“None of your business.”
“It certainly is my business. It’s my horse.”
Hall drew his knife. It was a sheep-shearing knife, but he hoped the stranger wouldn’t know. “I don’t have time to argue with you. I need your horse.”
“Put that away, boy, and stop being a fool. The shipment is guarded by eight Caden. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Caden, even out in whatever shithole town you come from. They could break your puny little knife with their teeth.”
The stranger made to grab the horse’s bridle, but Hall held the knife up higher, blocking his path. “I am sorry to be a thief, but that’s the way it is. I have to go.”
The stranger gazed at him for a long moment, assessing. “You’ve got stones, boy, I’ll give you that. What are you, farmer?”
“Shepherd.”
The stranger considered him for another moment and then said, “All right, boy. Here’s how it plays out. I will lend you my horse. His name, appropriately enough, is Favor. You ride him down the Mort Road and take a look at that shipment. If you’re smart, you’ll realize that it’s a no-win proposition, and then you have two choices. You can die senselessly, achieving nothing. Or you can turn around and ride to the army barracks in the Wells, so we can talk about your future.”
“What future?”
“As a soldier, boy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life stinking of sheep shit.”
Hall eyed him uncertainly, wondering if his words were a trick. “What if I just ride off with your horse?”
“You won’t. You’ve a sense of obligation in you, or you’d never be off on this fool’s errand in the first place. Besides, I have an entire army’s worth of horses if I need to come after you.”
The stranger turned and headed back into the pub, leaving Hall standing there at the hitching post.
“Who are you?” Hall called after him.
“Major Bermond, of the Right Front. Ride fast, boy. And if any harm comes to my horse, I’ll take it out of your miserable sheep-loving hide.”
After a hard night’s ride, Hall caught up to the shipment and found that Bermond was right: it was a fortress. Soldiers surrounded each cage, their formations dotted by the red cloaks of the Caden. Hall didn’t have a sword, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe that a sword would make any difference. He couldn’t even get close enough to distinguish Simon; when he tried to approach the cages, one of the Caden launched an arrow that missed him by no more than a foot. It was just as the Major had said.
Still, he considered charging the shipment and ending everything, the terrible future he had already sensed on the trip to New London, a future in which his parents looked at him and only saw Simon missing. Hall’s face would not be a comfort to them, only a terrible reminder. He tightened his grip on the reins, preparing to charge, and then something happened that he would never be able to explain: through the mass of tightly packed prisoners in the sixth cage, he suddenly glimpsed Simon. The cages were too far away for Hall to have seen anything, but seen it he had, all the same: his brother’s face. His own face. If he rode to his death, there would be nothing left of Simon, nothing to even mark his passage. And then Hall saw that this was not about Simon at all, but about his own guilt, his own sorrow. Selfishness and self-destruction, riding hand in hand, as they so often did.
Hall turned the horse, rode back to New London, and joined the Tear army. Major Bermond was his sponsor, and although Bermond would never admit it, Hall thought that the Major must have spoken a word in someone’s ear, because even during Hall’s years in the unranked infantry, he had never been pulled for shipment duty. He sent a portion of his earnings home each month, and on his rare journeys to Idyllwild, his parents surprised him by being gruff but proud of their soldier son. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the General’s Executive Officer by the young age of thirty-one. It wasn’t rewarding work; a soldier’s life under the Regency consisted of breaking up brawls and hunting down petty criminals. There was no glory in it. But this …
“Sir.”
Hall looked up and saw Lieutenant-Colonel Blaser, his second-in-command. Blaser’s face was darkened with soot.
“What is it?”
“Major Caffrey’s signal, sir. Ready on your command.”
“A few more minutes.”
The two of them sat in a bird’s nest deep on the eastern slope of the Border Hills. Hall’s battalion had been out here for several weeks now, working steadily, as they watched the dark mass move across the Mort Flats. The sheer size of the Mort army hindered its progress, but it had come, all the same, and now the encampment sprawled along the southern edge of Lake Karczmar, a black city that stretched halfway to the horizon.
Through his spyglass, Hall could see only four sentries, posted at wide lengths on the western edge of the Mort camp. They were dressed to blend in with the dark, silty surface of the salt flats, but Hall knew the banks of this lake well, and outliers were easy to spot in the growing light. Two of them weren’t even patrolling; they’d dozed off at their posts. The Mort were resting easy, just as they should. The Mace’s reports said that the Mort army numbered over twenty thousand, and their swords and armor were good iron, tipped with steel. And by any measure, the Tear army was weak. Bermond was partly to blame. Hall loved the old man like a father, but Bermond had become too accustomed to peacetime. He toured the Tearling like a farmer inspecting his acres, not a soldier preparing for battle. The Tear army wasn’t ready for war, but now it was upon them, all the same.
Hall’s attention returned, as it had so often in the past week, to the cannons, which sat in a heavily fortified area right in the center of the Mort camp. Until Hall had seen them with his own eyes, he hadn’t believed the Queen, though he didn’t doubt that she’d had some sort of vision. But now, as the light brightened in the east, it gleamed off the iron monsters, accentuating their smooth, cylindrical shapes, and Hall felt the familiar twist of anger in his gut. He was as comfortable with a sword as any man alive, but a sword was a limited weapon. The Mort were trying to bend the rules of warfare as Hall had known it all of his life.
“Fine,” he murmured, tucking away his spyglass, unaware that he spoke aloud. “So will we.”
He descended the ladder from the bird’s nest, Blaser right behind him, each dropping the last ten feet to the ground before they began to climb the hill. In the past twelve hours Hall had quietly deployed more than seven hundred men, archers and infantry, over the eastern slopes. But after weeks of hard physical work, his men found it difficult to remain still and simply lie in wait, particularly in the dark. One sign of increased activity on the hillside would have the Mort wide awake and on their guard, and so Hall had spent most of the night going from post to post, making sure his soldiers didn’t simply jump out of their skins.
The slope grew steeper, until Hall and Blaser were forced to scrabble for handholds among the rocks, their feet slipping in pine needles. Both of them wore thick leather gloves and climbed carefully, for it was dangerous terrain here. The rocks were riddled with tunnels and small caves, and rattlesnakes liked to use the caves for their dens. Border rattlers were tough brutes, the result of millennia spent grappling for survival in an unforgiving place. Thick, leathery skins rendered them nearly impervious to fire and their fangs delivered a carefully controlled dose of venom. One wrong handhold on this slope and it was your life. When Hall and Simon were ten years old, Simon had once captured a rattler with a cage trap and tried to make it into a pet, but the game had lasted less than a week. No matter how well Simon fed the snake, it could not be tamed, and would attack any movement. Finally Hall and Simon had let the snake go, opening the cage and then running for their lives back up the eastern slope. No one knew how long border rattlers lived; Simon’s snake might even be here somewhere, slithering among its brethren just behind the rocks.