When Grus saw that the Menteshe had stalled, he dared breathe again. With the nomads in his own army's rear, he'd feared his force would come unraveled like a poorly woven cloak. He began to think past mere survival. Pointing toward the hillock on the left, he said, "I wish we could get a messenger over there. If they hit the nomads from behind now.."

"I know," the general answered. "I'll try if you like, but I don't think anybody can get through the Menteshe."

Grus gauged the ground and grimaced. He feared Hirundo was right. He didn't want to send a man – or, more likely, several men – to death with no hope of success. But the battle hung in the balance. Part of being a king was doing things that needed doing, no matter how unpleasant they were. "I think you'd better -" he began.

He never finished giving the order. As they had not long before, he and Hirundo both cried out together. This time, though, they whooped with delight instead of shouting in anger and dismay. The officer in charge of the Avornans on the hill charged into the rear of the Menteshe without orders from anybody. Seeing what he ought to do, he went and did it.

He could hardly have timed the move better. The nomads had just discovered that they couldn't go forward anymore. Now they had enemy soldiers coming at them from behind, as they'd hoped to come at the Avornans. Thrown into confusion, they started streaming away toward the south. They were brave, yes, but they had never been much for taking a beating to no purpose.

"Push them!" Grus yelled. "Punish them! Make them sorry they ever tried to fight us! By the gods, they'd better be!"

The Avornans did what they could. It was less than Grus had hoped for, though not less than he'd expected. The Menteshe could flee faster than his men could pursue. They wore less armor to weigh them down. And they did not have to worry about keeping good order as they galloped away. The Avornans did, lest the nomads re-form and counterattack. A lot of the Menteshe, then, managed to escape.

"We beat them," Hirundo said. "We drove them back." He allowed himself a long, loud sigh of relief.

"We should have done more." But Grus could not make himself sound too disappointed. They had won. They had driven the Menteshe back. "For a while there, I wasn't sure we were going to keep our heads above water." That was putting it mildly.

"Me, too, Your Majesty." Hirundo sighed again, this time theatrically. "When they broke through there… They had a better general than anyone we've seen in charge of them before. And, I'm afraid, the general we had could have done a better job." He made a wry face.

"I'd be angrier at you if the nomads hadn't fooled me, too," Grus said.

Hirundo shook a finger at him – a fussy, foolish sort of thing to see on a battlefield. "Aren't you paying me to be smarter than you are?"

"I suppose I am," Grus admitted. "But we both got by with being stupid this time." He paused. "We'll want prisoners, too, quite a few of them. I need to know who was in charge of the Menteshe, and who fought for him."

"He was formidable, whoever he was," Hirundo said.

Grus hadn't been thinking about the enemy general just then, though Hirundo was right. He'd been wondering about the overlord that general served. Had Sanjar's men attacked him? Had Korkut's? Or had their warriors joined forces, perhaps under the banner of the Banished One?

Avornan soldiers brought Menteshe prisoners before him. Some of the captives spoke Avornan. He used an interpreter to talk to the others. One by one, he asked them, "Which overlord do you follow?"

Some of them said, "Korkut." Some said, "The Fallen Star." And some said, "Sanjar." That helped him very little.

He tried a different question, asking, "Which overlord commanded your army?"

Most of the Menteshe answered, "Bori-Bars," which gave him the name of their general.

Then Grus asked, "Which prince does Bori-Bars serve?" Some of the nomads gave Sanjar's name, others Korkut's. Grus scratched his head. He didn't see how one general could serve both princes. For that matter, neither did the Menteshe. They shouted angrily at one another. Grus summoned Pterocles, wondering whether the wizard could get to the bottom of it.

Pterocles looked at the prisoners. He listened to them. He cocked his head to one side, intently studying them. He muttered under his breath. "I think I am going to have to try a spell," he said. "This is

… interesting."

"Glad to intrigue you," Grus said.

The spell the wizard used reminded Grus a little of the one he employed to free the thralls. It involved a clear crystal swinging on the end of a silver chain and flashes of light. These weren't rainbow flashes, though; they were sparks of clear green light, the color of freshly sprouted grass in bright spring sunshine. The Menteshe smiled as the sparks swirled around them.

Pterocles wasn't smiling; his face wore a mask of intense concentration. After he had used the spell on three or four nomads, he turned to Grus and said, "It's very interesting."

"What is?" Grus asked, as he was surely meant to do.

"It's something less than thralldom and something more than nothing," the wizard replied. "It makes the Menteshe.. believe whatever they're told, you might say. They all heard that this Bori-Bars was against us and for their prince, and they didn't worry about who the prince might be. They all just followed Bori-Bars and made this attack on us."

Grus whistled tunelessly between his teeth. "Sounds like something the Banished One could deliver, doesn't it?"

"Well, I can't see anyone else who benefits more from it," Pterocles said.

"Neither can I," Grus said. "Is there a counterspell?"

"Maybe there is. I would have to work it out, though," Pterocles replied. "We may not need one. You saw how these nomads started going at each other like a kettle of crabs when they realized they weren't one big happy army after all. What do you want to bet the same thing is happening in their camps right now?"

"That would be nice." Grus had a vivid mental image of civil war breaking out anew among the Menteshe. He hoped it was a true image. But then, a moment later, it flickered and blew out. "If the Banished One wants to use this spell of his again, he can bring them together for another attack, can't he?"

Pterocles looked thoughtful. "That's a good question, Your Majesty. I haven't got a good answer for you. My guess would be that the spell wouldn't work so well a second time; people would remember what had happened before. If he wanted to do it again, he might have to find warriors who hadn't already been enchanted once. But I can't prove any of that, not until I see the magic in action again. It's only my feeling about how things are likely to work."

"All right. What you say seems reasonable to me – but I don't know how much that has to do with the way magic works," Grus said. "So the Menteshe may well come together against us in big armies again, regardless of whether Sanjar and Korkut kiss and make up."

"That's the way it looks to me," Pterocles said. "It's happened once. I don't see why it can't happen again."

"Neither do I," Grus said. "By Olor's beard, though, I wish I did." If the Menteshe kept throwing everything they had at his men.. . We'll just have to beat all of them, that's all. Then maybe they won't be able to keep us out of Yozgat.

Lanius waited anxiously for letters from the south. Grus' accounts of what went on were bald but, as far as Lanius could tell, generally accurate. One of these years, some yet unborn king with a taste for history would find Grus' letters in the archives and waste a lot of enjoyable time reconstructing his campaigns.

Grus usually wrote a letter every few days. He didn't have a precise pattern; even if he had, the vagaries of the courier system would have disrupted it. Lanius had learned not to worry when a week or ten days went by without word from the other king. All it meant was that a courier had been delayed, or perhaps that the Menteshe had waylaid one.