Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor (34 page)

Ah. Geri was right, then. He stared down at his cup. “So—”

“So other than doing what you are doing—you should be getting
yourself
prepared for the day when the King and the Heir and everyone else that can hold a blade goes down to the battlefields of the South to hold off that last big push that you know is coming.” Something about the tone of Geri's voice made him look up—because it was odd. Very odd. It didn't exactly sound like Geri.

Geri stared off into space, his face blank, his eyes looking— elsewhere. And Alberich felt an unaccountable chill on the back of his neck. There was something going on here, something he didn't recognize. “You are Selenay's bodyguard, Alberich, and when the day of that final battle dawns, she is going to need you more than she ever has before—because the last, the very
last
thing she will think about is her own safety, so it is the first, indeed, the only thing that
you
must be concerned about.
That
is what you must be readying yourself for. Nothing else, nothing less. If need be, you must save her from herself on that day, so that you save her for her Kingdom.”

Alberich had never believed those stories about how “the hair on the back of someone's neck stood up” when something very, very uncanny happened. Now he did—because he could feel that exact sensation. Geri continued to stare off into space, with that peculiarly blank expression on his face, but something glinting in his eyes. And Alberich had the distinct impression that whatever was speaking, it
wasn't
Geri. Which left—what? Here in Vkandis' own temple, it couldn't be anything inimical . . . but it sounded almost as if this was a prophecy.

He wanted to speak and ask something for himself; wanted to ask a question, a dozen—but they were all questions he really didn't
want
to know the answers to, honestly—

The Writ said that the future was mutable and unknowable, until one passed through it and it became the past. That was why the Writ spoke against the witch-powers of those who tried to predict the future—not because the attempt to know the future was wrong in itself, but because being told
a
future closed some peoples' minds to the possibility of any other and they focused all their attention, their hopes, and their fears, on
that
future to the exclusion of other possibilities . . . which defeated the entire Prime Principle of Free Will upon which all of the Sunlord's Writ was based.

All this flashed through Alberich's mind in the time it took for the cup to slip out of Geri's fingers and drop to the table with a clatter.

“Botheration!” Geri was back, startled, seizing a cloth and blotting at the spill before it escaped to make an even bigger mess. “Look at me—woolgathering! I'm sorry, Alberich.”

“No matter.” The hairs on the back of Alberich's neck had settled, but not the uneasy feeling that
something
had wanted him to know more than he should about the future.
A
future.

“I should be going. My day starts early, and yours, even earlier,” he said, trying not to show any of his unease.

“True enough; good thing for me that I'm a real lark-of-the-morning,” Geri said cheerfully as he walked Alberich to the door. “Come by here more often, won't you?”

Alberich almost,
almost,
prevaricated. Then he hesitated.

Because the Writ also said that when Vkandis
wished
the future to be revealed—or steered—He would find a way to do so.

“I will,” he promised, and went back out into the cold, dark, and the rain—ordinary things.

He didn't think he was going to sleep well tonight. Probably not for many more nights to come.

H
E had been expecting it for months, with a feeling of heavy dread and sick anticipation that put him off his food and kept him staring at the ceiling at night. All winter he'd worried and wondered. Were the Tedrels going to break with their pattern and attack in the winter? After that strange evening when Geri briefly spoke for—Something Else—how could he not have felt that the storm was about to break?

He'd wished for an inkling that he was doing the right thing—and he'd gotten it. Nothing inimical could have used Geri as a mouthpiece,
not
a Sunpriest, and
not
inside the sacred confines of the temple. Everything in the temple was sacred, no matter how homely it seemed. Vkandis was the Lord of All, from the Sun-fire to the hearth-fire, and he did not scorn the small and commonplace. So even if what had spoken through Geri was not Vkandis Himself, it was
certainly
some spirit that was doing so on behalf of the Sunlord.

Be careful what you ask for.
Well, now he had it, and now he knew, well in advance of everyone else, that Sendar and Selenay would go into combat, no matter who tried to stop them. Now he knew . . . and didn't dare tell anyone.

Now he knew but didn't know when. He only knew it would be soon. But how soon? Every night he went to sleep on edge, and every morning he woke with the feeling that a storm was coming. And certainly this was what everyone including the now-successful agents had been working toward, all this time—to lure the Tedrels into thinking that the Valdemaran defenses were a hollow shell, and a single concerted drive would crack through. And thanks to the four that
he
had planted, when that time came, Valdemar would know as soon as the Karsite troops themselves did. They would know days, weeks earlier than they would have before his four demi-Karsites got planted successfully on the other side of the Border.

Yes, he was expecting it. But when the word came, it still hit him like a blow to the gut.

It was Talamir who delivered the blow; that didn't make it
better,
but at least it was from the hand of a friend and delivered as calmly as that worthy could manage.

It was early spring—or tail end of winter, take your choice. Raw weather, in any event, the trees still leafless, though there were a few,
far
too optimistic for his way of thinking, that were swelling into bud. The snow was gone, but a bite in the air and the snarl of the wind suggested that it wouldn't be too wise to tempt fate by rejoicing aloud that it was gone. Half the days were clear and cold, half raining, that miserable, dripping rain that would come up without warning and then stay a week, and by the time it crawled away, half the Collegium would be down with head colds. It never stayed clear long enough for things to dry up, in any event, and it was a good thing that the Trainees' uniforms were gray, because you couldn't help ending up with mud from the eyebrows down by midday, no matter what you did. Tail end of winter,
he
would call it, for all that the days were longer, and you could, if you searched diligently, find a few foolhardy crocus and snowdrops coming up in the gardens.

Spring, and he hated to see it, because it meant at least another season of war. And Spring came sooner, the farther South you went. True, in the mountains at the Border, it actually came
later,
but once out of the mountains, or when you stuck to the valleys, Spring was well on the way.

Spring was no longer a season of hope and renewal, and had not been for some time. But would this be the
last
season of war, or only the latest? That was the question that hung suspended over his head like a sword.

For the past fortnight, he'd been running a cross-class with the Horsemanship teacher, an accelerated course in fighting while mounted, and each day it had taken most of a candlemark to clean Kantor up afterward; all the Companions had been mired to mid-flank and spattered above that line. He was cold as a frog, tired, and every time he licked his split lip, he tasted mud and blood. There was no other way of learning how to fight in this kind of muck except to
do
it, though, no matter how much everyone hated it.
He
was looking forward to a hot bath with utter longing, and he trudged into the quarters behind the salle, expecting only to see Dethor and perhaps get a little commiseration before he went back to see about that long soak in hot water.

It took him aback to see Talamir there—Talamir, sitting in one of the hearthside chairs, and the sun still in the sky, for Talamir
never
was free enough to come back here before sundown. Talamir's expression told him the worst even before the King's Own opened his mouth; he froze, feeling as if something had just petrified him in place. He knew; he
knew.
And it didn't take a Gift to tell him.

For a moment, he couldn't breathe. For a moment, he was stunned. The blow had fallen.

The Tedrels were moving.

“This is the season,” Talamir said, and that was
all
he needed to say. So the bait had been taken, the misinformation believed, This season, as soon as the rains stopped, the rivers subsided, and the ground was firm instead of mired, the Tedrels would make their all-or-nothing push.

He'd wanted it and dreaded it in equal parts, and now it had come.

He nodded, for there wasn't much that he
could
say at this point. Other than: “Know where, do we? When?”

“When—well, they're going to take a little longer than usual. They're going to try and browbeat the Karsites into adding troops, and if they can't get troops, they plan to demand money so they can hire whatever non-Guild scum they can hold together under a banner.” Talamir sounded quite certain of
that
information, which meant that
someone
had overheard something he (or she) technically shouldn't have. “They want shock troops to take the brunt of battle, so their own can move in behind, undamaged. And they'll want a bigger base to move from than before, one that will hold
all
of their people and possessions in it, ready to move into Valdemar as soon as they take it.”

“But
where?
” he persisted. That was critical. When they knew
where
the Tedrels were going to come across, they could set up their own defensive lines on ground of
their
choosing.

“Not yet,” Talamir admitted. “Other than that we
don't
think it'll be Holderkin lands. The last taste of them that the Tedrels got didn't seem to agree with them.”

Alberich's lip curled a little. He didn't much care for the Holderkin, but they had surely proved to be too tough for the Tedrels to digest. And it wasn't that they'd actually formed any kind of a defensive army either. By law and custom, they kept enough food in storage at each of their Holdings to keep everyone minimally fed for two years—and in that way, no single bad year could bring them to their knees. So when the Tedrels descended last summer, instead of fighting them, the Holderkin had locked every man, woman, child, and beast into their fortresslike compounds and sat the Tedrels out. After looting what little hadn't been locked up, and burning the crops, there wasn't much the mercenaries could do, except circle the walls, trying to get in. That wasn't a very successful strategy, and they wound up getting shot full of arrows for their pains any time they got within range. The places were too small to justify the amount of effort it would have taken to breach those walls, and there was no real loot of any kind if you did. The Tedrel recruits being what they were, they fought for the loot as well as the promise of a land of their own. Yet you couldn't leave the hundreds of Holds intact if you intended to occupy the land; that wasn't merely asking for trouble, it was inviting trouble in and offering it a cup of tea, so to speak. So last season when the Tedrels had tried to take Holderkin territory, the season had been singularly profitless and unsatisfying for them. Perhaps that had added to the impetus that impelled them to put in their final push now. They could not afford two lootless seasons in a row; too many of their recruits were
not
fighting for a new homeland, and would break ranks and desert if they saw no profit coming for a second year. You couldn't even tempt them with the Holderkin women; if the walls were breached, as had happened in one or two instances, the ones that didn't kill themselves were slain by their menfolk.

Given that the Holderkin would only follow precisely the same strategy a second time, it was vanishingly unlikely that the Tedrels would attempt the conquest of the entire country of Valdemar from there. It was far more likely that their plan was to conquer all of Valdemar and then cut off the Holderkin, dealing with them one Holding at a time at their leisure.