A jolt ran through him but he fought past the pain. Beyond it, he got a sense of the whole of Okrannel. It was not as if he were a distant hawk, soaring, able to look down on the nation. That would have been very helpful, but his mistress—the yrun of pain—instead gave him a sense of being a layer of thunderheads covering the nation. Where lightning struck, there pain dwelt, and certain loci had more than their share.
Laughing, he pulled himself from her torturous embrace and flowed out into his own flesh again. His eyes flicked open, then he raised a hand to cover them as the light from the snow blinded him. “So he has moved troops south?”
“As you said.” Phfas nodded so emphatically his talismans shook and rattled. “Spring will come early.”
The white-haired general shook his head. “Not as quickly as you would like, Uncle.”
Adrogans detested any parallels between warfare and games—precisely because a game was an abstraction that in no way encompassed war’s frightful cost in lives. Still, a certain amount of playing at warfare had to be done. Each side needed to conceal their strength, while retaining the ability to strike at the enemy or counter his moves. A game of cat and mouse it could be, in which both sides hoped their cat would not run into a hundred-pound mouse with sharp teeth and a scorpion’s sting.
In the battle for Svoin, Adrogans had succeeded in concealing just such a sting. He’d hidden troops from the Aurolani scouts and from his own people, then brought them in at a crucial moment to strike at the Aurolani rear. The surprise shattered the Aurolani host. Princess Alexia had slain the sullanciri that led them, and his troops crushed the Aurolani. The victory, in which he had been aided by his yrun allies, had given him the time he needed to liberate Svoin.
Common wisdom concerning warfare indicated that nothing could happen during the winter. Snows made travel difficult, both because roads and passes would be impassable; and because the snow would cover any forage for man or beast. Even if an army were to venture into the field and survive the frostbite and desertions that would come from hardship, a single blizzard could swallow them whole. Worse yet, a storm or avalanche could wipe out a supply caravan, leaving the army to starve.
Adrogans could not take refuge in the common wisdom, however, because the Aurolani troops were bred in a boreal realm where the worst winter in the south would be considered a mild spring day. While gibberers, frost-claws, and vylaens might not have been the most mentally flexible of troops, they did come in large groups, were used to the cold, and had a casual disregard for their own lives. Nefrai-kesh, therefore, had the ability to move troops down from Svarskya, infiltrate them into the highlands, and cause trouble.
The Jeranese general had predicted Nefrai-kesh would do just that for two reasons. The first was to sow terror in the countryside and erode any confidence won during the victory at Svoin. Besides, the Aurolani seemed to revel in cruelty for the sake of cruelty. The sullanciri had the troops, he could make use of them, and therefore he would.
Second—and of greater strategic importance, as long as Nefrai-kesh was on the offensive—was that he forced Adrogans to react. With hamlets scattered all over the highlands, there was no way to protect everyone. Adrogans would have to field a force that could be kept traveling hither and yon, trying to catch up with raiders who could fade away like ghosts. The effort to stop the raiders would exhaust his people, destroy morale, and possibly even build up resentment among the highlanders for his inability to stop the attacks.
Nefrai-kesh was operating under two disadvantages, though, and Adrogans was certain the Aurolani leader would have acknowledged neither of them as significant. The first was that while he was still human, he had been a formidable military commander. Adrogans knew that Kenwick Norrington had not been his equal even at the best of times, but he did accept that Norrington had known a great deal about warfare. This meant that Norrington might well accept the common wisdom about winter warfare. He would expect Adrogans would retire for the winter, and this gave the Aurolani an advantage since his troops could fight in winter.
The second fault compounded the error of underestimating his enemy. Nefrai-kesh likely knew nothing of the yrun, and certainly knew nothing of Adrogans’ connections with them. Wizards—as evidenced by the Vilwanese warmages in his army—tended to view the Zhusk as magickal curiosities, and Chytrine likely shared that view. Had she seen the Zhusk as any sort of a threat, she would have tried to wipe them out over the last quarter century.
Because his enemy was assuming his troops could not fight in winter, and because Nefrai-kesh was unaware that the yrun gave him enough information about where enemy troops were moving to position his own forces, Adrogans had no choice but to find a way to fight in the winter. The road to Svarskya had several key points that would cost him dearly to take, were they defended. By spring they would be, so if he could strike quickly and deep into Aurolani-occupied territory, he would save troops without which he could not possibly lay siege to Svarskya.
While the vast majority of his army was not well suited to operations in snowy highlands woods, he did have two groups who excelled at just that sort of thing. The Nalisk Mountain Rangers came from the central mountains of Naliserro and had even impressed the highlanders with their stoicism in the face of hardship. And the Loquelven Blackfeathers had fought hard and well at Svoin. Their leader, Mistress Gilthalarwin, still smarted from a disagreement with Adrogans, so she and her troops would take any opportunity they could to prove their worth.
Adrogans nodded slowly. He would use the Rangers and the Blackfeathers to track and destroy the forces Nefrai-kesh sent into the highlands. Striking out from there would be more difficult, but it could be done. If he could take the northern ford of the Svar River and then the Three Brothers Citadel guarding the road through the South Gorge, he’d be at the doorstep to Svarskya before spring rains came.
Phfas cackled. “If not early spring, a mild winter?”
“Not mild in terms of trouble, Uncle.” Adrogans slowly smiled. “Just one full of surprises for those who hate us.”
16
Will smiled as Crow unwrapped the parcel and revealed the sweetcake. “And I didn’t steal it, neither.” Crow glanced up and raised an eyebrow. “But you didn’t pay for it, did you? The baker thought he was giving to the Norrington as a gift.”
The thief blinked. “How did you know?” No one could have told Crow, since Will’s visit to the gaol had been unannounced. Will had assumed that arriving by surprise would allow him to use his status as the Norrington to bluff his way past guards, and it had. None of them were prepared to stop him, especially after he promised he had no weapons and said that his visit was vital for the defeat of the enemy.
The sweetcake had been obtained in a nearby shop where Will had loitered while studying the gaol and its guards. The shopkeeper, an older man with rosy cheeks and a roundness that made him waddle as he walked, had wrapped the sweetcake up and presented the parcel to Will with a touch of ceremony. Since they had been alone in the shop, Will knew the formality was sincere, not meant as a show that might impress others.
Will had thanked him, then headed to the gaol. A couple of guards questioned him, but armed with an imperious tone and a mask that he’d received from the hand of the king, he was not seriously hindered. He’d been ushered up rather than down, which surprised him a bit, and found Crow in a small room, but one that was clean, warm, and had a window that—despite being barred—admitted sunlight. The minimal furnishing consisted of a cot and straw mattress, a chamber pot, a single small table, and two chairs, but everything was in good repair and the chamber pot had a lid.