The Spellsong War: The Second Book of the Spellsong Cycle (65 page)

“. . . don’t push, Distek . . .”

“. . . enough water for everyone . . .”

Anna let Farinelli drink, then guided him back to a grove a dozen yards north of the stream, where she dismounted and tied him to a sapling. By the time she had the mirror unpacked and the lutar tuned, she had been joined by Hanfor, Jecks, and Liende.

They waited quietly as she ran through her vocalises. To the southwest, the watering and muted clamor continued. The sorceress pushed away the thought that watering the mounts of a full-sized army would have been impossible and concentrated on the words and chords of the spell.

“Danger in the Vale, danger near,
show Dumar’s armed danger bright and clear . . .”

Anna lowered the lutar and took a deep breath.

The glass turned to a map-picture of the Vale of Cuetayl and the Y-shaped hills, centered on the spot where the road from Stromwer entered the west end of the valley. A small hill flanked the road, and then dropped away to a flat. The Y-shaped hills were farther back.

“That hill—if there is an attack against you, it will come from there,” said Jecks.

“Me?”

“You remain the force of Defalk,” the lord pointed out. “I know little, except there are books that say the Sea-Priests have enchanted javelins—much as the enchanted crossbow bolt of Sargol’s. The javelins are
barbed. Sometimes they smear the barbs with the poisons of fish.”

“Lovely,” said Anna. The more she heard about the Sturinnese, the worse it got, and no one seemed to think that much about it—except her. Was she overreacting? Again? Avery had always claimed she overreacted to everything. “Let’s see if the mirror can show us another route into the Vale.”

From behind Jecks’ shoulder, Liende nodded. Hanfor held his portable sketching gear, his face blank. Jecks watched Anna, concern in his hazel eyes.

Anna took out the spell folder and rechecked the words, the small changes she’d made in the spell; hoping to avoid a repeat of the mirror-smashing in Stromwer. Before, the mirror had flickered through images so rapidly that none of them had been able to see anything—except that there were clearly many possible solutions, so many that they couldn’t be sorted out, even by sorcery.

At the time, Anna had wanted to scream. She hadn’t been able to think of one decent solution, and she still couldn’t, except in the general sense that she needed a way to flank the armsmen waiting in the Vale.

She cleared her throat, then lifted the lutar once more, and sang.

“Show me best and show me clear
the route to avoid this danger near.
Like a vision, like a map or plot . . .

This time the glass came up blank.

Shit! . . . So now what?
Anna frowned. his is going to take a bit.”

Trying to compose another spell in her head took what seemed forever. Finally, she lifted the lutar once more.

“Show the route, where it will start
to take us to the Vale’s very heart,
away from that road that all do take,
above the lines our foes do make. . .”

A
lousy spell . . . truly lousy. . . .

Weak spell or not, the glass presented another map-picture, showing a depression in the road where a trail wound off to the left. Anna could see what looked to be the narrow gorge that held the road and stream leading down into the Vale of Cuetayl.

“How far from the entry gorge?” she asked.

“Two deks, mayhap.” Hanfor sketched rapidly.

Anna thought and waited, thinking. She needed a better map or idea.

When Hanfor nodded, she had another spell ready, one probably equally shaky. Nonetheless, she tried it.

“Show us now and from the air,
the southern trail to Vale,
and how it winds its way to there . . .”

Anna looked at the image in the glass, and there was an image, much to her surprise. The so-called trail looked more like a goat track winding along a series of switchbacks, but eventually coming out on a plateau overlooking the middle of the Vale.

“The destination . . . that is good. But the trail, that is dangerous.” Jecks fingered his clean-shaven chin.

As the steam began to rise from the mirror frame, Hanfor sketched even more rapidly, speaking as he did. “We won’t reach that trail until late today, I would hazard. The stream is still close to the road. We could stop there.”

Anna said nothing, just nodded and studied the image as Hanfor continued to sketch out what he needed.

Finally, he nodded in turn, and Anna released the image with a couplet, and then a deep breath. She lowered the lutar and walked slowly to Farinelli to get her water bottle.

After drinking, she packed the mirror, and then the lutar.

“That’s a narrow trail for mounts,” mused Jecks. “Even if blessed by sorcery.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Anna asked.

Jecks flushed.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “We have to get rid of Ehara.”

“We do what we must,” he said stiffly.

Anna pursed her lips. She’d apologized once, and once was enough. She was getting tired of apologizing. Even for a lord who looked like a movie star.

T
he Sea-Priest chants over the silvered water glass in a thin falsetto. Sweat beads on his forehead, mixing with dust to form rivulets of mud down his cheeks while he struggles with the melody and the tempo.

As he finishes, a small and wavering image fills the center of the glass, an image that shows a long line of horses on a narrow trail, a trail clearly not the main road into the Vale.

“The bitch . . . the unpredictable sow. . . .”

The image shatters into silver globules that chase each other for several moments. JerRestin sits down on a boulder, breathing heavily and ignoring the heat that seeps through his dust-smeared white trousers.

After a time, he chants again, using a voice more tenor than falsetto.

When an image forms, it shows a figure in green atop a flat hill. Behind the slender woman in the brown hat, a line of players forms. Behind them are dusty armsmen,
still mounted. Flanking the sorceress are two mounted guards bearing heavy shields.

The Sea-Priest chants quickly, and the image dissolves into silver globules once more. He seats himself for a time, breathing heavily, before he climbs wearily from the shelter of the oblong rock overlooking the road and slowly scans the valley, a valley all too still for the life it encompasses.

He can sense the hidden archers and lancers to the west, but the sun has fallen on the side of the sorceress, not on her face.

The sounds of strings and horns echo faintly in the distance, so faintly he can barely hear them—but they come from the south. He scrambles down the scree of the slope toward his mount.

“ . . . bitch . . . the bitch. . . .”

His mumbled words are lost in the clatter of the small stones dislodged by his boots.

T
he midmorning sun beat down as fiercely as at midday in Falcor, and Anna’s shirt was again plastered to her back with perspiration as she shifted her weight in the saddle—carefully, given the steepness of the slope to her left. The trail was less than that, barely wide enough for a single mount, as it wound upward, back and forth on the southern side of the flat-topped mesa. According to Anna’s scrying, the mesa overlooked the south side of the Vale of Cuetayl and the central hills where Ehara’s forces and the Sturinnese waited to ambush the Defalkan contingent.

Jecks glanced ahead, at the scouts posted on each switchback, and then at Hanfor.

“No one has seen us,” the arms commander confirmed. “They do not know about this trail, or”—he smiled—“do not believe that a sorceress would stoop to such trickery.”

“Archers could inflict much damage here,” Jecks said.

“They have to be here to do such,” pointed out Hanfor, as he gestured upwards at the barren side of the mesa where little grew except for waist-high scrubby junipers at wide intervals, and intermittent patches of grass already browning. “And there is as little cover for them as for us. They would be seen from deks.”

Jecks nodded.

Anna said nothing, just used the kerchief, once gray and now reddish brown from sweat and dust, to wipe more moisture off the back of her neck. The air was drier than it had been at Abenfel or Stromwer and smelled faintly of some form of evergreen—juniper?

She’d stopped once to use the mirror, but it had shown no armsmen on the trail or near it. She just hoped the spell had been accurate enough.

“Still,” continued the graying veteran, “I will be happier when we can re-form all the armsmen.”

Anna eased out her second water bottle and drank, nearly draining the bottle. There were two more bottles, fastened behind her saddle. Sometimes, she felt she loaded Farinelli like a pack animal, with the extra water, the mirror and the lutar. But the lutar was light, and she wasn’t exactly heavy, not anymore. Sometimes, it was hard to believe she’d ever fought weight, now that she had to struggle to keep every pound.

The sun beat down, and on the slope above the narrow valley to the south of the Vale, not a blade of the sparse grass stirred. Not an insect hummed, and the only sounds were those of men and horses climbing the narrow trail.

Wheeeeee . . . eee . . .

Anna glanced back—just in time to see an armsman
and mount seemingly rolling down the steeper slope below one of the switchbacks, then a second as the mount following took a similar misstep . . . or lost footing on part of the trail weakened by the first mishap. She took a deep breath as the figures bounced, and slid out of sight.
Shit . . .

The line of riders slowed.

“Better that than hundreds of arrows,” suggested Hanfor from ahead.

Anna knew it to be true, but she still felt for the men and their mounts. Then she checked the path ahead.

Near the top of the mesa, the trail entered a depression slightly wider than the path had been on the lower slopes, a U-shaped gulch scooped out by infrequent rain runoff over the years. The sides came nearly to Farinelli’s shoulders. The end of the gulch flattened, broadened into a fan-shaped jumble of shallow and dry rivulets opening onto the flat of the mesa.

Just before leaving the gulched part of the trail at the top of the mesa, Anna glanced back. The line of mounts still stretched a third of the way down the slope like a snake running from switchback to switchback. Her eyes turned northward. The generally flat plain of the mesa stretched ahead for nearly a dek, dotted with the same scattered junipers and clumps of grass as the slope Farinelli had carried her up.

In the distance, the sorceress could see the more jagged rocky peaks on the north side of the valley. Was the valley a juncture between geologic plates? Anna pushed the vagrant thought away. She needed to know where the Dumaran and Sturinnese armsmen and archers were.

Liende and the players had reined up to Anna’s left, west of where Hanfor, Jecks, and Anna remained mounted. The guards had fanned out in front of the sorceress, watching as the rest of the armsmen appeared, mount by mount, riding up out of the low gulch.

“Best we form up here, and wait until the others are here,” suggested Hanfor.

“I’ll try the mirror to see where Ehara and his forces are now,” Anna said.

Hanfor nodded, his eyes still on the armsmen as they rode onto the mesa.

The sorceress rode Farinelli another fifty yards westward to a space clear of the scrubby junipers and even lower creosote bushes, but sheltered by the higher boulders that cast enough shade for the mirror. Jecks and the guards followed.

She reined up and dismounted, handing Farinelli’s reins to Lejun, since Fhurgen and Rickel still bore the heavy shields. The white-haired lord dismounted as quickly as she did, and took the leather-wrapped traveling mirror while she uncased the lutar and began to tune it.

Jecks laid the mirror on the leather wrapping in the shade while Anna ran through a vocalise.

She had to cough her throat clear of dust and mucus. A second vocalise helped. At the sound of hoofs she looked up to see Hanfor and Liende nearing.

“Alvar is forming the companies. I should see where our enemies are drawn up,” said the weathered armsman.

“I should have thought of that.” There were still so many things she should have thought of, but she hadn’t been trained to be a sorceress or a regent or a ruler. Like everything else, she seemed to have to learn what she was supposed to be doing on the job.

Liende dismounted in a businesslike fashion, and Anna motioned for her to join the group.
You’ve got to make more of an effort to keep Liende included. Don’t treat her like furniture . . .
Lord, Anna hated that when Dieshr and Avery had acted as though she were Queen Victoria’s chair—just expected to be there.

Hanfor smiled as he dismounted and walked toward the shadowed space under the largest sandstone boulder. “A regent and sorceress cannot remember everything all the time.”

For his words, she was grateful. She cleared her throat,
and stood over the mirror, humming softly to try to get the pitch right.

“Show me now and oh so clear
where our enemies now appear;
whether hidden or in sight,
show their places in your light.”

An overhead view of the vale appeared in the oblong mirror, bordered by a thin band of silver mist. Anna studied the mirror, with Jecks, Alvar, and Hanfor practically at her shoulder. Liende stood farther back.

Anna couldn’t see anything.

“There . . . you see they have the archers in the center, where they can blanket the road. Those are nets . . . darker than the rocks.” Hanfor spoke softly, but clearly. “The white and green. . . . the man by the overhang right there—he’s gone now—lancers—those are the ones from Sturinn—they are on the south hills.”

“The ones from Dumar are on the north?” Anna wasn’t sure she’d seen anything.

Jecks nodded.

She studied the image again before singing the release couplet. “That valley is wide, and the hills in the middle are high enough to block my voice, even from here. I don’t know if any spell will reach the north side—not unless it’s strong enough to destroy the whole valley.”