A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [66]
“My humble thanks. I know she’ll never love me, but at least I can die content, knowing she’ll live.”
“You might not die at all, dimwit.” It was Jezryaladar, strolling over to them. “The banadar has a trick planned. That was the reason they let one scout get away, as you might have known if you’d only listened more carefully.”
“With these odds, a trick’s not going to do much good, no matter how clever it is, and don’t you call me a dimwit.”
“My humble apologies.” Grinning, Jezryaladar sketched a bow. “And your intellect does seem to be catching fire, truly, if you realize that you’ve got no chance with Dalla.”
Calonderiel howled and slapped him across the face so hard that he staggered back. Before he could recover or speak, Calonderiel had stalked off into the night. Jezryaladar rubbed his face and swore softly to himself.
“Are you all right?” Aderyn said.
“I am, and you know, I deserved that. We’re all on edge tonight, I’m afraid.”
“Do you think Cal’s right, and things are hopeless?”
“I don’t, but blast me if I can tell why. I’ve just got this certainty deep in my heart that somehow or other Halaberiel’s going to get us a victory out of this, but I doubt me if the banadar believes it himself.”
• • •
The valley that sheltered the Lake of the Leaping Trout fell steeply to the water along its eastern side, but on the western, gentle hills rolled down, forming a strip of fairly flat ground, at least twenty yards wide, often wider, edging the entire length of the lake. When the lone scout came back with the news that the Westfolk were camped up at the far end, Melaudd and his allies automatically decided to move up on this flat ground, where they could ride three and four abreast in battle order, safe from some sudden ambush.
“Not that there’s going to be an ambush,” Garedd remarked. “From what I hear, the Westfolk only have about eighty riders with swords.”
“That troubles my heart,” Cinvan said, and he meant it. “I hate to fight with this kind of odds on our side. I’m an oath-sworn warrior, not a pig butcher.”
“Well, Melaudd’s an honorable man. He won’t let all four hundred men charge a tiny warband like that. Probably just half of the army will ride in the first wave, and then we’ll see what happens.”
“That’s a little better, anyway.”
As the Bear clan’s sworn men, Cinvan and Garedd were in that first wave when the army rode out on the morrow. Four hundred horseman jammed onto a narrow strip of ground tend to spread out, and the day was hot with the last of false summer, too, making the animals a little lazy and the men overconfident, with the end result that the line of march was over a quarter mile long as it wound its way toward the battle. At the time, since everyone assumed that the men in the rear would take no part in the fighting, it worried no one that they had no way of seeing what was happening in the van, if indeed anyone even thought of it. Cinvan and Garedd, riding some twelve ranks behind Tieryn Melaudd and Lord Dovyn, had as much of a view as they needed, especially since their route rose and fell to give them the occasional high ground. It was on one of these small rises, in fact, that they got their first good look at the elven line.
“Are they daft?” Melaudd said it so loud that Cinvan could hear him over the muffled clop of hooves on grass and the clinking of battle gear.
“Must be,” Garedd muttered in an answer unheard by their lord.
The elven swordsmen were dismounted. In regular ranks they stood some hundreds of yards ahead in a crescent formation, its open and embracing end toward the oncoming Bears. To one side of them was the lake itself, and on the other, a line of sharpened wooden stakes pounded at regular intervals into the slope, with the points slanting uphill.
“Clever, that,” Cinvan said grudgingly. “We can’t outflank them and ride them down.”
“Just so. But wait a minute, what’s that behind them? Looks like a crowd of women.”
“With stakes in front of them, too. What?! By all the ice in all the hells, what are those females doing there? Are they