“Let us hope this is not the case.” Pyrust nodded slowly. “Yes, Captain, you have news?”

The Fire Hawk captain bowed as the rain washed blood from his armor. “The ministers asked to speak with you, Highness.”

“Thank you.”

“Highness, I was unable to spare the carpet.”

Pyrust shrugged. “Fear not. Soon many of the ministers will be without employment. I will have them clean it.”

Chapter Forty

1st day, Planting Season, Year of the Rat

10th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court

163rd Year of the Komyr Dynasty

737th year since the Cataclysm

Uronek Hills, County of Faeut

Erumvirine

There are generals who look at war as a game. They study maps, not battlefields, and think of their warriors as toy soldiers. They think of casualties in terms of “acceptable losses” or “inevitable costs.” While they may be wise, they have their troops fight to shift colors on a map and, in their minds, all is reduced to dipping a brush in ink and painting.

I would give my opponent the grace of judging me and my troops based on the Virine troops he’d faced during the invasion. Doing that, however, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was stupid, precisely because he assumed I was stupid and that my men were incapable of fighting. He chose to underestimate us, which is as sure a sign of intellectual weakness as a military leader can display.

The first axiom in war is to assume the enemy is as clever as you are, if not more so. This forces you to look at all his actions and to ask yourself why you would be doing the same thing. If you can find no advantage to his action, then you may have discovered a mistake. If you can see a gain to exploiting that mistake, then you exploit it.

My difficulty lay in choosing which of his mistakes I would exploit.

Our withdrawal from Kelewan resulted in no serious pursuit. Once we had eluded the battalion he’d sent after us, we moved northwest through the central Virine plains toward the County of Faeut. We followed the Imperial Road, but I did send riders out to villages and towns advising them to evacuate north. My people found many of the villages already deserted, and these we put to the torch after hauling off anything of use.

We did leave one village intact, after a fashion. We put livestock into pens, then arranged every manner of trap we could think of in the houses. We poisoned the wells and prepared everything to burn. I left a squad there to observe what happened when the enemy reached it.

The refugees who preceded us raised the alarm, so local nobles met us on the road with whatever household warriors they could muster. They thought initially to oppose us, but when Captain Lumel introduced them to Prince Iekariwynal, they decided to join us. This swelled our number to over seven hundred, which was a decidedly useful force in the rugged hill country of County Faeut. Moreover it gave us guides and scouts who had an intimate knowledge of the battlefields we might use to engage the enemy.

Here was another mistake my enemy made. Because his army lived off the land, including the people, he had no locals to advise him. While the invaders advanced in good order, even the best maps could not account for places where spring runoff had collapsed part of the road, or where seasonal flooding turned a plain into an impassable marsh. The terrain forced his troops to stop where they needed to keep moving, and to take paths they knew nothing about.

Our campaign was not without surprises either, and the Prince turned out to be one of the pleasant variety. Though quite young, he did not lack for intelligence. He trusted Captain Lumel and struck up a friendship with Dunos. Dunos’ unwavering confidence in me became transferred to the Prince, and among our company, my word became law.

I divided my force into three battalions. Captain Lumel had his Jade Bears and had we ever arrayed ourselves for open battle, they would have held our center. Deshiel commanded the Steel Bear archers and two companies of local troops. Ranai commanded our heroes and whatever other locals came to fight.

Not all of my heroes led companies or even squads, for heroes do not always make good leaders. If they expect of others what they can do because of years of training, they willingly thrust their troops into situations where survival is impossible. I made it clear to all of my officers that our intent was to hurt the enemy as much as we could, and to allow them to do as little as possible in return. We would not duel with them, we would not engage them in any honorable pursuit. We would strike when they thought we could not, we would escape when they thought they had us trapped, and when they attacked from their right, we would strike from their left.

Urardsa attended all the briefings and watched the proceedings carefully. Many of the fighters found having a Gloon among them rather unnerving, but the fact that he never predicted doom was heartening. Even without suggestion, he would spend time peering off south toward the enemy host, then shake his head and turn away. My warriors’ confidence that he had seen doom for the enemy was worth ten warriors for every one I already had.

One night, when I woke in my tent, deep in a forest, I found him crouched in a corner, a ghostly presence that sent a chill through me. “What is it, Urardsa?”

The quartet of small eyes closed. “Your life is a tangled skein. I cannot find a clean line.”

“Should I be disturbed by this, or is it enough that you are?”

The Gloon smiled, then crawled closer. “Strands tangle, but yours are merging. Your future mirrors your past.”

“Those who forget their journeys are forever doomed to tread the same path.” I threw my blanket off and came up into a sitting position. “I know I have fought battles like this before. Perhaps even here, in Faeut.”

“You have been here before, many times.”

“Not just as Moraven Tolo. I have his memories, and they have been useful.” I wiped sleep sand from my eyes. “I am tempted to ask you if what you see is strong.”

The Gloon shook his head. “You will not ask. I will not tell.”

I smiled. “Battle is a place where possibilities shift too quickly for me to believe your predictions regardless.”

The Gloon laughed, not an altogether happy sound. “But you have told your people that a battle is won before the first arrow flies.”

“And it is. So it shall be tomorrow.”

What I had learned from the village helped greatly in planning the first significant fight. The vhangxi had been under slightly better control than at the graveyard, and the kwajiin made up more of the force pursuing us. Even so, the vhangxi tore the village apart. Many fell prey to our traps, and the kwajiin dispatched the most seriously wounded. The blue-skins did get ill from the water, though not as grievously as a man would have. Even when the village began to burn, they were not prone to panic and withdrew in good order.

In the troops themselves, we only noticed one flaw. The units seemed made up of clan groups, which did not mix and even seemed hostile to each other. The commander of the troops coming after us fought under a banner of a bloody skull, and all other troops chafed under being subordinate to his kinsmen.

We set our trap carefully to utilize all we had learned. We picked a point where a wooden bridge on the Imperial Road had been washed away and, in two days, cleared enough trees from a hillside track to make it appear as if woodsmen had created a road paralleling the gorge. It went east up and over two small hills, then through a ravine that angled back to the southeast. At the far end, the land dropped away into a deep cut that led down into the gorge roughly a thousand yards east of where the bridge had stood.