King's Shield (62 page)

“But the Venn are marching,” Noddy said, his thoughts paralleling Hawkeye’s. “That gives us some time, because we haven’t halted. We have to get us more time.”

“By?”

“Looking like more than we are.”

Hawkeye grimaced. He had never been good at ruses. His fighting style had always been to fly into direct attack.

Looked like he’d be doing that, all right—against the entire Venn army.

But the less that army knew, the better.

Noddy said, “What the Venn have to see when we meet is a mighty force.”

“Right.” Hawkeye glanced back at their six wings and all the remounts. “If they know we’re this few they’ll run right over us.”

Noddy had slewed round in the saddle. “Yes. We want them to halt. Plan. Rest up, even. Meanwhile. Every arrow that is aimed at something other than us doesn’t hit us.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Hawkeye said, cracking a laugh despite the drumbeat of his heart. Strange, how he hated getting ready for a fight, but when the time came, well—

Noddy whistled between his teeth, thumb hooked into his sash as the other held the relaxed reins. Then he grunted. “How’s this? We’re the ones with all the extra horse gear. We’ll armor all the horses. Not just those forward. Get all the remounts behind, say, the first five lines of lancers. That’s half of us. Scatter the rest of our men through the rest, to shoot, yell, move around. The boys give us their fighting tunics, we stuff ’em with straw. We brought plenty of it. We’ll wear our grays over our chain mail. We put the extra helms on the straw riders, helms on the ones in back.”

“You mean, you and me’re gonna lead ten or fifteen wings of straw men?” Hawkeye cracked another laugh.

“Twenty wings of lancers,” Noddy corrected, blank as always in tone, expression. “More, if we’ve got enough clothes to stuff. They only have to look convincing in the front.”

“We’ll be sure to insist we go into the songs as Captain Hay and Commander Grass. Hah!” The echo ricocheted back like a clap.

“But first, I’m going to write me some letters,” Noddy said and to Hawkeye’s amazement, he fumbled in his pack, produced pen and paper, swung a leg up and crooked his knee over the horse’s shoulder to make a rough-and-ready desk, then got right to it.

Chapter Fifteen

IN the officers’ mess, Evred found Inda seated at the table, hands busy fletching an arrow. As soon as Evred dropped onto a seating mat, there was a movement in the shadows beyond the single lamp’s circle, and Taumad appeared, a tray balanced on each hand.

“Everyone is at other tasks, and Nightingale is sleeping,” Tau said to Inda. “So I took dinner duty.” He swung the trays to the table with an elegant air.

Inda gave him an abstracted glance. Why did Tau have a red mark on his cheek, or was that the lamplight? “Good. Listen, Tau, what about that battle-tunic? The red one? Is it done, or should I finish it up tonight?”

“I finished it this afternoon.” Tau set bowls and spoons out for two. “Before we Runners had a meeting. Vedrid scarcely left me anything to do but some edging work.”

“Two places? Aren’t you eating?” Inda asked, rummaging through the canvas bag on his lap for another feather.

“Ate with the day watch,” Tau responded, unloading last the shallow cups and setting them down.

He served smoothly and quietly, the way Evred’s mother’s Adrani servants had. Evred had never particularly liked Adrani custom, but having grown up with it, he had discovered that he didn’t care for food to be thumped down onto the table the way most Marlovan Runners did it. This night he found Tau’s skilled efficiency oddly soothing, though ordinarily Tau’s presence was distracting, sometimes disturbing. Even in his blue coat, with his hair queued back exactly like the other Runners, he seemed to be playing at being a Runner. Nothing could hide the way he spoke and moved so at variance with the others. Though it seemed disgustingly fanciful, and Evred would never have said the words aloud, Taumad’s presence among the other Runners was like a golden Nelkereth charger among the sturdy workhorses of the north.

Evred had known better than to watch him fighting with Inda.

Inda finished the arrow, added it to the pile on the table, then stared sightlessly at the food.

“We don’t have enough arrows?” Evred asked him.

Inda grunted, blinked. “Yes. No. I don’t know. It gives me something to do with my hands, d’you see? Though I thought after we eat, I’d write letters.” He said it somewhat shamefacedly, as though he’d committed an error in referring even obliquely to the possibility of his own death.

Evred sustained the usual grip of fear at the idea of Inda’s death, but he’d gotten used to that by now. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “However, do you—” He wished they were alone, but knew the wish unworthy. Taumad had proved his trust: not just by saving Evred’s life, but by the fact that no one seemed to have heard about it afterward. Not even Inda, who was worse at dissembling than the academy boys they once were. So he squared to the question. “This matter of the restored magic on the lockets. Do you know what Dag Signi is doing right now?”

Inda had begun eating in his absent way. He dropped his biscuit onto the plate and thumped his elbow on the table so he could regard Evred with that direct, searching gaze Evred had to brace inwardly to meet.

“Why don’t you trust her?” Inda asked. “Is it magic, or is it her being a Venn?”

Tau poured out the light ale that was scarcely more potent than the root brew Inda had drunk as a boy. Inda seldom drank more than half a glass of wine, but many of the Runners had not noticed. Evred had become aware of that himself only toward the end of their cross-country ride. Inda never said anything at all about food or drink. He just ate and drank what was put in front of him, or went without if he didn’t like it.

Inda scarcely waited until Tau had finished pouring. Evred noticed Tau’s long, beautiful hands were marked with red, and one bore a thin, puckered red line across the back.

From hands to face. Tau’s profile was absorbed, as though his thoughts were at a far remove, though Evred suspected that was part of his role-playing.

The distraction had become a silence. Evred forced himself back to the irritating question that Inda had a right to ask.

Still, he waited until Tau picked up the empty bowl of cabbage slurry and bore it away. Then Evred said, “It’s both.” And, unwillingly forced the words out, “At night. Alone. It’s so easy to see the worst. Over and over.” In a low rush, “The older I get the better I understand my uncle. Not condone, but comprehend. You cannot be taken by surprise, you must imagine every contingency, and conspiracy is so very easy to envision. And then to believe. Because it does happen.”

Under Inda’s unwavering regard he busied himself with a biscuit he didn’t want to eat. His stomach had closed.

“You’re not like your uncle,” Inda said after a pause. And when Evred half raised a hand, as if pushing the words away, Inda dropped that subject. “Signi won’t do anything against us. Against her own people either. Against that damned Erkric, maybe.” He waited, and when Evred didn’t answer, Inda did not consider why. He grabbed up his spoon and shoveled slurry in as though he’d just discovered he was hungry.

 

 

 

“You too?”

Runner-in-training Goatkick Noth sat back in the saddle, surprised to discover two of his mates at the cook wagon, which creaked and rolled along.

“Here. You as well? What’s going on up front?” asked the runner driving the cook wagon.

“It’s
Toraca,
” one of the boys snarled so ferociously his voice broke into a squeak. “He’s gone mad.”

“Probably gone rabbit,” Goatkick sneered.

“Yeee-aaaa-hhhh,” the third drew the word out. “Rabbit. So now he has to write Armband letters to everybody and his uncle, and we don’t wait for the battle to end, we have to take them
now.
”

“I don’t believe it!” Here came the fourth. He threw his arms out wide, one hand clutching a rolled paper. “He has to write to his old mother
now
?”

“He’s getting rid of us,” said Goatkick.

No one argued, but they all fumed, thinking variations on,
What’d we do? . . . He couldn’t be holding a grudge about that little sting . . . He must’ve found out about me catching a nap behind the oats that night on midnight watch . . .

The cook wagon driver, a man with two children back in Yvana-Vayir, said with unsubtle irony, “Don’t you boys have duty? Or are you all promoted to commander? Move only when in the mood?”

Accused thus of the worst possible thing besides cowardice—frost—the boys flushed, hunched up defensively, and muttered among themselves.

“All this way, and we’re not going to get within a sniff of battle,” the first one stated in disgust, shoving his journey bread down into his pack, and twitching his reins.

The last of them appeared soon after, and on hearing that the others were already riding down the pass he snatched his travel loaf and took off, not even stopping to curse.

Ride on, boys,
the driver thought, his armpits prickling.
Ride on and stay alive. Maybe someday you’ll look down at your newborn sons and hope, if they get sent young off to battle, they’ll be under a Noddy-Turtle Toraca. Because maybe then they’ll live to complain about it.

After supper Inda packed everything he’d need and set it below his hammock. He’d shared a hastily converted weapons storage closet off the officers’ mess with Rat and Noddy: they’d put a bunk bed in for the two, and swung a hammock in the tiny remaining space. Even though Noddy and Rat were gone, Inda had found it unexpectedly comforting to sleep in a hammock again.

He picked up his gold case and ran up to the command tower. He found Evred in the office, his pen scratching swiftly and evenly over the page. Inda marveled at the speed with which Evred wrote. Another reminder of his own ignorance. He plopped down at the side desk, where ordinarily a Runner sat to copy or take down dictated orders.

Evred glanced up briefly. “Do you wish me to add any message for Hadand?”

Inda twisted around, and noticed the two closely-written sheets lying at Evred’s left hand. “I’ll write to her myself. But how are you going to get all that into the case? Cut it into pieces and number ’em?”

Evred made a negating move with the quill. “Runner.”

Inda opened his mouth, but Evred smiled bleakly and forestalled him. “No, this has nothing to do with my distrust of magic. Don’t you see? If I do not survive, there has to be a record, carried the way everyone expects.” His brows slanted derisively, as usual bringing Fox to mind. “If she doesn’t carry a child—and I would have heard by now if she does—this is probably a waste of time, and there will be a civil war. I can name who will start it, and probably who will win. Yet I must go through the forms and set out my wishes for the kingdom’s future in case she’s able to hold the kingdom long enough to see them through.”

Inda was back a step, uneasily contemplating the alien idea of his sister getting pregnant. “Hadand is chewing gerda?”

“She drinks it, actually. Says the taste is less abominable.” Evred grimaced slightly, remembering the first day she tried it, how she choked and gagged. He’d tried it too, choked, and they’d laughed together. Laughing helped, she said afterward. “For a year now.”

“Oh.” Shift again. “If anyone can hold the kingdom, it’s Hadand.”

“I think so, too. And so will most. But inevitably not all. Not if there isn’t any heir.” Evred flicked the quill, indicating the barracks-side of the castle. “Also, the only way I can think to keep Nightingale nailed down instead of having him try to drag himself after us is to appoint him the Armband.”

Inda vaguely remembered his old history lessons. How, at the bloodthirsty age of nine, he’d thought the notion of acting as King’s Armband exciting. When you carry a dead Jarl’s or king’s last wishes, you have all their power until you deliver it to the heir or the heir’s mother, if the heir was underage. Nightingale’s duty now was to stay out of battle, for he must live and protect those papers. Inda perceived the benevolence in that. Otherwise, Nightingale would surely force himself to follow them up the mountain.

Inda turned to his own task. He pulled out one of his knives and sliced one of the waiting papers into strips, then picked up the Runners’ quill, kept sharp and ready, and opened the ink bottle, always kept full.

His first was easiest:

Now his family. Inda’s nerves tingled. Hadand first.

For the first time he signed himself
Indevan-Harskialdna,
knowing how much she’d enjoy that. But it felt very strange to write it.

Tdor’s letter seemed impossible to start, a problem he’d been wrestling with all along.

That didn’t feel like enough. He rocked back and forth, hunched over his little paper.

Once—not long after they’d left the royal city—Inda had thought about writing to Tdor. But when he’d had paper and pen to hand, he had had no idea where to begin. Everything he wanted to say had a “But wait!” behind it, and another behind that, and another behind that, going all the way back to the last time they’d seen one another at eleven and thirteen.

Signi, always near, had said gently, “Inda? What is amiss?”