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  “What of them that’s already crossed the road?”

  “The chariots will hold the road,” Bannagran declared, loud enough for all to hear. He snapped the reins and his team leaped off, rambling across an open field to the road running south beyond.

  “For the Bear of Honce!” he heard more than one man cry enthusiastically behind him. He hated that nickname, hated being compared to some animal, but he couldn’t deny its power to rally men, and he surely needed that energy and hope at this time.

  F

  lames hungrily ate the thatched roofs, billowing thick black smoke into the air. Men, women, and children screamed and rushed about in stark terror as horsemen weaved through the village, launching torches onto the roofs, launching spears at the pursued, or just running down the smaller ones and trampling them under hoof.

  Prince Milwellis of Palmaristown kept his horse running and couldn’t stop laughing at the frenzy before him. This village, of no name worth remembering, had sent some men to the north to . . . to what, Milwellis still wondered. To parlay? To defend? In either case, they had utterly failed, since Milwellis, eager to be the first to Yansinchester, the target city of King Yeslnik’s diversion to the coast, just sent his large force swarming over them and into their village.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Milwellis noted a man darting behind the corner of a building. He kicked his mount into a short gallop, spinning around the corner, spear ready, to find the man huddled with his back against the stone, his hands open and defensively against his chest and belly.

  “Oh please, good sir, please don’t kill me!” he cried. “I’m with no one, not Ethelbert. Just a fisherman, I am.”

  “Be at ease, good man,” Milwellis said and lowered his spear across his lap.

  The man straightened, his arms going down by his sides. “We’re just simple folk,” he started to say.

  “Then no real loss,” Milwellis interjected. He thrust his spear into the man’s gut. The fisherman shrieked and doubled over as Milwellis tore his barbed weapon back out, taking along the man’s entrails.

  “I would carve the crest of Palmaristown in your forehead for your treachery against King Yeslnik, fool!” the merciless prince shouted as the man crumbled to his knees. “But I haven’t the time!”

  The fisherman fell flat on the ground, and Milwellis whirled his horse about, stomping over him as he went back to the fun at the village center.

  A

  large group moving east-to-west,” Erolis confirmed from his perch up in a tree. “Slipping in behind Yeslnik’s line as they spearhead east.”

  “Heartbeats?” Bannagran asked from his chariot below.

  “Hundreds, five hundred, perhaps.”

  Bannagran nodded and motioned his man down from the tree (and since the wind carried great bite this day, Erolis was more than happy to follow that order).

  “You follow as swiftly as you can,” Bannagran commanded Grees and the fifty other footmen he had rounded up. “We will turn them and send them running, and the quicker you are among them, the more confusion they will find. So, for your own lives, warriors, run!”

  As soon as Erolis stepped up into his chariot, Bannagran set his own off along the road, the other nine quickly sweeping up in his wake. Bannagran kept the pace measured for a short while, trying to gauge his timing for maximum effect at the enemy crossing point.

  As usual, his instincts proved perfect, and when he set his team into a full charge along the last span to the enemy crossing, more than three dozen warriors from various villages of the Mantis Arm were within striking distance of the road.

  Bannagran’s armored team and chariot roared down at the Ethelbert soldiers. The warrior led with a series of spear throws, plucking them from the stand before him, launching them with precision and great power, all the while aiming his team at the largest concentration. A couple threw spears back his way, but they were more concerned with trying to get out of Bannagran’s path, and their missiles proved ineffective.

  Men rushed about wildly, and some broke. Some who thought they had dodged the brunt of the charging horse team found their legs literally cut from under them by the great jagged blades protruding from Bannagran’s wheels.

  Screams echoed east and west of the road, including cries of alarm that the Bear of Honce had come. And from the north, where the other nine charioteers similarly pounded into Ethelbert’s forces, the fifty footmen howled and hollered and ran on at full speed.

  The road was cleared in moments. Bannagran pulled his team up to the side, took up shield and spear, and leaped away. None could stand before him. Indeed, his enemies knew him and shouted his name in terror as they broke and fled before him.

  All that Bannagran had hoped came to fruition in short order. The concentration of enemies moving to flank the southern end of Yeslnik’s line fell apart almost at once, and those who managed to escape the catastrophe ran back the way they had come, to the east.

  Bannagran and his nine fellows gave short chase, launching spears, inciting further terror. Grees and the others swept by, cheering their leader, the great Bannagran, who had arrived to turn certain disaster into victory yet again.

  “To your chariots,” Bannagran ordered the nine. “Those who have already crossed the road will try to strike at us from the west. They are caught alone!”

  As predicted, the peninsula warriors did come on from the west, trying to break through to secure their reinforcements. But this was Bannagran, the Bear of Honce, the hero of Pryd, the hero of Yeslnik’s Honce. Their spears were met by brutal and unforgiving charges of chariots. At one point Bannagran even grabbed a handful of javelins, leaped from his chariot, and chased after a group of five who ran back to the west.

  Not fast enough for one, who caught a spear in the back, and then another, who took one in the back of the thigh, and then a third, whom Bannagran hit with a flying tackle, burying him in the dirt.

  Just before Bannagran cut that one’s throat open with the serrated edge of his short sword, the man cried, “I surrender! Oh, but it’s not my war! I’ve children!”

  Bannagran held his slash, stood up straight, and hoisted the man to his feet beside him. He looked back to the man he had hit in the leg, thrashing on the ground, and to Erolis, closing in for the kill.

  “All quarter!” Bannagran called, and Erolis nodded. “These, too, are men of Honce!”

  “Hail King Yeslnik!” Erolis called back.

  Bannagran scowled at his prisoner.

  “Hail King Yeslnik!” the terrified man answered, and Bannagran nodded grimly and pulled him back toward the road.

  Soon after, Grees and the others returned, full of cheer and bluster. “We ran them off for good!” the farmer asserted. “And many’re down.”

  “Well done,” Bannagran congratulated him. “Now we turn west and quickly. Those out there are cut off from their allies and families, and they know it.”

  “How many?” Grees asked, concern in his tone.

  “It matters not,” Bannagran assured him. “They’ll have no heart for the fight.”

  P

  roud of his men and glad that he had again ably led them, Bannagran left the western fields of victory, driving for Yeslnik’s position in the center of his extended line. As it seemed that the fighting had ebbed—all warriors he passed on his way told him that the enemy had retreated to the fortified coastal towns—Bannagran eased his pace, so that his charioteers and footmen and their hundred prisoners, taken in those western fields with hardly a fight, as he had predicted, could somewhat pace him.

  He wanted them to arrive in view of King Yeslnik soon after he and the unpredictable young nobleman had begun their conversation. In dealing with Yeslnik, Bannagran knew, it was always wise to somehow gain an advantage.

  He found the young king basking in luxury in a grand tent, surrounded by so many layers of sentries that Ethelbert’s entire army, had it come at them, would not likely have gotten to Yeslnik. Inside, around a table set with lavish f
oods, Yeslnik and his field commanders dined and drank.

  Bannagran wasn’t surprised.

  “Ah, but the great Bear has come,” said Yeslnik.

  Bannagran winced at the mocking tone.

  “I expected your arrival this morning,” Yeslnik went on. “You were seen not far to the west many hours ago. I told you not to tarry.”

  “I happened upon a situation that needed to be addressed, for the good of my king,” Bannagran explained. “I had not the time to ride to you and to correct the breach in your defenses.”

  “Breach?” Yeslnik replied, his tone going higher and betraying his sudden anxiety.

  Always the brave one, Bannagran thought.

  “The success of your maneuver at your southern flank was obviously unanticipated,” Bannagran carefully explained. “Huzzah for the men of Delaval, so obviously eager to please their new king!”

  Yeslnik smirked at him, and Bannagran knew that the king understood the criticism behind the compliment. A buffoon in many ways, too prideful for his or his subjects’ good, and possessed of ridiculous vanity and deceit, Yeslnik was nevertheless not a simpleton, particularly not in matters politic. Bannagran silently reminded himself never to forget that.

  “The peninsula warriors made a fatal mistake,” Bannagran went on. “They tried to flank your spearheading advance by secretly advancing to the south of the southern end of your line. But they stretched themselves too thin. They are more used to fighting on the sea, methinks, or at the seacoast.”

  They heard a commotion outside the tent, and Bannagran knew that his men had arrived with the prisoners—and not a moment too soon, he thought.

  “They were desperate against your bold gambit in the south, and so they erred,” the Bear of Honce finished. He led Yeslnik and the other commanders present to the tent flap, coming in view of Bannagran’s forces leading the long line of captives.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Yeslnik asked Bannagran, surprising the champion.

  “It means that our enemy’s gambit has failed,” he started to answer, but before he could finish, before his group even fully entered the encampment, horns blew from the other direction and a great cheer went up among King Yeslnik’s forces.

  Yeslnik led Bannagran and the others from the tent to come in view of the new arrivals, Milwellis and his forces.

  “They have razed a line from the neck of the Mantis Arm to here,” King Yeslnik explained to Bannagran. “They have struck fear into the hearts of the fools who would oppose my reign. Never again will the men, what few remain, of the Felidan Bay villages take up weapons in support of Ethelbert. The region is nearly secured.”

  He turned to Bannagran. “Do you notice anything absent among Milwellis’s ranks?”

  Bannagran looked hard, but found no answers to the curious and curiously leading question.

  “Laird Bannagran did not hear of your edict, my liege,” one of Yeslnik’s other commanders remarked. Yeslnik nodded.

  Bannagran looked at them with puzzlement.

  “The days, the months, nay, the years, of merciful war are ended,” Yeslnik explained.

  “Merciful war?” Bannagran echoed with confusion.

  “Merciful?” Yeslnik spat. “The reason this uprising of Ethelbert continues is because of false mercy!”

  Bannagran let the description of the war as the “uprising of Ethelbert” go without the obvious challenge. This war was more a matter of Laird Delaval’s expansion of his substantive holding than anything else. As soon as the roads had been completed, Laird Delaval, with his large resources, had moved to unify Honce under his banner. Ethelbert, the second strongest laird, with the support of many other lesser lairds and with ties to Behr in the south, had opposed him.

  “Only when the cost of their choice is clear to those who would oppose me will they cease in their folly,” Yeslnik explained.

  “What would you have me do, my king?” Bannagran asked, a bit tentatively, for he was truly afraid of where this curious conversation might be leading.

  “Tell me what is missing from Prince Milwellis’s grand entrance,” Yeslnik replied, and loudly, so that the approaching Milwellis clearly heard.

  Bannagran scratched his head, not wanting to answer.

  “Prisoners,” Yeslnik said with a hiss. “The day of false mercy is ended. We do not offer quarter.”

  Bannagran swallowed hard, his mind whirling through the myriad of troublesome implications of such a ruthless edict. Why would any of those loyal to Ethelbert ever surrender with such a fate before them? He wanted to speak out, to explain to King Yeslnik that his own victory that very day would have been hard to achieve and would have cost him dearly had not the disoriented and fearful warriors of the Mantis Arm surrendered in those western fields—surrendered, despite outnumbering Bannagran’s forces two-to-one, because they knew there was no long-term solution to their dilemma.

  “Execute them,” Yeslnik instructed Bannagran, the king’s words snapping at the champion like a jolt of lightning.

  “I took them fairly, upon my word,” Bannagran dared to argue.

  “My word overcomes your word.”

  “Yes, my king,” Bannagran stammered, “but you cannot take from me my honor if you wish me to remain valuable to your cause.” His justification sounded inane to his own ears as he improvised the words, but he had to say something, anything, to dissuade Yeslnik from this course. Bannagran could kill any man or woman in battle without the slightest regret; he was a warrior and had been since his youth. But to kill unarmed, defenseless prisoners on such a scale, many of them simply folk caught up in the folly of lairds?

  “Are you refusing me?” Yeslnik asked, the threat clear.

  “No, my king, I am asking your deference in this matter.”

  Yeslnik stared at him hard.

  “Oh, just kill them quickly and be done with it,” said Prince Milwellis. “My liege, allow me,” he added, staring at Bannagran as he spoke, as if this request was surely elevating him against the champion of Pryd, who many believed to be Milwellis’s primary competitor for the favor of King Yeslnik. “As a reward for my efforts in the north.”

  Yeslnik looked from Milwellis to Bannagran and gave a little laugh, then motioned for Milwellis to proceed. The fearsome prince of Palmaristown eagerly climbed back upon his horse and motioned for a few of his most deserving and trusted comrades to follow.

  “It would seem the situation here is well in hand,” Yeslnik said to Bannagran in dismissive tones. “I expect that you are not needed after all. Take your charioteers and return to the hunt of the Highwayman.”

  Bannagran gave a curt bow and spun away, rushing to his chariot and motioning his nine to follow quickly.

  “And do not fail me again,” King Yeslnik said to him.

  Bannagran snapped his reins and sent his team charging away, hoping to be far from this place before the screams of terror and agony filled the air.

  No such luck.

  TWELVE

  Moral Outrage

  B

  ransen and Cadayle stood arm in arm by the prow of Lady Dreamer as she bounced and splashed her way through the springtime swells. The sky above loomed dark and foreboding, and some drizzle had filled the morning air, but Dawson McKeege had assured them and all the other nervous “stiffleggers” (as he called those who hadn’t spent much time on a boat) that it wasn’t much of a storm.

  “Just a pall,” he had called it. “Worse on the spirits than on Lady Dreamer.” The couple knew his words to be sincere. After all, Dame Gwydre herself was aboard; Dawson would never take a chance with the life of his beloved Lady of Vanguard.

  “Chapel Abelle,” Cadayle mumbled after a long while of silence. “What will you say to them when we arrive?”

  “Nothing,” Bransen answered. “Unless they ask. Then I will ask them why they found the need to so torment my family. What threat was Brother Dynard, truly? Or are they afraid to learn, as Father De Guilbe was so fearful of the barbarians that he wo
uld kill them all before speaking with them honestly?”

  “They will welcome you with open arms, then,” Cadayle replied sarcastically.

  “They should hear the truth, if they ask.”

  “You would not have waited for that invitation a few months ago.”

  Bransen looked at his wife curiously before nodding in concession. “Father Premujon understands—and accepted Cormack despite great risk.” As he spoke, he glanced back across the deck, to the sails of the vessels trailing them. De Guilbe and his people were on one, with the notable exception of Brother Giavno. Giavno sailed on Lady Dreamer with Father Premujon and his closest advisors, including Brother Jond, and with Cormack and Milkeila, as well.

  “Not so great a risk for the father,” Cadayle corrected. “Not with Dame Gwydre by his side.”

  “This meeting at Chapel Abelle will be interesting, even for me, though I hardly care for the affairs of the Order of Abelle,” said Bransen.

  “The Order of Blessed Abelle,” Cadayle corrected with a wry grin.

  Bransen rolled his eyes.

  “But you will still offer your opinion if asked,” Cadayle said with her unending playful sarcasm.

  “Your own mother was thrown in a sack with venomous snakes, then hanged by her wrists and left to die,” Bransen reminded, stealing her giggle.

  “Samhaist justice, not Abellican,” she said somberly.

  “The brothers of Chapel Pryd sat silent at her trial, at her sentencing, and at her intended execution,” Bransen reminded. “And those brothers were more than passive in the death of Garibond Womak!”

  Cadayle hugged him close. “I did not mean to upset you,” she said.

  “It is the way of a difficult world,” Bransen replied, returning the hug.

  “Where will we live?” Cadayle asked.

  “If Dame Gwydre’s writ is accepted, anywhere we choose.”