Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor (40 page)

This could have looked like some sort of parade, all of the Companions and their uniformed Heralds, with the single spots of Healer Green and Guard Blue among them. It didn't; Alberich could tell by the faces of those who gathered to watch them pass through their towns and villages that they gave no such impression. The expressions that the common folk wore were uniformly grim. Perhaps the people of Haven had not yet grasped the seriousness of the situation, but the people of the towns and villages knew it. There was no cheering, and the hope he saw in their faces was tinged with desperation.

:They know, don't they?:
he asked Kantor.

Ah. He shifted in the saddle, careful to do so with Kantor's stride so as not to throw him off. Well, that was something he wouldn't know about—letters from the front lines, and a village's interest in them. His mother couldn't have read a letter even if he'd been allowed to send her one from the Academy.

And he remembered, for the first time in a long, long while, the first line of the oath he had sworn when he joined the Academy.
The temple is your mother and your father is Vkandis Sunlord. . . .

It was still true. Just not in the way that those who had listened to him swear that oath intended.

They stopped for the night around dusk, outside a village—which one, he didn't know; they went past it too quickly for him to read the faded sign in the uncertain light. The Herald in the lead broke off down a side lane and the entire group followed, slowing as they did so. The lane was overgrown, entirely grass-covered, eventually bringing them to a tiny cabin set off in a clearing, with no sign of any inhabitant about it.

:That's because there
isn't
an inhabitant. This is one of the Waystations,:
Kantor told him.
:We're two days' journey from Haven at my usual pace; three or four by horse.:

Feeling stiff, though not as stiff and sore as he had expected, he slowly dismounted. He had read about the Waystations, though he had never seen one. This one, a little stone hut with a thatched roof, looked solid enough, though it wasn't very big. But sheltering no more than two Heralds at a time, and then not for very long, it didn't need to be, he supposed. The walls were thick, and so was the door; there weren't any windows, but inside he saw that the floor was slate, and there was a stone fireplace. It was a better structure than the one he and his mother had shared before she got her job at the inn.

The building itself was given over to Sendar and Selenay as their shelter. Six of the other Heralds returned to the village for provisions, while the rest, Alberich included, made camp and saw to the comfort of their Companions. Even the Guards and Healer Crathach put in the time to groom and feed and water the Companions they rode.

They completely exhausted the stores of food for the Companions in the Waystation bins, but at least there
was
plenty of grazing. It was fully dark by the time the six Heralds who had gone after provisions returned, and by then there were a couple of small fires going, sleeping rolls had been arranged according to friendships or prearrangements—Alberich's would be across the door of the cabin, and the other bodyguards would be in close proximity—and the steady munching of Companions through grass was as loud as the insects and night birds.

Alberich had expected that they would be cooking some sort of communal meal, but what was brought back from the village was both unexpected and touching. The villagers had given up parts of their
own
evening meals to send them to the Heralds on their way to the front lines. Ham, cold chicken, and bread, cheese and fruit, cold boiled eggs, sausage rolls, and sweet cakes, jars of pickles and packets of tea—

Parcel after paper-wrapped parcel came out of the saddlebags and net bags that the six had taken into the village, to be divided equally among the lot of them, Sendar and Selenay taking no precedence in what they got. There was a bit of trading as people swapped items they didn't care as much for, then things quieted down rather quickly.

“Draw straws over who washes up tonight, and who does in the morning,” Sendar suggested, as conversation ceased while jaws were otherwise employed. Most everyone was probably as starved as Alberich; they'd all eaten while on the move, taking out provisions that had apparently been packed by Palace servants, since Alberich didn't recall packing the contents of the little bag on the front of his saddle—a paper-wrapped pair of sausage rolls and a skin of cold tea. But it had been candlemarks ago, and it had been a very long day.

Someone collected enough black-and-white beans from the Waystation to equal the number of riders, and put them into a bag. Alberich was not unhappy to find his was a black bean, and when he was done with his ham and pickled beans, joined the queue of those who were cleaning up now. Water straight from the well felt refreshing after the hard and sweaty day of riding; it was going to feel cursed cold in the morning. Sendar and Selenay got black beans as well, and Alberich insisted they go ahead of him. There was method in this;
they
were in the Waystation and probably asleep by the time he finished, and he was able to stretch himself out across the door without worrying that he'd be inconveniencing them. But he wondered, just before he fell asleep, if there was even the faintest likelihood that a village of Karsites would sacrifice portions of their own meals to a troop of Sunpriests and Sunsguard under similar circumstances.

On the whole, he thought not.

The next day followed the pattern of the first, except that they had to stop at midday in a large town and several Heralds went to each tavern and inn in turn to collect meat pies for all of them. Alberich had an idea that he would be heartily tired of meat pies and sausage rolls before the end of their journey . . . but of course, that was the least of his worries, and it was better fare than he'd ever gotten with the Sunsguard.

The contrast between their grim purpose and the placid, lush countryside they rode through could not have been greater. Alberich tried not to look too closely at the folk who came out to see them pass, but he couldn't ignore them altogether, and it wrung his heart to see them—middle-aged men and older, women either
with
children or as old as the old men. There were a great many children and not very many young adults. He knew what that meant. Those that could be spared, were unattached, had no families to support—they were gone. In the army, facing the Tedrels. And who knew if they'd ever return? He saw that in the faces of those that they rode so swiftly past, in the fear they tried not to show.

But if the Tedrels broke through, these same people would be taking up whatever arms they had to defend their lives—or fleeing back up that road to Haven. . . . And try as he might, he could not but help look at those peaceful villages and imagine flames rising above the roofs, and bodies sprawled in the streets.

It was better when they were riding through the countryside. And maybe the others were cursed with the same sort of imagination as Alberich, for their pace seemed to increase, just a trifle, when they were going through a center of population.

So it went, sunrise to sundown, league after league of it, and no end in sight. It almost seemed to him as if he was caught in a peculiar nightmare, riding inexorably toward a dark and dreadful fate.

Selenay had longed for a day when she might ride out like any other Herald, taking to the road with her packs behind her, leaving the Palace and all of the stuffiness of the Court behind. Now that day had come, and she thought—often—that it might have been a good idea if she had never made that particular wish. She would rather have to suffer being laced into a tight gown and listen to dull speeches every day for the rest of her life than face the Tedrels. And it didn't matter that there would be an army between them and her. She was as much afraid for the people she knew, her friends, the people she'd been with as a Trainee, who would
be
in that army, as she was for herself.

What was more, the
reason
why Alberich had assigned bodyguards to her for day and night was real now. She understood that her life was in genuine, serious danger—and worse than just her life. She had learned in several sleepless nights following a long and somber talk with Alberich that there
was
a fate worse than death. The Tedrels had every reason to want to take her alive, and many more reasons to want to make sure that she was alive, and
outwardly
well, but not in possession of her wits anymore. And there were a great many ways to ensure that she wasn't sane once they got hold of her . . . the most obvious being to murder Caryo. She was used to a Valdemar where the King could walk unguarded among his people—but her father wasn't going anywhere without his six shadows either, and that shook her to the core. He no longer trusted his own people—or at least, no longer trusted the ones he didn't personally know. It would have made her weep, if she hadn't been too frightened to cry.

The heavy, leaden feeling of fear increased day by day. It hung over all of them, making conversation stilted and unnatural, punctuating the silences, and making it impossible to
enjoy
the fragrant, picturesque countryside through which they rode. The enforced, close presence of her father, quiet and grave with worry, or absent altogether as he Mindspoke with the Heralds relaying a moment-by-moment summary of what was going on with the enemy and with their own forces, was a greater burden than she allowed him to guess. She couldn't lean on him for comfort, for Alberich and Talamir were right; he was already taking on more than he should. She could only thank all the gods that ever were for Caryo; at least she had someone to turn to, even if that someone couldn't actually do any more than she could. It helped, immeasurably, when in the dark of some Waystation, unable to sleep, she could unburden her heart to another who would understand; and in moments when she could steal away a little, with Keren or Ylsa pointedly
not
looking at her, that she could pretend to groom Caryo and cry into her soft shoulder.

There were times when Selenay wondered if they would
ever
reach the army, but more times when she hoped they never would. So long as they rode, she could put off the day when everything would change. So long as they rode, she was safe, safe as only a Herald in the company of Heralds could be.

So long as they rode, the army had not yet met the enemy, and she could pretend that they never would.

Nevertheless, the Companions, even her beloved friend, carried them inexorably to that confrontation, and it was almost a relief when that day did come. Almost. The waiting might be over, but now she was
here.

She heard the army long before she saw it; the hum of a city many times the size of Haven transported to the rolling hills of the southland. And long before she heard it, there were other signs of it; provisioning wagons going toward it full and away from it empty, messengers pounding up or down the road.

There were other signs; more ominous signs. The countryside was empty. It was empty, because insofar as it was possible to get the people to leave, it had been evacuated. There wasn't a sheep on the hillsides, or a farmer in the fields. The fields that no longer held sheep
did
hold something else, grazing on the rich, emerald grass, grass that the Tedrels desired for their own herds. The horses, the oxen, the mules of the army grazed there—not the horses of the cavalry, which were kept within the camp, but the horses that drew the carts that supplied the army, the horses that carried messengers when the message was not urgent enough for a Herald. Common horses, but for the most part better by far than any that these hills had seen before.

But when they finally reached the outskirts of the encampment, it was something of an anticlimax, for it looked like nothing more than an ordinary army camp. They topped a hill, and saw the edge of the camp below them, across the slow river that split the valley in half, on the other side of a stone bridge. Sentries guarded the road there, the visible token of the ones Selenay could not see. Beyond the sentries, rows of pale canvas tents, rows of tents that were as even as furrows in the soil, that marched up the other slope and crowned the top of the hill, a strange and martial crop of spears and pikes planted in stands beside them. And yet, it was no larger an encampment than ones she had seen before, on the edge of the city.

She knew abstractly that it wasn't possible to
see
all of it from any one point, not in these hills. She knew that in her mind, but the emotional impact of so great a force as they had gathered together
should
leave her breathless, or so she felt. So as the sentries barring the road demanded and received passwords, she felt oddly disappointed.