The refuge was almost completely hidden, even from the air. Stone columns rose up all around, sculpted by wind and rain into ugly shapes reminiscent of half-men or gargoyles; the landing site was secreted in their shadows.
Fallion rode up and his graak dropped neatly onto the bluff, just before a dark tunnel.
He leapt down from the beast as a pair of young Gwardeen came to handle his graak. To his right and left, iron rings were set into the stone walls, and each riding graak had a single leg tethered to a ring.
Overhead, a stone arch led to a tunnel. Beneath the arch, the red rock had grown black, stained by mineral salts as water dripped over the ages, and there on the stone was an ancient tothan mural painted in vibrant colors-purples and blacks, titanium white and coral. It showed a scene of a tothan queen-a four-legged creature with two heavy arms-riding upon the shoulders of a huge crowd of lesser toth, as if being borne to victory.
The lesser toth carried long metal clubs as weapons, while sorcerers among them wielded staves made of purple toth bones, as clear as crystal.
Where the queen had been or what battles she had won, Fallion could not guess. Nor did he understand why she had a fortress hidden here in the mountains. But for the thousandth time he hoped that her people were no more.
At the mouth of the tunnel was a huge alcove filled with graaks. Farther back, sitting around an old campfire, a dozen Gwardeen had assembled, along with Valya.
None of the children under Fallion’s command was older than twelve. That was not surprising. The only way to reach this place was by graak, and graaks couldn’t carry the weight of an adult for any distance.
That night, the children huddled in a circle around a small campfire, arguing.
“I say we stay in ’iding,” one young woman said. “We don’t leave the cave till Shadoath’s army is gone.”
“You mean sit and starve?” a boy asked.
“There’s food in the valleys,” an older boy, Denorra, said-the boy who had cut the ropes to the bridge. “The farmers still have some stores.”
The children were having a moot, a counsel where all voices were to be heard.
“The stores won’t last for long,” Fallion said. “It’s just past spring planting season, and the winter’s stores are all but gone. They’ll become scarcer still once Shadoath’s troops finish burning and looting. And what will we do then, rob our own people for food?”
The children all looked up to him. He was their captain, and their friend, and though he tried to refrain from usurping authority in a moot, his voice counted for more than did the voices of some of the smaller ones.
Fallion wandered over to the fire but didn’t sit. Hearthmaster Waggit had impressed upon him the importance of making sure that when he spoke to a crowd, he assume a position of authority.
“He’s right,” Valya offered. “Shadoath is building worldships, and she’ll need slaves for that. She’ll take folks here captive, like she did on Syndyllian. Those who go into hiding won’t be able to hunt or farm. In time, they’ll be forced to forage for food, and that’s when her men will catch them. Shadoath is patient that way.”
She spoke as one who knew, but Fallion noticed how guarded her tongue remained. She hadn’t told these children that Shadoath was her mother.
I wonder, Fallion thought, if Shadoath is just hunting me. Maybe it’s Valya that she’s after. Perhaps Shadoath would even offer a ransom?
He would never think of selling her, of course, but the thought made him curious.
There was a stir at the mouth of the cave as a late rider landed.
One young Gwardeen, a girl of seven, said, “Aren’t we supposed to warn someone if the toth come back? Shadoath is like a toth, ain’t she?”
“The king of Mystarria,” another added. “That’s ’oo we’re supposed to tell. But ’ow do we get ’old of ’im?”
“The king’s already here,” someone said from the darkness. Jaz marched in from the mouth of the cave and nodded meaningfully toward Fallion.
Fallion had not seen his brother in months, and he was amazed at how fast his little brother was growing. Jaz had become tall and lean. He threw a bag at Fallion’s feet. Forcibles inside clanked in their peculiar fashion, echoing loudly in the small cavern, and a pair rolled onto the ground. “You’ll be needing these, Your Highness.”
The Gwardeen children stared at Fallion in disbelief, mouths open in surprise. Could their captain truly be the king in exile?
“Show them your ring,” Jaz urged.
Fallion fished into the pocket of his tunic and pulled out his signet ring-an ancient golden ring with the image of the green man upon it. Fallion had not shown it to anyone in years, not since he’d left Mystarria.
Most of the children fell silent, awed, unsure how to conduct themselves before a king. A couple of the older ones crept up from their sitting position, and managed to kneel.
One child, the girl named Nix, said, “But I thought the Earth King was the king of Mystarria?”
“He was,” Fallion said. “The Earth King was my father. But he died.
That’s part of why I came here: to see if I could discover what happened in his final days.”
Now even the youngest of the children began to kneel, and Fallion saw to his dismay that even Jaz chose this moment to bow.
“What shall we do, milord?” Jaz asked.
A wisely chosen question, Fallion realized. By asking it, Jaz was subtly urging all of the others to submit to Fallion’s will.
They were all looking to him for answers, each of them with eyes shining, full of hope.
I wanted an army, Fallion realized, and now I’ve found one: but only an army of children.
What could they do to battle Shadoath?
Fallion said, “The closest Gwardeen fortress is at the City of the Dead. That’s a four-day march from here, and it holds only four hundred good fighting men. That’s not enough to face Shadoath, not nearly enough.”
He looked to one of the scouts for help, the boy who had first warned him of the enemy approach. “How many men do you think we are fighting?”
“I saw twenty ships, big ones, and lots of away boats. I’d think that each could hold a thousand men.”
Fallion knew that the locals would not be able to repulse so many. Not everyone on the island was Gwardeen. There were plenty of local farmers, the descendants of outlaws. Tough men, many of them. But such folk weren’t necessarily fighters.
Fallion suggested, “Even if anyone can come to our rescue, it will take a good week for them to get here.”
A girl of eight said, “My father told me that there are ten thousand Gwardeen.” She said it as if it were a phenomenal number, an unimaginable host, and the number alone might scare away the enemy. Obviously, she hadn’t been listening when they spoke of the enemy’s numbers.
“Yes,” Fallion said, “but they’re spread out all over the land. It would take a year to gather them all. So we can’t rely on them to save us,” Fallion said. “We have no food, and we can’t forage. We won’t last a year.”
“There’s something else,” Jaz said. “Bright Ones fired arrows at me on my way to the hideout. One of their arrows took my graak in the wing. They’re hiding in the trees along the river, watching for graak riders. Every time one of us tries to fly out of here to forage for food, it gives them one more chance to spot us.”
As if to emphasize his point, there was a flapping of wings at the mouth of the tunnel, and a graak croaked as it announced its presence. A new rider had just arrived.
Fallion made a mental note to check the wing on Jaz’s graak. The membrane could be easily torn and become infected. They’d have to sew the wound closed and let the beast rest for a few days.
“What do we do?” the oldest of the Gwardeen girls asked. “Everyone knows to come ’ere. We could ’ave riders stragglin’ in all night.”
And if everyone knows to come here, Fallion thought, then this is no hiding place at all.
He wondered if he should run, just tell the children to fly away. They could go to the Fortress of the Infernal Wastes, and from there head inland.
But there were problems with even that simple plan. Even by flying out of the fortress, they might reveal its location, and Fallion needed to keep it as secret as he could. It had tremendous strategic value.
Besides, he thought, even if we fly away, what kind of life would that be? Would I really be solving anything?
