A Man Rides Through

  The boards of the porch creaked under her feet.

  From the porch of Vale House, the hills which enfolded the Kolted River appeared to bulk larger than they had the previous evening. They were dark in the dim forecasting of dawn, deep with potential; the whole world lay beyond them, completely hidden. They reminded her that Vale House would be easy to ambush.

  On the other hand, an ambush didn’t seem very likely at the moment. Even self-respecting villains and traitors were still in bed at this hour. And the Fayle’s two men were already there, along with a groom they had brought from Romish to care for the horses and a servant to look after the needs of the ladies Queen Madin and Torrent. As for the horses—

  There must have been sixteen or seventeen of them, filling the hollow between the manor and the river. Terisa’s and Geraden’s mounts. Horses for the four men and the two ladies. A pack animal to carry supplies. And a second mount for everyone, so that the horses could be rested while the Queen kept moving.

  They shuffled their hooves, shook their manes; two or three of them snorted disconsolately. Their tack jangled softly, muffled by leather. The groom moved among them, settling the saddles of the ones that would be ridden first, cinching up their girths. Queen Madin’s servant was busy checking the contents of his packs again.

  Because she was cold and had to do something, Terisa asked Geraden, “Do you think we should try to stop her?”

  He shrugged; the dimness hid his expression. “I’ll try. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  The sky spanning the hills grew to the color of mother-of-pearl, but without that nacreous flatness: it was at once deep and impenetrable. If anything, the approach of dawn made the hills darker; they clenched themselves around the river and Vale House, brooding. Nevertheless a stretch of water near the bend of the hills caught the air’s reflection and gleamed silver.

  Terisa wished that she could stop shivering.

  After a moment, Queen Madin came out onto the porch with Torrent beside her. The light was improving: Terisa saw that both ladies were wrapped in warm cloaks; riding boots protected their feet and calves; they had scarves bound around their heads to keep their hair out of their faces.

  “Are we ready?” the Queen asked anyone who could answer her. “Can we go?”

  “In a moment, my lady Queen,” replied the groom. He was busy inspecting the hooves of the horses.

  Geraden cleared his throat. “My lady Queen, are you sure this is wise? I have qualms about it.”

  “Geraden” – Queen Madin wasn’t looking at him; her gaze was fixed on the sharp outline of the hills – “you underestimate me if. you think that any ‘qualms’ of yours will stand between me and my husband.”

  He let a little sharpness into his voice. “Maybe you underestimate me, my lady Queen. You don’t know what my qualms are.”

  “Do I not?” She still didn’t look at him. “You are concerned that I may fall hostage to the forces besieging Orison.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. His tone told Terisa that he felt rather foolish.

  “That is an important concern. I have no intention of allowing any Alend or Cadwal to use me against the King.” She paused, then said, “It will be your duty to help me insure that the difficulty does not arise.”

  “Yes, my lady Queen,” Geraden murmured glumly.

  Terisa put her hand on his arm and gave him a small squeeze of consolation.

  “Now, my lady Queen,” the groom announced over the champing and rustling of the horses. “You can mount whenever you wish.”

  Torrent gave a stifled gasp. “A moment,” she said quickly. “I have forgotten something.” Before anyone could react, she hurried back into the manor.

  Softly, so that no one except Terisa and Geraden heard her, the Queen breathed, “Probably one of her dolls. She does not like to sleep without her dolls.” Her tone was affectionate, but it suggested that she didn’t know how she had managed to produce a daughter like Torrent.

  It was astonishing how distinct everything was to Terisa. Every one of the hills across the river had a particular shape, an individual character. Each of the mounts was facing in a different direction, stubbornly determined to see life from its own angle. Geraden held his head up as if he had caught some of the Queen’s mood. Queen Madin herself was a knot of controlled impatience. The groom and the servant waited. The Fayle’s men had begun to move toward the porch in order to help the ladies mount.

  And a touch of cold as thin as a feather and as sharp as steel slid straight through the center of her abdomen.

  “Geraden!” she shouted, almost wailed because her desperation was so sudden. “There’s a translation coming!”

  As if she and Geraden had the same mind, the same will, they grabbed Queen Madin by her arms, one on each side, and practically flung her off the porch, down the steps, out among the abruptly milling horses.

  Terisa had time to hear one of the men curse as if a horse had kicked him. She registered the Queen’s quick gasp of surprise, her swift self-command. She felt rather than saw the tethered mounts twist their heavy bodies around her, blunder against each other, stumble, start to panic.

  Then she turned in time to see a fall of rock appear out of the empty sky and crash down on the roof of Vale House.

  A fall of rock as massive as an avalanche. A few heavy, bounding stones hit, followed instantly by rushing thunder, the side of a mountain coming down.

  The slates and beams of the roof couldn’t hold, couldn’t begin to think of holding. Almost without transition, the whole attic story of the manor buckled and collapsed, plunging down into the level where the bedrooms were.

  “Torrent!” cried Queen Madin. Without thinking, she twisted against Terisa and Geraden’s grasp, tried to run back into the house. “Torrent!”

  Terisa helped Geraden drag the Queen backward.

  A frightened horse hit them with its hindquarters and knocked them all off balance.

  The rockfall went on with a sound as if the hills themselves had begun to rumble and break. The bedroom level of the manor held until too many tons of rubble piled into it; then, one room at a time, it crumbled toward the ground floor.

  Bouncing like balls, huge rocks came off the pile into the hollow. A horse screamed horribly; others squealed, wheeling in wild circles. They were tethered, had no way to escape. Behind Terisa, the groom was trampled to death. She didn’t know how any of the stones missed her. The rockfall and the horses made so much noise that she couldn’t hear any of the stones splash into the river; couldn’t hear any cries, commands, any warnings.

  Slowly, almost one stone at a time, the avalanche thinned. The rush of rock turned to scree and gravel, loose dirt.

  Terisa stared in shock as the thunder subsided and huge clouds of dust swelled into the dawn.

  The fact that she wasn’t moving nearly got her killed.

  There were men on horseback in the middle of the chaos, at least half a dozen of them. They lashed their beasts among the tethered mounts.

  One of them clubbed Geraden to the ground; he never knew they were coming. Another knocked Terisa into a swirl of panic-stricken hooves.

  And yet somehow, before she covered her head and curled into a ball to protect herself from being stamped on and broken, she had time to see three men leap from their mounts and snatch up the Queen.

  She had time to see that they were armed and armored just like the men of Prince Kragen’s army.

  They were Alends.

  Then hooves danced on all sides of her, thudded the dirt, hammered at her life, and she couldn’t do anything except cling to herself and clench her eyes shut until the horses either killed her or backed away.

  They backed away. Geraden was on his feet: he yelled at the horses, slapped at them until they retreated. At once, he reached down and pulled her to her feet.

  “The Queen!” he panted as if he had broken something in his chest. “What happened to the Queen?”

  At the same time, another woman cried
from the bottom of her heart, “Mother? Mother!”

  Staggering, Terisa turned; she dragged Geraden with her.

  Torrent stood amid the ruins of the porch as if she had never been touched. Her arms were locked and rigid at her sides; one of her hands clutched a knife. She didn’t look down into the hollow, at the horses, down at Terisa and Geraden; her face was lifted to the sky.

  “Mother!”

  Terisa stumbled in that direction, out of the confusion of horses, trying to reach the Queen’s daughter before Torrent went mad. With Geraden behind her, she clambered among the splintered and canting remains of the porch.

  “She wasn’t killed!” she answered Torrent’s wail, shouting to make herself heard over the memory of thunder. “They took her! She’s been kidnapped!”

  Master Eremis had sprung another of his imponderable traps. But this one changed everything. Alends—! He was in league with Alends? As well as Gart and the High King? What in the name of heaven was going on?

  Terisa’s shout snapped Torrent’s head down, brought her frantic gaze out of the sky to Terisa’s face.

  “What?”

  And Geraden demanded fiercely, “What? Kidnapped?”

  “Soldiers came.” Terisa could hardly distinguish between her own voice and the long, deep rumble echoing inside her. “Alend soldiers. They took her. That’s why this happened. So they would have a chance to take her.”

  “Alend soldiers?” Geraden began to snarl uncharacteristic obscenities, ones Terisa had never heard him use before.

  “Why?” Torrent asked softly, as if she were being split apart.

  “Because she’s so important!” Geraden rasped at once. “King Joyse will do anything to save her. He’ll surrender Orison and the Congery and every one of us to save her.”

  Slowly, Torrent raised her knife, stared at it. “It’s my fault.” Terisa was amazed that Torrent wasn’t weeping. The Queen’s daughter sounded like she was weeping. “I wanted to take a knife. So I could help defend us. Elega would have been ready for that. Myste would have been ready. But I forgot. I ran to the kitchen.” She turned the blade from side to side as if she had the idea of stabbing herself. “If I’d been with her – if I hadn’t forgotten – I could have saved her. I could have tried to save her.”

  There was no doubt about it in Terisa’s mind: Torrent was going mad.

  If she had gone to her bedroom, as her mother had expected, instead of to the kitchen, she would have been killed almost instantly.

  “No!” Terisa replied as loudly as she could, trying to convey conviction through her mounting sense of horror. “None of us could have saved her. They took us by surprise. The horses caused too much confusion. The men—”

  Abruptly, she pivoted away to see what had happened to the groom, the servant, the Fayle’s men.

  The dawn was brighter now: it didn’t raise much color, but it showed everything clearly.

  A hoof had crushed the groom’s head: he lay in the dirt as if he were abasing himself. One of the Fayle’s men clutched at an incapacitating wound in his left shoulder; the other had been hacked to death. Dead and dying horses sprawled everywhere, some of them still quivering. Perhaps ten of the beasts remained alive, but of those at least half showed injuries of one kind or another.

  In the middle of the carnage, Queen Madin’s servant knelt beside his mount, whimpering for his life.

  Swallowing nausea, Terisa whipped herself back to face Torrent. “None of us could have saved her,” she repeated hoarsely.

  “Then” – Torrent’s voice shook wildly, but she drew herself up as if she had become a different woman – “we must rescue her.”

  Terisa stared at her, shocked by the strange sensation that she could see King Joyse in Torrent’s eyes.

  “How?” With a visible effort, Geraden forced himself to speak gently, reasonably. “We don’t have any weapons – and there aren’t enough of us. By the time we get help from Romish, they’ll be long gone. They’ll have plenty of time to hide their trail.”

  Torrent shook her head. “Not Romish.” She took several deep breaths as if she were hyperventilating, with the result that she was then able to control the wobble in her voice. “You must get help from Orison.”

  Both Geraden and Terisa gaped at her.

  “They will not hide their trail from me. I will follow and make a new one behind them. I am helpless for everything else, but that I can do. He” – she indicated the man with the badly cut shoulder – “will get support for me from Romish. But you must ride to Orison. You must warn Father.”

  She had lost her mind. There was no question about it.

  Torrent couldn’t entirely stifle her rising hysteria. “Do you not understand? It is his only hope!”

  Terisa and Geraden stared at her, gaped, held their breath – and suddenly he gasped, “She’s right!” He grabbed at Terisa’s arm, wheeling toward the horses. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Terisa froze: she couldn’t move at all. Get out of here. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? Ride like crazy people halfway across Mordant to Orison, while she goes after those Alends and her mother alone. You’ve done this once before. Don’t you remember? You sent Argus after Prince Kragen, and he got killed. And stopping Nyle didn’t do us any good.

  “Terisa,” he demanded. “I tell you, she’s right. It’s his only hope.”

  “What—?” She couldn’t make her throat work. An avalanche had come this close to failing on her. Like the collapse of the Congery’s meeting hall. “What’re you talking about?”

  In response, Geraden made one of his supreme and unselfish efforts to control himself for her sake. Intensely, he said, “His only hope is if he finds out what happened to her before the people who took her know he knows. Before they can tell him. Before they start trying to use her against him. During that gap – if we can give him a gap – between when he knows and when they know he knows – he can still act. He can do something to save her. Or himself.”

  “Yes,” Torrent breathed. “It is the only thing I can do.”

  Abruptly, she climbed out of the ruin of the porch, heading toward the horses. Her knife was still gripped in her fist.

  As if she were her mother, she commanded the injured man, “Take a horse, ride to Romish. You’ll be tended there. Tell them what happened. Tell them I require help. I’ll leave a trail for them.” Then her tone softened. “You’re badly hurt, I know. There’s nothing I can do for you. I must attempt to save the Queen – and my father’s realm.”

  As if she were accustomed to extreme decisions – not to mention horses – she chose a horse, untethered it, and swung up into the saddle.

  Terisa would have tried to stop her, but Geraden’s acquiescence held her. “Geraden—” she murmured, pleading with him. “Geraden—”

  “Terisa,” he replied, so full of certainty that she couldn’t argue with him, “she’s right. I’ve got the strongest feeling she’s right.”

  “Farewell, Geraden,” Torrent broke in. “Farewell, my lady Terisa. Save the King.

  “Do that, and together we will rescue Queen Madin.”

  Geraden turned to give the King’s daughter a formal bow. “Farewell also, my lady Torrent. This story will fill King Joyse with pride, whatever comes of it.” A moment later, he added, “And both Myste and Elega are going to be impressed.”

  That almost made Torrent smile.

  Alone, she rode out of the hollow on the trail of Queen Madin’s abductors.

  Terisa put the best tourniquet she could manage on the wounded man’s shoulder. Gritting his teeth, Geraden slapped a measure of sense into the Queen’s whimpering servant, then instructed him to make sure the Fayle’s man reached Romish.

  After that, they selected the two best horses, packed a third to carry their supplies, and started toward the Demesne and Orison.

  THIRTY-SEVEN: POISED FOR VICTORY

  The Alend army didn’t move.

  It hadn’t moved for days.


  Oh, Prince Kragen kept his men busy enough: he was determined to be ready for anything. But he didn’t waste another catapult; didn’t risk any kind of sortie, much less a massed assault; didn’t make anything more than covert efforts to spy on the castle. In fact, the only thing he apparently did to advance his siege was to completely prevent anyone from getting into or out of Orison: he cut King Joyse off from any conceivable source of news. Other than that, he and his forces might as well have been engaged in training exercises.

  He was busy in other ways, of course. For instance, he had quite a number of men out at all times, furtively searching for some sign of the Congery’s champion. Knowing what the champion had done to Orison, Prince Kragen felt a positive dislike for the prospect of being attacked from behind by that lone fighter. In addition, he spent quite a bit of time, both alone and with his father, trying to fathom King Joyse’s daughters.

  But King Joyse’s warnings haunted him – and Master Quillon’s. He took no direct action to hasten the fall of Orison.

  That changed during the night which Terisa and Geraden had spent with Queen Madin.

  Naturally, Prince Kragen had no way of knowing where Terisa and Geraden were. He couldn’t know that they had ever left Orison – or that Mordant’s need was coming to a crisis around him.

  On the other hand, he was alert to every outward sign of what was happening in the castle.

  When the men who had the duty of watching the ramparts more closely after dark reported to him that they heard shouts and turmoil, saw lights in the vicinity of the curtain-wall, he didn’t hesitate: he sent half a dozen hand-picked scouts to creep as near to the wall as possible, climb it if necessary, and find out what was going on.

  The news they brought back tightened excitement or dread around his heart.

  There was a riot taking place on the other side of the curtain-wall.