do any of that, her reaction was to blame you for all of her troubles, real or imagined. Poor Arne. Poor Deline.”
“What am I to do?” Arne asked perplexedly.
The peer sighed. “If you had been at Easlon Court when I was a girl, perhaps you would have been one of the rare ones who could court a homely prince sincerely. How sad that Deline can’t appreciate that. There is nothing you can do except what you are doing. Be kind. Be patient. Be loving if she gives you a chance. She will despise you the more for it, but that is all you can do, and eventually she may come to understand that the reason she hates you is also the reason she loves you.”
“She is so reckless that she worries me,” Arne said.
“She worries a great many people. She has reverted to being the self-centered, completely amoral prince. She will continue to act impetuously, do whatever she likes, and decide afterward that it was the wise thing. There is nothing you can do except what you are doing. Now go fight your war. You are right to be concerned about Deline, but you shouldn’t worry about her. You should never worry about things you can’t change.”
There was much about the war that Arne couldn’t change, and these things worried him immensely. The little army of Easlon was losing, but it devastated the Lantiff in every skirmish. It could have held the army of Lant back for sikes, grudgingly yielding ground a few meters at a time, if it’d had unlimited supplies. Defeat loomed inevitably because it could only fight as long as its food lasted.
Every finger of attack the Lantiff extended was shattered and chopped off, but the massive army continued to ooze forward, testing the defenders’ flanks, ever extending the battlefield, ever stretching Inskor’s army thinner and thinner. But refugee one-namers continued to arrive, and the entire one-name population of Easlon was training for war and planning to join the battle the moment it was needed. Easlon’s len grinders continued to produce copies of Egarn’s weapon, and new recruits trained with them before they met the enemy.
They were littering the Ten Peerdoms with Lantian dead, and still the army of Lant advanced—across the Peerdom of Chang, across that of Labon, across the tiny Peerdom of Zrum, until one day it stood on Easlon’s border. Inskor anxiously kept scouts ranging far to the north and south so he would be forewarned if the Lantiff attempted another wide encirclement, but they did not. They were constantly making shallow flanking movements, but the main thrust of their attack was straight ahead. Their generals must have known the war would end when Easlon ran out of food, and they were keeping Easlon’s defenders occupied until then.
This was a new kind of war for the Lantiff. They were accustomed to triumphant advances and little fighting. Dim as their intelligence was, they soon perceived that the way to victory in the Ten Peerdoms was being piled with their own dead bodies, and they lost their enthusiasm for it. They responded to orders with a reluctance that hadn’t existed earlier. A charge by Deline’s elite guard could put their entire vanguard to flight.
But defenders were far too few, their food reserves too scant, and there seemed to be no end to the Lantiff and to the war. The brains of Inskor’s one-namers functioned perfectly, and they had no illusions at all about the future. They foresaw how the war would end, and they knew the Peer of Lant would ruthlessly exterminate them. None of them intended to be captured. The problem was that they had nowhere to run. They could survive for a time in the wild mountain terrain, but when their foraging became a nuisance, the Lantiff would systematically track them down. Or they could fight to the end and die fighting. There seemed to be no alternative. The children of Easlon knew the fate of children in the conquered peerdoms, and they were resolved to fight to the death beside their parents rather than become no-namers.
Inskor was forming plans of his own. He didn’t intend to wait until his battered army was overwhelmed or routed. If it retreated to the mountains, it would not be in order to hide and starve.
He had two options. One was to invade Lant. He could cut his way through the mountains with Egarn’s weapon and inflict the same relentless destruction on the Peer of Lant’s realm that she had visited on the Ten Peerdoms.
Or he could escape southward, taking with him refugees from the conquered peerdoms and the entire population of Easlon. There were peerdoms far to the south of Lant that hadn’t yet been engulfed in war. These states gained a reprive when the Peer of Lant turned aside to attack the Ten Peerdoms, but their peers knew the war against them would resume as soon as the Ten Peerdoms were subdued. They had learned from the unfortunate experiences of peerdoms further north, and for sikes they had been preparing their defenses with help from Inskor’s scouts. Their one-namers were already armed with Egarn’s weapon, and several of their commanders had joined the army of Easlon to learn about warfare first hand.
Inskor decided to do both. The best fighting elements would cut through the mountains, close the pass behind them, and take the war deeply into Lant. The Peer of Lant, and her main army, would be trapped on the far side of impassable mountains. Easlon’s young, elderly, and those unable to fight would be escorted southward through the mountains. The southern peerdoms would send help and supplies to meet the fugitives. The difficulties to be overcome, the hardships to be endured by those who made the trek, were staggering to contemplate. Many would die, but the survivors had a chance to continue surviving—at least for a time.
Inskor sent scouts to find the best route for the long march south, and Arne began placing caches of food supplies at regular intervals along the way.
Once Inskor make his decision, he and Arne met with the Peer and Prince of Easlon to discuss it. Abandoning their peerdom would be a sad wrench for them, but they accepted the inevitable. The beautiful prince had found herself a worthy mate—he was fighting with Bernal’s scouts, one of the few peeragers who had gone to war. She had borne a daughter, a future Prince of Easlon, and now she was pregnant again. She and her mother were grimly determined to survive, to work for the downfall of Lant, and then reclaim and rebuild their peerdom,
