Elvenborn (35 page)

wanted to demonstrate in the most public forum possible that their fathers could no longer threaten to strike them down in that particular fashion.

I cannot imagine that. I just can't. I know intellectually that there are men out there who think of their sons as possessions, and are perfectly willing to destroy them and try begetting a son again if their "possessions" offend them, but I still cannot fathom it in my heart.

Since their fathers didn't know it was only sets of gold-plated cuffs and torques that protected the rebellious Young Lords, and not some new sort of magic, this demonstration was going to set the Council rather well aback.

The rebels aren 't just Young Lords either, though most of them here are. Moth had given him a brief summary of the rebellion—and to say that he'd been shocked was an under¬statement. There's a considerable number of the ones who are Lords only because they aren't human, the scornfully disre¬garded Elvenlords no one talks about—the ones with little magic. Moth had introduced him to two of those bitter rebels, men Lord Kyndreth's age if not older. I wonder if the Great Lords have any idea how cordially they are hated by so many of their "inferiors " ?

Mind, this invulnerability to levin-bolts wasn't going to do the rebels any practical good, in the planned scenario. Kyrtian's army was too large and well-organized, and when the rebels fled, their army would fall apart. Kyrtian's men had orders to take anyone who surrendered as a prisoner; the rebels had no il¬lusions about the loyalty of their slave-fighters. When they fled, their army would drop weapons and capitulate. Kyrtian's vic¬tory was a certainty—as finely scripted as a Court dance and as predictable.

It was definitely getting lighter. When he'd first brought his reluctant mount up here beneath these trees, it had been too dark to see. Now the horizon had lightened, and he could make out the dark shapes of trees and undergrowth beneath him, and in the distance, the square and rectangular bulks of the build¬ings where their quarry waited—supposedly asleep and un¬aware of the army about to descend on them.

Good thing we aren't going to have to besiege this place; we'd be here for months. Before battles, or even the practices he and Gel had held on the estate, he usually got a tightening in his stomach, a dry mouth, and his skin felt hypersensitive. Not today; in fact, if anything, he was bored and he wanted it over with. The conclusion here was foregone; the only question was whether or not any of Moth's people would be injured before they could surrender.

The Young Lords had actually chosen their supposed strong¬hold well—although there wasn't a man on the Great Council who would have valued it properly. For the last couple of cen¬turies it had been the very minor holding of a very minor El-venlord who had not been swallowed up by some greater Lord only because he never quarreled with anyone, never gave of¬fense to anyone, and raised nothing more desirable than herbs and spices. This was finicky work, far more than any Great Lord had any interest in undertaking, so V'trayn Ildren Lord Je-remin and his wife, daughter and slaves had been left in peace. Until the rebellion, that is. At the moment, Lord Ildren and his household were safely waiting out the conflict in their cara-vanserie in one of the cities.

So much for him; what was of interest was his manor, which in the far past had been one of the original fortified manors of this region, built back when humans had armies and were con¬sidered at least a threat to Elvenkind. It had been further forti¬fied at the beginning of the first Wizard War, making it quite a snug little retreat. It was Kyrtian's opinion that its former owner would have done better to remain buttoned up inside it rather than fleeing to the city and the cramped discomfort of his tiny caravanserie.

But he hadn't, and the rebels had appropriated it as a place to house and train their human fighters.

It had been, therefore, of minor strategic importance until this moment. But he and Moth had decided that for today's purpose it would play the role of the rebel's headquarters, so that when the Young Lords all went to ground on Moth's estate after a spectacular rout, no one would be looking for them there.

It was a given that no one on the Council would wonder why people who had been clever enough to choose a defensible structure like this one as their headquarters would also leave it for a pitched battle outside the walls of the structure. Analyzing the enemy's strategy was not a skill that the Great Lords of the Council exercised. So long as things went their way, they were not inclined to ask why or look the situation over very closely.

Which is why they are in this particular quandary in the first place.

Birds twittered softly and sleepily overhead. They had begun to wake; it wouldn't be much longer before the attack.

Light seeped into the landscape, revealing it in shades of blue-grey. Rounded shapes were bushes, trees. Pointed ones, rocky outcrops. And in the far distance, leagues below his hill, the squares and rectangles were the fortified manor.

The light strengthened, although the only sign of the sunrise to come was the steady brightening in the east. A single figure stood sentry on the walls below; those of the Great Lords ob¬serving this in their telesons must be laughing now. One sentry! And the gates wide open!

The gates were wide open so that the army within could boil out easily—which, in a moment, when the sentry "spotted" the first of his troops attempting to approach by stealth and sounded the "alert", they would.

The distant figure suddenly moved, and the thin wail of a trumpet carried up to Kyrtian's ears, and the peace of the morning shattered like brittle glass as fighters erupted from every gate, shouting, their voices rising to Kyrtian in a con¬fused babble.

Time to give the signal.

Kyrtian stood up in his stirrups, pointed his right hand sky¬ward, and launched a bolt of magic up to the deep blue-grey bowl of the pre-dawn sky: not a levin-bolt, but one of the harm¬less illusion-bolts often used to enliven evening entertainments, a soundless shower of colored sparks of light high in the air. And now it was the turn of his army to emerge from the places where the men had lain hidden half the night, not shouting, but eerily silent, like an army of spirits....

But they didn't stay silent for long; that was too much to ex¬pect of flesh and blood. Halfway down the hill their nerves or their excitement got the better of them, and their own throats opened with a collective roar. Beneath his horse's hooves, the ground shook, and the terrified birds burst out of the tree above him.

At that moment, before the two armies had even met, Kyrtian spotted the Young Lords coming out of the gates of their fortress. He knew them by their colorful armor, riding out through the flood of their own fighters, their horses carried along like flotsam in a stream.

Ha!

He had been told not to hold back, and he didn't. As soon as the foremost of the riders got free of the human sea about him, Kyrtian aimed—gathered his power from the depths of his soul—clasped both hands above his head, and let loose a levin-bolt at the nearest.

The levin-bolt streaked from his clasped hands across the space between them, a fire-streaming comet, and those who saw it and had the time to react flung themselves screaming out of its path. Anyone with any experience of levin-bolts would see that this one was deadly—and strong.

It hit—it hit! Kyrtian's throat closed for a moment—what if Moth was wrong? But in the same moment, he knew, he knew that Moth had not been wrong, for his fatal levin-bolt in the moment of striking fragmented into a thousand shards of light, blinding his view of his target for just a moment. In the next moment, there was his target, unharmed—though the poor horse was frozen in place, all four hooves planted.

Yes! It works! Now sure that he would not kill someone, Kyrtian didn't hesitate, and at last he had a little of the thrill of battle, the exultation of success; bolt after bolt flew down the hill and into the chests of the Young Lords; bolt after bolt shat¬tered on their defenses just as the first had.

By now the fighters of both sides had cleared out of the way of the bolts, which meant that aside from a few scattered pairs locked in combat, the main body of troops weren't actually fighting anyone. That, too, was part of the plan.

But instead of taking heart from the failure of his levin-bolts to kill—as any sane commander would have—the Young Lords apparently "panicked" when confronted by a mage of superior power.

They turned tail and fled; not in a body, but breaking from their army, sending fighters tumbling out of the way of the hooves of their bolting steeds, and scattering in every possible direction except towards the enemy, whipping their horses in a frenzy of feigned fear. And at the sight of their leaders in a rout (which was, of course, the signal to certain of the human fight¬ers to move into the next phase of the plan), the rebel army it¬self suddenly broke off combat before it had even begun. Leaderless, it was every man for himself, and the humans were under no obligation to carry out the orders of masters who had abandoned them. Most surrendered or fled within moments. The lion's share of the ones who fled were Kyrtian's—brought to augment the Young Lords' troops and make the army look formidable enough to have been a real threat. Kyrtian's men, throwing down their weapons the better to flee unencumbered, were heading for a Gate that would take them home.

The rest dropped their weapons as well, but threw them¬selves on their faces to surrender—Kyrtian had counted on that, and he had the satisfaction of seeing that the surrendering fight¬ers managed to impede those who might have followed the ones who fled.

Now there was some pleasure, the thrill of seeing a plan un¬fold perfectly, though there was and would not be any of the excitement and triumph of a real victory.

The Great Lords' fighters pursued—but the vanguard was composed of more of his own men, and they managed to ob¬struct the passage of the men behind them by getting tangled up with those who were surrendering. This managed to impede the rest of the fighters, slowing them and permitting the van¬quished to get a head start. By the time real pursuit got under¬way, the enemy was already too far ahead to pursue effectively afoot. So, given that Kyrtian gave no orders to urge them on from his hilltop command-post, they began the easier task of taking charge of those who surrendered. Moth and Lady Virid-

ina had taken the precaution of tampering with every slave-collar to make it seem that the Young Lords had found a way to override the rightful owners' compulsions. Gladiatorial slaves—the only ones that were reasonable candidates for combat—weren't so plentiful these days that anyone would even consider killing or punishing these men for something they could not help; if their original owners couldn't be deter¬mined, they'd probably be allotted among the Great Lords as booty.

Further enrichening the coffers of those who don't need it. Kyrtian felt almost depressed, as he watched the chaos of the battlefield sort itself into tidy groups of prisoners and captors. There didn't seem to be many dead or seriously wounded; there were a few distant figures still on the ground, but they were moving in a way that suggested injury but not serious trauma.

I should be glad of that. And he was—but he also felt as if he'd been cheated, somehow; all of the preparation for a bat¬tle—more, far more, in the way of planning and organization— but none of the excitement. The most he felt was gratitude that it was done with and there were so few casualties.

The sun was only just cresting the eastern horizon, the mer¬est fingernail-paring of hot rose, and the battle was over; so far as the Great Lords were concerned, the war with their rebel off¬spring was over, too. Now would come the hard part; hunting them down individually, or waiting for them to come crawling back, looking for forgiveness. That was what they would be thinking, anyway, and Kyrtian was not about to allow them to discover any part of the truth.

He signaled to his horse, and let it plod back down the hill to his tent. Time to prepare himself for Lord Kyndreth's congratu¬lations, and pretend to an elation he didn't feel.

The subcommanders milled about in the background, not dar¬ing to approach such exalted personages as Lords of the Coun¬cil without being summoned, but clearly hoping to be noticed.

Kyrtian, on the other hand, was very much the center of atten¬tion, and not feeling particularly comfortable in that position.

"Brilliant!" Kyndreth boomed, as Kyrtian ducked his head

modestly. "Brilliant! Clearly they never guessed you would force a march after dark to get into place before sunrise."

"I had made a point of always bivouacking before sunset un¬til I knew where they had made their headquarters, my lord," Kyrtian said, as Lord Kyndreth accepted a glass of wine from one of the slaves. "I wanted them to see a pattern and become used to it."

Kyrtian's tent had been cleared of everything except tables and chairs borrowed from those of his underlings who insisted on traveling with suites of furniture; with carpets on the floor and slaves holding trays of refreshments, it could not have looked less like his campaign headquarters. But Lord Kyndreth had insisted on Gating here ("with a select few of the Council, nothing to trouble yourself about") to tender his congratula¬tions in person. "Nothing to trouble yourself about" had en¬tailed non-stop, frantic work on the part of his staff up until the very moment that the temporary Gate opened and Kyndreth and entourage marched through.

"Ha—of course, you'd never done such a thing before, so they lacked the imagination to suppose that you would do it now," Kyndreth laughed, as the other three Great Lords he had brought with him nodded wisely. "Of course, old Levelis never did such a thing either."

"Levelis," said one long-faced Lord sourly, "never exerted himself to travel more than a league or two at a time."

"Levelis is an old fool," Lady Moth snapped, joining the dis¬cussion, wineglass in hand, "and if it had been left up to him, I'd still be penned up on my estate next Midwinter."