Hryessa rode over and reined up. “We’ve secured the area, ser.”
“What are our casualties?”
“Three slashes. None that serious. For all the fancy uniforms, these boys weren’t that good. The blades aren’t bad.”
“Pack them up.”
“We’ve recovered most of the shafts and arrowheads, but some will need to be reworked.”
“What about our mounts?”
“Two won’t make it.”
“Take the ten best of their mounts. Use two for replacements, and load the rest with the blades and anything else of value. Let’s find one of the survivors who looks to be able to take a message back to his lord or whoever. Then we need to be moving out.”
“Still to Lornth?”
“It’s looking more important than even the Marshal thought.”
“I don’t care for that, ser.”
Neither did Saryn. “We need one of the riding wounded.”
“There are only two. They’re over by the banner.”
Saryn turned and rode the twenty or so yards to the left side of the road, almost opposite the west end of the orchard that had shielded the second group of attackers.
The two men in brown leathers were the only Lornians still horsed. Both were weaponless. One was black-haired, and both hair and beard were shot with white. Blood oozed from a crude dressing around his lower right arm, and a thin slash ran across his forehead. The other looked young enough to be his son, but with pale red hair and a strong nose, he in no way resembled the older Lornian. Pain contorted his face as he held a crooked lower right arm in place with his left.
Saryn reined up several yards from the pair, flanked by Westwind guards with blades in hand. She looked at the older armsman. “You are free to return to your lord and to tell him the price he has paid for dishonoring the parley flag-and for consorting with the enemies of both Westwind and Lornth. You can take your friend here with you.” She inclined her head toward the fresh-faced Lornian.
“The Lord of Duevek will not be pleased, Angels.” The dark eyes flicked from Saryn to Hryessa and back to Saryn.
“That is possible. We’re not pleased with your lord. Nor will the regents be pleased with him. That makes us even. Now…ride back to your lord and tell him to send retainers to remove these carrion and clear the road. You can also tell him he should be glad the regents have a treaty with Westwind, because, otherwise, he’d have suffered far worse. We’ve only taken the mounts necessary to replace those injured by his attacks-and the weapons used against us.”
“There are far more armsmen in Lornth than angels in Westwind.”
“That is very true,” Saryn replied. “You lost forty men. We lost none. You attacked first. The last time that happened, when Lornth attacked Westwind, we lost thirty, and you lost thousands. Think about it. In fact, you and your lord should think very hard about it.” Saryn felt the conflict boiling within her. Given the Lornian male arrogance, she wanted to slit the man’s throat on the spot as much as she needed him to convey the message. Given what might lie behind the walls of the villa on the hill, she had no intention of delivering it personally. Yet she could sense the swirling of both order and chaos around her. At least, that was the way it felt.
Abruptly, the man’s eyes widened, and he swallowed once, then twice. “Yes…Angel…I will tell him.” He swallowed again. “Might I go…?”
The younger man turned white and swayed in the saddle, then stiffened in greater pain, clearly because he’d moved the broken forearm.
“Go.” While firm, Saryn’s voice contained as much resignation as anger, and she watched as the pair started up the narrow road toward the villa. “What was all that about?” Then she turned to Hryessa. “One moment, he was all bluster, and the next, you’d have thought I was like the engineer when he was using the laser.”
The captain’s lips quirked into an ironic smile. “You looked much like the engineer, and a bright blackness gathered around you. It’s fading now.”
“You don’t seem all that worried.”
“You are an angel, Commander. All of you true angels have such moments. That is a mark of the angels.”
Saryn wondered about that, but introspection could wait. “We need everyone to mount up and get moving.” She pointed to the narrow middle road. “We’ll take the narrow track around the town, not the main road. I don’t imagine we’ll be exactly welcome right now.”
“They were stupid,” Hryessa said.
“That’s because it’s been years since we really exerted any force over Lornth,” Saryn pointed out tiredly. “People who are raised to think women are worthless have a tendency to forget what conflicts with their beliefs.”
“This lord will not forget.”
But how many others are there who already have?
As Saryn urged the gelding forward, she turned back for a moment to see if anyone followed, but the road was empty, except for the dead and wounded. For a moment, she looked back at the hillside and the villa occupying it. If one had to live in Lornth, there were worse places. Set on the hilltop and open to the Westhorns, there would be cool breezes most of the year, and the river wasn’t that far. Duevek itself wasn’t a bad town…
She shook her head. She doubted she’d ever see either Duevek or the villa again, because she certainly wasn’t going to return the way they’d come. That would be asking for even more troubles she didn’t need.
XXIV
Lornth stood in the middle of a valley entered through a gentle pass in the rolling hills and on the higher ground west of the river. As Saryn rode closer to Lornth in late mid afternoon, the already-small holdings grew even smaller, with the space near the cots filled with gardens or crowded pens for livestock. A cat watched from under a scraggly bush, and a nondescript brown dog tied to the post of a rickety porch kept barking as the squad passed, but no one left the cot to investigate. Then the packed-clay road changed into a stone-paved highway-about two kays out from where the randomly crowded cots with their tiny plots were replaced by dwellings whose stucco was a pink so pale it looked white, especially under the bright spring sunlight. The larger dwellings had courtyards with walls finished with the same pinkish white stucco.
As Saryn neared the first of the more-permanent-looking stucco dwellings, a dark-haired and pregnant woman froze in place and almost dropped a shirt she was hanging on a line when she caught sight of the guards riding toward Lornth. Ahead and rising above and to the west of the modest dwellings and structures of the town was a taller redstone tower that Saryn recognized as part of the palace complex. As the guards approached the town proper, they were assaulted by a series of odors, most of them unpleasant, if not revolting, all emphasized by the warm stillness of the air. The side of the road to Saryn’s right held a stone-lined sewage channel, with pools of filth along the bottom, a stark contrast to the cleanliness of Westwind.
Once they were into the town, Saryn saw that the side streets were narrower and darker than she recalled, if paved irregularly, and all had sewage channels on both sides. Some of the larger buildings lining the wider main avenue were of the same reddish granite as the tower and the palace walls. The scattered handfuls of people along the streets reacted in different ways, some gaping, some retreating into the shops, and some remaining apparently oblivious as the guards rode past.
Beyond the small square in the center of the buildings, marked by a pedestal and a statue of Lord Nessil, the avenue narrowed for the three-hundred-odd cubits it continued, flanked by taller, more ornate dwellings, before ending at what passed for a green. On the far side of the green, two hundred cubits away, rose the wall and the palace complex beyond it, all constructed of a pale pink granite.