A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [70]
Everyone slept late that day, then woke, cursing and weeping, to the grim task of burning their own dead and giving Melaudd’s army a decent burial in long trenches—after the bodies of men and horse alike had been stripped of every bit of metal, whether armor or tool. Out of respect for the prejudices of the noble-born, Halaberiel ordered Melaudd, his son Dovyn, and the two allied lords who’d died with them buried in a separate grave, though he did make sharp remarks about the foolishness of men who worried about their corpses. They packed and sodded a shallow mound over all the burials, too, and chipped the story of the battle onto a rough stone plaque. The job took days, and all during it, scouts rode out to the south and east to keep an eye on the Round-ears. Aderyn and Dallandra worked from dawn to dusk and then worked some more by torchlight as they tried to save the wounded horses as well as the wounded men. The elven casualties would mend fast, especially compared with the human beings, and without a trace of infection in all but the worst cases. The riders who had once ridden for Tieryn Melaudd were another matter entirely. Their worst cases all died; the rest were as sullen and misery-wrapped as only defeated men living on the charity of the enemy can be. Aderyn tended them alone to spare Dallandra the job.
“And I appreciate it, too,” she remarked one morning. “But what are we going to do with them? They’re prisoners, I suppose. Is Halaberiel going to use them to bargain terms or suchlike?”
“There’s naught he wants to bargain for, he says, so he’ll just release them.” Aderyn hesitated, studying her pale face and the dark shadows smudging under her eyes. “How do you fare, Dalla? You’ve been working yourself blind.”
“It keeps me from missing Nananna. And if I’m tired enough, I don’t have bad dreams.”
“Dreams about her, you mean?”
“Not truly.” She turned away and seemed to be studying the white clouds billowing up from the south. “I hope we leave here soon. Winter’s on the way, sure enough.”
Aderyn saw that he’d been shut out of some mental chamber as surely as if she’d slammed a door in his face.
When the camp did break, Halaberiel divided his forces. The least-skilled warriors escorted the prisoners south to the Eldidd border, where they’d leave them before turning west to rejoin their alarli. The best of the fighters went with the banadar on a forced march for the treaty-breaking dun beyond Cannobaen. Aderyn, Dallandra, the elven wounded, the injured horses saved from the battle, and a small escort of those archers who were simply sick of fighting headed back west to the place where they’d left the rest of the alarli—left them years ago, or so it seemed to Aderyn, back in some other lifetime. The day they marched, it rained, and it kept raining, too, a good long period of drizzle every day as wave after wave of clouds swept in, dropped their burden, then rolled on. Since with so many injured people and animals along, their small column moved a scant twelve miles a day, by the time that they did rejoin the alarli, those waiting for them were frantic for news. When they rode up, in fact, a huge wail of grief went up from the camp, because everyone assumed that they were the only survivors of some horrible defeat. Once the truth went round, everyone was as much furious as relieved.
“Isn’t that just like the wretched banadar!” Enabrilia snapped. “He never even sent them a message!”
“My apologies, truly,” Aderyn said. “If I’d known, I would have sent someone on ahead. We just assumed—”
“That Halaberiel had thought to tell them. I know, I know. Not your fault. The grazing’s getting really poor around here, by the way.”
“Well, we’ll move out tomorrow. The banadar wanted everyone to head for the winter camps. He said he’d find us there.”
“Good. With this rotten weather we’ve been having, winter can’t be far away.”
At that