Thraxton stared back. He heartily wished Ned of the Forest dead. But wishes had nothing to do with magecraft, no matter what benighted serfs might think. Picking his words with care, Thraxton said, “I have been incanting all through the battle. Without my cantrips, we should be in far worse state today than we are.”

“So you say,” Ned jeered. “So you say. It’d be all the better for proof, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

Leonidas the Priest said, “You must remember, the southrons have mages in their service, too, mages who wickedly seek to thwart Count Thraxton in everything he undertakes.”

“Isn’t he better than any of those fellows?” Ned rounded on Thraxton. “Aren’t you better than any of those fellows? You say you are. Can you prove it?”

“I can prove it. I will prove it,” Thraxton replied. “By this time tomorrow, neither you nor Earl James nor anyone else will be able to doubt what I can do.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Are you answered?”

“Ask me tomorrow this time,” Ned of the Forest said. “I’ll be able to tell you then. Meanwhile, I’m going back to my men.” With a mocking bow, he swept out of the farmhouse.

“Never a dull moment here, is there?” James of Broadpath remarked.

“Not hardly,” Baron Dan said, a remark almost uncouth enough to have come from Ned.

“Perhaps we should rest now, and beseech the Lion God to show us the way to victory come the morning,” Leonidas the Priest said. “If he is gracious, he will send us dreams to show the direction in which we should go.”

“I know the direction in which we should go,” Thraxton said. “I intend to take us there.” He pointed toward the southeast. “The direction in which we should go is straight toward Rising Rock.”

“Well said.” Dan of Rabbit Hill nodded. Leonidas looked aggrieved because Thraxton wasn’t giving the Lion God enough reverence, but Thraxton cared very little how Leonidas looked.

“Let me have a look at the map,” James of Broadpath said. “Dan, if you’d be so kind as to walk over here with me and tell me what the southrons might be up to that doesn’t show up on the sheet here, I’d be in your debt.”

“I’d be glad to do that, sir,” Baron Dan replied.

Leonidas the Priest got to his feet. He didn’t go over to the map. Instead, he said, “I shall pray for the success of our arms,” and left the farmhouse. That struck Count Thraxton as being very much in character for him.

Then another thought crossed his mind: and what of me? He shrugged. He was what he was, and he didn’t intend to change. And one of the things he was, was a mage. He had done a good deal of incanting this first day of the fight, but it had been incanting of a general sort, incanting almost any mage, even a bungling southron, might have tried. A bungling southron would not have done it so well, he thought. He knew his own worth. No one else gave him proper credit-to his way of thinking, no one else had ever given him proper credit, not even King Geoffrey-but he knew his own worth.

And he realized he’d not been using his own worth as he should. He was a master mage, not a journeyman, and he’d been wasting his energy, wasting his talent, on tasks a journeyman could do. Any mage could torment the other army’s soldiers. What he needed to do-and it struck him with the force of a levinbolt from the Thunderer-was torment the other army’s commander.

General Guildenstern would be warded, of course. The southrons would have wizards protecting him from just such an assault. But if I cannot overcome those little wretches, if I cannot either beat them or deceive them, what good am I? Thraxton asked himself.

Decision crystallized. “Gentlemen, you must excuse me,” he told Dan of Rabbit Hill and Earl James. “I have plans of my own to shape.”

The two officers looked up from the map in surprise. Whatever they saw on Count Thraxton’s face must have convinced them, for they saluted and left the farmhouse. Thraxton pulled out first one grimoire, then another, and then yet another. He sat by the hearth and pondered, pausing only to put more wood on the fire every so often to keep the flames bright enough to read by.

What made him realize dawn had come was having to feed the fire less often. As the light grew, so did the sounds of battle from the south. He put down the grimoires and began to cast his spell. A runner came in with a message. Without missing a single pass, without missing a word of his chant, Thraxton seared the fellow with a glance. The runner gulped and fled. Whoever had sent him would just have to solve his own problems.

Thraxton’s spell reached out for his opposite number in King Avram’s army. Strike for the head, and the body dies, he thought. But General Guildenstern was well defended, better even than Thraxton had expected. One after another, counterspells grappled with his cantrip, like so many children’s arms trying to push aside the arm of one strong man.

Driving on despite them took all the power Thraxton had. A lesser man, a less stubborn man, would have given up, thinking the spell beyond his power. But Count Thraxton persevered. This time, he thought, this time, by all the gods, I shall drive it home to the hilt.

And he did. For once, the spell did not go awry, as had happened before. For once, it did not rebound to smite his own soldiers, as had happened before. For once, Count Thraxton lived up to a brag as fully as any man might ever hope to do. He cried out in something as close to delight as his sour spirit could hold, and in full and altogether unalloyed triumph.

As Count Thraxton and his generals hashed over the first day’s battle that evening in a farmhouse close by the River of Death, so General Guildenstern and his generals spent that same night doing the same thing in another farmhouse, a widow’s miserable little hut made of logs, only a very few miles to the south.

“Well, boys, we’re in a scrap, no two ways about it,” Guildenstern said. He swigged from a bottle of brandy. “Ahhh! That’s good, by the gods. We’re in a scrap,” he repeated, hardly noticing he’d already said it once. “We are, we are. But we can still lick ’em, and we will.”

He clenched the hilt of his sword as if it were a traitor’s neck. When Thraxton’s attack went in, he’d had to do some real fighting himself. He knew there were men who questioned his generalship-he had plenty of them right here in the farmhouse with him. But no man ever born could have questioned his courage.

He looked around at the assembled military wisdom-he hoped it was wisdom, at any rate. “All right. Here we are, not quite where we wanted to be when we set out from Rising Rock. But we aren’t lost yet. Anybody who says we are is a gods-damned quitter, and welcome to go home. Question is, what will that Thraxton son of a bitch try and do to us when the fighting picks up in the morning?”

Lieutenant General George shook his head. “No, sir. That’s only part of the question.”

Guildenstern glared at him. Gods damn you, too, Doubting George, he thought. George had warned him Thraxton wasn’t retreating so fast as he’d thought himself. And George had had the nerve to be right, too. General Guildenstern did his best not to remember that as he growled, “What’s the other part?”

“Why, what we can try to do to him, of course,” George answered.

George’s Parthenian accent made it seem as if Thraxton the Braggart had an officer of his own at this council of war. But no one, not even Guildenstern, could challenge his loyalty to King Avram. And he wasn’t wrong here, either. “Fair enough,” Guildenstern said. “What can we do to that Thraxton bastard?”

“I would strengthen the right,” George answered around an enormous yawn. That yawn made Guildenstern yawn in turn, and went in progression from one officer to the next till they’d all shown how weary they were. Guildenstern had a cot to call his own. Doubting George-who yawned again-was perched on a three-legged milking stool. The rest of the generals either stood up or sat cross-legged on the rammed-earth floor.