“Great!” Yorick grinned with relief: then, suddenly, he frowned. “But wait a minute. How’ll your warlock find us?”
“Just stare at a fire and try to blank your mind every evening for a few hours,” Rod explained, “and think something abstract—the sound of one hand clapping, or some such, over and over again. The warlock’ll home in on your mind.”
Yorick looked up, startled. “You mean your telepaths can read our minds?”
“Sort of,” Rod admitted. “At least, they can tell you’re there, and where you are.”
Yorick smiled, relieved. “Well. No wonder you knew where the raiders were going to land next.”
“After the first strike, yes.” Rod smiled. “Of course, we can’t understand your language.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Yorick raised a forefinger. “I’ll make sure I don’t think in English.”
Rod wasn’t sure he could, but he didn’t say so.
Yorick turned back to the King and Queen. “If you don’t mind, I’ll toddle along now, Your Majesties.” He bowed. “I’d like to go tell my men it’s time to move out.”
“Do, then,” Tuan said regally, “and inform thy men that they may trust in us as deeply as we may trust in them.”
Yorick paused at the door and looked back, raising one eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
Tuan nodded firmly.
Yorick grinned again. “I think you just said more than you knew. Godspeed, Majesties.” He bowed again and opened the door; the sentry ushered him out.
Catharine was the first to heave a huge sigh of relief. “Well! ‘Tis done.” She eyed her husband. “How shall we know if the greatest part of his bargain’s fulfilled, ere thy battle?”
“Well, I wasn’t quite candid with him,” Rod admitted. He stepped over to the wall and lifted the edge of a tapestry. “What do you think, dear? Can we trust him?”
Gwen nodded as she stepped out into the room. “Aye, my lord. There was not even the smallest hint of duplicity in his thoughts.”
“He was thinking in English,” Rod explained to the startled King and Queen. “He had to; he was talking to us.”
Tuan’s face broke into a broad grin. “So that was thy meaning when thou didst speak of ‘eavesdroppers’!”
“Well, not entirely. But I did kind of have Gwen in mind.”
“Yet may he not have been thinking in his own tongue, beneath the thoughts he spoke to us?” Catharine demanded.
Gwen cast an approving glance at her. Rod read it and agreed; though Catharine tended to flare into anger if you mentioned her own psi powers to her, she was obviously progressing well in their use, to have come across the idea of submerged thoughts.
“Mayhap, Majesty,” Gwen agreed. “Yet, beneath those thoughts in his own tongue there are the root-thoughts that give rise to words, but which themselves are without words. They are naked flashes of idea, as yet unclothed. Even there, as deeply as I could read him, there was no hint of treachery.”
“But just to be sure, we’ll have Toby check out his camp right before the invasion,” Rod explained. “He’s learned enough to be able to dig beneath the camouflage of surface thoughts, if there is any.”
The door opened, and the sentry stepped in to announce, “Sir Maris doth request audience, Majesties.”
“Aye, indeed!” Tuan turned to face the door, delighted. “Mayhap he doth bring word from our sentries who have kept watch to be certain the beastmen do not turn back, to attempt one last surprise. Assuredly, present him!”
The sentry stepped aside, and the seneschal limped into the chamber, leaning heavily on his staff, but with a grin that stretched from ear to ear.
“Welcome, good Sir Maris!” Tuan cried. “What news?”
“ ‘Twas even as thou hadst thought, Majesty.” Sir Maris paused in front of Tuan for a sketchy bow, then straightened up, and his grin turned wolfish. “Three ships did curve and seek to sail into the mouth of a smaller river that runs athwart the Fleuve.”
“They were repulsed?” Glints danced in Tuan’s eyes.
“Aye, my liege! Our archers filled their ships with fire, the whiles our soldiers slung a weighty chain across the river. When they ground against it and found they could sail no further, they sought to come ashore; but our men-at-arms presented them a hedge of pikes. Nay, they turned and fled.” He turned to Rod. “Our thanks, Lord Warlock, for thy good aid in this endeavor!”
Rod started, staring, and Gwen caught his arm and her breath; but Sir Maris whirled back to the King, fairly crowing, “He did seem to be everywhere, first on this bank, then on that, amongst the archers, then amongst the pikemen, everywhere urging them on to feats of greater valor. Nay, they’ll not believe that they can lose now.”
Gwen looked up, but Rod stood frozen.
“Yet, withal,” said the old knight, frowning, “why hadst thou assigned command to me? If the High Warlock were there to lead, he should have had command as well!”
“But,” said Tuan, turning to Rod, “thou wast ever here in Runnymede, with ourselves, the whiles this raid was foiled!”
“I noticed,” Rod croaked.
“My lord, not all things that hap here are impossible,” Gwen sighed.
“Oh, yes, they are. Take you, for example—that someone as wonderful as you could even exist is highly improbable. But that you could not only exist but also fall in love with someone like me—well, that’s flatly impossible.”
Gwen gave him a radiant smile. “Thou wilt ever undervalue thyself, Rod Gallowglass, and overvalue me—and thus hath made a cold world turn warm for me.”
That look in her eyes he couldn’t resist; it pulled him down, and down, into a long, deep kiss that tried to pull him deeper. But eventually Rod remembered that he was on the deck of a ship, and that the crew were no doubt watching. He was tempted to consign them all to the Inferno, but he remembered his responsibilities and pulled out of the kiss with a regretful sigh. “We haven’t been doing enough of that lately.”
“I am well aware of that, my lord.” Gwen fixed him with a glittering eye.
“And I thought the Neanderthals had an ‘Evil Eye’!” Rod breathed, and turned to hook her hand firmly around his elbow as he strolled down the deck. “For now, however, let’s enjoy the Seabreeze and the salt air. After all, this is the closest thing to a pleasure cruise we’re ever apt to get.”
“As thou dost say, my lord,” she said demurely.
“Just so you don’t mistake my doppelganger for me,” Rod amended.
Gwen shook her head firmly. “That could not hap at any distance less than an hundred feet.”
“Well, I hope not—but quite a few people seem to have been making the error.”
“Ah, but how well do they know thee?” Gwen crooned. “If they’ve seen thee at all before, it has been only briefly and from a distance.”
“Yeah, but there’re some who… well, there’s one!” Rod stopped next to a brown-robed form that sat cross-legged on the deck, leaning against the rail with a half-filled inkhorn in his left hand, writing in a careful round hand in a book of huge vellum sheets. “Hail, Brother Chillde!”
The monk looked up, startled. Then a smile of delight spread over his face. “Well met, Lord Warlock! I had hoped to espy thee here!”
Rod shrugged. “Where else would I be? It’s the King’s flagship. But how do you come to be here, Brother Chillde?”
“I am chaplain,” the monk said simply. “And I wish to be near to the King and his councillors as may be, an I am able; for I strive to record what doth occur during this war as well as I may.”
“So your chronicle’s coming well? How far back have you managed to dig?”
“Why, I began four years agone, when the old King died, and have writ down all I’ve seen or heard that has occurred during, first, the reign of Catharine, then during the reign of both our goodly King and Queen.” He beamed up at them. “Yet, in this present crisis I have been fortunate to be in the thick of it, almost from the first. My journal shall be precise, so that folk yet unborn, and many hundreds of years hence, may know how nobly our folk of this present age did acquit themselves.”