Pirvan heard the doors shut and slipped a hand around Haimya’s waist. “I think we should be ready to say good night before long, too.”
“You are not, I trust, in too much haste in that matter?”
“Not such haste as to displease a lady.”
“I commend your honor.”
“It’s more good sense than honor, considering what displeased ladies can do.”
Haimya drew closer. “Perhaps you should contemplate the possibilities of a pleased lady.”
They did more than contemplate possibilities; they explored them thoroughly. They were lying close together when Haimya stirred and propped herself up on one elbow.
“Have we forgotten anything we need for going north?”
“We haven’t packed the supplies yet.”
“I was thinking of making sure that the knights do not accuse us of disobedience.”
Pirvan drew Haimya down onto his chest and savored that pleasure for a moment before replying. “We do have to spend some time in Karthay. Sir Marod was quite firm in his letters about the duty of all who served him, to learn what Karthay intends with its fleet. If we spend even a few days there, that and what we learn from Jemar will satisfy Sir Marod and anyone else who may ask questions.”
Haimya sighed and relaxed against her husband. Then he felt her shoulders quivering, and also warmth and dampness on his chest.
“Haimya?”
“Forgive me,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her free hand. “It’s foolish, but-this is the first time we’re going off and leaving the children since they were old enough to understand danger.”
Pirvan tightened his grip. “My lady and love, if you cry over that, you’ll have me joining you, and the bed will be drenched. You think I do not slip into their bedchambers at night sometimes, to stand looking down at them and all of our hopes that they carry?”
“I thought that was my secret.” She bit him gently on the shoulder, then started kissing him. The kisses made their way up his neck and cheek to his ear.
“My lady, in some ways you have no more secrets from me at all,” Pirvan said as he tightened his embrace still further.
Chapter 5
Darin’s raiders were four days’ march from their stronghold before they reached the first town to the east. It had no garrison of picked Istarian troops, and indeed had not even heard of the soldiers’ coming.
“Which is about the way Istar always treats us,” one merchant said. “We wait a year to get the message with the permission to put new gates on the storehouse. Then the messenger comes, with two hundred mounted escorts who eat the storehouse empty so there’s no need to put so much as a ribbon across the door, because what’s left wouldn’t feed a mouse!”
This was not the first time Darin had heard complaints from folk in the north, that the rule of distant Istar was capricious and as often harsh as helpful. That was certainly a weak point, at least of Istar, to bring back to Waydol.
Meanwhile, Darin felt no inclination to loot the town, particularly as its walls were of well-laid stone and its people robust and determined, if not particularly skilled in arms. Instead of raiding, he paid some hundred and fifty Istarian towers for a dozen reasonably stout horses. This would give him a band of mounted scouts, to ride in the vanguard, on the flanks, or to the rear, wherever the need was greatest.
The raiders moved on, in two columns now, with the scouts carrying messages back and forth. Darin found Fertig Temperer no less harsh-tongued than ever, but under the harsh tongue was usually shrewd advice. The dwarves did not often come out of their mountains in great numbers to fight in human wars, but their own wars were the stuff of legends. A dwarf resolved on battle had everything a minotaur did except stature and strength, and frequently made up for those with keener wits.
The seventh day took them past two villages, whose farmers were all in the field when the raiders burst out of the woods. Panic sent the farmers fleeing, raising the alarm as they ran.
Instead of barring the gates, one village left them open. Out of those open gates thundered half a dozen horsemen, so well accoutred and sitting their saddles so well that for a moment Darin feared they had encountered Knights of Solamnia.
Instead of charging home, however, the mounted men circled wide around the fleeing villagers. They rode to Darin’s flank, then charged that flank in as wide a line as six men could make, keeping beyond the reach of most of the archers in Darin’s center.
The riders struck home with vigor and skill. They spitted two of Darin’s men on lances, and a third fell with his skull slashed open. They wounded two more raiders, and one rider was dismounting to take prisoners when the archers finally came running to within range.
Unsettled, their shooting was wild, and narrowly missed adding to the toll of hurt and wounded friends. But two horses fell; the first dismounted man went down bristling with arrows, and Darin rode up to deal with the others unhorsed.
At least that was his intent. The two remaining mounted men turned their mounts hard about and flung themselves at him. The archers could not shoot, friend and foe being utterly mingled, and while Darin tried to learn the art of swordfighting from horseback the two dismounted men scrambled onto their dead comrade’s horse.
Then all the survivors put in spurs and were out of sight in the woods before the archers realized that they had a clear target again. Darin dismounted, hoping that at least the fallen man was alive to talk, but two arrows in the face had pierced deep enough to silence him forever.
“This,” Darin said, “was not well done. We were to annoy the enemy, learn his strength, and take prisoners. It would seem that Aurhinius has given his captains the same orders-and that this day, his scouts obeyed his better than we obeyed Waydol’s.”
The raiders made a cold camp that night, with extra guards posted in case the surviving Istarian riders returned with either darkness and surprise or greater numbers on their side. The night passed without either excitement or comfort, however, and at dawn the raiders moved out once more.
* * * * *
For the next few days, the land might as well have been uninhabited, for all that Darin and his company saw of the god-created races. There were farms and villages, and even one town to which they gave a wide berth, fearing it might house a garrison or scouts. But all of these were either deserted, or, as Darin thought more probable, wishing to seem that way.
They took to moving by night, reckoning that the local folk might have chosen darkness to do their business on roads free of raiders. But this only succeeded in getting the company thoroughly lost twice in as many nights, and three men wandered all the way into a bog, from which only one emerged alive.
Darin stood a little apart with his underchiefs as Imsaffor Whistletrot used his hoopak to sound a dirge for the lost men, while doing a kender dance that made the human chief think of a chicken on hot coals. As a musical instrument, the hoopak made a low-pitched roaring that reminded Darin of surf on the shore of a distant and haunted sea.
Which fit rather too well with his mood at the moment, he had to admit. The raiders had gone out with the intention of lowering Istarian spirits, or at least reducing their numbers. So far, the spirits and numbers most seriously lowered were the raiders’.
Waydol would be even less pleased with his heir than the heir was, at this moment, pleased with himself.
“What next?” Fertig Temperer asked, putting everyone’s thoughts into two gruff words.
Darin used the excuse of the farewell to the dead men to not reply for a few moments. But that was all he had before Whistletrot stopped his dance, slung his hoopak, and scrambled up the nearest tall tree.