“What became of him?” Lyopi asked.
Balif feigned indifference, but strong emotions plainly lurked behind this façade. “He overreached himself and so was dismissed.”
In view of his past services, Vedvedsica’s life had been spared, but he had been banished from Silvanos’s realm. Where he lived now, Balif knew not.
Shading his pale eyes, the elf lord changed the subject. “This open ground will suit Karada and the raiders. Not good for us on foot, though. We won’t have much shelter from attacking horsemen.”
The rumble of massed hoofbeats announced the approach of Karada’s band. The nomads emerged from camp in a column divided in three forces, each roughly two hundred strong.
Karada rode to the crest of the knoll where her brother, Lyopi, and Balif stood. When she stopped, the horsemen behind her halted. The middle section swung right and filled in the gap between Karada and the Silvanesti. The third rode out to their left, aligning itself beside the villagers. Bahco and two lieutenants rode out from the left wing to join Karada, as did Pakito and two riders from the right. Everyone dismounted, and greetings were exchanged.
“Bad weather for battle,” Balif remarked dryly.
“Bad for the enemy as well,” Karada replied, looking toward Zannian’s camp.
They all turned to follow her gaze. The pulsing wind scoured away the usual spires of smoke from campfires, leaving the western half of the valley looking barren. Sunlight, visible only intermittently through the thick clouds, flashed over the panoramic view. By the river, the raiders’ camp appeared deserted.
“Have they fled?” Bahco wondered.
Amero did not think so. “Their campfires burned until dawn. I could see them from the wall.”
“They’re there,” said Karada. “If I judge this Zannian right, he won’t run away. The ogres will be here, too. Of that I’m sure.”
She went to the forward edge of the knoll and looked over the ground between there and the low hills shielding the river. Except for a few odd boulders buried in the soil, and a tree or two, the land was level and without cover.
“Amero, your people and the elves will go there,” she said, pointing to the west baffle of Yala-tene. “Hold the ground between the village and the lake.”
“Just hold?” asked Balif.
“Yes. Between my band and the raiders, there will be nearly a thousand riders in the valley. Your fighters on foot number less than a hundred. You could get trampled by either side.”
“Good point,” Balif said, just as Lyopi muttered indignantly, “No one’s going to trample us!”
The elf lord added, “What if the ogres array against us? What then?”
“They won’t,” Karada said. “Chief Ungrah wants my head. He’ll come after me.”
“We’ll hold our place unless chance beckons us to go elsewhere,” said Balif.
“Don’t get adventurous on me, elf! The last thing I need in the midst of a melee is to have to break off and ride to your rescue!”
“I hardly expect you to rescue—” Balif began, but Amero signed for him not to argue, and Balif understood. It was her brother, fighting with the elves, whom Karada would feel compelled to rescue.
“Now,” Karada said, “I expect Zannian and his ogre friends to come for me as hard and fast as they can. I’ll make myself plain and invite them. In fact, I’ll give way to them, draw them in. Once they’re fully engaged, I want the wings to close in on their sides and rear.
No one is to escape.” To illustrate her meaning, she drew a simple plan in the dirt. Pakito and Bahco avowed their understanding.
More thunder rolled across the valley, chased by heavy gusts of wind. Whitecaps danced on the Lake of the Falls. Balif returned to his soldiers and marched them where Karada had decreed.
“Good luck,” Amero said, clapping his sister firmly on the shoulder. A smile teased the comers of her mouth, then she gruffly sent her brother on his way.
With the villagers in the lead, Balif and Amero’s groups descended the knoll and passed under the walls of Yala-tene. The plain was littered with the burned and broken remains of previous attacks—weapons, travois, dead horses. Fallen raiders were always cleared from the field by night, so no human corpses haunted their march. At one point Amero happened to look up and see the village wall, lined with his people. Some waved, but all were silent.
The west baffle was little more than a mound of rubble. Ogres had torn it apart, using slabs of rock and loose stones to make a crude ramp leading up to the main wall. Hekani pointed out the soot marks on the wall where he’d used fire to repel Ungrah-de. They also saw the bodies of four ogres, killed earlier, which still lay in the shadow of the town wall.
Amero arranged his people in a double line from the ruined baffle out toward the lake. Balif deployed his trained soldiers in a single, widely spaced line. The elves knelt on one knee, spears out. Balif stood behind them with the elf entrusted to carry the standard.
They waited.
Karada’s force spread out across the top of the knoll, and she took her place at the center of the front line. Horses pranced and pawed, sensing the nervous excitement of their riders. Overhead, the unsettled air added its own fuel to the tension. Birds roosting on the cliffs abandoned their nests in the swirling wind. Flocks of sweeps and starlings filled the sky, their dark bodies swooping and circling several times before being carried off on the wind.
It seemed a bad omen to Beramun, and she said as much to Karada.
“We make our own fates,” the nomad chief said. “No one else.”
“Do the Great Spirits mean nothing to you?”
“I have no time for them now.” Her gruff voice took on a more caring tone. “Be careful, girl.”
Beramun vowed she would. Her shoulder still twinged, but at least the pain was in her left shoulder and not her right, where she wielded her spear.
As part of Karada’s plan, a line of riders filed out on each side of her position, making it appear from a distance as though the whole nomad band was on the hill. On the reverse slope, Bahco and Pakito kept the bulk of their warriors secreted out of sight.
With the thick clouds churning it was hard to read the time of day, but it wasn’t long after Karada had deployed her various troops that the first stirrings on the riverbank could be seen. A deep drum sounded a steady, repeated note. Wind stole the sound and played it falsely off the rocky crags lining the valley. The drumming seemed to come from the east, then the south. Scouts sent in those directions reported no enemy in sight.
By the lake, Amero and his people tried to see what was happening. Even the disciplined elves were curious, a few daring Balif’s displeasure by breaking formation and standing erect and straining to see. A single word from him recalled them to their places.
From the village wall, people began shouting and waving. They had a longer view than anyone on the ground and could see what was coming.
The drumbeat grew louder. Something was moving on the riverbank. Swinging into view above the sandy hills came a great ogre, half again as tall as any man, festooned from head to waist in leather armor studded with chunks of stone the size of a human man’s fist. Skulls of past victims dangled from his chest, and a giant single-bladed axe rested on his shoulder.
“Ungrah-de,” said Amero under his breath. Merely speaking the name made him sweat. All of the villagers fighting with him closed in until their shoulders nearly touched. They’d fought the ogres for days from the wall, but it was quite another thing to face such monsters toe to toe on open ground.
More fanged faces appeared, striding along behind their leader. To warn Karada, villagers on the wall chanted, “Ogres! Ogres!”
They came forth in a broad spearhead formation, with Ungrah-de at the front. They crossed the old road from Yala-tene to the river, making straight for the open ground north of the village. When the trailing ogres on the right end of the line spotted Balif and Amero by the lake, they ignored them and kept going.